INTRODUCTION Players and Game I The man who would become the Great Leader stood on an indoor mountain of chemical fertilizer. Snow-white, stone hard, and two stories high, the mound of ammonium sulfate was eye candy for the masses, a symbol of the good life on offer from Comrade Kim Il Sung. Without fertilizer, people in North Korea go hungry, and some starve. It is true now, and it was true on February 22, 1948, when Kim had men cut the fertilizer flat on top, rig up a sound system, and conscript an audience. Three rings of soldiers, each armed with a Soviet-made submachine gun, protected the man atop the huge pile of fertilizer. The stage was socialist realism writ large, as straightforward as it was brutal: Support Kim Il Sung and eat. Challenge him, and his men will sort you out, using guns and muscle from the Soviet Union. Kim was thirty-five years old that day, but he looked younger, with smooth cheeks, short black hair, and a snug-fitting Mao suit.
He had been back on the Korean Peninsula for just two and a half years, having spent much of his life fighting the Japanese in Northeast China. He had not yet purged, jailed, exiled, or executed all his political rivals. It would be another year before he had the gall to call himself the Great Leader and another decade before he would package himself as "the sun of mankind and the greatest man who has ever appeared in the world." But he was getting there. His control of the police and the army was absolute. State-owned newspapers and radio applauded his every move. His paunch was expanding with his power. As Moscow''s chosen one--he had caught the eye of advisers close to Premier Joseph Stalin--Kim was rushing to rebuild and revolutionize a society traumatized by four decades of Japanese colonial domination.
Following a Soviet script, factories were nationalized and labor unions created. The eight-hour workday became law. A mass literacy campaign taught millions of subsistence farmers and their families to read. New laws limited child labor and guaranteed women equal pay for equal work. Kim''s government seized and redistributed farmland from wealthy landlords. Peasant farmers liked what they saw and grew more food. In cities, the poor and the young also seemed to be buying what Kim was selling. But the wealthy, the landed, and the well educated were frightened.
About two million of them fled south, where, in a similarly new nation called South Korea, bullying politicians were preaching capitalism while being advised, armed, and bankrolled by the United States. The Americans and the Soviets divided the Korean Peninsula in the anxious final days of World War II. On August 11, 1945, two American colonels working after midnight in Washington used a small National Geographic map to draw an arbitrary line across the peninsula. It tracked the thirty-eighth parallel, a border with no connection to Korea''s history, politics, or geographic features. The east-west line gave two-thirds of the peninsula''s population to South Korea, along with most of the arable land. President Harry S. Truman believed it was a good solution. Surprisingly, so did Stalin, and the deal was done.
In theory, over the next five years, the wartime allies would work on their respective sides of the border to reunite Korea''s thirty million people. Unification would supposedly occur after they moved beyond the hysteria of war and developed democratic institutions. But they did not calm down, and democracy was stillborn. The leaders who emerged, Kim in the North and Syngman Rhee in the South, were aggressive, egocentric nationalists. Each wanted to reunite Korea on his own uncompromising terms. Each wanted to rule it all, with weapons, money, and ideological window dressing from his superpower patron. Because of the mass exodus from the North, there was far more social cohesion and political stability in Kim''s realm than in Rhee''s, where striking workers and farmers clashed constantly with American-armed police. An American intelligence report concluded, "Younger people throughout North Korea, especially between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one, are beginning to believe in the Communist government.
" To build on that belief, Kim traveled to rice farms and teachers'' colleges, irrigation projects and dance schools. Most often, he visited factories, where he charmed workers, listened to local complaints, and gave "on-the-spot guidance" as state media took his picture. That is what he was doing on the fertilizer mountain: sweet-talking, inspiring, and intimidating a crowd of ten thousand cheering supporters, most of them young. His speech was the main event for his visit to Hungnam, an industrial city on North Korea''s east coast, where the Japanese had built several modern factories, including Chosen Nitrogenous Fertilizers, the largest fertilizer works in the Far East. Soviet soldiers had liberated the place in the late summer of 1945 as the defeated Japanese scurried away. Kim''s government nationalized it and repaired machinery the Japanese had tried to destroy. Fertilizer was brought back into production--glorious news in a mountainous nation of subsistence farmers, tired soil, and chronic food shortages. "Our workers are now mass-producing fertilizer essential for the peasants," Kim said as he began his speech.
