Wearing his trademark sunglasses, Kim is seen standing with uniformed soldiers during a training drill. The pictures appeared on Pyongyang's Korean Central Television. It's unclear when they were taken.
U.S. and South Korean officials say Kim suffered a stroke and underwent brain surgery. North Korea says he's not been ill, even though the 66-year-old leader has missed several recent key holidays, including North Korea's 60th birthday last month.
Kim Jong II: The making of a monster October 6, 2008 - 6:16am
Kim Jong Il became leader of North Korea after his father's death in 1994.
J.J. Green, WTOP Radio
WASHINGTON - He's considered one of the world's most ruthless leaders, but a glimpse into Kim Jong Il's early years may surprise you.
"One day he offered me a pack of cigarettes, mentioning they were the same kind his father smoked," recalls one of Kim Jong Il's former teachers.
"When I told him that I am not a smoker, he then gave me a box of chocolates, and for the next month -- almost every day -- Kim Jong Il would offer me chocolate."
This is the same Kim Jong Il who ordered the assassination of his own nephew, who sanctions graphic public executions, who experts say has allowed millions of people to starve to death while he spends billions on military weapons.
This is the same man who has amassed and stashed $4 billion in secret Swiss bank accounts and owns 12 estates, horse racing tracks, private lakes and much more.
What's the difference between the Kim Jong Il who would give chocolate to someone everyday for a month and the Kim Jong Il who would order family members to be executed by a firing squad?
He grew up.
His progression from a 17-year-old high school student struggling with his studies to the man who desperately sought his father's approval is the difference. Determination to succeed his father, Kim Il-sung, who died in 1992, is what drove him.
North Korea officially refers to Kim Il-sung as the "Great Leader" and he is designated in the constitution as the country's "Eternal President."
That's where Professor Kim Hyun Sik's connection to Kim Jong Il begins. Sik was 27 years old when Kim Il-sung sent for him in 1959.
"One day Kim Il-sung summoned me and instructed me to go over to the high school where his son, Kim Jong Il, was a student and to test him on his Russian and report back. Kim Il-sung was concerned that his son's Russian was not up to speed."
Speaking from his home in the D.C. area through his translator, the adjunct assistant professor of international politics at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, spoke enthusiastically about his encounters with Kim Jong Il and wove a tale that ranges from the ordinary to the tragic.
The ordinary, according to Sik, was young Kim Jong Il.
"Upon Kim Il-sung's instruction, I did go over to the school and spent an entire month at the school, seeing Kim Jong Il regularly throughout that month and evaluating him and teaching him Russian. My impression of the young Kim Jong Il at the time in 1959 was that he was an average student in terms of his grades. He was an average student in terms of his demeanor. He was properly respectful. He was polite. Nothing really stood out."
But by 1991, Kim Jong Il was a different man and North Korea was a different country -- and Sik was caught in the middle.
** "Kim Jong II: The making of a mMonster" will continue on WTOP all week. Check back for updates.
http://wtop.com/?nid=226&sid=1490673
If you follow that link, on the page you will find several MP3 files on the left hand side of the page, which is a very interesting series of interviews, that will give you insite into this devil personality. (there are 3 segments making of a monster and 8 about him)
NKorea reportedly fires missile into Yellow Sea
October 7, 2008
TOKYO—North Korea has fired a short-range missile into the Yellow Sea, media reports said Tuesday.
Japanese public broadcaster NHK quoted officials as saying Tokyo was trying to verify a report from a third country that the communist nation fired a missile. NHK said the firing did not involve a ballistic missile.
South Korea's Yonhap news agency said two missiles were fired Monday. The Japanese daily Mainichi carried a similar report and said it was a routine military exercise.
Japanese officials said they could not confirm the media reports.
In Washington, the Pentagon declined to confirm or deny whether any missile firing had been detected.
"We cannot provide information regarding specific intelligence," said Marine Maj. Stewart Upton, a Defense Department spokesman. "However, our concerns about missile activities in North Korea are long-standing and well documented.
"North Korea's development, deployment and proliferation of missiles and missile-related materials, equipment and technology pose a threat to the region and the world," Upton said.
North Korea often test-fires short-range missiles, including two in March. The country has been under a self-imposed moratorium on long-range missile tests.
