Book review: The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot - flight to freedom
No Kum-sok, the youngest pilot in the North Korean air force, defected to South Korea in a Soviet MiG warplane. The author tells his story and that of North Korea.
North Korea continues to spellbind and dumbfound. Kim Jong-un, a pudgy clone of his grandfather who founded the hereditary Stalinist state, recently executed his defence minister using a unique firing squad: a battery of anti-aircraft guns.
Obliteration is the name of the game, whether it's feeding your uncle to dogs or wiping out all the relatives and friends of potential rivals. With every ghoulish twist and turn of the Kim family saga, we wonder what enables these monsters to hang on to power. Why don't the people or some faction rise up and overthrow the regime? Leaders require some degree of legitimacy at some level to cling to power. Fear alone is never enough.
In his latest look at the Hermit Kingdom, Blaine Harden (author of the 2012 book Escape From Camp 14) offers some new and important insights seen through the eyes of one young man determined to defect to America, and who did so in the most spectacular fashion - and with immense cost. No Kum-sok became the youngest pilot in the North Korean air force before he flew off in a Soviet MiG to an American base in South Korea, even though he knew his best friend faced execution as a result.
No was the son of a factory manager who worked for, and admired, the Japanese imperial occupiers. The family were Christians. They ate imported soy sauce. His mother wore a fancy fur coat. In short, they ticked every bad box they could tick at the time Soviet soldiers drove the Japanese out, Mao Zedong was about to force the Nationalists into their Taiwan redoubt and Kim Il-sung was tightening his grip on power in North Korea.