It's January 1978. In North Korea, under his father's regime, Kim Jong Il has risen to the position of propaganda chief. In South Korea, the film industry is booming. Directors there are making award-winning pictures to international acclaim. Kim Jong Il wants to rival the South with movies of his own.

Kim Jong Il was obsessed with filmmaking. It was one of the reasons he was able to exert so much of his own personal influence on the country. Films can make powerful, visceral propaganda. And besides, Kim loves movies.

He watched everything from Japanese gangster flicks and erotic flicks to Hollywood to Bollywood. But it seems like he preferred Hollywood blockbuster mainstream films. The James Bond films were his favorite films. He loved the Rambo, horror films like Friday the 13th. But North Korea is a communist dictatorship, shut off from the rest of the world. In these conditions, it simply hasn't developed the creative talent. If Kim Jong-il wants to make a blockbuster,

he'll need to acquire a lead actor and director from elsewhere, by whatever means necessary. My name is Paul McGann, and welcome to Real Dictators, the series that explores the hidden lives of tyrants such as Adolf Hitler, Chairman Mao, and Joseph Stalin. In this episode, we return to the Far East, to North Korea, to follow the story of the man who more than any other shaped this secretive state, Kim Jong-il. From Noisa Podcasts,

This is Real Dictators. This is one of the most bizarre episodes in North Korea and certainly I would say counts as one of the most bizarre episodes in the history of modern movie making. Chae Yeon-hui is the name of South Korea's most glamorous and successful film actor.

Cha Eun-hee was at that time kind of past her prime, but she had been considered the most beautiful woman in Asia. She was the most famous actress in Southeast Asia in the 1960s. She'd been one of the first fashion models in South Korea. She'd been kind of a very glamorous star face in South Korea, and she was known everywhere. That's the voice of Paul Fisher.

He's an expert on Korean movies and the filmmaking career of a certain Kim Jong Il. One day Chae receives an unusual invitation to travel to Hong Kong. Chae Yoon Hee, the actress, was approached by a filmmaker from Hong Kong who was essentially offering her a script to direct and star in and wanted her to come to Hong Kong to meet him to talk about it. And so she traveled there in January of 1978 and was shown around Hong Kong for a couple of days.

Che is flattered and cajoled, until she's asked to accompany the filmmaker to the coast, where a top producer supposedly lives She was convinced by someone that she would go and meet an investor in a villa in a remote part of Hong Kong called Repulse Bay and was driven there in a taxi The car carrying Che wends its way from the city and on to this luxury outpost Repulse Bay sits at the south of Hong Kong Island

High-rise apartment blocks, some of the most expensive real estate in the world, follow the crescent-shaped perimeter of the sandy beach. But when Che arrives here, the beach is empty, save for a few abandoned deck chairs. Then the faint hum of two light engines becomes audible in the distance. They're getting louder. Two speedboats appear on the horizon. They're heading straight in Che's direction, because this meeting is a trap. They were met by a group of young men in long-haired wigs.

who essentially bundled her up onto a small skiff and then took her out to sea. And she fainted during the process, she says, and woke up on a ship with the beaming face of Kim Il-sung looking down at her from a portrait, taking her to North Korea. After a six-day boat ride through the South China Sea, the East China Sea, the Yellow Sea, Chae finally understands the enormity of her situation. The coastline of North Korea looms into view. Hold ashore.

Chae barely has time to lay a foot on Korean sand before she's forced into a car and driven away. Hours later, the vehicle arrives at a luxury compound. Chae will be held captive here. She's a prisoner, though she won't want for anything. Chae, once she arrived in North Korea, was put in a very luxurious villa. She had an attendant who looked after her every day.

Every meal was a banquet, was a feast. She could have anything she asked for. Every day Kim Jong Il sent her presents. Somehow knew exactly the Estee Lauder cosmetics that she used, knew exactly her dress size. And really it was kind of a charm offensive on Kim Jong Il's part. He's got his South Korean star. But Kim's team is not yet complete. Kim fancies himself more as a producer. He can't make a movie without a director. And who better than Chae's estranged husband?

