Korean culture and politics, as if Kim’s personality, perceptions, and preferences do not matter when we talk about how to solve the intractable nuclear problem.
I was at the forefront of shaping the understanding of the U.S. government and foreign partners on Korean Peninsula issues first at the Central Intelligence Agency and then as the deputy national intelligence officer for Korea at the National Intelligence Council. I led the U.S. intelligence community’s production of strategic analysis and represented our views on the Koreas in White House policy meetings. I also provided direct analytic support to the National Security Council and advised the director of national intelligence and his senior staff on key developments and emerging issues. My own evolution as an analyst coincided directly with Kim’s rise to power. I worked with talented colleagues whose dedication to the national security mission and analytic rigor inspire me to this day, and I owe them a debt of gratitude for teaching me how to write, think, rethink, and lead by example. This book is grounded in that accumulated knowledge about the development of North Korea under this new leader and how he became the Kim Jong Un of today. It tells the history of the regime, including its nuclear crises, through an accessible biographical lens and uncovers its leader’s aspirations, outlook, and sense of self, as well as his likely perception of North Korea’s place in the world. I conclude with recommendations on how the United States and the global community should approach the North Korea problem.
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As the snow fell and the mournful band music droned on, the young successor led the funeral procession to the Kumsusan Memorial Palace, where his father’s embalmed body would rest in perpetuity next to that of his grandfather. Kim’s sister, Kim Yo Jong, stood near him, her face wan and shoulders slumped in sadness.
Kim Jong Un had succeeded in his first task—organizing and presiding over a well-orchestrated funeral in the way that his father had for Kim Il Sung.
Then he got to work as North Korea’s new leader.
North Korea is what CIA analysts call “the hardest of the hard targets.” The nuclear-armed country is an enduring national security threat, but the regime’s opaqueness, self-imposed isolation, robust counterintelligence practices, and culture of fear and paranoia provide at best fragmentary information, impeding the agency’s ability to inform, predict, and warn with a high level of confidence. Some of the most mundane pieces of information, such as birthdays of key regime leaders or the Kim family’s whereabouts on any given day, are hard to verify or even obtain. Although North Korea has allowed foreign journalists into the country, their movements and reporting are tightly controlled and vetted. Kernels of what might have been truth are often buried under layers of regime mythmaking, rendering it indecipherable.
Hard target or not, this is our job at the CIA. Our mission is to warn policymakers about threats to our national security, highlight potential opportunities to advance U.S. interests, and sometimes “make the call”—give the president and other U.S. officials an answer stripped of nuance and caveat to assist them in making urgent decisions. We analyze a vast array of information, from classified to open source, incorporating our knowledge of the adversary’s history, culture, language, and past negotiations with the United States. In the career section of its website, the CIA specifies how intelligence analysts “must quickly sift through data that is often inconsistent and incomplete. This is like putting together the pieces of a puzzle received at different times, from different places, and with pieces of other puzzles mixed in.” Recruits must “connect the dots” because the country and the president rely on them to analyze the information and make objective assessments, many of which will have profound consequences for the direction of policy.
When it comes to North Korea analysis, it is especially difficult to fit the puzzle pieces together. You know what the completed picture should look like when you are working on a jigsaw puzzle. You can match colors and separate out the corners and the flat edges to build the outline. As the picture takes shape, it becomes progressively easier to finish the puzzle.
Connecting the dots seems simple enough. But how do you know which dots to connect and in what sequence? What do you do with a stray dot (or two or a dozen) that doesn’t fit the big picture but seems to be outlining a different shape? Kim Jong Un’s decision in early 2018 to meet