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Report: Kim using gifts to win support
EOUL, South Korea -- North Korean leader Kim Jong Il doled out foreign-made cars to senior intelligence officials to ensure their loyalty to his youngest son when he put the 26-year-old in charge of the country's powerful spy agency, a report said Wednesday.
Foreign cars? Do people really stay bought for a mere foreign vehicle nowadays? I'm not au courant on current bribery scales, I fear.
The appointment is part of Kim's plan to anoint the son, Kim Jong Un, as North Korea's future leader, South Korea's Dong-a Ilbo newspaper said, citing an unidentified source. The son is also overseeing the handling of two U.S. journalists detained in March while on a reporting trip to the Chinese-North Korea border, the report said.
That might be disinformation designed to build up Junior in the eyes of the insiders, or it might indicate the importance Kimmie has put on the journalists. Any guesses?
Jong Un was serving as acting chairman of the National Defense Commission, the country's highest post, one currently held by his father, Japan's Mainichi newspaper reported last weekend.

Wednesday's Dong-a Ilbo report said Kim ordered senior officials at the State Security Department in March to "uphold" Jong Un as head of the agency. Kim told the officials to "safeguard comrade Kim Jong Un with (your) lives as you did for me in the past," the mass-market daily said.

Five luxury cars, each worth some $80,000, were given as gifts to the officials, it said. The paper did not say which cars were given, but Kim has long been known to favor Mercedes and French wine as gifts to ensure his inner circle's loyalty.
All at the expense of starving people. Couldn't we cut the brake lines and poison the wine?
*shrug* The wine has been drunk, and the cars lost 20% value the minute they were driven off the lot.
South Korea's main spy agency, the National Intelligence Service, said it could not confirm the report.

The Dong-a Ilbo report also said that Jong Un was overseeing the handling of U.S. journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee of Current TV, a San Francisco-based media venture founded by former Vice President Al Gore. The two were sentenced to 12 years of hard labor for allegedly crossing into the country illegally and engaging in "hostile acts."

In Washington, State Department spokesman Ian Kelly told reporters that Mats Foyer, Sweden's ambassador to North Korea, visited the American journalists in Pyongyang on Tuesday. Sweden serves as the U.S. protecting power in North Korea because Washington does not have diplomatic relations with North Korea. Foyer has been in "constant contact" with the North, Kelly said. He said the U.S. was "pursuing many different avenues" to secure their release, but he would not elaborate.
Posted by: Steve White 2009-06-26
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=272883