(CHEERS AND APPLAUSE)
MAN: It's simply impossible
to understand Kim Jong-Un and predict his actions
without putting that in the context of his father and grandfather.
NARRATOR: This is the story of three men,
one family, the Kims.
(INTENSE MUSIC PLAYING)
Between them, they have run North Korea for over 70 years,
creating their own mythical legend, a Communist dynasty.
An entire nation lives under their control
while they hold the rest of the world to ransom.
(BEEPING)
(MISSILE BLASTS)
(LAUGHS)
Rocket man is on a suicide mission for himself.
NARRATOR: As Kim Jong-Un plays his game of nuclear poker,
he borrows from a script written by his grandfather,
Kim Il-Sung, and father, Kim Jong-Il.
CHARLES KARTMAN: Kim Jong-Il was a playboy.
He was sort of erratic.
(GUNSHOTS FIRE)
Our problem was, can you trust this man?
NARRATOR: Surrounded by enemies,
a cunning dictator who will stop at nothing to stay in power.
ADAM JOHNSON: There's always some paranoia.
There's always some plot going on.
(MISSILE BLASTS)
NARRATOR: While his people starve, he reaches for the nuclear button,
creating a narco-state to fund his missile program
and lavish lifestyle.
ADAM JOHNSON: You cannot survive and live there unless you're Kim Jong-Il.
NARRATOR: Seen through the eyes of the regime's friends and many enemies...
the Kims, one of the most notorious dynasties of modern times.
WILLIAM PERRY: They've been smart, and they've been ruthless,
and they've been single-minded on their overarching goal...
which is to preserve the Kim dynasty, to keep the regime in power.
(DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYING)
MIKE CHINOY: In 1988, South Korea had staged the Olympic Games
and it was a huge triumph.
In 1989, North Korea staged its response.
(CHEERING)
This youth festival was a classic North Korean production,
and it involved, not only their own people,
they had the supporting cast from all their comrades in the Socialist bloc.
It was a way for them to try to boost the image of North Korea,
and to show that they had friends all over the world.
(CHEERING)
So, you have this really weird dynamic
of this moment of great Communist triumphalism
presided over by Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il...
when the edifice underneath was so weak,
and in a matter of months, it was all going to come crashing down.
REPORTER: Tonight, East Germany
simply threw open the gates of that country,
the gates which have been closed now for almost 30 years.
MIKE CHINOY: If you put yourself in the shoes of Kim Jong-Il in the early '90s,
you've got Erich Honecker from East Germany...
REPORTER: It happened so suddenly, the wall finally opened.
MIKE CHINOY: ...Nicolae Ceausescu from Romania...
(SPEAKS ROMANIAN)
(GUNSHOTS FIRE)
MIKE CHINOY: (IN ENGLISH) ...and the Soviet Union.
(PEOPLE CHANT IN RUSSIAN)
MIKE CHINOY: (IN ENGLISH) These are all North Korea's friends,
and they've all ended up in the dustbin of history,
and this has to have generated considerable anxiety and unease
about the ability of North Korea to stay afloat.
I first went to North Korea in 1989,
and that was the first of what eventually became 17 trips over almost 25 years.
The way to look at North Korea is like a 15th-century Korean kingdom,
in which you have the emperor, who is the son of Heaven,
and the dynasty that springs from that.
NARRATOR: The grandfather of the dynasty, Kim Il-Sung,
has been North Korea's unchallenged ruler for the last four decades.
Now, the end of the Cold War
triggers the start of the handover of power to his chosen successor,
his son, Kim Jong-Il.
(CHEERS AND APPLAUSE)
MIKE CHINOY: The decision to put Kim Jong-Il at the head of the army
immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union,
to give him operational control
over the most important institution in North Korea,
at a time when his father was almost 80...
was a way to let everybody know that Kim Jong-Il is the guy.
KO YOUNG-HWAN: (IN KOREAN) His personality
is different from his father's.
He was a spoilt rich kid.
Raised like a prince.
He was rude and arrogant.
Any internal challenge against his power was what he feared the most.
He was also extremely paranoid and scared of his enemies abroad.