Shin Sang-ok, one of South Korea's most famous filmmakers. She happened to have been married to someone called Shin Sang-ok, who was the most famous filmmaker and director and producer in South Korea, who kind of fit the bill for Kim Jong-il perfectly because

He had sort of single-handedly built up South Korea's film industry in the 50s and 60s when everyone around him was making ramshackle kind of small films. Shin was the one who worked with the leadership to put in quotas and laws that protected local filmmakers and then built a huge studio and made blockbuster films that were respected abroad, which was kind of exactly everything Kim Jong-il wanted to do. Mike Breen is a journalist and author of Kim Jong-il:

North Korea's dear leader. They were seen as sort of the Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor of Korea. There was a director and his wife. They actually got divorced, but their relationship was like a big celeb gossip thing. Shin is kidnapped from Hong Kong in almost identical circumstances to Che. Once on North Korean soil, Shin is desperate to make this as swift a visit as possible. Paul Fisher. Within a few weeks of arriving to North Korea, he tried to escape.

He had a driver who parked outside his house every evening, went inside to play cards. And because cars were very rare at the time in North Korea, because you needed a special license to drive them, and because no one would steal one anyway, because there's no place to take it or hide it, the chauffeur was very lax with his security arrangements, and he tended to leave the keys in the ignition. Shin prepares to take his life in his hands. He's stolen a map from one of the guards.

Night after night in the small hours, he plots a route to freedom. Then one evening, he eases open his bedroom window. He climbs out, careful not to make a sound. He tiptoes across the driveway and climbs into the driver's seat of the chauffeur's car. Shin turns the key in the ignition. The engine coughs into life. Stealing himself, he slams on the gas. A screech of tires pierces the night as Shin makes a mad dash for the Chinese border.

His plan was he would drive until the last train station before the border and then hop on one of the freight trains and hopefully just make his way right across the border among freight and cargo and from there make his way to one of the American embassies that was opening in China. But Shin has severely underestimated his captors. They might seem blasé in the way they enforced his arrest, but that's because their web of power extends way further than Shin can comprehend.

What he hadn't accounted for was the fact that in North Korea, one in two or one in three people is an informer and everyone's raised to think that being a snitch is necessary and a moral value.

but also that there were people at every stop on the train route checking if anyone was climbing into the trains and that anyone sneaking on would be seen immediately. There were no hobos, there were no vagabonds, you needed a permit in North Korea even to go from one village to another. It all seems to be going to plan until it isn't. So he got as close as, you know, 15 minutes away from the border or something like that, thinking he was doing very well, but in fact the second he'd got close to the train tracks he'd been spotted.

And so he managed to ditch the car, climb onto a train, kind of dozed off until they reached the next station. And at the next station, three North Korean agents came out of the station, pulled him off the train and asked him if he was the guy who'd stolen the car and then brought him in to interrogate him. Back in captivity, Shin is once again at the mercy of North Korea's nefarious movie mogul, Kim Jong-il.

Shin went through this very odd interrogation with these two men, kind of asked them questions, wrote down his answers, left the room, came back, asked them more questions. And it kind of became clear really quickly that they must have been on the phone to Kim Jong-il, getting the questions to ask. After this little interview, he was sent to a jail, to one of the kind of lower security jails in the North Korean prison system, to learn his lesson. Shin knows enough about North Korean jails not to kick up any more of a fuss.

The North Koreans had a torture called the torture position, in which an inmate was asked to sit, legs crossed, back straight, staring dead ahead, 16 to 18 hours a day, without moving a muscle or flinching. And if you did, you'd be beaten or punished. And the logic behind it was that if you sat stock still, that was the only way to think about your crime and to repent.

