Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. This week we're going to look at North Korea, and in particular the leader of North Korea, the fascinating and eccentric Kim Jong Lun. Who is Kim Jong Lun? We have this tendency to think of him as a kind of wild eyed, tyrant, ridiculous, pot bellied, more or less a child with an eccentric love of the Chicago Bulls, a love that's led him straight into the arms of the almost equally eccentric Dennis Rodman. At the same time, we also think of Kim Jong Lun as a dangerous guy. Tortures his own citizens, killed off his uncle, tortures Americans who happened to find their way into North Korea, and, perhaps most frighteningly, commands a nuclear arsenal and increasingly sophisticated missiles that have the range to attack Japan and maybe even someday the United States itself. Donald Trump is also interested in Kim Jong Lun, and in fact, it's hard to think of any other world leader except possibly Vladimir Putin who's gotten quite the amount of attention that Donald Trump has given to Kim Jong Un. On some level, Trump treats Kim Jong Un like a dangerous wild man. On the other hand, often it sounds like our present has a lot of love for Kim Jong Un. I just received a beautiful letter from Kim Jong Un. I can't tell you the letter, obviously, but it was a very her still, very warm, very nice letter. I appreciate it, and I'll say it again. I think that North Korea has tremendous potential. So is Kim Jong un genuinely crazy? Or is he crazy like a fox? Is he so clever that he's managed actually to play the president of the United States and to use rational strategy to gain control over his country, improve the condition of his citizens, and advance his interests on the world stage. These are questions that Anna Fifield from The Washington Post has been trying to make sense of in her new book, The Great Successor The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un. To understand the North Korean leader's rise to power, she started by looking at his childhood. When he was twelve years old, Kim Jong Un moved to Berne, the capital of Switzerland, where his older brother was already studying at a private English language school there. He joined him there. And you know, he had traveled in the outside world before. His mother had taken him to Disneyland in Paris and in Tokyo, you know, so he'd been out in the world. But this is as Disneyland as the world, true. Yeah, maybe just as fake as Pyongyang, but a different kind of fake. So he moved there to Switzerland, and this was a chance for him to experience a little bit of the world and kind of have more freedom because ironically, you know, even though he was this princeling in North Korea, he was very isolated there. He lived on these palatial compounds. He didn't even know his half siblings. He only had his older brother and old younger sister to play with. He didn't go to school. He had tutors exactly. He's like some you know, medici from Yeah. So he when he went to Switzerland, that was a chance for him to have a little bit of normality. So he went to school. He was said to be the son of North Korean diplomats. He went with his aunt and uncle who they were posed as his parents during that time. So, yeah, he played basketball every day after school, he sat through classes. You know, he struggled to learn German, but he did eventually become conversant in it and in English during that period, and he was able to have something of a normal life. And I actually managed to track down his aunt and uncle who looked after him during that period. They defected to the United States in nineteen ninety eight while they were looking after Kim Jong un. You have a great theory about why they did that. Tell us what that was. Yeah, so when I met them, they told me it was because partly because they wanted to be a bridge between North Korea and the United States, and partly because that sounds so an outside of that sounds absurd, and I take it you to me, it also sounded absurd, and I didn't believe it for a second. They also said they were trying to get medical assistance for Kim Jong UN's mother, who had been diagnosed with breast cancer, And I think that's really the truth. They saw that their linked to the regime, there the reason that they held this privileged status within the regime. You know, had a terminal illness, so mainly Kim Jong UN's mother. Kim Jong UN's mother was not formally speaking married to Kim Jong UN's father. No, she was a de facto First Lady of North Korea and very powerful within that regime. So I think they saw that their privileged status would not exist forever and they took the opportunity to escape. So they did, in the middle of the night, take a taxi to the American embassy and burn and ask for political asylum, and they were granted it. So they've been living here since nineteen ninety eight. Now in your book, you protect their identities, but you must do an amazing job of sleuthing to turn them up, and you do have some really fascinating detail about what they're doing with themselves. Yeah, that's right. So they arrived in the United States, was very limited English. They were obviously the CIA wanted to talk to them a lot at the beginning about what they knew about the family and the regime. But they quickly settled into life in America. By you