The king of Pyongyang

Beside the car walked the dead dictator’s son and successor Kim Jong-un. Just 27, he looked overwhelmed. He broke down in tears several times during the ceremony.

Directly behind Kim walked his uncle Chang Song-thaek, considered to be the second most powerful man in North Korea. On the other side walked army Chief of Staff Ri Yong-ho and Defence Minister Kim Yong-chun.

These were the old men who would now wield power in Pyongyang. Or so many thought.

In the 1950s Kim Jong-un’s grandfather Kim Il-sung created something unique in the communist world - North Korea’s one-man hereditary leadership.

For nearly two decades Kim groomed his eldest son Kim Jong-il to succeed him. Wherever he went, the crown prince was at his side. In 1994, when the old man died, Kim Jong-il immediately took charge. But when he then died suddenly in 2011 his own son had barely begun his apprenticeship to become North Korea’s third Supreme Leader. Many experts now predicted the collapse of one-man-rule. They were soon to be proved wrong.

Within months Chief of Staff Ri Yong-ho and Defence Minister Kim Yong-chun had both been dismissed. Ri’s whereabouts remain a mystery to this day.

Then in December 2013 Kim Jong-un made his most dramatic move. His own uncle, Chang Song-thaek, was hauled from a party meeting, accused of treason and executed, with some unconfirmed reports even suggesting an anti-aircraft gun had been used.

Between 2012 and 2016 Kim carried out the biggest purge seen in North Korea since the days of his grandfather. South Korea’s Institute for National Security Strategy has reported the execution of 140 senior military officers and government officials. Another 200 have been removed or imprisoned.

Kim has removed anybody who stood in his way, replacing them with a younger cadre loyal to him. They are led by his own sister Kim Yo-jong, who in 2017 was appointed to the Politburo at the age of 30.

Today no-one is in doubt who pulls the levers of power in Pyongyang. Kim Jong-un is the Supreme Leader.

The first to predict Kim Jong-un’s rise to power may have been a Japanese sushi chef who goes by the alias of Kenji Fujimoto.

During the 1990s Fujimoto became an unlikely member of the Kims’ inner circle. He made Japanese food for Kim Jong-il, and claims he was the young Kim Jong-un’s “playmate”.

In 2001 Fujimoto returned to Japan and published his inside story. In it he described his first encounter with Kim Jong-un, and his older brother Kim Jong-chol.

“The first time I met the two young princes, they were both wearing military uniforms. They shook hands with each of the staff. But when it came to shaking my hand, Prince Kim Jong-un gave me an icy glare. It was like he wanted to say, ‘We hate Japanese like you’. I will never forget his sharp stare. He was seven years old.”

In a second book in 2003 Fujimoto wrote:

“Kim Jong-chol is regarded as the most likely successor. But I doubt that very much. Kim Jong-il used to say, ‘Jong-chol is no good, he is like a girl’. His favorite is his youngest son, the second prince. Jong-un is very much like his father. He is even built like his father. But his existence has not been revealed to the public.”

It was a remarkable prediction. At the time Kim Jong-un had not been introduced to the North Korean people, let alone the outside world. Most of his childhood was still a complete secret.

Choi’s own family were peasant farmers - they had not served the Japanese, but nor had they opposed them. And so Choi was sent to a combat unit. At the time his “status” did nothing to blunt his loyalty.

“In North Korea, you are brainwashed from a young age,” he says. “I was taught that the Kim family are gods. And I believed it.

“When Kim Il-sung made his new year address and said this year we must mine more coal, I said: ‘I will go to the mines!’ That's how naive and loyal to the Kim family I was.”

Choi rapidly discovered the Supreme Guard Command was not there to protect the Kims from foreign enemies, but from their own people.

“For the Kim family, everyone is a potential enemy,” he tells me. “The North Korean military, the General Staff Department, the Ministry of the People’s Armed Forces as well as the entire North Korean people, they are all potential enemies.”

Choi was trained to trust no-one, not even his own parents.

As the Kim family’s paranoia grew so did the size of this personal security force.

“When the Kim family saw the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the fall of the Soviet Union they were shocked,” he says. “They drastically increased the size of the Supreme Guard Command. Now it numbers almost 120,000 soldiers.”

Like a medieval royal house, the Kim regime is jealous of its power and sees enemies all around.

And like many royal families through the ages, it sometimes kills to protect its position.

On 12 February 2017, a group of friends gathered in a restaurant in the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur. They had come to celebrate the 25th birthday of an Indonesian woman, Siti Aisyah. Video from one of her friends' phones shows her smiling and blowing out a candle and singing.

According to Aisyah’s account of the night, she told her friends she had exciting news. She’d landed a job on a TV reality show. Finally, she could escape the sleazy Kuala Lumpur bathhouse where she worked. Her friends toasted her: “You are going to be a star!”

The next morning at Kuala Lumpur airport Siti Aisyah spotted her target, a rotund balding man in blue T-shirt and sports jacket. As he approached the check-in she ran up to him and splashed a liquid in his face.

“What are you doing?” he spluttered in broken English.

“Sorry,” she said as she ran away.

