Inside North Korea's Dynasty

It's simply impossible to understand Kim Jong-Un and predict his actions without

putting that in the context of his father and grandfather.

This is the story of three men, one family, the Kims.

Between them they have run North Korea for over seventy 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.

Rocket man is on a suicide mission for himself.

As Kim Jong-Un plays his game of nuclear poker,

he follows the lead of his grandfather,

Kim Il-Sung, and father, Kim Jong-Il.

Kim Jong-Il was a playboy, he was sort of erratic.

Our problem was: can you trust this man?

Surrounded by enemies, a cunning dictator who will stop

at nothing to stay in power.

There's always some paranoia, there's always some plot going on.

While his people starve, he reaches for the nuclear button,

creating a narco-state to fund his missile program and lavish lifestyle.

You cannot survive and live there unless you're Kim Jong-Il.

Seen through the eyes of the regime's friends and many enemies, the Kims,

one of the most notorious dynasties of modern times.

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.

In 1988 South Korea had staged the Olympic Games and it was a huge triumph.

In 1989, North Korea staged its response.

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.

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,

that in a matter of months, it was all going to come crashing down.

Tonight, East Germany simply threw open the gates of that country,

the gates which have been closed now for almost 30 years.

If you put yourself in the shoes of Kim Jong-Il in the early 90s,

you've got Erich Honecker from East Germany...

It happened so suddenly, the wall finally opened.

Nicolae Ceausescu from Romania...

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And the Soviet Union.

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

seventeen trips over almost 25 years.

The way to look at North Korea is like a fifteenth-century Korean kingdom,

in which you have the Emperor, who is the son of heaven and

the dynasty that springs from that.

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.

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.

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.

.

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, it, it

is like going 'through the looking glass'.

They're the ones who feel scared, beleaguered, and threatened and under siege.

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.

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,

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.

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.

They had gotten our attention with their nuclear program.

It was troubling because the more people studied the implications,

the more they became concerned.

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.

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.

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 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.

That would have stopped the nuclear program cold.

We would quickly and overwhelmingly retaliate if they were to ever develop

and use nuclear weapons.

It would mean the end of their country as they know it.

They know that that is what we are bound to do.

Along the coast of South Korea this war game Team Spirit has become

an annual irritant across the DMZ in North Korea.

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.

North Korea reacts to the American threat by massing its vast army

on the border with the south.

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.

The prospect of a new Korean War edges ever closer.

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.

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,

is forced to step in and take control of the crisis.

Kim Il-Sung believed he had overplayed his hand.

He did not want a war with the United States.

So he invited former President Carter to the North.

The communist guerilla 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.

Good morning.

Welcome to our country.

I'm delighted to be here sir.

This is my wife Rosalynn.

There was a kind of 'wow, this is a major historical moment.'

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-What is important between us is trust, confidence in each other,

that is the most important point.

Carter brokers a deal in return for American aid,

North Korea promises to suspend its nuclear program.

-If we meet again, then next time we'll become old friends already.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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 5 million people face possible starvation.

Without North Korea's communist allies to bail him out,

this is a crisis Kim Jong-Il will have to face alone.

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.

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.

More than half a million people are believed to have died during the famine.

What was interesting was that in spite of the intense human suffering,

the political system remained intact.

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.

Putting resources into ensuring regime survival takes priority over putting

resources into feeding the people, simple as that.

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.

Testing testing...

The regime keeps an iron grip over its people.

There are numerous prison camps within North Korea.

The prisoners are kept in brutal conditions.