know, they opened a dry cleaners, just like many Korean immigrants to the United States, and they quickly adapted to this life. They were working incredibly hard, their three children went into American schools and flourished. You know, they have all gone on and graduated from good colleges and are living normal kind of Korean immigrant to American dream lives. I mean, I can hardly imagine a better cover for people fleeing North Korea than mixing in with the community and opening a small business and working hard at it. Are they financially in need of doing that, do you think? I mean, they're working hard as part of their cover. They're working hard because they're broken. The only money they have is the money they're making from their drakening business. They're not broke, They are comfortable. They told me that they received two hundred thousand dollars from the CIA at the beginning to buy a house, and that they have not received any assistance since them. I mean, that's what they told me. That's all I have. But you know, that's incredible. I mean that could be the government's certainly a cheap yeah, well yeah, And but they have worked very hard and they have lived their own American dream. And presumably, although you're not disclosing their their identities, prisumably their identities are known to North Korean intelligence or do you think they're genuinely missed or skipped out by by North Korean intelligence. I imagine the North Koreans would know about them, but I don't know. I don't know if they know where they are. Yeah, I mean, and that was a big part of the reason that I went to great lengths to preserve their anonymity and not disclose exactly where they are, because yes, I do not want the North Koreans to find them the right and I hope you didn't even write it down in your notes on any electronic device. I did not in my brain all over which they can get into. So here's young Kim Jong un. You describe how he first went to the American school, and then after his aunt and uncle left, he actually switched to a public school, to a German speaking Swiss publics or state school. You say he had been isolated before and this was his chance to interact with other kids, But in your telling and from the people you spoke to, it sounds like he was actually a pretty lonely kid, even in Switzerland. Yeah. I think that he found it quite frustrating not to be able to communicate. So when he went into this German speaking school after his aunt and uncle had defected, and you know that was probably the coats. To avoid having to explain why his parents suddenly changed overnight. He went into a like a reception class where he was learning German, learning his lessons in very easy German at the beginning to adjust, and then he went into a normal classroom there, but he did seem to have some difficulties fitting in. Some former classmates described how he would lash out. He would kick their shins or spit at them and things in frustration. But then he did have a couple of good friends who he did invite back to his house, and one of them, who was the son of Portuguese immigrants, Kim Jong actually told him. He showed him a picture of Kim Jong il and said this is my father, and this kid laughed and said, yeah, right, your father as the leader of North Korea, and Kim Jong wan just let it go. And of course this classmate Frand discovered some years later that Kim Jong Gond really was telling the truth. So it's not a normal childhood by any measure, even though it may have been comparatively more normal than it was for Kim Jong Gond. Where he lived at home in North Korea. Yeah, nothing about his childhood was anywhere And what his aunt told me was that from that day, his eighth birthday, when he was unveiled as the future leader of North Korea, it had just become impossible for him to live a normal life. And some of the kids who knew him in Switzerland said they did find it kind of weird and surprising that when he was out on the basketball court after school there would often be this little lineup of Korean adults sitting in deck chairs, cheering and clapping excessively for him whenever he scored a point in the game. Can I actually ask about the basketball because that will turn out to be very important later on. His obsession with the Chicago Bulls in particular, who were the greatest team playing basketball at the time that he was a kid, turned out to be relevant to his later career and will come to that. But why basketball, first of all, any sense of why this archetypally American sport, which admittedly was globalizing very much in this period of time, in part through the avenue of the Bulls and their great star Michael Jordan. But he thought on why he became obsessed with basketball and the other question I'm dying to know is was he any good at it? It's not that easy to play basketball, especially if you're a short and slightly round child. I mean, there's loving it and then there's loving to play at Those aren't exactly the same thing. Yeah, right, So it's a funny story how he became interested and there. When he was a child, he was really obsessed with machines like planes and anything with an engine. Boys, Yeah, exactly. He loved to make model airplanes and fly them and things like that. But his mother became very concerned that he was so obsessive about this. You know, he