Star of His Own Show

By Donald Macintyre and Massimo Calabresi

KIM JONG IL LOVES HIS movies. Not just the more than 15,000 he's collected on videotape. His movies. Movies of him. The North Korean ruler is trailed not by the tight video crews that sometimes accompany Western leaders but by a film team straight out of 1930s back-lot Hollywood, armed with spotlights and huge reel-to-reel Panaflex cameras so loud they sound like insects feeding.

When Secretary of State Madeleine Albright visited Pyongyang in 2000, it was the arrival of Kim's film crews that informed the U.S. delegation that he would make an appearance. Because Kim is obsessed with drama and surprise, Albright didn't even know whether she would meet him until he showed up. Kim likes to stage surprises, not receive them. Members of Albright's entourage were told not to make any "quick movements" in his presence.

Of all the world's leaders, Kim, 60, may be the most strange, despite his effort in recent years to appear less so. Before he ascended to power, when his predecessor and father Kim Il Sung died in 1994, he was regarded outside North Korea as something of a joke--a pampered playboy who, with his Mao-era leisure suits, puffed-up coiffure and shoe lifts, would likely falter in his father's footsteps. Though he's maintained his singular sense of style, Kim has lessened his reputation for kookiness. The first time the outside world got a good look at him, in June 2000 when he summited with South Korean President Kim Dae Jung, he cracked jokes, demonstrated proper Confucian deference to his elder counterpart and showed a clear grasp of the issues. Then came the visit by Albright, the only senior U.S. official ever to meet Kim. "I found him very much on top of his brief," Albright recalls. He was also au courant on American culture, including the Oscars and the NBA.

Culture was Kim's first official portfolio. After earning a political-economy degree from Pyongyang's Kim Il Sung University, he was put in charge of arts and cultural affairs for the Central Committee of the Korean Workers' Party. He took his brief to an extreme, ordering the kidnapping of a South Korean director and his actress wife to assist in developing the North Korean film industry. When they escaped eight years later, they related that at a first meeting, Kim had asked, "What do you think of my physique? Small as a midget's dropping, aren't I?"

Other highlights in Kim's career include, according to some defectors, masterminding a failed 1983 hit in Rangoon on South Korean President Chun Doo Hwan and the bombing of a South Korean jetliner that killed 115 people. Hwang Jang Yop, once Pyongyang's chief propagandist and the most senior North Korean official to defect, says Kim terrorizes his own countrymen as well. Hwang depicts Kim as touchy, paranoid and vindictive and says he dispatches those who cross him to grim concentration camps.

Before he died, Kim Il Sung officially designated his son his heir, setting up the first dynastic succession in a communist state. The dead leader was named President for eternity; Kim rules as chairman of the National Defense Commission. Kim, once called Dear Leader, now uses his father's old title, Great Leader, as well. According to Hwang, Kim is all business when it comes to running his medieval kingdom. Working at night, he pores over reports, policy suggestions and even international best sellers--summarized by his aides to save time.

Still, Kim likes his fun. A big drinker, he was observed during his summit with Kim Dae Jung knocking back 10 glasses of wine. Former bodyguard Lee Young Kuk says that at one of Kim's luxurious palaces on the sea, his boss would tool around on a body board in a vast swimming pool equipped with a wave machine, while a female doctor and a pretty nurse swam behind. Kim has been reported to have three wives but maintains a reputation for womanizing. In a recent tell-all book, Russian security agent Konstantin Pulikovsky, who accompanied Kim on a 2001 train trip to Moscow, describes the sumptuous onboard feasts served Kim, the leader of a hungry nation. The train was well stocked with French wines and once with fresh rock lobsters. Kim was serenaded by four comely women dressed as conductors.

Pulikovsky claims Kim encouraged him to write the account of the trip, saying, "There are too many mysteries about me; let the people know the truth." When Albright was in Pyongyang, Kim took her to a packed stadium to witness a mammoth, highly scripted display of support for the regime. "He took great personal pride in having choreographed a lot of it," she recalls. Albright concluded that Kim saw himself as a director of a great drama, someone with a flair if not a weakness for the big show. Certainly that is a trait on display now. --With reporting by Kim Yooseung/Seoul and Michael Duffy/Washington

With reporting by Kim Yooseung/Seoul and Michael Duffy/Washington