Kim Jong-Il: The sex-mad pantomime villain with a finger on the nuclear button



Barbaric: Kim Jong-Il looks like a Bond baddie - only he's more bloodthirsty

With his bouffant hair, platform shoes and strange penchant for zip-up, khaki catsuits, it would be easy to dismiss North Korea’s dictator as a faintly ludicrous pantomime villain.

But Kim Jong-il, known as the Dear Leader by his impoverished, brutalised people, is a psychopath who threatens the world with his burgeoning nuclear arsenal — and his neighbours with his pathological bullying.

Last night, Kim was being condemned around the world for torpedoing a South Korean naval vessel, killing 46 crew. Yet warnings and international disapproval cut little ice with Kim, a deranged and deadly tyrant who would rather destroy his own nation than kowtow to anyone.

For North Korea, which boasts the fourth biggest army in the world — a million troops are stationed along the border with South Korea alone — is now no more than his plaything. And he likes nothing more than a game of lethal brinkmanship.

Last year, he defied the world by detonating a nuclear bomb that sent seismic shocks around the world. At the time, jubilant North Korean officials claimed the atomic weapon was more powerful than Hiroshima, prompting U.S. President Barack Obama to warn: ‘North Korea is directly and recklessly challenging the international community.’

Not that most of Kim’s 24 million cowering subjects are in on his deadly joke. They live the most controlled life on the planet — under 24-hour surveillance and the constant threat of terror and death. Indeed, North Korea is Orwell’s 1984 dystopia brought to life. Televisions can only receive government stations; mobile phones are the preserve of a tiny elite, and the internet is banned. The entire nation is a black hole in cyberspace.

Henchmen: Kim surrounds himself with obliging y- but ageing - yes men

There is no free Press. All public telephones are monitored. And nobody is allowed to leave. Ever. Indeed, only a select few even know of their Dear Leader’s latest act of war against his enemies in the South.

Gulags are dotted around the country, and with people facing life imprisonment simply for forgetting to wear a badge bearing the Dear Leader’s face, this is also one of the most barbaric regimes on earth.

Compared by diplomats to the Bond villain Blofeld, only more blood-thirsty and deranged, the Dear Leader has jailed hundreds of thousands of his subjects, using a legal system that punishes three generations of a family if just one speaks ill of him.

Human rights groups say that he currently holds 200,000 political prisoners, topping up the gulags as thousands of ‘free’ citizens die of starvation outside.

Executions and torture are rife. In rare accounts from defectors, specially trained dogs are set on prisoners to maul them to death. Others are beaten and shot through the head. There have been horrifying accounts of foetuses cut from the wombs of female prisoners.



Easy parody: Kim as a puppet in the comedy film Team America: World Police

Yet Kim, of course, lives a life of unbridled luxury, constantly attended to by a 2,000- strong retinue of women selected for their looks and — often enforced — sexual compliance.

Known as Gippeumjo in Korean — meaning ‘Pleasure Brigade’ or ‘Joy Division’ — the unfortunates selected for these duties must be less than 5ft 2in tall. The Dear Leader is himself just 5ft 2in, and wears six-inch platform heels to bolster his meagre stature.

Rounded up by officials at the age of 15 to service the Dear Leader’s whims, these young women dance at the state banquets staged in Kim’s 12 underground palaces that are dotted around the country.

According to defectors, the women are checked for scars and must be virgins. They are given six months’ training in sexual techniques, and write a pledge of allegiance in blood before they are interviewed by the Dear Leader himself.

Gulags are dotted around the country, and with people facing life imprisonment simply for forgetting to wear a badge bearing the Dear Leader’s face

They are then split into three groups: the ‘happiness team’, who are responsible for his massages; the ‘satisfaction team’, who provide sexual services; and the ‘gamujo team’, who sing and dance.

To her enduring trauma, Mi Hyang was one of those forced to become a member of the Gippeumjo. She was seized as a 15-year-old schoolgirl when two of the dictator’s officials entered her classroom.

They wanted girls who were ‘comely, yet virtuous’ for the dictator’s harem. Giving a rare insight into palace life in this notoriously secretive state, her chilling account was published this year by a human rights group.

‘They made a detailed record of my family history and school record,’ said Mi Hyang. ‘I was also asked whether I had ever slept with a boy. I felt so ashamed to hear such a question.’ For the next ten years, she was banned from all contact with her family. Any breach of this rule was punishable by death.

According to her account, the Dear Leader alternated between being virtuous and licentious, depending on how much cognac he’d consumed.

At times, Mi revealed, he could be a maudlin drunk, singing along to sad Russian and Japanese music with tears in his eyes. And when drunk, she said, he loves nothing more than eating the genitalia of shark, believing it boosts his libido.

