North Korean Policy Elites - Defense Technical Information Center

Each of the five papers in this collection takes its own approach to addressing the
questions of what factions or potential factions exist among the North Korean elite, what
information sources the elite use to learn about U.S. military initiatives, and what factors
influence how outside information is perceived. It would be an exaggeration to say that the five
viewpoints are as varied as the proverbial blind men’s descriptions of the elephant, but readers
have surely noted differences as well as consistencies among the perspectives. For example, no
two of the tables of North Korean elite purport to list exactly the same thing, and consequently
no two can be directly compared. The differences in emphasis and approach to understanding
North Korea point to the importance for U.S. policy makers of analyzing the behaviors of foreign
leaders from multiple perspectives.
A. WHO ARE THE NORTH KOREAN ELITE?
North Korea’s elite can be defined in any number of ways, and as the country undergoes
inevitable changes in its political and economic systems, the attributes that qualify one for elite
membership may be changing as well. Bermudez conceptualizes the elite as the convergence of
“five broad societal groupings: Kim Jong-il’s extended family and close confidants; the MPAF
[Ministry of People’s Armed Forces]; the KWP [Korean Workers’ Party]; the cabinet; and the
intelligence and internal security services,” with the “pinnacle of the power-holding elite” being
the members of the National Defense Commission. Gause refers to the elite as a “class,” which
paradoxically seems quite accurate in North Korea’s supposedly “classless” society. Hassig
adopts a definition that emerged from the initial discussions of the research group, defining the
elite broadly as “anyone who is in a channel of communication that leads upwards [to Kim Jongil].”
Mansourov notes that party membership used to be the “entry ticket into the elite club,” but
that under what he terms 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.” Mansourov argues that the people who are closest to Kim in the information
chain are three generals in the KPA Supreme Command’s Operation Command Group. Smith
endorses the idea that the elite consist of members of the topmost of the three political classes in
North Korea - sometimes referred to in internal North Korean documents as the “core” class, but
he also adds a concentric view of power: the “elite extends from Kim Jong-il’s inner
circle - probably no more than a half dozen to ten people - through senior military, party and
government officials, the middle ranks, out to, say, schoolteachers who instruct the children of
the elite.”
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