In total, Shin was kept in jail almost three years. Shin eventually agrees to direct films for Kim Jong-il if he's released from jail. Kim Jong-il feels that he's got both Chae and Shin isolated at his mercy. They've both kind of learned how to live in the system. They're both going to be loyal to him. It's time to make a movie. Shin had just been freed from prison a couple of weeks earlier, given new clothes, fattened up with good food.

and was told by the people looking after him, "Get ready, Kim Jong-il wants to meet you. You're going to your first party." On March 6th, 1983, five years after capturing Chae and Shin, Kim Jong-il arranges a party for the former couple to be reunited. This soiree is Kim's very own work of art. He watches on, gleeful, as events build towards an immaculate final scene. Chae is brought in first. Chae was the first one to arrive at the party, mingled for a while.

until suddenly, you know, people start applauding because someone's walked into the room. She's not really paying attention at first because she's used to the North Korean, you know, kind of, tendent to over-celebrate everything until someone tugs her on the arm and says, "Come on, you see who's here." Kim has even written himself a cameo role. He delivers his line to a tee.

"Oh, there's somebody I want you to meet." He creates this drama. There she is with the elite of North Korea, party time. And then in comes the kidnapped husband. Shin enters the room and is hit with a wall of noise. It takes a few moments for him to get his bearings. And straight ahead of him, what he can see is not Che at first, but Kim Jong Il, who's beaming as if he just pulled off the most amazing prank.

And so Shin walks towards Kim Jong Il and they have a sort of respectful nod and shake hands. Kim can barely contain himself. And then he notices Chae and she turns around and there's a slightly emaciated man she doesn't quite recognize at first and then realizes is Shin. The party is a single take masterpiece and Kim's already scripted a happily ever after. I've got an idea. Why don't you get married again? I'll tell you what, I'll marry you. You know, this man's a nutter.

Che and Shin have no choice but to go along with Kim's plan. So begins one of the oddest collaborations in the history of cinema.

So they agreed to make films for Kim and the first few films they made were very much in the propaganda mold about great Korean heroes of the past. But then they slowly kind of moved towards making more of the blockbuster type films that Kim himself loved and ended up making a kung fu film called Hong Kil Dong, which was very much like a Hong Kong kung fu action flick that people would watch now like a Bruce Lee flick. And then most famously, they made a monster film called Pulgasari, which was

a Godzilla ripoff, really. It became kind of the most infamous, sadly it's probably the worst film Shin's ever made. And he was quite a good filmmaker, but now he's sort of remembered for this terrible, terrible film that has become a cult classic everywhere. It'll be three years before the actor and director are able to escape. On March the 12th, 1986,

Chae and Shin check into the Intercontinental Hotel in Vienna, Austria. They've been sent to Europe by their tyrannical producer Kim Jong-il to source financial backers for a movie about Genghis Khan. A journalist arrives at the hotel to interview the couple. The North Korean bodyguards agree to leave the suite to give the three some privacy. It's a big mistake. Moments later, Chae and Shin are in a taxi, speeding across the Austrian capital towards the US embassy.

their bodyguards in hot pursuit. The taxi hits traffic, so the couple get out of the vehicle and sprint, weaving their way through the jam. They make it to the sanctuary of the US embassy in the nick of time. Their surreal ordeal is over. In a statement, the North Korean government accuses the pair of embezzling money intended to bankroll the Genghis Khan production. But for Che and Shin, the propaganda madhouse is a thing of the past. Freedom is finally theirs.

It's the 1980s, and Kim Il-sung is three decades into his reign as the great leader of North Korea. In the eyes of his brainwashed citizens, he has godlike status. That's largely thanks to the work of his son, Kim Jong-il. Kim Jr. heads up the country's propaganda machine. He spent years building a cult of personality around his father, harnessing the power of art to imbue him with mythical transcendental power. But behind the scenes,

The leader's health is ailing. Thoughts turn to succession. If this is to be a dynasty, it needs to survive the transition from one generation to the next. Kim Jong-il has spent years clearing rivals from his path. He's the overwhelming favorite for the role. True enough, he's officially declared his father's heir. State media bequeaths to him the title of "Dear Leader."

