Who was Kim Jong-Il?

Kim Jong-Il was the hereditary and eccentric ruler of North Korea, the country founded by his father, Kim Il-sung, from the time his father died in 1994 until his own death, which was announced by state media on Dec. 19, 2011. The two Kims have been the only leaders their country has known.

Under Kim Jong-Il, North Korea became a nuclear power. It has also become the world's most isolated state, one in which unknown numbers starved during recurrent famines, while money flowed to the country's military programs.

Increasingly reclusive since a reported stroke in 2008, Mr. Kim began taking actions to transfer power to his youngest son, Kim Jong-un, who in September 2010 was appointed a four-star general in the People's Army. In February 2011, his son was named vice chairman of the National Defense Commission, the country's most powerful body led by his father.


North Koreans heard about him only as their "peerless leader" and "the great successor to the revolutionary cause." Yet he fostered what was perhaps the last personality cult in the Communist world. His portrait hangs beside that of his father, Kim Il-sung, in every North Korean household and building. Towers, banners and even rock faces across the country bear slogans praising him.

Mr. Kim was a source of fascination inside the Central Intelligence Agency, which interviewed his mistresses, tried to track his whereabouts and psychoanalyzed his motives. And he was an object of parody in American culture.

 Short and round, he wore elevator shoes, oversize sunglasses and a bouffant hairdo - a Hollywood stereotype of the wacky post-cold war dictator. Mr. Kim himself was fascinated by film. He orchestrated the kidnapping of an actress and a director, both of them South Koreans, in an effort to build a domestic movie industry. He was said to keep a personal library of 20,000 foreign films, including the complete James Bond series, his favorite.

He rarely saw the outside world, save from the windows of his luxury train, which occasionally took him to China. Yet those who met him were surprised by his serious demeanor and his knowledge of events beyond the hermit kingdom he controlled.

Under Mr. Kim, the country followed a consistent policy of swinging wildly between confrontation and threats against South Korea and the United States and periods in which it pursued negotiations toward closer ties. 

In 2010, the North undertook a series of provocative actions, including the apparent sinking of a South Korean naval vessel and the shelling of a South Korean island outpost. Observers tied the incidents to Mr. Kim's desire to establish Kim Jong-un's credibility with the military.

At the same time, Mr. Kim had been facing external and internal pressures that forced him to reach out to China. His government's disastrous currency revaluation in November 2009 - meant to curb free markets - sparked inflation and deepened food shortages. United Nations sanctions, tightened after North Korea's nuclear test in 2009, had already curtailed the country's ability to earn hard currency abroad.

In May 2011, Mr. Kim met with officials in Beijing - his first visit outside North Korea since his stroke - and said his government would try to restart six-party talks on ending its nuclear weapons program, which he angrily abandoned in late 2008 because of preconditions.

Washington and Seoul have demanded that North Korea announce a moratorium before, not after, the talks begin. It is North Korea's often-repeated position that talks should proceed without preconditions.

In late August 2011, Mr. Kim went to Russia, where he met with President Dmitri A. Medvedev. During their meeting, Mr. Kim agreed to consider a moratorium on nuclear weapons tests and production, and said he wanted to return to the stalled talks on the nation's nuclear programme.

A Push to Resume Talks
Both Seoul and Washington had called for the resumption of the talks with North Korea. But after a South Korean warship sank on March 26 in an explosion many South Koreans attribute to North Korea, Seoul has insisted on finishing the investigation of the sinking - and if the North is culpable, punishing it - before engaging the country in denuclearization-for-aid talks. Washington has indicated its agreement. Thus, Mr. Kim's seeming eagerness to return to talks, if genuine, could disrupt Seoul's plans. Officials in South Korea privately said that they were increasingly sure that a North Korean attack sank the ship, which killed 46 sailors.

Analysts say Mr. Kim would seek to counter an attempt by South Korea to win Chinese support for punishing the North with economic pressure after the sinking of the warship. China is an ally with a growing influence on the future of North Korea, which needs Chinese aid after food shortages following a particularly harsh spring in 2010.  Mr. Kim's previous trips to China have led to aid shipments in exchange for gestures toward easing tensions in the region. His trip came three days after President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea met his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao, in Shanghai to discuss the ship sinking.

Some analysts think Mr. Kim was also seeking China's blessing for a succession plan that would install his youngest son, Kim Jong-un, as the country's next leader.

From Erratic Playboy to Puzzling Leader

According to the official version of his life story, Mr. Kim was born on Feb. 16, 1942, in a log cabin on Mount Paektu, the highest mountain on the Korean Peninsula. When he was born, the version goes, the sky was brightened by a star and a double rainbow.

The truth is that Kim was born a year earlier in the Soviet Union, at an army base near Khabarovsk, in the Soviet far east, not far from the short border shared by the two countries. His father was stationed there as the commander of a Korean battalion in the Soviet Army 88th Brigade, which engaged in reconnaissance missions against Japanese troops.

Before Kim Il-sung's death, it was common to view the younger Kim as an erratic playboy; tales of his reclusiveness and tastes for women and wine were abundant. There were doubts he could hold North Korea together once his father died. While Kim Il-sung was alive, his son avoided the spotlight. North Koreans did not even hear his voice until a broadcast in 1992, when at a ceremony for the army's 60th anniversary, he said, ''Glory to the people's heroic military!''

