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Hi there. My name is Oli, and I'm the guy that's done the music for Real Narcos. We here at Noisa Podcasts wanted to give you a heads up that Real Narcos will be returning in a few weeks with the crazy story of the Colombian drug lord Griselda Blanco. In the meantime, we are releasing a new show called Real Dictators, hosted by legendary British actor Paul McGann, who many of you will know for his leading roles in Doctor Who and With Nail and I.
In this first episode of Real Dictators, we are kicking off the story of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. So if you enjoy this first installment of Real Dictators, then please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or go to realdictators.com. Thanks so much for listening. And here is episode one of Real Dictators. North Koreans didn't know that man had landed on the moon because men landed on the moon were Americans. So therefore they weren't told.
The level of the compartmentalization of information is just phenomenal. The things that they don't know that we take for granted. If they knew freedom, they would want it. North Korea could have become anything, but helmed by Kim Jong-il, it would turn towards paranoia, secrecy and terror.
Because he never really left North Korea, he took what he saw in Hollywood films to be realism. North Korea became very good at selling drugs and making and selling counterfeit $100 bills, trafficking people in ivory and later nuclear secrets and weapons, anything that a criminal empire would do. And this was all backed up with the state's might. My name is Paul McGann, and welcome to Real Dictators.
The series that explores the hidden lives of tyrants such as Adolf Hitler, Chairman Mao and Joseph Stalin. You'll be right there in their meeting rooms and private quarters, on the battlefields and in their bunkers, up close and personal with some of history's most evil leaders. We'll take you behind the curtain, beyond the propaganda and the myth-making, to hear the real stories of their totalitarian regimes.
In this episode, we trace the story of the man who built a volatile rogue state with nuclear missiles trained on its enemies, all while living a life of the utmost luxury. He was having lobster flown in from wherever. He was dining on French wine. He was Hennessy's largest single-paying customer. Those starving people howling out there mean nothing to me.
It's the kind of evil where there is no feeling, there's just emptiness. You'll hear the voices of journalists and historians, as well as regime insiders who've escaped from North Korea. We'll piece together Kim Jong-il's early life and discover how this individual rose to absolute power, brainwashing millions and forcing them to enact his malevolent vision.
Once you have a nuclear weapon, all of a sudden the defense of your country is not so much based on boots on the ground and tanks and soldiers and all the rest of it. It's about if you attack us, if you do anything to us that we don't like, we'll fire a nuclear missile at you. Game over. From Noisa podcasts, this is Real Dictators. Since North Korea's inception in 1948,
The West has relied largely on the testimony of escapees to build a picture of life within the country's borders. Accounts of gulag-style prison camps, civilians being tortured and executed for displaying the slightest anti-government sentiment, stories of families eating grass, bark, and animal dung to survive. As recently as January 2020, eight North Korean government officials fled to China. Seven further individuals fell agonizingly short.
getting caught just miles from the border. Much of this terror is the work of the family in charge, the Kim dynasty, and in particular, a man called Kim Jong-il, the father of the current leader. If you happen to be one of those 23 million people born in North Korea, your life will be this very restricted, tragic, cruel existence with no hope of escaping. Kim Jong-il was the one who built this Truman Show
theater stage that would have no reason for existing but would go on pretending it had a reason to exist. So North Korea today has existed for 20 more years for the sole reason of sustaining the Kims and sustaining that leadership. And that's built on the pain and labor and heartbreak and tragedy of all the people who live there. Today, Kim's son and heir is locked in a war of words with President Trump. North Korea continues to challenge the balance of power in the Western world.
As the West waits on tenterhooks to see what the regime will do next, it's time to take you back in history, to tell the true story of the man behind it all, the story of Kim Jong-il. In the middle of a pine forest in the far east of Russia sits a small hamlet called Vyatskoye. Smoke plumes above the tree line and disperses into the clear star-speckled sky. The chickens are cooped up for the night. There's not even a hint of a breeze.
Crops stand perfectly straight and still in the fields. Moving through the trees towards the village, a faint hubbub becomes steadily louder. Tents and fire pits come into view. Korean men in military uniform lounge around, drinking and laughing. Their wives and children sit by the fires. It's February the 16th, 1941, the height of World War II, and these Korean expats are fighting the Japanese enemy.
