New, Improved Dictator

Who knew Kim Jong Il had a kinder, gentler side? The sourpuss-turned-showman stole the summit
By TIM LARIMER

Since kim jong il succeeded his father as leader of North Korea six years ago, he has been lampooned by the rest of the world as a pudgy playboy with a depraved lifestyle who drank cognac while his countrymen barely subsisted on grass and tree bark. He favored James Bond and Daffy Duck in his collection of some 20,000 videotapes. He was a lush who once showed up at a meeting so drunk that his own father had him thrown out. Nobody had ever heard him utter anything more than Glory to the Heroic Korean People's Army! and it was surmised that he had a speech impediment. He had a Howard Hughes-like obsession about germs and was paranoid to the point of having potential political rivals purged. He was even accused of masterminding plots to assassinate a South Korean president and to down an airliner. Oh, and he wore shoe lifts.

The consensus: North Korea's Dear Leader was unpredictable, reclusive, goofy and, because he was thought to control a nuclear weapons program on one side of the world's most fortified border, dangerous. Fast forward to last week's summit in Pyongyang. When Kim Jong Il, still pudgy, still wearing a 1950s khaki Mao suit and still sporting a bizarre hairdo, reached out with both hands to welcome South Korean President Kim Dae Jung, the makeover of a madman was complete. The 58-year-old leader of the world's most mysterious country had been transformed into a huggy-bear who could crack jokes at his own expense, banter about kimchi recipes and show proper Confucian deference to the elder President Kim. I am aware that one of your legs is not very comfortable, he remarked to his 74-year-old South Korean counterpart during a limousine drive from the airport to the capital. Clasping hands in a surprisingly touching show of warmth, he told the President, I hope your stay here is comfortable.
If there was one thing that most Korea watchers felt they knew for sure, it was that the comfort of a South Korean president was not high on the list of things Kim Jong Il cared about. But that was the old Kim. The new version is a masterwork of political repositioning. Part spin, part smarts and all opportunism, Kim 2.0 is an impressive creation, an example of a 180-degree image shift that was achieved in near-Internet time--hardly something anyone would have expected from Pyongyang, where cell phones are as uncommon as Cokes.

But that's precisely what the world got--much to the astonishment of the White House, which just weeks ago had been using Kim as Exhibit A of a rogue dictator while trying to convince Russia of the value of a missile-defense shield. It's too early to be certain that the new Kim is for real. The makeover, though, does seem to have legs. It's not that Kim is such a different guy; his opportunistic streak once helped him extort billions from foreign governments in exchange for capping his nukes program. It's that his interests--and the world around him--have changed for good.

Kim's history is a pastiche of fact, rumor and not a little romance. He was born--it is believed--in Siberia, where his father Kim Il Sung was being trained as a technocrat under Stalin. But his official biography transposes his birth to the slopes of Mount Paektu on the North Korean-Chinese border--for many, the mythical birthplace of the ancestor of the Korean people. Kim's mother died when he was a schoolboy. And when the Korean War broke out during his father's rule, he was spirited him off to the safety of Manchuria. In the 1960s Kim is believed to have trained as a pilot in East Germany. He returned to North Korea to serve as his father's factotum and, eventually his heir. Friends describe him as a calculating politician, a man who worked even to charm his father.

But evidently he also learned at the old man's side. Kim senior was a masterful manipulator. The key to his success was an iron will and a sense of who his friends were: Russia and China. But with the Soviet empire splintered at the end of the cold war and Beijing striding down the path of economic reform and global respectability, Kim junior has had to look elsewhere. Since taking over the helm, Kim at times has seemed to justify the worst Western images of him--such as when he test fired a missile over Japan in 1998. In the past year, however, he has begun to crack open his doors. Thousands of South Korean tourists now visit the North every year. Western investors have been told of opportunities to help the North upgrade its infrastructure. And last week, Kim even spoke of his eagerness to work toward national reunification.

That was all much more like the new Kim, a man who is reportedly an avid watcher of cnn and at least a one-time surfer of the Internet. Kim's calculated move to change his image, says Koh Yu-hwan, an expert on North Korea at Dongguk University in Seoul, was a stunning success. On his trip to Beijing last month, Kim even told his Chinese hosts he was cutting back on his drinking.

But to what end? There was little to fault in the way Kim Jong Il comported himself at the summit (although commentators in Seoul did wryly note that during one celebration he slung back 10 glasses of wine to five for President Kim). His gestures have gone a long way toward easing tensions on the Korean Peninsula. But what does he want next? Food? Money? Friends?

The best guess is that he wants some of all of the above--if he can get it without loosening his grip on power too much. North Korea's food situation is better than it was last year, when much of the nation was starving. But the country is still vastly underdeveloped. There may be other motives. China has been pressuring Kim to open up--mostly out of fear that North Korean intransigence could lead to a bigger U.S. presence in Asia, something Beijing is eager to avoid. In Washington, U.S. officials hope that the root of Kim's shift may be that the Dear Leader has simply realized there's no future in being a rogue. Whatever the reason, the smiling fellow who waved his South Korean counterpart goodbye at week's end was already looking less like a wacko in search of a weapon of mass destruction and more like a grandfather in search of a hug.

With reporting by Stella Kim/Seoul and Douglas Waller/Washington