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The Identity of Kim Il Sung (1949) [pdf]
- adultSwim 4y agoNote that this story is not accepted by historians. It's not clear that this is still the official position of the CIA or US government.
- cercatrova 4y agoThat was an incredibly interesting story. Where can I find more government declassified documents?
- AndrewKemendo 4y agoNot even joking the CIA has the best library for this: https://www.cia.gov/legacy/headquarters/cia-library/ https://www.cia.gov/legacy/headquarters/cia-library/ Luckily, you don't need to be an agency or IC employee to read a lot of it: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/home https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/home
- nl 4y agohttps://guides.loc.gov/finding-government-documents/declassified-documents https://guides.loc.gov/finding-government-documents/declassi... is an excellent source. https://www.documentcloud.org/app?q=classified https://www.documentcloud.org/app?q=classified is also pretty interesting and has good search tools.
- jhanschoo 4y agoA profile on Xi while he was Vice President of the PRC https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09BEIJING3128_a.html https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09BEIJING3128_a.html
- dmix 4y agoVery interesting, thanks. Anyone know who the professor is that sourced this? His father was China's "first Minister of Labor" and the professor became an American. > Despite Communist Party rhetoric regarding the creation of a "classless" society, the professor described, the pre-Cultural Revolution society and leadership compounds in which he and Xi Jinping grew up were, ironically, the "most precisely class-based mini-society ever constructed." Always an interesting observation. I've read is a constant source of conflict in many modern socialist groups is that ideological purity tests often damages their ability to maintain cohesion, recruit among the actual 'working class' since the party is usually middle class university kids, and infighting over petty details of organization has been satirized to death. While the historical success stories of (obviously authoritarian) socialist parties always had rigid hierarchies, clear leaders, and ruthless pragmatism. Politics always dilutes ideology, you just can't say that part out loud.
- yomkippur 4y agoWhat I find interesting about Xi is his father who was instrumental in introducing free market to China through the province he was in charge of Guandong or Guangzhou (?) who wanted to create self-reliant city governance by inviting limited test run of foreign capital in return for labor produce. Deng Xiaoping quickly recognized its potential and essentially took credit for this model that allowed China to catapult itself onto the world stage. I can only imagine his ambitions growing up, he's family suffered under the cultural revolution, he's father was sidelined and others took credit for what essentially transformed China. He was originally chosen as a candidate to replace Hu, after the March 2012 coup d'etat that led to the imprisonment of Bo Xilai and Zhou Yongkang. He was picked because he was predicted to be a lame duck but what transpired as you see was the political war launched to remove/reduce Ziang Zemin's grip on power. The internal struggles of the CCP and Xi's family history is very interesting but what I find even more interesting is how much the American media attacks Xi because Jiang Zemin has lot of friends in this area. Here's the info on 2012 Coup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSq_TVjw9rQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSq_TVjw9rQ
- dmix 4y ago> he's father was sidelined and others took credit for what essentially transformed China. Yeah it was probably easy to see Xi as just another party leader but this back story shows how he sees himself as both coming from and representing the very best that China has to offer and a bunch of his friends are very comfortable with such a singular strong man elitist taking over. He’s got the credentials for such a thing. It’s just too bad he went ‘redder than red’ in the critical years his father was in jail. But I guess his success was partly because he wasn’t a Deng Xiaoping acolyte that grew up being pro-West.
- yomkippur 4y agoYes precisely to your point of pro-West and isolationist factions that are splitting up the leadership. It does seem that from Xi's travels that he clearly feels secure enough to meet foreign leaders and leave beijing unattended. Jiang Zemin's people are throwing everything they got to hold on to essentially unlimited power and wealth. We can see that they also have their fans in the West who have benefited from this system setup by Deng. It's unlikely that Xi will compromise, I can see that he was able to hide his ambition very well, enough to fool other CCP princelings that tried to wrestle away control. ie) bo xilai
- noSyncCloud 4y ago>displaying a fascination with (and knowledge of) Buddhist martial arts and mystical powers Beyond parody.
- Fargoan 4y agohttps://www.theblackvault.com https://www.theblackvault.com Here's a good one https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/broken-arrow-incidents/ https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/broken-arrow-i...
- sn0w_crash 4y agoThat was superb
- MBCook 4y agoWow. I had no idea.
- WebbWeaver 4y agoLol I guess NSRB and FBI didn't need to know that
- yongjik 4y agoMeh, the so-called "fake Kim Il Sung theory" isn't a new info found in 2011, it was a raging conspiracy theory all the way back from 1940s. If you speak Korean, search for "김일성 가짜설", you'll find wiki pages the size of a book chapter. From what I've heard, the theory is largely discredited now. (Of course that doesn't mean North Korea's breathless account of Kim's heroic adventures is anywhere near believable, but that's a separate issue.)
- VictorPath 4y agoAlso as historical records show, and as some in the western braintrust noted at the time, the idea that Stalin was foisting revolution onto Korean communists, it was somewhat backwards - local Korean communists fighting the Japanese and then Americans, like the Chinese, were much more enthused about revolution in their countries than Stalin was.