NARRATOR: Kim Jong-Il had spent years as crown prince,
waiting to inherit the kingdom.
Now, as power beckons,
he introduces himself to his people in an address lasting just five seconds.
(IN KOREAN) Glory to the people's heroic military!
(INDISTINCT CHEERING)
NARRATOR: It is his only speech ever to be broadcast.
Now, with the fall of the Soviet Union,
and North Korea still officially at war with the United States,
it would be down to this reclusive and untried leader
to find a way to secure the future of his dynasty.
When you're inside North Korea, it is like going through the looking glass.
They're the ones who feel scared,
beleaguered and threatened, and under siege.
NARRATOR: And so, Kim Jong-Il makes a fateful choice:
the one thing that he knows will give his enemies pause for thought...
the one thing that could guarantee his regime's survival.
(DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYING)
CHARLES KARTMAN: We discovered through overhead photography,
that they were developing a complex at Yongbyon
that seemed to have no purpose other than the production of plutonium.
(BEEPS)
And the majority of the purpose of Yongbyon
was to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons.
North Korea suddenly backed out of an agreement
designed to limit the spread of nuclear weapons,
and put its country off limits to international inspectors.
A lot of alarms, as you can imagine, went off.
NARRATOR: To America, it looks like the actions of a war-hungry dictator,
but for Kim Jong-Il,
there is a ruthless logic to his masterplan.
No-one was going to threaten a North Korea in possession of nuclear weapons.
CHARLES KARTMAN: They had gotten our attention
with their nuclear program.
It was troubling
because the more people studied the implications,
the more they became concerned.
(INTENSE MUSIC PLAYING)
NARRATOR: For America's newly elected President Bill Clinton,
it is now a priority to find out more about the man,
who might one day have his finger on the nuclear trigger.
CHARLES KARTMAN: Kim Jong-Il was still the great unknown,
and what we did know of him was not entirely savory.
It was taken as, as kind of a given that they were going to find ways
to push us into places we didn't want to go.
WILLIAM PERRY: Kim Jong-Il understood
that their military could not stand up to the U.S. military.
And therefore, they believed they had to have nuclear weapons.
It was clear to me that that would be catastrophic.
We wanted to stop that from happening.
The question was how to do that.
I was prepared, given the authorization from President Clinton...
to use conventional cruise missiles to destroy their nuclear facility,
and that would have stopped the nuclear program cold.
BILL CLINTON: We would quickly and overwhelmingly retaliate
if they were to ever develop and use a nuclear weapon.
It would mean the end of their country as they know it.
They know that that is what we are bound to do.
(MISSILE BLASTS, WHISTLES)
REPORTER: Along the coast of South Korea,
this war game, Team Spirit, has become an annual irritant
across the DMZ in North Korea.
WILLIAM PERRY: I believed, and President Clinton believed,
that the North Koreans would probably respond
with a military attack on South Korea.
We were considering the possibility of hundreds of thousands of casualties.
NARRATOR: North Korea duly reacts to the American threat
by massing its vast army on the border with the South.
CHARLES KARTMAN: Kim Jong-Il had moved
tens of thousands of long-range artillery pieces
up to cover the whole area, including Seoul,
30 miles from the DMZ.
And so, there was a never-ending tension.
NARRATOR: The prospect of a new Korean War edges ever closer.
(SIRENS WAIL)
In the South Korean capital, Seoul,
the city braces itself for an imminent attack by the North,
as the United States moves closer to a surgical strike
on Kim Jong-Il's nuclear complex.
(SIRENS WAIL)
Kim Jong-Il had played the nuclear card
and taken North Korea to the brink of a new war with America.
But now his father, Kim Il-Sung,
still officially North Korea's supreme leader,
takes control of the crisis.
WILLIAM PERRY: Kim Il-Sung believed he had overplayed his hand.
He did not want a war with the United States.
(INTENSE MUSIC PLAYING)
So, he invited former President Carter to the North.
NARRATOR: The Communist guerrilla who had started the Korean War,
and called for the American imperialists to be crushed,
had turned elder statesman
and was about to talk peace with the old enemy.
-PRESIDENT CARTER: Good morning. -(IN KOREAN) Welcome.