Devotion: North Koreans bow in front of a statue Kim's father, Kim Il-Sung

‘He looked so normal — like a next-door neighbour,’ she said. ‘He has many brown spots on his face, and his teeth are yellowish. My previous imaginations about the Dear Leader were shattered at that very moment.’

There have been repeated rumours that Kim Jong-il is dangerously paranoid and employs up to four ‘doubles’ — party cadres who have undergone extensive plastic surgery and voice coaching — to confuse potential enemies and scupper assassination attempts. Even more bizarrely, many believe he is, in fact, dead, having succumbed to alcohol-related illness, diabetes or cancer, and that the ‘current’ Kim is a doppelganger.

Either way, the man with the bouffant hair is one of the few who have fun in this sinister state. With the exception of favoured party cadres, most of the people live in misery and terror.

Danger: North Korea's nuclear missiles

Indeed, while Kim feasts on lobster, sushi and Kobe marbled beef at £100 a gram, chronically malnourished North Koreans have literally shrunk over the years. With millions starving, they are now, on average, five inches shorter than those just across the border in the South.

Terrified of flying, Kim travels everywhere in a 21- carriage armoured train, to which delicacies such as live lobster are airlifted daily, as he tours his various palaces.

While on board, he likes to relax with members of the ‘Pleasure Brigade’ and drink vintage Bordeaux wines. (His doctors have told him that his prodigious consumption of Hennessy cognac was killing him. One of his favourite stops is Mount Baekdusan — a sacred spot in Korean folklore, where, according to state mythology, Kim was born.

On this auspicious occasion, it is said, a star rose over the mountain and a double rainbow appeared — sure celestial signs that he was, indeed, god.

Reached by an underground road, this is also the site of the Dear Leader’s nerve centre. Here, fighter jets and helicopters are on constant standby inside bunkers dug deep into the mountain.

This extraordinary subterranean lair also boasts a 50-metre swimming pool , which features a massive portrait of him, made from gold tiles, on the bottom.

He keeps horses, homes stocked with vintage wines, and hires top chefs from around the world to cater for his palace blowouts.

In the so-called Noah’s Ark project, he has even struck a deal with Mugabe to acquire two of every one of Zimbabwe’s most endangered species.

The two men are long-time allies after North Korea helped Mugabe slaughter 20,000 rival Ndebele tribesmen.

Mugabe’s thugs are rounding up baby elephants, rhino, giraffe and zebra as part of the project. They are to be air-freighted to North Korea — prompting an outcry from conservationists, who warn such young creatures will not survive the trip.

But then Kim refuses to abide by any laws. Indeed, he once ordered his secret agents to kidnap the stars of a Seoul soap opera — simply because he wanted them to work on his television productions instead.

As well as women, and his own image, Kim loves fast cars. While his people travel by oxen or bike, he reputedly spent £12 million on cars last year alone, racing them around the grounds of his palaces.

But then money is no object. For Kim is an accomplished thief, plundering £4 billion from the country and placing it in secret Luxembourg bank accounts. In truth, the Dear Leader’s strange behaviour is simply that of a son following in the footsteps of a deranged father.

Kim il-sung, who died in 1994, became leader in 1948 and introduced state-wide murder and transformed North Korea into a private fiefdom, leading the country into the Korean War.



Grim poverty: North Koreans are five inches shorter than their southern cousins

But whatever the fables peddled by state media, the truth is that Kim was born in Siberia, where his father had fled with a rebel group during Japanese colonial rule.

Not that such an inconvenient secret would ever be allowed to find its way onto the streets of the nation’s surreal capital, Pyongyang, where his countless vanity projects and monuments remain illuminated even when the regular power cuts plunge the rest of the nation into darkness.

Here, when not threatening his neighbours, Kim goes about his playboy existence, indulging his extraordinary passions for film — his collection is said to number 20,000 and he has even written a book on the subject; playing golf — state media claim he regularly scores three holes in one per round, and opera.

Used to getting his own way, a rare humiliation came last year when the rock star Eric Clapton turned down the chance to perform for the Dear Leader and his son Kim Jong- chul, who became a fan while studying in Switzerland.

But while Kim Jong-il is a drunken, paranoid megalomaniac, experts warn that he’s also a cunning strategist, keeping his country in a constant state of war with the South to cement his grip on power, and regularly outwitting the international community.

And things can only get worse. Named part of the ‘Axis of Evil’ by former U.S. president George W Bush, Kim is now reportedly working on a secret nuclear programme to produce weapons capable of striking cities on America’s Pacific coast.

So Kim Jong-il lives in a very strange world — but the world should beware.

As his subjects would surely warn if they were allowed to speak without facing torture and death, we ignore this catsuit-wearing oddball at our peril.