Kim Jong-il, the propaganda maestro, the man with nuclear ambitions, is now just a breath away from power. Kim Jong-il sits quietly, waiting in the wings as his father, elderly and infirm, inches closer to the grave. But despite being ordained as North Korea's leader in waiting, Kim still has work to do to shore up his position. As someone with no military experience, he must prove to the army that he is worthy of leading them.

Paul French is an East Asia analyst and author of North Korea: State of Paranoia The problem from Kim Jong-il, really from the day he was born, is that, as the South Koreans say, it has always been a case of the tiger father and the dog son, which is a Korean saying.

And the fact is that his father, Kim Il-sung, for all of his dictatorial proclivities and so on, was a guerrilla fighter, did lead a band of guerrillas in the fight against the Japanese in Korea. He did establish the nation. He was a nation builder. He was the father of the nation.

Kim Jong Il is the son and he has no military background. He had no credentials. He did not fight the Japanese. He was born in 1942. By the time of the end of the Korean War, he was only in his teens. He was not a fighter. He did not have a military command around him. He did not have a core

of colleagues and comrades around him. All he had was his father, and that meant that from the start he had to establish himself. And I think the easiest way to think of it is that just as Kim Jong Un now, his son must establish himself. He must establish himself as a hard man in a country where the military is

elevated to such a high position within the society. And that meant purging, that meant being tough, that meant being completely without mercy towards his enemies. Kim Jong Il launches a charm offensive. He tells the military that under his rule, they will be given an unprecedented central role in the country's affairs. The focus on the army is Kim's own signature twist on communism.

Increasingly, the army was becoming all-powerful, if you like. Kim Jong-il himself started to develop theories around what was called the Red Banner, which prioritised the army, and later what was called the Songun Theory, which really is the first time in Marxist-Leninist thought that the army, the military, is raised above the working class or the proletariat as the highest force in the land. For now, Kim takes on yet another meaty role. He's already head of propaganda,

Now he assumes control of North Korea's intelligence services. Kim Jong Il, when he's involved in the Central Guidance Committee, when he's involved in counterintelligence and so on, he is building a base. He is building alliances all the time because that is how he stays in power. It's quite a promotion for this lover of all things espionage. Now he's at the center of his very own blockbuster thriller. Journalist and author Paul Fisher.

Because he never really left North Korea, he sort of took what he saw in Hollywood films to be sort of realism. He told Shin Sang-ok, the filmmaker he kidnapped, he told in at least one conversation that he thought James Bond films were essentially docudramas about how espionage is done in the West. And there's no coincidence really that this guy who loved James Bond films, the second he took over his country's COVID operations, went around hijacking planes and assassinating people and kidnapping them and bombing them.

Because all the kind of real stuff of espionage, like following people in surveillance and everything, he knew nothing about it. And from what he saw in films, that's not what was done. He needed to form a constituency within the army. And that meant being involved in perhaps acts like the Rangoon bombing and the shooting down of Korean airliners, of aligning himself with generals, for that smooth transfer of power to happen. Kim Jong-il is fixated by South Korea, the North's bitter rival.

By 1987, with America behind it, South Korea is thriving. After years of its own dictatorship, the South is turning to democracy. There's two issues that Kim Jong-il has to deal with, both when he becomes leader and before that when he's working in intelligence.

One is that North Korea is effectively broke and needs money. And the other is that South Korea is undergoing rapid change. For many of the early years when Kim Il-sung was in control of North Korea, South Korea and North Korea were virtually equal. South Korea was a military dictatorship. It too had to build from the rubble. It wasn't doing a particularly good job of it as military dictatorships don't. It looked more like a Latin American country than it did a rising East Asian tiger.

The North, through of course the heavy input of Soviet aid and the use of Marxist-Leninist sort of speed battle techniques to get things built very quickly, appeared initially to be doing very well. But the discrepancy between the two started to emerge during the 1970s and 80s.