INTERPRETER: (IN ENGLISH) Welcome to our country.
I'm delighted to be here, sir.
(IN KOREAN) Thank you for coming here.
(IN ENGLISH) This is my wife, Rosalynn.
There was a kind of, "Wow, this is a major historical moment."
(SPEAKING KOREAN)
INTERPRETER: (IN ENGLISH) What is important between us is trust,
confidence, uh, in each other.
-That is the most important point. -PRESIDENT CARTER: Sure.
NARRATOR: Carter brokers a deal.
In return for American aid,
North Korea promises to suspend its nuclear program.
INTERPRETER: If we meet again,
then next time, we'll become old friends already.
NARRATOR: But for North Korea,
the real prize is the promise of a political and economic relationship
with the world's only remaining superpower.
The Kims' aggressive strategy had paid off.
MIKE CHINOY: Kim was very affable.
His interpersonal dynamic with Carter was quite warm and friendly.
And so, Carter was able to shift the climate away
from confrontation and towards negotiation.
The tension that had hung over the Korean Peninsula
slowly seemed to be lifting.
And then, suddenly, out of the blue, you had this terrible shock.
(THUNDER AND LIGHTNING CRASHES)
(IN KOREAN) Announcement to all party members and the people...
all our working people, co-operative farmers, soldiers,
and people's military soldiers,
all the intellectuals and young students.
We announce with grieving heart
to all the country and the people
Comrade Kim Il-Sung, General Secretary of the Korea Workers' Party
and Supreme Leader of the DPRK...
passed away at 2 a.m...
on the 8th of July 1994.
MICHAEL BUERK: Kim Il-Sung of North Korea has died of a heart attack.
He was 82.
His extravagant personality cult referred to him as "the Great Leader."
There's reported to be a frenzy of mourning tonight
in the capital, Pyongyang.
(PEOPLE WAILING, SOBBING)
REPORTER: With the death of Kim Il-Sung of North Korea,
the world's shrinking circle of Socialist leaders
lost its longest reigning member.
He was in control of North Korea from before the Korean War,
which he started in 1950,
up through his meeting with former President Jimmy Carter
that occurred just a couple of weeks ago.
The death of Kim Il-Sung was a shock...
and certainly, there was some concern.
The known quantity is about to be replaced by the unknown quantity.
MIKE CHINOY: The outside world had seen Kim Jong-Il
as the kind of spoiled brat son of the all-powerful dictator,
surrounded by all of these rumors of how strange he was.
(SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC PLAYING)
While he had been groomed to succeed him,
Kim Jong-Il was deeply, deeply distressed by his father's death.
North Korea's allies had all disappeared.
Partly because of that, their economic system was kind of seizing up.
And so, from the outside,
the big question was, how long would he last?
(DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYING)
REPORTER 1: An erratic regime with an untested leader
is on the brink of mass starvation.
Only a handful of outsiders have gotten close enough
to even guess about the scope of the disaster.
Two years of floods have been followed by a summer of drought.
According to one estimate, fully five million people face possible starvation.
NARRATOR: Without North Korea's Communist allies to bail him out,
this is a crisis Kim Jong-Il will have to face alone.
REPORTER 2: People are surviving on only about 12 spoons of food a day,
and that is being supplemented, in some cases, by handpicked grass.
It's clearly a very desperate situation.
MIKE CHINOY: Those were three exceptionally challenging years
in North Korea.
The public distribution system,
which is how most North Koreans got their food,
basically collapsed.
The damage was cataclysmic.
(SOFT MUSIC PLAYING)
(IN KOREAN) At that time in the mid-'90s you could see dead bodies
in front of railway stations,
the entrance to markets, basically everywhere.
In the end, nobody cared,
they died without even being noticed.
I can still picture them in the streets.
Many children and elderly people died at that time.
There were rumors of people being seized
in order to be eaten.
NARRATOR: More than half a million people are believed to have died
during the famine.
MIKE CHINOY: What was interesting was, in spite of the intense human suffering,
the political system remained intact.
SUE LLOYD ROBERTS: Children have skin diseases,
a kind of scurvy brought about by malnutrition and vitamin deficiency.
