To appreciate the woeful weakness of international intelligence on the family crime syndicate otherwise known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (aka DPRK or North Korea), consider this news report on Wednesday (April 29) about South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) testimony before the ROK National Assembly:
It’s highly likely that Kim Jong-un will visit Russia next month, the NIS also said. “We have confirmed that no hotel reservations have been made for Kim in Moscow. However, since North Korea’s embassy in Moscow has adequate sleeping facilities, hotel reservations don’t seem to matter.”
Oopsie! The very next day (April 30) we hear this from the Kremlin:
Dmitri S. Peskov, the personal spokesman to President Vladimir V. Putin, said that Moscow had learned of Mr. Kim’s decision through “diplomatic channels,” and that the tentative plans were canceled because of “internal Korean affairs,” the Interfax news agency reported.
Embarrassing? Yes. And this mis-assessment is actually even worse than it might seem at first.
To be sure: the North Korean regime’s decision-making process is enshrouded in a veil of state-enforced secrecy and officially inculcated strategic deception (what the Soviets used to call maskirovka) to keep foreign enemies, real and imagined, off balance.
But the notion that it was ever “highly likely” that the Dear Respected would have willingly ventured out from his own hagiographic bubble, and into the glare of an unforgiving, independent scrutiny by the foreign leaders and international media gathered for Moscow’s victory commemoration next month, reveals a basic lack of understanding about the essence of the North Korean system—and a basic lack of familiarity with the regime’s history.
The last “public” voyage abroad by one of the Kim dynasty’s designated scions was “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il’s visit to China in 1983. It was a disaster. While the DPRK of course portrayed the visit as a triumph, the Chinese camera crews showed a bumbling, fidgeting Kim Jong Il nervously gawking at Chinese calligraphy he obviously couldn’t read, and seating himself on the wrong side of a disgusted Deng Xiaoping at an honorific dinner before being instructed to move to his proper chair. (And by the way, this was China 1983: not to put too fine a point on it, the official media there were not exactly in the ‘throes of glasnost’.)
Though the Dear Leader did visit China thereafter on numerous occasions, he would never again subject himself to unedited foreign film footage: only carefully staged photo-ops.
The Dear Respected, to be sure, would appear to have more stage confidence than his departed father: but that is a low bar.
Under the carefully controlled conditions of the DPRK media, Kim Jong Un can be recorded delivering a pretty rousing speech—almost reminiscent of his grandfather Great Leader Kim Il Sung, who genuinely possessed the oratorical gift.
But Russia’s Interfax news agency is not North Korea’s KCNA. Even in a semi-free journalistic environment, the narrative of a Kim Jong Un trip to a gathering with world leaders runs the heavy risk of ending up as a sort of freak-show story. Unfair though it may be, any mistake or slip-up would be captured and re-broadcast ceaselessly and without mercy on the 24/7 news cycle. And this is to say nothing of the whispers from foreign dignitaries about Dear Respected’s debut performance abroad, and the commentary of the journalists from open societies, who are all too prepared to treat this as a comic novelty item.
For his own part, it is not clear whether Dear Respected is diplomatically housebroken—much less salonfaehig. Interacting with foreign dignitaries in next month’s Moscow setting would require a somewhat higher standard of comportment than his most familiar “foreign exchange” to date: his celebrated in-house drinking bout with visiting-circus-act Dennis Rodman.
In sum: almost nothing positive could accrue to the North Korean regime from sending its Boy Wonder to Moscow—while the negatives could be devastating. Just last week came the report that a new “elite guard” had been established within North Korea to monitor and suppress any nascent “anti-Kim activity.” How much more onerous would be their duties if Dear Respected returned from Moscow as a globalized laughing-stock?
North Korea may be the world’s least open society these days—but its borders are no longer entirely impermeable where flows of information are concerned. News often manages to get in these days, after a fashion. And there are few sorts of news as subversive to the authority of a dictatorship as mocking humor about it—no matter how low that humor may be. East European dissidents understood this back in the bad old days. And Pyongyang understands this very well today—just look at its reaction to “The Interview.”
None of this is to say that Kim Jong Un would never decide to visit Moscow (or some other overseas venue) and expose himself to intense examination by the outside world. After all, we already have some reason to question the quality of his judgment. But we should all understand why such a move would constitute nothing less than an error in judgment—and potentially, a grave one. Would that international “intelligence” services studying North Korea could recognize such an elementary reality, too.
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