http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/stor ... 52058036/1North Korea's Kim Jong Il dies at 69 Kim Jong Il, the diminutive North Korean dictator whose provocations and brinkmanship confounded three U.S. presidents and raised tension across northeast Asia, has died. He was 69.
Kim's death was announced Monday by state television in a "special broadcast" from the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, the Associated Press reported. The state media report said Kim died of a heart ailment on a train because of a "great mental and physical strain" on Saturday during a "high intensity field inspection." It said an autopsy was done Sunday and "fully confirmed" the diagnosis.
North Korea will hold a national mourning period until Dec. 29. Kim's funeral will be Dec. 28, it said.
Kim is believed to have suffered a stroke in 2008 but appeared relatively vigorous in photos and video from recent trips to China and Russia and in numerous trips around the country carefully documented by state media.
South Korean media, including the Yonhap news agency, said South Korea put its military on "high alert." President Lee Myung Bak convened a national security council meeting after the news of Kim's death.
Kim's death raises the specter of political chaos in a nuclear-armed hermit country. In September 2010, Kim Jong Il unveiled his third son, Kim Jong Un, as his successor, putting him in high-ranking posts. It is unclear whether the Swiss-educated Kim Jong Un, 27, has the skills to stay in power or keep the fragile country from collapse.
North Korea is calling Kim Jong Il's son a "great successor" to the country's guiding principle of self reliance, as the country rallies around heir-apparent Kim Jong Un as the next leader.
The North's official Korean Central News Agency said the country "must faithfully revere respectable comrade Kim Jong Un."
White House spokesman Jay Carney said in a statement Sunday night: "We are closely monitoring reports that Kim Jong Il is dead. The president has been notified, and we are in close touch with our allies in South Korea and Japan. We remain committed to stability on the Korean peninsula, and to the freedom and security of our allies."
The White House said Monday that President Obama spoke with South Korea's president at midnight, and the two leaders agreed to stay in close touch.
U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta "is closely monitoring the situation," said Navy Capt. John Kirby, his spokesman. He would not discuss whether U.S. forces in the region were on heightened alert.
Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is in contact with top commanders in the region and is keeping track of developments, said Marine Col. David Lapan, his spokesman.
Michael Green, a former senior director of Asia Affairs at the National Security Council during the George W. Bush administration, said Kim's death comes months ahead of the 100th anniversary of the birth of his father, former president Kim Il Sung, who is regarded as the regime's "eternal president." Green said Kim Jong Un may try to use the April milestone to conduct a nuclear test.
"It would allow him to flex his muscles and show the military that he's really in charge," Green said.
Bush had denounced North Korea as a member of an "axis of evil" that included Iran and Iraq. He described Kim Jong Il as a "tyrant" who starved his people to build nuclear weapons.
Kim Jong Il ruled North Korea with an iron fist for 17 years. Few expected him to last long when he succeeded his father in 1994. The pudgy 5-foot-3 Kim — who favored pompadours and beige jumpsuits — took power at a treacherous time. The Soviet Union had crumbled three years earlier, depriving North Korea of its closest communist ally and most generous economic benefactor.
The North Korean economy imploded in the 1990s. Famine killed as many as 1 million North Koreans from 1995 to 2000. Yet Kim managed to hang on to power, ruthlessly repressing internal dissent with executions and a brutal prison system that holds hundreds of thousands of political prisoners, including children, according to Human Rights Watch.
Kim kept his generals happy by handing them 25% of his indigent country's budget under a policy of "Military First" that ignored the needs of his hungry, impoverished people. Still, He rallied the public by presenting North Korea as a racially pure state besieged by evil foreigners, especially the Americans who kept thousands of troops garrisoned across the Demilitarized Zone in South Korea. The DMZ is a remnant of the Korean War when the North invaded South Korea in 1950, sparking a three-year war.
Kim developed a nuclear program — with tests in 2006 and 2009 — used as a potential threat to extort aid from his enemies and stoke a xenophobic local pride that kept his people unified and loyal during a period of intense hardship. His brinkmanship with nuclear and missile tests made North Korea a player to be reckoned with — even though it ranks only a pitiful No. 189 in world economic output per capita.
Kim's death is a full-blown "state crisis" for North Korea, said Park Young-Ho, senior researcher at the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul. "I don't think there will be significant movement in a short time period, but we must watch closely whether or not Kim Jong Un's power remains solid."
According to North Korean mythology, Kim was born on sacred Mount Paektu in an event marked by the auspicious appearance of a double rainbow and a special star shining in the heavens. In fact, he was likely born in the Russian Far East, according to Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader, a history of North Korea's leaders by journalist Bradley K. Martin.
Kim Jong Il's father, Kim Il Sung, had led a communist guerrilla force fighting the Japanese occupation of the Korean peninsula. After World War II, the Soviet-backed Kim Il Sung became North Korea's leader.
Kim Jong Il's mother died when he was 7. He worked hard to please his father, even taste-testing his food for poison. He helped purge veteran communists who balked at Kim Il Sung's attempts to create his own cult of personality.
The efforts to ingratiate himself worked, allowing Kim Jong Il to outmaneuver a stepmother plotting to put her own son in line to take power.
Throughout the 1970s and '80s, Kim Jong Il carefully stacked the North Korean bureaucracy with his supporters and weeded out those of questionable loyalty. He stayed out of the public eye. State-run media referred to a mysterious "party center" known for his wisdom, but rarely mentioned him by name. In 1980, Kim Il Sung named him heir apparent, giving the world its first communist dynasty.
Even before taking power, Kim Jong Il was associated with murderous and hare-brained schemes. He personally ordered the 1987 bombing of South Korean airliner that left 115 dead, according to Kim Hyon Hui, one of the North Korean agents who planted the explosive.
A film buff who adored Sean Connery and Elizabeth Taylor, Kim Jong Il kidnapped South Korean actress Choi Eun Hee and her movie director husband in a bizarre 1978 plan to jump-start a North Korean film industry.
In a 2003 interview with USA TODAY, Choi said Kim had a self-deprecating sense of humor, introducing himself by doing a pirouette and saying, "I look like a sack of dwarf's droppings, don't I?"
Choi and her husband produced 21 movies for Kim before escaping at an international film festival in 1986.
Kim's appearance and Bacchanalian habits — he was at one time the world's No. 1 consumer of Hennessy cognac, and he imported pizza and sushi chefs to feed him — made him a target of satire. He was, for instance, depicted as a foul-mouthed puppet in the 2004 film Team America: World Police.
Outsiders tried to bring him in from the cold. In its waning days, the Clinton administration sought to normalize diplomatic relations with North Korea but couldn't reach a deal. Two successive South Korean presidents — Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun — tried a "Sunshine Policy" of unconditional aid to Kim's regime; each visited the capital of Pyongyang. But their visits were never reciprocated.
President George W. Bush tried a different approach, treating Kim with hostility. Kim responded with its first nuclear test in 2006. The Bush team then switched to diplomacy. For a time, it seemed to work. Then Kim's provocations began again, culminating in another underground nuclear explosion in May 2009, testing just in time to test the Obama administration.
Despite U.S. threats, promises of aid and diplomatic recognition — nothing worked. To the end, Kim believed that his regime could not survive unless he kept his country forever mobilized for potential war, forever oppressed and forever isolated economically — whatever the cost to his 24 million people.
Contributing: Aamer Madhani in Washington, Calum MacLeod in Beijing and Tom Vanden Brook