But all of them, including this little girl with jaundice,
have had their cheeks rouged to make them look healthier to outsiders.
MIKE CHINOY: Putting resources into ensuring regime survival
takes priority over putting resources in to feed the people.
Simple as that.
MIKE CHINOY: By the late '90s, Kim Jong-Il had this daunting challenge
of keeping the dynasty intact and keeping the system afloat
at an exceptionally challenging time.
So, you had an all-pervasive security apparatus
that would quash any political dissent.
(SPARKS CRACKLE)
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
Testing, testing...
Testing.
My job was to interrogate
the North Korean defectors and espionage agents.
The Hwanghae iron works on the west coast,
they employed tens of thousands of employees.
Every day sixty or 100 people died.
Starved.
So the general managers, they sold steel to China
to buy food to feed the employees.
And Kim Jong-Il found out.
"Why did you do this without my permission?"
So, they killed eight people in front of all employees.
(GUNSHOTS FIRE)
So for the first time in North Korean history,
the factory employees staged a sitting demonstration against Kim Jong-Il.
Please give us food.
The following morning what happened?
Kim Jong-Il brought in military tanks and ran over them.
After that North Korea was shaking.
(DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYING)
(IN KOREAN) Over a number of years, I worked closely with Kim Jong-Il.
Kim Jong-Il was very clever.
He had animal instincts for picking out any party members
who have bad sentiments towards him.
He was extremely paranoid.
Maybe because he's so short,
he always wore a bouffant hairstyle to look taller.
He had shoes with a 7cm heel specially made in Switzerland.
He had a big belly, so he always wore a jacket to hide it.
Just saying something like ''the leader is fat" or "he's short"
can send three generations of your family to a concentration camp.
NARRATOR: The regime keeps an iron grip over its people.
There are numerous prison camps within North Korea.
The prisoners are kept in brutal conditions.
And in addition,
some executions are carried out in full public view.
MAN: (IN KOREAN) Fire.
Fire.
HYEONSEO LEE: I witnessed the first public execution in my life
when I was seven.
The criminal's or victim's immediate family
and relatives had to stand at the very front line.
When I see the people dying in front of me,
it reminds me, I shouldn't do anything against the government and leadership,
otherwise, I will be killed exactly like the person in front of me.
That's exactly what the regime wanted.
MAN: (IN KOREAN) You have witnessed how miserable fools end up.
Traitors who betray the nation and its people end up like this.
NARRATOR: The famine had pushed North Korea to the edge.
But Kim Jong-Il is determined to survive, come what may,
and wants the world to know it.
(CHEERING)
MIKE CHINOY: In Kim Il-Sung Square,
a signal to the United States and the rest of the world
that North Korea, for all its troubles, is still a power to be reckoned with.
(CHEERING)
ADAM JOHNSON: You know, the Arduous March,
as the famine was known in North Korea, was really devastating.
But Kim Jong-Il only knew one lifestyle.
He didn't know a night without his cognac,
without his caviar, without his sushi.
We never saw him get thin.
(CHEERING)
NARRATOR: Very few outsiders ever came close to the Kims' secret inner circle.
But one man did gain the trust of Kim Jong-Il.
ADAM JOHNSON: Kenji Fujimoto is a man from Japan
who, uh, became the chef of Kim Jong-Il, "the Dear Leader."
NARRATOR: He spoke at length to an American writer about his experiences,
before returning to North Korea, where he now lives.
(TAPE WHIRRS)
ADAM JOHNSON: Sakudaira, uh, December 9, with, uh, Fujimoto-san.
KENJI FUJIMOTO: (IN KOREAN) Everybody called him the General.
ADAM JOHNSON: You know, he told me that
he would oversee the perfect serving of the evenings' meals.
And then, once that was all finished,
he would then come join in the drinking, often late,
and Kim Jong-Il loved to make him drink extra to catch up.
So, he basically just rolled with Kim Jong-Il's posse.
KENJI FUJIMOTO: (IN KOREAN) By drinking 100ml in one go he gave me a US $100 bill.
TRANSLATOR: By drinking what?
-KENJI FUJIMOTO: Cognac. -TRANSLATOR: Cognac.
