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The Dear Leader's health has been a matter of great speculation among foreign intelligence agencies. Over the years he has been variously reported to suffer from heart trouble, diabetes, epilepsy, and kidney disease. A Chinese military officer whose wife is a medical doctor told me he was treated by a Chinese medical team for head injuries sustained in a serious automobile accident in September 1993. A high-ranking official of South Korean intelligence, on the other hand, said he believes the younger Kim sustained injuries to his side and perhaps internal organs in 1993, in a fall sustained while horseback riding. None of the stories has been confirmed.

In July 1994, wearing a dark cadre suit with a black mourning armband, Kim Jong Il kept his own counsel at the ceremonies for his father. Pyongyang radio referred to him as "the Dear Leader, the sole successor to the Great Leader," and Korea experts speculated about how quickly he would assume his father's titles of general secretary of the Workers Party and president of the DPRK. Initial predictions were that he would claim the posts and titles of supreme leadership after a hundred days of mourning, then after one year of mourning; then after two years, and so on. His failure to take the two top posts stirred speculation that Kim Jong 11 faced important opposition within the hierarchy.

THE FRAMEWORK NEGOTIATIONS

The long-awaited third round of U.S.-DPRK nuclear negotiations, which had finally convened the day that Kim Il Sung died and was quickly interrupted, resumed in Geneva on August 5. American negotiators were relieved to discover that the death of Kim Il Sung had not altered the existing DPRK negotiating positions nor diminished the desire of its leadership to make a deal. From the outset of the Geneva talks, the North Koreans were impressively businesslike and determined to move ahead, in sharp contrast to their argumentative style on many previous occasions.

In a single week of talks ending with a postmidnight press conference on August 12, the two delegations were speedily able to agree on the rough outlines of a settlement of the central issues. Additional progress emerged from tougher bargaining when the negotiations resumed in September after a six-week recess.

As a result of the Carter mission, North Korea had already agreed to freeze its nuclear program while negotiations proceeded. In Geneva the two sides now pursued a permanent solution along the lines they had previously discussed: that Pyongyang would abandon all of its proliferation-prone gas-graphite nuclear facilities in return for modern light-water reactor nuclear power plants.

Beyond this basic provision, a comprehensive agreement had to take account of a number of lesser items of great concern to one side or the other. DPRK negotiator Kang, in private conversation with Gallucci, referred to several key items as "our chips": the eight thousand irradiated fuel rods that had been unloaded earlier in the year from the 5-megawatt nuclear reactor; the reprocessing facility that could extract from those fuel rods enough plutonium for four or five nuclear weapons; and the mandatory IAEA "special inspections" of the disputed nuclear waste sites, which might cast light on whether North Korea already possessed hidden plutonium. The United States also had some important bargaining chips, especially the possible establishment of political and economic ties that could create a new environment for North Korea and substitute, in some degree, for the loss of the Soviet Union and the shifts in the policies of China.

Early on, the North Koreans asked to be compensated for the energy they would be giving up by shutting down their working reactor and stopping work on the two larger ones long before the promised light-water reactors were on the scene, a period estimated to take at least ten years. They made it clear that they needed something concrete to take home at the end of the negotiations. The Americans explored supplying various energy sources,