The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (6 page)

The man in charge in the South was Lee Hu Rak, a former noncommissioned officer in the Japanese army and former chief of staff to President Park before being named to head the KCIA. Although it took its name and some of the functions from its US model, in many respects the KCIA was more like the prewar Japanese
kempeitai
or the Soviet KGB in its unbridled power in the domestic as well as the foreign arena. The former US diplomat and Korea scholar Gregory Henderson called the KCIA “a state within a state, a vast shadowy world of . . . bureaucrats, intellectuals, agents and thugs.” By the early 1970s, the director of the KCIA was more powerful and more feared at home than the prime minister or any other governmental figure except the president himself.

After receiving written instructions from the president about visiting the “special zone,” Lee traveled secretly through Panmunjom to Pyongyang in early May. Looking back on it, Lee recalled that “I felt the kind of anxiety that is quite indescribable” because “we simply had no ghost of a precedent to guide me as to how to open up some sort of mutually acceptable communication.” He was also mindful that, as the chief of intelligence for the Republic of Korea, he was the person the northern communists would like most to get their hands on, after Park himself.

His hosts took him to see the sights of Pyongyang and to a revolutionary opera extolling Kim’s anti-Japanese exploits. Then on his second night in Pyongyang, Lee was awakened and driven through a rainstorm to a well-guarded building in the hills around the North Korean capital. He was not told where he was being taken. At fifteen minutes after midnight, at the end of the harrowing ride, the thoroughly shaken KCIA director, who thought he might never live to see the dawn, found himself face-to-face with Kim Il Sung.

KIM IL SUNG

The Great Leader, as he was known to his subjects, is among the most fascinating figures of the twentieth century, dominating his country during his lifetime as few individuals are ever able to do. From the late 1950s his power was virtually unlimited within the borders of North Korea, and his decisions often had repercussions involving life and death in South Korea and beyond. As a national leader, Kim surpassed all others of his time in longevity. When he died in July 1994 at age eighty-two, he had outlived Joseph Stalin by four decades and Mao Tse-tung by almost two decades, and he had remained in power throughout the terms of office of six South Korean presidents, nine US presidents, and twenty-one Japanese prime ministers.

The future founder and leader of North Korea was born in Pyongyang on April 15, 1912, the day the
Titanic
sank. His parents were both Christians. His mother was the devout, churchgoing daughter of a Presbyterian elder, and his father had attended a missionary school.

Kim had only eight years of formal education, the last two in Chinese schools in Manchuria, where his father moved to operate an herb pharmacy. When he was seventeen years old, he was expelled from school for revolutionary activities and never returned to the classroom. After being jailed briefly, in the early 1930s he joined guerrilla bands fighting the Japanese who, after turning Korea into a Japanese colony in 1910, had invaded and occupied Manchuria. The Korean guerrillas were organized by and attached to an army led by the Chinese Communist Party.

Although Kim’s activities fell short of the brilliant, war-winning exploits later concocted by North Korean propagandists, he was successful
enough that the Japanese put a price on his head. By 1941 Kim’s unit and other parts of the Chinese guerrilla army were forced to retreat across the Manchurian border to Soviet army training camps, where they spent the next four years. During these years Kim married a Korean partisan and fathered two sons, the elder of whom was Kim Jong Il, his eventual political heir and successor.

It is still unclear how Kim was selected to lead North Korea. Having spent years in a Soviet training camp, Kim was well known to the Soviet officers who occupied the area north of the thirty-eighth parallel in 1945, and he had a reputation for being reliable and courageous. He appeared in Pyongyang immediately after the war in the uniform of a Soviet army captain, according to a Soviet general who served in the occupation force. Some accounts suggest that Joseph Stalin himself made the final choice of Kim from several candidates. Stalin is reported to have said, “Korea is a young country, and it needs a young leader.”