North Korea, which conducted an underground nuclear test in 2006, stopped disabling its nuclear facilities in August, around the time reports say leader Kim Jong Il suffered a stroke. North Korea denies that Kim is ill.
http://www.boston.com/news/world/asia/articles/2008/10/07/nkorea_reportedly_fires_missile_into_yellow_sea/
NKorea may be developing small nuclear warhead October 8, 2008 - 6:08am
By HYUNG-JIN KIM Associated Press Writer
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - A top South Korean military officer said Wednesday that he believes North Korea is trying to develop a nuclear warhead that is small enough to be carried by its missiles.
North Korea is believed to have enough plutonium to produce about half a dozen bombs, but it is not believed to have mastered the technology needed to fit a nuclear weapon on a missile. The communist nation conducted an underground nuclear test in 2006, and its long-range missiles may be able to reach as far as the West Coast of the United States.
Gen. Kim Tae-young, chairman of South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a parliamentary committee that he believes "North Korea has been pushing to develop a small warhead to be mounted on a missile," according to the general's office.
Kim said it was not clear whether the North had already manufactured such a warhead.
South Korea would attack suspected nuclear sites in North Korea if the communist country attempts to use its atomic weapons on the South, Kim said.
"If (the North) tries to use nuclear weapons, we will launch a strike to get them not to use" the weapons, he said.
Kim made similar remarks in March, prompting an angry reaction from Pyongyang. Kim's office later said he was talking about a general military principle in dealing with outside threats, not about a pre-emptive attack on the North.
There was no immediate reaction from North Korea to Kim's comments.
Kim's latest remarks came at a time of increased tension on the Korean peninsula.
North Korea began disabling its main nuclear complex north of Pyongyang last November as part of an aid-for-disarmament pact with the U.S., South Korea, China, Russia and Japan. North Korea, however, stopped the disablement work and began reassembling the facilities in mid-August in protest at Washington's refusal to remove it from a blacklist of state sponsors of terrorism.
The U.S. pledged to remove the North from the blacklist after the regime submitted a long-delayed account of its nuclear programs in June. The U.S. later insisted the North would only be taken off the list after it agreed to an international inspection of its nuclear declaration.
Washington's top nuclear envoy visited Pyongyang last week to resolve the impasse, but it was unclear whether it produced any breakthrough.
http://wtop.com/?nid=385&sid=1493318
North Korea preparing to restart atomic facility
October 9, 2008 - 6:10pm
Associated Press Writer
VIENNA, Austria (AP) - North Korea moved closer Thursday to relaunching its nuclear arms program, announcing that it wants to reactivate the facility that produced its atomic bomb and banning U.N. inspectors from the site.
The U.S. said the moves did not mean the death of international efforts to persuade the North to recommit to an agreement that offers it diplomatic and economic concessions in exchange for nuclear disarmament.
Despite the gloomy implications of North Korea's moves, they could be a negotiating ploy: The year needed to start its reprocessing plant could be used to wrest more concessions from the regime's interlocutors.
John Bolton, who has served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and U.S. undersecretary of state in charge of the North Korean nuclear dossier, suggested the North's tactics were working.
Bolton, a critic of what he considers U.S. leniency with North Korea who remains well-connected with senior Bush administration officials, told The Associated Press that Washington was planning to meet the communist country's key demand "within a week" by removing it from a State Department list of nations that sponsor terrorism.
That would be a significant move because the disarmament deal is bogged down over U.S. refusal to do just that until the North accepts a plan for verifying a list of nuclear assets that it submitted to its negotiating partners.
It was unclear whether the U.S. would settle for less than the full accounting it had asked for before the North walked away from the talks.
White House press secretary Dana Perino said a nuclear disarmament verification protocol remained essential to taking North Korea off the terrorism list.
She added, however: "If we can get a verification protocol that we are satisfied with, then we would be able to fulfill our side of the bargain."
The plans of the reclusive communist nation were revealed by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The North had already banned IAEA inspectors from the reprocessing plant last month after demanding they remove agency seals from the facility. But the experts continued to have access to the rest of the site until Thursday.
"Since it is preparing to restart the facilities at Yongbyon, the DPRK has informed the IAEA that our monitoring activities would no longer be appropriate," the U.N. nuclear watchdog said, using the formal acronym for North Korea.
It said the North "informed IAEA inspectors that effective immediately access to facilities at Yongbyon would no longer be permitted" and "also stated that it has stopped its (nuclear) disablement work."
