The power behind the throne in North Korea was a dashing accordion player in his youth, whose life changed when he met the daughter of autocratic North Korean founder Kim Il-sung at university and wooed and married her despite the dictator’s opposition.
Now an ascetic-looking, bespectacled 65, Jang Song-thaek has overcome a purge, bitter palace intrigue and personal tragedy to become the chief adviser to his nephew Kim Jong-un, the third-generation leader of North Korea after his father Kim Jong-il’s death last week.
While little is publicly known about North Korea’s first family, acquaintances, South Koreans who met Jang during a 2002 visit and analysts say he could steer the young Kim toward opening up one of the world’s most isolated states.
Photo: Reuters
“He did seem to be someone who’s more interested in the outside of North Korea and more interested in the rest of the world,” former US assistant secretary of state Christopher Hill said, adding however that he needed to see more evidence.
“Jang Song-thaek is interesting,” Hill added, who traveled to Pyongyang as a US special nuclear envoy from 2005 to 2008.
In recent pictures out of Pyongyang, Jang is one of the few men in civilian clothes seen standing near Kim Jong-un at the mausoleum where his father’s body lies in state.
Jang is a leading member of the coterie that will now rule North Korea, a source with close ties to Pyongyang and Beijing said this week.
His official titles include vice chairman of the National Defense Commission, the supreme leadership council which Kim Jong-il led as head of the military state.
In Seoul, officials and other sources said Jang has three traits that make him suited to run, or at least influence the running of North Korea: He understands the mechanics of Pyongyang’s power structure, he knows South Korea well and he has good connections in North Korea’s 1.2 million-strong military.
Han Kap-soo, a former South Korean agriculture minister who hosted the North Korean delegation in 2002, said Jang was diffident, but clearly not someone to be taken lightly. He was also fond of a drink.
“As expected, the focus was on Jang,” Han said.
“But he never came out in front. When we tried to take pictures, he tried to move to the back,” Han added.
However, one morning, after a night of hard drinking, Jang failed to emerge from his room on time. No one dared knock on his door.
“I thought: ‘Oh, people can’t even go wake him up,’” Han said.
Jang was born in 1946. He was not from the North Korean elite and not the sort of husband Kim Il-sung wanted for his headstrong daughter Kim Kyong-hui, an author.
Nevertheless, he attended the prestigious Kim Il-sung University in Pyongyang.
“He drank well and was fun and played the accordion well. And he was a very smart guy,” said Jang Sung-min, author of the book War and Peace: Where is North Korea headed after Kim Jong-il?
“So many girls liked him. He was so charming, that’s why Kim [Kyong-hui] fell in love with him,” Jang said.
Joo Sung-ha, a defector, said the couple, who were classmates, continued to meet despite opposition and Jang’s exile to another university.
“Kim Kyong-hui drove Kim Il-sung’s Mercedes whenever she had time to meet Jang and did laundry for him after he moved to another university due to Kim Il-sung’s opposition,” Joo said, citing other North Korean sources.
Joo attended Kim Il-sung University, but in later years.
The two wed in 1972, but it was not a happy marriage, said Joo, who was a university lecturer in North Korea before defecting.
Kim Kyong-hui was later described as an alcoholic and the couple’s daughter committed suicide at her apartment in Paris in 2006, ironically because her parents were reportedly opposed to her boyfriend.
Kyong-hui later became Kim Jong-il’s most trusted confidante, but often disparaged her husband, at times treating him like a subordinate or a servant, according to a Japanese chef who cooked for the leader in the 1990s.
In 2004, Jang was thrown out of the power clique because of differences with Kim Jong-il and perhaps for having close ties with the leader’s disgraced first son, Kim Jong-nam.
However, he was rehabilitated two years later, apparently at the behest of his wife, and he later switched his support to Kim Jong-il’s favored third son, Jong-un.
He also ran afoul of other powerful people at the time and was badly hurt in a car accident, South Korean media said.
It’s not known how he did it, but he was soon back in the inner circle.
“He is exceptional in the grasp of the mechanics of power,” Baek Seung-joo of South Korea’s state-run Korea Institute for Defense Analyses said. “He is a powerful man, a skilled operator and a bold person, which was apparent as early as in 2000.”
After his brother-in-law suffered a stroke in 2008, Jang gradually boosted his influence and cemented his place in the power circle, becoming, with his wife, one of Kim’s most trusted advisers by the time of his death.
Jang also amassed influence during a long tenure in the powerful Organization and Guidance Department of the ruling Worker’s Party.
In the 1990s it was believed to be “the most powerful department in all of North Korea,” said Lee Jong-seok, an authority on the North’s power elite.
Jang is now likely to seek control of the party’s Office No. 39, the source of financial resources to control and influence the elite, South Korean analysts say.
Office No. 39 would allow him to maximize domestic influence and possibly extend his reach over foreign policy and North Korea’s nuclear program, according to a US Department of Defense report published last year.
That post would give him the ability to open up North Korea if he could do so without destabilizing the regime, analysts said.
“I think Jang Song-thaek is the one who acknowledges the need for cooperation with the outside,” said Han Ki-bum, who was a specialist at the National Intelligence Service, South Korea’s spy agency, until 2009.
In public and on the surface, Jang prefers to keep a low profile. However, that only conceals the power he wields, those who have met him say.
“He was a hard drinker, with a very powerful image, and he seemed to have a sense of authority and power,” said Park Jie-won, a member of South Korea’s parliament who met Jang, once in Pyongyang and again when he was part of a high-level delegation that toured industrial sites in the South in 2002 under warming ties.
“He came across as very sharp,” said Park, who was also the right-hand man of former South Korean president Kim Dae-jung, who held the first summit with Kim Jong-il in 2000 that led to a breakthrough in the bitter rivalry between the two Koreas.
However, for all his power, Jang can be overruled by one word from his nephew. He is unlikely to seek power for himself.
“Jang Song-thaek and Kim Jong-un can’t abandon each other,” said Joo, the defector.
“Kim Jong-un lacks solid power now and Jang sees no need to risk his life to overthrow Kim. Jang will have more say in this new Kim Jong-un era, but Kim Jong-un is the one who makes the decisions,” he added.
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese
RIVER TRAGEDY: Local fishers and residents helped rescue people after the vessel capsized, while motorbike taxis evacuated some of the injured At least 58 people going to a funeral died after their overloaded river boat capsized in the Central African Republic’s (CAR) capital, Bangui, the head of civil protection said on Saturday. “We were able to extract 58 lifeless bodies,” Thomas Djimasse told Radio Guira. “We don’t know the total number of people who are underwater. According to witnesses and videos on social media, the wooden boat was carrying more than 300 people — some standing and others perched on wooden structures — when it sank on the Mpoko River on Friday. The vessel was heading to the funeral of a village chief in