Dipping in and out of Japanese-held territory, they launch guerrilla attacks on their foes before disappearing once more into the forest. The Koreans get on pretty well with the Russian locals. In the daytime, they gather water and hay for livestock, tend to the crops, and ride tractors together. This is just another place of all those around the globe caught up in the Second World War. But tonight, the village of Vyatskoye is about to become part of a momentous story.
Inside one of the tents, a woman, the wife of a Korean officer, gives birth. The flames of the bonfire outside dance on the linen of the tent wall as the child comes screaming into the world. In honor of his Russian birthplace, the parents will nickname this boy Yuri Kim. He'll become better known by his full Korean name, Kim Jong-il. In decades to come, Kim Jong-il will return to this region.
As the all-powerful North Korean dictator, his luxurious armored train will roll through the Russian wilderness. He'll allow himself to get tantalizingly close, but he'll never return to the site of his birth because, to acknowledge he was born here, would undermine his entire regime. Instead, Kim Jong-il will spin a decades-long yarn about himself and his family that forgets their humble origins and elevates them far above the people they govern.
to practically godlike status. Myth will replace reality, as Kim Jong-il becomes one of history's most feared and all-powerful dictators. Right from the get-go, Kim's life is based on a lie. The reality of his Russian origins is suppressed. Instead, the official state report claims that his was a birth unlike a normal person's. Paul French is an East Asia analyst and author of North Korea, State of Paranoia.
North Korean propaganda has always created incredible myths. What it said that when Kim Jong Il was born, a glacier on the lake on Mount Paektu, which is the most famous mountain in Korea and supposed to be where the Korean nation and people were founded, cracked. Double rainbow appeared in the sky. A new star appeared in the heavens. Cranes, which is the national bird of Korea, flew across the sky.
to announce the birth of this son. It seems bizarre, it is bizarre, it is represented in posters, it's been represented in films and so on. Kim's father, Kim Il-sung, is actually a commander fighting for the communist resistance in the far east of Russia. But this truth must be forgotten. Andrei Lankov explains. Lankov is a director of NK News and one of the world's leading authorities on North Korea. As a former resident of Pyongyang, the North Korean capital,
He understands the country better than most outsiders. There was a serious problem because his father at that time was a Soviet junior officer in the Soviet army. North Koreans always tried to play down the Soviet involvement with the early stages of the North Korean history. So actually Kim Jong-il was born Yuri Kim on the Soviet military base near Khabarovsk.
But it's impossible to admit it for the North Koreans. So they made up a story about him born on the Korean soil. His father heads up a Korean unit within the Soviet army. In return, the Soviets are helping him to liberate the Korean peninsula from Japanese control. Mike Breen is a journalist and author of the book Kim Jong-il, North Korea's Dear Leader.
The Japanese took control of Korea in 1910. Very unusual in the colonial world, you normally colonize a distant, poor country, but they colonized their neighbor, their immediate neighbor. So they tried to turn Korea into a cousin of Japan, if you like.
The only real violent resistance sustained was by communists. The communists really fueled the independence movement. Kim Il-sung was one of those guerrilla fighters. In 1945, the knockout blow comes from an unexpected source. Japan is forced to surrender after America brings the country to its knees. World War II has come to an end. It's ironic, given how bitter relations between the two will become.
But North Korea has the United States to thank as the Japanese army pulls out. Kim Il-sung, the guerrilla warrior, returns victorious to his homeland with his wife and young son in tow. His son's infancy will go hand in hand with the glorious foundation of a new country. It's a double story that generations of North Koreans will be forced to imbibe. Jang Jin-sung used to work as a psychological warfare officer for Kim Jong-il,
He was also one of the dictator's favorite propaganda poets, until he defected from the secretive state in 2004. Today, Jang is one of Pyongyang's most vocal critics. He remembers growing up in the North and being fed the myth of Kim Jong-il's beginnings. Jang's voice has been translated and read by an actor. During kindergarten, we learn about the childhood of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il.
Then during adolescence we learn about their youth and at university we are told about their university lives. In this way, we are indoctrinated with their revolutionary history, being brought up with deified accounts of their lives. Of course, in North Korea, when we are young we get brainwashed and learn about Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il's achievements through stories suitable for our age like a legend.
