sinkings that were all but impossible to investigate. Lawyers for German insurance giant Allianz Global Investors, Lloyd’s of London and several other reinsurers filed a suit in a London court against the Korean National Insurance Corporation. They contested its claim for a 2005 helicopter crash into a government-owned warehouse in Pyongyang. In court documents, the companies alleged that the crash was staged, that the North Korean court’s decision to uphold the claim had been rigged and that North Korea routinely used insurance fraud to raise money for the personal use of Kim Jong Il.
The reinsurance companies, however, dropped their claims and agreed to a settlement that was a near- complete victory for North Korea. They did so, legal analysts said, because they had foolishly signed contracts in which they agreed to be bound by North Korean law. After the settlement, North Korea’s lawyers said it was ‘staggeringly unfair’ to suggest that the country engaged in insurance fraud. But publicity generated by the case alerted the world’s reinsurance industry to avoid North Korea, and so the fraud wound down.
When Kim Kwang Jin helped send the twenty-million-dollar bags of cash from Singapore to Pyongyang, he said that Kim Jong Il was delighted.
‘We received a letter of thanks and it was a great celebration,’ he said, noting that Kim Jong Il arranged for him and his colleagues to receive gifts that included oranges, apples, DVD players and blankets.
Fruit, home electronics and blankets.
This meagre display of dictatorial gratitude is telling. In Pyongyang, living standards for the core class are luxurious only by the standards of a country where a third of the population is chronically hungry.
Elites have relatively large apartments and access to rice. They are also granted first dibs on imported luxuries such as fruit and alcohol. But for residents of Pyongyang, electricity is intermittent at best, hot water is rarely available and travel outside the country is difficult except for diplomats and state-sponsored businessmen.
‘An elite family in Pyongyang does not live nearly as well — in terms of material possessions, creature comforts and entertainment options — as the family of an average salary man in Seoul,’ Andrei Lankov, a Russian-born political scientist who attended college in Pyongyang and now teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul, told me. Average per capita income in South Korea is fifteen times as high as in the North ($1,900 in 2009). Countries with higher per capita incomes than North Korea include Sudan, Congo and Laos.
The exception, of course, is the Kim family dynasty. Satellite images of the family’s residences stand out like sable-clad thumbs in the mangy landscape of North Korea. The family maintains at least eight country houses, according to books by his former chef and a former bodyguard. Nearly all of them have cinemas, basketball courts and shooting ranges. Several have indoor swimming pools, along with entertainment centres for bowling and rollerskating. Satellite pictures show a full-size horseracing track, a private train station and a water park.
A private yacht, which has a fifty-metre pool with two waterslides, was photographed near the family’s house in Wonsan, which is located on a peninsula with white sandy beaches and is believed to be a family favourite. The former bodyguard said Kim Jong Il often went there to hunt roe deer, pheasants and wild geese. All his houses have been furnished with imports from Japan and Europe. The family’s beef is raised by bodyguards on a special cattle ranch and their apples come from an organic orchard where sugar, a rare and costly commodity in the North, is added to the soil to sweeten the fruit.[9]
The privileges of blood are uniquely rich in the Kim family. Kim Jong Il inherited his dictatorial control of North Korea from his father in 1994 — the first hereditary succession in the communist world. The second such succession occurred in December 2011, after Kim’s death at age sixty-nine. His youngest son, Kim Jong Eun, was promptly hailed as the ‘supreme leader’ of the party, state and army. Although it was unclear if he, his older relatives, or the generals would wield real power, propagandists worked overtime manufacturing a new cult of personality. Kim Jong Eun was described in the party daily,
Other than having the right blood, the son’s qualifications were meagre. He attended a German-language school in Leibefeld, Switzerland, where he played point guard on the basketball team and spent hours making pencil drawings of Chicago Bulls great Michael Jordan.[10] He returned to Pyongyang at seventeen to attend Kim Il Sung University. Little is known about what he studied there.
Preparations for a second father-to-son transfer of power became apparent in Pyongyang shortly after Kim Jong Il suffered a stroke in 2008. It left the Dear Leader with a noticeable limp and signalled the emergence of Kim Jong Eun from obscurity.
In lectures delivered to select audiences in Pyongyang in 2009, Kim Jong Eun was described as a ‘genius of the literary arts’ and a patriot who ‘is working without sleep or rest’ to promote North Korea as a nuclear superpower. A propaganda song, ‘Footsteps’, was circulated at military bases to prepare the cadre for the coming of a dynamic ‘Young General’. He was indeed young, in his late twenties, born in either 1983 or 1984.
At his coming-out party in September 2010, the Young General’s face was officially shown to the world for the first time. Astonished Western journalists who are normally denied access to North Korea were summoned to a grand military parade in Kim Il Sung Square, where they were encouraged to film and photograph a young man who looked as fresh as his father looked debilitated. He was the spitting image of his late grandfather Kim Il Sung, who was always more beloved than Kim Jong Il.
That uncanny resemblance, as Kim Jong Eun moved to consolidate power after the death of his father, seemed orchestrated. His clothes and haircut — Mao suits and a short military trim with no sideburns — were the same as his grandfather’s when he seized control of North Korea in 1945. Rumours circulated in South Korea that the resemblance had been enhanced by plastic surgeons in Pyongyang to render the young man as a kind of Great Leader II.
If the new leader is to secure the same steely grip on the country as his father and grandfather, he certainly needs some measure of public support, along with solid backing from the military. His father, Kim Jong Il, may never have been popular, but he had nearly twenty years to learn how to dominate his elders. He had handpicked many of the leading generals and was effectively running the country when his father died in 1994.
Not yet thirty years old, with less than three years to learn the levers, Kim Jong Eun has no such advantage. Until he figures it out, he will have to depend on his privileged blood, a budding cult of personality, and the loyalty of relatives, courtiers and generals who may or may not be content to stand in the shadows.
4
Shin was putting on his shoes in the school dormitory when his teacher came looking for him. It was Saturday morning, 6 April 1996.
‘Hey, Shin, come out as you are,’ the teacher said.
Puzzled as to why he had been summoned, Shin hurried out of the dormitory and into the schoolyard. There, three uniformed men were waiting for him beside a jeep. They handcuffed him, blindfolded him with a strip of black cloth and pushed him into the backseat of the jeep. Without saying a word, they drove him away.
Shin had no idea where he was being taken or why, but after half an hour of bouncing along in the backseat, he became afraid and started to tremble.
When the jeep stopped, the men lifted Shin out and stood him on his feet. He heard the clunk of a heavy metal door opening and closing, then the whine of machinery. Guards nudged him into an elevator, and he felt himself descending. He had entered an underground prison inside the camp.
After stepping out of the elevator, he was led down a corridor and into a large, bare, windowless room where guards removed his blindfold. Opening his eyes, he saw a military officer with four stars pinned to his uniform. The officer sat behind a desk. Two other guards in khaki stood nearby. One of them ordered Shin to sit down in a straight-backed chair.
‘You’re Shin In Geun?’ the officer with four stars asked.
‘Yes, that is correct,’ Shin replied.
‘Shin Gyung Sub is the name of your father?’