ADAM JOHNSON: Uh, Fujimoto would talk about the endless parties,
but these parties were life and death.
At these parties, Kim Jong-Il would spontaneously marry people.
He would divorce people.
He would make women box one another.
There were stories of sexual acts.
There's a story that's confirmed about one person
having to shoot another person at a party.
Quickly, Fujimoto-san became the person
to procure the elite goods that Kim Jong-Il favored.
He would get his shopping list and he would take the jet.
(MAN SPEAKS INDISTINCTLY OVER RADIO) X-Ray, One radio check, check one two.
ADAM JOHNSON: He would go to Iran for caviar.
He would go to Prague for beer.
He would go to Denmark for pork.
Kim Jong-Il would get burger urges, and there was a McDonald's in Beijing,
and the jet would be fired up for midnight runs to get Big Macs.
Long trips to France to get cognac.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars a year,
so they obviously knew this was their single greatest customer on Earth.
And, of course, Japan, to the Tsukiji fish market for his sushi.
KO YOUNG-HWAN: (IN KOREAN) In North Korea,
any information about the Kim family is top secret.
When Kim Jong-Il came to power,
nobody really knew about his wives including their names.
Song Hye-rim, Kim Young-sook,
Ko Young-hui and Kim Ok.
NARRATOR: Kim Jong-Il's wives and mistresses
give him at least five known children,
one of whom is destined to become the dynasty's next leader,
Kim Jong-Un.
ADAM JOHNSON: Kim Jong-Il's children were precious commodities.
They had nannies. Uh, they were in protected places.
From an early age,
Fujimoto-san said Kim Jong-Un was aggressive,
there was fire in his eyes, he was competitive,
and that everyone called him "the little tiger".
There was a time in which Fujimoto-san notices
that Kim Jong-Un and his older brother are attempting to make a kite work.
And the kite won't fly.
And there are lots of executives standing around, men in suits.
None of them will help the boys with the kite.
They go to assist the boys,
they might be insinuating incompetence in the boys.
An action like that could put you under great scrutiny.
(CHEERS AND APPLAUSE)
Fujimoto-san told me,
he comes out and he knows what's wrong with the kite,
there's no tail on it.
So, he puts the tail on the kite, and then the kite flies.
When Kim Jong-Il comes back and sees the kite flying,
sees his boys happy, it has a great impression upon him.
And one day, Kim Jong-Il came to Fujimoto-san,
and he said, "I've fired the nannies, and you're going to be their playmate."
NARRATOR: North Korea's human and economic ruin
leaves Kim Jong-Il desperate for hard currency
to prop up his ailing dynasty, and he will stop at nothing to get it.
BOB HAMER: The FBI was aware that somebody was counterfeiting our $100 bill.
So, I put the word out that I was looking for good quality counterfeit money.
(DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYING)
I spent 26 years in the FBI.
I've successfully posed as a contract killer,
as a white-collar criminal, as a pedophile,
as an international arms dealer.
It was a pretty exciting rollercoaster career.
This money is easy money, right?
-MAN: Okay. -Easy money.
BOB HAMER: This was my first meeting with Wilson Liu.
It was in a hotel room.
He was telling me that he was responsible
for bringing in near-perfect $100 bills to the United States.
And I explained I could get their container through the port.
When you've got like this kind of business, if you do one time,
you don't want to do the other business anymore.
-MAN: Okay. -It was 35 cents on a dollar,
so it was $350,000 for a $1 million purchase.
I know, political... Politics is very, very dark.
And dirty, I hate it.
BOB HAMER: You just don't buy a printing press off of Craigslist.
We're talking about the same presses
that are used by our Bureau of Engraving and Printing.
We're talking about specialized paper.
So, all of this has to be acquired with the approval
of the highest levels of government.
And Wilson Liu, in conversation, said
that these were the North Korean-manufactured supernotes,
our counterfeit $100 bills.
(PRINTING PRESS CLICKS, WHIRRS)
We were told that it would be coming in a 20-foot container.
The money would be stored in rolls of fabric.
We keep rolling and rolling,
and all of a sudden, I feel lumps in the fabric.
And this money, the counterfeit currency, the supernote, is all there.
