The history of failed attempts on the lives of Pyongyang’s leaders shows if you come for the Kims, you better not miss.
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By Adam Rawnsley
The two dozen commandos trained to lớn kill North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung on a remote island off the coast of South Korea never made it to lớn Pyongyang. The men of the 2325th Group’s 209th Detachment had been recruited from the country’s poor, desperate, and criminal & brought khổng lồ Silmido Island to lớn be trained khổng lồ become assassins. Khổng lồ South Korea’s own authoritarian leaders in 1968, this meant they had lớn be hardened. They were abused, neglected, and put through grueling exercises with guards shooting at their feet & beating them with bats when they didn’t perform khổng lồ expectations. Six of them were executed for disobedience; another drowned by accident.
Their mission was to infiltrate North Korea, sneak into one of Kim’s palaces, and murder the Great Leader, paying North Korea back in kind for a failed 1968 special operations raid aimed at assassinating South Korean President Park Chung-hee. By 1971, Park had given up on the prospect of revenge. The men of Silmido Island, however, had not. That year, they rose up, killing 18 of their guards with their honed commando skills and stealing a boat across the Yellow Sea lớn the port of Incheon. There they hijacked two buses and set out to lớn Seoul khổng lồ kill the men who had ordered them to lớn be turned into weapons.
Like many attempts lớn kill members of the Kim dynasty both before and after, this one ended in ruin, blazing out in a hail of gunfire & grenade explosions as the remaining recruits fought a doomed battle with police in the South Korean capital.
But even if they had been launched against the North, their fate would have been the same. Even their handlers believed their chances of survival were slim — a fact they kept hidden from the commandos. The North had long proved inhospitable ground for infiltrators. South Korean intelligence had “made no serious effort” to lớn carry out intelligence operations in the North in the late 1960s “because the expected losses of intelligence agents would be high và the benefits nil or virtually nil,” according to a declassified CIA report.
Nearly a half-century later, the Kim dynasty is still in nguồn in North Korea, và talk of decapitation is in the air once again. The pace of North Korea’s ballistic missile and nuclear weapons development has taken it from a national security sideshow lớn what Secretary of Defense James Mattis now calls the greatest threat to lớn the United States. The options for halting the increasing reach of the North’s nuclear missiles — a catastrophic war or a politically unpalatable nonproliferation agreement that the North might cheat on — aren’t enviable, but the U.S. Defense Department has tried lớn develop military options, carrying out joint exercises with South Korea in 2016 for a new plan that would involve strikes on North Korean leadership.
South Korea, for its part, has put its authoritarian past and personal revenge plots behind it. But fearful of the North’s growing nuclear and ballistic missile arsenal and irritated by its constant display, Seoul has begun to lớn counter Pyongyang’s aggressive messages with threats of its own to lớn kill current leader Kim Jong Un at the outset of any war.
But long before Pyongyang began lighting off ballistic missiles and churning out nuclear warheads, the Kim dynasty has been facing down assassination threats, both real & imagined. From the days of Japanese colonialism in the 1930s through the turbulent over of communist regimes in the 1990s, many have tried (and failed) to kill a Kim. But despite facing lethal challenges from within and without, the dynasty has always managed khổng lồ dodge would-be assassins thanks lớn canny survival skills, some less than fully baked plots, và an elaborate network of bodyguards, secret police, và informants.
All the Kims’ men
The Kim family’s first brush with death came in the 1930s, when Kim Il Sung joined the Chinese 1st Route Army as an insurgent in the resistance against Japanese colonial rule in Manchuria & Korea. Once Kim had made a name for himself in the resistance against Japanese occupation, Japanese police set up a designated “special activities unit” lớn hunt him down, employing dozens of former guerrillas whom the Japanese lured from Kim’s unit by promising amnesty. Together with a network of police informants, the men stalked their former comrade & leader — a lesson in betrayal that Kim would remember for the rest of his life.
