How Do We Know What We Know About North Korea?
January 26, 2006
A delegation of financial management professionals visited Pyongyang in October 2004 on one of the highly-monitored trips occasionally offered to a select group of outsiders. They saw streets that were empty, surrounded by tall apartment buildings in which there was no sign of life-no clothes or plants on the balconies, no gawking faces looking out of the windows. Occasionally a hurried individual, possibly an official, would sprint nervously across one of Pyongyang’s grand plazas and rush into the subway. It was almost like the regime had ordered everyone to stay away from the group on its tour, but who could know? One night the delegation of capitalists was treated to a long-running, theatrical event—a musical written by Kim Jong-il. Its major theme, driven home to the audience in monotonous redundancy, was "Secrecy is the lifeblood of the revolution."
It is difficult to know North Korea well, largely because the North Korean regime wants us to know nothing, and pursues a strategy of deception on everything that matters most. One result of this phenomenon is that American policy toward North Korea always seems to be based on guesswork and ignorance. Secrecy, or at least its byproduct of American uncertainty, is indeed the lifeblood of North Korea’s continuing survival.
We tend to throw up our hands in resignation when we are faced with the series of bizarre statements and conflicting actions the regime pursues. North Korea is a regime that says it wants open, friendly relations with the outside world; espouses unification with South Korea; sends a team to the Olympics to carry a flag alongside South Korean compatriots; and hospitably shows deference to an aging president of the Republic of Korea during the June 2000 summit. It also threatens to destroy its neighbors; preaches hatred against Americans, South Koreans, and Japanese; sends commandos on submarines to conduct missions of abduction, murder and destruction across South Korea; and frequently threatens to destroy Seoul in a “sea of fire.”
The North’s erratic behavior, some argue, is in response to the world’s intimidation. Most western nations, however, approach North Korea with policies characterized primarily by patience and disinterest. Neither warrants, nor should be said to incite, such extreme fluctuations in North Korea’s behavior. The cycle of mood swings is accordingly generated by the regime for its own purposes, to gain some reward internationally or domestically.
Understanding how that can be the case, however, defies much of what political scientists believe they know about human societies. Indeed, understanding how a regime can destroy all social institutions (organized religions, labor unions, political parties, clubs, communities and neighborhoods) and supplant any competing influences with strict obedience to a single supreme leader (Suryong), confounds post-enlightenment political theory. What North Korea has done produces a kind of cognitive dissonance among American analysts, and as a result, we simply conclude there must be something we just don’t know.
Imagining North Korea’s motivations has become a cottage industry in Washington, and it is not always motivated by a thirst for truth. As Ambassador James R. Lilley has observed, “…to support policy objectives, American diplomats and analysts come up with explanations about North Korean behavior that support whatever arrangement they’re trying to deliver. They persuade the American people to support policy outcomes that are little more than concoctions of how things should work out with North Korea.”1
Policy options generally tend to be based on the lowest common denominator of decision makers’ points of view. In international relationships based on years of experience and openness, such as the relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States, a vast reserve of experience and tested judgments underpin discussions of any issues between us. That is not the case with North Korea. Nevertheless, North Korea is perceived as having objectives that a community of analysts, even though professing ignorance, believes makes sense.
Mirror-imaging is a pitfall to be avoided in foreign policy analysis, but it is routinely employed in the case of North Korea. Everyone would prefer to think that the North Korean regime is like other countries-it is guided by patriotic motives, seeks to serve its people, and hopes for wide-spread prosperity and peace with the rest of the world. Although there is little to confirm those points, we do not conclude that North Korea is decidedly different from other nations in history, we simply conclude there must be much we do not know about it.
More often than not, discussions about North Korea in Washington are truncated by someone saying sagaciously, “You may be right, but we don’t really know.” A confession of what little is known about North Korea punctuates Congressional testimony by every official in every administration’s statements regarding North Korea. In the world of North Korea analysis, admitted ignorance is more honored by the scholarly community than insightful analysis of what is known.
But there is more known about North Korea than we admit, and there are some people who naturally study more attentively and therefore know more than others. It has taken two journalists to produce two phenomenally important books that collect a tremendous hoard of evidence about the regime and its ruling circle. Jasper Becker’s Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea (Oxford University Press, 2005) is a concise, thorough, crisply-written synopsis of what has been learned about North Korea over the years. Brad Martin’s 868-page Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2005) is an encyclopedic presentation of the facts about North Korea, packed with original source materials, and is especially exhaustive on Kim Jong-il’s personal life and modus operandi.
