Tidbits Quotations To Accompany

Everyone knows that North Korea’s leader is a bloodthirsty madman and buffoon—or is he really? Mark Bowden digs into the hard facts for an unusual portrait.

oes anyone make an easier target than Kim Jong Un? He’s Fatboy Kim the Third, the North Korean tyrant with a Fred Flintstone haircut—the grinning, chain-smoking owner of his own small nuclear arsenal, brutal warden to about 120,000 political prisoners, and effectively one of the last pure hereditary absolute monarchs on the planet. He is the Marshal of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Great Successor, and the Sun of the 21st Century. At age 32 the Supreme Leader owns the longest list of excessive honorifics anywhere, every one of them unearned. He is the youngest head of state in the world and probably the most spoiled. On the great grade-school playground of foreign affairs, he might as well be wearing across his broad bottom a big KICK ME sign. Kim is so easy to kick that the United Nations, which famously agrees on nothing, voted overwhelmingly in November to recommend that he and the rest of North Korea’s leadership be hauled before the International Criminal Court, in The Hague, and tried for crimes against humanity. He has been in power for a little more than three years.

In the world press, Kim is a bloodthirsty madman and buffoon. He is said to be a drunk, to have become so obese gorging on Swiss cheese that he can no longer see his genitals, and to have resorted to bizarre remedies for impotence, such as a distillation from snake venom. He is said to have had his uncle, Jang Song Thaek, and the entire Jang family mowed down by heavy machine guns (or possibly exterminated with mortar rounds, rocket-propelled grenades, or flamethrowers), or to have had them fed live to ravenous dogs. He is reported to have a yen for bondage porn and to have ordered all young men in his country to adopt his peculiar hairstyle. It is said that he has had former girlfriends executed.

All of the above is untrue—or, perhaps safer to say, unfounded. The Jang-fed-to-dogs story was actually invented by a Chinese satirical newspaper, as a joke, before it began racing around the world as a viral version of truth. (And to be sure, he did send Uncle Jang to his death.) It says something about Kim that people will believe almost anything, the more outrageous the better. In light of this, is it worth considering that the conventional take on Kim Jong Un does not come close to providing an accurate picture?

What if, despite the well-documented horrors of the Stalinist regime he inherited in 2011, while still in his 20s, Kim has ambitions at home that one might be tempted to describe—within carefully defined limits—as well intentioned? What if, against terrific odds, he hopes to improve the lives of his subjects and alter North Korea’s relationship with the rest of the world?

There is no shortage of evidence to the contrary—evidence, namely, that Kim is little more than a bad, and erratic, approximation of his canny father. Kim has continued his father’s military-first policies: the same saber rattling and shrill denunciations come screaming out of Pyongyang, the same emphasis on building nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, the same unabashed political oppression. For years, North Korea has engaged in what experts in Washington have called “a provocation cycle”—ramping up provocative behavior, such as launching missiles or conducting nuclear tests, followed by charm offensives and offers to begin a dialogue. Under Kim Jong Un, the provocation cycle continues to spin dangerously. When Sony Pictures suffered a damaging and embarrassing breach of its internal computer network weeks before the scheduled December release of the comedy The Interview, little prompting was needed before fingers started pointing at Pyongyang. In the movie, Seth Rogen and James Franco play Americans who land an interview with Kim and then are enlisted by the C.I.A. to try to assassinate him. Earlier, in June, North Korea had promised to unleash a “merciless countermeasure” should the film be shown.

Whatever his true character, Kim faces a problem peculiar to dictators. His power in North Korea is so great that not only does no one dare criticize him, no one dares advise him. If you are too closely associated with the king, your head might someday share the same chopping block. Safer to adopt a “Yes, Marshal” approach. That way, if the king stumbles, you are simply among the countless legion who were obliged to obey his orders. One way to read the confusing signals from Pyongyang in recent years is that they show Kim, isolated and inexperienced, clumsily pulling at the levers of state.

Kim is, in fact, playing a deadly game, says Andrei Lankov, a Russian expert on Korea who attended Kim Il Sung University, in Pyongyang, in 1984 and 1985, and now teaches at Kookmin University, in Seoul. “He has had a spoiled, privileged childhood, not that different than the children of some Western billionaires, for whom the worst thing that can happen is that you will be arrested while driving under the influence. For Kim, the worst that can actually happen is to be tortured to death by a lynch mob. Easily. But he doesn’t understand. His parents understood it. They knew it was a deadly game. I’m not sure whether Kim fully understands it.” Running with the Bulls