Kim was protected during his guerrilla days by a band of bodyguards, which reportedly included his first wife, Kim Jong Suk, the mother of Kim Jong Il. North Korean histories of the period recount a battle in which Kim Jong Suk saved the future North Korean leader’s life in northeastern China, shielding Kim Il Sung from enemy soldiers taking aim at him from a nearby field of reeds & dropping the would-be assassins with her Mauser rifle. The tale has long been a propaganda parable about the need for absolute devotion khổng lồ the Kims’ security, though there’s little independent evidence khổng lồ back it up.
The first confirmed attempt on Kim Il Sung’s life in the postwar era — though not the last — came during a ceremony at the Pyongyang railway station commemorating the Korean independence movement on March 1, 1946. Assassins reportedly sent by the South Korean government threw a homemade grenade at the podium as Kim spoke, & Yakov Novichenko, a Soviet Army lieutenant guarding the assembled dignitaries, sprang into action and grabbed the grenade, which exploded in his hand, blowing off his arm. The incident spawned a lifelong friendship between Kim và Novichenko, as well as a cheesy Soviet-North Korean biopic in the mid-1980s. (Leonid Vasin, an assistant section chief in the Soviet Army’s special propaganda section who worked closely with Pyongyang later, would in time write a more skeptical account of the incident. Vasin claimed that the homemade grenade landed about 100 feet from Kim & to the right of the podium, posing little threat.)
The coterie of guards surrounding Kim in the mid-1940s would eventually evolve into one of the world’s most repressive & pervasive police states, run for the personal benefit of the Kim family. Within that architecture of repression grew an elaborate praetorian guard for the North’s supreme leaders, protecting them with multiple, overlapping rings of security.
At the innermost ring are five khổng lồ six elite, handpicked bodyguards from the brigade-sized Office of Adjutants, also known as Office No. 6, who directly protect the Kims. (It’s the loose equivalent of the U.S. Secret Service — except with đôi mươi times as many people, in a country a fraction of the size of America.) The Kims’ personal guards are senior officers who have proved their reliability & loyalty through years of service in North Korea’s Guard Command, a 100,000-member unit devoted khổng lồ the security of the Kim family & the upper levels of North Korean officialdom. Other Guard Command soldiers, picked from families with no known ties to lớn Pyongyang’s communist elite, provide the next layers of protection around Kim Jong Un, surrounding him at events, official visits, và on personal travel, as well as protecting his various residences.
The capital itself is protected by the Pyongyang Defense Command và Pyongyang Air Defense Command, which would fight within the city và defend its airspace in the sự kiện of a major war or coup attempt. Outside of Pyongyang, the 3rd Corps of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) comprises the final, most heavily armed ring, guarding the western approaches lớn Pyongyang from the port of Nampo north to the Chongchon River.
A handful of agencies also conduct surveillance within the North khổng lồ act as an early tripwire for signs of disloyalty & coup plots in the making. The State Security Department runs an expansive network of eavesdropping và informants lớn spy on North Korean civilians while the more sensitive work of surveilling senior Workers’ buổi tiệc ngọt officials is carried out by the Organization & Guidance Department. Within the KPA, the Military Security Command acts as a kind of parallel secret police khổng lồ keep tabs on those in uniform.
Together, the domestic intelligence and security agencies are aided by the cultivation of a Kim personality cult, which emphasizes the worship of the Kim family as essentially supernatural beings. Attempting to kill a Kim, for many North Koreans, would be more than treason — it would be blasphemy. Like Chinese emperors, the North Korean state, too, promises suffering not only khổng lồ “traitors” but lớn their families, further deterring any attempt.
The not-so-glorious 1990s
The greatest demo of the security apparatus protecting the Kims came in the 1990s as North Korea transitioned from the leadership of Kim Il Sung to his son Kim Jong Il. With the fall of the Berlin Wall và the Soviet Union, communist states were crumbling, & many wondered if North Korea would be the next khổng lồ go. In addition lớn the geopolitical shift, there were also whiffs of discontent about Kim Jong Il’s position as his father’s heir.
