The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot Read online

  ALSO BY BLAINE HARDEN

  Africa: Dispatches from a Fragile Continent

  A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia

  Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China

  penguin.com

  A Penguin Random House Company

  First published by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2015

  Copyright © 2015 by Blaine Harden

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Excerpt on page vii from Freedom from Fear and Other Writings by Aung San Suu Kyi (Penguin Books)

  Photograph credits

  Courtesy of Kenneth Rowe: Insert pages 1 (top, bottom), 3 (top, bottom), 4 (top), 11 (top), 12 (top, bottom), 13 (top), 14 (top, bottom); courtesy of the Korean Friendship Association (KFA), www.korea-dpr.com: pages 2 (top, bottom), 4 (bottom), 5 (top, bottom left and right), 15 (top); National Archives, photo no. 111-SC-306875: page 6 (top); National Archives, photo no. 26-G-3584: page 6 (bottom); U.S. Air Force Photo: pages 7 (top, bottom), 9 (top, bottom), 10 (top, bottom), 11 (bottom); © 2014, The Washington Post. Reprinted with permission: page 8 (top); San Francisco Chronicle/Polaris: page 8 (bottom); U.S. Department of State Photo–Herbert J. Meyle: page 13 (bottom); photo handout from the Korean Central News Agency/AFP Photo/KCNA via KNS: page 15 (bottom); photo by Blaine Harden: page 16

  ISBN 978-0-698-14048-6

  Map Illustrations by Daniel Lagin

  Version_2

  For Jessica, Lucinda, and Arno

  Under the most crushing state machinery courage rises up.

  Aung San Suu Kyi

  CONTENTS

  Also by Blaine Harden

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Maps

  INTRODUCTION: Players and Game

  PART I

  GUERRILLA AND RICH BOY

  CHAPTER 1: Beginnings

  CHAPTER 2: Poodle and Pretender

  CHAPTER 3: Sweet-Talking Stalin

  PART II

  WAR

  CHAPTER 4: The Great Liberation Struggle

  CHAPTER 5: Kicked in the Teeth

  CHAPTER 6: MiGs

  CHAPTER 7: Return to North Korea

  CHAPTER 8: An International Sporting Event

  CHAPTER 9: Attack Maps and Defection Bribes

  CHAPTER 10: Uncle Yoo

  PART III

  FLIGHT

  CHAPTER 11: Flying Clear

  CHAPTER 12: Squeezing the Moolah

  CHAPTER 13: Right Stuff and Fake Stuff

  CHAPTER 14: Learning and Purging

  EPILOGUE

  PHOTOGRAPHS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  TIME LINE

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  INTRODUCTION

  Players and Game

  I

  The man who would become the Great Leader stood on an indoor mountain of chemical fertilizer. Snow-white, stone hard, and two stories high, the mound of ammonium sulfate was eye candy for the masses, a symbol of the good life on offer from Comrade Kim Il Sung. Without fertilizer, people in North Korea go hungry, and some starve. It is true now, and it was true on February 22, 1948, when Kim had men cut the fertilizer flat on top, rig up a sound system, and conscript an audience. Three rings of soldiers, each armed with a Soviet-made submachine gun, protected the man atop the huge pile of fertilizer.

  The stage was socialist realism writ large, as straightforward as it was brutal: Support Kim Il Sung and eat. Challenge him, and his men will sort you out, using guns and muscle from the Soviet Union.

  Kim was thirty-five years old that day, but he looked younger, with smooth cheeks, short black hair, and a snug-fitting Mao suit. He had been back on the Korean Peninsula for just two and a half years, having spent much of his life fighting the Japanese in Northeast China. He had not yet purged, jailed, exiled, or executed all his political rivals. It would be another year before he had the gall to call himself the Great Leader and another decade before he would package himself as “the sun of mankind and the greatest man who has ever appeared in the world.”

  But he was getting there. His control of the police and the army was absolute. State-owned newspapers and radio applauded his every move. His paunch was expanding with his power.

  As Moscow’s chosen one—he had caught the eye of advisers close to Premier Joseph Stalin—Kim was rushing to rebuild and revolutionize a society traumatized by four decades of Japanese colonial domination. Following a Soviet script, factories were nationalized and labor unions created. The eight-hour workday became law. A mass literacy campaign taught millions of subsistence farmers and their families to read. New laws limited child labor and guaranteed women equal pay for equal work. Kim’s government seized and redistributed farmland from wealthy landlords.

  Peasant farmers liked what they saw and grew more food. In cities, the poor and the young also seemed to be buying what Kim was selling. But the wealthy, the landed, and the well educated were frightened. About two million of them fled south, where, in a similarly new nation called South Korea, bullying politicians were preaching capitalism while being advised, armed, and bankrolled by the United States.

