Double the Kims, Double the Trouble

Dozens of people have portrayed North Korea’s Dear Leader Kim Jong-il on South Korean television comedy shows. His once-chubby appearance, platform heels and bouffant hairstyle provide great material. Now North Korean refugees are telling contacts in South Korea that Kim Jong-il has not one but several look-alikes playing the role for him in North Korea, and they’re not doing it for laughs. It’s not clear, however, if any of the doubles is playing the Dear One in face-to-face meetings with foreign visitors.

Still, it would seem logical that Kim Jong-il had one or more stand-ins, as did the Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein in his final years in power before the American invasion in early 2003. No way could Kim have time for all those trips to farms and factories and military units while his health remains uncertain and he’s preparing his youngest son, Kim Jong-eun, to take over de facto power as early as next year.

North Korean defectors have been spreading stories that support the view that Kim Jong-il indeed has a double. “A North Korean defector was talking to me about the same thing,” says Ha Tae Kyung, whose “Open Radio for North Korea” broadcasts short-wave news and views for two hours a day into the North. “He said he knows a girl whose father is the actor for Kim Jong-il.”  More than one actor, though, has got to be playing the role, portraying Kim Jong-il when he was fat and healthy – and then sick and underweight when he appeared on North Korean TV last April for the first time since suffering a stroke in August of last year. “Recently Kim Jong-il is losing his hair,” says Ha. “He’s very skinny these days. Most of the pictures put out by North Korean authorities are not the real Kim Jong-il.”

The sense among analysts is that Kim Jong-il has to be preoccupied with arranging his succession. Third son Jong-un still seems to be the front-runner even though he’s not getting a lot of publicity these days. As long as the father survives, the Dear Leader’s brother-in-law, Jang Song-Taek, is believed to wield the most power, says Ryoo Kihl-jae at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul, “but his authority stems from Kim Jong-il” and two or three generals are vying for control.”

Whenever the Dear Leader passes away, the generals are likely to want to grab real power behind the figurehead of the son. All of which lends credibility to the view that Kim Jong-il does have doubles – but that he can speak and act for himself when it comes to dealing with his own underlings as well as foreign visitors.

The next chance for close-up scrutiny may come if Kim Jong-il accepts an invitation from China’s President Hu Jintao to come to Beijing. It may be unimaginable for a double to replace him on such a journey, but the trip should provide a chance to pick up some DNA evidence. That’s just in case a few drops of sweat and saliva are needed to determine who’s really who as the Dear One clings to life while transferring power to his son and hanging on until what may be his last big blast, ceremonies in 2012 marking the 100^th anniversary of the birth of his father, the late Great Leader Kim Il Sung, who died in 1994 but still reigns as “eternal president.”

But is Kim Jong-il really still alive? The Japanese writer Toshimitsu Shigemura has written two books and numerous articles claiming that Kim Jong-il has been seriously ill for the past decade. He may have died, according to Shigemura, who spent 30 years as a correspondent for Mainichi Shimbun, a leading Japanese newspaper, including lengthy tours in Seoul and Washington. Even if Kim is alive, says Shigemura, you cannot say he’s on his last legs. Rather, Shigemura insists, he’s not on his legs at all but bed-ridden, unable to walk at all -- that is, if he has not already joined his father in the pantheon of deceased Great Leaders It was after the June 2000 summit with the late Kim Dae-jung, the former South Korean president who died in August, that Shigemura says Kim Jong-il “was bedridden with diabetes,” a disease that in its later stages is sometimes controlled only by amputation of one or both legs.

Shigemura cites the names of three Japanese who claim to have met the Dear Leader’s look-alikes. One visitor believed he was meeting Kim Jong-il, Shigemura says, until the man said frankly, “I am a double.” The most convincing evidence, in Shigemura’s view, is the testimony of a Japanese magician named Princess Tenko, whom Shigemura says Kim Jong-il met in the 1990s in a fancy nightclub in Tokyo’s swank Akasaka district. Princess Tenko told Shigemura that she had called on Kim two or three times in Pyongyang. “Kim Jong-Il appeared on a wheel chair,” Shigemura said in a recent lecture in Portland, Oregon. The attentive magician asked a son and daughter of the Dear Leader – it’s not clear who -- to call her when he appeared near death, as Shigemura told the story, “and they called her cellular phone at the beginning of 2003.”

And if that really was the real Kim Jong-il, wan and weak as he sat down on the dais before his Supreme People’s Assembly several days after North Korea fired a long-range Taepodong-2 missile on April 5, says Shigemura, it was an altogether different Dear Leader who hosted the former U.S. president, Bill Clinton, in early August. Clinton spent three hours and 17 minutes in the company of the alleged Kim Jong-il before returning to California in a private jet with two TV women who’d been held in North Korea for 140 days after North Korean soldiers grabbed them as they were filming along the Tumen River border with China for Al Gore’s Current TV network.

Or was that an actor mouthing well-rehearsed lines? Yes indeed, Shigemura assures me, and he’s equally convinced that an actor played Kim Jong-il in October while hosting China’s Premier Wen Jiabao. The same actor who played Kim Jong-il for Clinton’s benefit, Shigemura believes, greeted Premier Wen when he arrived in Pyongyang in early October, two months after Clinton’s visit, and then bade Wen farewell in an elaborate airport ceremony. Nothing short of the most sophisticated equipment is going to provide the answer, is this Kim Jong-il or is he not Kim Jong-il?

