The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot

by Blaine Harden

  Before dying, the Great Leader tried to make sure his creation would never die—and that his bloodline would always rule. He set up a Stalinist monarchy that crowned his eldest son, Kim Jong Il, as leader. When Kim Jong Il died in 2011, power passed to his third son, Kim Jong Un, who was just twenty-eight when he took command.

  For all their fakery and falsified history, three generations of dictators named Kim have found—and continue to find—legitimacy from a true and ghastly story of the Korean War: the U.S. Air Force’s bombing and napalming of the North. It was a propaganda gift to the Kim family that keeps on giving.

  “[Our people] have strong anti-U.S. sentiments because they suffered great damage at the hands of the U.S. imperialists during the war,” Kim Il Sung told American journalists in 1972. “Since the situation is tense, we cannot but continue stepping up preparations for war. We make no secret of this. Who can guarantee that the U.S. imperialists will not attack this country again? What is most important in our preparations is to educate all the people to hate U.S. imperialism.”

  Under Kim’s son and grandson, that hatred has been reinforced daily, as the government works hard to keep the old war terrifyingly fresh. State media constantly remind North Koreans that their parents and grandparents were incinerated and dismembered by Americans. Schoolchildren are still trained to bayonet dummies of American soldiers. State media still lie about who invaded whom during the Korean War. Sixty years after the war ended, hundreds of thousands of North Koreans gathered in Pyongyang’s May Day Stadium to celebrate their “victory.” Outside the stadium on the day of the celebration, a book was on sale, titled The U.S. Imperialists Started the Korean War.

  “It may seem strange to Americans when we hear that North Koreans are worried about an attack from the United States, but from their point of view it is not strange at all,” said Kathryn Weathersby, a Korean War scholar. “It is still the 1950s in North Korea and the conflict with South Korea and the United States is still going on. People in the North feel backed into a corner and threatened. It is, of course, very useful for the Kim family to keep them afraid.”

  The U.S. bombing narrative—together with semi-fictional news reports about what the imperialists are up to now—has given the Kim dynasty what it desperately needs: justification for spending nearly all its resources on nuclear weapons, long-range ballistic missiles, and a huge military that conscripts every young North Korean.

  As important, the perceived persistence of the American threat—and the Kim family’s sacred duty to fight against it—is an all-purpose excuse for the country’s long slide into isolation, poverty, and hunger. The family’s argument goes like this: Sure, it’s miserable living in North Korea, but don’t blame us. Imagine how much worse it would be if we weren’t protecting you from the American bastards. Never forget, their bombs killed Grandma.

  IV

  No Kum Sok carefully researched his role as a true believer in Communism. He convinced an instructor at the naval academy that he had the right ideological stuff to fight the Americans in the air. Soon after he joined the North Korean air force, he discovered he was better at flying than he was at regurgitating Communist platitudes. He certainly liked it more.

  At nineteen, he became the youngest jet fighter pilot on either side of the Korean War. He flew more than a hundred combat missions in a Soviet-made MiG-15, a formidable killing machine for its time. On a remote runway during the war, he personally showed off one of these fighter jets to the Great Leader and his young son Kim Jong Il. As they inspected the aircraft, No gave serious thought to assassinating the elder Kim but never mustered the courage to pull his service pistol out of its holster.

  Throughout the Korean War, MiGs tormented and shot down American bombers. They forced the Americans to bomb under cover of night. In thousands of encounters along the border between North Korea and China, MiGs faced off against American warplanes in the world’s first all-jet dogfights. The U.S. Far East Command was so obsessed with MiGs that it offered a $100,000 reward (about $900,000 today) to the first enemy pilot who delivered one to an American air base.

  In the cockpit of his MiG, No dressed like a World War I flying ace. He wore a leather flying jacket, leather gloves, puffy blue cotton pants, and tall leather riding boots. His flight helmet predated the jet age by at least three decades. It was made of leather and looked not unlike the one Snoopy wore in the Peanuts comic strip.

