Successor, a timely behindthescenes look at one of the world elusive dictators kim jongun. In thehe extraordinary reporting with his route through three generations of family rule andn north korea that began with his grandfather. The great successor is almost certainly the most complete portrait that we have of kim jongun providing vital insight into the mind and motivations of the young still mysterious leader. Compelling case for understanding kim as a rational and methodical actor on the world stage without diminishing the cruelty of his regime and the danger it poses. Before moving to china a year ago and japan and korea for the post. Over the course of her career she has reported for more than 20 countries and visited north korea a dozen times. She was a nieman fellow at the Harvard University studying close ascites and last year she received the award from Stanford University for outstanding reporting onom asia. I think of no better person to speak with anna the Washington Post for an affairs david. Their conversation this morning will be followed by a Panel Discussion about current u. S. Relations withh north korea with hthe noted korean expert in the Washington Post david and karen. The great successor will be available for purchase after the program so stick around to get bur copy signed. Before we begin the timeliness of the book publication, we are exactly when youre out from the historic summit that brought President Trump and kim jongun together in singapore. Thank you again for being here, and please join me in welcoming david and anna to the post live stage. [applause] thank you so much to doug, this is really a treat for me as opposed journalists, anna at really is, as doug suggested a Gold Standard and coverage of north korea to give you sent all redo a blurb on the back of the book that we authors all like to get blurbs from people. But, really one as externally as this. There is quite something known journalists in any language who is done more to establish kim jongun that anna fifo. And i want to open with your big scoop that is getting reaction from President Trump and a lot of other people on page 213 of this book, no doubt said many some weeks ago, you write that hakim jongun wounds halfbrothr became an informant forro the c, an agency of a track record of bringing down spies and did not like. President trump was asked aboutn this yesterday, the report was picked up at the wall street journal and he said, i sawas the information about the cia respect to kim jonguns half brother and i would tell him that that would not happen under my office, in other words, if i understood the president for swearing, recruiting agents to spy on a country that is still threatening us with Nuclear Weapons. Lets start with this group and tell us what you can about the role of an informant played by kim jongun later murdered by some brother. Thank you, thank you for the introduction, kim jongun own older halfbrother, we think the two of them never actually met, they lived entirely separate and kim jongun had many families are different children and he kept them all in different compounds. Even when he went to switzerland they had no relationship whatsoever. Having said that, it was still a real surprise. In a very brutal way having a chemical weapon applied to his face and he died within 20 minutes of the attack. There was quite a lot of talk of what he would do that, kim jongun was outside north koreao for almost two decades of that stage, he of the protection of the chinese, so he had really shown no interest whatsoever in the leadership of north korea. But having said that, north korea and the regime is founded on a bizarre bloodline of idea that the family descended from the Holy Mountain and north korea. So technically kim jongun could be considered a rival to the leadership of north korea because he had the blood running through his veins. But during the course of my reporting i was told by reliable source, that kim jongun had been an informant for the cia in his final years. He had been meeting his handlers in Southeast Asia and malaysia and passing on what information he knew about his brother and arranging and even though he was in exile, he continued to have good contacts at the top ofo the regime and was very close to his uncle until kim jongun had them killed in the end of 2015. His uncle was a north Korean Ambassador to malaysia. He continued to have highlevel contacts, couldve been a good source ofe information in the reporting is, he had met his handler and malaysia in the days before and had 120,000 in cash in his backpack at the time of his death. That would give reason for kim jongun. That is the question of the day i would say. Is it your information or would you assume, at the time of the grisly murder with a biological weapon theyim kim jongun was tare that his halfbrother was an asset of the cia . Its impossible to say, i spent the last two years to get into his head which is a very scary place. But on so many levels, he had openly criticized the regime in airports around asia. If kim jongun did know about this, all of these things are treason in his eyes and anyone of them could be reason to the to feel he had to get rid of his brother. Finally if i ask you on what the likely effect of President Trumps remarkable statement, would be for an agency in American Government that is struggling everyday to know as much as it can about north korea that is closed, this would have negative effects together information. One of the big challenges with north korea from iran or the beer, there is almost no human intelligence of north korea from the hardest of the hard targets. If the cia was successful in recruiting, there is a huge boom in the regime. So if i was somebody with the cia and i heard the president say that. I want to turn to the book, its an extraordinary narrative i novel which is a surprising place, i want to begin with the question how you as a journalist put the story together, you say at one point early in the book, kim jongun became an enduring obsession. Obsessions are good things for a journalists because it puts us in a place where we just have to know the next factor. Walk this through your research in this amazing compound where the 1 errors of north korea hung out, and