North Korean Policy Elites - Defense Technical Information Center

work, monitor their communications, and ensure that Kim Jong Il knows everything about each
one of his relatives, whereas his own secrecy and privacy are well preserved and no one knows
anything about him. Marshal Li Ul-Sol, 16 Kim Il Sung’s closest long-time aide and confident, his
former personal aide de camps, and one of Kim Jong Il’s trusted elders, has been the Chief of the
Secret Service since 1982. He is a very influential figure in the top leadership. But, because of
Marshal Li Ul Sol’s advanced age, the day-to-day operations are believed to be handled by one
of Kim Jong Il’s in-laws, Vice-Marshal Chang Sung-U, who is Li Ul-Sol’s first deputy. The
Secret Service is a real player, albeit cautious and surreptitious, in all the internal family power
feuds.
“Power Transmission Belts”
Five major political forces affecting all spheres of the North Korean life, namely the
national security establishment, the old guard, the technocrats, the local elites, and the “foreign
wind,” approach the “extended family clan” with their own visions for national development and
policy recommendations for the burning issues of the day, and attempt with different degrees of
success to penetrate and influence the Kim “family court” in order to ensure the representation of
their corporate interests at the heart of national decision-making at the time of political
succession.
These five “transmission belts” connect the “hub” of the North Korean policy-making,
the Dear Leader and Supreme Commander-in-Chief Kim Jong Il, with the “outer circle” of the
North Korean elites, the brain-feeding tubes at the center and in provinces, who also constitute
the “protective belt,” absorbing external shocks and safe-guarding the regime from mass
discontent.
Party membership serves as an entry ticket into the elite club, but increasingly it is taken
for granted and is no longer sufficient for the new nomenclature. Access to state assets, prestige,
and power, accumulation of private wealth, or government licensing authority is a must to
qualify for the new elite status. Among the members of the same interest-based establishment,
there may exist significant value gaps on the ideological continuums from conservative to liberal
and from moderate to radical. But, different “transmission belts” tend to articulate and aggregate
divergent strategic priorities and policy preferences among the North Korean elites.
16 Li Ul-Sol was born in 1920 in South Hamgyong Province. He served in the Chinese Communist Eighth Route
Armies together with Kim Il Sung in the 1930s and graduated from the Soviet Military Academy in the 1950s. He
became a corps commander in 1962 and commander of the Fifth Army Group in 1968. He has been a member of
the WPK Central Military Committee since 1980 and a member of the National Defense Commission since 1990.
He was promoted to vice-marshal in 1992 and to full marshal in 1995.
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