Dear Leader: Poet, Spy, Escapee - A Look Inside North Korea

By Jang Jin-sung & Shirley Lee

11 min read

Why does it matter? Because the machine that enslaves North Korea is built from language, art, and performed belief — not just guns.

The man who kept Kim Jong-il's regime alive through poetry ran a department whose entire purpose was to think like the enemy. He read Seoul newspapers, used a South Korean alias, and wrote counterfeit South Korean literature designed to make southerners feel sympathy for the North — all while genuinely believing in the system he was gaming on its behalf. North Korea isn't a military dictatorship held together by guns. It's a cultural one, engineered by a man who started in a poetry department and understood that if you control what feelings are permitted, you never need the guns at all. Jang Jin-sung was one of its master architects — until the craft turned on him. What this book reveals isn't the North Korea of satellite photos and nuclear briefings. It's the one built from the inside out, where the most dangerous thing a person can do is notice the gap between the performance and the belief.

The God in the Room Turns Out to Be Five-Foot-Three

Just after midnight, a young North Korean poet named Jang Jin-sung pedals his bicycle through a blackened Pyongyang, wearing his best suit, summoned to meet a god.

He arrives at a private island off the Gangwon coast after hours of curtained vans, circuitous routes, and a speedboat so fast that a guard's cap blows into the sea. The security theater is elaborate: identity checks at every transfer, watches confiscated at the door, Japanese alcohol wipes distributed so no one contaminates the Dear Leader's hand. A soldier with vicious eyes shouts at senior Party cadres as though they are recruits. They reply, "Yes, sir." These are some of the most powerful men in North Korea.

When the gilded doors finally open, what enters first is a small white dog. A Maltese, tumbling ahead of its owner. The owner is an old man — shorter than Jang expected, thin-haired, unremarkable — who chases after the puppy rather than acknowledge the standing ovation. The cadres cheer until their eardrums hurt. Kim Jong-il strokes his dog and murmurs into its ear.

Later, during the banquet, Jang catches a glimpse beneath the tablecloth. Kim has removed his shoes. The heels are stacked at least two and a half inches high. The permed hair was working toward the same illusion. Without the engineering, the Supreme Leader of twenty million people barely clears five foot three. At the table, he calls his most senior advisors "You" and "Boy," muddles his grammar, and orders the nationwide replacement of enameled propaganda slogans with hand-painted ones because he happened to like one sign he saw that week. The cost to the state is irrelevant. The command takes five seconds.

Then a woman in a white dress sings a Russian folk song, and Kim begins to cry. Within moments, every cadre in the room is weeping — loudly, convulsively, in perfect unison. Jang feels the tears come to his own eyes too, not quite voluntarily. When the song ends, the wailing stops as though a switch was thrown.

The real architecture of the system is here, not in the gulags — though those exist — but in the performance, and the terror of falling out of sync with it. The god needed platform shoes. The loyalty needed to be rehearsed, in public, with witnesses. That's what kept it standing.

The Regime Ran on Poetry, Not Bullets

The North Korean regime was built on poetry, and that is not a metaphor. Kim Jong-il, supreme commander of the military, had no military experience. He began his career in the Propaganda and Agitation Department and liked to say, 'I rule through music and literature.' The guns were real, but they were not the primary instrument of control.

The primary instrument was language — specifically, the total ownership of it. In North Korea, every written work had to be commissioned by the Workers' Party, ratified before publication, and shaped to fit rules Kim Jong-il had personally codified in his multi-volume Juche Art Theory. A poem written outside that chain of command was not a creative offense. It was treason. The body that enforced this — the National Literary Deliberation Committee — could send everyone connected to a deviant text to a prison camp. Under this system, what people could say determined what they could think, and what they could think determined what they could feel.

