Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il

by Michael Malice

  The only I could do was make sure that she went to the doctor. Hye Rim was examined by the best medical minds that Korea had to offer. I even flew in a specialist from abroad, without disclosing to him who this woman was. Every physician said the same thing, virtually verbatim: “There is nothing physically wrong with her. She is suffering from depression and needs treatment immediately.”

  I wanted Hye Rim to get the greatest care for her condition that she could,so I sent her to a psychiatrist. But it didn’t seem to make much of a difference. The face that had once lit up movie screens throughout the DPRK was now fading away before my eyes. I was so concerned that I spoke to her therapist after he’d met with her a few times. “What’s your professional opinion as to the best course of action?”

  The man couldn’t look at me directly. He played around with the papers on his desk and strumming his fingers awkwardly. “It’s an atypical situation, Dear Leader.”

  “In what sense?”

  “In terms of the patient’s...preferred...treatment.”

  “Please be frank with me. Nothing you say will leave this room. You have my word.”

  He nodded, acknowledging that he believed my promise. “Understand that I wouldn’t say this for another patient, and that I’ve never said anything like this before.”

  “Understood, understood. What is it?”

  “It’s my belief that the patient would be better treated...elsewhere.” “You don’t mean another doctor or another hospital, do you?” “No.”

  I clenched my jaw. “You mean abroad.”

  “I would never say such a thing! The Juche idea—”

  I rolled my eyes as I interrupted him. “Where, then? Moscow?” “...Yes.”

  “Will you tell her this?” “With your permission I will.”

  “Actually, let me tell her.” I wanted to face Hye Rim, so that she could see for herself how genuinely concerned I was. I drove straight home from the hospital, and of course found her in bed when I got back.

  Hye Rim whimpered as I turned on the light in her bedroom. “Jong Il? Is that you? I was just resting a bit.”

  “I spoke to your doctor,” I told her from the doorway.

  She didn’t move. “And? Obviously you want to tell me something.” “He feels that you would be better treated abroad. In Moscow, specifically.”

  “Of course he does.”

  “What?”

  Hye Rim turned onto her side and leaned on her elbow. “This is what you wanted, isn’t it? Me out of the country? Let me guess: I’ll have a wonderful apartment. I’ll be taken care of, and I’ll never have anything to worry about.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad.”

  “It didn’t sound so bad when your sister suggested it to me months ago, either.”

  “Hye Rim—”

  She turned back around as she began to cry. “I’ll go, I’ll go. Living abroad can only be better than this. Because this isn’t living.”

  And so she went, and I never saw her again. It was hard for Jong Nam to watch his mother leave, but even he could tell that she wasn’t well. The circumstances of his birth still required keeping him a secret from Korean society, but now I allowed myself a bit more leeway. He couldn’t go to school but I still found him some tutors that he enjoyed studying under. And sometimes, when things were quiet, I brought him into one of my offices. One such visit I picked him up and sat him at my desk, smiling with pride. “How does that feel?” I asked him.

  “OK.”

  “That will be your desk when you grow up,” I said.

  As Jong Nam got older, the Great Leader grew increasingly enamored with the idea of grooming him to take my place one day. Then, one evening when we were having dinner, he let me know that he’d made an important decision. “Building an independent, self-reliant national economy,” he recited, “does not mean building an economy in isolation. Yes, we are opposed to foreign economic domination, but we need not rule out international economic cooperation.”

  I paused. “That’s from On the Juche Idea.”

  “Yes,” he told me. “A great work. I’m well-acquainted with the author, you know.”

  At another time I might have laughed, but I wasn’t in the mood for jokes. Clearly President Kim Il Sung was building up to something unpalatable. “And why do you bring it up?”

  “The world Jong Nam grows up in will be very different than the one that you grew up in—let alone myself. Now that we’ve established the monolithic ideological system in Korea, we are increasingly engaging with the outside world. It would be good to have agents that we can completely trust, ones who know about foreign cultures.”

