WASHINGTON — Kim Jong-il, North Korea’s leader, is seriously ill and is likely to have suffered a stroke weeks ago, American officials said Tuesday, raising the prospect of a chaotic power struggle in nuclear-armed North Korea.
North Korea celebrated the 60th anniversary of the founding of the country with a parade in Pyongyang, the capital, on Tuesday.
Kim Jong-il in a photograph released by North Korea on Aug. 11. No public appearances by the North Korean leader have been reported since mid-August.
Intelligence officials in Washington said that the exact status of Mr. Kim’s health was unclear, but that on Tuesday he failed to attend a celebration of the 60th anniversary of the founding of North Korea and that American intelligence agencies believed that he was now under the care of doctors in Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital.
On Wednesday, Song Il-ho, a senior North Korean diplomat, denied news reports suggesting Mr. Kim was ill. “We see such reports as not only worthless, but rather as a conspiracy plot,” the Kyodo news agency quoted Mr. Song as saying.
Later, the country’s No. 2 leader, Kim Yong-nam, said there was “no problem” with Kim Jong-il, Kyodo reported.
Kim Jong-il’s health is a topic of intense interest among governments and security experts, especially because Western officials are unclear about who would succeed the man known as the “Dear Leader.”
North Korea is one of the world’s most isolated and unpredictable states, and a messy transfer of power would focus new attention on the security of its nuclear weapons arsenal.
Mr. Kim had not missed the 10 past military parades staged for major anniversaries, during which columns of armored vehicles and rocket launchers rumbled through Pyongyang’s main plaza and legions of goose-stepping soldiers saluted him.
But on Tuesday, there was only a parade by militia groups in charge of civil defense, and Mr. Kim did not attend.
An American intelligence official, who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on condition of anonymity because assessments about Mr. Kim’s health are classified, said Tuesday that it did not appear that Mr. Kim’s death was imminent. The official said there were no clear indications the North was stepping up preparations for a transfer of authority. The official would not say whether American intelligence agencies expected Mr. Kim to fully recover.
The topic of Mr. Kim’s health came up in discussions between the chief American negotiator on North Korean nuclear issues, Christopher R. Hill, and Chinese officials during a recent trip by Mr. Hill to China, said a Bush administration official. But despite the closer contacts between China and North Korea, the official said, Mr. Hill did not come away with a clear sense of Mr. Kim’s condition, or what would happen in the event of his death.
Earlier this year, the North had agreed to abandon its nuclear weapons programs in return for economic and political rewards from the United States and its allies, a major diplomatic victory for the Bush administration.
But late last month the North Korean government reversed course. Angry that Washington had not removed it from a terrorism list, it said it had stopped disabling its main nuclear complex.
It is now unclear whether Mr. Kim ordered the reversal or whether other North Korean officials were making decisions while he was incapacitated.
Since the founding of North Korea in 1948 under Soviet guardianship, it has had only two leaders: Kim Il-sung and, after his death in 1994, his son, Kim Jong-il. Unlike his father, Mr. Kim has not publicly groomed any of his three sons to eventually take power, said Nicholas Eberstadt, a North Korea expert at the American Enterprise Institute. There are doubts about the abilities of all three sons, and American officials tend to gravitate toward theories that a military committee might take over the country.
Underlying that guesswork are questions about who within the military hierarchy would control the country’s small arsenal of nuclear weapons.
“There are a lot of people who will give you a series of assumptions about what happens to nuclear control if there is a leadership change,” one senior administration official with access to intelligence on North Korea said Tuesday. “To put it charitably, they are guessing.”
South Korea’s largest newspaper, Chosun Ilbo, reported Tuesday that Mr. Kim collapsed Aug. 22, citing an unidentified South Korean diplomat in Beijing.
The North’s state-run media have not reported any public appearance by Mr. Kim since mid-August, and speculation was already swirling that he might be in poor health. According to South Korea’s intelligence service, Mr. Kim has chronic heart disease and diabetes. He is believed to be in his mid-60s.
Among scholars who examine every broadcast and speech from North Korea the way Kremlinologists once examined the Soviet Union, there has been particular focus on the talk given on Monday by Kim Yong-nam, considered the second-ranking official in the country.
According to officials in Washington who read a translation of the speech, Mr. Kim appeared at times to refer to the country’s leader in the past tense, saying at one point, “Comrade Kim Jong-il’s seasoned leadership served as a decisive function that brought about the morning light of a powerful Socialist state and unfolded an era of new prosperity of military-first Korea.”
But Kim Jong-il was also referred to in the present tense, including one tribute that said he “is a truly peerless patriot.”
North Korea experts in Seoul cautioned that Mr. Kim had often disappeared from public view for extended periods.
“The nuclear talks are in a stalemate,” said Kim Keun-sik, a North Korea expert at Kyungnam University in South Korea. “Tensions with the United States are deepening. Kim knew that the world was watching whether he would show up today. For him, this may be a perfect chance to bring world attention to him.”
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