  No’s pretend persona as a Communist fanatic was sorely tested in jet-to-jet combat. He tried to seem gung ho in the eyes of his fellow pilots, yet he avoided close encounters with American fighter pilots. He quickly learned that they had better flying skills—and that they were feverishly competing with one another to kill pilots like him.

  Back on the ground, No compensated for his caution in the sky by ramping up his Red fanaticism. He volunteered to give dramatic readings of Kim Il Sung’s speeches. When North Korean pilots gathered for meetings of self-criticism, he denounced them for not showing enough love to the glorious leader. Having known pilots who were executed for perceived wrong thinking, he worried that someone would see through his act and order him shot.

  No’s performance ended on a sunny September morning in 1953. He climbed into a MiG-15 for what was supposed to be a routine combat-readiness mission.

  He knew nothing of the much-publicized reward that the U.S. military had promised to any pilot who delivered a combat-ready MiG. Nor could he have known that in Washington the new American president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, disapproved of paying cash for an enemy airplane. Ike viewed it as a bribe, beneath the dignity of the United States. He did not want a stolen MiG and did not want to pay taxpayer money to a Commie turncoat.

  As he took off that morning, No did know that Kim Il Sung had created a new law authorizing his government to execute the family and friends of defectors.

  North Korean ground control became suspicious when the MiG did not return on time. An impatient voice squawked over No’s headphones, using coded language to ask, Where the hell are you?

  He did not reply.

  PART I

  GUERRILLA AND RICH BOY

  CHAPTER 1

  Beginnings

  I

  Kim Il Sung led a guerrilla raid on the night of June 4, 1937, that, in his words, “heralded the dawn of the liberation of Korea.”

  The attack on Pochonbo, a speck of a town on the Korean border, did nothing of the sort. It was a strategically insignificant pinprick. But it mightily annoyed the Japanese. Over the next three years, they crushed Kim’s insurgency. By the end of 1940, his guerrillas were dead, in prison, or holed up in the Soviet Union.

  Pochonbo, though, was a fine piece of personal branding. The Japanese elevated Kim Il Sung to their list of most wanted Red bandits. International newspapers reported the raid and his gallant leadership. Thanks to Pochonbo and a handful of other guerrilla strikes that stung the Japanese in the late 1930s, Kim became a household name among millions of Koreans who seethed under their Japanese colonial masters. To an ill-educated peasantry hungry for heroes, he became a legend. Stories spread about his wizardry: he fashioned bombs out of pinecones, walked across rivers on leaves, and could make himself invisible.

  Kim treasured Pochonbo as his finest military moment. He and about two hundred partisans crossed the Yalu River on rafts from Manchuria, as northeastern China was then called, and sneaked into the Korean village.

  “At 10 p.m. sharp, I raised my pistol high and pulled the trigger. Everything that I had ever wanted to say to my fellow countrymen back in the homeland for over ten years was packed into that one shot reverberating through the street that night. The gunshot, as our poets described, was both a greeting to our motherland and a challenge to the Japanese imperialist robbers whom we were about to punish.”

  The punishment that followed was real but limited. A post office, a police station, and a few other buildings were burned. A han
dful of Japanese policemen were killed or wounded. Kim and his men rounded up about ninety new guerrilla recruits and fled that night across the river to a hideout in Manchuria.

  Before they left, Kim wrote, admiring townsfolk asked him to give a speech.

  Looking round the crowd, I found their eyes, as bright as stars, all focused on me.

  Taking off my cap and waving my uplifted arm, I made a speech stressing the idea of sure victory and resistance against Japan. I concluded with the words: “Brothers and sisters, let us meet again on the day of national liberation!”

  When I left the square in front of [the town hall], which was a mass of flames, my heart felt heavy and full of pain, as if pierced with a knife. We were all leaving a part of ourselves behind in the small border town as we marched away, and the hearts of those left behind wailed silently as they watched us go.

