♪
[cheering]
POST: It's simply impossible to understand Kim Jong-Un and predict his actions without
putting that in the context of his father and grandfather.
NARRATOR: This is the story of three men, one family, the Kims.
Between them they have run North Korea for over seventy years,
creating their own mythical legend, a communist dynasty.
An entire nation lives under their control while they
hold the rest of the world to ransom.
TRUMP: Rocket man is on a suicide mission for himself.
NARRATOR: As Kim Jong-Un plays his game of nuclear poker,
he follows the lead of his grandfather,
Kim Il-Sung, and father, Kim Jong-Il.
KARTMAN: Kim Jong-Il was a playboy, he was sort of erratic.
Our problem was: can you trust this man?
NARRATOR: Surrounded by enemies, a cunning dictator who will stop
at nothing to stay in power.
JOHNSON: There's always some paranoia, there's always some plot going on.
NARRATOR: While his people starve, he reaches for the nuclear button,
creating a narco-state to fund his missile program and lavish lifestyle.
JOHNSON: You cannot survive and live there unless you're Kim Jong-Il.
NARRATOR: Seen through the eyes of the regime's friends and many enemies, the Kims,
one of the most notorious dynasties of modern times.
PERRY: They've been smart, and they've been ruthless, and they've been single minded
on their overarching goal, which is to preserve the Kim dynasty,
to keep the regime in power.
CHINOY: In 1988 South Korea had staged the Olympic Games and it was a huge triumph.
In 1989, North Korea staged its response.
This youth festival was a classic North Korean production, and it involved,
not only their own people, they had the supporting cast from all their comrades
in the Socialist bloc.
It was a way for them to try to boost the image of North Korea and
to show that they had friends all over the world.
So, you have this really weird dynamic of this moment of great Communist triumphalism
presided over by Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il,
when the edifice underneath was so weak,
that in a matter of months, it was all going to come crashing down.
REPORTER [over TV]: Tonight, East Germany simply threw open the gates of that country,
the gates which have been closed now for almost 30 years.
CHINOY: If you put yourself in the shoes of Kim Jong-Il in the early 90s,
you've got Erich Honecker from East Germany...
REPORTER [over TV]: It happened so suddenly, the wall finally opened.
CHINOY: Nicolae Ceausescu from Romania...
[speaking in Romanian].
And the Soviet Union.
[chanting in Russian]
CHINOY: These are all North Korea's friends, and they've all ended up in the dustbin of
history and this has to have generated considerable anxiety and unease about the ability
of North Korea to stay afloat.
I first went to North Korea in 1989, and that was the first of what eventually became
seventeen trips over almost 25 years.
The way to look at North Korea is like a fifteenth-century Korean kingdom,
in which you have the Emperor, who is the son of heaven and
the dynasty that springs from that.
NARRATOR: The grandfather of the dynasty, Kim Il-Sung, has been North Korea's
unchallenged ruler for the last four decades.
Now the end of the Cold War triggers the start of the handover of power to his
chosen successor, his son Kim Jong-Il.
CHINOY: The decision to put Kim Jong-Il at the head of the army immediately after the
fall of the Soviet Union, to give him operational control over the most important
institution in North Korea at a time when his father was almost 80,
was a way to let everybody know that Kim Jong-Il is the guy.
NARRATOR: Kim Jong-Il had spent years as 'crown prince', waiting to inherit the kingdom.
Now as power beckons,
he introduces himself to his people in an address lasting just five seconds.
[cheering].
NARRATOR: It is his only speech ever to be broadcast.
Now with the fall of the Soviet Union, and North Korea still officially at war with
the United States, it would be down to this reclusive and untried leader
to find a way to secure the future of his dynasty.
CHINOY: When you're inside North Korea it, it, it
is like going 'through the looking glass'.
They're the ones who feel scared, beleaguered, and threatened and under siege.
NARRATOR: Kim Jong-Il makes a fateful choice; the one thing that he knows will give his
enemies pause for thought, the one thing that could guarantee his regime's survival.
KARTMAN: We discovered through overhead photography,
that they were developing a complex at Yongbyon that seemed to
have no purpose other than the production of plutonium,
and the majority of the purpose of Yongbyon was to produce plutonium
for nuclear weapons.
REPORTER [over TV]: North Korea suddenly backed out of an agreement designed to limit
the spread of nuclear weapons and put its country off limits to international inspectors,
a lot of alarms as you can imagine, went off.
