Kim Jong Il, North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung's son and heir-designate, wanted to give his father a special present on his 80th birthday in 1992. He decided on a quilt made from sparrow feathers, but only from the neck for their softness.

The younger Kim, now 52, ordered a "Campaign to Catch Sparrows." In the five months leading up to the birthday celebration, a frenzied North Korean populace killed and plucked 700,000 hapless birds.

Kim Il Sung, now 82, got his quilt. And Kims elder and junior-"Great Leader" and "Dear Leader" as they are called respectively in the North Korean press-gave thanks for the unwavering devotion of the North Korean people.

A nation of zombies led by despotic lunatics?

Many Western analysts and intelligence officials have portrayed the leaders of the isolated Pyongyang regime that way. These analysts suggest nothing they say can be believed or trusted.

Yet as the Clinton administration tries to figure out if the latest peace offering from Kim Il Sung is for real, longtime South Korean observers of Pyongyang's behavior are painting a different portrait of Kim Il Sung. They call him the ultimate survivor of Communist world politics, more the clever politician than the irrational guerrilla leader.

"Kim Il Sung is very shrewd, very rational and very strategic," said Ha Yong Chool, a professor of international relations at Seoul National University. "The prospect of success for his current strategy may not be good. But he knows how to play the big game."

And he has been playing for a long time.

Put in power by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II, he stayed there only because the Chinese army bailed him out after his disastrous decision to invade the South in 1950.

After the Korean War, he ruthlessly eliminated his domestic opposition as he tiptoed through the minefields of a growing Sino-Soviet split.

Over the years, his regime repeatedly engaged in dangerously provocative acts: A 1968 commando raid on the South Korean presidential palace; the 1968 seizure of the U.S. Navy ship Pueblo; a 1983 terrorist bombing in Burma that killed 17 South Korean government officials; a 1987 bomb that blew up a South Korean airliner with 115 people aboard.

He also has threatened often to again send his army-1.1 million strong-to force unification of the Korean Peninsula under his command.

To whip his people into ever longer hours of toil and self-sacrifice, he has propounded a vision of a society based on juche-self-reliance.

But as he found his economy falling farther behind that of the South, he did not let juche prevent him from taking economic aid from China and Russia.

Now, communism has collapsed in the former Soviet Union and its sphere. The two Germanies have reunified, and Kim's allies are headed down the capitalist path.

This is the aging dictator's latest political test: Can he leverage a suspected nuclear weapons program into Western aid and face-saving recognition that will allow him to pass his economically floundering regime onto his son?

The troubles faced by the two Kims suggest the "breakthrough" trumpeted by former President Jimmy Carter last weekend probably will break down, analysts said.

If it does, Carter's initiative will have turned out to be just one more roadblock thrown up by the isolated regime in its long, tortuous retreat toward history's dustbin.

The problem, analysts said, is the paradox at the heart of Kims' leadership: They want to open their economy to desperately needed trade and investment while maintaining s Stalinist-style regime, a trick no Communist government has been able to pull off.

North Korea's economy, which has been cut loose of Russian and Chinese largesse, has shrunk for four straight years, and last year's bad harvest has taken its people to the brink of starvation.

To let outsiders help will expose the North Korean people to the fact they have been fed lies about the regime's great successes, analysts said.

The same goes for his apparent decision to meet with South Korean President Kim Young Sam. Almost certainly the first item on a renewed North-South dialogue-after resolving the nuclear impasse-will be reducing tensions along the border and allowing humanitarian exchanges between the 10 million Koreans who have divided families. That, too, would provide millions of northerners with a view of the world from outside the grips of the propaganda machine.

"A genuine peace process would cause the collapse of their system in the long run," said Ok Tae Hwan, director of research planning at South Korea's Unification Ministry.

"He wants to maintain his political system. I don't think (the Carter deal) will help him."

The Great Leader's official biography says he was born Kim Song Chu into a peasant family at Pyongyang on April 15, 1912, two years after Japan annexed the Korean Peninsula.

He was the eldest of three sons. His father, educated by American missionaries, soon moved to Manchuria to run a herb pharmacy.

Young Kim, educated in Chinese schools, never made it past the 8th grade. He was expelled for "subversive student activities." His father died in 1926 at age 32 when Kim was 14; his mother, a devout Christian, died six years later at age 40.

After Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, Kim joined one of the many guerrilla groups that sprang up to fight the colonialists. While many Western intelligence agencies have cast doubts on Kim's early guerrilla activities, a 1988 biography by Suh Dae Sook-based on extensive research of Japan's Manchurian police records-suggested Kim was a minor officer in a small Chinese-led group.

It was in this period that Kim took the name of Kim Il Sung, a legendary anti-Japanese resistance fighter who died in 1931.

By 1941, the efficient Japanese occupation had wiped out most of the insurgents, and Kim fled with his new wife to the Russian Far East. There they spent the war years in relative safety while being trained in Stalinist-style politics. The boy who would become the Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, was born on Feb. 16, 1942, the first of three children.

Near the end of the war, Soviet and U.S. war planners-including future Secretary of State Dean Rusk-divided the Korean Peninsula at the 38th parallel. After the Japanese surrender, the Russian army moved into the northern half. Over the next three years, they installed a Soviet-style system with Kim Il Sung at its head.