We’re not even sure how old he is. Kim was born on January 8 in 1982, 1983, or 1984. To tidy up their historical narrative, Pyongyang’s propagandists have placed his birthday in 1982. The original Kim, the current leader’s grandfather and national founder, Kim Il Sung, for whom universal reverence is mandatory, was born in 1912. As the story goes, in 1942 his son and heir, Kim Jong Il, came along; for this second Kim, a slightly lesser wattage of reverence is mandatory. In truth, Kim II was born in 1941, but in North Korea myth trumps fact to an even greater extent than elsewhere, and numeric symmetry hints at destiny, like a divine wink. That is why 1982 was seen to be an auspicious year for the birth of Kim III. For reasons of their own, South Korean intelligence agencies, which have a long history of being wrong about their northern cousins, have placed his birthday in the Orwellian year 1984. Kim himself, who occasionally shows magisterial disdain for the slavish adulation of his underlings, has said that he was born in 1983—this according to the American statesman, rebounder, and cross-dresser Dennis Rodman, who had been drinking heavily when he met Kim, in 2014 (and who shortly afterward went into rehab). Whichever date is correct, the Sun of the 21st Century has walked among us for three decades.

What do we know for sure about those years? About enough to fill one long paragraph. We know that Kim is the third and youngest son of his father, and the second-born son of Kim II’s second mistress, Ko Young Hee. In the last half of the 1990s, he was sent to two different schools in Switzerland, where his mother was secretly being treated for breast cancer, ultimately to no avail. The first of these was the International School of Berne, in Gümligen, and the second was the Liebefeld Steinhölzli school, near Bern. At the latter, he was introduced to his teenage classmates as “Un Pak,” the son of a North Korean diplomat. His classmates remember him on his first day of upper school, a skinny boy dressed in jeans, Nike trainers, and a Chicago Bulls sweatshirt. He understandably struggled in classes taught in German and English. He was undistinguished academically, and apparently unbothered by it. He is remembered as having been fond of video games, soccer, skiing, basketball (in which he was able to hold his own on the court), and those Bulls, who were in the process of winning the last three of their six N.B.A. championships behind Michael Jordan, one of Kim’s heroes. In 2000, he returned to Pyongyang, where he attended the military academy that bears his grandfather’s name. At some point, around 2009, Kim II decided that Kim Jong Un’s older brothers were unsuited for leadership, and he selected the youngest son as his heir. At about this time, Kim III began putting on weight—literally and figuratively. Some believe that in order to more closely resemble his revered grandfather, whom he resembles anyway, he was “encouraged,” or ordered, to do so. He assumed power when Kim II died, in December 2011, and at around the same time he was wed, in an arranged marriage, to Ri Sol Ju, a former cheerleader and singer about five years his junior. He is said to be genuinely in love with his wife. The Kims have a daughter, whose birth is believed to have been induced so that she would be born in 2012 rather than 2013. Mrs. Kim is often seen with her husband in public, a clear departure from his father’s practice. Kim II’s women were usually kept offstage. (A notorious womanizer, he was known to be officially married once and kept at least four known mistresses.) Kim stands five feet nine inches, taller than most North Koreans, and his bulk is now estimated to be upwards of 210 pounds. He already shows signs of the heart problems that killed his father, and also possibly of diabetes, and seems to regard modern notions of healthy living as Western nonsense. He openly chain-smokes North Korean cigarettes (unlike his father, who smoked Marlboros), drinks a lot of beer and hard liquor, and evidently approaches mealtimes with gusto. There is no picture of him jogging.

alk-show comedians and the tabloid press may delight in mocking Kim, but many of those who watch him closely are actually impressed. What are the things a dictator needs to be good at? You need to manage the system—the party structure, the military, the economy, and the security forces—in such a way that your people remain loyal. This is done by adopting policies that bring prosperity, if not to everyone, then to at least enough people; by artfully elevating those most loyal and able; and by demoting the able but disloyal. Threats to your power must be eliminated ruthlessly.

A dictator needs to know how to present himself in public, and at this, Kim III already excels. He has a deep voice and is a capable public speaker. “I have noticed in my viewing of him that he moves well as a politician,” says Bill Richardson. “He is a lot better than his father. He smiles. Goes and shakes people’s hands.” Daniel Pinkston, a deputy project director for the International Crisis Group, who studies North Korea closely, says, “I do not like dictatorships, but as far as being a dictator—given that system, and what type of person is needed to manage it, maintain it, and sustain it—he is a great dictator.”

A great dictator must offer more than an impressive voice and posture. He must be decisive and instill fear. In his first three years, Kim has removed the two men who posed the most serious risk to his rule. The first to go was Vice Marshal Ri Yong Ho, chief of the general staff of the Korean People’s Army and a member of the Presidium of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party. Ri had been close to Kim II and had direct responsibility for protecting Pyongyang and, perhaps more important, the Kim family. He had been one of the stars of his generation. In July 2012, Kim III called a rare Sunday meeting of the Workers’ Party Central Committee politburo and abruptly stripped Ri of his duties. It was the first sure sign that Kim planned to run the show himself. After Kim’s purging, Ri vanished. His ultimate fate is unknown, but no one is expecting him back.

