Meet Kim Jong Un

Kim Jong Il’s aides were standing around a billiard table in the game room of one of the Dear Leader’s villas outside Pyongyang. It was a formal occasion: they were going to meet Kim’s sons, including the one who would one day succeed him as head of what is probably the world’s most despotic regime. Kim Jong Un was dressed in a military uniform. When his father entered the room, he snapped to attention and, along with his elder brother, gave the old man a crisp salute.

It was 1990. Kim Jong Un, now the new leader of North Korea, was 7 years old.

North Korea is a cocktail of poisonous elements: autocratic, repressive, isolated and poor. It is a place where not even an iota of freedom is imaginable. Its regime is dangerous not only to its people but also to the rest of the world. North Korea, notes South Korean scholar Cheong Seong-chang, is “a Stalinist monarchy” where bloodlines, and only bloodlines, determine who the next dictator will be–no matter how young or inexperienced that person may be.

Nearly 30,000 U.S. troops sit across the border, helping defend the North’s prosperous, democratic brethren in the South against a 1.2 million-member army, most of it arrayed within 30 miles (50 km) of the demilitarized zone. Over the past decade, despite crippling economic sanctions imposed by most of the outside world, North Korea has defiantly developed and tested nuclear weapons and the long-range missiles needed to deliver them. Western intelligence agencies estimate that Pyongyang possesses eight to 12 nuclear weapons. The hard truth is that North Korea is Asia’s last remaining Cold War trip wire.

This is the country now ostensibly helmed by young Kim Jong Un, just 29 by most accounts, the grandson of Kim Il Sung, the founder of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the creator of its core ideology: juche, or self-reliance. In Korean, Kim Il Sung was called Suryong (Great Leader), a virtually godlike figure. When he died in 1994, his eldest son, Kim Jong Il, then 52, continued the dynasty. With Kim Jong Il’s death last December at age 69, it is Kim Jong Un’s turn.

He is in the world’s spotlight. When China’s Twitter equivalent, Weibo, lit up recently with unfounded rumors that Kim Jong Un had been assassinated, the posts went viral. On Feb. 13 came some real news about North Korea: the U.S. State Department announced that Washington and Pyongyang would resume face-to-face talks in Beijing on Feb. 23 in an attempt to get Pyongyang to rejoin the long-stalled six-party talks on disarming North Korea. (The other stakeholders are South Korea, Japan, China and Russia.) These talks no doubt were a prominent point of discussion during Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping’s recent visit to Washington. Resumption was in the air even before Kim Jong Il died, but the talks have taken on a different, greater significance, offering outsiders a tantalizing first view into the evolving power structures of North Korea under Kim Jong Un. Now Pyongyang says it first wants 300,000 tons of food aid–North Korea has been afflicted by serial famines–before proceeding. Yet in agreeing to the Beijing meeting so soon after the Dear Leader’s death, Pyongyang is signaling that Kim Jong Un will follow his father and carry out what North Korea experts in Seoul call the regime’s “dynastic policies.”

Whether and to what extent North Korea will change under Kim Jong Un is a matter of greatest consequence to the global balance of power. It’s not even clear if he is calling the shots in Pyongyang. And if he is, will–or can–he do what is needed: reform and open up the planet’s most hermetic society, detoxify it and usher it into the modern global community? The only sure thing for now is that Kim Jong Un is the least-known and understood leader ever of a nuclear-armed nation.

The Dear Hoopster

Kim Jong Un was Kim Jong Il’s third son, the second with a woman described as his consort. Ko Young Hui was an ethnic Korean born in Osaka, Japan, who died in 2004 of breast cancer. She and her family had returned to North Korea in the early ’60s, lured like many Korean residents of Japan then by propaganda that the DPRK was a workers’ paradise. Back then, Japanese-born Koreans were the lowest of the low in North Korea’s quasi-caste system–Kim Il Sung came to power fighting the Japanese, and Pyongyang demonizes Tokyo almost as much as it does Washington. But Ko, who became a dancer after attending a prestigious art school in Pyongyang, caught the eye of the Dear Leader. In 1981 she gave birth to a boy, Kim Jong Chul; Kim Jong Un was born two years later. In North Korea, Ko’s birthplace is a closely guarded secret, as is the fact that some of her kin–including a half brother–still live in Japan.