  The legend of Kim Il Sung is part Robin Hood, part Harry Potter, and partly true. For many years, Kim’s political adversaries—including South Korea and the United States—made little effort to sort out fact from fiction. A rumor spread in North and South Korea that the real Kim Il Sung was killed in Manchuria sometime after the Pochonbo raid and, with the assistance of the Soviet Union, was replaced by a much younger guerrilla leader. The fake Kim, rumor had it, was a Soviet stooge who became the Great Leader. A confidential American intelligence biography stated flatly in 1952 that Kim was an “imposter.”

  As rumors go, this one had extraordinary staying power. It gained credence because few Koreans knew what Kim looked like or that he was so young, just twenty-five when he led the raid on Pochonbo. Adding to the confusion, he changed his name, taking the nom de guerre Kim Il Sung (meaning “become the sun”), which other partisan fighters in Manchuria had used. The fake-Kim story was especially appealing to anti-Communists in South Korea, where for years it was a propaganda staple that undermined the legitimacy of North Korea.

  The rumor also persisted because of Kim’s character. He was a shameless self-promoter. All his life, he exaggerated his achievements to the point of absurdity. A key to understanding Kim is “his enormous self-regard,” writes Bradley K. Martin, one of his biographers. “[He] developed very early a preference for the company of people who acknowledged him as a genius, hero, and great man.”

  The speech Kim claims to have delivered in Pochonbo is a case in point. As the village burned and his men killed and looted, did Kim really take time for grandiloquence in front of starstruck peasants? One of his longtime partisan comrades in Manchuria said the Pochonbo speech was fabricated, self-serving piffle: “Here he was busy running away. What type of mass speech could he give?”

  Narcissism and nonsense notwithstanding, Kim Il Sung was not an impostor. Photographs and government records, along with Korean, Chinese, and Russian eyewitnesses, verify that the young guerrilla leader who led the raid on Pochonbo was the same young man (albeit slightly older and better nourished) who rose to power in North Korea.

  He was born Kim Song Ju in a village near Pyongyang in 1912. His father was a teacher and practitioner of herbal medicine who was more educated and less poor than most Koreans of that time and place. His father attended Sungsil Middle School in Pyongyang, which was founded and run by American Presbyterian missionaries. The city then had the fastest-growing Christian community in East Asia and was sometimes described as the Jerusalem of the East. Kim’s mother came from an educated, Christian family. In his memoirs, Kim acknowledges that both his parents attended church regularly, taking him and his two younger brothers along. His father taught him to play a pump organ in church.

  But it was great-power maneuvering, not religion or missionary teaching, that shaped Kim’s world, pushing him and his family into exile in Manchuria and transforming him, while still in middle school, into a Communist guerrilla leader who spoke excellent Chinese and was eager to fight Japan.

  Imperial Japan established complete control of the Korean Peninsula in 1905, after defeating Russian naval forces and accepting a peace proposed by President Theodore Roosevelt, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his trouble. The backstory of that deal was less than noble. It was a trade-off between rising colonial powers in Asia: Japan agreed not to interfere with America’s occupation and exploitation of the Philippines, and the United States, despite a late-nineteenth-century treaty of “amity and commerce” with Korea, quietly accepted Japanese dominion over the Korean Peninsula.

  In 1910, two years before Kim was born, Japan formally annexed Korea and began to force Koreans to accept Japanese culture as their own. This pushed hundreds of thousands of Koreans into Manchuria, which for a time was slightly less oppressed by the Japanese. In some parts of eastern Manchuria, Koreans outnumbered Chinese four to one. Kim’s family moved there in 1920, when he was seven. That same year Japan sent troops to eastern Manchuria to root out Korean nationalist fighters. The Japanese killed about thirty-six hundred of them but in the process enraged the half million Koreans who had settled there. Manchuria became a fertile recruiting ground for the Chinese Communist Party.

  Kim was fourteen when his father died. Three years later, he was expelled from middle school and sent to jail for nine months for joining a Communist youth group. After a long cold winter behind bars, he changed his name to Kim Il Sung and never returned to school. He had been radicalized. When Japan launched an all-out military conquest of Manchuria in 1931, he joined the Moscow-backed Chinese Communist Party.