would ring he's making a model ship. He would ring an actual naval engineer from the North Korean People's Army to ask a question at three o'clock in the morning. You know, this is his sense of entitlement, and the admiral would answer the phone. Can be hard to read those instructions. And so his mother was concerned that he was becoming too obsessive with this, and she wanted to get him into sport. And there is this Korean belief, you know, South Korean, North Korea, to this day that if you play basketball you'll grow taller, and so his mother channeled him into basketball. He actually is a few inches taller than his father was, so you know, who knows, maybe I worked a little, but so she encouraged this, and Kim Jong un just basically switched from one obsession to the other. So he you know, he had all the gear, all the spalleding, you know, official NBA balls. He used to sleep with his basketball also, like a lot of American kids, right, absolutely, I slap was mine, you know what I mean? You know that very characteristic of a kid who just really loved was a sport. Yeah, that's right. And so then he would go out at every opportunity he had a basketball hope at his apartment building where he was, he would go out to the nearby high school and play with other kids every single day after school. Joe may have been his only form of social interaction that wasn't mediated through language. Yeah, exactly, no lang. I mean he was trying. Yeah, but you don't really need to speak language. Pay basketball. It enables you to communicate in some way through that. That's what you know, the NBA would like us to think of that, and I think that is sort of true. Yeah, And so I think he was not exceptionally good or even very good at that time. He did love it, okay, I think he was Okay, he wasn't unspeakably bad. No, he put in a lot of practice at that time, and he really is a really serious fan, as we would come to see later. You know, the very first time that Dennis Rodman went to North Korea, he took three Harlem Globetrotters with him because his people thought, you know, the Harlem Globetrotters with all their on court antics would be very entertaining and very accessible for North Korean people. Kim Jongan hated it. He wanted a serious game. So the next time Dennis Rodman went, he took these retired all stars because Kim jong n wanted a real, proper game to play there. So he is really serious about this, and he does follow it very closely. Say something about the weird way by which Dennis Rodman, of all of the players of the Chicago Bulls from the era where Kim Jongan was a kid and a fan, ended up being the person you mentioned in the book that the CIA actually thought of sending Dennis Rodman in the first place. I don't know how you came across that that's a fascinating thing. I had never read that anywhere else before, but that it didn't work, and yet Rodman still ended up going. How did that happen? Yeah, that's right. So I think when Kim Jongan took over, American intelligence agents and you know, administration officials saw an opportunity to try to engage this new leader. So the first wink actually knew about it, though, was when Vice Media took Dennis Rodman. They had initially tried to convince Michael Jordan, but for some reason he was not so keen on going to North Korea. They got Dennis Rodman instead. But this was down on his luck and needed the money, exactly happy to go. But this idea did not originate with Vice. First of all, the CIA had talked about taking a Chicago ball or sending a Chicago bull to North Korea, and they had settled on Dennis Rodman as well, and for whatever reason, that didn't work out. But at the same time and the last years of the Obama in the middle years actually of the Obama administration, outside experts were going into the Oval office and one of them actually suggested that they take advantage of the Chicago Bull fascination and try to, you know, make a bridge that way. So it didn't go anywhere that Obama, very excellent basketball player, did not appeal to for a long time. Yeah, yeah, but it did not appeal to him at that time. It took Dennis Rodman and Vice to make that happen. Once you brought up Vice and Dennis Rodman, I just have to ask you about the surreal scenes that you describe in your book on the trip that Vice put together at which Rodman went. None of it sounds like ordinary journalism. None of it makes Kim Jong un sound like an ordinary head of state. Tell me about how that happened and about the weirdness that ensued. Yeah, so VISs did come up with this idea to take a Chicago Bull. They got Rodman, and the North Koreans responded without really knowing that Vice News wasn't your standard media organization at their time, but they had told their leader that Dennis Rodman wanted to go, and he accepted and off they went. And yes, there was the basketball side of things, but also there was a lot of partying that went on during these trips. So it sounds like everybody was drunk or drugged out of their minds. Yeah. In fact, you know, one stage during the course of the evening on that Vice trip, Dennis Rodman had to tell the Vice entourage, you know, the Vice team, to tone it down a little. They were so out of control. And one of them said to me, you know, we knew things were bad when Dennis Rodman was telling us to cool