Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il

by Michael Malice

  He paused, carefully considering his words. “This can’t be played as some sort of surrender on my part.”

  “No, of course not. It will be presented as an agreement, not a defeat. There are 63 men in total. I don’t see why they can’t all be released.”

  Now he turned back, and I saw the strength behind the sunshine. “Then you’ll let families come to visit Seoul.”

  “63 prisoners, and 63 families.”

  “No,” he insisted. “100 families for 63 prisoners.”

  “Fine,” I said right away. “How about for August 15th? It would be a superb element to add to Liberation Day celebrations.”

  “Perfect. We’ll let the prisoners out immediately following that.”

  So he still didn’t completely trust me, and wanted to make sure that I could be held to our agreement. I didn’t blame him, and didn’t begrudge him that either. To give him confidence, I vowed to put my promise in writing. On the day Kim Dae Jung left, June 15, the two of us signed the North-South Joint Declaration pledging further cooperation between the two sides. Also included in the declaration was an invitation for me to come visit Seoul at an appropriate time in the future. Later that day, I saw him off at the airport, shaking his hand firmly and vowing to pay him a return visit.

  Just as we agreed, the separated families were reunited in August to great worldwide applause. A month after that, all of the south’s remaining prisoners were released to the north with great fanfare. I kept my promise to Kim Dae Jung, checking to make sure that all of our newspaper articles treated his decision respectfully. I sincerely hoped that we could build on these small steps in the future—and, frankly, I was interested in going to see Seoul for myself.

  Soon word got to me that Kim Dae Jung and myself were under consideration to share the Nobel Peace Prize. There had been recent precedent for sharing the award. The men who’d negotiated the Irish ceasefire agreements had won, as had Arafat, Peres and Rabin for their Middle East work. In the end, the committee blatantly snubbed me and awarded the Prize to Kim Dae Jung alone. This was how toxic the perception of me had become in the Western world. I was less palatable to them than even Arafat was.

  I didn’t dwell too much on this slight. I was focused on winning peace, not winning Peace Prizes. Mere months after Kim Dae Jung’s visit, an American Secretary of State was going to visit Pyongyang for the first time. Even though President Clinton’s term of office was about to conclude, my summit with Madeline Albright still retained had enormous potential. If it went well, a presidential visit would follow—and diplomatic relations with it. It would be the highlight of my career as leader, a fulfillment of President Kim Il Sung’s lifelong goal.

  Establishing diplomatic relations with the United States would bring immediate and profound consequences to the DPRK. We’d be able to radically reduce military expenditures and instead focus on building the economy, agriculture and infrastructure. It would also mean an elimination of the American sanctions, which would lead to a great deal of foreign investment into resource-rich Korea. I was especially eager to lose the “state sponsor of terrorism” designation, a legal classification with many harmful implications.

  This time around, I was the one who spent time worrying about the summit. Albright wouldn’t be coming as a peer; she knew perfectly well that she represented vast power. There wouldn’t be a sense of kinship, as there had been with Kim Dae Jung. The only thing the United States and Korea had in common was a shared history of animosity and war, a history of hatred that went back to the 1860s. Just as I did since I’d been a child, I read as much as I could about the subject in preparation—and was surprised by what I uncovered about Madeline Albright.

  The first female Secretary of State, Albright had a reputation for delivering political messages through the brooches that she wore. She carried a large array of them everywhere that she went, with each brooch being a subtle indicator of what she was feeling that particular day. When she met President Putin, for example, she wore a brooch of monkeys covering their eyes to protest his position on Chechnya. I was very pleased to learn of this information. It would allow me to ascertain her thoughts—especially if I played dumb about her jewelry’s meaning.

  I left very explicit instructions to receive a phone call as soon as Albright landed on October 22, 2000. I could barely work, silently urging the phone to ring. Finally, the call came through. “Comrade,” the official said, “the Americans have landed. There are about two hundred of them in total.”

  “And Mrs. Albright, what is she wearing?” I said. “Uh...she has on a jacket in the Western style—”

  “No, not the jacket!” I snapped. “Her brooch! What kind of brooch does she have pinned to her lapel?”

  Fortunately DPRK diplomatic training encourages our staff to pay extraordinary attention to detail. “It’s a large one with the design of the Stars and Stripes, the emblem of the American flag.”

  “Large? How large?”

  “It’s the boldest brooch that I’ve ever seen, about the size of a playing card.”

  “I understand. Good work.” I hung up the phone and considered what this first brooch meant. There was little to deduce, since the message that Albright was sending wasn’t very subtle. It’s well-known that everyone in the DPRK always wears a lapel pin with a picture of either the Great Leader, myself or both. Albright’s first brooch was a symbol of defiance, that America would not be submitting to Korean ways even for the sake of diplomatic pleasantries. When I finally briefly met her later that day, I saw that the brooch was even larger than I’d envisioned, almost to the point of obnoxiousness.

