Kim Jong-il: Silver Chopsticks and the Stolen Director

Silence was the most effective political tool he had.

That framing misses the actual horror of the situation. This was more than just a hidden tape moment. Shin Sang-ok was abducted in nineteen eighty-three. He was held for years before he even got close to a recorder. According to Shin’s own accounts and the tapes he eventually smuggled out, Kim Jong-il wasn't a screaming tyrant in private. He actually apologized. He told Shin the kidnapping was "primitive." He even admitted his intelligence agents lacked finesse. It is a chillingly corporate way to describe a state-sponsored crime.

The tapes suggest he was frustrated by the quality of his own people. He told Shin that North Korea desperately needed "top-tier talent" to compete on the global stage. To Kim, this was a clumsy recruitment drive rather than a crime. He was obsessed. We know from former associates that he kept a climate-controlled archive of over twenty thousand films. He loved James Bond and Friday the thirteenth. He watched them while strictly prohibiting his citizens from viewing any foreign media at all.

He saw cinema as the ultimate tool for state legitimacy. He didn't see a contradiction between his personal library and the public ban. He likely viewed himself as the only one sophisticated enough to handle the "poison" of Western media.

He didn't feel he had to justify it beyond the needs of the state. On the recordings, he sounds like a frustrated producer complaining about a bad crew. He told Shin, "Our filmmakers just do the same old things." He was bored. In his mind, the cultural survival of the state outweighed Shin’s freedom.

I honestly don't know how he kept a straight face. When you look at the diplomatic records, you see a man who was almost pathologically aware of his own image. During the two-thousand Inter-Korean Summit, he reportedly shocked President Kim Dae-jung by calling himself a midget before anyone else could. People who were there said he openly acknowledged that the Western media portrayed him as a lunatic.

It was a power move. By mocking himself, he took the ammunition away from his guests. He did the same thing with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in two-thousand. She discovered he was a massive N-B-A fan. When she gave him a basketball signed by Michael Jordan, he didn't just say thank you. He placed it in a high-security museum. It suggests he saw Western pop culture as a serious diplomatic currency, not just a private hobby.

It is a jarring contrast. During his month-long train trip through Russia in two-thousand and one, the envoy Konstantin Pulikovsky recorded that Kim had live lobsters airlifted daily to the train's stops. He ate them with silver chopsticks and drank imported French Bordeaux. The logistics of flying seafood to a moving train in the middle of Siberia are just a lot to process.

The numbers are staggering. Sales figures from the nineteen-nineties revealed he was the world's largest individual consumer of Hennessy Paradis Cognac. He was spending up to eight hundred thousand dollars a year on it. To me, that is the most unsettling part. He knew exactly how the world worked. He knew his people were dying in a famine, and he simply chose the cognac. He wasn't a hermit because he was lost. He was a hermit because he could afford to be.

It shows he wasn't the delusional fanatic the propaganda suggested. The Shin Sang-ok tapes reveal a man who was acutely aware of his own primitive methods. This was true even as he spent nearly eight hundred thousand dollars on foreign cognac. He wasn't lost in the myth. He was a cynical pragmatist who used a reputation for being a lunatic to maintain absolute control.