Kim Is No Madman, Kidnaped Pair Say : North Korea: Film couple, captives for eight years, describe new ruler as a meticulous planner.

North Korea’s new leader, Kim Jong Il, is not quite the “madman” portrayed in press reports in the West but rather a meticulous planner who executes his projects with iron determination, according to South Korea’s premier actress and film director, who were kidnaped by Kim and held captive for eight years in Pyongyang.

Had he been born to another life instead of being the eldest son of Kim Il Sung, the world’s longest-reigning dictator until his death earlier this month, the younger Kim might have made a great movie producer, Choi Eun Hee and her husband, Shin Sang Okk, said in an interview with The Times.

As experts try to figure out what Kim is really like, negative images persist of a man who abuses alcohol and women and is possibly unpredictable enough to start a nuclear war.

The pudgy 52-year-old, who loves movies and the theater as much as his Hennessy cognac, was such a devotee of Stalin that he would use “any means”--including the abduction of innocent artists such as themselves--to fulfill his goals, the couple said.

Kim Jong Il is suspected to be the mastermind of the 1983 bombing in Burma (now Myanmar) that killed more than a dozen South Korean officials and the 1987 midair bombing of a South Korean airliner that killed all 115 aboard--to frighten people from coming to Seoul during the 1988 Olympics.

To be sure, Choi, 63, and Shin, 67, know the frightening side of Kim--it was on his orders that they were kidnaped to North Korea from Hong Kong six months apart in 1978, then not even told for years if the other was alive.

But while South Korea’s most famous movie couple still cringe when recalling their captor, they also speak of him without rancor, almost dispassionately, as if they were discussing a main character in a movie they were making.

Despite his terrorist past, the Kim Jong Il they knew between 1978 and 1986 would not start a nuclear war--because that would amount to a suicide for his nation, said Shin, who had many long talks with Kim. “He is not as rash as he appears to those who don’t know the inner workings of North Korea. North Korea’s nuclear program is the only bargaining tool he has. He’ll use it as a tool.”

During the wide-ranging interview in Los Angeles, Choi and Shin provided a close-up view of the reclusive North Korean leader about whom little is known outside his secretive nation, where a personality cult grew around Kim Il Sung that is equivalent to a state religion.

The couple escaped from their North Korean captors in 1986 and settled two years later in the Los Angeles area, living now in Beverly Hills. They became U.S. citizens last year and are working on an epic film, “Genghis Khan,” which they began in North Korea.

Their joint memoirs, published in 1988 in Korean and Japanese, sold 300,000 copies in Japan alone. The fact that they related their experiences, filling 863 pages, is one reason they do not feel a need merely to demonize their onetime captor, they say; getting on in years, they feel there’s little time left to dwell on the unpleasant past.

What’s more, like millions of other Koreans of their generation, having lived through brutal Japanese colonial rule, World War II, the Korean War and decades of dictatorship, they are numb--and practiced in a survival technique of forgive and forget.

In this spirit, the couple see their kidnapings as examples of Kim’s well-planned moves to achieve what he believed was good for his country. As a movie buff who recognized the power of the medium, his dream was to create a first-class movie industry in his country. To achieve that, he plotted to abduct them.

Since Korea was partitioned at the end of World War II, the Communist regime in the North has abducted countless artists, musicians and writers, including this century’s most famous novelist, Lee Kwang Soo, in an attempt to deplete the South’s intellectual roster.

“If you measure Kim Jong Il with Western standards of freedom and human rights, he is irrational,” said Shin. “On the other hand, if you analyze him in the context of Stalinism, he is not crazy.”

“The end justifies the means. Wasn’t it Lenin who said it was all right to steal for the sake of the revolution?” said Choi.

From their intimate encounters with him, Choi and Shin are convinced that Kim has the ability to assume and retain power over North Korea.

“The so-called North Korean specialists don’t know anything,” Shin said. “They’ve never met the man.”

Referring to “experts” who have speculated that Kim may not survive beyond the next two years because he doesn’t have his father’s credentials and charisma, Shin said:

“If Kim Jong Il goes, so go all the people around him. Do you think they will let that happen? Kim Il Sung didn’t groom him to be his heir just because he was his son. Kim Il Sung chose him because he knew he was capable.”