How deep that control went becomes clear only when you see what happened when Jang encountered a copy of Byron's collected poems — one of just one hundred printed copies, a restricted edition for the elite. Reading it, he discovered that words like 'Dear' and 'Respected' were ordinary terms of human affection, not titles exclusive to the Kim family. He had grown up assuming these words were something like surnames, etymologically Korean, belonging only to the Kims. Byron showed him they could be applied to any person. He described the experience as learning to speak Korean from a foreign-language speaker — his own mother tongue returned to him, unlocked. From there came a second shock: Byron's pirate protagonist vanishes from an island in grief over a dead lover, and the poem treats this private sorrow as something real and total, not subordinate to any leader or state. Jang had been taught that the most sublime emotion a person could feel was loyalty to the Supreme Leader. Byron suggested that love for another individual could be just as absolute. That realization — that private feeling could exist outside the Leader's jurisdiction — was the crack in the architecture.

The Tool That Sustains the Regime Is the Tool That Destroys It

Imagine training a forger so thoroughly that he must memorize every brushstroke of the original — the weight of the paper, the rhythm of the signature, the idiom of the artist's private letters.

The United Front Department called its version of this logic 'Localization.' Jang Jin-sung and his colleagues in Office 101 were required to become South Koreans — not perform them, but inhabit them. They read Seoul newspapers each morning, wrote under South Korean pseudonyms, received rations from UN aid packages (labels still attached) because their job was to live as outsiders. Kim Jong-il's framed mandate hung on the otherwise bare office wall: 'Inhabit Seoul, although you are in Pyongyang.' The idea was that only genuine immersion could produce propaganda convincing enough to penetrate South Korean democratic movements. The regime's most sophisticated weapon required its operators to look, daily, at everything the regime insisted did not exist.

The opening was not dramatic. It was a lunch break, colleagues gone for air, a South Korean periodical with sections blacked out by censors. Jang held the page against the window. In the transmitted light, the letters beneath the black bars became legible. What he read was routine scholarship anywhere else: historians — South Korean and otherwise — attributed responsibility for the 1950 invasion to the North, not the South. Jang had learned the opposite as an axiom since childhood. The party's version wasn't just the official story. It was the only story structurally permitted to exist. One windowpane dissolved it.

At some point, this depth of study stops being useful only to the forgery. It becomes understanding.

The mechanism was self-defeating by design. The more loyal the propagandist — the more completely he absorbed the enemy's culture to subvert it — the more reality he absorbed along with it. Jang was genuinely skilled, a craftsman trained to sharpen feeling into precise literary form, and he couldn't unknow what he now knew. The artistic honesty the regime had cultivated in him to praise Kim Jong-il turned toward what he actually saw: children raised on watery broth who didn't recognize a bowl of real rice when they were given one. He wrote that down in secret. The regime had built the instrument of its own critique, then handed it to someone who knew how to use it.

The Country Jang Returned to Had Been Eating Its Own Dead

Young-nam's mother served Jang a bowl of rice she had spent three months assembling — ten grains set aside at every meal, meal after meal, until there was enough to fill the bowl halfway. She brought it out with salted cabbage and pickled anchovies arranged like delicacies, proud of what she had managed to offer a guest. Jang told her he had eaten on the train.

This is the arithmetic the famine actually ran on. While Jang and his colleagues in Pyongyang received weekly individual rations — eleven pounds of seafood and meat, thirty eggs, fresh produce — the state had quietly dissolved the Public Distribution System for everyone else in 1994, launching instead a national campaign of 'self-sufficiency' and suppressing any information about the rations that continued flowing to the elite. The gap between those two systems was not a policy failure. It was the policy.

At the marketplace entrance, the walls were covered not with prices but with slogans, each one beginning the same way: Death by firing squad. For hoarding food. For wasting electricity. For gossip. A siren sounded and soldiers herded the crowd inward at rifle-butt. The prisoner brought out wore ordinary clothes — a deliberate signal, Young-nam explained, that anyone present could be standing where he stood. His crime: stealing one sack of rice. Before the sentence was read aloud, a soldier pressed a V-shaped spring into the man's mouth, the kind that expands once inserted, so that his final sounds would be animal and unintelligible, nothing that could become a slogan or a last word. The shot came. The man had been a farmer.

The state that executed him for taking rice had also taken his rice. The 'patriotic rice movement' — a campaign urging ordinary citizens to donate grain to the nation as an act of loyalty — funneled what little people had upward toward the elite and the military. Young-nam's mother had saved ten grains at a time for three months so that a visitor from Pyongyang could eat.