The second threat was Uncle Jang, who, being a family member and a far more powerful figure than even Ri, was far more emphatically dumped. Kim made a public show this time, demonstrating a more impulsive flair in such matters than his father, who was content to shoot errant generals quietly, to imprison them, or retire them to rural estates. The fall of Jang harked back to the old Soviet show trials and the flamboyant excesses of Saddam Hussein, who liked to get up onstage with a fat cigar before his assembled leadership and personally point out those who were to be taken from the hall and shot.

What exactly was Kim up to? It was crucial to clean house in the military, replacing older leaders loyal to his father with those primarily loyal to him, many of them younger men. This not only ensured that the military’s commanders were beholden to him but also infused the old Cold War-era ranks with more modern thinking and less resistance to change.

He has also initiated sweeping economic reforms. His father was leaning toward some of these in his later years, but the changes have been so aggressive that the prime mover behind them must be Kim himself. Most are designed to build North Korea’s economy on money, which seems an almost silly thing to say, since economies are by definition about money. Not in North Korea. In the nation’s past, the only path to prosperity was ideological purity. If you lived in a better apartment, drove a nicer car, and were permitted to live in the relatively affluent districts of Pyongyang, it meant you had the approval of the regime. Increasingly, North Koreans can better their lot by earning more money, as is the case throughout the world. Managers of factories and shops have been given financial incentives to do better. Success means they can pay their workers and themselves more. Kim has pushed for the development of special economic zones in every province of the country, with the aim of setting up internal competition and rewards, so that the fruits of success in one area no longer must be fully returned to the state. It is part of a general effort to kick-start productivity.

In the agricultural sector, Kim has also implemented reforms that have proved surprisingly effective. “He decided to do what his father was deadly afraid of doing,” says Andrei Lankov, the Russian Korea expert. “He allowed farmers to keep part of the harvest. Farmers are not working now as, essentially, slaves on a plantation. Technically, the field is still state property, but as a farming family you can register yourself as a ‘production team.’ And you will be working on the same field for a few years in a row. You keep 30 percent of the harvest for yourself. And this year, according to the first unconfirmed reports, it will be between 40 and 60 percent that will go to the farmers. So they are not slaves anymore, they are sharecroppers.”

There was no dramatic announcement of the change in policy, and few have noticed the turnaround. Chronic malnutrition remains a problem. But in 2013, according to Lankov, for the first time in about 25 years North Korea harvested almost enough food to feed its population.

The strangest of Kim’s recent overtures was the Dennis Rodman episode. The meeting is certainly the most significant contact any group of Americans has had with North Korea since Kim assumed power. It was conceived as a stunt by Shane Smith, the bearded, tattooed co-founder and C.E.O. of Vice Media, the highly successful and offbeat news-and-entertainment company. A few years ago, Smith proposed to his staff that they figure out a way to get back to North Korea. Various approaches were kicked around before it was decided to try to exploit Kim’s fascination with Michael Jordan and the Bulls. Vice contacted Jordan’s representatives, proposing to fly him to Pyongyang with their crew, and were met with a combination of disbelief and silence.

“We had thrown out the idea of Dennis Rodman as [laughter here] a gay, very crazy idea,” says Jason Mojica, at the time a Vice producer and now editor in chief of Vice News. “And then someone who kind of overheard here just literally got in touch with his agent.” The agent conveyed that his client was generally keen on anything to make a buck—he had recently appeared at a dental convention—and so Rodman was enlisted. They had a Chicago Bull.

“He did great,” says Mojica.

With his colored hair, his piercings, and his tattoos, and with his flamboyantly ill-defined sexuality (he wore a wedding dress to promote his 1996 autobiography) and his reputation for substance abuse, Rodman might be considered a poster child for capitalist libertine decadence. A less likely ambassador to North Korea cannot be imagined. But his name opened doors magically. Vice proposed that Rodman lead a basketball camp for kids, if possible with the help of other pro basketball players. These turned out to be three of the Harlem Globetrotters, adding to the surreal character of the event. The highlight of the visit would be an exhibition basketball game between two mixed teams made up of the Americans and the North Koreans. “We kind of expected that it would be held in some run-down gymnasium with like 80 to 100 little kids, and that the game would just be this little thing that we really did just for the cameras,” says Mojica. As part of their overture, the group from Vice did mention that they would love to meet with Kim Jong Un: “Waves, hello, maybe we can shake his hand before he disappears. But we never expected it to actually happen.”

