Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (42 page)

Before Kim Il-sung’s death, I interviewed a former official who told me that the North Korean president, as he aged, craved the companionship of girls in their early teens. Kim had a history of that. Recall the time he had spent while in his early twenties with pubescent and prepubescent tap dancers in the guerrilla zone. Later, after the Korean War, he took in three orphaned girls, fifteen-year-old Kim Young-ok and her thirteen- and eleven-year-old sisters, and raised them, eventually sending them to college, the former official told me.
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The practice developed of having one or two of the most beautiful thirteen-year-old Happy Corps recruits assigned to each mansion or villa start training immediately, instead of waiting to graduate like the rest. Kim Il-sung “wanted more than sexual satisfaction,” the former official told me.
“He wanted to become younger through their
ki
—life force. The thirteen-year-olds don’t sleep with him. They get training. Then at fifteen they become sexual product. Kim Il-sung likes to be with them as they mature—thinks it’s good for his health. If you’re in the same room with young people, their
ki
is supposed to transfer to you.”

Some other very high-ranking officials also became entitled to special privileges. In the 1960s, one of Kim Il-sung’s early mistresses, a well-known entertainer, became madam of a brothel established to service big-shot clients.
⁵⁹
Former bodyguard Kim Myong-chol told me that in 1983 he and fellow bodyguards learned of a new division of the female companion corps established to service very high officials other than Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. This was the
kwabu-jo,
made up of beautiful widows from all over the country who were recruited to participate in a sort of recycling. (In Korean tradition, widows normally could not expect to remarry.)

Mainly, though, for officials outside the inner circle, unsanctioned sexual relationships had to be furtive. A former official described to me a casual love affair. “Once I went to a rural area and was returning to Pyongyang at night in my Mercedes-Benz 230. I saw a girl in the road—roads are mostly deserted, as you know. She was waving, trying to hitch a ride. I stopped and she said she had missed her bus. She worked at a textile factory in Pyongyang. I said I’d take her there. On the way I got to know her. She was interested in me and asked for my address. I gave her my office phone number. One day she called and said, ‘I have some free time this afternoon.’ I took her to the Pyongyang Hotel for dinner. Somehow we grew close, and I slept with her. I went home and, the next day, went to the office as usual. My wife called and said, ‘You’d better come home early today’ When I got home my underwear were on top of the bed and my wife told me to look at them. The girl had been a virgin, and there was a stain on my underwear. I got in trouble— there was a lot of hostility at home. I didn’t see the girl after that, but a couple of years later when she got married I bought her some clothes. Her name was Sun-yi—same name as a famous South Korean singer. Lots of high officials have similar affairs.”

On occasion the regime cracked down to show that the rules applied even to the affairs of the high and mighty. Kim Yong-sun, who later would serve as a very high-level Workers’ Party secretary in charge of relations with the United States and Japan, was sent to a camp for three years of reeducation early in his career, in 1979. His offense was getting caught in a compromising situation with one of the pretty young women assigned to clerical duties in the offices of the leadership.
⁶⁰

In 1965, there was a case that a defector later reported to international human rights organizations. A woman university student was tried publicly
for having sex with numerous men, including influential party officials. The trial was held in front of some twenty thousand citizens, who criticized and accused her for about four hours. Finally the judge ruled that her moral depravity had violated Kim Il-sung’s instructions, so she must die. The excited crowd shouted curses at her and a firing squad shot her dead.
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The behavior of the woman who was executed probably had been fairly tame compared with the Kims’ sex lives, news of which would have shocked most North Koreans. But unlike President Bill Clinton’s United States and Prince Charles’s Britain, North Korea had no news media that would publicize tales of the rulers’ bed-hopping and cut their images down to mere human size. And the senior Kim, for his part, although he was a sociable sort who enjoyed business-related entertaining, kept his peccadilloes private to the extent he did not, as a general rule, hold private parties even for his pals in the inner circle.
⁶²

Kim Il-sung, while he did not have much of a conscience, “would never flaunt his lifestyle in front of his people,” a former elite official told me. “They make the girls’ parents sign contracts of secrecy, tell them their lives are in danger if they talk. And people around them don’t really know the nature of their work is servicing Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. Most of their acquaintances think they have gone to acting school.” Any unauthorized person who might happen to discover the truth would be in grave peril simply on account of the knowledge.

Some bodyguards and household servants were in on the secret, of course. In exchange for their silence they were permitted to lead “lives without normal controls—privileged lives,” the former high official told me. It was through that inner circle that the word eventually leaked to other high officials outside the Kims’ immediate households. Some bodyguards-turned-generals, aping the Kims’ behavior, set themselves up with harems of their own. That aroused other officials’ suspicion and led to some discreet conversations in which bodyguards spilled the beans. Still, the former official said, most North Koreans did not know. As for the high officials who had found out, they feared the consequences if they talked about it with anyone they did not trust implicitly.

Kim Jong-il had a troubled upbringing. At age seven, already having lost a younger brother, he suffered the death of his mother. His father was often absent, preoccupied with affairs of the heart in addition to such affairs of state as his invasion of South Korea and the three-year war that followed. As the UN forces advanced across the 38th parallel, Jong-il, then called Yura, and his little sister were shipped off to the rear for the duration. Following the war, the father’s paramour—the hated rival of the boy’s dead mother— became first lady of the land. In classic East Asian style, it appears, the jealous new “wife sought to channel her husband’s affection to her own children at the expense of her stepson, on whom she spied and informed. The sadness and alienation of a boy bereft of maternal love could have been more than enough in themselves to cloud his developing personality.

