Kim Jong Il reported dead in North Korea

Kim Jong Il, the strangely antic and utterly ruthless heir to North Korea's Stalinist dictatorship, died Saturday -- apparently of a heart attack -- North Korea's state media reported today. He was 69.

During his reign, he menaced the world with his nuclear ambitions and presided over a famine that killed hundreds of thousands of his subjects.

New of Kim's death came as North Korea prepared for a hereditary succession. In September 2010, Kim Jong Il presented his third son, the twenty-something Kim Jong Un, as his successor, putting him in high-ranking posts.

Kim Jong Il formally succeeded his father, Kim Il Sung, in 1994, less than three years after the collapse of North Korea's longtime sponsor, the Soviet Union. With the end of Soviet trade subsidies and security guarantees, Kim Jong Il found himself in charge of a broken and vulnerable country.

He plowed his nation's scant resources into nuclear arms and attempts to build missiles capable of striking the West Coast of the United States, and he used what many North Korea watchers called nuclear blackmail to extract international aid in the form of fuel and food.

Kim had a knack for keeping the world on edge. North Korea shot ballistic missiles over Japan in 1998 and detonated a small nuclear device in 2006. It sold missiles to Iran, Syria and Pakistan, among other countries, stoking fears that North Korean-made weapons of mass destruction would find their way to terrorists.

In response to this volatile menace, President George W. Bush identified North Korea, along with Iran and Iraq, as part of an "axis of evil" in his 2002 State of the Union Speech. From 1988 to October 2008 -- when a new agreement was reached on nuclear inspections -- North Korea kept company with Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria on the U.S. State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism.

In North Korea, Kim was relentlessly propagandized as "Dear Leader," a name meant to evoke a benevolent force protecting the country from outside destructive influences. His father, dubbed "President for Eternity" after his death, had been "Great Leader." The two men built a cult of personality that was dangerous to challenge.

Echoing his father's policies, Kim tolerated no dissent, and a vast network of secret police and brutal labor camps enforced his rule. He restricted all travel abroad, and those caught trying to defect were severely punished. During his reign, North Korea maintained one of the world's largest standing armies, despite a famine from 1996 to 1999 that killed as many as 1 million people. Food shortages persisted because of the government's reluctance to open the country to international aid organizations.

Like his father, Kim Il Sung -- who founded the North Korean state, with Soviet patronage, after World War II -- Kim put great emphasis on the doctrine of "juche," or self-reliance. Experts said this accounted for his unpredictability when negotiating with other governments or with nongovernmental organizations that wanted to ship grain to hundreds of thousands of starving North Koreans.

North Korea's treaty violations and its production of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium did not help the situation as they repeatedly disrupted disarmament-for-aid negotiations involving South Korea, the United States, Japan, China and Russia.

Very little is known for sure about Kim and his family, for reasons of state security. What glimmers have become available show a man accustomed to living in opulence known to very few, if any, other North Koreans. He enjoyed fine cognac and cuisine and a harem of women dubbed his "Joy Brigade." On a state visit to Moscow in 2001, he traveled by special armored train that did not spare the smallest luxury, including silver utensils, the finest Burgundy wine and entertainment provided by singing female conductors.

He was fond of bouffant hairdos, big-rim sunglasses and jumpsuits -- a bizarre look that prompted the Economist magazine to feature him on its cover with the phrase "Greetings, Earthlings."

Although Kim was reputedly an avid Internet user -- very few North Koreans seemed to have uninterrupted electrical power -- his regime cultivated in its citizens a paranoid view of the outside world.

North Koreans were taught to fear invasion from the South, with whom the North has remained technically at war since 1950. Internally, he portrayed international aid groups as enemies paying tribute.

Kim's official biography is unreliable, combining the supernatural with traditional Korean mysticism. North Koreans are told that Kim Jong Il was born Feb. 16, 1942, on Mount Paektu, North Korea's tallest peak. Legend says that a magic swallow foretold his birth and that a double rainbow and new star in the heavens heralded his coming.

Many Western scholars believe that Kim was born Feb. 16, 1941, in the Siberian village of Vyatskoye, where his father was training for guerilla warfare against the Japanese.

His mother, Kim Jong Sook, died during a pregnancy in the late 1940s, and a younger brother drowned in Pyongyang in 1947, after his father, newly installed by the Soviets, returned to Korea. The numbers of Kim Il Sung's and Kim Jong Il's marriages and children are unverifiable.

One of Kim Jong Il's greatest struggles was with the North Korean economy, which stagnated after the withdrawal of Soviet aid. He made half-hearted attempts at privatization, including the private sale of grain, but he found those efforts posed too great a risk to his obsessive need for total control.

Kim has constantly provoked his neighbors with aggressive behavior: the missile fired over Japan in 1998, for instance, or the naval battle that erupted in June 2002 between South and North Korean vessels in the Yellow Sea after several defections from North Korea.

Four South Korean and as many as 30 North Koreans died in the 2002 naval engagement, an incident to which Kim offered a perplexing response. He issued an angry tirade about the United States' trying to "push relations to the brink of war" and a note of congratulations about South Korea's victory in a World Cup soccer match.

More recently, the North Koreans were blamed in 2010 for shelling South Korean territory called Yeonpyeong Island -- which left two South Korean marines dead -- and sinking the South Korean warship Cheonan, killing 46 sailors. The North Koreans reportedly acknowledged the shelling but denied the sinking. Some outside experts explained these actions as displays of might that were undertaken while a succession process was unfolding in Pyongyang.