As a leader, Kim was cordial to and comfortable with ordinary people. He emerged from a family of hardworking ordinary people and described himself in his memoirs as “an ordinary man.” Vadim Medvedev, a Gorbachev aide who was Kim’s escort for several days in Moscow in 1986, wrote later that he was “greatly surprised” to find in him “an absolutely normal person, with whom you could talk not only about politics but also weather, exchange opinions on events happening around and impressions on what we saw.”

Yet at the same time, Kim came to live in luxury and exclusiveness beyond the dreams of kings. He inhabited at least five sumptuous palaces in North Korea and innumerable guesthouses built for his comfort and amusement, all completely cut off from anyone except servants, bodyguards, and carefully screened guests. Uninvited people were barred from even setting foot on the wide and well-tended road leading to his Pyongyang residence. Like Stalin and Mao, whose cults of personality he emulated but far outdistanced, his automobile used special lanes, and other traffic was banished when he moved through the streets of his capital. When he went to the Soviet Union by train in 1984, all rail traffic was stopped along his route at the demand of the North Koreans, so that his luxurious special train could travel unimpeded by any competing or oncoming trains. (This caused massive tie-ups in the Soviet rail system.) When his train stopped to take on supplies or to give Kim a breath of air along the way, the station platforms were cleared of their normal throngs, left vacant except for specially authorized people, some of whom had been recruited to applaud and cheer him.

In deference to his health, a special institute was established in Pyongyang to concentrate on the aging process of this one man, with doctors and medical specialists monitoring his every move and special fruits and
vegetables produced solely for his consumption. When Kim traveled to Berlin on his 1984 European trip, according to a former East German diplomat who helped arrange the visit, Kim’s aides arranged for a special bed to be flown ahead for his sleeping comfort (as was often the case with Ronald Reagan as US president). In addition, they brought a special toilet with built-in monitoring equipment that instantly analyzed whatever the Great Leader eliminated for any sign of health problems. The former German diplomat said that medical specialists from different friendly countries were assigned primary responsibility for consultation on different parts of the leader’s body, with East German doctors being given responsibility for Kim’s head and neck, including the large but benign tumor on the back of his neck that had been visible since the early 1970s.

From his education in Chinese schools and his four years in a Soviet military camp, Kim was fluent in Chinese and conversant in Russian. His complex relationship with the two giants of communism—his neighbors, sponsors, and, for most of his life, his allies—was central to nearly all that he did or said. To a large extent, he owed his career as well as his country’s well-being to China and Russia, yet he was always wary of their dominant power. In a tradition practiced by Koreans throughout their history, Kim went to extraordinary lengths to gain and maintain as much independence as possible.

Oleg Rakhmanin, a former Soviet official who had extensive meetings with Kim over a twenty-five-year period, said that when Kim was being actively wooed to take Moscow’s side against Beijing, he was “careful and prudent, weighing his every word. He was afraid the Chinese would learn what he said to us. . . . [Kim was] a calculating character—a chess player who calculates his every move.” Another former Soviet official, who had been posted in the Soviet Embassy in Pyongyang, described Kim as “a flexible and pragmatic politician, an Oriental Talleyrand. He would agree with our leaders and give a lot of promises, but afterward he would pursue the same line, his own line.”

Due perhaps to his limited formal education, Kim was not a book reader and could not be fairly described as an intellectual. In deference to the intellect, he added a pen to the traditional communist hammer-and-sickle as North Korea’s official emblem, but in personal conversations he rarely referred to world history or to any work of serious literature. “He knows a lot of Confucianism and a smattering of Marx, Lenin, Hegel, and such,” said a former communist diplomat who dealt with Kim extensively.

Most of his government’s philosophical utterances dealt with “the
juche
idea,” which was hailed in North Korea as Kim’s original, brilliant, and revolutionary contribution to national and international thought. But Kim acknowledged on occasion that
juche
was not original with him. Although the fact was rarely mentioned in the North, the term and concept
go back at least to Korean scholars in the early years of the twentieth century. Kim explained that “I have just laid special emphasis on it.”

Kim’s version of
juche
, emanating from North Korea’s militant nationalism, is usually described in shorthand as “self-reliance,” but there is much more to it. According to Han S. Park of the University of Georgia, a leading American expert on
juche
as a philosophical system and state religion, “
Juche
views Korea as a chosen land, as people are told consistently that world civilization originated from the Korean peninsula.”