NARRATOR: North Korea also launders the supernote
via sealed diplomatic bags, using Asian-organized crime syndicates,
as well as the banks and casinos of Macau.
But that's just one part of a vast criminal operation
centered on Pyongyang, and spanning the entire globe.
MIKE CHINOY: The North Koreans got involved
in all kinds of dodgy international dealings.
They were selling all kinds of stuff
because they desperately needed foreign currency.
NARRATOR: North Korea also traffics narcotics.
Methamphetamine and heroin have been seized as far as Germany,
Russia, and Australia.
(SIREN WAILING)
All the money is channeled back into a secret fund
controlled by Kim Jong-Il,
to help pay for the one thing he hopes will guarantee his regime's survival.
(ALARM BUZZES)
(MISSILE BLASTS)
REPORTER: The Pentagon calls the firing of a ballistic missile
by North Korea a, quote, "serious development."
MIKE CHINOY: The missile test was, I think in part,
a signal to the United States
that, "If you're going to not come through on your side,
then we can continue to do things that you don't like.
Just because North Korea has problems, don't anybody rush to conclude
it's a weak state that you can push around."
You have this sort of duality in North Korean behavior,
which alternates between very provocative military measures,
and then steps that the North Koreans take
to indicate they're not so scary and that you can deal with them.
(CHEERING)
REPORTER: A historic turning point on the Korean Peninsula.
The leaders of North and South Korea in Pyongyang,
pledging to bring the Cold War in this volatile corner of Asia to an end.
The North Korean leader sought to project a new image.
He even joked about his eccentric reputation overseas.
(IN KOREAN) Europeans often ask me why I live as a recluse.
This is my first time to show that I'm not.
President Kim Dae-Jung came and liberated me from my reclusive life.
(LAUGHTER)
MIKE CHINOY: This was a guy who, before this time,
had almost never been heard to speak in public.
And now he was both speaking, and even making self-deprecating jokes.
So, it suggests that this is an act, in a sense.
They can turn it on, they can turn it off as and when they see fit.
CHOI HAK RAE: (IN KOREAN) When President Kim Dae-Jung
visited North Korea for the summit...
I was a member of the press entourage.
That's when I first met Chairman Kim Jong-Il.
They offer the best of the best when foreign visitors come to their country
even if they are on the verge of being starved to death.
They even served food made of bear paws.
They served world class wine.
It was way too luxurious.
He tapped me on the shoulder when talking and I did the same back.
I told Chairman Kim Jong-Il.
If you want to improve relations with the U.S.,
you should not be interested in developing missiles or nukes.
Chairman Kim Jong-Il answered me...
"I know that as soon as we even try to shoot missiles at the U.S.,
their missiles and nuclear weapons will turn our republic into ashes.
and wipe us off the Earth.
However, the only way to get the U.S. to engage with us
is to develop missiles and nuclear weapons."
NARRATOR: Kim Jong-Il's strategy of engaging America works.
In October 2000, Madeleine Albright arrives in Pyongyang
to prepare the ground for a possible historic summit
between Kim Jong-Il and President Clinton.
The U.S. hopes it will lead to North Korea finally abandoning
its missile program.
REPORTER: Secretary of State Madeleine Albright is making history today,
closing a diplomatic gap created by the Cold War.
She's in North Korea for unprecedented talks with its leader.
(DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYING)
CHARLES KARTMAN: Madeleine Albright had gone there
to take the measure of the man.
Who is Kim Jong-Il,
and is he somebody that we can reliably have our president sit down with?
Her very visit itself was an important step
towards the kind of normalization that the North Koreans seemed to want.
(IN KOREAN) Ask her if she's having a pleasant time.
(IN ENGLISH) Uh, do you spend a pleasant time, yes?
I did. I danced today.
-(CHEERING) -(FIREWORKS BOOM)
REPORTER: Kim Jong-Il brought Albright
to an elaborate performance in a stadium in Pyongyang
to honor him and his Workers' Party.
CHARLES KARTMAN: And then, there's the cards and all of that,
and one of the cards had a missile being shot up,
and Kim Jong-Il turns to Madeleine Albright and said,
"Well, this is... can be the last one."