The IAEA said its small inspection team would remain on the site until told otherwise by North Korean authorities, and the State Department suggested it does not view North Korea's statement as the end of a six-nation agreement on ending the regime's atomic program.
"This is a regrettable step, but one that is reversible," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.
Still, the North Korean reversal compounds the White House's nuclear setbacks with time running out for President Bush, who leaves office early next year.
Washington has been successful in persuading the international community to do nuclear trade with India. In doing so, it has set up lucrative access for U.S. firms looking to provide nuclear technology worth billions of dollars, reversing more than three decades of U.S. policy that has barred the sale of nuclear fuel and technology to a country that has not signed international nonproliferation accords and tested secretly developed nuclear weapons.
But along with the North's resurgent atomic defiance, Iran remains a nuclear thorn it the Bush administration's side as it continues to flout U.N. sanctions and Western pressure to give up uranium enrichment, a potential pathway to the bomb.
Tensions also rose elsewhere on the Korean peninsula, with the North warning the South against sending naval ships into its waters and threatening warfare as it reportedly shifted an arsenal of missiles to a nearby island for more test launches.
The warning came hours after a South Korean newspaper reported that a U.S. spy satellite detected signs the North had positioned about 10 missiles near the disputed sea border after test-firing two short-range missiles on Tuesday. The Chosun Ilbo report cited an unidentified South Korean official.
Yongbyon, located about 60 miles north of Pyongyang, has three main facilities: a 5-megawatt reactor, a plutonium reprocessing plant and a fuel fabrication complex.
The reactor is the centerpiece of the complex, with the facility stretching more than a mile along the Churyong River, satellite images show.
The reprocessing center to the south of the reactor is capable of extracting weapons-grade plutonium from spent fuel rods. Thousands of them remain in storage but would likely be moved to the reprocessing plant as a next step. South of the reprocessing center, fuel rods are made from natural uranium in the fuel fabrication complex that lies tucked into a bend in the Churyong River.
A second reactor with the potential to produce much higher quantities of plutonium has not been completed.
North Korea was to dismantle the Yongbyon nuclear complex in return for diplomatic concessions and energy aid equivalent to 1 million tons of oil under the deal with the U.S., South Korea, China, Russia and Japan.
But the accord hit a snag in mid-August when the U.S. refused to remove North Korea from the terrorism list until the North accepts the plan for allowing a full check of the list of nuclear assets the North says it has.
U.S. chief nuclear negotiator Christopher Hill recently returned to Washington from a trip to North Korea meant to jump-start the talks, but the State Department has declined to provide details of his meetings.
For the U.S., the North Korean nuclear reversal is the second major setback this decade _ Yongbyon was under IAEA seal in December 2002 when Pyongyang ordered U.N. inspectors out of the country and restarted its atomic activities, unraveling a deal committing the U.S. to help the North build a peaceful nuclear program.
North Korea quit the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in January 2003. Then on Oct. 9, 2006, it set off an underground test explosion of a nuclear weapon. There was widespread international condemnation, but the U.S. also softened its position and the six-nation deal soon followed.
Scientists began disabling the Yongbyon reactor a year ago, and in June the North blew up its cooling tower in a dramatic show of commitment to the pact.
Eight of the 11 steps needed to disable the reactor had been completed by July, North Korean officials said.
http://www.wtop.com/?nid=105&sid=1482649NKorea warns South against provoking warfare
October 9, 2008 - 3:55pm
By JAE-SOON CHANG
Associated Press Writer
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - North Korea warned South Korea against provoking war on Thursday as it reportedly deployed an arsenal of missiles near their sea border and told U.N. inspectors it plans to restart its nuclear facility.
The North's naval command accused the South of encroaching on its territory around the disputed sea border off Korea's west coast and threatened to take unspecified "decisive action" unless Seoul stops sending naval vessels into its waters.
The warning, delivered in a statement on the communist regime's official Korean Central News Agency, came hours after a South Korean newspaper reported that a U.S. spy satellite detected signs the North had positioned about 10 missiles on an island near the disputed sea border after test-firing two short-range missiles Tuesday. The Chosun Ilbo report cited an unidentified South Korean government official.
Later Thursday, North Korea told the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna that it was banning inspectors from its main nuclear complex in Yongbyon and stopping its program to dismantle the site, the agency said.
It was the clearest indication that the North plans to pull out of an international deal to end its nuclear program.
