By Mick Krever, CNN
Who controls the Hermit Kingdom?
According to a North Korean defector – a former regime insider who was one of Kim Jong Il’s favorite poet-propagandists – it is not the 31-year-old dictator Kim Jong Un.
“When Kim Jong Il died and Kim Jong Un succeeded him, people saw the transfer of power from father to son,” Jang Jin-Sung told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in London. “What they did not see also was what happened to the apparatus of the totalitarian system that supported the rule of Kim Jong Il.”
That apparatus, Jang said, is the Organization and Guidance Department, or OGD – it was Kim Jong Il’s education as he rose through the ranks, and was full of his university friends.
It is an “old-boy’s network” made into a massive surveillance organization.
“Kim Jong Il had the OGD as his old boys' network,” Jang told Amanpour. “Kim Jong-un may have friends in his Swiss school, but he has no one inside North Korea.”
Jang is the author of a new book, "Dear Leader: Poet, Spy, Escapee – A Look Inside North Korea."
“After the execution of Jang Song Thaek [Kim Jong Un’s uncle], he has become an orphan – not just in terms of family connections, but in terms of politics.”
“He's a political orphan.”
Precious little is known about Kim Jong Un, who inherited the leadership of North Korea after his father’s death in 2011.
Since that time, Jang said, Kim Jong Un has had to rely on his father’s “old-boys network” to get anything done.
But because that group does not respect the younger Kim, who was educated in Switzerland, the way it did his father, Kim Jong Un has become nothing more than the symbolic head of North Korea.