The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [197]
In interviews shortly after their escape, Choi and Shin depicted Kim Jong Il as confident, bright, temperamental, quirky, and very much in charge of governmental as well as theatrical affairs. To his kidnapped "special guests," he could be privately self-deprecating, as when he said to actress Choi in their first dinner meeting, "What do you think of my physique? Small as a midget's turd, aren't I?" Or audacious, as when he summoned Choi at five A.M. to the final hours of an all-night party with his friends, a band, and lots of whiskey, of which he had imbibed too much.
While the kidnapping of Choi and Shin is the best documented of the many violent acts associated with the name of the younger Kim, it is not the only one. The terrorist bombing that killed South Korean cabinet members at Rangoon in 1983 was attributed to a clandestine agency reporting to him. Kim Hyon Hui, the female agent in the bombing of Korean Air Lines flight 858, in which 115 people were killed in 1987, was told that her orders came directly from Kim Jong Il in his own handwriting, although she did not see them. Various unconfirmed accounts suggest that the younger Kim had direct supervision of the North Korean nuclear weapons program.
At the same time, Kim Jong II is believed to be more interested in modernizing than most others in the ruling circles. In a diplomatic dispatch to Berlin in 1982, the East German embassy remarked on the younger Kim's "modern" outlook and credited him with a loosening up of popular lifestyles, including the approval of more fashionable women's clothing, the reintroduction of dice, card, and board games, and the increased consumption of alcoholic beverages, especially beer.
In a tape recording brought out by the filmmakers, Kim Jong Il said in 1984, "After having experienced about thirty years of socialism, I feel we need to expand to the Western world to feed the people. The reality is that we are behind the West." At the same meeting, however, he said that North Korea could not open up, as even the Chinese were urging. "We have been stuck strategically" because opening up in his militarily embattled country, even for tourism, "would be naturally tantamount to disarmament." This could only be done after unification, he said.
In preparation for his succession, North Korean authorities went to extraordinary lengths to glorify Kim Jong 11: his portrait, along with that of his father, was placed in every home, office, and workplace. A fascinating example of the indoctrination was recounted to me by a Russian correspondent whose wife gave birth in the late 1980s at Pyongyang's maternity hospital during his assignment in the DPRK. The hospital is one of dozens around the country sponsored by Kim Jong 11 in honor of his mother, who died in childbirth. After the correspondent's baby was born, the head nurse presented the newborn child to his father, declaring, "Congratulations from Comrade Kim Jong Il!" A few minutes later, several nurses paraded in military style into the birthing room with a large jar and a longhandled spoon. They ceremoniously placed a spoonful of honey into the mouth of the astonished new mother, chanting, "This is a gift from Comrade Kim Jong Il!" Sugar and honey were in such short supply among ordinary North Koreans that a spoonful of honey was a great delicacy. Despite such gestures, defectors and outside experts say that affection for Kim Jong II in North