Beyond its sanctification of Kim’s decisions,
juche
was a declaration of political independence from his two communist sponsors. Although it was originally called “a creative application of Marxism-Leninism,” eventually all reference to Marxist connections was abandoned. The
juche
philosophy has deep traditionalist roots and great appeal to the Korean antipathy for external domination. In practice, it became synonymous with North Korea’s famous autarky.

For a visitor from afar, the most extraordinary thing about the Kim Il Sung era was the unrestrained adoration, bordering on idolatry, built up around the Great Leader, which seemed to reflect a craving for adulation that could never be sated. Kim’s photograph, later joined by a separate picture of his son Kim Jong Il, was on the wall in every home as well as every shop and office. Starting in the 1960s, at the son’s order, every North Korean adult wore a badge bearing the senior Kim’s likeness on his or her suit, tunic, or dress.

Within his country Kim was nearly always referred to as
suryong
, or Great Leader, a term referring to the greatest of the great that Kim reserved for Lenin, Stalin, and Mao before he began applying it to himself in the 1960s.

In the late 1980s, according to one count, there were at least thirty-four thousand monuments to Kim in North Korea, not including benches where he once sat, which were protected with glass coverings, and other memorabilia of his many visits throughout the country. The main square in the capital, the leading university, the highest party school, and many other places and institutions were named for him. During Kim’s travels as well as his everyday meetings, an aide followed behind him, writing down his every observation, many of which were published in several languages and considered holy writ by North Koreans. In the 1960s, near the beginning of the buildup, a Soviet party official who had experienced the deification and later downfall of Stalin had the temerity to ask Kim directly, “How is it possible there is this cult of personality in your country?” Kim’s answer was, “You don’t know our country. Our country is used to paying respect to elders—like China and Japan, we live by Confucian culture.” It is unlikely that anyone was bold enough to ask this question of him in later years.

Kim created an impermeable and absolutist state that many have compared to a religious cult. No dissent from or criticism of Kim Il Sung, his tenets, or his decisions was permitted. Citizens were arrested, and some even sent off to one of the country’s extensive gulags, for inadvertently defacing or sitting on a newspaper photograph of the Great Leader or his son and chosen successor. Reports of inhuman treatment, torture, and public execution for failure to conform with Kimism were rife. Prison camps were established in remote areas containing as many as 150,000 people, many of whom were held in ghastly, inhuman conditions with little chance of ever being released.

Kim’s biographer Dae-Sook Suh of the University of Hawaii wrote that Kim became “a ruler who wields more power than the notorious monarchs of the old Korean kingdom,” building a state that practices “a peculiar brand of oriental despotism” rather than communism. “There was no such thing as a conversation with Kim Il Sung,” said a prominent South Korean who was Kim’s guest on numerous occasions. “If he spoke to a North Korean, that person stood up, in effect at attention, to receive instructions or orders.” With his personal guests who were important to him or his state, Kim was a stickler for detail. While in Pyongyang, “he would call me every day,” said this South Korean, always asking, “How are you feeling? Is everything all right?”

In a revealing speech in the 1970s, Kim told government officials that “whatever I am doing, I cannot rest easy unless I have the whole situation at my fingertips.” As the restless and energetic leader of a small country, Kim telephoned the chief of the general staff every night for a report on the military situation and the foreign minister for a report on diplomatic developments. Based on the reports, he said he issued immediate instructions.

During most of his years in power, Kim traveled incessantly within the country on personal inspection tours, giving “on-the-spot guidance.” As late as 1980, Kim told Representative Stephen Solarz (D-NY), the first US political figure to visit Pyongyang, that each year he spent ten to fifteen days on such tours in each of the ten provinces and three special cities. Kim boasted to Solarz that as a result of his conversations with farmers in their fields, he had personally countermanded government instructions about the planting time for rice—and claimed that the amended policy produced a bumper crop.