Besides fertilizer, he said, the "extremely creative enthusiasm" of Korean technicians was increasing pig-iron production and repairing hydroelectric dams. "All this proves that we can build a prosperous, independent, and sovereign state by ourselves." But a "happy society" required much more. Kim said a "genuine people''s government" must destroy the "enslavement policies" of the "American imperialists and their stooges" and take control of the entire Korean Peninsula. He was hinting, not very subtly, at a military invasion of the South, which he was already planning. On a secret trip to Moscow just before he launched that invasion, Kim assured Stalin that Koreans in the South would joyfully support a Communist invasion and the Americans would slink away in fear. "The Americans," he said, "will not risk a big war." II No Kum Sok was there that day.
He was sixteen years old and a student at Hungnam First High School, which had closed at midday in honor of Kim''s visit, as had the city''s factories. Ordered by teachers and foremen, students and workers queued up outside the fertilizer plant, where soldiers frisked them for guns and explosives. Two years earlier, someone at a rally had tossed a hand grenade at Kim. Thanks to a Soviet minder who grabbed it out of midair (and was severely wounded), Kim was not hurt. Since then, though, security had tightened. After soldiers searched him, No entered a cavernous warehouse more than three stories high and longer than three football fields. Afternoon light drizzled down through greasy skylights. With four classmates, No climbed a ladder to a steel balcony.
He watched from there as Kim--surrounded by attendants who carried his photograph and led the crowd in chants about his genius--marched into the warehouse and climbed the mound of fertilizer. Kim radiated a raw animal magnetism and had a broad fatherly smile. The boy had never seen or heard anyone like him. The leader''s voice was strong, his language plain and powerful. To No, Kim seemed somehow larger than other human beings, although photographs and contemporary descriptions show that he was not all that large, about five feet seven inches. Workers in the factory were spellbound as Kim praised them for being the "prime movers of modern society." No hung on every word. Kim''s rise to power had changed the very words the boy could speak, read, and write.
When Japan ruled the peninsula, the Korean language was banned; everyone was supposed to speak Japanese. It was the only language No could fluently read and write. After Kim and the Soviets took over, Japanese was banned; speaking it was seditious. Russian replaced English as a foreign language in middle school. Baseball, the game No''s father had played and loved, was condemned as a decadent waste of time. A new law banned any meeting of more than five persons without official permission. A teacher told No''s class that freedom of religion would, of course, be protected under Kim''s rule. But the teacher also said there would be state-enforced limits: devout Christians, if they behaved like "superstitious fools," would not be allowed to hold jobs in the military or in the professions.
The boy, whose churchgoing father had attended a missionary school, got the message. He stopped going to church. He also stopped listening to the Voice of America on the radio, fearing what he might learn and inadvertently say to teachers and classmates. The rise of Kim Il Sung delighted several of No''s relatives. His paternal grandfather called him a "genius." Yoo Ki Un, his maternal uncle, decorated the living room and bedrooms of his Hungnam home with photographs of Kim and Stalin. Uncle Yoo, who worked as a supervisor in a machine-assembly plant, tolerated no criticism of his leader. To keep the peace with Uncle Yoo, to prevent his school friends from snitching on him, and to give himself a future in the new North Korea, No decided to pretend to be a "No.
1 Communist." He began his act soon after seeing Kim''s speech, and it would save his life. He lied on his examination for admission to the North Korean Naval Academy. In answer to questions about his family background, he wrote that his recently dead father had been a socialist-leaning laborer who hated the Japanese and loved the Great Leader. The one truth in that statement was that his father was recently dead. No''s father had been a successful manager for a Japanese industrial conglomerate. The Noguchi Co.