They are always deified and before I met Kim Jong Il personally, I had always believed that he was someone who didn't even have to go to the toilet. Let me tell you this, the deification of the Kim family is not propaganda. It is a false idolization consistent with the distortion of history. In 1946, the Korean peninsula becomes divided. The Americans are firmly in control in the south.
while the Russians and Chinese are supporting Kim Il-sung and his communist fighters in the north. Kim Jong-il is just four years old when his father brings the family to the new northern capital of Pyongyang. The communist guerrilla movement has morphed into a full-blown political party, the Korean Workers' Party. Kim Il-sung is its leader. East Asia analyst and author Paul French.
The Korean Workers' Party, the Communist Party that controls North Korea, really emerged from the Second World War. The Communist Party with Kim Il-sung was backed largely by Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party with material: advisors, weaponry, MiG fighter planes and so on. Kim Il-sung is widely seen as a triumphant warrior, the man responsible for driving out the hated Japanese. His Workers' Party forms a government and assumes power in the North.
The Party sits right at the heart of North Korean life. It will come to dominate all aspects of society.
Since the establishment of the DPRK in North Korea, the party has been all-powerful. And all power has been concentrated in the supreme leader, Kim Il-sung, and then the dear leader, Kim Jong-il. And that party ripples down to every aspect of society, to where you work, often who you marry, where you go to school, whether you get to go to university, what job is allocated to you afterwards, what privileges you may have. And by privileges, I mean food,
meat, rice and things like that. But the party is also the justice system. The party is also the punisher of transgressors. Anyone who disagrees with the cult of personality, anyone who challenges the authority, the legitimacy of the Korean Workers' Party and whoever the leader is at the time, as a punisher, the punishments are extremely harsh, right up to, of course, the well-known large gulag prison camp system and widespread use of execution.
and purging within the party itself.
The party starts as it means to go on, by seizing the thoughts and aspirations of the North Korean people and holding them hostage. So no one ever feels quite secure, no one ever feels quite safe. Whether you're an ordinary person who may say the wrong thing in the wrong place, you can be punished. If you're a member of the so-called elite, the higher echelon of the party, you are subject to being on the wrong side of a factional dispute or a clique dispute, and the results of that can be pretty catastrophic.
From the beginning, the Workers' Party is the engine room of state propaganda. This propaganda portrays Kim Jong-il as a precocious, even messianic child. If you believe the official party line, Kim learns to walk at just three weeks old. He starts talking at just eight weeks. But even these halcyon days of infancy are about to take a turn for the sinister.
One day, when Kim is seven years old, he and his brother are playing together in a pond behind the family mansion. The skyline of downtown Pyongyang is visible in the middle distance. In this fledgling nation, vast square buildings are being constructed en masse in the style of socialist classicism following Stalin's lead. On the grassy lawn behind the house, young Kim and his brother continue playing, but then something goes horribly wrong.
Somehow, the brother drowns. No one can be sure how, but to this day, rumors abound that Kim himself was responsible. Mike Breen. Kim Jong-il was the older of the two boys. He was playing with his younger brother in a pond, and the little boy, the younger boy drowned in the pond.
Now, there are people who, out of North Korea, who like to claim that he held him under the water out of jealousy or whatever or just because he was evil. But there's no particular evidence to suggest that. A five-year-old doesn't sort of turn into a mass murderer. It was probably just a horrible accident. But one way or another, you know, he'd have been old enough for this to weigh on him. Whichever account you subscribe to, even this tragic story can be turned into propaganda.
Paul French. This story has always been spun in two different ways. It has often been presented by those wishing to attack Kim Jong-il as he is inherently evil. He wanted no challenges from the start, so his first purge was of his five-year-old brother and he drowned him in a swimming pool.
However, that gets spun another way almost surreptitiously, which is to sort of show again his hard man credentials. You don't want to mess with Kim Jong Il. Don't take on Kim Jong Il. The mythology remains. This is not someone you wish to tangle with. Think very carefully before you cross this family and these men. Just a year later, in 1949, tragedy strikes again. Kim's mother dies after giving birth to a stillborn baby.
Any child would be affected by this one-two punch. His mother's death leaves Kim adrift and desperate for his father's attention. The Korean culture is very blood-oriented. So the father is the leader of the country,
He's going to marry again. In this sort of situation in Korean culture, and you see it in South Korea as well, the children of a first marriage are invariably mistreated by the next wife who favors her own children. And so here's this little boy with his sister. His brothers die, then his mom dies, and then he doesn't see much of his dad because his dad's busy running his dictatorship.
