Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  Kim Jong-il mobilized relatively young people to help him. Totally in charge of propaganda for the party starting in 1973, he commanded the newly formed Three Revolutions teams—North Korea’s answer to China’s Red Guards. He and his loyalists pushed aside older figures, many of whom were purged for alleged incompetence or insufficiently “revolutionary” attitudes. But age was no barrier when he sought allies for his machinations, and he also teamed up with selected members of the old guard. Rivals, including his uncle, stepbrothers and stepmother, bit the dust.

  To show his fitness for the top leadership, the propaganda and cultural specialist had to present himself as more broadly qualified. That required dabbling in the larger economy. In 1972, not yet formally anointed as successor, he is reported to have told leading officials and engineers that he had resolved to take upon himself “the task of automation.” Presumably his father gave advance approval; in any event, the stated reason for what might have appeared to outsiders as arrant usurpation was that a “technical revolution,” begun in 1970, had not made enough progress.

  The technical revolution’s official goal was “finally freeing all the working people from backbreaking labor.” But as we saw in chapter 9, the movement appears rather to have been a response to the fact that militarization, by enlarging the army, had created a labor shortage. Automation was the way to stretch the available labor supply. Change had proven elusive, though, because managers were mainly concerned with meeting their production quotas. Thus, they had little time to think about automation, say the regime’s official historians. Besides, “some people were victims of a sort of mysticism.”

  They believed that “putting industry on a totally automated track was feasible only in developed countries.”3

  At the outmoded, Japanese-built Hwanghae Iron Works, Kim Jong-il demonstrated what was to become a signature element of his management style. If he decided on a project his philosophy was: Full speed ahead and the cost be damned. Steelmaking officials and technicians argued that automating Hwanghae’s old, worn-out sintering plant would not be cost-effective. That was nonsense in the young Kim’s view. “Money should not be spared,” he ordered. “Calculation should not come first in spending money for the working class.” In what seems an echo of his insistance as a university student that computation be dropped from the economics curriculum, he added: “Counting may be done later.” His show project of automating the old iron works was completed in short order.

  In Kim Jong-il’s mind, the technical revolution was an extension of the ideological and cultural work in which he had done his apprenticeship. For him, policy issues boiled down to motivation. With material re-wards ideologically frowned upon, positive motivation meant propaganda and mass mobilization. His cinema and opera work merged directly into his new duties. North Koreans were encouraged to emulate the heroes and heroines of his movies and revolutionary operas. They organized “Sea-of-Blood” Guards and “Flower Girl” Guards to push for innovations. “Day after day, leading characters in the works of art became real in each factory and each workshop.”5 A magic trick he encouraged the Pyongyang Circus conjurers to develop and show off to his father highlighted the campaign to reduce women’s kitchen labor.6 To whip up support for the Hwanghae Iron Works modernization, he brought in “a high-powered economic cheering squad” composed of Central Broadcasting Commission professionals to broadcast to factories and related industries nationwide, urging them to aid the automation project.7

  In 1973, with output of tractors and other agricultural machines failing to meet demand, Kim Jong-il and his propaganda and agitation department mounted a campaign to raise productivity at Kumsong Tractor Works and Sungri General Motor Works. “Party activists and hundreds of artists, reporters and editors rushed to the production sites, with all the means of publicity put into action, including newspapers, radio stations, TV stations and feature films.” Artists sang and danced on the site, their songs “reverbrating in high pitch” as teach-ins, bulletins and wall newspapers called forth “the political consciousness and creative initiative of the working class.” Thanks to the “fresh innovations” thus inspired, both factories were said to have worked wonders.8

  Despite such successes, the country’s leaders remained troubled by workplace-level resistance to the campaigns.9 In 1973, the year of the campaigns in the two tractor plants, Kim Il-sung established a movement to remove the “shackles of outdated thinking” and promote vigor in carrying out ideological, technical and cultural revolution— “the Three Revolutions.” Organized into teams of twenty to fifty members were tens of thousands of zealous ideologues—young party members, technocrats, intellectuals and college students, who had been educated completely under the communist regime. After special training, they were sent into factories, farms and offices, even schools. The elder Kim soon placed his son in command of the effort,10 inspiring analysts abroad to suggest that one purpose of the teams was to root out opposition to Kim Jong-il’s succession and install his young loyalists in positions of authority.11