And eventually, of course, South Korea moved from a military dictatorship to a full-blown and very vibrant democracy. The economy took off and it has become one of the top 10 economies in the world. North Korea went in completely the reverse direction and into decline. On the world stage, South Korea is flavor of the month.

South Korean brands, LG, Hyundai, Samsung, these are becoming world-beating brands. It is moving in the direction of a Japan rather than a North Korea. While the South thrives, the outlook north of the border is bleak. North Korea is hamstrung by its leaders' refusal to open up the countryside to outside influences and investment.

They did not want to open the country. Kim Il-sung was always very clear, and Kim Jong-il echoed this when looking at the Chinese experiment which was starting at that time, that if you open the window, flies will get in. Meaning that once you do go down the road of China, all sorts of spiritual pollution and other things come in that effectively erode the country. North and South Korea are travelling further and further down different, diverging paths.

So the discrepancy between the two becomes there. So anything they can do to disrupt that, to slow that process, has to happen. South Korea is awarded the 1988 Olympic Games. It's a huge PR coup for this young democracy, a symbol of how their reputation has been transformed in the eyes of the international community. The Kims are outraged. They are adamant the event should be hosted by North and South Korea jointly. To Kim Jong Il's way of thinking,

The South Koreans need a reality check. Their brand needs to be tarnished. They're making the North look bad. He decides to finish the job his father started back in the Korean War, by attacking the South. But the Cold War is in full swing. Large-scale military invasions are not how things are done in these times. Instead, more subtle, covert attacks that undermine the enemy's credibility are the order of the day. First off,

Kim Jong-il tries to orchestrate a communist boycott of South Korea's big occasion North Korea's communist allies were meeting to decide whether to boycott the third Olympics You know, Moscow got boycotted by the West in '80 Los Angeles got boycotted by the East in '84 Seoul in '88 What are we going to do? This time, the communist nations are split Kim can see they need some convincing

November 29th, 1987. In Baghdad, Iraq, passengers board Korean Airlines Flight 858 bound for South Korea's capital, Seoul. The plane makes a scheduled stopover at Abu Dhabi. A man and a woman disembark, stepping out into the dry desert air. They leave the airport and disappear into the metropolis. Hours later, the plane soars over the Andaman Sea, approaching Bangkok.

Then a bomb explodes in an overhead storage bin. 115 people, mainly South Koreans, are killed. Watching on in Pyongyang, Kim Jong-il feels sure this act of terrorism is a golden excuse for his communist allies to boycott the Seoul Olympics. The North Koreans were giving them a pretext. It's too dangerous. You've got planes dropping out of the sky. This is a war zone. But Kim's scheme is about to backfire.

South Korean intelligence traced the two bombers to a hotel room in the Gulf state of Bahrain. Realizing they're about to be arrested, the terrorists tried to commit suicide by biting into cyanide capsules hidden in cigarettes. One of the bombers, the male, succeeds. The South Korean agent stopped the female terrorist in the nick of time. In police custody, back on the Korean peninsula, she confesses that Kim Jong-il sent them.

With Kim's murderous tactics exposed, the Eastern Bloc countries turn their back on the North and vote to go ahead with the South Korean Olympics. In the West, the White House brands North Korea a state sponsor of terrorism. Kim Jong-il has overplayed his hand. He's pushed the South too far and demanded too much from his communist allies. Perhaps the propaganda got to his head. Perhaps he believed his own hype.

After all, his cult of personality is a far cry from the reality. As a former propaganda poet for Kim Jong Il, Jang Jin Sung knows this better than most. He remembers the first time he met Kim and the impression he made.

So I'd seen Kim Jong-il in propaganda, but in reality the gap was too big. When he spoke, subjects and verbs in his sentences were all mixed and everything was in casual language. His behaviour as well was not with the class of a leader, but was rather like a normal grandfather. Also, he was wearing platform shoes.