And then dad marries again, has more children, and the stepmother obviously is ambitious for her children. One son in particular, who as we speak, is a North Korean ambassador. If Kim Jong-il had grown up with a loving mother, who knows? History might well have been different. One thing is clear: cruelty and emotional distance are part of Kim's life from the very beginning. Kim Il-sung's parenting leaves a lot to be desired.
Paul Fisher is author of a Kim Jong Il production. He had an absent father who was by all accounts a womanizer who spent more time with women from the secretarial pool than he did with his kids and remarried fairly soon to a woman that Kim Jong Il resented and whom along with his half siblings he tried to erase out of North Korean history the second he had the power to.
So he grew up isolated, quite resentful of the new family and of the situation. And the only adults around him were people who were lower than he was in the hierarchy. But the great leader has more pressing concerns than his son's psychological scars. Long before the days of the Japanese occupation, there was one unified Korea. People across the peninsula still share a history, a heritage, a language. Now, in an attempt to win all of Korea for the communists,
Kim Il-sung prepares to send troops into the South. June 25, 1950. At dawn, 75,000 soldiers from the North Korean People's Army pour across the 38th parallel, the boundary between North and South Korea. This invasion is the first military action of the Cold War. It starts a conflict that will be known as the Korean War. Just days later, American troops arrive in support of the South. It's as close to World War III as the world has seen.
Five million soldiers and civilians lose their lives. Aided by the United States, the South starts to make gains, depleting Kim Il-sung's forces. Seeing their communist ally in trouble, China invades on behalf of the North and pushes the Americans back. The Korean War ends in stalemate in July 1953. No peace treaty is ever signed.
Paul French. People forget that the Korean War has never technically ended. So many families were split between those in North Korea and those in South Korea. And for those families in South Korea, it was as if the other side of their family had gone into a black hole and never been heard from again. The important thing to understand is that the two Koreas exist in rivalry. The Korean peninsula, the Korean people,
have a history that goes back a couple of thousand years. The current border, the North Korean border with China and Russia, was roughly set about 1,300 years ago.
So to understand North Korea today and the standoff with South Korea, you have to go back to the context of the Korean War, 1950-53, which ended in an unresolved manner. It ended in a truce. There wasn't even a peace treaty. There's just a truce, which is still in place today. There's no peace treaty. So in many ways, this war continues. We're waiting for it to be resolved.
For the North Koreans, in a sense, the war is still on. And one of the major ways that they maintain power is through a sort of theatrical victimhood that the war was never completed. And so there's still a struggle to be had. As the Korean War peters out, both sides agree to a demilitarized buffer zone between North and South.
The DMZ still divides the two countries to this day. The actual demilitarized zone itself just runs across the 48th parallel. It's completely arbitrary. It was drawn by American planners with no other reason than it looked about to be the middle of the country. And yet it has become this incredibly well-armed center with both sides facing each other. The North Koreans obviously on one side and the South Koreans with the backing of about 30,000 GIs from America on the other side of the border.
The DMZ is this strip that goes across the middle of the country separating the two armies. And it's the most completely misnamed piece of real estate in Korea. There was an American general here many years ago, commander-in-chief of US forces, famously used to say to the press, "There ain't nothing D about that MZ."
This thing is sort of bristling with equipment. It's incredibly tense, not least because it is only 40 miles from Seoul. So, of course, any move by the North Koreans across the DMZ South would mean that the Korean capital, where over 50% of South Korea's population live, would be immediately vulnerable.
It's heavily armed, it's heavily fortified. The North Koreans have been accused repeatedly of digging tunnels underneath it. There are occasionally firefights. It's not as bad as it used to be, but still occasionally people lose their temper and start sniping at each other. It's virtually impossible to cross as a border because it is landmined and so on. And in fact, it's become a wonderful nature reserve because so few people can go into it that many species of birds, migratory birds and so on, stop on their flights north there.
But it remains a symbol of an ununified Korea. The Korean War instills in the Kims a lifelong fear and loathing of America. The Workers' Party decrees the creation of a vast million-man army to make sure the North can never be invaded again. Now Kim Il-sung is convinced that North Korea must become entirely self-sufficient, never again dependent on China or Russia bailing them out.
In 1955, he declares an official policy of North Korean self-reliance known as Juche. Juche theory initially united the country under a blend of Marxism-Leninism, Korean mythology and of course Confucianism, which is very strong across the country and of course creates hierarchies and responsibilities and fathers answering to sons and workers answering to bosses that suit a dictatorial communist regime very well.