Much of what Becker and Martin present in their books comes from defectors. For years there has been a scholarly debate over the reliability of information from defectors, as though, in the case of North Korea, valid eye witness accounts could emanate from any other source. Defectors are not impartial, but that does not mean they are inaccurate.
Journalists like Becker and Martin, however, recognize defectors for what they are-sources that can often be corroborated. After a few decades, we now have a track record on defector’s stories. Even inconsequential information, such as who drove trucks in Chongjin, can tend to substantiate important earlier assertions. In intelligence work, this process is referred to as the mosaic technique, and Becker and Martin have produced two stunning mosaics.
Both Becker and Martin have relied heavily on interviews with and the writings of Hwang Jang Yeop, North Korea’s highest level defector. Kim Il-sung’s favorite political theoretician, Hwang served in key posts of the workers’ party and president of Kim Il Sung University. At the time of his defection in 1997 he was one of the few trusted to travel abroad-as Secretary of External Affairs for the Korean Workers Party. Now dedicated to ending Kim Jong-il’s regime and bringing democracy to his native land, Hwang has written extensively in books and articles published in South Korea. One of Hwang’s interesting observations is that Kim Jong-il often said, “Keeping secrets is the essence of life in the party.”2 Martin has done an especially valuable service to American analysts by including so much source information from Hwang.
Rep. Christopher Cox and Senator Jesse Helms invited Hwang to tell Congress what he knew about North Korea in 2001. After a three-year stonewalling effort by South Korea’s intelligence apparatus, President Roh Moo Hyun finally permitted Hwang to visit Washington in November 2004. On Capitol Hill, he was frequently asked whether Kim Jong-il was insane, a question on which Hwang repeatedly demurred. In Martin’s book, however, we are admitted to the Kim’s world of secrecy, paranoia, and manipulation, and can draw our own conclusions.
We learn that Kim Jong-il’s pathological jealousy extends even to loyal party members who become “too popular.” For example, Hwang told Martin, “if a party secretary in charge of a certain district wins the confidence of the residents, [Kim Jong-il] will surely get the secretary replaced.”3 Martin tells how one of Kim Jong-il’s wives, the actress Song Hye-rim, was exiled to Russia in part to stifle rumors in Pyongyang about their faded relationship. After rumors about her began to spread among students in Moscow, Kim Jong-il ordered the security commander of the Korean Peoples Army to silence them. According to Hwang, “The commander interrogated the North Korean students living in Moscow, and executed all the students who simply replied that they knew that Song Hye-rim was living in Moscow.”4
Martin delves into the intestacies of intrigue amongst the ruling family in a way no other individual scholar has ever done, by tracking news stories and interviewing as many of the principal actors as he could gain access to. Students of North Korea have known for years that Kim Jong-il harbors ill-will toward his stepmother, and has accordingly isolated her children, his half-siblings, in a policy he calls “pruning the lesser branch.” From Martin we learn much more. For example, we learn of the attempts Kim’s stepmother took to persuade Kim Il-sung that Uncle Yong-ju should be the Great Leader’s successor, not Kim Jong-il, and Kim Jong-il’s counter-efforts to destroy her. “By introducing Kim Il-sung to two women who then became favorites of the Great Leader…[one of whom bore him a son],” Martin was told, “Kim Jong-il drove a wedge into his father’s marriage and reduced the first lady’s influence.”5
Of course, it is not necessarily the mandarin court intrigues of the ruling family that most interest American analysts. Martin offers more than a few surprising revelations on more critical questions that have occupied our attention for years. For example, scholars have puzzled over who ordered the axe murders of 1976, an incident in which North Korean guards along the DMZ attacked an American tree-pruning mission that had been approved in advance by North Korea. Kim Il-sung was forced to apologize for the incident, and North Korea found itself ostracized even by the Non-Aligned Movement. Martin points out Kim Jong-il’s position became vulnerable at that time. Even oblique references to him were dropped in the official press. Soon after the incident, Kim Jong-il’s portrait was removed from public places. “Having seen enough of the younger Kim’s leadership,” Soviet newsmen stationed in Pyongyang told Martin, “North Korea’s officers had blamed Kim Jong-il for the diplomatically embarrassing axe incident.”6 If Kim Jong-il was in fact responsible for the attack, we can add this debacle to other mistakes he is known to have backed: the 1983 bombing in Rangoon and the1987 downing of a commercial airliner. This permits a fuller understanding of the current leader’s poor judgment and operational incompetence.