  A North Korean named Kim Ji-il, who was an elementary school pupil when the movement was launched, recalled after his defection to the South that teams “would even come to our school and inspect the kids, their lifestyles and so on. This took about ten days. They would hold a meeting each day take one kid at a time and make him or her confess publicly to some misdeed or other. The other kids would get into the spirit of the criticism session and remind whoever was being grilled: ‘You also did so and so!’ I was class president so I felt a lot of conflict about this. But North Korea is an inter-critical society.”

  Kim Ji-il recalled that “confessions might be something like, ‘I was absent,’ or ‘I came late to school.’ ‘I didn’t participate well in the criticism session.’ Or, ‘I fought with another kid.’ It wasn’t the details they cared about. They wanted to intimidate you and give you stress. Each Monday we had to get up and make Kim Jong-il pledges: ‘I will be faithful to the leader, blah blah blah.’ Part of the pledge was, ‘In case of-war I will sacrifice myself as an advance-guard stormtrooper.’ I had to be the first one to read it, and they always criticized my pronunciation of advance-guard stormtrooper, keunuidaekyeolsade. ”12

  In workplaces, the teams’ official missions were to whip up fervor for overproduction, combat conservative and bureacratic tendencies and “teach modern science and technology to those cadres who do not study much and who are preoccupied with their day-to-day work.” Particular targets were older officials who had lost their own zeal and become mired in bureaucratic routine and sloth. Even the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party was not exempted from the requirement to play host to a Three Revolutions team.13

  Longer-lived than China’s Red Guards, the Three Revolutions teams lasted for more than two decades. Former member Kim Kwang-wook, whose term in the organization ended in 1993, told me that college students had been eager to join the Three Revolutions teams because it put them on the fast track leading to high officialdom. About 70 percent of college graduates went to work in Three Revolutions offices, said Kim, who defected right after leaving the group—before he could put his civil engineering training to work building underground tunnels for the army.

  Despite the teams’ vaunted morale-building function, in reality the members worked as snoops and spies, Kim Kwang-wook told me. Thus, in his initial assignment in Pyongyang, “I had to write down everything any of the three hundred citizens I watched might say—anything against the regime.” The young people

  spied on ordinary citizens, but our special duty was to spy on factory managers and government officials. We were sent to factories and treated like gods or kings, because they were afraid we’d rat on them. I was in the mines for six months, then I moved to a factory making excavation equipment. I took care of the transport, fueling and equipment departments and if anyone used them excessively I reported on that. If someone opposed an order Kim Jong-il had sent down—saying, “Why should we do that?”—-we’d make a
report, While I was in the mines an official got into that kind of trouble. He got fired and sent as a common laborer to an airport. It was someone else’s report. At that time there were a lot of corruption scandals. We heard that Kim Jong-il said, “I’ll choose more loyal and efficient mine officials.” One official, in a department that was considered desirable, complained to his colleagues about Kim Jong-il’s orders, and his colleagues reported him.

  By the time Kim Kwang-wook joined, the teams had reached something of an accommodation with the people they watched. Nevertheless, as we saw in the case of pilot-spy Kim Woong-pyong in chapter 14, they could not simply stop reporting altogether so they reported selectively. “Mostly we overlooked what we heard. We got TV sets as bribes. I myself received cloth to make a suit. We got to know those officials really well after a while. But how could there be nothing, among three hundred people? If-we called a cup a plate, it-was a plate. If officials crossed Three Revolutions team members, the team members might simply make up stories about them.”

