Jung H. Pak - Becoming Kim Jong Un: A Former CIA Officers Insights into North Koreas Enigmatic Young Dictator

Even by the standards of North Koreaconsummate purveyor of propagandaone could not have asked for better weather for the staging of Kim Jong Ils funeral on December 28, 2011. It was cold, bleak, and snowing. The white snow contrasted perfectly with the black of the hearse, the coffin atop it, and the mourners attire, matching the melancholy in the peoples hearts as they bade farewell to their beloved leader, who had ruled them since 1994, when the countrys founder, Kim Il Sung, had died. As the funeral procession moved through the snow, the North Korean people lining the streets wept, fainted, and convulsed with grief, genuine or otherwise. Men and women, soldiers and workers, the young and the old beat or clawed at their chests and clung to one another for comfort or pounded the ground in anguish. The roar of this collective demonstration of sorrow was deafening, and it probably stirred even those in the crowd who did not feel this passion for the dead leader who had ruled with an iron hand.

Prominently leading the procession was the baby-faced Kim Jong UnNorth Koreas new leader. He kept his composure, walking silently and mournfully, though his tense face and tears betrayed the real grief he must have felt. He was now, after all, an orphan; his mother had died of breast cancer when he was twenty years old.

Kim Jong Il, the dictator, father, and movie impresario, would have been pleased with every aspect of this final production.

Kim Jong Ils death on December 17, 2011, from overwork, as the North Korean state media described it, was not a surprise. Everyone knew that Kim had health issueshe had suffered a stroke in late 2008and that the time would probably come when his familys history of heart disease and his days of smoking, drinking, and partying would catch up with him. His father, Kim Il Sung, had also died of a heart attack. Still, the death was jarring.

At the time of the funeral, I was a relatively new analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency, having begun my job there in early 2009, soon after Kims stroke. When he had made his first public appearance at the rubber-stamp Supreme Peoples Assembly spring meeting, he was shockingly thin, his once plump cheeks now crepey and clinging to his prominent cheekbones. His gait was slow and measured.

When Kims death came, a palpable anxiety gripped the world. South Korea convened a National Security Council meeting as the country put its military and civil defense on high alert. Japan set up a crisis management team, and the White House issued a statement saying it was in close touch with our allies in South Korea and Japan. At CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, I remember being watchful for any indications of instability in Pyongyang, as I began to develop my thinking about where North Korea might be headed under its youthful and inexperienced new leader.

The North Korean regime was quick to dispel any doubt or confusion about its next ruler. The state media, after dutifully exalting Kim Jong Ils brilliant life and leadership and his role as the parent of the nation and a lodestar of the fatherlands reunification, immediately proclaimed that the future was secure under Kim Jong Un:

At the head of our revolution today stands Comrade Kim Jong Un, the great successor.All of the party members, the men and officers of the peoples army, and the people should faithfully uphold the leadership of Comrade Kim Jong Un, they should firmly defend the single-hearted unity of the party, the army, and the people and should further strengthen it like steel.