Haggard and Noland. Meanwhile, as his people were starving, Kim chose to purchase luxury items for himself and loyalists and funnel the regime’s funds toward ballistic missile development and other big-ticket military hardware, highlighting that his ultimate priority was his own survival and the perpetuation of North Korea as a garrison state.
Internally, the regime blamed others for the people’s suffering. One defector told Fahy, “This is what they taught the people: …‘America, the international community, and the puppet South Korea are ceaselessly preparing for war. We have to tighten our belts to build up the national defense, to build up the economy.’…And for that, the citizens suffered through hell, not anticipating the rain and snow storms that came and destroyed the farms. ‘Let’s tighten our belts and forward march!’ That is the way they propagandized it.”
When the worst of the famine struck the population, leading to understandable crimes such as stealing grain or corn from a field, the regime sought to punish rather than help. Sandra Fahy’s interviewees recounted public executions for these desperate acts of survival. Dozens of witnesses told her that these criminals had their heads completely shot off, “the hot blood” creating a mist as it rose into the cold winter air. When asked why the head was targeted, the defectors told her that “it was because the criminal’s thinking was wrong: the criminal was thinking like a capitalist.”
During the 1990s, the stories of suffering continued to leak out, as defectors provided accounts of the horrible toll the famine took on the country. Corpses piled up near train stations; roving bands of starving orphans stole what they could or collapsed when they couldn’t find anything; women turned to prostitution in an attempt to survive and feed their families. People of all ages, including children, foraged in the woods to find roots, mushrooms, and other wild plants, often with tragic consequences when they would unwittingly eat poisonous varieties. One defector recalled that the hungry died on the streets and corpses were left out in the open. Another said, “The sound of the children crying out for something to eat in the evening, they were like frogs croaking, crying.” A woman who defected described taking a train in 1997 and realizing that a fellow passenger was dead; she said that she and the other people on board were “blasé” about the corpse, suggesting how famine deaths became just a part of people’s daily lives. People ate garbage, rats, frogs.
For Kim Jong Il, who took over the country just as the worst effects were being felt, the timing of the famine could not have been worse. For many North Koreans, the disaster defined the transition from his father’s rule to his, exacerbating the challenges that he faced as the new leader without the guerrilla background to burnish his credentials. The timing of Kim Il Sung’s death, Fahy wrote, “marked a distinct before-and-after for many North Koreans, who consequently placed recollections of pre-1994 as ‘not that bad,’ ” while the Kim Jong Il years were seen as starting the downturn in the economy and food security.
The intelligence community was aware of the internal and external stresses on the new leader, issuing warnings about the potential for a North Korean collapse. Senior U.S. officials were openly predicting that his regime would fail. In 1996, CIA director John Deutch, in his testimony to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, expressed his concern about such a possibility in the near term because of the “incredible economic problems that the country faces.” And earlier that year, General John Shalikashvili, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told The Washington Post, “We are now in a period where most who watch the area would say it’s either going to implode or explode—we’re just not quite sure when that is going to happen.” In 1998, a group of CIA analysts and outside experts convened by the agency assessed that the Kim Jong Il regime could not “remain viable in the long term,” the majority doubting that “the current, deteriorating status could persist beyond five years.”
KIM JONG UN RETURNS HOME
Kim Jong Un was most likely unaware of all the challenges his father faced or his country’s tenuous circumstances, given his youth and his years abroad; he returned to Pyongyang in 2001. It must have been jarring to finally move back to Pyongyang after living in a small, multinational town in Switzerland and jet-setting from the Alps to the Riviera. While he was a small fish in a