Under Juche, North Korea will feed itself and arm itself without any input from the rest of the world. At the head of this new self-reliant nation, a single great leader. North Korea may be communist, but it's helmed by one individual. Kim Il-sung has become father to a nation, but he's still not much of a father to his son. As a boy and then as a teenager, Kim Jong-il watches on as the great leader starts a new family.
His is a bizarre and isolated upbringing.
I think that he was always very isolated. That isolation and also that privilege, being able to have what you want, led to early problems and there are many verifiable stories that his drinking and indulgences did start at a young age and did cause some problems. The fact that he may have been errant at times and indeed several of his sons slightly went off the rails is due to the isolation of privilege, if you like, being cut off from an entire society.
Fred Coolidge is professor of psychology at the University of Colorado. He's conducted psychological profiles of many tyrants, including Saddam Hussein, Adolf Hitler, and Kim Jong-il. One could imagine that you need to be told no to develop some sort of boundaries on what you can do and what you can't do. That could play a major role later in his life where nobody's ever told him no, and he can do what he wants. And of course, if you've been raised by the supreme leader of
Imagine what that's going to do to your ego and to his narcissistic tendencies. Kim Jong Il is one of the lucky ones, a member of the communist elite. Other boys his age have to do 10 years military service. He's excused from this. He's got time on his hands. He develops an interest in the arts. According to party legend, Kim writes 1,500 books over a period of just three years, as well as six full operas.
According to his official biography, each opera is better than any in the history of music. Then there's his sporting prowess. According to his bodyguards, the first time Kim picks up a golf club on North Korea's only course, he shoots 11 holes in one in a 38-under par round. Unfortunately for anyone looking for a repeat performance, Kim promptly retires from golf forever. Kim loves Western music.
He becomes obsessed with Elvis Presley and even with the notion of becoming a star himself. But his favorite of the arts is film. Paul Fisher is an expert on the history of North Korean cinema, as well as the filmmaking career of Kim Jong Il himself. Lenin had said something about cinema being the most important tool of propaganda in a socialist country. And Kim Il-sung, before Kim Jong Il, really believed in this. So as early as 1948, when they founded the
One of the first things he did was create a national center for the cinema. Cinema was still a novelty in Korea at the time, even though it was the middle of the 20th century. And people still sort of treated everything they saw on the screen as a marvel, but also as something that had the ring of truth in it, because you just saw it on a screen. It had to be true. If the people didn't know how to read or write, it didn't matter. They could still enjoy a film.
The Supreme Leader can see that the medium of cinema has huge untapped potential for propaganda. From very early on, they either built the cinema in every town or village or they would transform the common room of a factory somewhere into a cinema. And they had travelling projectionists who travelled around with the same film.
and it was compulsory to go to the cinema. And everyone knew this, they weren't quite reality, but they were the workers' paradise that was right around the corner that we should all aspire to turning reality into. As the son of the leader, Kim Jong-il demands his father's diplomats bring him foreign films. These works are completely banned for the rest of the population.
As a very young man, he kind of used his father's ministries to create an international bootlegging network, really, where ambassadors in different countries would request a film print to borrow to watch in private, and then would make a copy of it and ship it off to North Korea for Kim Jong-il. So he had a massive archive of films from all over the world that eventually grew to something like 20,000 titles that people think might be the biggest private film archive anywhere in the world.
Kim's tastes are extremely wide-ranging, but like anyone, he's got his favourites. He watched everything from Japanese gangster flicks and erotic flicks to Hollywood to Bollywood, but it seems like he preferred the kind of Hollywood blockbuster mainstream films that a 30-year-old would like at the time. And so he would tell people that the James Bond films were his favourite films, horror films like Friday the 13th,
He loved 'Rambo', 'First Blood', that Sean Connery was his favourite actor, that he would watch anything with Elizabeth Taylor. In later life he met Madeleine Albright and talked to her about 'Amistad' and all these films that had been nominated for Oscars at the time. And he liked big Hollywood mainstream films really. Kim Jong-il is living a sheltered life, one of extreme privilege. But state propaganda paints him like one of his action movie heroes.
James Pearson is an award-winning journalist and author of North Korea Confidential.
Kim Jong Il was obsessed with art, literature, filmmaking. He made it his life's work to be as involved in that as possible before he even came into power. It was one of the reasons he was able to exert so much of his own personal influence on the country. So he had a genuine interest in directing North Korean films, in making sure that North Korean state ideology was very central to all of that. And of course the propaganda about him doing that was gushing with pride and support of his every word.