  “I agree...”

  “So I think that Jong Nam should go to school abroad.”

  As a father I couldn’t bear what the Great Leader was saying. But as an advocate of the Juche idea, and as a military genius, I knew that he was speaking the truth. He always was. Even during the Fatherland Liberation War, as the son of the Supreme Commander, I had still managed to have a childhood surrounded by friends of my age growing up in the same environment. Jong Nam, on the other hand, was growing up completely isolated. If he stayed in Korea, that was how he would have to remain. If his family background were uncovered, his upbringing would forestall him from following me into the leadership position. Better to keep his background a mystery than to have to deal with gossip as Jong Nam grew up in Pyongyang.

  I was devastated when I eventually watched Jong Nam fly off to school in Geneva. Unfortunately, coming home to Kim Young Suk only made it worse. The two of us had nothing in common whatsoever. Our attempts to engage in conversation only ended up in awkwardness and tension. It wasn’t her fault and it wasn’t mine, but it was more than clear to both of us that our marriage existed in name only. Nothing of value was ever going to come out of it.

  That’s when I fell in love for the last time.

  I was at a party for some army functionary when a very attractive woman sidled up to me. “Do you remember me, Dear Leader?” she smiled.

  “Of course,” I told her. “You’re Ko Young Hee.”

  Her eyes opened wide with amazement. “How did you remember that?”

  “Oh, it’s simple. I remember the name and birthday of everyone that I’ve ever met.”

  She folded her arms, skeptical. “What’s my birthday, then?”

  “June 16. And out of deference to you being a beautiful lady, I won’t mention the year.” The reason I remembered her birthday was because it was exactly four months after my own. And the reason I remembered her at all was because she’d been a dancer with the Mansudae Art Troupe. She had stood out even among all those gorgeous women.

  Unlike with Kim Young Suk, I had an enormous amount in common with Young Hee. We started spending many nights together watching movies—and then many mornings together discussing them. She reminded me of Hye Rim, but the Hye Rim that I’d first fallen in love with: vibrant and witty, someone with an enthusiasm that she brought to every conversation.

  Any idea of us being an official couple was of course absolutely impossible. Forgetting my other two wives, Young Hee hadn’t even been born in Korea. Though of Korean blood, she had grown up in Osaka, Japan. When she was a girl, she’d moved back to the DPRK alongside many other Japanese-born Koreans. Her background was too tainted to ever put her forward publicly.

  As the years passed, Young Hee gave me two more wonderful sons: Kim Jong Chul in 1981 and Kim Jong Un in 1983. But there still was never any doubt that Jong Nam would be my heir. The eldest son is always the successor.

  Eventually Jong Nam graduated from school and returned to Korea. I’d worried when he had been away, yet I remained worried when he returned. He often spoke at length about all the “international” friends that he’d made while abroad. This made me highly suspicious. If he regarded these foreigners as useful contacts, if they were insights into possible allied countries, then it was wonderful. But if he regarded friendship with outsiders as some sort of exciting purs
uit, then I had a big problem on my hands. I did my best to try and put such concerns aside. I told myself that I was just being a perfectionist since I cared so much about Korea’s future. When all was said and done, Jong Nam was still heir to the bloodline of Mt. Paektu.

  There were many positive characteristics my son displayed as he became a young man. He was very bright and very sociable, far more like his grandfather in this regard than like myself. And, like his father and both of his paternal grandparents, Jong Nam loved guns. On more than one occasion I heard talk of him getting drunk and shooting up the ceiling at either the Koryo Hotel bar or Pyongyang’s other nightspot. No one ever got hurt, so I let it slide. After all, I didn’t want a son who was afraid to pull a trigger. He was going to be inheriting my Songun politics!