Rumors of coup plots & assassination attempts began lớn trickle out of the North & into Japanese và South Korean media. In the early ’90s, news outlets began to report on a supposed assassination plot led by Col. Gen. An Chang Ho và 30-40 military officers who had all studied at the Frunze Military Academy in the Soviet Union. The plotters purportedly planned to lớn turn their tanks’ guns on the two Kims during an April 1992 military parade commemorating the 60th anniversary of the founding of the KPA.
“There is a lot of sourcing — from truyền thông reports lớn defector interview data — that establishes that An was dismissed and arrested & that alumna of Russian và East European military universities were subject lớn investigations,” says Michael Madden, a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins University and an expert on North Korean leadership. “Whether An actually participated in an assassination attempt or violent power challenge is a different matter altogether.”
Shortly after the death of Kim Il Sung, the KPA’s 6th Corps, based in North Hamgyong province, supposedly went on the move in 1995 with the aim of mounting a coup. “The plot was uncovered by elements within the 6th Corps itself, so it wasn’t as if it was found out by the security services,” says Ken Gause, the director of the international affairs group at CNA, a nonprofit research và analysis organization, and an expert on North Korean security institutions. “It was mainly the head of the 6th Corps
What really happened in North Hamgyong — whether it was the beginning of a coup or a grab for resources, as Gause suspects — is still a matter of some debate và mystery. In any case, the incident represented a worrying breakdown in command for a system premised on absolute control.
There were repercussions for the 6th Corps.
“The most credible story is that they tied the senior military command of the 6th Corps in a barracks building & then set the building on fire,” Madden says. Today, the 6th Corps has been blotted from the records.
Reviewing the options
Kim Jong Il rode out the rocky years of the 1990s và consolidated his power enough lớn ensure another hereditary transition of power to lớn his son Kim Jong Un. But the prospect of a nuclear strike, made more likely by Pyongyang’s progress in weapons development, has given new urgency lớn efforts lớn disrupt the North’s chain of command in the event of war in a preemptive strike.
“This is not anything unusual. People are publicizing it, making a big khuyến mãi out of it, but there are many leadership targets in North Korea,” says retired Army Col. David Maxwell, a former Special Forces officer who served with U.S. Special Operations Command Korea. “All of the command and control facilities, all of the relocation facilities from Pyongyang, the villas that Kim Jong Un might use during time of war — all of these are potential targets, at minimum, for surveillance and, in extremis, to target people that are at those leadership locations.”
While knocking out enemy leadership in a war is hardly a new idea, the South Korean military has gotten more vocal about its decapitation capabilities in recent years. South Korea’s Army Special Warfare Command announced in năm nhâm thìn that it was standing up a special operations unit tasked with killing Kim Jong In & other senior leaders in the sự kiện a preemptive strike became necessary. For its part, North Korea has accused its adversaries in Washington and Seoul of a bizarre plot lớn “commit state-sponsored terrorism against the supreme leadership of the DPRK by use of bio-chemical substance.”
But any special operations team would face steep hurdles in getting close enough lớn Kim Jong Un to kill him.
First, South Korean special operators would have to lớn hitch a ride with their American counterparts in the U.S. Air Force Special Operations or the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment to infiltrate the North. Once across the Northern Limit Line, a team would then have to make it past the KPA’s 3rd Corps, which defends the approaches lớn the capital against invaders looking lớn land at Nampo and take the highway up or drop from the sky in an airborne assault.
“If the defense by the 3rd Corps & the 4th Corps has failed, the
American special operators have carried out multiple such raids in places lượt thích Pakistan, Somalia, & Libya since 9/11, swooping in with stealth và speed lớn capture or kill terrorist leaders on the run. Trying lớn replicate those feats against a heavily armed nation-state lengthens the odds considerably. “It looks good in the movies, but it’s not something that is easily done,” Maxwell says.