To make things worse, inveterately status-fixated Koreans around him, young and old alike, deferred to the eldest son of the country’s top leader as if he were a little prince, thus encouraging the bully in him. By the time he graduated from college he was well along toward developing a reputation, among both Pyongyang’s Korean elite and the small foreign community, of being wild, recklessly impulsive and, by turns, cruel and warm-hearted, even extravagantly generous.

At the same time, though, Kim Jong-il had begun showing flashes of the intelligence and artistic sense that he would use later to transform the country’s stodgy cinema and stage productions. More important, living with daily
exposure to high statecraft and palace intrigue, he was sharpening skills of manipulation and political infighting that eventually would help carry him to the pinnacle of power as his father’s successor.

The regime said nothing about the circumstances of Kim Jong-il’s birth and infancy until the mid-1970s, when he had been tapped as the successor. What was said after that was crafted to lend a magical aura of inevitability to his rise. In recent years, however, witnesses have come forward who knew the boy and his parents and described their lives in the Soviet Union and in the period after they moved to Pyongyang.

The Korean-American writer Peter Hyun in an article in the Seoul monthly
Wolgan Chosun
recounted a 1999 interview with Lee Min, a comrade of Kim Il-sung and his wife during the anti-Japanese period. Kim Jong-il’s mother, Kim Jong-suk, “was quite a beauty,” Lee recalled. “Her face was that of a princess but her complexion was dark on account of her many years in the field. Her eyebrows were black and her eyelashes were long, making her truly attractive. Her build was even more attractive.”

Lee was a member of another of the fighting units that escaped to Siberia after taking a beating from the Japanese. In 1942, she met Kim Il-sung, then a captain in the Eighty-eighth Brigade, and his wife. Lee married a Chinese who was also deeply involved in the anti-Japanese struggle in Manchuria and who eventually became governor of Heilongjiang Province. As a Korean-Chinese, she herself became a high-ranking provincial official dealing with ethnic minority issues. Sensitivities in Sino–North Korean relations may have been at the root of her reticence on one key question when she spoke with Hyun. “Kim Jong-il was born before I met Kim Jong-suk, and I don’t have anything to say about his birthplace,” she said.

The two women spent considerable time together between 1942 and 1945. Kim Jong-suk, according to Lee, “spent winters indoors and summers outdoors. She was quick, generous and had many talents,” among them cooking, sewing, acting and singing. In the dramatic productions that Kim Il-sung produced in the Eighty-eighth Brigade’s camp, Kim Jong-suk directed the dancing “and, often, danced herself.”

Kim Jong-il, Lee recalled, “was a bright and agile child. He had his mother’s dark eyes and dark complexion. He was a cute boy.” In the afternoon, after his child care center let out, the boy enjoyed playing with a wooden rifle, marching along with fighters who were undergoing training. “When he played with Choe Hyon’s daughter Gop-dan and other kids, Jong-il had to be the commander. Gop-dan was one year older than Jong-il. I would ask him if he could kill the Japanese with a wooden gun. He would reply confidently that he could. I would tell him that he needed a real gun to kill a Japanese, and then he would ask his mother for a real gun. Kim
Jong-suk told him: ‘No, you cannot have Dad’s gun. You must use your wooden gun to take a real gun from the enemy. That’s the only way you “would ever become a general like your dad.’ Kim Jong-suk was quite strict with Jong-il.”
¹

At a Russian nursery attended by children of Eighty-eighth Brigade members, Yura Kim and the other children received ideological indoctrination. Stalin and Mao Zedong were exalted beings, while capitalists and religious believers—especially the Germans and Japanese—-were compared to wolves for their evil, cunning natures. In an interview with a South Korean newspaper, a woman who had cared for Yura at the nursery recalled him as a rough lad given to biting other children.
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Photographs from the period show that the home of the Kims after they moved from the Soviet Union to Pyongyang was a Western-style, multi-story house built of stone—from the look of it, probably one that had belonged to Japanese colonialists or Western missionaries. Such a house required servants. A Japanese woman was trying to return to Japan in 1946 when Pyongyang authorities dragooned her into working in the Kim residence as a maid. Not hiding her obvious feeling that she was too refined for such duty the woman later described the mistress of the house, Kim Jong-suk, as a rustic. Lacking style or glamour, the North Korean first lady had not adapted her rough ways of dress and behavior to the unfamiliar life in a city. “She used to go out barefooted to the back yard of her house and butcher chickens whenever she was told to prepare food for guests,” the Japanese woman recalled. “She was very quick in plucking out chicken feathers. It was just enough to make me imagine how she had operated during her partisan’s life in the forests.
³

Pyongyang’s version of Kim Jong-il’s upbringing following the family’s return to Korea in 1945 begins with a visit to Mangyongdae to meet surviving relatives on his father’s side. The white-bearded great-grandfather, Kim Bo-hyon, naturally made a big fuss over the three-year-old, joggling him on his knee and remarking: “On this joyous day the deceased members of our family will probably close their eyes in relief. Thank you, my dear granddaughter-in-law. You’ve brought our great-grandson to us and our Mangyongdae home brightens up.
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This typical homecoming story is charming and believable—except for one enormous, gaping hole. The account, like other official biographical works, says nothing to indicate that Kim Jong-il was not the only son whom Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-suk had brought back with them to Korea. In fact he had a little brother, then one year old—the same brother who, three years later, drowned in a pond at home in Pyongyang. It stands to reason that the little one, even if his parents had not brought him along to take his
turn being joggled on Grandpa’s knee, would have rated a mention at least. In Confucian family life, after all, even though the eldest son is the be-all and end-all, it is considered important to have at least one more son—as insurance that there will be a male to carry on the line if something happens to the firstborn.