Who Is Kim Jong Il?

S E O U L, South Korea, Jan. 8, 2003 -- He may be the most reclusive, enigmatic, unpredictable dictator in the world today. But, just how much does the world really know about Kim Jong Il?

The most common images of North Korea's "Great General" show him looking down on Pyongyang's main square, saluting, as columns of soldiers and artillery parade through the capital of perhaps the world's most sealed-off society — a society dominated by Kim's bizarre personality cult. But there is more to the North Korean leader than this traditional Cold War snapshot.

It is difficult to separate fact from fiction when it comes to deconstructing Kim Jong Il — he presides over an impoverished, hermetic country where brainwashing, brutal repression and a fanatical military are very much a part of everyday life.

Kim and his government have little contact with the outside world, and few Westerners have visited Pyongyang. Much of the West knows Kim simply as the odd-looking dictator in the Mao suit who seems once again determined to turn his country into a nuclear power.

Kim is far more complex a character, however, than the eccentric front he reveals to West would indicate.

‘A Ruthless, Powerful Leader’

"He is a ruthless, powerful leader, who ultimately holds the destiny of North Korea, and by extension, how peace or war could come to the Korean Peninsula," said Lee Chung Min, an associate professor of international relations at Seoul's Yonsei University.

Lee and others who have studied and met the North Korean leader describe him as a cunning politician who has a clear strategy in place.

Even if he may appear at times to be acting irrationally, there is nearly always a method to Kim's madness, they say. Unpredictability, many believe, is North Korea's most potent weapon.

Donald Gregg, a former U.S. ambassador to South Korea and CIA station chief in Seoul, visited Pyongyang as recently as November and said he sees a rational motivation in Kim's decision to fire up North Korea's nuclear reactors.

"My thesis is that Kim Jong Il is trying to change," Gregg said. "I don't think we have yet to come to grips with the need on the part of the North Korean military to be given some sort of assurance that they can participate in this process of change without having us blow them out of the water when we get finished with Iraq."

Gregg theorized that the only way for North Korea to parry this perceived aggression from the United States is to talk tough. The decision to activate North Korea's reactors, in Kim's mind, may very well be a entirely rational — it may be the only way to deter the U.S. from striking out at its next "axis of evil" target.

Youthful Playboy

But Kim wasn't always perceived as the cunning, shrewd politician that many in the West know him to be today.

Kim grew up in the footsteps of his father, Kim Il Sung, who founded not only the communist state, but a powerful family mythology that permeates all corners of North Korean life. The younger Kim's birth was rumored to have been heralded by a bright star and double rainbows, and the child grew up in the lap of luxury, a crown prince of sorts in the world's most isolated state.

Sketchy intelligence reports over the years portrayed Kim as a cruel, vain playboy — a lover of fast cars, beautiful women, expensive brandy and the fantasy world of filmmaking. He has reportedly said that if he didn't become his nation's leader, he would have been a film producer.

Intelligence reports also claim that as Kim became more involved in his father's government, he became involved in foreign terrorist operations such as a bombing in Burma (also known as Myanmar) that killed several South Korean Cabinet members and the downing of a South Korean airliner in the 1980s.

Letting the Guard Down

Yet despite these reports of a checkered past and rumors of a brutal hand when it came to maintaining order in his own country, as North Korea began to collapse in the 1990s, a different Kim began to emerge.

At the urging of China, a traditional ally of North Korea, Kim began to slowly open up and he appeared to the outside world to be more confident, more rational, even if desperation was the driving force behind his coming-out.

Kim allowed foreign aid organizations to help feed his starving people, even if it meant that pictures and tales of North Korea's crippling famine would be transmitted around the world. He traveled abroad, taking a much-publicized train ride to Beijing to meet his counterpart and friend, Chinese leader Jiang Zemin. He even went so far as to hold a dramatic summit meeting with South Korean President Kim Dae-jung.

In 2000, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright became the highest-ranking American government official to visit North Korea, where Kim treated her to a spectacular pageant in Pyongyang's stadium. After the visit, Albright said she did not find Kim to be as weird as the rest of the world believed him to be.

"In having discussions with him [Kim], he is perfectly rational and he is isolated but not uninformed," Albright told ABCNEWS.

But Kim's apparent willingness to engage in dialogue with the outside world began to fade with the arrival of the new Bush administration and the president's now-infamous declaration that North Korea, Iran and Iraq make up an "axis of evil."

Confused by the sudden reversal in U.S. policy that accompanied the change in administrations, Kim retreated and chose to revert to his crazy, unpredictable persona again to ensure that he could fend off a potential U.S. attack, Gregg suggested.

"I think their military is frightened by us," Gregg said. "And we have not been able to give them the kind of reassurance that they got from the end of the Clinton administration, and I think that is what they are looking for."

If, in the end, Kim does extract such a promise from the United States, it may well reinforce a belief that his brinksmanship does work.

As he recently told a Russian diplomat, "I know I'm an object of criticism in the world, but if I am being talked about, I must be doing the right things."