Art Of The Deal

For years, he’s been seen as a naïf or a MADMAN. But what if KIM JONG UN is the smartest guy in the room?

- Bill Powell

IN EARLY 2012, A FEW MONTHS AFTER NORTH KOREAN leader Kim Jong Il was buried in an elaborate state funeral, I found myself in the Pyongyang office of a man named James Kim. He’s an evangelical Christian, a veteran of the Korean War and a former political prisoner in North Korea. He is also the founder of the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, which is how he met Kim Jong Il. As we spoke, James talked about attending the funeral and how he encountered the Dear Leader’s son, a portly 29-year-old named Kim Jong Un.

Back then, the conventional view was that the young Kim was too inexperienced to maintain a tight grip on power like his father and grandfather before him. He’d attended junior high school in Switzerland, loved to play basketball and was a huge fan of Michael Jordan—strands of normality that some latched on to, perhaps hoping this Kim would be different. Could he possibly open up the economy and give his people a whiff of the prosperity their neighbors enjoyed? Could he persuade his generals to slow their relentless race to a nuclear bomb, which so alarmed the outside world?

Sitting in his office on the university campus, James thought this notion was naïve. The young leader would nominally be in charge, if only to keep the Kim dynasty intact. But others would really be running the country, starting with Kim’s uncle Jang Song Thaek, a powerful official close to the Chinese. As for Kim, James said, he “is just a boy. He’s soft.”

James knew the Kim family well, but he was wrong about the young leader. We all were. Kim quickly assumed control of North Korea, ramped up its nuclear weapons program and dispatched his perceived enemies, from Jang (shot by firing squad in 2013) to his half-brother, killed with a VX nerve agent in Kuala Lumpur in 2017. Suddenly, Western observers who once considered Kim a naïf now saw him as a madman.