Certainly not the way it did. The proposal was accepted, and Rodman flew to Pyongyang in February 2013 with the Globetrotters and the Vice crew. Along for the ride (and for his language skills) was Mark Barthelemy, an old friend of Mojica’s—they both attended college in Chicago in the 1990s and played in bands. Barthelemy developed a lifelong interest in Korea—he calls it an “obsession”—learning the language and living in Seoul for six years, working mostly as a stock-market analyst. Mojica wanted someone along whom he trusted and who understood the language.

The visiting Americans were given the full Potemkin—touring a new shopping mall, a fitness center, a dolphin show, the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun. The group was shocked when, on the day of the exhibition game, instead of being led into a run-down gymnasium, they were escorted into an arena more like Madison Square Garden, packed to the rafters with North Koreans.

“We were quickly setting up, and all of a sudden that roar happened, and that was our first indication that Kim Jong Un was there,” says Mojica. “And it was incredibly shocking—I could not believe it.”

The moment was captured in the episode Vice filmed of the trip for HBO. The crowd of uniformly dressed spectators rises as one and begins thunderous cheering and clapping. Then the camera turns to view Mr. and Mrs. Kim.

“I was just walking around the sideline of the court shooting pictures and then suddenly I see people just stand up and start screaming,” Barthelemy recalls. “He walked in and sat down, and then Rodman went over to sit next to him, and the atmosphere in the place was electric for a moment and then just very aware … You could feel everyone watching.” As translators hovered, Rodman sat and chatted with the Supreme Leader during the event.

After the game, the Americans were invited to a reception. There was an open bar, at which Mojica ordered a scotch. “There is kind of a receiving line, kind of like a wedding reception,” Mojica recalls. “So then I turned and immediately the very first person in the line is Kim Jong Un. Like right to my right, and I am like, Oh shit! So I put this glass of scotch down, and I go over, and suddenly the cameras are flashing, and I have my Saddam-Rumsfeld moment. So it was kind of like: here is my handshake photo with the evil dictator that will come back to haunt me years later.”

When Mojica took his seat at the assigned table, a waiter brought his discarded drink back and then set down a full bottle of scotch. The meal was lubricated with toasts, and at one point Mojica was pulled forward by Rodman, who held out the mike to him. Mojica had prepared brief remarks in advance, so they could be screened by one of the North Korean minders. So he stood with a microphone in one hand and a full tumbler of scotch in the other. He told the room that the most difficult part of the trip had been trying to get Rodman, the N.B.A.’s onetime bad boy, to get along with the Globetrotters, who were like Boy Scouts. “And I think that we have done that,” Mojica said, “and therefore it proves that anything is possible, even world peace!”

There was laughter and cheering, first from the Americans, and then, moments later, from the North Koreans, as his words were translated. Mojica lifted his glass to Kim, took a sip of the scotch, and went to put the microphone down. Then he heard a voice yelling at him from across the head table. He looked up and realized that it was Kim, sitting on the edge of his chair, shouting and gesticulating with a raised left hand. Mojica was confused. Then Kim’s translator shouted the Supreme Leader’s words in English: “Bottoms up! You have to finish your drink!”

Mojica looked down at the giant glass of brown fluid. This was clearly a command performance. “I am a guest, so I am going to do it,” he says. “So I finished—kind of guzzled this drink—and when I finish, my head is kind of spinning.” He reached back for the microphone and spoke again, amazing himself as the words came out of his mouth: “If we keep it up at this rate, I will be naked by the end of the evening.”

Some of the women in the audience looked aghast. There was silence as the remarks were relayed to Kim in translation. “He is sitting there kind of like on the edge of his seat with his mouth open and eyes wide,” Mojica recalls. “And he is like, listening, listening, and nodding and nodding, and then he is like, Oooh!, slapping the table, and everyone laughs with a great relief.”

Mojica says his memory grows foggy from that point on. He remembers a North Korean all-girl rock band revving up the theme music from Dallas, and then Rocky. One of the American group’s translators got up onstage and played the saxophone. Things got a little out of hand. There was crazy dancing. A friend of Rodman’s got into a drunken fight with someone in the Globetrotters’ entourage. One of the North Korean hosts went over to Mojica with a message from Rodman. “He suggested that we may want to chill out a little bit,” he says. It was alarming. Things had apparently drifted further out of hand than the producer had thought. How many people can say that they were told by Dennis Rodman at a party to tone things down?

At one point in the evening, before things got too hazy, Mojica remembered, he stared at Kim for a long time because “he was right there.” Sitting just 12 feet away, Mojica tried to take in every detail, knowing how rare it was for an American to get such a close look at Kim Jong Un. The Supreme Leader seemed perfectly relaxed. Not at all drunk. Friendly. Smiling. Fat. Interacting with his guests, though in a very formal way. It was hard for Mojica to believe that this young man was, in this place, completely, utterly, in a way most Americans cannot fully comprehend, in charge.