I thought, he is the highest person in the DPRK, why does he have to go up on shoes? The most shocking thing was what happened when he cried. When Kim Jong Il took out his handkerchief while listening to a Russian folk song sung by a singer, the executives, who were calm and normal a minute before, had all started to wail, that weird loyalty with tears. That was very shocking for me.

Also, while watching Kim Jong-il cry, I wondered why would he cry. My conclusion was the following. Kim Jong-il had everything, not as a human being, but with his power, he'd lost all the emotions as a human. So while I was watching his tears, I thought, those are not normal tears. He wants to be a human so much, he sheds tears of blood. The 1988 Seoul Olympic Games are full steam ahead. It's a kick in the teeth for Kim Jong-il.

But his despondency won't last long, because he's about to get the news he's waited for his whole life. On July 8th, 1994, his father, Kim Il-sung, dies of a sudden heart attack. As North Korea grieves for its fallen leader, his funeral is an immaculately orchestrated display of public mourning. A convoy of four blacked-out sedans crawls slowly through the center of Pyongyang.

Slightly ahead is a purple-colored car with a giant 15-foot painting strapped to its roof, mounted in a white frame, encrusted with faux diamonds. The giant canvas depicts a lone man striking a bold, heroic stance, dressed in a black suit and tie. One of the black sedans carries Kim Il-sung's corpse. Hundreds of thousands of North Koreans line the streets. Many are wailing, but little too theatrically. After a 25-mile tour of the city,

The procession comes to a halt outside the Kum Su San Palace of the Sun, a sprawling site surrounded by flowering gardens. This was Kim Il Sung's home. In death, it will be his mausoleum. A line of stern men in black suits carries the coffin from the motorcade into the palace. Jung Kwang Il is a North Korean defector. These days he smuggles DVDs and USB thumb drives loaded with offline websites such as Wikipedia into North Korea.

He remembers the death of Kim Il-sung and how the great leader was inescapably central to life in North Korea. I was born in the 1960s, so I know about Kim Il-sung and I've experienced his politics. We learned that he was our parent. When we were studying, we would put down a rice bowl and would say, "Dear Leader Kim Il-sung, thank you." That's how we learned. I joined the military in 1979.

Up until 1979, we didn't really have trouble eating or surviving, or didn't suffer from lack of food. We didn't lack anything until then. But then Kim Jong-il appeared, and at the end, since Kim Jong-il got involved with everything in politics,

there became a complete lack of food. From then, little by little, food distribution didn't work well, and surviving became a hard thing to do. So unlike what we would think, the majority of North Korean people didn't really think Kim Il-sung was a very bad person. With his father passed, Kim Jong-il will soon emerge from the shadows to assume total control over North Korea. For his people, an already repressive state is about to make their lives a whole lot worse.

It's 1994, and Kim Il-sung, guerrilla fighter turned great leader of North Korea, has died, leaving the country to his son and heir, Kim Jong-il. Mike Brain. Kim Il-sung died in 1994, age 82. This was a day that North Koreans never thought would arrive. Then it happened suddenly.

So it does seem from the outside that it looked very contrived, the scenes of mass hysteria and stuff like that. I think there's an element of genuine grief, a bit of fear for the future. Kim Il-sung, much more than his son or grandson, was actually admired. He was seen as having the credentials for leadership in his own sort of paternalistic, dictatorial way.

He would sort of go around factories and hug people and stuff like that. Kim Jong-il was a bit more austere. So the father was genuinely admired by a lot of people, even if their perception of him was sort of fed by propaganda and marshalled by the fear of the gulag. But with Kim Jong-il installed as the new North Korean premier, life for the people is about to change forever.

The North Korean cult, and there's no better word for it, intensified after the death of Kim Il Sung. It was pretty intense before. The previous leader remains the figurehead. In fact, there is no president in North Korea because Kim Il Sung, the late Kim Il Sung, is the eternal president.

