Kim Ki-nam, the ‘Goebbels of North Korea’ who shaped the personality cult of the ruling Kim dynasty – obituary

Kim Ki-nam, who has died aged 94, was known, south of the 38th parallel, as the Goebbels of North Korea and was widely credited as the mastermind behind the personality cult woven around the ruling Kim dynasty, elevating the veneration of family members above even ideology in the hermit kingdom.

Over more than four decades as the leader of North Korea’s propaganda apparatus, Kim Ki-nam (no relation of the dictators), was instrumental in the creation of the quasi-religious cult around the “eternal leaders of Korea”, the founder of North Korea, Kim Il-sung, and his successors, Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un, helping to establish the country as a one-man hereditary dictatorship through successive generations.

He was particularly close to Kim Jong-il, helping him to expand the family cult after his father’s death in 1994. He was seen as the architect of claims of the great accomplishments of the country’s “Dear Leader” such as that he learnt to walk at the age of three weeks, was talking at eight weeks and, during three years at university, wrote no fewer than 1,500 books – and six full operas – and scored 11 holes in one in the very first golf round of his life.

Tall, bespectacled and with a slight hunch, Kim Ki-nam was (despite his authorship of such works as Fundamental Changes Brought About in Party Ideological Work Under the Banner of Converting the Whole Society to the Juche Ideology), a talented writer and charismatic public speaker.

Exerting a stranglehold over the country’s press, media, arts and publishing, he was the Korean Worker’s Party’s (KWP’s) key author of political slogans and in later years was responsible for much of the staging and choreography of mass rallies to mark the birthdays of dynastic leaders past and present.

“Nature and the sky unfolded such mysterious ecstasy in celebration of the birthday of Kim Jong Il,” the country’s central news agency reported after one such occasion, though whether North Korea’s poverty-stricken people shared in the euphoria must be doubted.

According to a report in 2019, Kim Ki-nam managed a loyalty fund into which donations were regularly extorted on such celebratory occasions. The fund had ostensibly been set up to promote the North’s “Juche” or self-reliance doctrine around the world, but the money was said to be destined for Kim Jong-un’s coffers.

The son of an iron worker, Kim Ki-nam was born in what is now the northeastern Chinese province of Heilongjang on August 28 1929. At school in Pyongyang he joined a student group opposed to the Japanese occupation. After the establishment of North Korea in 1948 he attended Kim Il-sung University and spent some time studying in Moscow.

He joined his country’s diplomatic service and served as ambassador to Beijing in the early 1950s. In 1956 he was appointed section chief in the KWP’s International Department and joined the faculty of Kim Il-sung University, where he became a professor.

After a further spell in Moscow at the Soviet Union’s Higher Party School he became an editorial writer for the KWP daily newspaper, Rodong Sinmun. In 1966 he was appointed deputy director of the KWP Propaganda and Agitation Department (PAD) where he was said to have become “drinking buddies” with Kim Jong-il, who became PAD director in 1967.

In 1972 he was appointed associate editor, and in 1974 editor, of the party’s theoretical magazine, Kulloja, and in 1976 he was promoted to editor-in-chief of Rodong Sinmun. From 1977 he served several terms in the Supreme People’s Assembly and was elected to the 6th Central Committee at the 6th Party Congress in 1980.

During the 1980s Kim Ki-nam led publicity initiatives both to support Kim Jong Il’s succession and establish Kim Il-sung’s world-historical status, including, it was said, writing essays and speeches attributed to Kim Jong-il. He also managed the establishment, reported as “discoveries,” of “slogan-bearing trees”, supposedly “revolutionary legacies” of Korea’s anti-Japanese guerrillas.

In April 1989 he was appointed director of the PAD and three years later was elected KWP secretary for propaganda and party history.

Having survived frequent purges, after Kim Jong-il’s death in 2011, Kim Ki-nam was one of seven leading North Korean officials who served as pallbearers at his funeral. Within four years he was one of only two still in office, the other five having either disappeared, been executed or banished. In 2016 he was elected a member of the newly created State Affairs Commission.

Kim Jong-un has paid tribute to a “veteran revolutionary who had remained boundlessly loyal” to the regime. As a result of such devotion, Kim Ki-nam was one of the very few North Korean officials allowed to visit the South.

In 2005 he became the first North Korean official to visit the South Korean national cemetery at Seoul and in 2009 he led a delegation to attend the memorial service to Kim Dae-jung, the former South Korean president who held the first inter-Korean summit with Kim Jong-il in 2000.

Kim Ki-nam officially retired from office in October 2017, passing on his role to Kim Jong-un’s sister Kim Yo-jong, though he continued to make appearances at public events.

Kim Ki-nam, born August 28 1929, died May 7 2024