  The considerably older subjects of all that surveillance “couldn’t express animosity but I know they didn’t like us,” Kim Kwang-wook said. “In Oriental culture you must speak a certain way to elders. I didn’t speak that way—-we used plain, not honorific, speech. Officials really hated the Three Revolutions teams.” That didn’t bother the youngsters much, though. “If you’re a team member, you automatically get accepted into the party, so we didn’t feel any compunction. That was my attitude, and that’s the way others felt as well.”14

  ***

  Superficially the Three-Revolutions teams were similar to the radical Maoist Red Guards who rampaged across China. In reality, though, Kim Il-sung had long opposed the “leftist deviation” of bottom-up, egalitarian democracy. His regime had made clear its opposition to the “reckless rebellion” of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.15 Far from unleashing the masses, the Three Revolutions teams were all about control. Kim and his son kept the teams themselves under tightly centralized control and used them, in turn, to control potentially troublesome elements in the bureaucracy and the economy.

  In March 1975, the third year of the Three Revolutions teams, Kim Il-sung claimed that because of the teams, the country had passed the $1,000 mark in per capita income and joined the advanced countries. Even if such claims were true, not everyone was pleased. Watching the advance of the young Kim and his like-wise youthful comrades and disapproving of the aggressive behavior of the youngsters in the Three Revolutions teams, some of the old revolutionaries wondered how long it would be before they themselves were consigned to history. Kim Il-sung sought to soothe them in 1975. “The target of the Three Revolutions teams is not the old cadres themselves but their outdated thought,” he said. “Elderly officials should not be simply dismissed but be remolded through the movement.”16

  As we have seen, and as we shall see again, Kim Jong-il’s version of generational politics did involve selective harsh attacks on older-generation foes. He would not have been his father’s son if purges had not been part of his arsenal. But he also worked hard to win the acceptance of first-generation members of the leadership, flattering and allying himself with those who supported him or who exhibited enough pliability that he believed he could deal with them.

  There was no shortage of sycophants. When Kim Jong-il graduated from college and joined the Workers’ Party in 1964, one former high official told me, the princeling rated his own female “mansions volunteer corps.” Its organizers were Yi Yong-mu, a general in charge of the KPA Political Department, and Jun Mun-sop, bodyguard commander. Other flatterers, as well, introduced him to young women or brought him other gifts. “Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il both love to give and receive gifts,” this former official said. “Kim Il-sung likes health food. Kim Jong-il requests presents with value overseas—gold bullion and foreign currency”17

  Another former official, Kang Myong-do, told me that in the 1970s, Li Dong-ho, a very powerful figure in espionage in South Korea, held parties for Kim Jong-il and gave him presents. Foreign affairs specialist Ho Dam was also giving presents to flatter the junior Kim. Kang told me that Kim Jong-il seemed to savor the attention. The gift-giving, as is traditional in East Asia, was mutual. Kim Jong-il was wont to give lavishly, whether the recipient was already close to him or was someone he had yet to bring over to his side.

  Official biographies relate incidents such as his gift to a television cameraman of an apartment in 1964—the year of the junior Kim’s university graduation, when his work involved him with the Central Radio and TV Broadcasting Committee. The cameraman, a Korean War orphan, was a newlywed. The intent of the story is to show the young Kim following in his father’s footsteps in showing “warm affection” for orphans “as if he were their own parent.” Kim summoned the cameraman and drove him downtown.

  Presently the car stopped in front of a high-rise apartment house. Leading the man up the well-polished artificial granite staircase, Kim Jong-il halted in front of Room Ten on the first floor, and produced a small piece of paper from his briefcase. “Now, take it, it is the occupation certificate. I could not allow myself to give you an old house because yours is a young family. … Go in and see whether you like it.” With these words Kim Jong-il opened the door.18

  “Party rules prohibit gift-giving among members,” a former elite official told me. “But Kim Jong-il gave gifts to try to buy people off from forming factions against him.” When he gave an imported automobile, as was often the case, the gift was marked with a special “216” license plate—the numerals representing the junior Kim’s birthday, February 16. “Once Kim Jong-il gave me an Audi with one of the ‘216’ license plates,” the same former official told me.

  Besides cars, Kim Jong-il’s gifts included television sets, radios and watches—all foreign-made, of course. The overall scale of his gift-giving soon grew so enormous as to affect the economy seriously. Various sources confirm that a special unit in the party, dubbed Room 39 on account of its office location, was given the mission of bringing in foreign exchange to pay for Kim’s purchases. To accomplish that, Room 39 had a monopoly over the export of several high-demand products.