Kim Jong-il Didn't Inherit Power — He Stole It, Then Mummified the Evidence

Kim Jong-il did not inherit power. He took it, slowly enough that no one could name the exact moment it was gone.

The method was patient and almost invisible. Starting in the 1960s, when he was confined to the Propaganda and Agitation Department after falling out with his stepmother's faction, Kim Jong-il began routing his father's administrative proposals through cassette recordings he controlled — ostensibly to reduce the elder Kim's workload. The technology was the trap. Once all proposals flowed through recordings Kim Jong-il managed, he controlled which ones reached his father and in what form. He gradually centralized this function through the Organization and Guidance Department, until by 1980 the arrangement was complete: Kim Il-sung remained the visible Supreme Leader, presiding over ceremonies and portraits, while every real decision had already passed through his son's hands. The father was governing a curated selection of his own country.

The government structure built to conceal this was equally precise. Official titles were facades — the Foreign Minister was a presentable face; authority ran through unmarked offices below him. The entire apparatus worked this way, a stage set where the labeled doors opened onto empty rooms. Outsiders, and most insiders, read the signage and missed the architecture.

When Kim Il-sung died, his last recorded wish was to be buried beside the comrades he had built the revolution with. Kim Jong-il had him embalmed instead and installed in the Kumsusan Palace, where the body lay in state permanently, available for viewing. The man who had been quietly displaced during his lifetime was converted, in death, into the founding legitimacy of his usurper's reign.

The Women the Regime Sold, and the Women Who Sold Themselves to Survive

A woman stands in a Pyongyang market during the famine years with a hand-lettered sign and her seven-year-old daughter beside her. The sign reads: 'I sell my daughter for 100 won.' The crowd that gathers doesn't offer money. It curses her. Only a passing army lieutenant, stopping to read the sign, takes the girl for the asking price. Then the mother does something no one expects: she spends the 100 won immediately, on a single packet of bread, which she puts in her daughter's hands before the lieutenant leads her away. It was the last thing she could give her. The crowd that had been calling her a monster falls silent.

The regime created the conditions for that transaction, then watched them multiply outward across the border. In China, North Korean women who had crossed the Tumen River were known in the countryside by a single word: pigs. The term was price list and taxonomy both. Brokers graded the women by age and appearance and priced them accordingly — a Grade 1 woman fetched roughly $1,500 and was considered a premium purchase. Lower grades went to remote farms or to men with disabilities who couldn't attract wives through ordinary means. Women who ran away, as many did, were shackled at night until they produced a child, at which point the emotional math of motherhood was expected to finish the work the chains had started. A girl sold at fourteen to an older farmer in a rural village was raped on her first night while his mother and sister held her down. Her daughter, Jung-hyun, was born blind. When she tells this story she addresses the ceiling, as though the room itself cannot hold it.

What the regime understood, and what the market in China confirmed, is that the female body was a resource to be allocated: by the state when strategy required it, by brokers when desperation made it available, by farmers when isolation created demand. The mother in the Pyongyang market had no other asset left. She spent the money on bread because the bread was real and the future was not. That's the transaction the regime made possible: a mother buying her child one last meal with the price of losing her forever.

Kim Jong-il's Three Rules for Never Losing a Negotiation He Never Intended to Win

Jang Jin-sung was inside the United Front Department when Kim Jong-il formally codified his approach to international engagement into three principles. The United States, Kim concluded, would accept any lie if it arrived in a logically coherent package. Japan was susceptible to emotional pressure. South Korea could simply be ignored or squeezed. These weren't cynical observations offered after the fact. They were operational rules, distributed to the apparatus, governing how each relationship was to be managed.

The Sunshine Policy, launched by South Korea's President Kim Dae-jung in 1998, shows how those rules worked in practice. Seoul designed it as a peace overture — unconditional aid and economic cooperation intended to gradually soften North Korea's posture. Within months of its launch, Kim Jong-il ordered the United Front Department to develop what was internally called a 'Sunshine Exploitation' strategy. Aid would flow in. Concessions would not flow out. And to keep South Korea sending both money and goodwill, the regime planned military provocations along the disputed maritime border — not as fits of anger, but as a reserve asset. The threat of resumed hostility was the price of continued peace. South Korea could pay in aid, or pay in blood.