it. Yeah. There was a lot of drinking. There was karaoke. Apparently Kim Jong un sang some James Brown get on up during this evening. One of the people who was on the Vice team was playing the saxophone. Kim Jong UN's uncle, uncle Jong Song Tech, the one he would later have executed, was there that night, and there were a lot of quite brazen toasts. I mean, Dennis Rodman stood up and said something about how Kim Jong UN's father and grandfather had done some screwed up things. I'll paraphrase there. Can I see what says in your book your father and grandfather did some fucked up shit he did, and everybody was holding their breath. And to get away with saying that to the leader of North Korea and walk away cleanly, what I don't know is how the Korean translated translated that sentence you purely one would hope, I would hope. Yeah, although you were saying that Kim jonglen can speak English. Yeah, he seems to be able to understand some English. Who we've seen him when he was talking to Donald Trump. He seemed to be nodding and getting the jokes first. I don't know how his curse words are and whether he got that, but anyway, early in one's education to speak English on the basketball Yeah, yeah, you're right. But anyway, once it was translated, he laughed and everybody breathed aside of relief, and on they continued. So I think you know the story is of that trip, and as well the vice film that they made out of it contributed to a kind of deepening of the perception that Kim jongn was not the kind of person who was going to be able to consolidate power and then actually govern as essentially a monarch, because once you've got not one, not too but three rounds of succession, you can call it a dictatorship, but it has monarchic components. And you make a great point in the book that there's an imagined bloodline that takes all of the Kim Jong's family and takes them back to a mythical birth on Mount Pectu, which is a kind of site of kings. So it really really is monarchic, and I guess I want to turn now to this question of how he actually pulled it off and surprised everybody. So let me start by asking you whether you think that it's to do with Kim jongon's own personal qualities ultimately that have enabled him to consolidate power, or whether it's really a product of a recognition in the senior echelons of the regime, not so senior as to be executed or assassinated, but just below that that the monarchy works better with a figurehead at the top of it, and they're better off keeping him than they would be with the uncertainty and disorder that would follow his removal. Yeah, I think he has shown a natural aptitude for this. There is a reason why he was the son who was chosen as the successor. There weren't so many choices, no, but there were three, and the third son should have been the last choice, right, but he rose to the top. You know, he very shrewdly used that North Korean brains trust the people who had been supporting his grandfather and then his father. You know, if we look at the man who walked around the hearse at his father's funeral with Kim Jong On at the front of the car, those people had been propping up this regime forever they were They were the regime, and Kim Jong iarn had their support. They helped in the transition process. They made sure that power remained with him, and once they had served their purpose, he got rid of because these were the powerful people who had their own potential factions and power bases and could theoretically pose a challenge to him. So there was the head of the Korean People's Army had helped Kim Jong An, had helped his father. He was disappeared and never seen again. And then we had the propaganda chief, the guy who was in charge of perpetuating all of this mythology about the bloodline and the exceptional gun skills. At the age of five, he also disappeared from view, never seen again. Uncle Jong Song Tech, who was close to his older Kim Jongn's older half brother Kim Jong nam, and who had been very much in charge of economic relations with China and appears to have been kind of a reformist minded person, very charismatic, gregarious character. I've heard so many stories about his drinking and his karaoke skills and things. He had a really sizeable power base. He is. He doesn't just disappear from view. He is hauled out of a politbureau meeting very publicly. There's this long dire tribe against him of like Shakespearean kind of rhetoric, calling him a thrice cursed treacherous being, and then he has executed a few days later. If you are somebody powerful in that regime and you see all of these other people humiliated and executed in this way, you are going to think twice about questioning this guy and challenging this guy. So partly it's through this fear and Kim Jong uns showing that nobody is safe, not even his own family members, that he's been able to look after this regime. But the other part of it is that he has made sure that the people around him, the people who keep him in power, have become rich under him. They are living a life much better than ever before. They have been able to use their positions in a very corrupt way to earn a lot of money on the side through business dealings and you know, making money during their travels. So those people are living a better life than ever before. So through