One of the few people outside North Korea with firsthand recollections of Kim Jong Un as a boy is Kenji Fujimoto, the pseudonym of a Japanese chef who served Kim Jong Il, cooking delicacies for the First Family even as much of North Korea starved. A sushi chef in Tokyo, Fujimoto moved to Pyongyang in 1982 to work for a joint-venture event and catering business so he could make more money. (He was paid $5,000 a month.) At a banquet, Kim Jong Il sampled Fujimoto’s sushi, liked it, hired him as his personal cook in 1988 and gifted him with a Mercedes-Benz. Fujimoto, who now lives in Nagano, Japan, has written four books on his life in North Korea, including the latest, Successor of the North: Kim Jong Un. He befriended Kim Jong Un one day by repairing the boy’s broken kite. Soon, Fujimoto would play with Kim Jong Un and his brother Kim Jong Chul almost daily. Despite having to wear a military uniform and salute his father, Kim Jong Un seemed, at least to Fujimoto, like a relatively normal kid. He enjoyed pickup basketball and, unlike Kim Jong Chul, didn’t shrink from being a team captain. He was very competitive, Fujimoto says, encouraging or scolding other players on his team. After a game during which he had screamed at his teammates for their poor play, Kim Jong Un told Fujimoto that perhaps he had been too harsh. The chef replied that he had to be, “otherwise they can’t improve.” Kim Jong Un “giggled” in response.

In the mid-1990s, like his older male siblings (including a half brother), Kim Jong Un moved to Switzerland. He stayed with a family assigned to the North Korean embassy in Bern and for the first two years of his life there studied German and English. In 1998, under the pseudonym Pak Un and the pretext of being the son of a diplomat, he enrolled in seventh grade at Schule Liebefeld-Steinhlzli, a public school in the suburb of Liebefeld–a sedate, leafy town of bland apartment blocks and colorful villas. One of the early mysteries surrounding Kim Jong Un is why he attended Liebefeld-Steinhlzli when his brothers had gone to the posh International School of Berne. A former East Asia intelligence officer who has long studied the Kims speculates that Kim Jong Il did not think his youngest son would be his heir. Thus the older boys went to the fancier establishment.

Despite the deception surrounding his true identity–Kim Jong Un once confided to a schoolmate who he really was, only to have the other laugh it off as a joke–the boy lived what his fellow students say was a normal life. He stayed in a nondescript apartment block about a 10-minute walk from school, and his love affair with basketball intensified. At a time when Michael Jordan was dominating the NBA, Kim became a big fan of the Chicago Bulls, says onetime classmate Joao Micaelo, now a chef in Vienna: “I think 80% of our time we were playing basketball.” Kim sometimes wore the jersey of Dennis Rodman, the flamboyant Bulls power forward known as much for his body piercing and tattoos as his rebounding. When they weren’t on the basketball court, Kim and his schoolmates played combat video games, watched Jackie Chan movies and occasionally did homework.

In 2000, just after he had started ninth grade, Kim left school “abruptly,” according to a local education administrator, Ueli Studer, and headed back home–something that “wasn’t unusual” for the children of embassy officials, Studer told Reuters in December. When Kim returned to Pyongyang, Fujimoto was still there; the Japanese chef would remain an unofficial guardian until the boy was 18, when Fujimoto returned to his homeland for good.

