Do not expect me to change

Called the Dear Leader by his people,Kim,the son of North Koreas founder,remained an unknowable figure. North Koreans heard about him only as the great successor to the revolutionary cause. Yet he fostered what was perhaps the last personality cult in the Communist world. His portrait hangs beside that of his father,Kim Il-sung,in every North Korean household and building.

Kim was a source of fascination inside the Central Intelligence Agency,which interviewed his mistresses,tried to track his whereabouts and psychoanalysed his motives. And he was an object of parody in American culture.

Short and round,he wore elevator shoes,oversize sunglasses and a bouffant hairdo-a Hollywood stereotype of the wacky post-cold-war dictator. Kim himself was fascinated by film. He orchestrated the kidnapping of an actress and a director,both of them South Koreans,in an effort to build a domestic movie industry. He was said to keep a personal library of 20,000 foreign films,including the complete James Bond series,his favourite. But he rarely saw the outside world,save from the windows of his luxury train,which occasionally took him to China.

He was derided and denounced. President George W Bush called him a pygmy and included his country in the axis of evil. Childrens books in South Korea depicted him as a red devil with horns and fangs. Yet those who met him were surprised by his serious demeanour and his knowledge of events beyond the hermit kingdom he controlled.

A Deal With Washington

President Bush said during his first term in office that he would never tolerate a nuclear North Korea,but as his presidency wound down,many of his aides believed he did exactly that.

Kim played a weak hand very well. He succeeded in fending off pressure from Washington and Beijing,and forcing Washington to talk with him and ultimately to haggle with him. He dragged out negotiations,holding on to his nuclear fuel and whatever weapons he had produced. It is that arsenal that now worries American and Asian officials.

When the history of this era is written, said Graham Allison,a Harvard professor and expert on proliferation,the scorecard will be Kim 8,Bush 0.

Kims policy of songun,or army first, lavished the countrys scarce resources on the military. But as the Norths economy shrank,its isolation deepened. Possibly as many as 2 million peoplealmost 10 per cent of the populationdied in a famine in the mid-to-late 1990s brought on by incompetence and natural disasters.

Do not expect me to change! is a popular catchphrase credited to Kim and used to exhort his people to remain loyal to his socialist ways.

A young Kim

Kim is believed to have been born in Siberia in 1941,when his father,Kim Il-sung,was in exile in the Soviet Union. But in North Koreas official accounts,he was born in 1942,in a cabin. In his youth and middle age,there were stories about his playboy lifestyle. There was also speculation that he was involved in the 1983 bombing of a South Korean political delegation in Burma. Washington put North Korea on its list of state sponsors of terrorism after North Korean agents planted a bomb that blew up a South Korean passenger jet in 1987 under instructions from Kim,according to one of the agents,who was caught alive.

Kim campaigned for power relentlessly. He bowed to his father at the front porch each morning and offered to put the shoes on the fathers feet long before he was elected to the politburo,at age 32,in 1974,said Hwang Jang-yop,a former North Korean Workers Party secretary.

It was not until 1993,as the existence of the Yongbyon nuclear plant and North Koreas nuclear weapons ambitions became publicly known,that Kim appeared to be his fathers undisputed successor. That year,he became head of the National Defence Commission.

In 1994,in a showdown with the US,North Korea threatened to turn its stockpile of nuclear fuel into bombs. The standoff was defused when Kim Il-sung welcomed former President Jimmy Carter,who pushed Clinton and Kim into a deal. Within a month,however,the countrys founder and Great Leader was dead and Kim took over.

Pressuring Pyongyang

Once President Bush took office in January 2001,all cooperation between Washington and Seoul over how to deal with the North came to a halt. A concerted effort began to push North Korea over the brink. In October 2002,the US administration presented North Korea with evidence that it had secretly tried to evade the 1994 nuclear agreement with the US by purchasing equipment to enrich uranium from Abdul Qadeer Khan,a founder of Pakistans nuclear weapons programme. That led to a confrontation that changed the nature of the North Korean threat.

After the invasion of Iraq,Kim was not seen for nearly two months. He emerged only to start another confrontation in 2006,first with a series of missile tests,then,in October,the Norths first nuclear test.

In the summer of 2007,Kim agreed to stop the production of new nuclear fuel at Yongbyon. By then he presumably had all the weapons he needed.

As soon as President Obama came into office,Kim ordered a second nuclear test,this one more successful than the first. The move aborted efforts by Obama to engage with the North Koreans. And the next three years were spent with the US and South Korea demanding the North live up to the denuclearisation pledges it made during the Bush administration. Instead,it did the opposite. In 2010,the North made two attacks against the South Korean military.

Despite his ill health,he was reported to have visited one of the units that attacked the South,to hand out medals,and recently managed one last visit to his benefactors in China.