But the personality and character of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il are hidden in a fog of propaganda and rumor. Even scholars of the Pyongyang regime are unsure what lies behind the two-dimensional figure the public occasionally glimpses. A short, pudgy, bespectacled man with a pompadour, he looks unimposing in photographs, and yet he pulled off the first communist dynastic succession in history.
Mystery is a source of leverage and power.
But since South Korean President Kim Dae-jung announced plans for a June 2000 summit with the North Korean leader, the rhetoric over Kim Jong Il has changed considerably. He's the person who rules half of the Korean peninsula and one-third of the Korean people. He's a very powerful person, there's no doubt about that, and he's definitely not a crazy person. The peak, on the northern border with Chinese Manchuria, is the highest on the peninsula and the site where Korean legend says the nation came into existence 5,000 years ago. Kim's birth in the Far Eastern region of the Soviet Union on February 16, 1942.