- hackerlight 4y agoIt was Mao foisting it onto Korea. Stalin was a careful opportunist and thought Korea would be too risky and reckless, so he was hesitant but was eventually persuaded by Mao that it was a good idea. > local Korean communists ... were much more enthused about revolution in their countries than Stalin was. Even if we substitute "Stalin" for "Mao", this statement has low epistemic legibility and low relevance. It could have been 100, 10k, or 1 million Korean communists who were genuinely more "enthused" than Mao was, given that there's likely to be N > 0 people who are more enthused about any kind of political project inside of a large population when their enthusiasm is contrasted to that of a single person. That's a given. It doesn't detract from the fact that an ideology and system was forced onto a sizeable unwilling population with Mao's direct backing.
- pattusk 4y agothis is untrue, the Korean peninsula had a strong socialist (including non-Marxist forms of socialism) and later communist (as in affiliated with the COMINTERN) movement from the early 20th century and its main influence was the Japanese Communist Party - not Mao. (Incidentally, a large part of the membership of the Japanese Communist Party was Korean - up until the cadres.) North Korean troops (and earlier the so-called "Yanan Koreans") were also instrumental in securing the Chinese communist victory during the Civil War through their actions in Northeast China. So in a sense they forced communism on China just as much as the Chinese forced communism onto Korea. > It was Mao foisting it onto Korea. Stalin was a careful opportunist and thought Korea would be too risky and reckless, so he was hesitant but was eventually persuaded by Mao that it was a good idea. Your statement refers to the Korean War. As archive records now show, both Stalin and Mao were reluctant and Kim Il Sung only managed to convince Stalin by pretending that Mao was on board for an invasion of the South (and likewise lying to Mao about Stalin being on board). In any case, North Korea was already socialist before the Korean War. And the South also had a very strong communist movement - the first governments that sprouted in Korea after 1945 were "people's committees". But the US backed dictator Syngman Rhee (selected for his staunch anti-communism, the man was so reactionary his conservatism shocked even US intelligence) managed to politicide the Southern communists in large numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodo_League_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodo_League_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeju_uprising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeju_uprising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeosu%E2%80%93Suncheon_rebellion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeosu%E2%80%93Suncheon_rebelli...
- mwint 4y agoWhat do the "(Ueda: ###, ###, ###)" blocks mean? Some kind of internal CIA/gov't unique-person-identifier?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- audiometry 4y agoOr Unicode style references to the Chinese characters that compose those names?
- zinekeller 4y agoSince that Unicode didn't exist back then, maybe a table of Hanja? (Also since it mentioned Ueda I guess it originally meant Japanese Kanji repurposed by the US for standardisation.)
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoIt's a Japanese dictionary where characters can be referenced by an index number: https://www.amazon.com/Uedas-Daijiten-Dictionary-Characters-Compounds/dp/B000LECANA https://www.amazon.com/Uedas-Daijiten-Dictionary-Characters-...
- AdamH12113 4y agoIt looks like a way of referring to Korean (or Han?) characters. The document seems to have been typed, so adding characters from another language would be difficult. It looks like: Kim = 12380 Il = 4446 Sung = 3610 Ju = 4871 The interesting part seems to be the claim that Kim Sung-ju's name was originally changed to a different set of characters that were also pronounced Kim Il-sung: Kim: 12380 Il: 1 Sung: 4499 and that this name was later converted to the (12380, 4446, 3610) one from above, which was the name of a famous Korean general who fought the Japanese in the 1920s.
- anewpersonality 4y agoTLDR Kim il sung is Don Draper
- tomahunt 4y agoOh, I thought he had derived a math identity.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- 2143 4y agoYou work with math? --- A company I worked for had its own in-house tool for leave management of employees. The leaves are supposed to get reset on January 1st but that year it didn't happen automatically for whatever reason. Somebody asked on an internal chat group when the "leaves would be reset". It had been a long day. I casually replied "mid March". Everybody panicked, and I panicked because I didn't know why they where panicking. Later we discovered I thought he was asking about when leaves on trees would reappear after the winter (after they fell down during fall/autumn) :D This was weird because I was in a torrid region where it's rather hot and humid all year round, there's no such thing as winter, it never snows, and the trees are evergreen — there's never an all-leaves-are-down situation. (The year prior to that I was in another part of the Earth where the leaves are gone winter. I told you it had been a long day.)
- jwilk 4y agoWhat does resetting the leaves mean?
- smcl 4y ago"Leave" is a word for holiday/vacation in UK English. So you'd have a yearly allocation of (say) 25 days of leave/holiday/vacation that is consumed through the year (by going on holiday), then on or shortly after New Year it would be "reset" back to 25.
- 2143 4y agoThanks. I wonder what they call it in the States.
- walterburns 4y agoThis is the CIA's published version of this document: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp80-00809a000600270269-4 https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp80-00809a000...
- TazeTSchnitzel 4y agoThe webfont used by that page looks so horrible on my system that I thought the page was an image. I've never used a site before that benefited so much from going to Inspect Element and disabling the font: property.
- waffleiron 4y agoNote that this is unevaluated information according to the document, and coming from a single person.