you, through loyalty, developing this loyalty and keeping everybody fearful, he's managed to keep it together. So you're describing what sounds to me like a two track strategy. The first track is rely on the people who think they need you to get into power and to consolidate your power, and then one by one knock them off. You call that the Richard the third strategy, as long as you're being Shakespearean, Yeah, and the good thing about that strategy is you knock off your potential opponents. The risky thing about that strategy, see Richard the third is that you've knocked off your potential opponents, and there's the danger that you won't have a base once you've done that. And then that leads to the second strategy that you're describing, which is actually to improve the status of the people who you are relying the new people, as it were, the ones who were rising by virtue of your position and who therefore will owe what they have to you in particular, and not to your father. How has Kim Jong un gotten that new rising class of elites to be so much better off than they were in the past. Yeah, he's allowed a lot or tolerated a lot more kind of market based activity. So there's now a lot of trading that happens between China and North Korea. And if you are senior in the regime and involved in any kind of trade whatsoever, and so many people are, Like all of these huge apartment towers in North Korea have been built, a lot of it through military labor, but Chinese money and Chinese investments, So they are selling these contracts to Chinese investors and taking a cut on the side. So these people have been able to earn a lot of money. People who are sent to or to earn money for Kim Jong earn, and he has a whole special unit setting up just to filling his coffers. They have also been able to enrich themselves on the side. So because these people have been allowed to be corrupt and making their money, yeah, they have more reason than ever to be loyal to Kim Jong ear And they had this new band of loyal people who would not enjoy this privileged position. And these riches if they were to defect to South Korea and drive a taxi. So from what you're describing, it sounds like he's created a one percent via corruption. And to do that, there has to be a part from which you can steal, and the part is trade. Increased economic activity and increased trade more than existed previously. And in your account, by allowing that relatively small tranche of people to get a bit of the pie as it comes into him, I mean he may get the line share of it, but allowing them to scrape off a certain amount and make real money, he's built an elite class that is loyal to him in a way that looks a bit like the model that the senior ranks of the Chinese Communist Party followed, not in the last decade, but in two or three decades before then, when China was just beginning its market opening, when of course, party senior party officials became tremendously rich and created an elite that then consolidated itself and supported the government. Do you think he's copying China in that regard In some respects, yes, but in some respects no. I mean, I think he would like some economic development and that sense that life is getting better, but he can't have even Chinese style reform and opening like even that is too risky for him because the difference there is that there is a kind of jockeying for power within the Chinese Communist Party. You know, they not every leader has been called Mao in China, right, There is a competition, and Kim Jong un cannot have that kind of competition within the ranks of North Korea because it would be very hard for him to say, or would have been very hard for him to say that a twenty seven year old marshall who's never spent a day in the military and has no political experience is the best guy for the job. But he could allow competition for the second rank, as it were. I mean, if he's treated more or less as a monarch, he could allow among the elites some jockeying for power in his regime by do you do a good job, do you bring in money, do you show loyalty to me? I mean, maybe he is and there has been some changes there people. You know, in the Communist Party ranks, people do rise and fall there, and so we have seen a number of people disappear from the Politburo people rising, so he has tried to make his own. Every place has politics, I mean, even an authoritary and dictatorship has parted. North Korea has hawks and doves, you know they do. There is this, you know, he has to manage that. Let's talk now about his expansion of market reforms more broadly, to reach a larger and larger segment of the population through gradual marketization. That seems to be in a way both the most brilliant and also the most high risk aspect of his policy, the attempt to sort of improve the standards of living not just of a one percent but of a growing entrepreneurial class. You're in a country in North Korea where historically entrepreneurship was completely prohibited and punished, and if people did it on the sly, they were very limited in what they could get away with. And now there's been a gradual but very meaningful opening of entrepreneurial opportunities. Is it working, Yes, it is working to an extent. This trend started after the famine at the end of the nineteen nineties. Out of