  The Americans and the Soviets divided the Korean Peninsula in the anxious final days of World War II. On August 11, 1945, two American colonels working after midnight in Washington used a small National Geographic map to draw an arbitrary line across the peninsula. It tracked the thirty-eighth parallel, a border with no connection to Korea’s history, politics, or geographic features. The east-west line gave two-thirds of the peninsula’s population to South Korea, along with most of the arable land. President Harry S. Truman believed it was a good solution. Surprisingly, so did Stalin, and the deal was done. In theory, over the next five years, the wartime allies would work on their respective sides of the border to reunite Korea’s thirty million people. Unification would supposedly occur after they moved beyond the hysteria of war and developed democratic institutions.

  But they did not calm down, and democracy was stillborn. The leaders who emerged, Kim in the North and Syngman Rhee in the South, were aggressive, egocentric nationalists. Each wanted to reunite Korea on his own uncompromising terms. Each wanted to rule it all, with weapons, money, and ideological window dressing from his superpower patron.

  Because of the mass exodus from the North, there was far more social cohesion and political stability in Kim’s realm than in Rhee’s, where striking workers and farmers clashed constantly with American-armed police. An American intelligence report concluded, “Younger people throughout North Korea, especially between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one, are beginning to believe in the Communist government.”

  To build on that belief, Kim traveled to rice farms and teachers’ colleges, irrigation projects and dance school
s. Most often, he visited factories, where he charmed workers, listened to local complaints, and gave “on-the-spot guidance” as state media took his picture.

  That is what he was doing on the fertilizer mountain: sweet-talking, inspiring, and intimidating a crowd of ten thousand cheering supporters, most of them young. His speech was the main event for his visit to Hungnam, an industrial city on North Korea’s east coast, where the Japanese had built several modern factories, including Chosen Nitrogenous Fertilizers, the largest fertilizer works in the Far East. Soviet soldiers had liberated the place in the late summer of 1945 as the defeated Japanese scurried away. Kim’s government nationalized it and repaired machinery the Japanese had tried to destroy. Fertilizer was brought back into production—glorious news in a mountainous nation of subsistence farmers, tired soil, and chronic food shortages.

  “Our workers are now mass-producing fertilizer essential for the peasants,” Kim said as he began his speech. Besides fertilizer, he said, the “extremely creative enthusiasm” of Korean technicians was increasing pig-iron production and repairing hydroelectric dams. “All this proves that we can build a prosperous, independent, and sovereign state by ourselves.”

  But a “happy society” required much more. Kim said a “genuine people’s government” must destroy the “enslavement policies” of the “American imperialists and their stooges” and take control of the entire Korean Peninsula. He was hinting, not very subtly, at a military invasion of the South, which he was already planning.

  On a secret trip to Moscow just before he launched that invasion, Kim assured Stalin that Koreans in the South would joyfully support a Communist invasion and the Americans would slink away in fear.

  “The Americans,” he said, “will not risk a big war.”

  II

  No Kum Sok was there that day.

  He was sixteen years old and a student at Hungnam First High School, which had closed at midday in honor of Kim’s visit, as had the city’s factories. Ordered by teachers and foremen, students and workers queued up outside the fertilizer plant, where soldiers frisked them for guns and explosives. Two years earlier, someone at a rally had tossed a hand grenade at Kim. Thanks to a Soviet minder who grabbed it out of midair (and was severely wounded), Kim was not hurt. Since then, though, security had tightened.

  After soldiers searched him, No entered a cavernous warehouse more than three stories high and longer than three football fields. Afternoon light drizzled down through greasy skylights. With four classmates, No climbed a ladder to a steel balcony. He watched from there as Kim—surrounded by attendants who carried his photograph and led the crowd in chants about his genius—marched into the warehouse and climbed the mound of fertilizer.

  Kim radiated a raw animal magnetism and had a broad fatherly smile. The boy had never seen or heard anyone like him. The leader’s voice was strong, his language plain and powerful. To No, Kim seemed somehow larger than other human beings, although photographs and contemporary descriptions show that he was not all that large, about five feet seven inches. Workers in the factory were spellbound as Kim praised them for being the “prime movers of modern society.” No hung on every word.

  Kim’s rise to power had changed the very words the boy could speak, read, and write. When Japan ruled the peninsula, the Korean language was banned; everyone was supposed to speak Japanese. It was the only language No could fluently read and write. After Kim and the Soviets took over, Japanese was banned; speaking it was seditious. Russian replaced English as a foreign language in middle school. Baseball, the game No’s father had played and loved, was condemned as a decadent waste of time. A new law banned any meeting of more than five persons without official permission. A teacher told No’s class that freedom of religion would, of course, be protected under Kim’s rule. But the teacher also said there would be state-enforced limits: devout Christians, if they behaved like “superstitious fools,” would not be allowed to hold jobs in the military or in the professions. The boy, whose churchgoing father had attended a missionary school, got the message. He stopped going to church. He also stopped listening to the Voice of America on the radio, fearing what he might learn and inadvertently say to teachers and classmates.

