The Supremo in His Labyrinth

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Any threat to the Dear Leader was handled with brutal dispatch. Once a fishing boat slipped through the 16-km cordon in front of the beach house, coming within a few hundred meters of the shore. Lee saw a guard let off warning shots and then open fire, killing two people on board. The guard got a medal; the families of the victims were told their relatives died in the line of duty and were awarded color television sets and refrigerators. Another time, Lee got a call about a car, apparently lost, that drove onto a paved road leading to the beach house. When he arrived, guards had already shot the driver. A passenger had jumped out and was trying to run away. Guards shot him twice in the back.

Kim's real partying took place at one of his two residences in Pyongyang, where he could drink, act the big shot and get close to pretty girls. The beverage of choice was Paekdu Mountain Bulnoju (or Eternal Youth) a fiery liquor made from rice. Female band members and dancers wore micro-minis and tank tops and the men gave them drinks if they performed well. The women were trained not to drink too much but the men, including Kim, usually ended the evening trashed.

During the working day, the drinking started again, sometimes as early as noon (although Kim didn't get sloshed at the office). Kim became furious if he wasn't the center of attention: he got upset if he saw people shaking hands while he was in the room, scolding them for ignoring him. When Kim was in a good mood, he would shower his guards with gifts: deer and birds he hunted and sometimes pineapples, bananas and mandarin oranges — all rare luxuries.

By North Korean standards, Lee lived a very good life. But in 1988, he was forced to leave it behind because his cousin was selected to become a driver for Kim. (No more than one member of a family can be on Kim's security detail in case they conspire against him.) He was instructed to tell no one he had been a bodyguard. But when he got back to his home town in Musan near the Chinese border, disillusionment was almost immediate. Life had gotten much harder in the 11 years he had been away and Lee was shocked to find his parents didn't have enough to eat. He bought a second-hand radio on the black market and accidentally tuned into a South Korean radio station. Drilled to believe the poor kept getting poorer in the South, he listened incredulously to reports on South Korea's growing prosperity.

Feeling he had been tricked for 11 years, he fled to China. But a man posing as a South Korean official, probably a North Korean agent or a trafficker, lured him into Pyongyang's embassy in Beijing, taking him there by car at night. (Lee was told it was Seoul's compound.) He was handcuffed, drugged and loaded on a plane back to Pyongyang. Lee thinks his years of service kept him from getting shot. But he was brutally interrogated for six months — he dropped from 94 kg to 54 kg — and sent to the Yodok political prison camp near the east coast, not far from the beach house he once guarded. Yodok is a place from which few prisoners emerge alive. Lee subsisted on 130 g of food per meal; half of that was given to another inmate if he didn't fulfill his daily work quota. He survived by eating snakes and rats and weeds he pulled from the ground.

Lee's section of the camp held about 1,000 prisoners but he estimates there were tens of thousands more in total. Guards beat their charges with wooden sticks and death was a constant presence. Lee still has nightmares about a 24-year-old man who told the guards he was going to urinate and then tried to flee. They found him and shot him in the leg. As he yelled in pain, the man's legs were bound with wire and he was hitched to the back of a jeep, then dragged through the camp until his scalp and the skin on his back tore off. Then he was strung up and shot and guards ordered the other prisoners to file by the body and touch it. "Until then I was so hungry, I couldn't feel angry," Lee recalls. "That was the first time I felt rage."

After four years, Lee was released, possibly because his cousin was still one of Kim's bodyguards. His digestive system ruined, for six months he could eat nothing but bean curd. He had lost four teeth, some sight in his right eye and some of the hearing in his left ear. He escaped successfully through China to South Korea. Today he is a driver and does odd jobs for a South Korean company. He has also passed on some of his combat skills as a trainer for the South Korean military. The bodyboarder he once thought was a living god doesn't inspire awe anymore, only contempt. "I realize I wasted 11 years of my life." Lee learned close up that cults of personality look a lot better from afar.