Just like his father and just like Kim Jong-un, the leader now, there's lots of propaganda which talk about just how fantastic they are, when the reality is, of course, that he is very, very young and he's never fired a bullet in his life, really. When Kim isn't devouring movies, you might find him studying for college or, more likely, indulging in hedonistic pursuits.
Professor of Psychology, Fred Coolidge. It's said that Kim Jong-il, when he made college finally, was a bit of a hell raiser, and you know, involved in womanizing and drinking and other things. Probably not surprising for most college students, or some college students at least, because we have that kind of feeling that that's what happens when one goes off to college. At the same time, given his upbringing, it is a little bit surprising. But it's always been noted that sometimes people go from extremes. Mike Breen.
I only met one person who actually knew him as a student, who was a fellow student, and said that before he became identified as a successor, he wasn't treated like a prince. He was like another normal guy. He didn't have airs and graces, and there wasn't massive security around him. That changed when he sort of started on the career track, so to speak. Kim Jong-il graduates from the institution that bears his father's name, Kim Il-sung University, in 1964. After college, it's down to work.
He's handed a job in the Workers' Party.
This is now kind of the mid-1960s, and Kim Jong-il had graduated from Kim Il-sung University, and his uncle Kim Yong-ju had found him different posts in the party bureaucracy, as was expected of him. The truth was Kim Jong-il was using that to learn how the party worked, who got promoted, who got demoted, how, who had people's ears. Already, Kim Jong-il is actively building a power base in the Workers' Party.
one that will serve him well in the future. Kim Jong-il was very good at keeping things secret and keeping his cards close to his chest. And while everyone else was in a way making a case for why they would be very good as a successor, Kim Jong-il played a sort of game where he wanted to seem uninterested in it, wanted to seem
as if he was a good, respectful, humble son. His strategy to shore up his own case was to essentially suck up to his father and prove to his father that, you know, I will not make my own case for leading the country, but I'll make the case for what I'll protect your legacy and make sure that even after you're gone, it's not me people will remember, it's you. And slowly, he would try and implant people who were of his age, of his circle, had gone to university with him in posts that were opening up
so he could build his own little circle of influence within the party for when the time came. As the leader's son, Kim Jong Il is the frontrunner. But it's by no means a done deal that his father will name him his successor. Kim will have to wait and see what the supreme leader decides. Right now, things are looking fairly positive. His father is about to offer him a promotion to a new role he thinks his son will enjoy. So it's now 1968 and this purge happens.
And many people in the film studios and in the propaganda department were purged because they had been trying to make films, speeches, write novels that were praising one of Kim Il-sung's rivals. The purge represents an opportunity for Kim Jong-il to prove himself in his father's eyes. It's a chance he's not about to miss.
There's a sort of famous story, whether it's true or apocryphal, of Kim Il-sung going to the studios with Kim Jong-il and exhorting the remaining people at the film studios to work better for him and for his leadership and asking if anyone, you know, would have the courage to take over the propaganda and agitation department and do things right. Kim Jong-il was the one in the back of the room whose voice suddenly rose and said, "I will do it. I can do this."
That was sort of the first time that Kim Il-sung realized that this kid's been sitting in cinemas his whole childhood, he's obsessed with films and with this kind of thing, he might just be the best person for this job anyway. It's a watershed moment in Kim Jong-il's rise. This is the perfect position for a young man desperate to ingratiate himself with his father.
Kim Jong-il found himself suddenly catapulted from civil servants with no clear role into running the whole of the country's propaganda system. Kim Jong-il is making a pact with his father. I will build your legacy. I'll protect your legacy. If you choose me as an heir, I will make sure that people remember you and I won't be tearing down statues of you the way they might be doing in Russia or Eastern Europe or China. Kim has been promoted to the heart of his father's government.
Now, he's entrusted with a vital task: to spread the myth that his father is a living god. Kim Jong Il starts to spread the idea that his father is an immortal figure, a messiah who won the Korean War and liberated the North. He commissions statues and paintings of his father and orders them to be displayed throughout the country. Andrei Lankov, director of NK News and a leading expert on North Korea.
Kim Jong-il was instrumental in creating a highly systematic and formalized type of personality cult, which has little, if any, parallels in the world history. Pictures, large murals, or sometimes mosaics depicting him being placed on pretty much all major crossroads. It's something you would expect in many other places.