  The next day Albright and I were due for our first real diplomatic meeting. I knew that she’d gone in the morning to pay her respects to the Great Leader at the Kumsusan Memorial Palace. After her gratuitous first brooch, a tiny part of me was worried that she wouldn’t be as deferential as I would have liked. Thankfully, by all accounts she showed every possible courtesy to the eternal image. This, too, told me a great deal. Albright could have easily refused to tour the temple of Juche. Or worse, she could have gone but refused to act in a dignified manner. Instead she chose to act respectfully. That meant she was turning her back on the usual American high-handedness and dominationism—or at least, pretending to.

  Then it finally came time for me to meet with Secretary Albright. She smiled brightly when she saw me entering the meeting room. As I walked in, I cursed myself for not wearing my sunglasses. I had made eye contact with her right when I’d arrived! Now I couldn’t glance down at her lapel, for then she’d realize that I knew about her jewelry code. I knew I needed a distraction, so I went with something that would certainly throw her off guard: a joke.

  “Well, here I am!” I announced. “The last of the communist devils!” I waited as the translator repeated what I said, and then Albright burst out laughing despite herself. Quickly I cast a glance at her brooch. To my consternation, she was wearing not one but two different symbols of American arrogance! The first was an American eagle, and above it was Uncle Sam’s top hat. I wasn’t sure what she meant by these. Did it symbolize one piece of jewelry broken into two, as Korea herself was divided? I realized her brooch code was far more complex than I’d given the woman credit for.

  “I’ve brought you a present,” Albright said. She gestured to one of her entourage and he brought over a basketball. “This has been signed to you by Michael Jordan.”

  I was flattered. I of course often received gifts from prominent personalities from all over the world. There were so many, in fact, that I put them on display in our International Friendship Exhibition for the appreciation of all the people. But this was the first basketball that I’d ever been given—and from such an acclaimed international athlete! “Do you want me to go outside and bounce it around?” I asked her.

  She smiled again. “No, I think I’d rather talk.”

  “Me too.”

  So we sat and discussed all sorts of issues. I made it a point to giv
e her concise, clear-cut answers so that she would encourage President Clinton to make a visit in the brief time he had left in office. The most important thing for both of us was to find agreement on the issue of terrorism—and very quickly such agreement was found. Our two nations had issued a joint statement on the subject earlier that month. It was good for both of us to validate and confirm what had been said. “I would greatly like it,” urged Albright, “if we could count on the DPRK’s cooperation regarding the issue of terrorism, per our statement.”

  I bit my tongue, not pointing out to her that we ourselves had been the victims of American terrorism. In that moment, I vividly recalled seeing that downed Yankee soldier when I was a young boy—but I put it out of my mind immediately. That was a lifetime ago, I decided. “As we said in the statement,” I told her, “the DPRK opposes all forms of terrorism against any country or individual. It is an unacceptable threat to global security and peace, and should be opposed in all its forms.”

  Albright nodded, listening with intense concentration. “This sort of cooperation will go far toward removing the DPRK from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.”

  “All I want,” I told her, “was peace.”

  Albright and I so genuinely enjoyed one another’s company that we ran far over our scheduled time together. Just as with Kim Dae Jung, she saw for herself that I wasn’t the madman that many people portrayed me as. She recognized that I was practical and thoughtful, just like a real live human being. At one point Albright seemed to forget that we were having formal talks and openly expressed admiration. “You know,” she said, “some of the things you say are really quite fascinating.”

  “Well,” I replied, “we have much to learn from one another.” For an American Secretary of State to praise me, even in a quasi-private setting, was without precedent. Yet I still wasn’t sure if she was speaking the truth or if she was simply using flattery and her womanly wiles to further her goals.

  The next time I saw Albright was at the banquet we had scheduled that evening. Immediately my eyes went to her brooch. To my profound delight, it was in the shape of a heart. There could have been no clearer icon of respect and friendship. Seeing that, I greeted her warmly and looked forward to having a wonderful dinner with the Secretary.

  At one point during dinner, Albright turned to everyone at the table and issued a challenge. “There’s a puzzle I know back in America,” she said. “How can you get to sixteen, just using your ten fingers?”

  I knew the answer immediately. I looked up and down the table to see if anyone else would be able to solve the riddle. The Secretary grinned to herself, thinking she had gotten us all with her trick question. “I have it,” I said. “It’s quite easy.” I extended both my hands with the thumbs overlapping to form a multiplication sign, thereby indicating “4x4.”

  “That’s right!” she said with delight, leading the room into applause. The summit could not have gone better. When Albright left for the airport, I once again had an official call to tell me what she was wearing.

  “Comrade,” he said, “her brooch was in the shape of a cowboy.”

  “A cowboy!” I said. “Are you sure?”

  “I am absolutely certain. I checked twice to make sure I was seeing the right thing. Does that mean something?”

  “If it does,” I said coyly, “then you’d have to ask Mrs. Albright. Thank you, that will be all.”

  I was an admirer of the cinema. I knew what that cowboy brooch meant. It was the emblem of a person who settled hostilities in a far-off, seemingly inhospitable land. It was a symbol of peace. That day, Secretary Albright was the hero riding off into the sunset, living her American happy ending.

