What’s in Store for North Korea After Kim

This story has been updated

There are pictures released recently by the Korean Central News Agency, the propaganda arm of the North Korean government, that are meant to give the impression that Kim Jong Il is back running his benighted country after a stroke last summer. And then there are those shown here, of Kim at an indoor swimming pool. He looks old, frail and sick. The pictures, according to diplomats and intelligence analysts in East Asia and Washington, capture reality. Kim is 68, and though it is thought he has made a reasonable recovery, he has apparently not resumed all his duties as North Korea’s absolute ruler. That is focusing the minds of analysts on two related questions: Who will succeed Kim when he is gone? And how will North Korea behave?

We know how it’s behaving now: badly. Or, as a diplomat in Seoul puts it, throwing an “intercontinental ballistic hissy fit.” On April 5, the North made good on its plan to launch a Taepodong II rocket, an armament with a range of about 2,500 miles to 2,800 miles (4,000 km to 4,500 km), which would bring Hawaii within its reach. On March 31, Pyongyang announced that it will charge two young American journalists with “hostile acts,” claiming that they strayed into North Korean territory from northeastern China. And despite a worsening economy, the regime said it would toss out international-aid workers who were delivering desperately needed food rather than accede to demands from both the U.S. and South Korea that the government allow aid agencies to monitor where the food goes. (See pictures of Kim.)

But if outwardly it’s business as usual for North Korea, internally, things have changed. Analysts say Kim is being aided in running the country by his most trusted deputy, his brother-in-law Chang Sung Taek, the husband of Kim’s younger sister Kim Kyong Hui. Chang, 63, oversees North Korea’s State Security Agency, which includes the regime’s notoriously brutal secret police. That position alone, analysts say, makes it unthinkable that Chang is anything other than a hard-liner. He climbed the ranks of the ruling party much more quickly than most; more than a decade ago, he began to join Kim on visits to vital military units, where he established close ties to senior commanders. Soon, Kim was sending him on key trips abroad.

Chang, according to a source, is “intelligent and charismatic.” Earlier this decade, he started hosting social gatherings at his home, and the parties attracted a following among the North’s élite. In Kim’s eyes, they became too popular. In 2004, Chang was accused of “fostering factions” and placed under house arrest. “Kim became jealous,” says Yang Moo Jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul. But Kim remained close to his sister, and analysts believe that she played a critical role in getting her husband rehabilitated. In early 2006, Chang appeared at a New Year’s party alongside Kim, a signal that all had been forgiven.

If he is helping Kim run the North, Chang has his work cut out for him. Sources in Washington and Seoul acknowledge that there have been reports of discontent within North Korea’s military, despite the fact that Kim has bent over backward to keep the armed forces on his side. He has succeeded in securing loyalty from older, senior officers, intelligence analysts believe. But the economic crisis has put a serious crimp in the cash flows of illicit businesses run by North Korean military officers either directly or through cutouts. Trade with China has plummeted, in part because of the sharp drop in prices for commodities such as zinc and iron ore, which the North exports. That has “seriously cut the incomes of any number of military officials who benefit from that trade,” an East Asia intelligence source says.

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The decision to cut off U.S. food aid has angered some officers, sources say. A chunk of that aid was diverted by the military for sale in private markets, which have become increasingly important in feeding the population. So halting aid not only risks another humanitarian disaster in the North — Kim presided over a famine that killed nearly a million North Koreans in the 1990s — but also reduces corrupt officers’ incomes.

All this has once again raised the possibility of regime change in the North — perhaps by the kind of implosion seen in Eastern Europe nearly 20 years ago. It’s a beguiling prospect. But however much the world may want to see 23 million people released from the grip of a detestable regime, the possibility discomfits some South Koreans. Reeling from the global economic crisis, they aren’t sure they can afford sudden reunification. And it absolutely petrifies China, which likes having a buffer state not allied with the U.S. between itself and the South. (See pictures of Kim’s rise to power.)

Even if Kim dies tomorrow, what will come next in North Korea might not be radically different. “Do not conflate the end of the Kim regime with the end of North Korea as a state,” says Andrew Scobell, a political scientist from Texas A&M University, who wrote a paper for the Pentagon last year assessing the North’s future. Baek Seung Joo, who watches North Korea at the Korea Institute for Defense Analysis, says, “We have been through a transition before.” When Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il’s father, died suddenly in 1994, Kim Jong Il succeeded with little apparent problem. “Outsiders,” Baek says, “constantly underestimate the durability of this government.”

Durability is right. Kim had been in power only a few years when the famine struck, but it didn’t shake his grip. Ever since then, China has been pressuring him, unsuccessfully, to reform his economy. Kim has been able to resist such demands partly because North Korea is dynastic, with a cult of personality that is freakishly strong; there are no fewer than 30,000 statues and monuments to the Kim family throughout the country. Kim has three sons from which to choose a successor, and it’s now become something of a parlor game among analysts to select the front runner. At the moment, that seems to be Kim’s youngest son Kim Jong Un, 26, who bears a striking resemblance to his father and is said to be his favorite.

Jong Un’s mother Ko Young Hee, a former dancer, was Kim’s third wife. Analysts say that before she died of breast cancer in 2004, she pushed Kim to name one of their two sons as his successor. (Kim’s third son is by a different wife.) By 2007, Jong Un and his older brother Kim Jong Chul were enrolled in a program created specifically for them at Kim Il Sung Military University. Kim is said by his former sushi chef, Kenji Fujimoto, who wrote a memoir of his days in the North, to think that Jong Chul was “soft and effeminate.” But he adores Jong Un, who Fujimoto says has a hot temper, like his father. There are unconfirmed reports that earlier this year, Kim officially singled out Jong Un as his successor.

Intelligence sources concede they are in the dark about any relationship between Kim Jong Un and Chang. If Kim died suddenly, analysts think, Chang would become the de facto leader even if one of the sons was put forward as a front man to maintain the dynasty. That implies that in all likelihood, the post–Kim Jong Il era will look a lot like the present. The country’s unifying ideology, called juche, is usually translated as “self-reliance.” But as a Western diplomat in Seoul says, “it’s more like ‘up yours.’ ” No sign of that changing.

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