  According to defector Kang Myong-do, Room 39 was founded in 1974 and given sole authority over the export of gold and silver, steel, fish and mushrooms. “Only through Room 39 could those products be exported,” said Kang. “Previously each unit handled its own imports and exports, but Kim Jong-il’s order made it treason to deal in those products through any other route. Because of Room 39 activities, the government had no bank reserves and became nearly broke. So from the mid-1980s most foreign trade had to be done on credit. Anyone who could borrow $1 million from another country-was considered a North Korean hero.”19

  ***

  Gift-giving didn’t win over all the skeptics who questioned Kim Jong-il’s rise. Different approaches were needed to deal with several first-generation revolutionaries who “treated Kim Jong-il as a kid not yet weaned,” in Kang Myong-do’s words. Those included top civilian officials Kim Dong-kyu, Kim Il and Pak Song-chol as well as a senior general, O Jin-u, who had been a guerrilla protégé of Kim Il-sung’s in Manchuria.

  According to Kang’s account, Kim Jong-il betrayed a bosom pal to get O on his side. The pal was Yi Yong-mu, the ambitious general and Politburo member in charge of the political department of the Korean People’s Army (and, by some accounts, the husband of a cousin of Kim Il-sung’s), who had oiled his way into Kim Jong-il’s inner circle starting in the junior Kim’s college days. “Yi was very obsequious to Kim Jong-il, and Kim Jong-il liked that very much,” said Kang. “He gave lots of presents to Kim Jong-il and built him a mansion at Changwan Mountain. From the KPA orchestra he handed over nineteen-to-twenty-year-old women to Kim Jong-il as Happy Corps members—they both liked women. Yi was really friendly with Kim Jong-il. They went all over the country in a Lincoln and a Mercedes-Benz. Yi used familiar language in addressing Kim Jong-il. Kim Jong-il trusted Yi 100 percent. Yi was ver
y confident, and O Jin-u didn’t like his attitude.”

  Then, said Kang, “some personnel problems arose in Kangwon Province. The First Infantry commander’s job was open, and Yi and O favored different people. O was a veteran of the First Infantry and he wanted a first-generation revolutionary to take over the job. Yi wanted one of his own cronies.” On paper, Yi was in charge of military personnel matters, having been assigned the job by Kim Il-sung himself. According to Kang, though, Kim Jong-il realized that if he supported his buddy Yi he would “be seen as siding against the first generation of revolutionaries. Kim Jong-il, being smart, sacrificed Yi, consigning him to a secondary post in a logging area in the remote mountains of Chagang Province.” Going further, Kim Jong-il suggested to Kim Il-sung that O Jin-u be given Yi’s former job as head of the overall political department of the KPA. “Kim Jong-il considered O Jin-u not so smart, but he wanted somebody from the first generation on his side,” said Kang.20

  O’s support apparently proved useful to Kim Jong-il in his competition with his uncle. Hwang Jang-yop is quoted as reporting that Kim Jong-il and O Jin-u “were major factors behind driving Hur Bong-hak, Kim Kwang-yop and other military men out of power between 1969 and 1970 for purposes of emasculating Kim Yong-ju politically”21

  Kim Yong-ju was elected to the Politburo in 1970, ranked sixth in the regime. Kim Il-sung gave him the high-profile mission of negotiating with South Korean intelligence chief Lee Hu-rak in the North-South talks of 1972–1973. But in the palace politics at home Yong-ju had met his match in his cunning nephew, and the uncle’s rise proved ephemeral. He lost to Kim Jong-il his post as party chief of organization and guidance in September 1973. As a consolation prize Kim Il-sung gave him a vice-premiership— negligible in the scheme of things in Pyongyang, where the party apparatus far outranked the cabinet. Kim Yong-ju was dropped from public mention entirely after his attendance was noted at an April 1975 meeting of the Supreme People’s Assembly. (He was not to make another announced appearance until 1993.22) His follower Ryu Jang-shik like-wise disappeared from public view in September of 1975.