NARRATOR: To America, it looks like the actions of a war-hungry dictator,
but for Kim Jong-Il, there is a ruthless logic to his masterplan: no one was going
to threaten a North Korea in possession of nuclear weapons.
KARTMAN: They had gotten our attention with their nuclear program.
It was troubling because the more people studied the implications,
the more they became concerned.
NARRATOR: For America's newly elected president Bill Clinton,
it is now a priority to find out more about the man who might one day have his finger
on the nuclear trigger.
KARTMAN: Kim Jong-Il was still the great unknown, and what we did know of him
was not entirely savory.
It was taken as, as kind of a given that they were going to find ways to push us
into places we didn't want to go.
PERRY: Kim Jong-Il understood that their military could not stand up to the U.S. military,
and therefore they believed they had to have nuclear weapons.
It was clear to me that would be catastrophic.
We wanted to stop that from happening.
The question was: how to do that?
I was prepared, given the authorization from President Clinton,
to use conventional cruise missiles to destroy their nuclear facility.
That would have stopped the nuclear program cold.
CLINTON: We would quickly and overwhelmingly retaliate if they were to ever develop
and use nuclear weapons.
It would mean the end of their country as they know it.
They know that that is what we are bound to do.
REPORTER [over TV]: Along the coast of South Korea this war game Team Spirit has become
an annual irritant across the DMZ in North Korea.
PERRY: I believed, and President Clinton believed, that the North Koreans would
probably respond with a military attack on South Korea.
We were considering the possibility of hundreds of thousands of casualties.
NARRATOR: North Korea reacts to the American threat by massing its vast army
on the border with the south.
KARTMAN: Kim Jong-Il had moved tens of thousands of long range artillery pieces up to
cover the whole area including Seoul, 30 miles from the DMZ.
And so, there was a never-ending tension.
NARRATOR: The prospect of a new Korean War edges ever closer.
NARRATOR: In the South Korean capital, Seoul, the city braces itself for an imminent
attack by the north, as the United States moves closer to a surgical strike on
Kim Jong-Il's nuclear complex.
Kim Jong-Il had played the nuclear card and taken North Korea to the brink of
a new war with America.
But now his father Kim Il-Sung, still officially North Korea's supreme leader,
is forced to step in and take control of the crisis.
PERRY: Kim Il-Sung believed he had overplayed his hand.
He did not want a war with the United States.
So he invited former President Carter to the North.
NARRATOR: The communist guerilla who had started the Korean War,
and called for the American imperialists to be crushed, had turned elder statesman
and was about to talk peace with the old enemy.
-Good morning.
-Welcome to our country.
CARTER: I'm delighted to be here sir.
CARTER: This is my wife Rosalynn.
CHINOY: There was a kind of 'wow, this is a major historical moment.'
[speaking in Korean].
-What is important between us is trust, confidence in each other,
that is the most important point.
NARRATOR: Carter brokers a deal in return for American aid,
North Korea promises to suspend its nuclear program.
-If we meet again, then next time we'll become old friends already.
NARRATOR: But for North Korea the real prize is the promise of a
political and economic relationship with the world's only remaining superpower.
The Kims' aggressive strategy had paid off.
CHINOY: Kim was very affable.
His interpersonal dynamic with Carter was quite warm and friendly.
And so Carter was able to shift the climate away from
confrontation towards negotiation.
The tension that had hung over the Korean peninsula slowly seemed to be lifting
and then, suddenly, out of the blue, you had this terrible shock.
BUERK [over TV]: Kim Il-Sung of North Korea has died of a heart attack.
He was 82.
His extravagant personality cult referred to him as 'the Great Leader'.
There's reported to be a frenzy of mourning tonight in the capital, Pyongyang.
REPORTER [over TV]: With the death of Kim Il-Sung of North Korea,
the world's shrinking circle of socialist leaders lost its longest reigning member.
He was in control of North Korea from before the Korean War,
which he started in 1950,
up through his meeting with former President Jimmy Carter that occurred
just a couple of weeks ago.
KARTMAN: The death of Kim Il-Sung was a shock and certainly there
was some concern;
the known quantity is about to be replaced by the unknown quantity.
CHINOY: The outside world had seen Kim Jong-Il as the kind of 'spoiled brat son of
the all-powerful dictator', surrounded by all of these rumors of how strange he was.