The most practical method might be a missile barrage by either the United States or South Korea. The South’s “Korea Massive Punishment & Retaliation” plan, announced after the North’s September năm 2016 nuclear test, calls for ballistic and cruise missiles to lớn flatten sections of Pyongyang associated with Kim Jong Un & his commanders should a nuclear strike appear imminent. Four years before the plan’s rollout, Seoul tipped its hand with the public kiểm tra of a Hyunmoo-3 cruise missile, shown smashing into a target crafted in the shape of Pyongyang’s Kumsusan Palace of the Sun.
But all the missiles và special operators are useless unless they have good intelligence to guide them to a leader’s location. Getting that kind of sensitive information in a hard target lượt thích North Korea can be a quixotic quest, but that hasn’t dimmed the appetite for the enterprise, says Jeffrey Lewis, the director of the East Asia nonproliferation program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. “Although it never really works, military & political leaders are always drawn to lớn decapitation. It’s catnip for idiots.”
Lewis points khổng lồ the 2003 invasion of Iraq as an example of the problems such missions are likely khổng lồ hit. In that case, the United States sent stealth aircraft loaded with bunker-buster bombs & cruise missiles lớn strike a site where American spies believed Saddam Hussein was hiding. Saddam wasn’t there, nor were any leadership bunkers, & the Iraqi dictator wouldn’t be caught for another eight months.
The day after
But even in a scenario where the United States or South Korea succeeds in a preemptive strike against Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s conventional military capabilities ensure that it’s still capable of inflicting catastrophic damage on the South, where the United States has thousands of troops deployed. Nor is it necessarily clear that the KPA would throw down its weapons in the wake of Kim’s death. Secretary of Defense James Mattis has assured U.S. Lawmakers that even though the United States would prevail in a war against the North, any conflict would be “more serious in terms of human suffering than anything we have seen since 1953.”
The North’s problems won’t end after Kim Jong Un because the Kim family inheritance encompasses more than just the flesh-and-blood heirs lớn the throne of Pyongyang. The North’s royal family planted deep roots in North Korean society in the form of decades of brutal misrule and penury inflicted upon its subjects. That bodes poorly for the country’s ability khổng lồ quickly erect a better society from the ashes of any future conflict. In the end, North Koreans will be tormented by the ghosts of their supreme leaders long after the last Kim is gone from power.
Removing the last Kim — as catastrophically bloody as it would be — might be relatively easy compared with governing the chaotic kingdom left behind.
Kim’s purge began with the murder of his father’s most trusted aides. The killing spree continues khổng lồ consolidate power, but after 10 years in office his people are starving.SEOUL—Ten years after the death of North Korea’s long-ruling father, Kim Jong Il, his youngest son Kim Jong Un has ruthlessly tightened one-man rule but failed miserably to lớn meet the basic needs of the vast majority of his poverty-stricken country’s 25.6 million people.
The kid was just 27, with virtually no prior experience, when his father died suddenly at 70 on Dec. 17, 2011. Lớn the shock of skeptics who doubted he was up to the job and were sure he would soon fall from grace và power, he swept aside his relatives và his father’s aides in asserting control over the ruling Workers’ tiệc nhỏ and the enormous armed forces.
Now 37, maturing into middle age, Kim Jong Un can look back on a decade in which he’s ordered the executions of hundreds of rivals, bureaucrats, and military officers perceived as threatening his unobstructed grip on a dynasty harking back to his grandfather, Kim Il Sung, installed by the Soviet Union in 1945. On the way he’s also ordered four nuclear tests & dozens of missile flights showing North Korea as a threat both lớn its nearest neighbors, South Korea and Japan, & to targets in the U.S.
But how long can Kim brandish such fearsome weaponry while his health deteriorates in tandem, it seems, with the economy?