stories about him and searching then, how do you assemble the narratives . When i return in 2014, i was so astonished, the young guy who is 27 years old when he took over, he had been able to hold onto the leadership in the expectations. I wanted to figure out why and as a reporter we do what we do try to reported out. So i tried to recreate the childhood and bring together as much information as i could of how he grew up and how he became and now he justifies the brutal things that he does to remain the leader. I was living in japan and i found a sushi chef whod been living in the Royal Household in this is such a good illustration about how little we know about kim jongun and the peoples brains this is a very eccentric character. Somebody who moved to north korea. But he had this access to kim jongun at a very young age and he told me, about the Birthday Party where he was present and he was presented with a little uniform and called the little general. In real generals came to his Birthday Party and saluted to him. And i managed to track down his aunt and uncle who had been his guardians and switzerland posing as his parents while he was at school during his teenage years, we were able to confirm that and they were also at the Birthday Party where he was named the successor. I really just try to seek out to find everything a person that i could have any kind of encountering him. In the lot off the stories are superficial and i was hoping to get anything that we could add that would increase the understanding of the man who is such a threat to the outside world. One image thatt hunted me was that of kim jongun at the perhaps 11 or 12 as a schoolboy with an obsession for basketball. Every afternoon putting on his Chicago Bulls jersey with bachael jordans number talk about the weird basketball obsession when it was bizarre and Dennis Rodman of all people, the weirdest characters to come out of the mba. This is real, he is a huge basketball fan, every day she was shooting hoops, and nobody knew who she was, the other kids just thought he was tight, they did they get is quite strange that there was adult sitting there cheering every time he scored a point or whatever. And kim jongun is trash talking another things and it was of littlele weird. Trash talk for kim jongun, i try to imagine what he would call the players. Maybe that word came later. His mother was a very powerful influence on a child. This is overlooked. It was actually his mother got him into basketball because there is a saying in korean and south korean mothers to this day think if you play basketball you will grow g tall. Kim jongun was a very short guy so she planted a a seed in his head and he is to then his mother so maybe it was. I dont know. People knowing about this basketball obsession, have tried to send emissaries, i think its right that Madeleine Albright said i have seen this several times, and north korea there is a huge Buckingham Palace style which is a gift museum and displays all of them. And there is an mba, basketball signed by many players, m michal jordan, that was delivered by Madeleine Albright when she met kim jongun there. We dont know whether that was for the children or exactly who that was. But theres a strain of basketball there. But we laugh at kim jongun allowing Dennis Rodman to come in. The this was a serious discussion, this may be a way to forge a bridge to the north korean leader. But it did not go anywhere i want to turn to the narrative as kim jongun becomes leader and becomes under title says the great successor, i want to remind people in the audience or streaming, if you have questions that you would like me too ask anna, the post live and send them to me by the computer. Kim jongun becomes the great successor in 2012, and he has extraordinary selfconfidence from the beginning, he speaks more than his father typically did and give us a picture of the men who arrives in power and then his course from there to what you described in 2016 the moment where he plants his flag at home andnd abroad. When he took over he was only 27 years old which is young anywhere let alone in the society like korea. There was a lot of skepticism of whether he could do it or remain leader and keep it all together. One of the surprising things is the fact that it was veryem calculating entry from the getgo in a way he approached this job. He had a bunch of advisors and in fact many of the people who walked around at the funeral were people who served his father and some served as grandfather. The man now ahead of north korea was foreign minister in 1984 when kim jongun was born. They serve the regime for a long time. They think they were his advisors and helped him consolidate his role but he very ruthlessly got rid of all the people one by one once they served a purpose for him. That included his uncle who disappeared, the head of the army who helped with the transition, the propaganda chief, all of these to the regime that disappeared because he was done with them. He showed an ability to be very brutal and ruthless. And that made think about questioning him inn the future. I think that enabled him to prove him to be a strong leader so when he stood up on the stage in 2016 at the congress, i was there for that, i was astonished to see this Young Man Holding forth in front estherleon and have thousand 60 something generals and not just the confidence he shows but he laid out the quite ambitious plan for economicti improvement, they dot say reform because that applies to the system. But he really put his name to this plan in a fiveyear economic plan that was much more bolder than his father had ever done in his 17 years of power his father spoke in public only once and that was one sentence, so the fact that kim jongun was up there so confident, so willing to hold forth and make himself accountable, he showed different be a very leader from his father in particular and only saw more and more and that of 2017 and 2018 unfolded. One of the strong themes in your book is your way in which the close society, hermit kingdom that was called and have become more open, not as hermetic as it once was. There is a Younger Generation in the scene how you came back and saw people dressed in close from h m in the stores that you find anywhere in the