N. Korean Heir Apparent Is a Bizarre Enigma

Kim Jong Il, North Korea’s presumed new leader, is said to watch public executions with “frenzied joy” and amuse himself by ordering subordinates to shave their heads or strip naked. He is suspected of masterminding international bombings and kidnapings blamed for killing more than 100 people.

The eldest son of Kim Il Sung, the Communist dictator of Pyongyang’s grim regime who died Friday, reportedly stages frequent orgies in his palatial villas. He is paranoid about germs, a film fanatic with 20,000 videos and an ardent fan of Daffy Duck cartoons.

Such bizarre tales have long filtered out of Pyongyang from diplomats and defectors about Kim, 52, the pudgy, bespectacled scion of the Marxist world’s only family dynasty. But whether they are true or false is impossible to say.

The only thing certain about the mysterious prince of Pyongyang is that almost nothing is known for certain about his character, his hold on power or his ability to govern his cloistered country. Nor is it clear how he intends to rescue an economy said to be near collapse, placate a people reduced to eating roots, manage North Korea’s military of 1.1 million soldiers, the fourth-largest in the world, or deal with the country’s nuclear program.

Only one Westerner is known to have ever met him, an Italian entrepreneur named Carlo Baeli who was treated to a lobster dinner cruise on one of Kim’s pleasure boats in 1992. Kim has made only one known public utterance in his life--”Glory to the heroic Korean People’s Army!”--which he shouted at the end of a two-hour military display in 1992. His speeches are read by narrators on television and the radio.

“He is a very mysterious person,” said Ahn Byung Joon, a political science professor at Yonsei University in Seoul. “We don’t know much about his character, experience and ability. We know only his appearance and face on TV. For the time being, there is no doubt he will take over, but how long he will be able to rule is very difficult to say.”

One Western diplomat in Tokyo, as baffled as everyone else by Kim, said only that officials are concerned about reports of his “unusual character.”

Clues as to how solid Kim’s support base actually is may come over the next several days from the kinds of speeches he makes and policies he announces, said one North Korean expert in Seoul. One critical clue will be whether he assumes the three titles of general secretary, president and chairman of the military commission of the Korean Workers’ Party--as well as whether he ascends from “Dear Leader,” as he is called, to “Great Leader,” as his father was known--this expert said.

The younger Kim has been groomed by his father to take over the helm for the last 20 years. He has aimed to solidify his support base since 1972, when he established the “three main revolutionary squads” to mobilize 40,000 new college graduates a year to build loyalty to Kim in the party, factories and schools.

In December, 1991, the senior Kim named his son supreme commander of the military, awarding him the highest title of “marshal” four months later.

Yet he is known to have faced opposition from a “veterans group” within the army. Diplomats say the conflict is generational and that many of the senior officials opposing him have been forced to retire or were reportedly executed.

In addition, analysts say, he is bitterly opposed by his stepmother, Kim Song Ae, and her allies in a long-running drama of palace intrigue. The hatred is said to be mutual: Kim reportedly cuts the face of his stepmother out of every photo in which she appears.

And unlike his charismatic father, who genuinely commanded public adoration, Kim is a recluse who mistrusts everyone and finds it difficult to meet people’s eyes, much less make friends, analysts say.

“Nobody knows what kind of person he really is, but what is certain is that among those who have met him, not one has a good impression of him,” said one source close to Chongryun, the pro-Pyongyang residents group in Tokyo.

To help consolidate Kim’s power, the party propaganda machine began cranking up its output of official hagiography in the mid-1980s. He is now even said to possess magical powers, such as the ability to condense time and space.

The circumstances of his birth have been rewritten from a mundane event in frozen Siberia to a glorious miracle atop the Korean peninsula’s highest and holiest mountain amid bright lights and a double rainbow.

According to Naewoe Press, which monitors North Korean developments from Seoul, Kim was born Feb. 16, 1941, but his birth year was moved to 1942 to create an even, 30-year difference with his father. His birthplace was also moved--to the sacred Mt. Paekdu, in a secret camp of “freedom fighters” opposed to the Japanese colonialists.

His mother died when he was 7, and he was evacuated to China for the duration of the Korean War--events said to have devastated him and even affected his emotional development.

Pyongyang spin-meisters credit Kim with an “insatiable” desire for learning, with consuming thousands of books during junior high school, writing six classic operas in just two years and other wondrous feats.

More objective analysts who monitor North Korea say Kim shows two faces: a ruthless terrorist and an economic reformist.

The trigger-happy image stems largely from suspicions that he masterminded the 1983 bombing in Burma, now Myanmar, that killed 17 South Korean officials and the 1987 midair bombing of a South Korean airliner that killed all 115 people aboard.

In addition, he initiated two of North Korea’s most recent belligerent acts: the decision to put North Korea on a “semi-war” footing on March 8, 1993, and the stunning announcement four days later that it was pulling out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Some analysts at the time, however, said Kim’s move was mainly to show his “boldness” in an attempt to consolidate his rule.

At the same time, he is known to have promoted economic reform within the Stalinist state. He was behind the establishment of the North’s rare free-trade zone in the Tumen River estuary on the Chinese border, as well as other moves beginning in the 1980s to woo more foreign investment and liberalize the economy.

A joint-venture law he supported in the early 1980s produced more than 100 enterprises--many of them financed by North Korean residents in Japan. But only 20 to 30 are still functioning, said one economics expert. Kim’s “three main revolutionary squads” too often disrupted factory production with ideological meetings. Or the North Koreans kicked out their foreign partners to seize the profits but foundered when they left, the expert said.

“He doesn’t have the ability or talent to think up these programs himself,” the expert said. “He is surrounded by staff who do it for him.”

In fact, Kim’s main interests are said to be films, women and wine. He holds regular parties with strippers and orders high-ranking officers to play with them, according to two 1989 defectors, actress Choi Eun Hee and her director husband, Shin Sang Ok. The pair say they spent eight years in Pyongyang after Kim ordered them kidnaped from Hong Kong to teach him about movie-making.

According to defectors and diplomats, Kim is sensitive about his height (5 feet, 6 inches) and weight (189 pounds) and wears heels and a permed bouffant to elongate his profile. He orders his home disinfected every day.