North Korean leader gravely ill, officials say

U.S. officials are concerned that his health could jeopardize nuclear talks.

WASHINGTON (AP) — North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il may be gravely ill, perhaps the victim of a stroke, U.S. and other Western officials said Tuesday after he failed to appear for a major national parade. If so, it could jeopardize the already troubled international effort to get his nation to abandon nuclear weapons.

The Yonhap news agency said late Tuesday that Kim is alive but ill.

Kim’s absence from a military parade for the country’s 60th anniversary lent credence to reports that the man North Koreans call the “Dear Leader” had been incapacitated during the past few weeks.

The 66-year-old Kim, who has been rumored to be in varying degrees of ill health for years, has not been seen since mid-August. Though he appears rarely in public and his voice is seldom broadcast, Kim has shown up for previous landmark celebrations.

“There is reason to believe Kim Jong Il has suffered a serious health setback, possibly a stroke,” one Western intelligence official said. A senior U.S. official said fresh rumors had been circulating about Kim’s health and his control over North Korea’s highly centralized government.

A former CIA official with recent access to intelligence on North Korea said that even before Tuesday the agency was confident that reports of a health crisis were accurate.

The officials spoke anonymously to summarize sensitive intelligence.

The reclusive Kim took power in 1994 after the death of his father, Kim Il Sung. It was communism’s first hereditary transfer of power, and both Kims are revered in a personality cult perpetrated by the country’s authoritarian government.

To the outside world Kim is best recognized as a silent, waving figure with a bouffant hairdo and a quasi-military suit reminiscent of communist leaders of an earlier time. Word of his possible health problems recalled the Soviet era, too, when U.S. analysts pored over photos of military parades for clues to who was up and who was down in the Kremlin.

Neither the White House nor the State Department would comment publicly on Kim’s health, noting that the North Korean government is one of the most opaque and secretive on Earth.

But U.S. officials said privately they were concerned that Kim’s apparently failing health jeopardized six-nation talks aimed at ridding North Korea of its nuclear weapons. The United States has been a wary partner in those talks, but their success is one of the Bush administration’s signature foreign policy goals.

The talks are now stalled in a dispute over the North’s obligation to allow intrusive foreign accounting of its known nuclear stockpile.

North Korea’s powerful military is known to be opposed to the negotiations with China, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the United States. Many analysts believed the process was continuing mainly due to Kim’s support and his backing of moderates in the foreign ministry.

U.S. officials noted that shortly after the health rumors began to circulate in mid-August, North Korea started to adopt a tougher line in nuclear negotiations. The North first suspended disablement of its main nuclear reactor and then threatened to rebuild it, saying the U.S. had not kept a pledge to remove the country from a terrorism blacklist.