  This is when his transcendent genius as a revolutionary theorist and military leader kicked in, according to his memoirs and the official history of North Korea. He created the Korean People’s Army, taught Marxism to Korean children, and seized supreme command of an anti-Japanese war based in eastern Manchuria. “I believed that revolution in my country would emerge victorious only when it was undertaken on our own responsibility and by the efforts of our own people, and all the problems arising in the revolution must be solved independently and creatively,” Kim wrote in his memoirs.

  Yet it was all fiction. There never was a Korean People’s Army in Manchuria. As a child expelled from middle school, Kim had not read Marx (which was unavailable to him in Chinese or Korean), and he almost certainly did not understand Marxism well enough to teach it to anyone. He fought the Japanese in Manchuria as a member of a Chinese insurgency. He was almost always under Chinese command. There was no separate group of Korean Communist partisans for him to join. Kim did not work independently to foment revolution.

  The untruths were the work of Kim Il Sung and his legion of hagiographers, blowing self-serving smoke back through time. A vast tapestry of these state-sanctioned lies and distortions has obscured and diminished Kim’s real achievements, according to his most respected biographer, the historian Dae-Sook Suh, whose careful sifting of evidence found that Kim’s military exploits in Manchuria were impressive, particularly for someone so young.

  “It is his persistence and obstinate will, characteristic of many successful revolutionaries, that deserve recognition,” Suh writes. “What is most damaging to his record is his exaggerated claims.”

  II

  In 1937, while Kim Il Sung was killing Japanese policemen and becoming a legend, No Kum Sok was a chubby-cheeked five-year-old riding a tricycle imported from Japan. A photograph taken that year shows him sitting on the tricycle wearing a thick wool coat with shiny buttons, a Japanese-style cap, short pants, kneesocks, and white shoes.

  He was “upper-class,” especially when compared with most Koreans living under the thumb of imperial Japan. Decades of colonial rule had transformed the peninsula into a well-run, rapidly industrializing, but profoundly inequitable police state. Four out of five Koreans held menial and unskilled jobs, mostly on tenant farms. Food production increased sharply in Korea under colonial occupation, but the availability of food in local markets did not. Most of it was shipped to Japan. The daily lives of twenty-four million Koreans were dominated by fewer than a million
Japanese settlers, nearly all of whom made a comfortable living from white-collar jobs, managing factories, and running the colonial government. Most Japanese lived in well-lit urban neighborhoods. They had electricity, gas, drinkable tap water, and underground sewers; most Koreans had none of these services. In their homes, Japanese women relied on poorly paid Korean servants to clean and cook. On buses, the Japanese forced Koreans to give up their seats and routinely shouted racist insults at them in shops.

  Japan tightened its colonial vise even more in 1937 as it went to war in southern China and began to milk its empire for raw materials, soldiers, prostitutes, and slave labor. The Japanese moved with particular ferocity in Korea, squeezing the national identity out of its subjects and trying to replace it with a “profound gratitude for the limitless benevolence of our Emperor.” Shifting into what historians have characterized as “colonial totalitarianism,” Japan attempted to “blot out an entire culture.”

  In the run-up to World War II, Koreans were forced to give up their language, their literature, their religious shrines, even their names. Children were punished if caught speaking Korean at school. As part of their “imperialization,” hundreds of thousands of Korean men were conscripted as slave labor, and thousands of others were forced to “volunteer” to fight in Japan’s overstretched military. Tens of thousands of Korean women were compelled to work as “comfort girls,” servicing the sexual needs of Japan’s military.

  Along with cultural extermination, Japan’s colonial policies in Korea insisted on growth and profits—for Japanese investors. To that end, imperial Japan exported heavy industry and state-of-the-art infrastructure to the peninsula, encouraging Japanese conglomerates to take advantage of cheap land, abundant mineral resources, and eager-to-please colonial officials. They built steel mills, chemical factories, fertilizer plants, and several large hydroelectric dams. To connect their plants to ports and to one another, the companies built the most developed network of railroads in Asia outside Japan. As a result, Korea entered the 1940s with the best-managed network of railways, roads, and ports in the developing world.