The one moment the calculation misfired is instructive precisely because it was an exception. At the 2002 summit with Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi, Kim Jong-il admitted that North Korean agents had abducted Japanese citizens over the years. He expected the confession to unlock roughly eleven billion dollars in normalization aid from Tokyo. The UFD had warned him explicitly: acknowledging the kidnappings was a trap, and the fallout would be uncontrollable. He ignored them. When five of the abducted Japanese nationals were allowed to return home temporarily, they refused to go back, and the agreement collapsed. Japan hardened permanently. The aid never materialized.

What makes this disturbing isn't the cynicism — cynicism is ordinary. It's the precision. Kim Jong-il didn't improvise hostility toward his neighbors. He taxonomized it, assigned each country its specific vulnerability, and built a bureaucracy to exploit those vulnerabilities systematically. The one time he deviated from his own advisors' analysis, he lost. The machine, in the end, was smarter than the man running it.

Freedom Is Not Given — It Is What Young-min Died For

A phone booth in Shenyang, late afternoon. Jang Jin-sung drops coins into the slot and learns that his friend is dead. Young-min had been caught on the streets of Yanji, loaded into a Chinese police car, and somewhere on a mountain pass had asked to stop. When they let him out to relieve himself by the road, he jumped from the cliff face rather than go back.

Jang had been playing piano in a borrowed apartment when it happened. That detail — not the death itself, but the simultaneity — is what breaks him. He sinks to the pavement and cannot stop weeping, not only from grief but from a specific guilt: he had refused Young-min, on one of their last days together, the small mercy of getting drunk. There had been practical reasons. They were fugitives with a budget and a direction. He held the line. Young-min died sober, falling off a mountain he didn't want to survive.

The escape that follows belongs to Young-min as much as to Jang. In Beijing, a stranger's instructions lead him to a rubbish bin containing a cell phone and 2,000 yuan. Cryptic phone calls guide him to a hotel café, then into a black sedan with two men he cannot read. By the time the car is moving, he has convinced himself he is being delivered to North Korean agents — that the whole apparatus was theater, that the cliff is waiting for him too. Then the South Korean flag appears through the windshield. An embassy official says the same sentence several times, slowly, watching Jang's face for the moment it registers: you are on South Korean soil. Jang's silent response, repeated to himself like a counter-spell, is something close to a prayer for freedom.

What Jang carried across that border — besides the manuscript of poems he had guarded through every checkpoint — was a decade inside the machine that tells people what to feel. He had written the propaganda. He had run the ideology. He knew the language of captivity from the inside, which means he also knew exactly what freedom costs the people who don't reach it. Young-min jumped rather than go back. The mother in the Pyongyang market spent a soldier's 100 won on bread so her daughter would have something to hold. Every diplomatic summit, every measured statement about constructive engagement — it all lands differently once you understand that the regime's only consistent goal is to make sure none of those people ever gets to feel what Jang felt in that car. Freedom, for him, is not an arrival. It is what Young-min paid for so that someone could say what it costs.

The Poetry That Only Hunger Can Destroy

There is a version of North Korea assembled from think-tank reports, satellite photographs, and diplomatic readouts — and then there is the country where a woman spent three months saving ten grains of rice per meal so a visitor could eat. Jang Jin-sung spent years manufacturing the first version, crafting the language that made outsiders see what the regime needed them to see. He believed writing a poem about a starving girl meant he understood her. Hunger in a Chinese field taught him otherwise: real deprivation destroys the very instruments we use to witness it, and the poem suddenly read like something a stranger had composed. A regime that calls itself a cultural power while guaranteeing its people are too hollowed out to feel anything hasn't built a culture. It has eaten one. What came across the border with Jang wasn't testimony. It was proof — carried in Young-min's body, in the mother's ten grains, in every detail too small and too specific to have been invented. Proof changes the obligation. The next round of talks involves the same actors and the same language, but the human cost behind that language now has a face, a name, a handful of rice. You can't unknow that.