  The rise of Kim Il Sung delighted several of No’s relatives. His paternal grandfather called him a “genius.” Yoo Ki Un, his maternal uncle, decorated the living room and bedrooms of his Hungnam home with photographs of Kim and Stalin. Uncle Yoo, who worked as a supervisor in a machine-assembly plant, tolerated no criticism of his leader.

  To keep the peace with Uncle Yoo, to prevent his school friends from snitching on him, and to give himself a future in the new North Korea, No decided to pretend to be a “No. 1 Communist.” He began his act soon after seeing Kim’s speech, and it would save his life.

  He lied on his examination for admission to the North Korean Naval Academy. In answer to questions about his family background, he wrote that his recently dead father had been a socialist-leaning laborer who hated the Japanese and loved the Great Leader. The one truth in that statement was that his father was recently dead.

  No’s father had been a successful manager for a Japanese industrial conglomerate. The Noguchi Corporation had built nearly all the big factories in Hungnam, including the one where Kim delivered his speech. Thanks to his father’s career with Noguchi, No grew up rich, as measured by Korean standards. His mother, Veronica, who grew up in a well-to-do Catholic family, owned a stylish fur coat. In the heat of the North Korean summer, the family traveled to a summer cottage in the mountains. Their soy sauce was top-drawer, Kikkoman, imported from Japan.

  III

  The Great Leader was staggeringly wrong about the Korean War. South Koreans never supported his invading army, and the United States did not slink away. Kim’s invasion triggered a hugely destructive war with no victory, easy or otherwise, for any country involved.

  Rival armies from North and South Korea, from China, and from a United Nations force dominated by the United States ranged back and forth across the Korean Peninsula for about a year before settling into a blood-soaked stalemate that lasted two more years. By the end, about 1.2 million soldiers had been killed, including more than 36,000 Americans. Territory was neither gained nor lost. There is still no official peace, only an armistice. While there were no winners, the war’s biggest losers were probably the people who lived in North Korea when it began.

  In an air campaign that the American public never paid much attention to, the U.S. Air Force massively and continuously bombed North Korea for three years, turning nearly every city, town, and village in the Pennsylvania-sized country into rubble.

  “We were bombing with conventional weapons everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another,” said Dean Rusk, a key supporter of American involvement in the Korean War and later a secretary of state during the Vietnam War. A Soviet postwar study of American bomb damage in the North found that 85 percent of all structures in the country were destroyed. The air force ran out of targets to blow up and burn. While there are no numbers from the North Korean government for civilians killed, the official population of the country declined during the war by 1,311,000, or 14 percent. General Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, estimated the percentage of civilian deaths to be even higher. “Over a period of three years or so, we killed off—what—twenty percent of the population [1.9 million people],” he said.

  LeMay urged his bosses, at the start of the war, to force an immediate surrender by using massive bombing to kill civilians quickly and in large numbers. But politicians in Washington found that to be “too horrible,” LeMay said, so they used massive bombing to kill civilians slowly and in large numbers.

  Kim’s control of North Korea survived the destruction. He made himself the center—the fatherly leader of a revolutionary family—around which a traumatized society could unify, rebuild, and find directio
n.

  Being wrong never seemed to hurt the Great Leader. When events contradicted his promises or challenged his policies, he invented a new reality and forced his people to accept it. In North Korea’s version of history, war began when South Korea and the United States invaded the North. It ended with a heroic North Korean victory orchestrated by his brilliant generalship. The pivotal roles played in the war by the Soviet Union, which armed the North, and by China, which fought the Americans to a draw on the ground and saved Kim from his ineptitude as a military commander, were airbrushed away.

  To make his fictions credible at home, Kim isolated North Korea from the outside world. It became a prison state, with the Great Leader as warden. He decided what inmates could know, where they could live, if they could travel. Hundreds of thousands of security agents spied on everyone, rewarding citizens when they informed on one another. People were sorted geographically based on his perception of their loyalty. Those judged to be “wrong thinkers” were sent to labor camps in the remote mountains, where hundreds of thousands of prisoners and their family members died. After more than half a century, these camps are still going strong. A United Nations commission of inquiry has found that guards in the camps commit “unspeakable atrocities” that “resemble the horrors” of Nazi Germany and constitute crimes against humanity.

  By keeping North Koreans in a cage for half a century and feeding them lies, Kim succeeded in convincing them that he was indeed a wonderful human being—and that his No. 1 enemy, the United States, would forever be their enemy. Although he died of natural causes in 1994, Kim lives on among his people as their Eternal President.

  For outsiders struggling to understand contemporary North Korea, Kim’s pivotal importance also lives on. His rise to absolute power is the essential story that explains the government’s belligerence, paranoia, and sustained mistreatment of its own people. The feudal, caste-bound social system that he invented is still in place.