While he had been groomed to succeed him, Kim Jong-Il was deeply,
deeply distressed by his father's death.
North Korea's allies had all disappeared.
Partly because of that their economic system was kind of seizing up and so from the
outside, the big question was: how long would he last?
REPORTER [over TV]: An erratic regime with an untested leader is on the brink
of mass starvation.
Only a handful of outsiders have gotten close enough to even guess about the
scope of the disaster.
Two years of floods have been followed by a summer of drought.
According to one estimate, fully 5 million people face possible starvation.
NARRATOR: Without North Korea's communist allies to bail him out,
this is a crisis Kim Jong-Il will have to face alone.
REPORTER [over TV]: People are surviving on only about 12 spoons of food a day,
and that is being supplemented in some cases by handpicked grass.
It's clearly a very desperate situation.
CHINOY: Those were three exceptionally challenging years in North Korea.
The public distribution system, which is how most North Koreans got their food,
basically collapsed.
The damage was cataclysmic.
NARRATOR: More than half a million people are believed to have died during the famine.
CHINOY: What was interesting was that in spite of the intense human suffering,
the political system remained intact.
ROBERTS [over TV]: Children have skin diseases, a kind of scurvy brought about by
malnutrition and vitamin deficiency.
But all of them, including this little girl with jaundice,
have had their cheeks rouged to make them look healthier to outsiders.
CHINOY: Putting resources into ensuring regime survival takes priority over putting
resources into feeding the people, simple as that.
CHINOY: By the late 90s, Kim Jong-Il had this daunting challenge of keeping the
dynasty intact and keeping the system afloat at an exceptionally challenging time.
So you had an all-pervasive security apparatus that would quash any political dissent.
YI: Testing testing...
NARRATOR: The regime keeps an iron grip over its people.
There are numerous prison camps within North Korea.
The prisoners are kept in brutal conditions.
And in addition, some executions are carried out in full public view.
NARRATOR: The famine had pushed North Korea to the edge.
But Kim Jong-Il is determined to survive come what may, and wants the world to know it.
REPORTER [over TV]: In Kim Il-Sung Square, a signal to the United States and the rest
of the world that North Korea, for all its troubles, is still a power to be reckoned with.
JOHNSON: You know, the Arduous March, as the famine was known in North Korea,
was really devastating.
But Kim Jong-Il only knew one lifestyle.
He didn't know a night without his cognac, without his caviar, without his sushi.
We never saw him get thin.
NARRATOR: Very few outsiders ever came close to the Kims' secret inner circle.
But one man did gain the trust of Kim Jong-Il.
JOHNSON: Kenji Fujimoto is a man from Japan who became the chef of Kim Jong-Il,
the Dear Leader.
NARRATOR: He spoke at length to an American writer about his experiences,
before returning to North Korea,
where he now lives.
JOHNSON: Sakudaira, uh December 9, with uh Fujimoto-san.
JOHNSON: You know, he told me that he would oversee the perfect serving of the
evening's meals; and then once that was all finished he would then come and join in the
drinking, often late, and Kim Jong-Il would love to make him drink extra
to catch up.
So, he basically just rolled with Kim Jong-Il's posse.
-Cognac. -Cognac.
JOHNSON: Fujimoto would talk about the endless parties,
but these parties were life and death.
At these parties Kim Jong-Il would spontaneously marry people,
he would divorce people.
He would make women box one another.
There were stories of sexual acts.
There's a story that's confirmed about one person having to shoot another person
at a party.
Quickly Fujimoto-san became the person to procure the elite goods
that Kim Jong-Il favored.
He would get his shopping list and he would take the jet.
MAN [over radio]: X-Ray One radio check, check one two.
JOHNSON: He would go to Iran for caviar, he would go to Prague for beer,
he would go to Denmark for pork.
Kim Jong-Il would get burger urges and there was a McDonald's in Beijing and,
and the jet would be fired up for midnight runs to get Big Macs.
Long trips to France to get cognac.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, so they obviously knew this
was their single greatest customer on Earth.
And of course, Japan, to the Tsukiji fish market, for his sushi.
NARRATOR: Kim Jong-Il's wives and mistresses give him at least five known children,
one of whom is destined to become the dynasty's next leader, Kim Jong-Un.
JOHNSON: Kim Jong-Il's children were precious commodities.
They had nannies, uh they were in protected places.
