Dear Leader Kim Jong Il, pictured in 1981 with his eldest son,
top right, sister-in-law and her two children.


Kim Jong Il lives in decadent luxury and total secrecy. Now, a longtime bodyguard tells Donald Macintyre the wicked ways of North Korea's Dear Leader.

When bodyguard Lee Young Kuk first saw his boss body boarding in a private indoor swimming pool, he knew not to show his reaction. But it was a scene he could hardly forget: Kim Jong Il, North Korea's current leader, in a bathing cap, splashing around in a seven-story pleasure palace equipped with bar, karaoke machine, a mini movie theater—everything a Dear Leader could want. The ground floor had an enormous swimming pool with a wave machine. Kim liked to get on a body board fitted with a small motor and tool around in the artificial waves. A pretty nurse and female doctor always accompanied him in the pool, swimming under their own power. Says Lee: "I wasn't surprised. You don't doubt anything—he has absolute power."

Today Lee is a doubter—and a whistle blower. His 11 years as one of Kim's bodyguards gave him a unique view of the reclusive man who runs a country labeled last month by U.S. President George W. Bush as one of the world's most dangerous terrorist states. Lee traveled with Kim on visits to farms and factories and guarded his palatial residences. He stood watch as Kim bossed around underlings and partied with scantily clad women. He saw luxury and excess that later came to appall him. Disillusioned, Lee fled, but was caught and thrown into one of North Korea's political prisons. He is one of a handful of inmates who have emerged alive.

A year and a half ago, Lee successfully escaped North Korea via China and now lives in Seoul. After months of hesitation, he decided to tell his story for the first time after learning that North Korean authorities have put his family under surveillance. He hopes to keep the wife and son he left behind from harsh treatment, gambling that Pyongyang will hesitate to further blacken its international image once his story is public. These days, South Korea discourages defectors from speaking out to avoid upsetting President Kim Dae Jung's policy of engagement with the North. But Lee, 39, believes engagement will never work: "North Korea's not going to change," he says. "If it did, Kim Jong Il thinks the country would collapse."

Lee was handpicked for the bodyguard job: when he was 17, recruiters came to his high school and selected him from a lineup of 1,000 students—he was more muscular than most of his classmates. They scrupulously investigated his family, checking out cousins many times removed for political unreliability. Other prerequisites: no facial scars and a well-proportioned body. Sent to Pyongyang to train with 120 new recruits, he spent six months at the headquarters of Kim's personal bodyguard corps. For security reasons, all his family records were removed from the government's files, turning Lee into a non-person with only an ID number. Bodyguards were allowed no contact with their families. Lee's parents didn't know if he was alive or dead for 11 years.

Recruits ate well, getting the same rations as top party officials, including pork, fish and canned fruit. Training was demanding: Taekwondo classes—sometimes carried out on steep mountain slopes—and lots of hiking, including 25-km marches in full combat gear. Marksmanship was an important part of the training, especially the ability to shoot would-be assassins. Lee learned to hit a moving target at 250 m after sprinting in a chemical weapons suit and gas mask. The targets, he says, were always mock-ups of American soldiers; recruits were taught Americans would suck the blood from their necks. Lee met his boss for the first time on Jan. 1, 1979, shortly after graduating. Standing in front of the man he had been taught was a living god, he blurted out his prepared lines—his name, hometown, parents' names and a fulsome expression of gratitude—but only just: "I was shaking. I was so nervous I couldn't talk right." After guarding buildings and vehicles, he worked his way up to Kim's Elite corps of about 200 bodyguards. He traveled with Kim to public events and guarded him at some of the eight residences he has outside Pyongyang, one for every province in North Korea. At the east coast beach house, he was part of a team assigned to protect Kim as he went for walks, always accompanied by a female doctor and nurse. "The nurse had to be pretty, smart, talkative and witty enough to entertain him," says Lee. "We didn't think they were really medical people—they were both under 26." Kim refused to eat, drink or smoke anything from abroad, except for French wine. Even his hair oil had to be made in North Korea.