Understanding how strong Kim Jong-il actually is, and how he maintains his power base, are the most significant tasks facing North Korea watchers. In this regard, Jasper Becker has pieced together reports that cast light on the dark years at the end of Kim Il-sung’s life and Kim Jong-il’s scramble to consolidate power after his father’s demise. He takes on the thorny issue of Kim Jong-il’s complicity in his father’s death, citing no less a source than Kim Jong-il’s own bodyguard, Lee young-guk. According to the guard, when Kim Il-sung suffered his fatal heart attack, Kim Jong-il gave orders that no one, including doctors, was to be allowed into Kim Il-sung’s room. “[F]ive helicopters were sent from Pyongyang to collect the body,” but the two carrying doctors and Kim’s personal entourage crashed, killing all on board. All of the other people involved in the Great Leader’s final hours “either committed suicide or disappeared into the gulag.”7
Becker provides a convincing picture of the differences that may have around that time between father and son. As the elder Kim’s health and eyesight failed, Kim Jong-il found opportunities to make himself the exclusive avenue of access between party officials and his father. The elder Kim relied on taped reports from his son regarding conditions across the country.8 Becker describes the “grotesque climate of mutual flattery” between father and son that kept the reality of North Korea’s decline from Kim Il-sung until it was shattered around 1991. At that time, a cousin of the Great Leader, Kang Song-san, who had promoted some reforms as premier in the years 1984-1986, insisted on briefing Kim Il-sung on the famine in North Hamyong province. Kim Il-sung went to see conditions for himself, and was told by foraging peasants that they were starving. Kim Il-sung then reappointed Kang as premier and dismissed Kim Jong-il’s appointee, Yon Hyong-muk.9 The elder Kim then asked his brother to take over some of Kim Jong-il’s responsibilities, and issued orders blocking Kim Jong-il from top positions in the Workers Party.10 Whether this points to the elder Kim’s realization in his latter days that his son should not succeed him can only be guessed, but, as Becker points out, the persistence of such reports from North Koreans at a minimum indicates the disparity between how North Koreans view the father, and how they view the son.
Becker presents the most extensive recitation of efforts to oppose the Kim regime ever published. Beginning with armed clashes between workers and soldiers in Chongjin in 1981, he follows the course of North Korean rebellious activities up to the present. He reveals thirty high-ranking officials plotted to stage a rebellion to coincide with nuclear inspections in 1993; a military unit in Sinuiju also staged an uprising in 1993, and officers at Hanggon Military Officers Training School were burned at the stake for plotting to assassinate Kim Jong-il in 1994.11 The better known “VI Corps incident” has always been difficult to sort out from the conflicting reports available. Yet Becker consolidates these into a clear picture of what it was about: “The plotters…hoped to seize control of the local university, provincial communication centers, the Chongjin port, and various missile-launch installations. Then they planned to call on the VII Corps headquarters down the coast in Hamhung for support before advancing on Pyongyang where their true target lay.”12 They did not succeed, nor did the other anti-regime attempts which Becker lists.
The study of North Korea is a high priority for the intelligence agencies of not merely the United States, but also the Republic of Korea, the Peoples Republic of China, Russia and Japan, among others. What they have learned, however, can seldom be used in the public debate. It is protected information, stored pending confirmation, and fed to busy policymakers in small bite-sized pieces. Luckily, a steady stream of defectors has emerged from North Korea over the past twenty years, many of whom were high-level, informed officials in the regime, including a significant group of security and diplomatic personnel. While a mere decade ago many American scholars felt confident in describing North Korean defectors as automatons who continued to be unable to voice objective information about the regime even after they defected, the 1997 defection of Hwang Jang Yeop and the treasure trove of his voluminous writings since then have demonstrated we can learn as much from North Korean defectors as we learned from Soviet defectors. Becker and Martin have put this information in a form that stands to illuminate the study of North Korea for years to come.
Unfortunately, if we can no longer plead ignorance about North Korea, we must come to grips with the facts. However reassuring it is to assert what we do not know about the regime, the problem is that what we do know is terrible. We may regret that for so many years scholars have been content to plead ignorance and give North Korea the benefit of the doubt on questions critical to our security. In the long run, our patience and self-restraint may prove to have been fundamentally, strategically wrong.
How do we know what we know about North Korea? was written by PAI's Korea Fellow, a former Pentagon official. © PAI 2006