So here's an atheistic country that doesn't believe in the afterlife, but nevertheless they've made their founding president the eternal president of the country. The whole idea is to remain faithful to the original revolution. Kim Jong Il now has total control over North Korea. But his concern is that people will realize he has no rightful claim to the power he's inherited. James Pearson is an award-winning journalist and author of North Korea Confidential.

Kim Jong-il just didn't have what his father had. His father had some kind of genuine legitimacy. He had been sort of very much supported by the Soviets. He had indeed fought the Japanese who had colonised Korea at the time. So he had a kind of real legendary history to him. And Kim Jong-il was basically a kind of spoiled rich kid. He was like the, inherited the family business. So he didn't have the same kind of legend to him. Kim may have inherited power by virtue of being the supreme leader's son,

But his rise has been no accident. For years, he's worked behind the scenes to thrust himself to the front of the line. Kim Jong Il was able to build his own power by removing his opponents, by putting himself at the head of pretty much every other organization within the cabinet.

and moving to a position much closer to the center of power. There are rumors, in fact, that he tapped his father's own phones or had them rerouted to his office so that he could vet who he spoke to and could listen in on private conversations. There's definitely evidence to suggest that he was working on his own succession for years before it actually happened. A grandiose fanfare accompanies this essential. But Kim Jong-il has taken over a country that is financially broke and falling apart at the seams.

Years of isolation have made the North Korean economy extremely vulnerable. If its small circle of allies goes down, North Korea goes down with them. In 1991, the Soviet Union collapses. 69 years of communism come to an end, as Russia begins a steady process of re-engagement with the West. The collapse of their key ally has a catastrophic impact on North Korea. This is compounded by a succession of disastrous harvests.

By the mid-1990s, people across the country are starving. In the early 90s, I mean, this is the beginning of the problems that North Korea is still facing today. I mean, they traded with the Soviet Union on what was known as friendship prices. Basically, they were propped up by the Soviet Union.

And when the Soviets weren't willing to give a hand out, they got the Chinese, play them off against each other. And Kim Il-sung was very good at that. The Soviet Union collapsed and then the Russians, they ended friendship prices. They wanted the North Koreans to pay foreign currency for whatever they gave them, fuel and grain. North Koreans didn't have it. The upshot was the North Koreans

weren't self-sufficient in food and didn't have the money to buy it. And then on top of that, in the mid-90s, they had a couple of years of heavy rains and flooding, some disastrous harvests, which pushed them into famine. So in the second half of the 90s, they were going through a full-blown famine. They've not really recovered fully. North Koreans were probably better off in the 70s than they are now. It's only 1995.

Kim Jong Il's reign as North Korea's dear leader has barely started, but already he's bringing the country to its knees. In total, this decade will see around a million people starve to death in one of the worst famines of the 20th century. Hundreds of thousands of people died, up to millions depending on who you ask or which assessment you go with. It was a terrible time where your next door neighbour might fall over, keel over and die.

Mothers would try and give up their babies because they knew they couldn't afford to feed them. It was human tragedy on an enormous scale. North Korea is so underdeveloped that when viewed from space, it lies in almost complete darkness compared to the rest of Asia. Yet, despite the famine, Kim Jong Il manages to turn his country into an international pariah. It's said no other country on Earth has more political prisoners than North Korea.

Some estimate there are 200,000 people locked up for their views. Anyone who disagrees with the cult of personality, anyone who challenges the authority, the legitimacy of the Korean Workers' Party and the punishments are extremely harsh, right up to, of course, the well-known large Gulag prison camp system and widespread use of execution.