But there were very peculiar features, like a decision in the early 1970s that every adult North Korean should spot a badge depicting Kim Il-sung every time he or she leaves their place of residence. Or a decision that not only offices, but every single home should display portraits of Kim Il-sung. The Kims are using propaganda to show a popular support at home.
At the same time, they have unfinished business in international affairs. They've created a siege mentality. It's North Korea versus the world. Now they're growing more and more willing to take risks. Kim Il-sung has a daring mission in mind, one he will entrust only to an elite army unit. In 1968, a team of North Korean commandos prepares to slip into South Korea and make their way to the capital of Seoul.
Their task is to assassinate the South Korean president, Park Chung-hee. Park is a military strongman who seized power in a coup. He represents an existential threat to the North, in Kim's eyes at least. At night, the commandos cross the demilitarized zone, cutting through a US Army fence, and they enter the South. They begin the 31-mile journey to the capital on foot. The following afternoon, the commandos set up camp on a mountain. Exhausted, they rest.
Nearby, four local South Koreans trawl the slopes of the mountain. They're brothers, out gathering firewood. One of them stops suddenly, raising a hand. They follow the snores, and they stumble across the North Korean camp. One of the soldiers wakes and sounds the alarm. The commandos leap to their feet and apprehend the intruders. But what to do with them? Some of the soldiers want to kill the captives and be done with it. Others aren't so sure.
In the end, the commandos decide the solution is to submit the four South Korean brothers to a lesson on the virtues of communism. After such a lecture, they reason the scales will surely fall from the brothers' eyes and they'll become committed anti-capitalists. The brothers are released after proclaiming their allegiance to communism and vowing never to go to the police. Unsurprisingly, out of sight of the camp, they break into a sprint and head straight for the nearest police station.
Early the next morning, the commandos make it to Seoul. But thanks to the brothers' tip-off, the authorities in the capital have implemented heightened security measures. It's clear to the commandos that a rethink is needed. Later that morning, dressed in South Korean army uniforms, the commandos approach a police checkpoint. It's barely 100 meters from the Blue House, the president's official residence. The local police chief approaches them.
What is their business here? What unit do they report to? The police chief is unconvinced by their answers. He reaches for his pistol, but before he can draw, the commandos shoot him. Now the commandos throw caution to the wind. They begin lobbing grenades at the checkpoint. A full shootout ensues. Reinforcements arrive to bolster the defenses around the presidential residence. The commandos realize their mission is failing. Offering each other cover fire, they disperse.
Once out of the city, they head for the mountains. They've left a bloody scene behind them. Outside the blue house lie the bodies of 92 murdered South Koreans, soldiers and civilians. Over the next few days, the South Korean army orchestrates a thorough sweep of the local peaks. Outmanned and outmaneuvered, the commandos are picked off one by one. Kim Il-sung's daring mission into the south has been thwarted.
But the Blue House raid illustrates how emboldened the North has become. Later that year, Kim's troops capture a US Navy spy ship, the USS Pueblo. The American crew will eventually be released, but the North will keep hold of the ship itself. To this day, the Pueblo remains on the Potong River in Pyongyang, where it's used as a military museum. Such daring acts of brinkmanship are golden propaganda opportunities for the Kim regime.
Kim Il-sung's public image is that of a tough, uncompromising ball buster. In crafting this image, North Korea is looking to its Russian neighbours for inspiration. The cult of personality around Kim Il-sung was a creative cult, in a sense, in the way that it had been around Stalin. It's taken directly from Stalin's playbook.
Stalin was quite happy often for rumors to circulate about his days as a bank robber and to show how tough he was. Kim Il-sung is always happy for his role as a guerrilla leader to be somewhat inflated. And to this day, we really don't know the truth. This cult of personality is largely the work of the leader's son, Kim Jong-il. He was the one who intensified the personality cult of the father.
to the point that even visiting Soviets and Chinese who were okay with Stalinism and Maoism thought, "Man, this is over the top." It was probably the most extreme of the communist personality cults. It's kind of the mirror image of a religion of the worst sort. And the founding father remains as the supreme being in the cult. By elevating his father in this way, Kim Jong-il hopes to be anointed his father's heir.
