North Korea is an enigmatic place with a virtually unknown leader, though tales often slip out of the tyrannical domination of the ruling Kim family. Through snippets of information leaked from the Hermit Kingdom as North Korea is commonly known , experts have gleaned a picture of the country, its society and its leader, year-old Kim Jong Un.
A new National Geographic documentary, "North Korea: Inside the Mind of a Dictator," examines the country and the people who live there and delves into the psychology of its young leader. The series is full of interviews with experts, childhood friends, escaped bodyguards and even former U.
Before you watch, here are some fundamental things to know about the country and its equally closed-off leader, courtesy of North Korea expert B. R Meyers and his book, "The Cleanest Race. Much to the chagrin of other communist countries, North Korea slowly developed its own kind of "socialist utopia," seen in the symbolism used by its ruling party. Where most communist countries use the hammer and sickle to symbolize the union of the peasantry and the working class, the Korean Workers Party integrates a Korean calligraphy brush, to incorporate Korean intelligentsia.
In traditional Leninism, intelligentsia were considered part of the bourgeoisie , and many found themselves jailed, deported or executed in other communist states. North Korea expert B. Meyers says Kim's official ideology, "Juche," reads like a college term paper, designed to fill a certain amount of space while ensuring no one actually reads it. The result, he says, is thick books with little substance. In short, the doctrine pushes for North Korea's total self-reliance and independence from the outside world.
Forget that the country was completely dependent on the Soviet Union for the first 50 years of its existence, Meyers says. North Korea isn't anywhere close to self-reliant. When news stories report that North Korea lives under "crippling sanctions," that's both true and misleading.
It's true that the country lives under sanctions that block everything from military equipment to coal. It can't even get foreign currency. To get around that, North Korea reportedly operates an underground crime syndicate. Mr Kim also sought to improve relations with Mr Trump, and in April , the two leaders held historic face-to-face talks in Singapore aimed at the denuclearisation of North Korea.
The following year, the two leaders, joined by South Korea's Moon Jae-in, participated in an impromptu - but largely symbolic - meeting at the demilitarised zone DMZ that separates North and South Korea. However, relations between the US and North Korea later deteriorated, with a second Trump-Kim summit in Hanoi in March ending abruptly without any deal. Talks stalled after the Trump administration refused to lift sanctions until Pyongyang fully abandoned its nuclear programme.
Then, in January , Mr Kim said he was ending the suspension of nuclear and long-range missile tests put in place during the US talks, and threatened that "the world will witness a new strategic weapon". In October that year, North Korea unveiled its biggest ICBM to date , and in January it showed off a new submarine-launched missile which it called "the world's most powerful weapon".
Domestically, Mr Kim's repeated replacement of defence ministers - there have been at least six men in the post since - has been seen by some analysts as an indication of his lack of confidence in the loyalty of the armed forces. The most high-profile indication of a possible power struggle within the North Korean elite came in December , when Kim Jong-un ordered the execution of his uncle Chang Song-thaek.
State media said he had been plotting a coup. Mr Kim is also widely believed to have ordered the murder of his exiled half-brother , Kim Jong-nam, in February at Kuala Lumpur International Airport. Not much was known of Mr Kim's personal life until television footage of an unidentified woman attending events with him surfaced.
Little is known of Ms Ri, but her stylish appearance led some analysts to suggest that she was from an upper-class family. Reports have suggested that Ms Ri may have been a singer who caught Mr Kim's attention during a performance. According to South Korean intelligence, the couple have three children. Mr Kim's sister, Kim Yo-jong, holds a senior post in the Workers' Party of Korea - and stole the limelight when she represented her brother at the Winter Olympics in the South.
It is not known whether his elder brother, Kim Jong-chol, holds an official role. In April , rumours about Kim Jong-un's health alleged he might have undergone a serious operation and there was uncertainty about his recovery. The reports were based on South Korean fringe publication Daily NK and seemed to be backed up by the fact that Mr Kim had missed the anniversary of his grandfather's birthday, the almost mythical founder of North Korea, Kim Il-sung.
Whether true or not, the intense speculation over the health of the obese year-old reveal a crucial weakness of the North Korean dynasty. The question of succession has the potential to bring the brutally enforced authoritarian structure to the brink of disintegration each time a leader passes away. Mr Kim's children are said to be too young to be even considered for succession. In the framework of North Korea's political mythology, power is legitimised by the Mount Paektu bloodline going back to Kim Il-sung.
The further removed from the country founder a new generation is, the higher the chance a power struggle between party, army and government could escalate. North Korea crisis in words. Meet North Korea's first family. Is Kim Jong-un getting a media makeover? North Korea formed a new spy agency called the Reconnaissance General Bureau in , just as Kim Jong-un was being groomed to succeed his father, who had suffered a stroke.
Chief of the bureau was Kim Yong-chol, who remains one of the North Korean leader's most trusted aides. The colonel said that in May , an order came down the chain of command to form a "terror task force" to kill a former North Korean official who had defected to the South.
I personally directed and carried out the work. Hwang Jang-yop was once one of the country's most powerful officials. He had been a key architect of North Korean policy. His defection to the South in had never been forgiven. Once in Seoul, he was extremely critical of the regime, and the Kim family wanted revenge. But the assassination attempt went wrong. Two North Korean army majors are still serving 10 year prison sentences in Seoul for the plot.
Pyongyang always denied it was involved and claimed South Korea had staged the attempt. There was more to come. A year later, in , a South Korean navy ship, the Cheonan, sank after being hit by a torpedo. Forty-six lives were lost. Pyongyang has always denied its involvement. Two soldiers and two civilians were killed. There has been much debate over who gave the order for that attack. Mr Kim said he was "not directly involved in the operations on the Cheonan or Yeonpyeong Island", but they "were not a secret to RGB officers, it was treated with pride, something to boast about".
And those operations would not have happened without orders from the top, he says. The sinking of the Cheonan and the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island are not a thing that could be carried out by subordinates. It's an achievement. Mr Kim says one of his responsibilities in the North was developing strategies to deal with South Korea. The aim was "political subordination". Many cases", he claims. He doesn't elaborate, but he does give us one intriguing example.
That was in the early s. I have met several convicted North Korean spies in South Korea, and, as NK News founder Chad O'Carroll notes in a recent article, South Korean prisons were once filled with dozens of North Korean spies arrested over the decades for various types of espionage work. A handful of incidents have continued to occur and at least one involved a spy sent directly from the North. But NK News data suggests that far fewer people have been arrested in South Korea for spy-related offences since , as the North turns to new technologies, rather than old fashioned spies, for intelligence gathering.
North Korea may be one of the world's poorest and most isolated countries, but previous high-profile defectors have warned that Pyongyang has created an army of 6, skilled hackers. According to Mr Kim, the previous North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, ordered the training of new personnel in the s "to prepare for cyberwarfare". British security officials believe that a North Korean unit known as the Lazarus Group was behind a cyber-attack that crippled parts of the NHS and other organisations around the world in The same group is believed to have targeted Sony Pictures in a high-profile hack in Mr Kim says the office was known as the Liaison Office.
He claims it had a direct telephone line to the North Korean leader. The office also safeguards communication between North Korean spy agents. Kim Jong-un has recently announced the country is once again facing a "crisis" and in April he called on his people to prepare for another "arduous march" - a phrase that has come to describe a disastrous famine in the s, under Kim Jong-il.
Back then, Mr Kim was in the Operations Department and was ordered to raise "revolutionary funds" for the Supreme Leader.
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