world but certainly in china to which some have trouble in a sense of momentum developing and people floating balloons with usb p flh drives that have everything youa cann imagine that they might sed across the border. Tells about that modernization spark in a few think that is what is powering at the center of kim jongun vision . He is very deliberately looked at the economy and when he came and pinned it to the Nuclear Program, he tolerated the growth of the market and there was private markets there were state run in a number of them have doubled under kim jongun and their crosscountry everywhere. And people are like entrepreneurial and north korea for so long. So you see people cutting here or selling homemade snacks or important rice cookers enclosed from china. And making their living and making their own way and independent. Change, theg biggest change in north korea and 70 years and there is an entrepreneurial class, growing middle class and north korea, across the country more and more people are able to make their own living and earn their own wages and buy their own food. But no one has benefited as much as aeo people in pyongyang. He has very deliberately enabled them to get rich. So in corruption, people officials are on the take when the military a Party Officials are trained to earn money on the side. As a result, they have become with more disposable income, very obvious consumption and north korea, people walk around with their smart phones and like anywhere else the smart phones are not connected to the outside world, but still, it looks like there is progress in some of the youngling else who live in pyongyang because of this development, they told me about all the things they can enjoy and one of the things is that they love to workout and go to the gym and yoga classes, not because the exercise freaks but that is t as it excuse to work tightight clothing and flirt wih opposite. And theres a sense that getting closer to what they can imagine having in beijing. That is very deliberate on kim jonguns part, these are the people they keep them in power. In the millennials are the people who can keep them in power for 30 or 40 years to come. He is really focusing on them. And the ark of then story, he has plaintiffs flag for money, drives quite ruthlessly toward Nuclear Weapon capability review ability to deliver those weapons with muscles. They would regenerate 12018, a new president in america, and tell us about that turn in january 2018 and how it takes us toward singapore and hanoi. It actually comes on novembeh korea conducted its launch in a put out a statement that said we have now completed our rocket program. And that completed to me was the time, the ready to talk, they are done. Because all he needed was a credible threat ib and show that he had the missiles, nukes, had been able to put them together but divide all the expectations to create these two things, it was reasonable to think he could if youte wanted to. This is a signal that he was ready for kim to point out. He was ready to Start Talking on a diplomatic defense. When he took over as h a leader, he revised the policy that his grandfather had introduced. A simultaneous progress policy. It was a Nuclear Program and economic development. He was done with nuclear issues, onw turning to the economy in he can grow his economy while there was crippling sanctions imposed on him. And they are hurting, i think they really hurt trade into hornorth korea. So he needed to try to metamorphose size to the charming list understood dictator, so he came out into the world and he started meeting xi jinping, south korea and tried to present himself as a completely reasonable, responsible leader just like any of the other members of the nuclear club. Of course this was an act but it showed how savvy he was been able to turn on the charm and push President Trump buttons in terms of beautiful love letters and the things he sent them. He has been quite savvy in the way hes done this. Tell us how you imagine the relationship between kim jong jongun, brutal leader of the worlds most solitary and state, donald trump president of the United States, there are so many different speculations in the press, father son, brother brother, gangster gangster, and the greenroom, is this two guys in search of the Nobel Peace Prize . So tell us how you think about the two. It was really fascinating to watch kim jonguns reaction when donald trump during the summits. And in korean culture there is a lot of politeness of honorifics and thinks, kim jongun was playing the junior partner, he was using language which the translator told President Trump that he was using and allowed him to go first in all of these things to show he was a junior in donald trump was a senior. I think he was positioning himself in that way. But part of the reason i was hoping my book could add to what we know aboutha him, because the North Koreans knowing awful lot about donald trump, they have read that out of the deal, they have red fire in. I know somebody who has seen them reading this. Somebody had tracked two meetings with the North Koreans and had an encyclopedic knowledge of everything kim jongun in donald trump and e tweeted. They have really been doing their homework and trying to figure out what h motivates him and what might appeal to him but there was very little in the other direction. In terms of the general public theres very little in the other direction. I wanted to look at personality of kim jongun and his motivation. So to conclude my questions with how in the end you assess whats ahead. And then i want to go to a couple of questions that we have from people who are watching this and sending them on twitter and facebook. What is fascinating me about yourur book, it is absolutely devastating in the assessment of northno korean leaders reality t you have concluded that his opening towards United States in the west is a serious one, you said that you are feeling back in june 2018 before the singapore settlement maybe is time to try something different. I had the same feeling. Interestingly to me, your optimism about the future continued even after the hanoiin summit, which was a significant failure. You end your book by quoting him. And you quote him saying in the rear press