Body
Twenty years ago in Seoul an official related to me that Kim Jong-il had the world’s second largest collection of pornography. I repressed my instinct to ask who was number one. He also explained that Kim had heart disease, emphysema, diabetes, syphilis, AIDS, pretty much everything but beriberi and rickets.
A few years later, Kim Jong-u, then chair of the Committee for the Promotion of External Economic Cooperation was reputedly purged and executed. An acquaintance subsequently visited him however, and found him alive and kicking. Well, alive and kicking with one leg: Kim had experienced a stroke, and was paralyzed on one side.
So while I’m not from Missouri, I come by my skepticism naturally, particularly when it comes to news from North Korea. And this has been quite a week.
CNN started it off by airing an interview with an alleged high level defector who claimed that Kim Kyong-hui, aunt of Kim Jong-un, and widow of Jang Song-taek, and one of the few people who openly talked back to Kim Jong-il, had been poisoned on orders of her nephew. Great story, but its veracity immediately came under fire. DailyNK reported that Kim was alive, being treated for a nerve disorder, and was “on the path to recovery.” (According to the story, her nerve problems were aggravated by the execution of her husband, whether by firing squad or hungry dogs. She has my sympathies.) New Focus International then questioned the bona fides of the CNN source arguing that this individual had misrepresented his credentials and was in essence a fraud. All we need now is for Kim Kyong-hui, like Bela Lugosi, to rise from the crypt and appear on the six o’clock news.
The National Intelligence Service then got into the act, claiming in testimony in front of a South Korean National Assembly committee that the North Korean defense chief, General Hyon Yong-chol, had been purged and executed for dozing off during meetings and talking back to his boss. (Man, it’s a good thing that I’m not North Korean or I would have been offed years ago.) As in the case of the alleged Kim Kyong-hui poisoning, the report immediately attracted skeptical commentary, and now the NIS is backing away from its statement: they think that Hyon was purged, but may not have been executed by firing squad, either using conventional weapons or via the currently stylish use of anti-aircraft guns. Parenthetically, in a different interview with CNN, a North Korean official admitted that the regime executed subversives, but bristled at the notion that they used anti-aircraft guns.
Obviously such an information constrained environment is a natural breeding ground for misinformation and disinformation. I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if the creative tale-spinners in Nigeria start producing North Korea-themed 419 scams: “Dear Sir, Before my father Park Ki-hwan was executed by anti-aircraft gun, he managed to stash away $16 million…” And it could be, as Bruce Cumings has observed, that the Young General really does govern like Caligula. But it’s not for nothing that at least one former intelligence analyst became a fiction writer, either. I suppose the lesson of this story is not to trust everything you hear about North Korea. Especially if it involves poisoning, anti-aircraft guns, pornography, or sexually transmitted disease.