necessity, people were like literally starving. Today, the whole generation was malnourished and a shorter exactly exactly. He brand damaged. Yeah, so that was lerated at the time out of necessity, but Kim jongn has allowed that to expand under quite constrained circumstances though. So now there are markets. There are more than four hundred and fifty marketplaces around the country, more than double the number than when he took over. Every major city in town has one at least one, and this has become the life. Kind of marketplaces are you describing, Well, this is a thing that they've become, you know, quite institutionalized. There are huge buildings built by the state. The state rents out the stalls. They take may make money from the rent. They tax the sales in there, so the state is really enriching itself. And what's being sold everything, Yeah, everything. Able to visit one, I have not been allowed to visit one, but I've seen a lot of secret footage from inside these markets and talk to people about them. You know, there's the daily necessity, So a lot of people are selling food. There's rice that's coming in. You can buy electronics from China. You can buy rice cookers, and you can buy glittery cell phone cases. You can buy if you have the money and more and more people do. You can buy everything, So this is a way that people are able to earn their own living independent of the state. This is a huge change in North Korea. I mean, it's giving up on the core notion of self reliance through radical Marxian and communism exactly exactly. I mean, even though they stick to that in their propaganda, it's not happening in effect anymore. But there are still constraints and people do have to be kind of very careful not to run a foul of the system, like if you are seen to be living too large or you know, it's not so much the authorities, you don't have to worry about the authorities. But in a bigger risk is that is jealousy. You know, where once people in North Korea were equally poor, now there are more and more middle class people. There's more conspicuous consumption, you know, and if your neighbor sees you living too good at life, they might rat on you and try and make up something about you or tell people that you are corrupt and then us necessary feature of all inequality. But inequality has turned out to be, for a better or worse, a necessary feature of all relatively marketized economies. Yeah, but when you're told every day that you live in a socialist paradise and that the leader is, you know, taking great care of you, that can be even more hard to stomach. I think I'm sure that's true. China pulled it off, though. I mean, there in China you still have the rhetoric of state socialism even as you've got increasingly marketized economy, and you've got it vastly greater inequality than previously existed. Yeah, I mean. And the reason I say that it is working in North Korea and that people are now much more entrepreneurial and aspirational is because Kim Jong un hasn't really had to do anything to allow this improvement. You know, people have been able to trade and earn their way to a better standard of living. You know, sometimes life is a little bit better, you know, better than horrible, you know, slightly less horrible. Sometimes it's a lot better, depending on how successful these people are. But he has been able to take all of the credit for this. He's been able to say that under his great leadership, people's lives are improving without having to do very much at all. The next challenge for him is how he sustains that improvement. Because I mean, one of the fascinating things I discovered when I went to Switzerland and I leafed through the curriculum from the time that Kim john Lund was at school and burn and all students in Switzerland learn about the French Revolution. They learn about rising expectations and how you know those expectations going unmet can lead to revolution. And I wonder if he remembers those lessons and now if he is thinking about how he sustains the sense of things getting better. And that is why I conclude that he needs to press ahead with economic development. He needs to try to attract foreign investment. He really needs to get rid of those American led sanctions and allow trade and money to flow unfettered, because you know it will run out of steam. You're describing somebody who has the perfect training, as it were, for his job. You know, maybe growing up part of the time in Switzerland didn't teach him to eliminate his enemies. Maybe he had to learn that by watching The Godfather or just by watching his father do it. And he managed to do that. But the marketized reforms, the gradual marketized reforms, sound very much like what one would expect from someone who grew up in the West, who saw the capitalism was delivering much greater standard of living than anyone in North Korea was experiencing, and when he came to power, decided to open things up. Not politically by any stretch of the imagination, but economically. I mean, is that what you're saying, that's connecting the dots. No. I think that his time in Switzerland taught him that if he lived in a democracy, he'd be in nobody. He'd just be another kid struggling to get by. He wouldn't be loved and adored at every turn. You know that the Swiss or the Western liberal democratic