Kim’s interest in athletics was not limited to basketball: he had learned to Rollerblade and ride a Jet Ski. He wasn’t “great at studying,” Fujimoto says, “but he liked sports.” He had also acquired some other habits shared by privileged teenagers the world over. Just before he left North Korea, Fujimoto attended a party that Kim threw for his friends. Kim spent much of the evening drinking from a high-priced bottle of vodka. Knowing Fujimoto was about to return to Japan, as he often did to buy food unavailable in North Korea, Kim asked him, “You’re coming back, right?” He then riffled through a stack of old photographs and gave the chef a black-and-white picture of himself when he was 11 years old. Before the news of his ascension, it was the only picture of Kim the world had ever seen.

A Late Bloomer

For much of the next decade, Kim Jong Un’s life is even more of a blank, other than the fact that he attended the Kim Il Sung Military Academy in Pyongyang (senior-thesis topic: guidance systems for artillery). When Kim Jong Il suffered a stroke in 2008, few students of North Korea identified Kim Jong Un as a potential successor. By then, older brother Kim Jong Chul was most often cited as the likely heir, given that Kim Jong Nam, the eldest, had embarrassed himself in Tokyo seven years earlier: he and his family were detained for trying to get into Japan on fake passports, supposedly to visit Tokyo Disneyland. Since then, Kim Jong Nam has been under the “protection” of the Chinese leadership, Pyongyang’s chief patron, dividing his time between Beijing and the casinos of Macau.

The stroke that Kim Jong Il suffered concentrated the Dear Leader’s mind. A successor had to be named: someone from the family had to become the high priest of “Kim Il Sung–ism,” as Chun Young-woo, senior presidential secretary for foreign affairs and security in Seoul, calls the “theocracy” of North Korea. But his father viewed Kim Jong Chul as too reticent. In one of his books about North Korea, Fujimoto quotes the Dear Leader as saying that Kim Jong Chul “resembles a girl”–hardly an asset in male-dominated North Korea.

That left only one choice. As it happened, as he moved into his late 20s, Kim Jong Un developed a striking resemblance to his grandfather Kim Il Sung. Clearly not playing as much full-court hoops as he did when he was younger, Kim Jong Un now had the same fleshy face the Great Leader had. In a society mesmerized by personality cults, “that meant a lot,” says North Korean defector Lee Sung Bak, who was a government bureaucrat. On Sept. 27, 2010, Kim Jong Un at 27 was named a four-star general in the Korean People’s Army and appointed vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, making him second in command of the country’s most powerful institution.

With his father’s wishes made plain, there was never any doubt that Kim Jong Un’s ascension would be smooth. He is said to be close to Jang Sung Thaek, an influential figure married to Kim Jong Il’s younger sister, Kim Kyong Hui. They are widely believed to be acting as regent figures who will help Kim Jong Un carry out those dynastic policies–doing what Kim Jong Il had planned in the next few years. By the standards of North Korea, Jang is a fairly well-known quantity. He has traveled to China frequently and has also–unusually for top North Koreans–been to Seoul: in 2002 he led a delegation from Pyongyang to bolster economic ties between the North and South. South Korean officials who have met him view him as a safe pair of hands and, given his closeness to Kim Jong Il, the logical choice to be watching over Kim’s son. This, at least, is the conventional view of the succession that has taken place.

The Once and Future Kim

Today everyone in a position of power in North Korea is at least twice Kim Jong Un’s age and vastly more experienced. But they will nonetheless snap off salutes to him. Any deviation has meant at minimum a sentence in North Korea’s notorious gulag and at worst death. Consider one especially brutal case: in the mid-1990s, just as the famine that would eventually kill millions of North Koreans was taking hold, reports of grumbling and dissent in a prominent Korean People’s Army’s division reached Pyongyang. Kim Jong Il, according to an intelligence source, had the unit’s officer corps–several dozen men–arrested and then made the enlisted men watch what happened next. The arrested officers were forced to lie in the middle of a road, their hands and legs tied. Several tanks rumbled forward and ran back and forth over the officers, crushing them to death. This combination of ruthlessness, ideology and isolation leads many observers of North Korea to believe that “there is no question Kim Jong Un will be making the decisions now,” says a former intelligence analyst in East Asia.