And, uh, "Yeah, I hope so."
NARRATOR: But as time runs out on the Clinton presidency,
the hoped-for peace summit between the two countries never happens.
(SIREN WAILS)
Neither side will ever know what could have been.
(WOMAN SCREAMS)
WOMAN: Oh, my God! Oh, my God.
NARRATOR: With President Bush in the White House,
9/11 triggers a cascade of events with consequences for the entire globe.
GEORGE W. BUSH: As we gather tonight, our nation is at war
and the civilized world faces unprecedented dangers.
North Korea is a regime arming with missiles
and weapons of mass destruction while starving its citizens.
States like these, and their terrorist allies,
constitute an axis of evil.
Bush put North Korea into the axis of evil,
along with Iran and Iraq, in his famous State of the Union address.
So, I think the North Koreans were not at all confident
about the prospects for dealing with the United States.
REPORTER: Tonight, the world's attention is absolutely fixed on Iraq.
The U.S. gave the regime its first taste of a strategy called "shock and awe".
(MISSILE BLASTS)
MIKE CHINOY: The invasion of Iraq would have been
a very unsettling development for North Korea.
Saddam Hussein didn't have nuclear weapons.
Look what happened to him.
We are not going to let that happen to Kim Jong-Il.
(MAN SPEAKING KOREAN)
(EXPLOSION)
REPORTER: Until this morning, around the world,
eight countries were known to have nuclear weapons.
Now, we must add North Korea to that list.
MIKE CHINOY: Once that test had taken place, everything changed.
You can't ever go back, you've done it.
They'd shown the U.S., "You can't intimidate us."
The stakes became much higher, the situation became much more dangerous.
North Korea had a bomb.
I'm very much proud of our scientists and the researchers
who have conducted such a very, very successful
nuclear underground test.
REPORTER: Will there be any more?
That will be enough. You don't think so?
MIKE CHINOY: A lot of these key turning points,
there's a give and take.
It's not Kim Jong-Il rolling out of bed
after a night swilling cognac with his pals, saying,
"Oh, let's just stage a nuclear test today."
Even though that's the comic strip caricature that a lot of people have.
WILLIAM PERRY: They've been smart, and they've been ruthless...
and they've been single-minded on their overarching goal,
which is to preserve the Kim dynasty, to keep the regime in power.
REPORTER: The health news is not good for North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il.
The ailing Communist leader suffered a serious setback
and has been hospitalized.
JEAN LEE: He appeared looking very gaunt. He had suffered a stroke.
He had a pronounced limp.
It was clear that he wasn't well.
And so, that's when we started to see the signs
that a succession campaign was underway.
NARRATOR: The dynasty that had ruled North Korea for over 60 years
was about to introduce the third generation to the people.
(CHEERING)
On the balcony overlooking Kim Il-Sung Square,
the chosen son, Kim Jong-Un.
JEAN LEE: It's been clear, watching Kim Jong-Un,
that he is a young man who has known for a long time
that he had a very specific role to play.
ADAM JOHNSON: Fujimoto-san told me, DVD nights were a big thing.
This particular night, um, Kim Jong-Un is there, and he's 11,
and they watch a, a movie called In the Line of Fire,
starring Clint Eastwood.
There's a scene where there are four Secret Service members
and they're all walking with their hands on the body of the limousine.
Kim Jong-Il says, "Stop.
This is how you must protect me. You must have my hands here.
This is how I want to be protected."
(GUNSHOTS BLAST)
REPORTER: North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il is dead.
Kim suffered a heart attack due to the, quote,
"Great mental and physical strain
caused by his uninterrupted building of a thriving nation."
(MAN SPEAKING IN KOREAN)
(WAILING, SOBBING)
ADAM JOHNSON: When we saw the footage of Kim Jong-Il's funeral procession
down those cold snowy streets of Pyongyang,
well, there was the coffin on the top of the limousine
exactly as portrayed in In the Line of Fire.
with Kim Jong-Un with his hand in the position
that Clint Eastwood was walking in.
You're talking about three generations of omnipotent, powerful people.
(MUSIC PLAYS THROUGH CREDITS)