interview, my gut feeling is a good result will come so, take us into why you chose to in the book that way, what your own feeling is about wie good result, and one of her twitter questioners said what will this country look like in ten years . As covering north korea, i should know better to be optimistic. When north korea if youre pessimistic and expect everything to fall to pieces. That has beenn history. But looking at kimus jongun, ad seeing he is so different from his father, yes there are some things that he doesnt same, but much bolder, much more gary is, he seems to enjoy it and much more than his father ever did. But i also think because he is so young, he knows that the situation of north korea is unattainable. He made a sense of Economic Growth ofno improvement of north and south korea, north korea and china not getting any whiter if not getting smaller. So i do think that he wants to try to normalize the relationship and would like a peace treaty to in the korean war for once andor for all. He would like to be seen as a responsible leader of a developmental dictator in other parts of asia and singapore and otherga places. But having said that, with my optimism, i think he needs this process and even today, despite the complete disaster of hanoi, the signals are very positive. They are still talking about wanting to get back to talk. Today it is just entered the disease tmz to present flowers to the former first lady who died. There is an outreach that shows the this sign of frustration, the attention, process to continuek his very unique window of opportunity. That he had a very proengagement president and south korea who is really been the glue. He has a very unconventional american president as a counterpart who shown a willingness to do things differently and not listen to advisors. Him. Is an opportunity for one of the things that i didnt cover during the course of my reporting, a north korean diplomat in new york actually went to his famous fortuneteller in koreatown and asked if donald trump would be reelected. The answer was yes, so i guess the North Koreans they can have 60 years, not two. But they have a sentence opportunity for them to strike a deal which may not be there. So i do not think, by any imagination in north korea that he should open up the economy, the even very limited chinese, that is impossible for the authoritarian estate. But he can make much progress on the economic front without opening up the information. To put the question directly, President Trump is making a bet that kim jongun needs economic opening, certainly in in to sanctions but beyond that. But badly enough is good to continue to engage in. Is President Trump right . Yes, i think he is right. I think all the assets over the past decade have not worked and its right to tryry something different. I do not for second thing kim jongun is going to give up his Nuclear Weapons but i think there could be a different process going on. I think they should work on the liaison. They should be talking. So i think if they continue this process then maybe they can make some change. I thinknk north korea has survid for n this long by shutting the people off from the outside world and keeping them d isolat. We in the outside world are not helping them to do that. Youre helping north Korean People to get more information, bring people out, the north korean soccer players in the u. S. And musicians, why are they not people to People Exchange that we can help openex their es and to not allow the regime to isolate the country for decades to come. A final question before i turn this over to my colleagues to continue and explore thesehe issues. The question that haunts us warmer in moments of crisis when north korea. Then im sure has consumed thousands of hours. Is whether kim jongun is a rational indeterminable actor or whether he is irrational and impulsive. You probably know him better than any journalist in the world. He is rational absolutely. He is still in power, seven and a half years on with all these odds against them,. The regime that mustve been suspicious of him and the outside world expected him to fail and so much pressure on him to fail. He has somehow managed to withstand it all. He has a not done this iff he ws not irrational a actor. He is definitely not a good person. This is not a nice t n guy. When i say that he is rational i dont want them to think im sympathetic to him anyway. If you look at the cold political science, he has done everything he could do to stay in power if he cannot do that if you was a total nut job. A brilliant book, a brilliant journalist. Thank you so much. [applause] wednesday the 18th anniversary of the 9 11 terrorist attack. Watch the live coverage at 8 30 a. M. Eastern on cspan3 from the 9 11 moral plaza in new york city. A moment of silence, the reading of the names and the ringing of the bow. At 9 00 a. M. Eastern on cspan from the pentagon, a ceremony at the 9 11 memorial. Live coverage of the 18 and the rectory of the 9 11 terrorist attack on cspan. Cspan3 and online at cspan. Org or listen live on the free cspan radio app. Saturday object to be at 9 0w disability attorney, in her book she di details becoming the deah graduate of harvard. All the students go to school and expect the teachers to teach them. I cannot do that. I had to think about what might be missing, what are the potential unknowns. How can i find the unknowns. In all my life, this price process of unknowns and come up with solutions. At 10 00 p. M. On after words, American University professor talks about his book, how to be an antiracist. He is interviewed by author and Princeton University professor. I dont think people who are trying to be part of the movement against racism recognized really that the history eugenicist were classified as racism, they said im not racist. When the segregationists were charged with being racist, they said i am not racist. Even White Nationalist today are saying im not racist, no matter if theyre in the white house or planning the next mass shooting. At 11 00 p. M. , former defense secretary jim mattis recounts his military career and his thoughts on leadership in his book calls on chaos. Learning to lead. Watch book tv, every weekend on cspan2. Next, americas retreat from w