Any threat to the Dear Leader was handled with brutal dispatch. Once a fishing boat slipped through the 16-km cordon in front of the beach house, coming within a few hundred meters of the shore. Lee saw a guard let off warning shots and then open fire, killing two people on board. The guard got a medal; the families of the victims were told their relatives died in the line of duty and were awarded color television sets and refrigerators. Another time, Lee got a call about a car, apparently lost, that drove onto a paved road leading to the beach house. When he arrived, guards had already shot the driver. A passenger had jumped out and was trying to run away. Guards shot him twice in the back.

Kim's real partying took place at one of his two residences in Pyongyang, where he could drink, act the big shot and get close to pretty girls. The beverage of choice was Paekdu Mountain Bulnoju (or Eternal Youth) a fiery liquor made from rice. Female band members and dancers wore micro-minis and tank tops and the men gave them drinks if they performed well. The women were trained not to drink too much but the men, including Kim, usually ended the evening trashed.

During the working day, the drinking started again, sometimes as early as noon (although Kim didn't get sloshed at the office). Kim became furious if he wasn't the center of attention: he got upset if he saw people shaking hands while he was in the room, scolding them for ignoring him. When Kim was in a good mood, he would shower his guards with gifts: deer and birds he hunted and sometimes pineapples, bananas and mandarin oranges—all rare luxuries.

By North Korean standards, Lee lived a very good life. But in 1988, he was forced to leave it behind because his cousin was selected to become a driver for Kim. (No more than one member of a family can be on Kim's security detail in case they conspire against him.) He was instructed to tell no one he had been a bodyguard. But when he got back to his home town in Musan near the Chinese border, disillusionment was almost immediate. Life had gotten much harder in the 11 years he had been away and Lee was shocked to find his parents didn't have enough to eat. He bought a second-hand radio on the black market and accidentally tuned into a South Korean radio station. Drilled to believe the poor kept getting poorer in the South, he listened incredulously to reports on South Korea's growing prosperity.

Feeling he had been tricked for 11 years, he fled to China. But a man posing as a South Korean official, probably a North Korean agent or a trafficker, lured him into Pyongyang's embassy in Beijing, taking him there by car at night. (Lee was told it was Seoul's compound.) He was handcuffed, drugged and loaded on a plane back to Pyongyang. Lee thinks his years of service kept him from getting shot. But he was brutally interrogated for six months—he dropped from 94 kg to 54 kg—and sent to the Yodok political prison camp near the east coast, not far from the beach house he once guarded. Yodok is a place from which few prisoners emerge alive. Lee subsisted on 130 g of food per meal; half of that was given to another inmate if he didn't fulfill his daily work quota. He survived by eating snakes and rats and weeds he pulled from the ground.

Lee's section of the camp held about 1,000 prisoners but he estimates there were tens of thousands more in total. Guards beat their charges with wooden sticks and death was a constant presence. Lee still has nightmares about a 24-year-old man who told the guards he was going to urinate and then tried to flee. They found him and shot him in the leg. As he yelled in pain, the man's legs were bound with wire and he was hitched to the back of a jeep, then dragged through the camp until his scalp and the skin on his back tore off. Then he was strung up and shot and guards ordered the other prisoners to file by the body and touch it. "Until then I was so hungry I couldn't feel angry," Lee recalls. "That was the first time I felt rage."

After four years, Lee was released, possibly because his cousin was still one of Kim's bodyguards. His digestive system ruined, for six months he could eat nothing but bean curd. He had lost four teeth, some sight in his right eye and some of the hearing in his left ear. He escaped successfully through China to South Korea.

Today he is a driver and does odd jobs for a South Korean company. He has also passed on some of his combat skills as a trainer for the South Korean military. The body boarder he once thought was a living god doesn't inspire awe anymore, only contempt. "I realize I wasted 11 years of my life." Lee learned close-up that cults of personality look a lot better from afar.