- tablespoon 4y ago> Note that this is unevaluated information according to the document, and coming from a single person. It lists the source as "Ibuk T'ongsin," which appears to have been some kind of periodical. Looks like it's just an English translation of open-source intelligence.
- avodonosov 4y agoMaybe the HN title should be changed. People in other comments are very excited: "I had no idea!", "wow, CIA dossier!". Possible title: "Unevaluated information about Kim Il Sung's identity from an old publication in some Korean monthly periodical."
- sideproject 4y agoThe fascination around North Korea and its leaders is understandable. I grew up in South Korea in the 80's and we just lived with "it" constantly (as people still do). I remember when I was in primary school, you will find these propaganda papers on the streets telling South Koreans of how corrupt their government was and urging them to defect to North. Apparently, North Korea would send balloons filled with these propaganda messages. South would do the same to North. Then there was a TV show once a year where separated families in North & South re-unite for a holiday. They were separated during the Korean War and the two governments allowed these families to be found and meet for a few days, before they were separated again. They hadn't seen each other for ~30 years so were young and only remembered just a few bits of information. These TV shows made EVERYONE cry.
- Narretz 4y agoThese reunion shows were reported on in Germany, too. I haven't heard anything about them for a few years, though. I assume not many direct separated family members are still alive, or there's currently no agreement about these meetings. It's fascinating that the population of both countries is now largely born after the split.
- avodonosov 4y agoDo you know the "Ibuk T'ongsin" listed as the source in the doc? Is that a name of the "monthly periodical" or the name of the author who wrote the article for that monthly periodical?
- luispauloml 4y agoIn hangul, it's written as 이북통신, and it was a periodical promoting propaganda against North Korea: http://www.much.go.kr/L/x3th5X5gDH.do http://www.much.go.kr/L/x3th5X5gDH.do Also, if you can't read Korean, I recommend using https://papago.naver.com/ https://papago.naver.com/ instead of Google Translator.
- GekkePrutser 4y agoFunnily enough what you describe with balloons is still being done with USB sticks today: https://flashdrivesforfreedom.org/ https://flashdrivesforfreedom.org/
- peter_retief 4y agoWhat a singularly horrible human being.
- suction 4y agoExtremely interesting to see how the CIA works, in 1949 they didn't have to be as believable as now - it's obviously a smear job in how it tries to paint him as a murderer and lowly thief only out to get money. It's no wonder it has been discredited. For the easily offended - no, I don't think he was a good guy.
- MrPatan 4y agoI wonder if the CIA fabrications of today only seem believable now and will seem unbelievable in 70 years.
- suction 4y agoI would think so, and it gets harder for them due to globalisation and countries working together economically (well apart from Russia maybe) - because back in 1949, China, Korea and Japan were basically impenetrable black boxes for most people, where you'd take the CIA's word for it because who knew what was possible or likely in those cultures?
- pydry 4y agoI wonder why people believe them now, to be honest.
- pyronite 4y agoI'd say it depends. Which "CIA fabrications of today" are you referring to? Many people likely have something that springs to mind, based on their own existing biases, but that differs between people. When naming a particular "fabrication" you'll probably encounter much more resistance. (Russiagate? HIV/AIDS? The moon landing?)
- MichaelCollins 4y agoRemember all the accusations of Julian Assange being a rapist?
- ransom1538 4y ago"it's obviously a smear job in how it tries to paint him as a murderer and lowly thief only out to get money" I am trying to follow the logic here. The CIA wanted to smear Kim by using a restricted classified report that wasn't released for 60 years? If I was doing a smear campaign in 1949 I would put it on the radio.
- thriftwy 4y agoWhat's (Ueda: X, Y, Z) notation? Is it some kind of numberic representation of Hanja (Korean using Chinese characters)?
- jwilk 4y agoSee replies to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32220169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32220169.
- dzonga 4y ago>> he's neither brilliant or educated but he's reliable i.e gets things done. something to note.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cal85 4y agoWhere did you get this quote from? The closest line in the document is quite different: > Kim is neither brilliant nor adequately educated, but he has proven himself highly acceptable to Stalin.
- Heleana 4y agoThat was an exceptionally fascinating account to hear. Where can I get more documents that have been declassified by the government?
- hindsightbias 4y agohttps://cryptome.org/ https://cryptome.org/ before wikileaks was wikileaks.
- EarthIsHome 4y agoFor those interested in the Korean War, Blowback's season 3 [0] covers the span from Japan's imperial occupation of the Korean peninsula to the Korea War. [0]: https://blowback.show/ https://blowback.show/
- rospaya 4y agoI love Blowback. Season one was great, season two a bit less great, since absolutely any bad thing was blamed on the US, as if Castro and the USSR didn't do anything repressive or bad against the Cuban people.
- apexalpha 4y agoThis is a report (summary) of a radio broadcast by a south korean Radio station in 1949. This is not a CIA analysis of Kim Il Sung, just a report on a report.
- kwatsonafter 4y agoHe was a good man in lieu of western propaganda. Read his speeches on nuclear war. https://www.marxists.org/archive/kim-il-sung/index.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/kim-il-sung/index.htm