  I, on the other hand, was left behind, not knowing how much danger loomed on the horizon.

  Chapter 20

  Korea is Two

  Life is neither a Hollywood fairy tale nor even a Korean one. Cowboys aren’t always heroes who come to bring peace. Sometimes they come to bring war, consciously and gleefully, and woe to anyone who gets in their way. In American imagery, the heroic lawman isn’t the only who comes in on a white horse. That’s also the steed ridden by death himself.

  On November 7, 2000 Al Gore overwhelmed the cowboy George W. Bush in the presidential election by a margin of 337,000 votes. Despite this, Bush spent an enormous sum of money and manipulated the incoherent election system to his own advantage. The following January, Bush was sworn into the White House.

  It was very obvious to me from early on that President Bush and I would have very little in common. But what was shocking to me and to the world public was how little he had in common with his very own predecessors. From the first day of his inauguration, Bush launched an offensive against any and every international treaty that had been signed by those in power before him.

  We’re not isolationists in Korea, but we want to keep the status quo. Part of that means honoring international agreements that we’ve committed ourselves to. It’s both the right thing to do and the strategic thing to do. I regarded such forthrightness as a very basic principle to follow in seeking a peaceful world, a world free of imperialism and dominationism. Yet not everyone sought such a world. For some people, war itself was the goal—and those people were now in charge of the most powerful army on earth.

  Bush’s philosophy was rooted in the ideological confrontation of the Cold War days, based on the belief that strength meant justice. If another country had been as dismissive and contemptuous of the international order as President Bush was, he’d regard them as a “rogue nation.” But since America had so many soldiers and so much weaponry, such classifications apparently didn’t apply.

  The Bush administration quickly began beating the war drums. Every area in the world was under consideration for American strikes. It was as if Bush and his team sat down with a globe and wondered where they should next unleash destruction. The fact that such talk was so open and so public only added to the horror and disgust felt by most other countries—with the DPRK certainly foremost among those. Any hopes I had that the summit with Secretary Albright would lead to a presidential visit to Korea were crushed completely.

  All this put me in a very difficult position. There were two possible ways to further Korea’s goals on the world stage: either calming tensions with our enemies or bolstering them with our friends. Seeing that the former wasn’t an option under Bush, I turned to the latter. Russian president Putin had visited the DPRK in July of 2000. When I saw how quickly US-Korea relations were deteriorating, I returned the favor in the summer of 2001. Immediately afterward, I hosted Jiang Zemin, the first Chinese president to visit north Korea in almost twenty years. But though our talks were warm, even cordial, they weren’t what they could have been. Putin was no Premier Stalin and Jiang was no Chairman Mao. The relations between Korea and Russia, and Korea and China, would never again be what they’d once been.

  Just one week after the visit from the Chinese president came the events of September 11th, Juche 90 (2001). The facts of that day are well-known: Using Japanese-style kamikaze tactics, nineteen mostly-Saudi men hijacked several planes and flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. My heart went out to the American people as I, like billions of others, watched the events unfold.

  It was a tragic day not just for the United States but for the world. I say that as a humanitarian, but I also say it as a tactician. President Bush now had the pretext he’d been seeking to launch any war that he desired. I often said that we in Korea do not want war, but we are not afraid of it. This didn’t mean that I had any misconceptions about how truly devastating war could be. I’d lived through two wars myself. I knew that they needed to be avoided at all costs. But they didn’t seem to share my concerns in Washington. In the days that followed the 9/11 attacks, the sadism emanating from the White House was like something out of a horror story. They wanted blood. They wanted vengeance. Someone had to die. The only question was who.

  Bush addressed a joint session of C
ongress on September 20. “We will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorists,” he said. “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with the US, or you are with the terrorists.” In other words, the US imperialists were demanding a blank check to do as they wished with impunity and to disagree with them was to side with the terroristic murderers of 9/11. This was, simply put, obscene. One nation’s suffering didn’t give it the right to violate another’s sovereignty.

  North Korea became an explicit target for Bush in January of 2002. He blustered that the DPRK, Iran and Iraq “constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred.” My reaction to his speech was one of disgust but not surprise. I knew exactly who Bush was and how he thought. I’d been fighting the US imperialists since I’d been a little boy.

  It’s difficult for me to convey how much his speech poisoned relations between the DPRK and the United States. Besides the hostility, the entire speech was grounded in dishonesty. To begin with, the very expression “Axis of Evil” was an act of double plagiarism. The evil came from “evil empire,” used by President Reagan to denounce the USSR during the Cold War—the same long-gone Cold War which the US imperialists cite to justify remaining in south Korea in perpetuity.

  Second, the word “axis” was stolen from the “Axis Powers” during the Second World War. As such, the term had strong rhetorical power and with good reason. The Axis Powers were perhaps the most despicable force that the world had ever seen. To compare the DPRK to Imperial Japan was the worst insult imaginable to my country’s dignity. It was to dismiss the suffering, the brutality and the torture that the Korean people had to suffer under the control of the wicked Japs—the same Japs who were now such close friends with the United States, not Korea.