According to Aisyah’s version of what happened - which has not stopped her being charged with murder by the Malaysian authorities - it was all just a prank for the TV show.

Sitting in a café a few metres away were a group of alleged North Korean agents. Apparently satisfied their mission had been completed, CCTV footage shows them walking to the departure gate and boarding a flight to Dubai.

The rotund man was now starting to feel unwell. His face was itchy and he was finding it harder to breathe. Within minutes he was slumped on a chair unconscious. Airport staff called an ambulance. As it sped towards Kuala Lumpur his lungs filled with fluid and he drowned.

The man’s passport said he was a North Korean diplomat called Kim Chul. In fact, the dead man was Kim Jong-nam, the older half-brother of Kim Jong-un.

Kim Jong-nam had been poisoned with a powerful nerve agent - VX. Inhaling a drop the size of a grain of sand is enough to kill.

Kim’s was a brazen killing and - despite North Korea denying any involvement - all the evidence seemed to point towards his younger half-brother in Pyongyang. But what was the motive?

Their father Kim Jong-il had a complicated love life. He had two official wives, and at least three mistresses, with whom he fathered five children. Kim Jong-nam was the child of his first mistress Song Hye-rim. Kim Jong-un was the younger son of his second mistress Ko Yong-hui, a former actress born in Japan. The old dictator kept his mistresses and their children secret. They lived in secluded villas, isolated from each other. Though they shared a father, Kim Jong-nam and Kim Jong-un never met.

As the oldest son, Kim Jong-nam was long considered Kim Jong-il’s most likely successor. But in 2001 he was arrested as he attempted to enter Japan on a fake passport. He had planned to visit Tokyo’s Disneyland.

The crown prince of North Korea was filmed being marched to a plane and expelled. For his father in Pyongyang it was a humiliation he could never forgive. Kim Jong-nam was removed from the succession and sent into exile in China. Or so the story goes.

But that is not the whole story.

The extent of this “black” economy became clear to me while interviewing a young defector in Seoul in 2012.

South Korean President Park Geun-hye had just ordered the closure of the Kaesong Industrial Zone - just across the DMZ in North Korea.

“When I heard the news, I called my father and told him to go to China and buy Choco Pies,” the young defector told me.

This left me confused.

“Sorry,” I said, “where is your father?”

“In North Korea,” he said.

“How do you call him?” I asked.

His father, it turns out, has a Chinese sim card for his mobile phone. This is illegal and dangerous, but also common. Once a week he travels to the Chinese border, connects to a Chinese mobile network, and his son can call him.

“And what about the Choco Pies?” I asked.

South Korean companies operating in the Kaesong Industrial zone had been paying their North Korean workers, in part, with South Korean products. One of the most popular was Choco Pies.

They were so popular they had become a kind of black-market currency in the North. Now that the Kaesong zone had shut, the black-market price for Choco Pies would sky rocket. So, he told his father to go to China and bring back as many boxes as he could carry, the profits would be good.

Then on 20 April this year, at a plenary session of the Worker’s Party of Korea, Kim Jong-un made a speech entitled:

“The further acceleration of socialist construction as required by a fresh high stage of the developing revolution.”

In it Kim declared a freeze on all further testing of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles and a “new strategic line” that would focus on building North Korea’s economy. This speech has been taken by some observers as a signal that Kim Jong-un is ready to fulfil that promise he made on the train - to follow China’s example.

One is John Delury from Yonsei University in Seoul.

“The new strategy is economics first - 100% on the economy,” he says. “Kim is saying, ‘I'm really going to improve the economy. You're not going to have to tighten your belts again.’

“For the last five or six years it has been modest improvement but nothing breakthrough. Instead he's obviously been focused on the nuclear programme. And so we're now seeing a pivot.”

Others, like Bradley K Martin, are far less certain.

“Is he seriously thinking he can transform this country? I don’t know. It doesn’t fit with what we know about him. He’s had years to do so if he wanted to. He has done showmanship like his father and his grandfather. ‘Let’s build monuments.’ Each has done the same thing.

“I have seen no evidence the economy has really been reformed except for tacitly admitting that there is another economy – which it had to. Everyone would have died if it hadn’t been for the ‘other economy’.”

If Kim Jong-un is now intent on developing his country he needs sanctions lifted. He needs trade and massive investment. To get that, the US and its allies will demand he give up his “treasured sword”, his nuclear weapons. Is that what he now intends?

Early on the morning of 4 July 2017 a US spy satellite flying high above North Korea spotted activity at an airfield in North Pyongan Province. A huge 16-wheel “transporter erector launcher” (TEL) drove on to the airfield. It had a large missile on its back.

Over the next hour US intelligence officers watched as the missile was erected and fuelled for launch. During the operation they could clearly see a man strolling around the missile, smoking a cigarette.

This story was told by Ankit Panda, the editor of The Diplomat magazine, who says it was leaked to him by an intelligence source. The man with the cigarette, so close to a rocket full of inflammable fuel, could only have been Kim Jong-un.