model was not for him. I think it showed him that he needed to keep his bizarre family personality cult intact if he was going to continue to enjoy this very privileged position at the top. But does it have to Can I just push back a moment? I mean, someone is raised to be a prince, he's told from an early age that his destiny is to become a prince. He does then does prince like things, you know, succeeding to power, killing off his enemies. Eventually we haven't talked about it, but killing off his own brother in this spectacular airport assassination. These are all things that are in the script for a prince. It doesn't require, I don't think, for us to explain this behavior to think that, you know, he saw, he saw that he couldn't have made it into democracy. I mean, it's just natural. If this is your destiny, you proceed along this destiny. Yeah, I mean, I think the bottom line is that, especially since so many people, including the President of the United States, since we're coming to him, I said that he's a rational or crazy in some way. I mean, the conclusion that I very much draw is that he has not. He has acted perfectly rationally and in a calculated manner. With all of this, with the brutal executions, with the gradual opening on the economic side, and the tolerance of markets, all of the stuff exactly, It makes perfect sense if you are a totalitarian leader whose primary goal is staying in power. So your rationalist. Kim Jong un has his great interlocutor today in Donald Trump, whom you just mentioned, and I want to ask you about their dance. They're in some very complex and intricate dance where they're close and they're far, and they're close and they're far. How rationally do you think Kim Jong un has acted in that engagement and how successful do you read his efforts as having been, I mean very successful. I think he's been in the driver's seat the entire time, and he's really figured out how to play Trump. I mean, he knows how to push the president's buttons. You know, the North Koreans have as you know, the Chinese and the Japanese, on the South Koreens, everybody, they've devoted a lot of energy to try to figure out Donald Trump. You know, they were so mystified by all these tweets at the beginning and what did this mean. But the North Koreans, the people on the top of the regime, they have read the Art of the Deal. I've heard about instances where North Korean officials have quoted Donald Trump's tweets. They have an encyclopedic knowledge of everything he said. They're officials who have read Fire and Fury, Michael Wolf's account of inside the White House. So they have really studied how to deal with him and what he responds to. So after Kim Jong n, you know, completed as he said, his nuclear and missile program and was ready to turn to diplomacy. He figured out how to flatter the president. You know, all of these like beautiful love letters that Donald Trump talks about, enormous physically enormous love letters, you point out right, not just you know, flowery flattery, but physically enormous, like comedic sized envelopes. He's sent a million dollar check from publishers bearing exactly, but Donald Trump responds to it. He shows everybody who goes into the Oval office these letters because he's so proud of it, and it's enabled Kim Jong on. You know, look at that first summit in Singapore, they agreed to almost nothing. It was so vague, but Donald Trump walked out explaining away the human rights abuses of North Korea, saying that you know, there are a lot of rough places out there, you know, dismissing what happened to Otto Wambiera as a way. You know that that's what how they got back to talks and things. And that's the American who died after being in a comma exactly, a healthy young man who left North Korea brain dead. Through this flattery, Kim Jong n has managed to win over Donald Trump, and you know, the style worked without Jong Leon ever having to get to the substance. Kim Jongon certainly seems to have captured a lot of Trump mind share. I think immediately of something that you reported for the first time in your book, namely that Kim Jong Nam, his older brother who was assassinated, had actually been in contact with the CIA, And shortly after you reported that in your book, Donald Trump went public with the statement that if it were under his auspices, he would never have allowed this connection to take place. I saw the information about the CIA with respect to his brother or half brother, and I would tell him that would not happen under my auspices. So there you have the President United States responding to your book specifically in reference to Kim Jong Leon. Why do you think he's doing that? Is he trying to defend him his friendship, as it were, from the idea that he would mess with Kim Jongon's older brother by via the CIA. I cannot explain Donald Trump's thanking on that. That may not be part of your job, but if you fueled it, so you have to say, oh, yeah, no, no, I mean you could hear the Champagne corks popping in Pyongyang. Right, The CIA agents call North Korea the hardest of the hard tasks. Right. They true for journalists too, isn't it. I mean, when you're North Korea correspond There is like almost zero human intelligence on North Korea, like in vast contrast to almost every other autocratic regime around. So the fact