Becoming Kim Jong Un: A Former CIA Officer's Insights into North Korea's Enigmatic Young Dictator by Jung H. Pak

Becoming Kim Jong Un: A Former CIA Officer's Insights into North Korea's Enigmatic Young Dictator

by Jung H. Pak

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History & Foreign AffairsMemoir & Biography

Former CIA senior analyst Jung Pak's analytical biography of Kim Jong Un — drawing on the intelligence-community methods she was trained in, this is leader-portrait-as-strategic-assessment rather than narrative biography.

Core ideas
  • The Swiss boarding-school years are treated as formative but not transformative — Kim returned to the family system, and that system's logic dominates everything else.
  • The post-2011 consolidation (the Jang Song-thaek execution, the Kim Jong-nam Malaysia assassination) is read as classic regime-stabilization moves with a personal-paranoia accelerant — not unique behavior, but unusually extreme even by dynastic-autocracy standards.
  • The Trump-Kim diplomacy of 2018-19 is reconstructed from the intelligence-analyst's frame — Kim got what he wanted (legitimacy, photo ops, sanctions relief in places) while ceding nothing structural.
Published2020
Pages336
ISBN9781984819727
ReadFeb 2025
North Korea

Connected to 6 other books

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