From an early age, Fujimoto-san said Kim Jong-Un was aggressive,
there was fire in his eyes, he was competitive and that everyone called him
'the little tiger'.
There was a time in which Fujimoto-san notices that Kim Jong-Un
and his older brother are attempting to make a kite work.
And the kite won't fly.
And there are lots of executives standing around men in suits.
None of them will help the boys with the kite.
They go to assist the boys, they might be insinuating incompetence in the boys.
An action like that could put you under great scrutiny.
Fujimoto-san told me he comes out and he knows what's wrong with the kite
there's no tail on it.
So he puts the tail on the kite and then the kite flies.
When Kim Jong-Il comes back and sees the kite flying, sees his boys happy,
that has a great impression upon him.
And one day Kim Jong-Il came to Fujimoto-san, he said, 'I've fired the nannies and
you're going to be their playmate.'
NARRATOR: North Korea's human and economic ruin leaves Kim Jong-Il desperate for
hard currency to prop up his ailing dynasty, and he will stop at nothing to get it.
HAMER: The FBI was aware that somebody was counterfeiting
our $100 bill.
So I put the word out that I was looking for good quality counterfeit money.
I spent 26 years in the FBI.
I've successfully posed as a contract killer, as a white-collar criminal,
as a pedophile, as an international arms dealer.
It was a pretty exciting rollercoaster career.
HAMER: This was my first meeting with Wilson Liu.
It was in a hotel room, he was telling me that he was responsible for bringing in
near perfect $100 bills to the United States.
And I explained that I could get their container through the port.
HAMER: It was 35 cents on a dollar, so it was $350,000 for a $1 million purchase.
-And dirty, I hate it.
HAMER: You just don't buy a printing press off of Craigslist.
We're talking about the same presses that are used by our Bureau of Engraving and Printing
we're talking about specialized paper.
So, all of this has to be acquired with the approval
of the highest levels of government.
And Wilson Liu in conversation said that these were the North Korean manufactured super
notes or counterfeit hundred-dollar bills.
We were told that it would be coming in a 20-foot container;
the money would be stored in rolls of fabric.
We keep rolling and rolling and all of a sudden, I feel lumps in the fabric.
And this money, the counterfeit currency, the super note, is all there.
NARRATOR: North Korea also launders the super note via sealed diplomatic bags,
using Asian-organized crime syndicates, as well as the banks and casinos of Macau.
But that's just one part of a vast criminal operation centered on Pyongyang and
spanning the entire globe.
CHINOY: The North Koreans got involved in all kinds of dodgy international dealings.
They were selling all kinds of stuff because they desperately needed foreign currency.
NARRATOR: North Korea also traffics narcotics.
Methamphetamine and heroin have been seized,
as far as Germany, Russia, and Australia.
All the money is channeled back into a secret fund controlled by Kim Jong-Il,
to help pay for the one thing he hopes will guarantee his regime's survival.
REPORTER [over TV]: The Pentagon calls the firing of a ballistic missile
by North Korea a quote "serious development."
CHINOY: The missile test was I think in part a signal to the United States
that if you're going to not come through on your side then we can continue
to do things that you don't like.
Just because North Korea has problems, don't anybody rush to conclude it's a weak state
that you can push around.
You have this sort of duality in North Korean behavior which alternates between very
provocative military measures and then steps that the North Koreans take to indicate
they're not so scary and that you can deal with them.
REPORTER [over TV]: A historic turning point on the Korean peninsula.
The leaders of North and South Korea in Pyongyang, pledging to bring the 'Cold War'
in this volatile corner of Asia to an end.
REPORTER [over TV]: The North Korean leader sought to project a new image,
and even joked about his eccentric reputation overseas.
[laughter].
CHINOY: This is a guy who before this time had almost never been heard to speak in public.
And now he was both speaking and even making self-deprecating jokes.
So it suggests that this is an act in a sense;
they could turn it on they could turn it off as and when they see fit.
NARRATOR: Kim Jong-Il's strategy of engaging America works.
In October 2000, Madeleine Albright arrives in Pyongyang to prepare the ground for a
possible historic summit between Kim Jong-Il and President Clinton.
The US hopes it will lead to North Korea finally abandoning its missile program.
REPORTER [over TV]: Secretary of State Madeleine Albright is making history today,
closing a diplomatic gap created by the Cold War.
She's in North Korea for unprecedented talks with its leader.