that the CIA had managed to recruit Kim Jong Nam, somebody who, though he didn't have contact with his brother, still had good contacts at the top of the regime. He was still in close contact with senior officials, that was a real coup for them to have been able to get any information from somebody so senior and so well connected. So for Donald Trump then to say that the US would not try to gather this kind of intelligence about a man who's threatening to like send nuclear tipped missiles to the Capitol or to the White House. You know, can you imagine in your account, Kim Jonguan is the dictator who has everything. He's rational, he's reforming, he's improving the standard of living for his people. He need to do it more, but he's doing it. And he's played the President of the United States beautifully. What's next for him, and what's the succession plan beyond him if any Yeah, I mean, I think now he is getting into quite tricky territory because the economic side of it is challenging, you know, to try to allow more economic development without allowing opening, without allowing more damaging information coming into the country. That's something that's going to be a real challenge for him because as these bags of rice and you know, solar panels come across the border from North Korea, so too do USB drives and SD cards that contain movies and dramas and music from the outside world. Some opening is happening. You show that convincingly, yes, So he has to balance that. But he also has to try to balance this diplomatic side. He's managed so far to string along Donald Trump. He also has the South Korean president playing a mediator role. But I think you know, Kim Jong und does not want to go up his nuclear weapons. There's no way he's going to feel secure enough to do that anytime soon. Just to push back on that, it would never be sensible for him to give up his nuclear weapons. Giving them up is an invitation to regime change. Keeping them is a guaranteur of regime such it would seem to me as close to a truth of political science as one could imagine that if you've got nuclear weapons, you don't give them up. Kim John was taking over in two thousand and eleven as the Arab spring was exploding. You know, he saw Mohamma Gadaffi, who gave up his nuclear capability and a deal with the United States, dragged from a ditch, and you know that must be burned in exactly, burned in his brain. So now, I mean, I think he does want to make it look like he is willing to give up something, and maybe he is willing to give up something, some hardware. You know, all of these missile launches and nuclear tests have shown he has a lot of capability. He's getting all the parts he needs. He can retain the capability while looking like he's giving up some ICBMs and things there. So the challenge for him now is to sustain this, to make the US look like they are getting something so that he can get something in return. You know, he desperately needs sanctions relief because these sanctions have been hurting North Korea like never before. How's his health? His health is not great. I mean look at him and the times he's been coming out in Vladivostok in South Korea in the DMZ there, he is not a healthy man. He's a chain smoker. He's struggling for breath, and this is one of the most puzzling things to me, like, if Kim Jong un is concerned about leading for the rest of his natural life, he's not doing much to take care of himself, because if there's one thing that poses a risk to him, it's his health. Thank you very much, enam really super fascinating. Thank you for that avenue and window into the thought process of somebody who comes across from your account as hitting all the right notes. Thank you, No, it was my great pleasure to be here. Talking to Anna Fifield and reading her book really made me deeply reconsider my instinct to think of Kim Jong un as a bit of a buffoon. She's made a very convincing case to me that he's actually deeply rational. That has major consequences for how we think about our interactions with North Korea going forward. A rational actor is not to be addressed by silly symbols like basketball summits or oversized letters. The fact that he uses those symbols doesn't mean he takes them seriously. It just means that he thinks that our president takes them seriously. What we need to do if Kim Jong un is a very careful, thoughtful dictatorial leader is meet him with the tools that influence the behavior of dictators, that is strength and incentives. Perhaps we can give him the right set of interests to encourage the development of his own economy and gradually slowly and cautiously lead him towards some opening so that the country that he runs is no longer the brutal dictatorship that it still remains to this day. Even as we do that, though, we have to keep in mind that he will be thinking about one thing, and one thing only, the interests of Kim Jong un. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia Genecott, with engineering by Jason Gambrell and Jason Rostkowski. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Our k is composed by Luis GERA special thanks to the Pushkin Brass Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg and Mia Lobel. I'm Noah Feldman. You can follow me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. This is deep background