  Jong Nam soon got married and had children as well, which delighted me. His political career, meanwhile, following a similar path to my own. I got him a position in the Party’s Propaganda and Agitation Bureau, where he excelled. Still, I knew he longed to work on the international scene, so this is where I eventually put him. In many ways, Korea is a unique nation. But, like every other country in the world, the DPRK sometimes engages in activities that are “unsavory” and best not discussed. It is with these types of matters that I entrusted Jong Nam, fulfilling the Great Leader’s purpose of sending him to school abroad.

  In early May 2001 I received word from my contacts in Tokyo that something had gone terribly wrong with one of Jong Nam’s trips to Japan. I was receiving all the information as soon as it was occurring—but so was the international media. The debacle had immediately turned very public, which made it that much more embarrassing.

  Jong Nam and his family had been intercepted by Japanese immigration authorities on suspicion of their fake Dominican Republic passports. His was under the name “Pang Xiong,” Chinese for “fat bear”—a too-clever reference to his portly carriage. The Japs had asked him questions for an hour before he admitted to being my son. Thankfully, he lied to them about the purpose of his trip and said he was there to visit Tokyo Disneyland. In fact, I knew he’d been there to collect money for a covert weapons shipment.

  I suspected that the Japanese knew why he was in Japan and I further suspected that someone had tipped them off. But thankfully they took his reasoning at face value, possibly to protect their sources. Or maybe they thought his public humiliation would be punishment enough. In either case, it surely made him aware that they were on to him and would be watching him in the future.

  Behind the scenes, I was told, the Japs were feverishly arguing over how to handle the situation. The police wanted a long, full interrogation, as police are wont to do. The diplomats wanted to merely expel him from the country and avoid an international incident, as diplomats are wont to do. Thankfully, the diplomats carried the day. On May 4, Jong Nam and his family were expelled to Beijing with no charges, explicitly so as to prevent conflict with the DPRK.

  It was when they got to China that I finally managed to get my son on the phone. “How are you?” I asked. “How is everyone?”

  “We’re fine,” he said. “Don’t worry, they took very good care of us. We were treated with the utmost respect.”

  “I don’t trust those Jap bastards for a second.” “It’s not like it was back in the day.”

  “It’s exactly like it was back in the day!” I yelled. “They didn’t get any information out of you, did they?”

  “No,” he said, “they didn’t.”

  “So why did you tell them that you were going to Disneyland?”

  Jong Nam sighed. I could tell he was tired and exasperated. He’d always had a short fuse, even as a boy. “I had to tell them something!”

  “Yes, I understand. But why Disneyland?”

  “It was a joke.”

  “A joke? Going to Disneyland is a joke?”

  “Yes. Like in the commercials. You know, ‘What are you going to do now? I’m going to Disneyland!’ The Americans say it.”

  “I see.” And I did see. The fact that Western journalists took his Disneyland joke at face value spoke to how little they understood the supposedly humorless DPRK. It also showed how quick they were to repeat what they are told, verbatim, by those in power. Neither of these things surprised nor concerned me. What did bother me was this: My own son was making jokes about America to the Japanese devils, when he should have been making jokes about America and Japan to the Korean people. It seemed as if his entire frame of reference was foreign. This time, I too gave him the benefit of the doubt. Again.

  It was only after the DPRK’s successful nuclear test in 2006 that I understood the truth of the situation. Everyone in the Party was in a celebratory mood. My Songun politics had been vindicated beyond dispute. No longer would Korea have to live under threat of nuclear blackmail, wondering if one night the US imperialists would decide that they’d had enough and choose to rain death upon us once again. Our nuclear capacity was the greatest possible impediment to a military strike, an urgently needed step toward ensuring that war would never again break out on the Korean peninsula.

  Yet the only one who seemed to be less than enthusiastic was Jong Nam. He applauded at the meetings like everyone else, but he seemed to be upset by the whole thing. The evening of the announcement I spoke to him at my home, assuming that something else had to be the matter. “What’s wrong?” I asked him. “This is a wonderful day for Korea!”