KARTMAN: Madeleine Albright had gone there to take the measure of the man.
Who is Kim Jong-Il and is he somebody that we can reliably
have our President sit down with?
Her very visit itself was an important step towards the kind of normalization
that the North Koreans seemed to want.
-Uh, this has been a pleasant time, yes?
ALBRIGHT: I did. I danced today.
REPORTER [over TV]: Kim Jong-Il brought Albright to an elaborate performance in a
stadium in Pyongyang to honor him and his Workers' Party.
KARTMAN: And then there's the cards and all of that and one of the cards had a missile
being shot up and Kim Jong-Il turns to Madeleine Albright and said,
'Well this is, can be the last one.' And, 'Yeah, I hope so.
NARRATOR: But as time runs out on the Clinton presidency,
the hoped-for peace summit between the two countries never happens.
Neither side will ever know what could have been.
[screaming].
-Oh my god. Oh my god.
NARRATOR: With President Bush in the white house, 9/11 triggers a cascade of events
with consequences for the entire globe.
BUSH: As we gather tonight, our nation is at war and the civilized world faces
unprecedented dangers.
North Korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction,
while starving its citizens.
States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil.
CHINOY: Bush put North Korea into the axis of evil, along with Iran and Iraq,
in his famous State of the Union address.
So, I think the North Koreans were not at all confident about the prospects
for dealing with the United States.
REPORTER [over TV]: Tonight, the world's attention is absolutely fixed on Iraq.
REPORTER [over TV]: The US gave the regime its first taste of a strategy called
'shock and awe'.
CHINOY: The invasion of Iraq would have been a very
unsettling development for North Korea.
Saddam Hussein didn't have nuclear weapons; look what happened to him.
We are not going to let that happen to Kim Jong-Il.
[speaking in Korean].
[explosion]
REPORTER [over TV]: Until this morning, around the world, eight countries were known to
have nuclear weapons.
Now we must add North Korea to that list.
CHINOY: Once that test had taken place, everything changed.
You can't ever go back, you've done it.
They'd shown the U.S.: you can't intimidate us.
The stakes became much higher, the situation became much more dangerous.
North Korea had a bomb.
GIL-YON: I'm very much proud of our scientists and the researchers who have conducted
such a very very successful nuclear underground test.
REPORTER: Will there be any more?
GIL-YON: That will be enough, you don't think so?
CHINOY: A lot of these key turning points there's a give and take.
It's not Kim Jong-Il rolling out of bed after a night swigging Cognac with his pals
saying, "Oh, let's just stage a nuclear test today."
Even though that's the comic strip caricature that a lot of people have.
PERRY: They've been smart, and they've been ruthless and they've been single-minded on
their overarching goal, which is to preserve the Kim dynasty,
to keep the regime in power.
REPORTER [over TV]: The health news is not good for North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il.
The ailing Communist leader suffered a serious setback and has been hospitalized.
LEE: He appeared looking very gaunt, he had suffered a stroke,
he had a pronounced limp, it was clear that he wasn't well.
And so that's when we started to see the signs that a succession campaign was underway.
NARRATOR: The dynasty that had ruled North Korea for over 60 years was about
to introduce a third generation to the people.
On the balcony overlooking Kim Il-Sung square, the chosen son, Kim Jong-Un.
LEE: It's been clear watching Kim Jong-Un that he is a young man who has known for a long
time that he had a very specific role to play.
JOHNSON: Fujimoto-san told me, DVD nights were a big thing.
At this particular night um Kim Jong-Un is there, and he's 11,
and they watch a movie called In The Line of Fire, starring Clint Eastwood.
There's a scene where there are four Secret Service members and they're all
walking with their hands on the body of the limousine.
Kim Jong-Il says, 'Stop, this is how you must protect me, you must have my hands here,
this is how I want to be protected.'
REPORTER [over TV]: North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il is dead.
Kim suffered a heart attack due to the quote 'great mental and physical strain caused by
his uninterrupted building of a thriving nation.'
♪
JOHNSON: When we saw the footage of Kim Jong-Il's funeral procession
down those cold snowy streets of Pyongyang,
well there was the coffin on the top of the limousine exactly as portrayed in
The Line of Fire
with Kim Jong-Un with his hand in the position that
Clint Eastwood was walking in.
You're talking about three generations of omnipotent powerful people.
♪
Captioned by Cotter Captioning Services.