The Remaking of Kim Jong Il

By Tim Larimer/Tokyo

When Kim Jong Il succeeded his father as leader of North Korea six years ago, he was lampooned by the rest of the world as a pudgy playboy who drank cognac while his countrymen barely subsisted, many of them reduced to eating roots. He favored James Bond and Daffy Duck in his collection of some 20,000 videotapes. He was a lush who once showed up at a meeting so drunk that his father had him thrown out. Nobody had heard him utter anything more than "Glory to the heroic Korean People's Army!" He had a Howard Hughes-like obsession about germs, was so paranoid that he would have rivals purged, so ruthless that he was accused of masterminding a plot to assassinate a South Korean President and to down an airliner. He wore shoe lifts.

The portrait created by these rumors and suspicions--North Korea's Dear Leader was unpredictable and goofy, and because he was thought to control a nuclear weapons program on one side of the world's most fortified border, he was dangerous. Fast forward to last week's summit in Pyongyang. When Kim Jong Il, still pudgy, and still wearing a poufy black hairdo, reached out with both hands to welcome South Korean President Kim Dae Jung, the makeover of the madman image was complete. The 58-year-old leader of the world's most mysterious country had been transformed into a fellow who could crack jokes at his own expense, banter about kimchi recipes and show proper Confucian deference to the elder President Kim. "I am aware that one of your legs is not very comfortable," he remarked to his 74-year-old South Korean counterpart during the limousine drive from the airport to the capital. Clasping Kim Dae Jung's hands in a surprisingly touching show of warmth, he told the President, "I hope you stay here comfortably."

If there was one thing that most Korea watchers felt they knew for sure, it was that the comfort of a South Korean President was not on the list of things Kim Jong Il cared about. But that was the old Kim. The new one is a masterwork of political repositioning. Part spin, part smarts and all opportunism, Kim 2.0 is an impressive creation, an example of a 180-degree image shift that was achieved in near Internet time--hardly something anyone would have expected from Pyongyang, where cell phones are as uncommon as Cokes.

But that's precisely what the world got--much to the astonishment of the White House, which just weeks ago had been using Kim as Example A of a "rogue dictator" while trying to convince Russia of the value of a missile-defense shield. It's too early to be sure that the new Kim is for real. The makeover, though, does seem to have legs. It's not really that Kim is such a different guy--his charmingly opportunistic streak once helped him extort billions from foreign governments in exchange for capping his nukes program. It's that his interests--and the world around him--have changed for good.

Kim's history is a pastiche of fact, rumor and not a little romance. He was born, it is believed, in Siberia, while his father was being trained as a technocrat under Stalin. But his official biography transposes his birth to the slopes of Mount Paektu on the North Korean-Chinese border--for many, the mythical birthplace of the ancestor of the Korean people. Kim's mother died when he was a schoolboy. When the Korean War broke out during his father's rule, he was spirited off to the safety of Manchuria. In the 1960s Kim is believed to have trained as a pilot in East Germany. He returned to North Korea to serve as his father's factotum. Friends describe him as a calculating politician, a man who worked even to charm his father.

He also evidently learned at the old man's side. His father was a masterly manipulator. The key to Kim senior's success was an iron will and a sense of who his friends were: China and Russia. But with those allies weakened by the end of the cold war, Kim junior has had to look elsewhere. At times since taking over the helm, he has seemed to live up to the worst Western images of him--such as when he "test- fired" a missile over Japan in 1998. In the past year, however, he has begun to open his doors. Some South Korean tourists can now visit the North, and trade between the two Koreas has been increasing. Last week Kim spoke of his eagerness to work toward reunification.

That was much more like the new Kim the CIA sometimes hears about, a man who is reportedly an avid watcher of CNN and at least a onetime surfer of the Internet. On a trip to Beijing last month, he told his hosts he was cutting back on his drinking. Kim's "calculated move" to change his image, says Koh Yu Hwan, a North Korean expert at Dongguk University in Seoul, was "a stunning success."

But to what end? There was little to fault in the way Kim Jong Il comported himself at the summit (although commentators in Seoul wryly noted that during one of the celebrations he slung back 10 glasses of wine to five for President Kim). As the euphoria fades, however, the reality checks have begun. Some observers warn that this could be yet another North Korean plot, elaborately staged to make the South let down its guard. On the other hand, if Pyongyang is sincere, what next? The agreement signed by the two Kims is skimpy on details. Reuniting separated families is an appealing idea, but more than 6 million South Koreans have relatives in the North. Who gets to go? Most perplexing of all, where does one start in trying to meld North Korea's Stone Age economy with the Internet-savvy South. Then there's the issue the two leaders merely flirted with: the weapons of mass destruction that Pyongyang uses to threaten the rest of the world. Warns Victor Cha, a Korea expert at Georgetown University in Washington: "Handshakes and hugs and delightful small talk are all very nice. But all the tougher issues are still out there."

Kim seems to want more access to money, food and technology--if he can get it without loosening his grip on power. There may be other motives. China has been pressuring Kim to open up--mostly out of fear that North Korean intransigence could lead to a bigger U.S. presence in Asia. In Washington, U.S. officials say the root of Kim's shift may be that the Dear Leader has realized there's no future in being a rogue. It's a message Kim seems to have absorbed. The smiling fellow who waved his South Korean partner goodbye at week's end was already looking less like a wacko in search of a weapon of mass destruction and more like a grandfather in search of a hug.

--With reporting by Stella Kim/Seoul and Douglas Waller/Washington

With reporting by Stella Kim/Seoul and Douglas Waller/Washington