Last month, Pyongyang barred U.N. weapons personnel from a plutonium reprocessing facility at Yongbyon, as it took steps to restart its weapons-producing atomic program despite an international disarmament-for-aid pact.
The actions came at a time of increasing concern about security on the Korean peninsula.
The two Koreas remain technically at war since the Korean War, which began June 25, 1950 and ended in 1953 with an armistice, not a peace treaty. North Korea does not recognize a sea boundary unilaterally drawn by the U.N.
In its warning Thursday, North Korea said the maritime dispute was "so dangerous that a third West Sea skirmish and a second June 25 war may break out at any moment."
South Korea's Defense Ministry said the country has never violated the sea border.
North Korea reportedly fired two short-range missiles off the west coast Tuesday. South Korean intelligence officials believe the North is planning to fire more than five more missiles, the Chosun Ilbo report said.
South Korea's Defense Ministry, the National Intelligence Service and the U.S. military command in Seoul said they could not confirm the reports.
North Korea routinely test fires short-range missiles. It conducted an underground nuclear test two years ago and in 2006 fired seven missiles off the country's eastern coast.
In 2007, the North agreed to dismantle its nuclear program in exchange for energy aid and other concessions. It abruptly stopped disabling the Yongbyon facility in August.
Associated Press writers Hyung-jin Kim in Seoul, George Jahn in Vienna, Austria, and Matthew Lee in Washington contributed to this report.
(This version CORRECTS DELETES incorrect reference to armistice on June 25. The war began on June 25, 1950. Trims.)
http://www.wtop.com/?nid=105&sid=1478944
AP: U.S. nears removing N. Korea from terrorism blacklist
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Bush administration is nearing a decision to remove North Korea from a terrorism blacklist and may do so as early as Friday in a bid to salvage faltering nuclear disarmament talks, The Associated Press has learned.
U.S. officials said Thursday that no final decision had been made but diplomats briefed on the matter told the AP that they believe an announcement that North Korea will be tentatively taken off the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism is imminent.
The delisting depends on North Korea agreeing to a plan to verify an account of its nuclear activity that it submitted over the summer, the diplomats said. North Korea would be put back on the list if it doesn't comply with the plan and abandon nuclear arms, they said.
The diplomats spoke on condition of anonymity ahead of an expected announcement, which would follow meetings last week in Pyongyang between North Korean officials and U.S. envoy Christopher Hill as well as days of intense debate in Washington.
The move would be a last-ditch attempt to save a disarmament agreement that has frayed badly in recent months as North Korea moves to restart its main nuclear plant and takes other provocative steps such as expelling U.N. inspectors and launching short-range missiles.
FIND MORE STORIES IN: United States Washington George W. Bush China US State Department Tokyo Seoul Pyongyang Dana Perino National Security Council North Koreans Yongbyon Gordon Johndroe N. Korea Christopher Hill
Saving the deal and getting Pyongyang to follow through would also be a major foreign policy success for the administration in its waning months.
But opponents of the deal, mainly conservative hawks in and out of the administration, say removing the North from the terrorism list now would be a reward for bad behavior from a country that cannot be trusted.
North Korea had disabled its Yongbyon nuclear facility under the initial phases of the deal but since August has been reversing that because the United States has not removed it from the terror list as it agreed after North Korea provided a declaration of its atomic program in June.
The U.S. has said it will fulfill the obligation only when North Korea accepts a plan to verify that accounting.
But while he was in North Korea, Hill proposed a face-saving compromise under which the North would be provisionally removed from the terrorism list as soon as it deposits with China an agreement on verification, according to U.S. officials.
China, the chair of the six-nation nation negotiations, would then announce that the North Koreans were on board, allowing Pyongyang to claim that Washington moved first, they said.
Despite signs the delisting is close, details of what North Korea is prepared to allow in terms of inspections of its nuclear sites are unclear. The specifics of Hill's discussions with the North are closely held in Washington among a tight circle of top Bush aides, officials said.
White House press secretary Dana Perino said agreement on a "verification protocol" remained the key to taking North Korea off the list. "If we can get a verification protocol that we are satisfied with, then we would be able to fulfill our side of the bargain," she said.
Later, amid a swirl of speculation in Washington, Seoul and Tokyo that the delisting would come on Friday, National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe would say only that "no final decision has been made yet."
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2008-10-10-us-northkorea-nuclear_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip
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