“He was good for the first four or five years,” said Choi Jin-wook, president of the Center for Strategic và Cultural Studies in Seoul. “Now he’s trying to get out of economic hardships.” To bởi vì that, Choi told The Daily Beast, “He’s trying khổng lồ please his people,” but “he can’t because of economic difficulties.” Since COVID-19 led Kim early last year to lớn shut down the Yalu & Tumen river borders with China, trade “is 10 percent of previous years,” said. Choi. “Oil and food are almost nothing. He has failed in every sense.”
To guarantee power, however, Kim has wiped out anyone who would question—much less challenge—his authority beginning with two of his father’s highest-level aides.
The chief of staff of the armed forces, Ri Yong Ho, was ousted và reportedly executed in July 2012. In December 2013, Kim’s uncle-in-law, Jang song Thaek, who was married khổng lồ Kim Jong Il’s sister, was dragged out of a politburo meeting and beaten before his execution on a wide range of charges, mostly to vị with corruption. Both Ri & Jang had walked with Kim Jong Un for three hours on a snowy day in December 2011 beside the hearse bearing Kim Jong Il’s casket and were assumed to lớn be tutoring the young man on the ways of statecraft.
Kim Jong Un salutes as he và his uncle Jang Song-thaek (3rd L) accompany the hearse carrying the coffin of Kim Jong Il during his funeral procession in Pyongyang on Dec. 28, 2011.
Then, most dramatically, Kim’s older half-brother, Kim Jong Nam, was murdered in February 2017 in Kuala Lumpur Airport by two young women paid small sums by North Korean agents to lớn smear what they were told was water on his face as a prank. The water turned out lớn be VX nerve gas.
These three deaths portended the killing of scores of others who might have been close lớn them. At Kim’s behest, the regime has also sought lớn annihilate what he has called “the vicious cancer” of popular South Korean culture as exemplified in K-Pop và Squid Game, snuck into the country at grave risk.
The Seoul-based Transitional Justice Working Group said this week that many of those caught “watching or distributing South Korean video” had been executed. On the basis of interviews with 683 escapees from North Korea, the report lists 27 official burial sites and details 23 executions. “Interviews reported that inhumane treatment of the accused before execution—used as a warning to the public—has persisted under Kim Jong Un” even though “in some cases pardons were issued” khổng lồ show his “benevolence.”
Executions, often in public, had been routine throughout the reigns of both Kim Il Sung, who died in 1994, & then Kim Jong Il, but “after Kim Jong Un took power nguồn it became worse,” according khổng lồ Ji Seung-ho, who escaped from North Korea in 2006. Ji, now a member of South Korea’s National Assembly, told members of the Seoul Foreign Correspondents Club that the new leader, not yet 30, “started lớn target the upper class of officials.” The reason, said Ji, was “to showcase his power.”
A North Korean soldier stands before spectators during a mass military parade at Kim Il Sung square in Pyongyang on Oct. 10, 2015.
Simultaneously, fearful of unbridled military influence, Kim sought to elevate the party above the armed forces, about 1.2 million troops on active duty, including tens of thousands within a few miles of the demilitarized zone between North và South Korea.
Until Kim Jong Un took charge, “it was military first,” said Ji. “He has transitioned to lớn placing more power in the party,” making himself general secretary of the buổi tiệc nhỏ as well as president of the state affairs commission.
Robert Collins, author of books và studies on nguồn struggles in North Korea, ranks control of the party’s Organization & Guidance Department as Kim’s “biggest achievement.” Under Kim’s younger sister, Kim Yo Jong, the department’s vice director, that agency is “the control tower of the regime” through which big brother holds sway over “every institution in North Korea, including the military & the security services,” Collins told The Daily Beast. “Such control is critical lớn his continued rule.”
It was after Kim had emerged as a powerful ruler in his own right that he reached his highest levels of visibility in the eyes of the world. Donald Trump in 2017, the first year of his presidency, responding khổng lồ nuclear & missile tests, famously called him “rocket man” and threatened in a UN speech lớn “totally destroy” him.
