Defector: Shadowy organization, not Kim Jong Un, controls North Korea-video

Who controls the Hermit Kingdom?

According to a North Korean defector – a former regime insider who was one of Kim Jong Il’s favorite poet-propagandists – it is not the 31-year-old dictator Kim Jong Un.

“When Kim Jung Il died and Kim Jong Un succeeded him, people saw the transfer of power from father to son,” Jang Jin-Sung told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in London. “What they did not see also was what happened to the apparatus of the totalitarian system that supported the rule of Kim Jung Il.”

That apparatus, Jang said, is the Organization and Guidance Department, or OGD – it was Kim Jung Il’s education as he rose through the ranks, and was full of his university friends.

It is an “old-boy’s network” made into a massive surveillance organization.

“Kim Jung Il had the OGD as his old boys' network,” Jang told Amanpour. “Kim Jong-un may have friends in his Swiss school, but he has no one inside North Korea.”