Shortly after dawn the missile’s main engine fired and it roared skywards, flying nearly 3000km into space before splashing down in the Sea of Japan. Kim Jong-un was jubilant. Photos released later showed him smiling and hugging senior military officers. And there in his hand was the tell-tale cigarette.

Pyongyang claimed the rocket was a new intercontinental ballistic missile capable of hitting the US and that the launch was a 4 July gift to President Donald Trump.

North Korea has pursued its nuclear weapons programme doggedly, at great economic cost and in the face of intense international pressure to desist.

After coming to power in 2011 Kim Jong-un dramatically accelerated the North’s nuclear and missile programme, conducting many more ballistic missile tests over a shorter period of time than his father had.

On 29 November last year it culminated with the launch of an enormous new missile, the Hwasong-15. North Korea’s state news agency KCNA said the new missile was capable of carrying a “superheavyweight warhead” and striking the whole of the mainland US.

The KCNA report said Kim Jong-un “declared with pride that now we have finally realised the great historic cause of completing the state nuclear force, the cause of building a rocket power”.

Many outside experts agreed - Kim could now hit the US.

So if you were to accept Kim’s nuclear missiles aren’t needed for defence, what are they for? The answer according to Duyeon Kim is to achieve so-called decoupling - stopping the US from coming to South Korea’s aid if and when Pyongyang decides it’s time to “reunify”.

“Based on the North's public statements and their actions and their private comments, it appears that the nuclear weapons are for both deterrence and for potential use in forceful unification. That's something that they've talked about openly and in private.”

Myers agrees Kim’s nuclear weapons are about unification, but not necessarily by force.

“North Korea needs the capability to strike the US with nuclear weapons in order to pressure both adversaries into signing peace treaties. This is the only grand bargain it has ever wanted.

“The treaty with Washington would require the withdrawal of US troops from the peninsula. The next step, as Pyongyang has often explained, would be some form of the North–South confederation it has advocated since 1960. One would have to be very naive not to know what would happen next.”

The idea that poor, backward North Korea could impose unification on a modern, wealthy and militarily more advanced South appears preposterous, and maybe it is. But Bradley K Martin says, however unlikely, it remains Pyongyang’s objective.

“I have always believed reunification is their number one goal,” he says. “Many people say they gave up on it long ago - they know they can’t do it. Those people underestimate the confidence you can build if you have the attention of a whole people. If you are running the propaganda system in a one-man dictatorship you can convince people they can do anything.”

I should be halfway to Beijing. Instead I am sitting in a drab room at a Pyongyang hotel. On the far wall portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il stare down. Right now, their expressions appear particularly malevolent.

I feel dazed, shell-shocked. Across the table a slender man with a face lined by years of smoking is looking at me with an expression of calm menace.

“This can all be over very quickly and you can go home,” he says, rotating an unlit cigarette in his right hand. “If you confess your crimes and apologise this will all be over. If you refuse, things will get much worse.”

An hour before, I had been at Pyongyang airport preparing to board a flight to Beijing. Now I am facing hours, possibly days, of interrogation.

My crime, according to my crinkle-faced interrogator, is “insulting Marshal Kim Jong-un”. The pit of my stomach turns cold.

This is a serious offence. I’m not sure how I’ve done this. Nor, it becomes clear, is my interrogator. It doesn’t matter. My guilt has been decided elsewhere. Now he must get my confession.

As the night wears on the team changes and the threats become more frightening. A new interrogator stares at me with cold, malevolent eyes.

“I am the one who investigated Kenneth Bae,” he says. “I think you know what that means.”

I do. Kenneth Bae is a Korean-American pastor who was sentenced to 15 years hard labour by North Korea. He served 735 days before a deal was done for his release.

My interrogation was terrifying, but also surreal. I had been invited to Pyongyang to cover a visit by three Nobel laureates. Then I was detained and threatened with prison because the regime didn’t like what I’d written.

To me this seemed counter-productive. But I had fundamentally failed to understand my assigned role - to uncritically present North Korea’s version of the truth to the outside world. I had transgressed, I had become an enemy.

Weeks later in Seoul a senior North Korean defector explains.

“Your crime was not just to criticise Kim Jong-un, but where you did it,” he says. “In his own capital.”

He is certain the only person who could have approved my detention, and release, was Kim Jong-un.

“You were very lucky to get out,” he says.

Prof Paik Hak-soon is the director of the Center for North Korean Studies at the Sejong Institute in South Korea. He also thinks I was lucky to get away with “only” being expelled.

“Kim’s identity is that of a king,” he says. “His sense of self-esteem does not allow any criticism or opposition from others. Any person or country that challenges or opposes him, faces retaliation without fail.”

North Korea has a long history of detaining foreigners for minor transgressions. Kim Jong-un has a particular penchant for it. Since 2011, 12 foreign nationals and four South Koreans have been held by Pyongyang.

Three months before my detention in 2016, a young American tourist, Otto Warmbier, was sentenced to 15 years hard labour for stealing a propaganda poster from a hotel wall. His punishment seemed out of all proportion to his alleged crime.

Warmbier was eventually returned to the US with severe brain damage, and died a few days later. Most observers think his case is unusual. American captives are rarely physically abused - they are too valuable.