The US State Department regards Kim Jong Il as the head of a rogue state. But Kim is impervious to American name-calling. Because he keeps his people in isolation, they have little idea how the rest of the world views them. James Pearson: From the outside, if you look at Kim Jong Il, he's of course notorious for being quite a comic-looking character. He wore very high heels and his shoes to try and increase his height. He also had a very sort of

large hairstyle to try and achieve the same thing. And he is a subject of ridicule for many people on the outside of the country. But when you talk to people who actually met him, they describe him as being a very logical, reasonable, charming, for want of a better way of putting it, diplomat. Madeleine Albright, even the former US Secretary of State, had many good things to say about him. But

That merely reflects perhaps just how successful he was as a very powerful and ruthless dictator. The biggest threat to Kim's regime is the booming prosperity of the North's next-door neighbour. The North Korean of the 1990s, who was struggling to find the next bowl of rice or gruel just to survive the famine, would be blown away by the kind of economic development that was going in through South Korea at the time.

The biggest effect that the prosperity in South Korea could have in the minds of the North Korean leadership is that it exposes their ideology. It shows the North Korean people that perhaps their way of managing the economy doesn't actually work.

Despite this total information crackdown, despite the fact it's one of the most isolated countries in the world, information has always got in some way. And then by word of mouth, this spreads very quickly around North Korea, in much the same way things go viral on the internet today. So it really is no secret now, especially, that things are much, much better in South Korea. And that's a really big challenge for the North Korean government. In light of South Korea's economic rise, as well as that of Japan, Kim focuses on building up intelligence networks.

If he knows more about these rival powers, then he'll be better placed to undermine them. Here, he has a particularly sinister tactic. One of the things that became a hallmark of Kim Jong Il's reign was the kidnapping of foreign citizens to North Korea. What seems to have happened is that Kim Jong Il ordered the kidnapping

by mini submarine from the coast of Japan of young Japanese who were taken to North Korea. And as far as we can work out, married to North Koreans or married to each other and kept in isolation, but teaching people in the intelligence services to speak Japanese with a Japanese accent or to be able to speak Korean with a South Korean accent.

accent to allow them to penetrate Japan and South Korea to a greater extent and not be found out. The kidnapping of Japanese citizens particularly is still an issue today. We really don't know how many were taken. Of course, now many, many people whose loved ones went missing around those times in the 1980s when this campaign was at its height. Now, of course, we'll always wonder whether those people were taken to North Korea and are somehow still in North Korea.

It's an absolute tragedy and an awful situation. With his spies dotted around neighboring countries, Kim Jong-il sits at the center of a web of intelligence. But the advent of the internet has the potential to undermine his control over information. Kim is swift to crack down on such new technologies. As technology improves, you need to improve how you control information. So now there's no internet access or very limited internet access.

It's kind of an internal intranet, if you like, and they need to know who's on it. You go in and buy a radio, the dial is fixed. You can actually pay to have the welder come in and sort of cut it, but you might get in trouble for doing that. I mean, the North Koreans are geniuses at controlling the airwaves. I was in North Korea once and sitting in a hotel lobby just sort of watching the TV there,

And there was actually a documentary about famine, I think it was Ethiopia at the time. And that looked like a normal documentary. But you see, the underlying message is these people are inferior to us. You know, aren't we lucky? The fact that they were going through their own famine was something that kept their mouths shut about publicly. Kim continues to reject international trade and any semblance of capitalism.

He'd rather see millions starve to death. But his relentless insistence on communist self-sufficiency has one effect he doesn't quite anticipate. With their leader refusing to provide them with food, the North Korean people will develop their own methods of feeding themselves. In the next episode of Real Dictators, the North Korean people adapt to survive. We hear from one man who flouted the rules on trade and commerce and paid a horrific price.

With the country starving, lurid rumors emerge about how the dear leader spends his leisure time. And Kim Jong-il begins work on an arsenal of nuclear weapons that will terrify the world and pave way for his own son's ascent to power. Real Dictators is presented by me, Paul McGann. The show is created by Pascal Hughes, produced by Joel Doddell, edited by James Tyndale,

The music was composed or assembled by Oliver Baines from Flight Brigade. The strings were recorded by Dori McCauley. The sound recordist is Robbie Stamp. The sound mixer is Tom Pink. Real Dictators is a Noisa and World Media Rights co-production. If you haven't already, we'd love you to follow us wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Or check us out at realdictators.com.