But Mr. Kim proved to be canny, if puzzling and erratic, making moves toward better relations with the West and then reverting to the use of shrieking vitriol. As the price for a summit meeting in Pyongyang with the South Korean leader Kim Dae Jung in 2000, he managed to extort $100 million in under-the-table cash payments. That same year he met with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and hinted broadly at a thaw. When the Bush administration concluded that North Korea had been cheating on a nuclear agreement it signed with President Bill Clinton, Pyongyang reacted fiercely, then returned to negotiations before setting off its first nuclear explosion in 2006. A deal reached the next year has seemed perpetually ready to fall apart.

In August 2009, Mr. Kim sent a message of improving ties with South Korea through his high-level delegation, which met with the South's president, Lee Myung-bak, in the first major political meeting between the two Koreas in nearly two years. The North Korean delegation flew to Seoul to pay its respects to former President Kim Dae-jung, who died Aug. 18.

The trip was widely seen as an opportunity for Kim Jong-il to reach out to Seoul. After months of raising tensions with nuclear and missile tests, North Korea appeared to be shifting its tone.

Pomp and Succession
Questions were raised about the possible succession when United States and South Korean officials reported that Mr. Kim suffered a stroke in August 2008. The North Koreans denied the reports and called news of his stroke a Western conspiracy to sabotage the government. But in December, a French doctor who treated Mr. Kim said he had indeed suffered a stroke but did not undergo any operations and remained in control of the government.

On Jan. 23, 2009, the North Korean leader met a senior Chinese Communist party official in Pyongyang, Chinese and North Korean media reported. It was Mr. Kim's first public meeting with a foreign visitor since August. Analysts in Seoul saw the meeting as an attempt to demonstrate to the outside world that Mr. Kim was still in control of his country, well enough to make key decisions about its nuclear weapons program and deal with the new American administration.

North Korea's Parliament elected him to another five-year term in April. It also revised its constitution, officially naming Kim Jong-il its ''supreme leader'' and his ''military first'' policy its guiding ideology. The Constitution also declared for the first time that North Korea ''respects and protects'' the ''human rights'' of its citizens, and expunged the term ''communism'' from its text.

Analysts saw the changes as signs that one of the last holdouts from the former Communist bloc was trying to improve its international image in an effort to engage the United States and that the ailing Mr. Kim was trying to burnish his legacy.

As North Koreans marked the 62nd anniversary of their nation's founding in September 2010, speculation abroad had deepened over succession plans. But just before the meeting of the ruling Workers' Party in Pyongyang on Sept. 28, the elevation of Mr. Kim's youngest son was announced. The largest party gathering since 1980, the convention has widely been seen as a chance for the leader to reaffirm his control over the party and promote Kim Jong-un as the third-generation heir to family rule.

Kim Jong-il oversaw important party affairs years before he officially took over following the death of Kim Il-sung. But no such apprenticeship had been reported for Kim Jong-un until after his father suffered a stroke in 2008.

Kim Jong-un's rise along with that of Kim Kyong-hui, his aunt, signaled a long-awaited shift.

Then in February 2011, Kim Jong-un, who is believed to be 28 or 29, smoothly acceded to a senior position on the National Defense Commission, according to a report by a leading newspaper in Seoul.

Although his emergence as a serious political figure had been undeniable, some political experts had remained unconvinced that Kim Jong-un was completely secure in his anointed position. But if the report of his promotion is true, experts said, there can be no further doubts.

Freed U.S. Journalists 
In August 2009, former President Bill Clinton paid a dramatic 20-hour visit to North Korea, in which he won the freedom of two American journalists, opened a diplomatic channel to North Korea's reclusive government and dined with its leader.

The North Korean government, which in June sentenced the Current TV journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, to 12 years of hard labor for illegally entering North Korean territory, announced that it had pardoned the women after Mr. Clinton apologized to Mr. Kim for their actions, according to the North Korean state media.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton denied that Mr. Clinton had apologized.

Mr. Clinton's mission to Pyongyang was the most visible by an American in nearly a decade. It came at a time when the United States' relationship with North Korea had become especially chilled, after North Korea's test of its second nuclear device in May and a series of missile launchings.

A Rare Apology
After years of struggling to contain free markets, which are technically forbidden, North Korea took its boldest step yet by abolishing its old bank notes in November 2009. The government allowed people to exchange only a limited amount of old money for the new currency, at a rate of 100 to 1, a measure that effectively wiped out much of the private wealth that had been accumulated by entrepreneurs who profited from the markets. The government also banned the holding or use of foreign currency, widely used to smuggle in basic goods from China.

The policy backfired. Prices skyrocketed as market activities ground to a near halt, while state-run stores failed to meet the demand for goods. In February 2010, the North Korean government made a rare apology for a policy blunder and lifted the ban on using foreign currency.

Mr. Kim's rule endured despite a famine that killed an estimated 1 million of North Korea's 22 million people and the isolation caused by its nuclear brinkmanship. But the apology and the policy reversal revealed cracks in his leadership, and were seen as further signals that his government is retreating from its campaign against the free markets that have proliferated in the impoverished country.