The question is like asking, Is God Dead -- God, that is, in the person of the Kim Jong-il, who together with his father, the Great Leader, assumes god-like stature in North Korea in a holy trinity that also includes the Dear Leader’s sainted mother, Kim Jung Sook. Somehow the world has got to know. Until we get the definitive answer, the debate is sure to rage. But how will anyone be able to prove or disprove Shigemura’s claims? The next time some big-time foreign visitor calls on Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang, the people with him should bring not only little gizmos for picking up traces of DNA but also carry tiny thumb-nail-sized cameras and recorders tucked away in their coat lapels and tie clips.

Intriguing though Shigemura’s theories may sound, however, they’re not universally accepted. Self-respecting Korean experts shy away from guesses that may seem too speculative. Ryoo Kihl-jae says the claim that actors are posing as Kim Jong-il is “a famous argument,” but “I do not have any trust in such findings.” For now, says Ryoo, Kim Kong-il is “living well” and a lot of those reports of a double standing in for him are “just imagination.”

The wave of public appearances reported by the North Korean propaganda machine to show he’s in good health convinces others that North Korean actors are portraying him far more regularly than before his stroke. Shigemura, now a professor of international relations at prestigious Waseda University in Tokyo, is undeterred by questions from skeptics who suggest that perhaps his evidence about Princess Tenko and other visitors is a little outdated.

Has Kim Jong-il not proven his existence by hosting Bill Clinton, I ask. And how about  his subsequent meetings with the chairwoman of Hyundai Asan, Hyun Jeong-eun, the company responsible for developing both the Kaesong Industrial Complex and the Kumkang tourist zone inside North Korea.? Most convincingly, how could anyone doubt his authenticity after those sessions with China’s Premier Wen?

Shigemura laughs politely at the notion that anyone should accept what he clearly views as scams. “The Kim Jong-il who saw President Clinton is totally different,” he observes. “He looked very healthy” – in contrast to the sickly looking one who appeared four months earlier before the Supreme People’s Assembly. A skilled actor, Shigemura believes, could easily have rehearsed what to say and gotten off all the right lines for the benefit of Clinton and the impressionable aides and advisers who accompanied him. But could Ms. Hyun of Hyundai Asan as well as Premier Wen, both of whom had met him before, be so easily fooled? Certainly, says Shigemura, especially since the Kim Jong-il they had met previously may well have been the same actor.

There seems to be little question that Kim Jong-il does have a double, or maybe a few of them, to cover for him on all those trips he makes to farms and factories, army bases and art exhibits. How else could one man, an ailing one at that, really have gone on more than 120 such excursions reported so far this year? Kim Jong-il started going on all those trip when he resurfaced several months after his stroke. The real question everyone was asking initially was whether North Korean photo editors had doctored the photographs, showing earlier pictures of Kim Jong-il, or whether he had a double sitting in for him. The best guess is that some photographs were doctored and in others showed a look-alike. And in some cases, the doctored photographs may have been photographs of the look-alike.

Shigemura believes careful study of the photographs alone leaves no doubt of his thesis, and the fact that dictators everywhere seem to like to have doubles for protection against assassination adds weight to this view. “These dictators always need look-alikes for security reasons,” says Choi Jin Wook, senior North Korean specialist at the Korean Institute of National Unification. In any case, he observes, “Kim Jong-il has been doing on-the-spot guidance too often for his health.” Kim Tae Woo at the Korean Institute for Defense Analyses takes a measured view. “There have been such rumors,” he says. “We don’t know whether this is real or fake.” As an obvious precedent, he goes along with the example of the late Saddam Hussein, who often sent a double for appearances around Baghdad.

No doubt there were auditions for the role of Kim Jong-il, possibly at the sprawling film studios in Pyongyang where the Dear Leader once personally directed and produced propaganda epics. A whole cast of actors may have had to be trained to play the role considering the changes in his appearance. “One of the refugees said she has heard of many look-alikes,” says Kim Bum-soo, editor of a political weekly here. “He must have. Why not?”  When Kim Jong-il showed up live on video at the Supreme People’s Assembly, he was no longer the pudgy fellow that he was before his stroke eight months earlier. An actor would have had to rehearse diligently, as if for the starring role in a great international theater, to portray him as he slowly recovered to the point at which he could meet and greet first Bill Clinton and then Wen Jiabao.

After going to Pyongyang for the inter-Korean summit of June 2000, Kim Dae-jung discouraged satires on Kim Jong-il for fear of upsetting his Sunshine policy of reconciliation with the North. From time to time, however, South Koreans still delight in appearing on TV satirizing the curly-haired little guy. In North Korea, of course, the role of the Dear Leader is no laughing matter. Could it be that an actor is not only playing the part but usurping the power -- extemporaneously mouthing orders? And do all those at or near the center of power in Pyongyang necessarily know who’s really who? It’s time to end the game of guessing who’s Kim Jong-il and who’s not.  Will the real deal, that is the Dear Leader himself, please stand up and be counted – not two or three or four times but once and for all?

All tags:

None

Login or register to tag items