The World

Sporting a bouffant quiff and Stalinka tunics, Kim had been raised as a princeling, favouring Scotch whiskies, lobsters and sushi, but he was a shrewd power broker, learning from his father the essential rules of Kimite dynasty – survival depended on playing off the superpowers, promoting the family and liquidating any opposition. His two obsessions were western films and nuclear weapons. Father and son regarded themselves as being at perpetual war with South Korea and the capitalist states, and kidnapped over 3,000 citizens from South Korea and even Japan. Having started in the Agitprop department, Jong-il craved a sophisticated film industry. In 1978, he orchestrated the kidnapping from Hong Kong of Choi Eun-hee, the beautiful actress ex-wife of the leading South Korean film director Shin Sangok; when he was lured to Hong Kong to find her, he too was kidnapped. After two years of indoctrination, they were taken to meet Kim, who showed them his collection of 15,000 movies, ordered them to remarry and produced their Marxist monster movie Pulgasari.

As for any monarch, the biology of succession was unremitting. Kim had first had a daughter in an arranged marriage, but while supervising North Korean films and theatre he naturally had access to a harem of official entertainers known as Kippumjo, the Joy Squad, said to be divided into Satisfaction, Happiness and Entertainment divisions for sex, wellbeing and dancing, according to Kenji Fujimoto, Kim’s sushi chef and companion. A film star, married to someone else, gave birth to his first son Kim Jong-nam – but without the father’s all-important blessing. Around 1972, he started an affair with a dancer Ko Yong-hui, who bore him three children, two sons – the second named Kim Jong-un – and a daughter Kim Yo-jong, who became his official family.

While maintaining a state with a million-strong military and 200,000 political prisoners, father and son sought the Bomb, but their Soviet and Chinese allies refused to help. The Kims scoured the world for technology to upgrade uranium and develop weapons, opening negotiations with Pakistan, which was trying to catch up with India. Pakistan’s nuclear mastermind, A. Q. Khan – nicknamed Centrifuge Khan – handed over the technology during the 1980s when Benazir Bhutto, daughter of the executed premier of the 1970s, heiress of another south Asia family dynasty, was elected prime minister. First promoted by Benazir’s father, A. Q. Khan had embarked on history’s greatest criminal enterprise: the sale of Pakistani nuclear technology. He travelled the world to eighteen countries. Saddam was interested; in Iran, Syria and Libya, Khamenei, Assad and Qaddafi bought it. Khan delivered the Libyan package emblazoned ‘Good Look Fabrics’, disguised as a suit from an Islamabad tailor. When Kim bought it, Benazir Bhutto supposedly delivered it personally.

When America discovered the existence of North Korea’s nuclear programme, Kim, whom American diplomats remembered as genial and masterful, conducted negotiations to squeeze maximum benefits for his dwindling economy while secretly procuring the Bomb. At the same time, he reviewed his sons for their suitability for the succession: the oldest was not of his official family; the second was too weak; but his third son, Kim Jong-un, nicknamed ‘Jong Unny’, whom he had sent to a Swiss school, was just like him.

In Moscow, reformers, oligarchs and the Familia feared that Yeltsin, fuddled and soused, was about to lose the election to the Communists: a heart attack had rendered him almost gaga. But Berezovsky raised $140 million and commandeered the TV stations to ensure that he was re-elected. The Familia

fought Korzhakov for power: Lenin and Stalin had commandeered the criminal underworld for their murderous secret police; courtiers and oligarchs now threatened to kill each other. A bomb beheaded Berezovsky’s driver. ‘After the attempt on Berezovsky’s life,’ recalled Korzhakov, ‘he always wanted to kill someone in return … telling me so calmly, as if I was the guy killing everyone.’

Yeltsin’s Familia dismissed the overmighty bodyguard; the half-alive Yeltsin won the 1996 election. But in August Chechen warlords infiltrated Grozny and retook the city, expelling the Russian army. Yeltsin underwent quintuple coronary surgery. The Familia then ruled the floundering state.

America thrived as the unipower. The elation of Cold War victory dizzied American and European potentates; America and its system, liberal democracy, had triumphed. Success begets success: in Africa and south America, countries became US-style democracies. It was hard not to watch Russian implosion with a certain smugness.^*