Kim Jong Il, North Korean leader, dies at 69

Kim Jong Il, the reclusive dictator who kept North Korea at the edge of starvation and collapse, banished to gulags citizens deemed disloyal and turned the country into a nuclear weapons state, died Saturday morning, according to an announcement by the North's official media on Monday. He was 69 and had been in ill health since a reported stroke in 2008. 

North Korea on Monday urged its 24 million people to rally behind 20-something heir-apparent Kim Jong Un as the nation mourned the death of supreme leader Kim.

South Korea, meanwhile, put its military on high alert, while people in the streets of Pyongyang broke into tears as they learned the news that Kim had died of heart failure. The United States said it was in close contact with allies South Korea and Japan.

A White House official said in a statement that it is closely monitoring reports of Kim's death.

"The president has been notified, and we are in close touch with our allies in South Korea and Japan. We remain committed to stability on the Korean peninsula, and to the freedom and security of our allies," the statement said.

The North said it would place Kim's body in the Kumsusan memorial palace in Pyongyang and would hold a national mourning period until Dec. 29. Kim's funeral will be held on Dec. 28, it said.

In a "special broadcast" Monday from the North Korean capital, state media said Kim died on a train due to a "great mental and physical strain" on

Dec. 17 during a "high intensity field inspection." It said an autopsy was done on Dec. 18 and "fully confirmed" the diagnosis.

"It is the biggest loss for the party ... and it is our people and nation's biggest sadness," an anchorwoman clad in black Korean traditional dress said in a voice choked with tears.

Called the "Dear Leader" by his people, Kim, the son of North Korea's founder, remained an unknowable figure. Everything about him was guesswork, from the exact date and place of his birth to the mythologized events of his rise in a country formed by the hasty division of the Korean peninsula at the end of World War II.

North Koreans heard about him only as their "peerless leader" and "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. Towers, banners and even rock faces across the country bear slogans praising him.

Kim was a source of fascination inside the CIA, which interviewed his mistresses, tried to track his whereabouts and psychoanalyzed his motives. And he was an object of parody in U.S. 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 favorite. 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." Children's books in South Korea depicted him as a red devil with horns and fangs. Yet those who met him were surprised by his serious demeanor and his knowledge of events beyond the hermit kingdom he controlled.

"He was a very outspoken person," said Roh Moo-Hyun, who as South Korea's president met Kim in Pyongyang in 2007. "He was the most flexible man in North Korea."

And though he presided over a country that was starving and broke, he played his one card, his nuclear weapons program, brilliantly, first defying the Bush administration's efforts to push his country over the brink, then exploiting America's distraction with the war in Iraq to harvest enough nuclear fuel from his main nuclear reactor at Yongbyon to produce the fuel for six to eight weapons.

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

But if "he was the greatest master of survival, against all odds," said Andrei Lankov, a North Korea expert at Kookmin University in Seoul, "it was his own people who paid the price, and the price was pretty high." 

Kim's policy of songun, or "army first," policy lavished the country's scarce resources on the military, at 1.1 million-strong the world's fifth largest.

But as the North's economy shrank, its isolation deepened. Possibly as many as 2 million people -- almost 10 percent of the population -- died in a famine in the mid- and late-1990s brought on by incompetence and natural disasters. Once richer than South Korea, the North now has a per-capita national income that is only 5.7 percent of that of the rival South.

Kim is believed to have been born in Siberia in 1941, when his father was in exile in the Soviet Union. But in North Korea's official accounts, he was born in 1942, in a cabin.

Little is known of his upbringing, apart from the official statement that he graduated in 1964 from Kim Il Sung University, one of the many institutions, buildings and monuments built to commemorate his father. At the time, North Korea was enmeshed in the Cold War, and the younger Kim watched many crises unfold from close up, including North Korea's seizure of the USS Pueblo, a U.S. spy ship, in 1968. He appeared episodically at state events, rarely speaking. When he did, he revealed that he had a high-pitched voice and little of his father's easy-going charisma.

In his youth and middle age, there were stories about his playboy lifestyle. There were tales of lavish meals at a time his country was starving -- his cook once wrote a book after leaving the country -- and his wavy hair and lifted heels, along with a passion for top-label liquor, made him the butt of jokes.

Kim campaigned for power relentlessly. He bowed to his father at the front porch each morning and offered to put the shoes on the father's 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 who had been a key aide for the Kim regime before his defection to Seoul in 1997.

After his health problems in 2008, Kim appointed his third son, Kim Jong Un, who is believed to be in his late 20s, to several key government posts, raising speculation that he would be the successor.

Asian stock markets moved lower amid the news, which raises the possibility of increased instability on the divided Korean peninsula.