His only fear is that his younger step-brother may be chosen instead. So Kim takes out some insurance. It's rumored he starts spying on his father, bugging his home and office. This enables Kim to preemptively strike anyone who doesn't support his taking over. The key is to purge people before they become a problem, not after. Purging takes many forms. Nam Il is a partisan who fought alongside Kim's father in World War II.
But when he starts to question Kim Jong Il's suitability for the top job, he meets a sticky end. One day Nam Il is driving his car when he's hit by a truck. He's not the only one. An inordinate number of North Korean officials die in suspicious automotive incidents. Kim ensures his own stepbrother is quietly sent abroad, assigned to ambassador postings in Europe, where he remains to this day. At just 25 years of age,
Kim Jong-il is learning his father's blueprint of power. Purging is absolutely key in the playbook of North Korean dictatorship. Kim Jong-il purged or forced people into exile or executed them or imprisoned them. But purging goes all through society. A purging can involve the bosses of factories who are not seen to be doing particularly well or not completely on side being demoted. It can be as simple as that. It can be as bad as obviously being taken out and shot.
Kim Jong Il is quick to silence anyone who pipes up against either himself or his father, the great leader. But he's got a secret of his own that he must keep under wraps. Kim Il Sung arranged a marriage for his son. Didn't know he already was not only living with the woman but had a child with her. Didn't know. So Kim Jong Il dutifully married this woman and kept the other's secret.
Now, of course, all his friends knew. There's no news of the world in North Korea to sort of blow it out of the water, but he kept this from his father for many years. Kim Jong-il's illegitimate son, Kim Jong-nam, is born in 1971. This is not the last we'll hear of him. 45 years later, he'll be dragged kicking and screaming into public view. But for now, the child's life is shrouded in secrecy. It's the 1970s.
And behind the scenes of his father's regime, Kim Jong-il is going from strength to strength. His job is to indoctrinate the North Korean people with his father's cult of personality. He's in charge of North Korea's vast propaganda machine. He's already purged multiple rivals, clearing the way for his own rise to power. Kim Jong-il loves the movies. In another life, he might have tried to make it as a Hollywood producer. He regards cinema as the perfect vehicle for propaganda.
Sonatus is in the 1970s and Kim Jong Il's been in charge of his film industry for a few years.
Kim Jong Il in a way, at this point, he's sort of a Michael Bay of communist filmmaking. And he liked big films with big emotions, very, very violent films. And he'd made a couple of films that had found some success in China and Eastern Europe.
He was always, you know, as North Korea was at the time, in this race with South Korea in everything. Because the two countries were trying to prove that they were the legitimate Korea. And Kim Jong-il, in a kind of mix of wanting to do better than South Korea, but also to have his cake and eat it too, to be able to bomb planes and kill people, but also be seen
as this paradise of cultural peace, thought that if he was able to make films that won awards at film festivals around the world, that received good reviews around the world, that were respected around the world, that would help North Korea's case for legitimacy in the peninsula. But North Korea has become something of a cultural desert. Starved of inspiration and sheltered from the outside world, the North just hasn't developed the movie-making talent.
It's not somewhere likely to produce that sprinkle of stardust. He had this dilemma, which was his filmmakers weren't good enough. And because he was keeping everybody hermetically sealed away from the world, they couldn't really learn what was happening elsewhere in the world. They couldn't really benefit from the equipment elsewhere in the world. He needed a Korean. The only Koreans who could do the job were South Koreans.
And if he couldn't get them the normal way, the regular way, which was very unlikely, he would have to forcibly get himself one. In January 1978, Kim Jong-il hatches a plan that is barely believable. This is one of the most bizarre episodes in North Korea, and certainly, I would say, counts as one of the most bizarre episodes in the history of modern moviemaking.
In the next episode of Real Dictators, Kim Jong-il kidnaps South Korea's finest actress and also its leading director. Kim launches a charm offensive at the armed forces, readying the ground for his coronation. And his father dies, leaving the path to power finally, seemingly clear. That's next time on Real Dictators.
Real Dictators is presented by me, Paul McGann. The show was created by Pascal Hughes, produced by Joel Dudow, edited by James Tyndale and Katrina Hughes. The music was composed or assembled by Oliver Baines and Flight Brigade. The strings were recorded by Dory McCauley. The sound recordist is Robbie Stamp. The sound mixer is Tom Pink.
Real Dictators is a Noisa and World Media Rights co-production. If you haven't already, we'd love you to follow us wherever you listen to your favorite shows or check us out at realdictators.com.