The younger Kim has been running day-to-day operations of the Pyongyang government for the past 20 years, said Shin, an assessment shared by numerous North Korea watchers in South Korea.

During the movie couple’s eight years in Pyongyang, they dined with Kim, watched movies with him and visited his home--considered a rare privilege. They spent scores of hours discussing movie projects, which Kim considered a key to mobilizing his people’s support.

Their bizarre odyssey began when Choi, South Korea’s most popular actress since World War II, was kidnaped in Hong Kong in January, 1978, in Repulse Bay. Out of nowhere, several men appeared, picked Choi up and put her on a freighter--sobbing, screaming and then fainting--to the North Korean port of Nampo near Pyongyang, she wrote in her memoir.

Several days later, Choi was met at the dock by Kim Jong Il, whose welcoming remarks were: “You have suffered a great deal trying to come here. I am Kim Jong Il.”

She was driven to one of his villas. For many months, she locked herself in the bathroom and cried. Often she ran the faucet full blast to keep her guards from hearing her, and called out the names of her two adopted children and other family members. Sometimes she felt like she would go crazy, she recalled.

Shin was abducted six months later, after mounting a fruitless search for Choi. He, too, was lured to Repulse Bay, bound and anesthetized and taken by different boats to Nampo, Shin said.

For five years Choi and Shin did not know whether the other was alive or in North Korea. They were held captive separately until they were reunited on March 6, 1983, at a banquet hosted by Kim at Communist Party headquarters in Pyongyang.

Choi was moved from villa to villa, subjected to indoctrination and constantly under watch. Shin was held in a political prison for four years, after he twice tried to escape in a Mercedes-Benz.

After the pair were reunited, they plotted their getaway. The only way out was to cooperate with Kim, they said.

On Oct. 18, 1983, Kim hosted a 57th birthday party for Shin. That night Kim asked Shin to be his special adviser on motion pictures. Kim asked Shin to forgive their “recent difficulties” and admitted his involvement in the kidnapings.

Kim told Shin he wanted to export movies to improve his country’s image.

That very night Shin Film Inc. was created, and two days later the movie couple were off to Eastern Europe with diplomatic passports and $3 million to make a movie Kim Jong Il wanted completed for his father’s birthday, six months later.

Kim Jong Il’s 15,000 movies, one of the world’s largest private collections, included all of Shin’s films--more than 100 in all.

“Kim Jong Il liked both of us--long before he met us,” Shin said. “So did Kim Il Sung.

Now, having won Kim Jong Il’s confidence, the two were permitted to travel, even to Western Europe, though they were always accompanied by North Korean officials. While in Europe, they even held a news conference and said they had gone to the North voluntarily, though South Korean officials dismissed that as another North Korean propaganda ploy.

The couple made half a dozen films for North Korea.

Their “One-Way Mission” won the best-director award at a 1985 film festival in Czechoslovakia. A pleased Kim Jong Il called Choi. “Our country has never won an honor like this,” he said.

In January, 1986, they were in Vienna on the way to Budapest, where they were to begin work on a film about Genghis Khan. Choi and Shin, helped by a Japanese journalist they knew, made a daring escape in a taxi, eluding their guards, who were in hot pursuit. They dashed into the U.S. Embassy and sought refuge. For two years after that they lived in a Washington, D.C., suburb, under the protection of U.S. officials until 1988. A furious Kim Jong Il had placed a $1-million bounty on them.

During their stay in Pyongyang, they led a “privileged” life, they acknowledged, even during their confinement.

Kim made sure his aides remembered their birthdays and had appropriate gifts delivered to them.

And whenever Kim called Choi on a special hot-line telephone he had set up to talk to her, he was solicitous, always inquiring about her well-being.

Speaking in Korean throughout the interview, but occasionally using English words such as “scenario” and “productions,” both Choi and Shin said images of North Korea in the West are distorted, showing the extremes. They attributed this to the tendency of Westerners to focus on what is said as opposed to what is left unsaid.

“For example, all these reports about Kim Jong Il’s sexual proclivities and eccentricities are exaggerated,” said Shin. “I don’t think Kim Jong Il womanizes any more than other powerful men in the world who can have women at their beck and call,” he said.

