No consensus on N. Korea's aims

BEIJING — There are stories of Kim Jong Il the goofball, who has a library of 20,000 films and loves James Bond. And there are stories of Kim Jong Il the madman, who is such a big fan of South Korean movies that he had a director and actress kidnapped. Both are true.

Then there is the story that North Korea's reclusive, eccentric leader — responsible for the deaths of as many as 2 million people by famine — is such a sensitive person that when he accidentally shot a pregnant deer while hunting he had it raced to a hospital to be saved.

The newest Kim story is potentially terrifying: That North Korea is about to conduct a nuclear weapons test, making Kim Jong Il one of the most feared men on Earth, capable of either threatening the world with a working bomb or selling one to terrorists.

What links these stories is how they come cloaked in mystery, a void of information in which the easiest reality to grasp is the caricature of Kim as a buffoonish Dr. Evil.

People who study North Korea say this is a false impression based on errant guesswork about a country few outsiders have been allowed to visit. Kim is not deranged, the experts say. He is wily. He has taken a tiny, has-been communist country ruled as a private fiefdom and made it the focus of the world's attention through menace, obfuscation and brinkmanship.

Even now, with North Korea in the headlines, it remains such a closed country that there is absolutely no consensus whether Kim is in the final stages of preparation to test the bomb and become a nuclear state. It is possible he is simply trying to heighten the pressure on the Bush administration to negotiate a more favorable deal.

But what is fading from view is the idea of expecting steady progress toward an international agreement that ends North Korea's nuclear ambitions and relieves the world's concern.

"I am much more concerned today than a year ago," said Stephen Noerper, a longtime North Korea watcher affiliated with the Nautilus Institute. "It appears things are beginning to go badly wrong."

It has been nearly a year, Noerper pointed out, since the last negotiating session in Beijing involving North Korea, China, Russia, South Korea, Japan and the United States. Instead of progress, the tone has turned icy, with President Bush at a recent news conference calling Kim a "tyrant" who "starves his people" and runs "huge concentration camps."

This came after South Korean officials and the State Department asked the president to avoid name-calling, according to analysts.