He may make the decisions, but they will be based on information filtered through those around him, men who are not peers but elders. In addition to Jang, the inner circle includes Kang Suk Ju, the top foreign policy adviser who famously admitted to U.S. diplomats in 2002 that Pyongyang had a uranium-enrichment program to go along with its plutonium-based nuclear program. The key military official is Ri Yong Ho, chief of the general staff, who was directly across the hearse from Kim Jong Un during Kim Jong Il’s funeral procession through Pyongyang.

These men and other senior officials are deeply vested in the status quo and probably resistant to any change that would weaken their positions. Yet unlike in 1994, when Kim Jong Il came to power, many North Koreans now have some sense of the outside world. They haven’t been abroad, as Kim Jong Un has. But they watch TV shows and movies on DVDs smuggled from China–South Korean soap operas are particularly popular–and some access Chinese cell-phone networks near the border and chat with relatives who have fled the country. In short, they know life beyond their borders is vastly different–and better.

Pyongyang’s Bubble

Two issues are critical for North Korea. Will it liberalize its economy, as its chief patron China did more than 30 years ago, and finally allow its citizens to get at least a whiff of the prosperity that surrounds them in East Asia? And will it give up its pariah status as a rogue nuclear state–a choice the other six-party governments practically begged Kim Jong Il to make, to no avail, in return for economic and diplomatic blandishments to help reinvent the country? The time that young Kim Jong Un spent in Switzerland, dressing in Dennis Rodman jerseys, playing video games and befriending Westerners, prompts some to think the young man must know these decisions are no-brainers. He experienced the outside world and then witnessed the abject, criminal poverty of his own country. After all, didn’t Deng Xiaoping, the mastermind of China’s opening, spend time in France with Zhou Enlai when he was young?

If only it were that simple. The Kim dynasty and its personality cult obscure a grim, overarching reality: the smothering, vicious police state whose internal security apparatus employs no fewer than 300,000 people and exists only to maintain control over the population, no matter how destitute or restive. Kim Jong Il, it’s true, allowed small private markets to grow, but only because after the period of starvation in the 1990s, there was nowhere else to go. Bolder steps require less state control, and there is little evidence that the ruling Korean Workers’ Party and the State Security Ministry are willing to loosen the reins. North Korea is also a kleptocracy, with senior officials raking off millions from state-owned enterprises as well as from illicit trade in everything from weapons to pirated pharmaceuticals. Upsetting the economic status quo means very big toes get stepped on. Is 29-year-old Kim Jong Un going to go there? Does he have the smarts? Says chef Fujimoto: “I don’t want to use the word intelligent. He’s not [that] type.”

The other center of power is the military, in charge of the nuclear weapons that the leadership believes are the ultimate guarantor of its security. Perhaps that’s why Kim Jong Un has already been shown on local TV visiting troops around the country, displaying a populist touch–joking amiably with soldiers just a few years younger than he is. Kim Jong Il practiced what came to be called “military first” politics, putting its interests ahead of even the party’s. The son is doing the same.

Could Kim Jong Un cajole or even threaten the old guard into going along with policies that might benefit the benighted citizens of North Korea? A man who knew his father and who has dealt with the leadership in Pyongyang–and who shook Kim Jong Un’s hand at Kim Jong Il’s funeral–waves the question away. To ask it, he suggests, is to misunderstand the regime. The system needs the dynasty to persist because without it, the entire edifice of power in North Korea could collapse. In that sense, Kim Jong Un is a necessary front man. But the notion that he will pull all the policy strings, stay abreast of palace intrigues and tell senior cadres and military officers what to do is “a fantasy,” says the insider. “He’s just a boy. He is soft.”

NBA fan Kim Jong Un probably knows that in pro basketball, soft is the one thing you do not want to be. And his life now is no game.

TO SEE THE ICONOGRAPHY OF THE KIM DYNASTY, GO TO time.com/kimicons