Those angry words were the prelude lớn a melting of hearts when the two met in Singapore in June 2018 for the first ever summit of American & North Korean leaders. Trump, convinced that Kim would begin giving up his nukes after they both signed a joint statement pledging to work for “denuclearization of the Korean peninsula,” was later to say they had fallen “in love.”
President Donald Trump shakes hands with North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un following a meeting at the Sofitel Legend Metropole khách sạn in Hanoi on February 27, 2019.
The passion faded, though, when Trump walked out of the next Trump-Kim summit in Hanoi in February 2019 with Kim refusing lớn yield to lớn demands for denuclearization and the U.S. Balking at giving up sanctions.
North Korea’s nuclear complex at Yongbyon is humming away, manufacturing warheads và missiles, according lớn 38 North, a think tank tracking North Korea from Washington.
Kim this year has ordered tests of a hypersonic missile & a submarine-launched ballistic missile but no nuclear demo since September 2017.
He’s now transfixed by economic challenges that have much to vị with shifting emphasis from military to các buổi party power. In fact, “for a significant period of time, Kim appeared to be losing control of the North Korean economy,” said Bruce Bennett at the RAND Corporation, “North Korean entrepreneurs developed their own form of capitalism that made many individuals wealthy and able lớn bribe government officials, avoiding Kim's control.”
Most worrisome, though, is mass hunger reminiscent of the famine of the 1990s that cost the lives of as many as 2 million people from hunger và disease.
“North Korea’s difficulty in feeding its people, and especially its elites, has been a major failure for Kim,” Bennett told The Daily Beast. He had “hoped khổng lồ stimulate patriotic action that would increase crop yields & otherwise meet the food needs, and also increase the productivity of the rest of the North Korean economy. He does not appear khổng lồ have had much success in doing this—it has been a major failure.”
If the outlook is cloudy, however, there’s no denying Kim has proven his mettle as a dictator. “Skeptics underestimated the degree khổng lồ which Kim Jong Il had prepared his son for leadership & had chosen his second son khổng lồ succeed him precisely because of the young man's reputation for cunning và ruthlessness,” said Evans Revere, a retired U.S. Diplomat who followed Kim’s rise closely in Seoul and Washington.
After he had “brutally consolidated his rule,” said Revere, he “filled the upper reaches of the Party, security và military bureaucracies with a younger group of loyalists.” By now, “solidly in control, the only real threats lớn his rule seem to be a dissolute lifestyle and bad genes.”
North Koreans, though, have had to lớn pay the price. Human Rights Watch, based in New York, charged that Kim has “expanded invasive surveillance & repression of North Koreans, denied people their freedom of movement within the country và across borders, và responded to the COVID-19 pandemic with heightened food insecurity that threatens widespread starvation.” While he “opened up the economy and decreased major crackdowns on traders’ markets,” said HRW, “ illegal border crossings became almost impossible, corrupt practices were normalized, & government ‘requests’ for unpaid labor rose.”
Indeed, Kim’s ascent lớn absolute power nguồn “comes at a great cost to lớn the North Korean people,” said Daniel Pinkston, a long-time analyst of the North at Troy University’s Korea campus. Kim “and his inner circle are ruthless, & they are willing & able lớn shift the costs of regime survival onto the populace.”
Always, however, “the interesting variable is Kim’s health,” Pinkston told The Daily Beast. Kim has shed around 45 pounds recently. He is down lớn about 265 pounds, judging from photographs distributed from Pyongyang. He looks pretty good but there’s no telling how long he’ll be around.
“If Kim is no longer leader, can someone other than a Kim family member step in and utilize the myths extolling the Kims for more than half a century?” Pinkston asked rhetorically. “I’m doubtful. So was Kim’s recent weight loss due lớn illness? Or was it deliberate as a choice to lớn improve his health? If the former, and he cannot rule for long, then the likelihood of instability for the buổi tiệc nhỏ and state is much greater.”