  He shook his head. “It’s not. We need to abolish nuclear weapons, all nuclear weapons, lest we destroy mankind.”

  “...What?”

  Jong Nam looked right at me, and I realized I didn’t know this man who was peering at me from behind foreign designer glasses. “I know you don’t agree,” he said.

  “As a matter of fact, I don’t!”

  “But how do you think all this is going to end?”

  “It’s going to end in an independent Korea whose sovereignty is respected!” I said, trying not to raise my voice—and trying to remember the last time that someone had spoken to me like that.

  “I’ve talked with you before about how we need to make changes.” “I thought you meant changes in allocation between heavy and light industry. I didn’t realize you meant throwing our whole system away!” “I’m not speaking of throwing our system away,” he insisted. “You yourself always cite how much the weather contributed to the famine. Doesn’t that imply protecting the environment, in order to lessen the impact of natural disasters? Doesn’t that imply a need to take action to protect the ecosystem?”

  “The ecosystem?” I laughed a bit. I’d never heard the word spoken in Korea before.

  “Look,” he said, “I’ve traveled with you to Beijing on more than one occasion, many years apart. You’ve seen what happened there. You’ve seen the growth, the progress. We can follow their lead.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I’ve seen what happened there. I’ve seen the complete collapse of the moral order! I’ve seen Chairman Mao become regarded as an embarrassment instead of the liberator of the Chinese people. We could never implement the Chinese reforms. We do not have a large agricultural sector in Korea, as the Chinese did. But regardless of that, we are not China. We are Korea! Any ‘change’ needs to be change in our way, in line with the Juche idea put forth by the Great Leader.”

  “We need more openness,” he asserted.

  “If you want openness, open a window!”

  That’s when it hit me: My own son had been infected with flunkeyism. He wanted to put other foreign powers and their methods above that of Korea and Korean principles. He wanted to disregard what President Kim Il Sung had established and what I’d upheld. Jong Nam didn’t want to succeed me. He wanted to oppose me, but he was going to wait until I’d died to do so. This wasn’t simply him disagreeing with me. No, this was him taunting me with what would happen after I was gone.

  He forgot one thing: I wasn’t gone yet.

  It wasn’t inevitable that the eldest son be the next leader, just as it hadn
’t been inevitable with me. The fact that I was the Great Leader’s son had been an important factor, to be sure. Who else would be as loyal and supportive? Who else could be trusted to carry forth a father’s vision than his own son? But I hadn’t been the only one carrying the blood of President Kim Il Sung. My uncle had been under consideration at one point, and others were a possibility. It was my loyalty and my skill which had carried the day, not merely the circumstances of my birth. It was precisely loyalty that Jong Nam was lacking: loyalty to me, loyalty to Korea and, most importantly, loyalty to the Great Leader and the Juche idea. Naming some other successor than Jong Nam would prove that I too had earned the leadership role and didn’t simply “inherit” it.

  My other choices for succession were very limited. My second son, Kim Jong Chul, was an impossible option. I suspected he had some sort of hormonal imbalance, for he was so effeminate that he was like a girl. I couldn’t very well leave a military-first society in the hands of a sissy.

  That left my youngest son, Kim Jong Un. And he was young, very young. At first I thought that meant he too would be unacceptable. But the more I thought about it, the more I warmed to the idea. My own youth had been used against me when I’d been named successor. And as General, Kim Il Sung had been so young that many in the south claimed that he must’ve been an impostor who merely adopted the actual Kim Il Sung’s name.

  Jong Un wouldn’t be alone when he took over. Kim Kyong Hui would make sure to advise Jong Un and help in the transition of power after I was gone. My sister had seen everything I had, shared the exact same bloodline and was even more loyal to the Juche idea than I—if such a thing were possible. When her own daughter insisted on having a boyfriend with an unsuitable songbun, Kyong Hui had driven the poor girl to suicide. She would certainly make sure that my youngest son stayed the course.