North Korean hagiography insists he was born on sacred Mount Paektu in an event marked by the auspicious appearance of a double rainbow. He actually was born in a military camp in Soviet Siberia, where his father, then a communist guerrilla leader, was hiding from the Japanese occupying Korea during World War II.
Kim Jong Il's mother died when he was 7, and he seems to have been desperate to ingratiate himself with his father. As a young man, he taste-tested his father's food for poison.
Kim Jong Il won favor in 1967 when he helped purge veteran communists who resisted Kim Il Sung's efforts to create his own cult of personality. The son's loyalty helped him fend off a challenge from his conniving stepmother, who was trying to maneuver her own son to the throne. His vanquished stepbrother now serves as the country's ambassador to Poland. He isn't allowed to come home to North Korea.
For years, Kim Jong Il kept a low profile. North Korea's government-controlled media referred to a mysterious ''party center'' known for his wisdom but rarely mentioned him by name. Some North Koreans concluded that their leader's heir had a speech impediment or a birth defect. Then, in 1980, he was formally named next in line to succeed his father, setting up the first dynastic succession in a communist regime. He was known as Dear Leader until his father's death in 1994, when he assumed Kim Il Sung's title of ''Great Leader.''
Experts assumed the son would fail, perhaps toppled by ambitious generals. North Korea was sliding into poverty and famine, its economic lifeline cut after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The new regime was expected to crumble. But Kim Jong Il had quietly spent the 1970s and 1980s putting loyalists in top positions.
''He was able to get rid of all his competitors,'' says Chon of the Korea Institute for National Unification. He co-opted the military brass with a ''military-first'' policy that has given men in uniform first claim on the country's meager resources.
