A journo's journey; from Canterbury to North Korea via the West Wing

Friday, 14 June 2019

When Anna Fifield pitched her idea for a book on North Korean leader Kim Jong Un back in 2016, he was arguably best known for his trademark high-cut haircut and being friends with former NBA basketballer Dennis Rodman. 

Fast forward three years and the Supreme Leader is everywhere. There he is being mocked by Donald Trump as 'Little Rocket Man', while the next week they're exchanging love letters. He's gleefully posing for photos as he tests his latest inter continental missiles, or assassinating family members in increasingly cruel and ostentatious ways, and casually wandering across the 38th parallel that separates Communist North from capitalist South.

When it comes to running an authoritarian regime where millions of people have starved while a few elite become fabulously wealthy, the Kim dynastic have managed to maintain their hold on power by controlling the information flow.

But through her near-decade reporting for the Financial Times and Washington Post, Fifield has been accumulating anecdotes, contacts and a profound knowledge of Comrade Kim and his unlikely ascent to power, and has frequently pierced that protective shell. 

In The Great Successor, released worldwide this week, Fifield doesn't so much lift the veil as yank the curtains back, open the window and invite the whole world in for a look.

**READ MORE:

* The Great Successor: a book extract

* 'Hundreds' of execution sites identified

* Brother of Kim Jong Un was 'informer for the CIA'**

Part history book, part biography, this non-fiction thriller is laced with eagle-eyed observations and salacious details of a murderous young tyrant who's also a basketball purist with a thirst for Johnnie Walker Black and cigarettes.

Fifield pored over satellite imagery, spoke to defectors in China, and South Korea, and travelled to everywhere from Malaysia to Switzerland to research the book. The result is the most complete book on Kim, and this caricature of a man begins to take on three dimensions.

For Fifield, uncovering the 'all-encompassing propaganda cult' became an obsession. She worked on the book every day for the past two years, on top of a reporting role, and would rise at 4am most days.

It's all a long way from her journalistic beginnings watching TVNZ foreign correspondents Cameron Bennett and Liam Jeory covering the Balkan wars in the 1990s.

'I thought it looked so glamorous,' she says down the phone from New York. 

'Growing up in New Zealand looking out at the world, I had a curiosity,' she says. 'I was always throwing myself into opportunities and working hard, and that made the difference.'

Fifield, 43, was born in Dunedin the eldest of two children. Her father was a police officer and mum worked for a dentist. When her father transferred to Hastings, the family moved and wound up staying there.

Mum Chris Hall recalls testing Anna on capital cities aged five while doing the dishes. 'She had a thirst for knowledge.'

Hall says her daughter always had her head in a book, but was also sporty – running a half marathon at the age of 12 – and sociable, and from an early age showed ambition.

'She told us she wanted to be the prime minister,' Hall says. 'She just had this drive to learn.'

Fifield attended Hastings Girls' High and did a Bachelor of Arts at Victoria University before completing a diploma in journalism at Canterbury University in 1997.

At 21 she was one of the youngest in the journalism class, and was constantly in search of self-improvement. While many of her classmates, followed the time-honoured journalistic tradition of boozing, Fifield was taking night classes in photography, French and Māori, and selling her stories freelance to national publications.

'She worshipped Kim Hill and always wanted to follows in her shoes as a morning radio host,' classmate and former Sunday Star-Times editor Jonathan Milne recalls. 

'Anna still jokes about her disappointment that she never made it. We thought she wasn't cut out to do hard news, that her future was in soft feature journalism. How wrong we were.'

Her first reporting role was at the Rotorua Daily Post, first in Whakatāne and then in Rotorua covering, among other things, irregular geothermal activity. 'I reported on geysers blowing up under people's garages,' she says.

Fifield moved to Wellington to work for the now-defunct New Zealand Press Association, and while there won a financial reporting scholarship to London with the Financial Times in 2000. She never looked back.

Her big break at the paper came the next year. She was working on the foreign desk on September 11, 2001, and, at the ripe old age of 25, pulled together the paper's global coverage.

'That was my first front page byline at the FT and it was such a thrill,' she says.

She applied for postings around the world, and quickly got snapped up for the Seoul bureau.

Fifield says she soon became fascinated by the North, which was still being run by Kim's dad Kim Jong Il in those days.

'It became my absolute obsession as a journalist because it's so challenging to figure out what's going on and find people who will talk to you.'

A posting at the White House followed, where she had a tiny desk in a corner of the West Wing during President Barack Obama's tenure.

Along the way she had son Jude, 8, and managed to juggle solo parenting with the globetrotting life of a journalist. When she was hired by the Washington Post to work in their Tokyo office, her mother Chris came to live with them for four years in Japan to look after Jude.

The list of academic achievements goes on; in 2014 she was a Nieman journalism fellow at Harvard University, studying how change happens in closed societies.

In 2018, she received the Shorenstein Journalism Award from Stanford University for her outstanding reporting on Asia.

She's broken a string of major stories from North Korea in recent years, including US prisoner Otto Warmbier being in a coma, and then this year, the compo that North Korea demanded for his 'healthcare'.

But she never forgot her humble beginnings.

When she came back to Christchurch to cover the March 15 mosque shootings she took time out to go in and speak to her old journalism school at Canterbury University.

Milne says: 'I know that returning home to cover the Christchurch mosque shootings meant more to her than any other story she's ever covered. It was personal.'

This week Fifield was travelling between New York and Washington DC, and then off to the US West Coast to promote the book.

The global reach and almost unlimited resources of the Washington Post, owned by the world's wealthiest man, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, is an enviable place to be in the current cash-strapped media environment.

'I feel very fortunate. Jeff Bezos is investing in the company and trying to encourage innovation. It's very exciting to be at the forefront of this media revolution.'

For Fifield, the release of the book will make it unsafe to return to North Korea.

Regardless, the returns were diminishing, she says, and it was a price she was willing to pay.

'Even if they invite me back, I would not go because it would not be safe. I will go back to North Korea after reunification.'

Kim Jong Un's ascent to the centre of global politics will no doubt do wonders for the success of The Great Successor, but it's precisely the kind of good fortune that hard work will bring.

* The Great Successor: The Secret Rise and Rule of Kim Jong Un, by Anna Fifield, is published by Hachette and is for sale now at $37.99