Shin said he was impressed by Kim’s patience in achieving his projects. “He spent five years trying to win me over to his side to make movies,” Shin said.

Physically, the primary thing Choi remembers about Kim Jong Il is his “roundness.”

“He has a round face, his eyes are round and big, and he is rotund.”

Kim also had a good sense of humor and laughed easily, she said. Sometimes he told self-deprecating jokes about his appearance, too.

Once, when Kim visited Choi, he stood at the entrance and as soon as he saw her asked: “How do I look?”

When she hesitated, he grinned and said: “I look nanjaenggi ttong-jjaru, “ meaning a small sack of excrement, one of the more earthy Korean jokes.

In a sign of respect, Kim addressed them as sunsaeng (teacher). They, in turn, called him “dear leader” or “comrade leader.”

After the couple won the best director award, Kim called Choi. The actress, who was working in their studio when Kim phoned, recorded the conversation, a copy of which was made available to The Times. The conversation was preserved on one of seven tapes they packed in their luggage when they left North Korea for the last time.

In a 10-minute conversation, laced with laughter and jokes, Kim accused her and her husband of ignoring him.

“Dear leader, it is I who should say that you have all but forgotten us. We hadn’t heard from you for so long, we thought we were vanished from your universe.”

“Not I, teacher Choi,” he said, laughing. “You are the ones who have forgotten me. Lately, you don’t want to have anything to do with me.”

He inquired about her health, then suggested that she take some time off to conserve her energy. Kim asked about Shin, who was making a movie in Beijing at the time, and invited them to join him for dinner as soon as he returned.

“Half of the time, our phone conversations with Kim Jong Il were taken up with jokes,” said Shin, who too had a hot line to Kim Jong Il during his separate confinement.

One time, as Choi sat in her quarters wallowing in sadness and thinking of her children and relatives back home, the phone rang.

It was Kim.

“Teacher Choi, it is I, Kim Jong Il. What are you doing right now?”

“I was reading earlier, but I’m knitting just now,” Choi said.

“I’ll be sending a car within the hour. Please come to our home.”

His voice was cheerful and, Choi thought, slightly tipsy.

“Thank you so much for the invitation, but what’s the occasion?”

“To tell you the truth, today is my birthday. We haven’t prepared anything special, but we’re having a family get-together. Why don’t you come, teacher Choi.”

She chose a cobalt blue traditional Korean dress, made from fabric Kim had given her.

The car he sent for her sped across the bridge over the River Taedong, toward the eastern section of Pyongyang, past rows of poplar trees, and finally stopped in front of an unpretentious one-story house.

Kim was at the entrance when she arrived.

He introduced her to his wife, a handsome woman who surprised her, Choi said, by wearing a long Western dress instead of the traditional Korean attire most women in North Korea wore.

“Teacher Choi,” Kim said, “my wife is just a simple homemaker. Isn’t that what women should do--stay home and raise children?”

She also met his son. He was chubby like his father.

Choi asked him how old he was. He responded “eight.” But when she asked what his name was, the boy complained, “Why do you want to know my name?”

Stroking the boy’s head, Kim Jong Il said gently: “When adults ask children questions, children are supposed to answer.”

As if to assuage the awkward situation, a young man, who appeared to be the boy’s tutor, arrived and led the child to play outside.

Afterward, she realized the faux pas she had committed. “Who in North Korea would dare ask the name of the grandson of their Great Leader?” she asked herself.

But Kim was in a jovial mood that afternoon. He walked around his spacious living room with a video camera, capturing the party. Afterward, he played the video for everyone.

The picture came out blurry and pink. Everyone laughed about that, including Kim.

The motion picture couple said they believe Kim would have made a fine movie producer because of his enormous dedication and meticulousness.

“We nicknamed him ‘micro-manager,’ ” Choi said. “He pays attention to everything. He keeps track of everything. He is simply amazing.”

Soon after her capture, Kim had his aides deliver a score of boxes to her door. They contained materials for every type of clothing--from party wear to casual wear. Choi had only two pieces of clothing in her shopping bag when she was kidnaped.

Just as he carefully picked gifts for his captives and planned for the enhancement of North Korea’s film industry, they believe, Kim Jong Il can manage his government. The couple advised: “Don’t underestimate Kim Jong Il.”