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 news media today. He was reported to be 69, and had been in ill health since a reported stroke in 2008.

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 Central Intelligence Agency, which interviewed his mistresses, tried to track his whereabouts and psychoanalyzed his motives. And he was an object of parody in American culture.

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.”

Wendy Sherman, who served as counselor to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, said, “He was smart, engaged, knowledgeable, self-confident, sort of the master-director of all he surveyed.”

Albright met Kim in October 2000 in what turned out to be a futile effort to strike a deal with North Korea over limiting its missile program before President Bill Clinton left office.

“There was no denying the dictatorial state that he ruled,” Sherman said. “There was no denying the freedoms that didn’t exist. But at the time, there were a lot of questions in the U.S. about whether he was really in control, and we left with no doubt that he was.”

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.

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, Abraham Lincoln-like. The cabin was in a secret camp of anti-Japanese guerrillas his father commanded.

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 easygoing charisma.

The world did not hear his voice until 1992 when he issued a one-liner while overlooking an enormous Armed Forces Day parade: “Glory to the heroic People’s Army!”

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 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.

There was also speculation that he had been involved in the 1983 bombing of a South Korean political delegation in Burma, and that he had known of, and perhaps had ordered, the kidnapping of Japanese citizens. Nothing was ever proved.

Washington put North Korea on its list of state sponsors of terrorism after North Korean agents planted a bomb that blew up a South Korean passenger jet in 1987 — under instructions from Kim, according to one of the agents, who was caught alive.

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 government before his defection to Seoul in 1997.

“At an early age, Kim Jong Il mastered the mechanics of power,” Hwang said.

It was not until 1993, as the existence of the Yongbyon nuclear plant and North Korea’s nuclear weapons ambitions became publicly known, that Kim appeared to be his father’s undisputed successor. That year, he became head of the National Defense Commission, the North’s most powerful agency, in charge of the military.

In 1994, in a showdown with the United States, North Korea threatened to turn its stockpile of nuclear fuel into bombs. It was the closest the two countries came to war since the armistice ending the Korean War was signed in 1953. The standoff was defused when Kim Il Sung welcomed former President Jimmy Carter, who pushed Clinton and Kim into a deal.

Within a month, however, Kim Il Sung, the country’s founder and Great Leader, was dead. Many doubted at the time that the younger Kim would take over. There were rumors of a military coup, and theories that he would be allowed to keep his fast cars and to consort with visiting European “entertainers” as long as he did not try to run the country. Like much intelligence about North Korea, that turned out to be wrong.

Kim consolidated power in the late 1990s, and flexed his muscle by testing a North Korean missile over Japan, sending that much larger and more powerful nation into a panic.

But he could not learn to feed his own people, and his country became even more dependent on China for food and fuel and on “humanitarian” donations from South Korea and the U.S.

In June 2000, Kim played host in Pyongyang, the North’s capital, to the first summit meeting with a South Korean president, Kim Dae-jung, since the peninsula was divided more than five decades before.

The South Korean leader received the Nobel Peace Prize later that year, though his reputation was soon tainted by revelations that a South Korean company had paid off the North Koreans, and presumably their leader, to arrange the trip.

Once Bush took office in January 2001, all cooperation between Washington and Seoul over how to deal with the North came to a crashing halt. Bush rejected the South’s “sunshine policy” of engagement with North Korea, and ended Clinton-era talk that he and Cheney viewed as dangerous appeasement.

As soon as President Barack Obama came into office, Kim ordered a second nuclear test, this one more successful than the first. And he waited out the predictable hail of international condemnation. The move aborted any efforts by Obama to engage with the North Koreans. And the next three years were spent with the United States and South Korea demanding that the North live up to the denuclearization pledges it made during the Bush administration.

Instead, it did the opposite. In November 2010, the North Koreans showed a visiting scientist from Stanford University, Siegfried Hecker, an apparently working uranium enrichment plant that the country had been building for years.

The same year, the North made two attacks against the South Korean military, sinking a ship and later shelling an island near Northern waters. The episodes caused the U.S. and South Korea to conduct new joint exercises, even while the Chinese, apparently fearing a complete collapse of the North Korean regime, increased its economic aid.

Since his health crisis, in 2008, Kim had been grooming his third son, Kim Jong Un, believed to be in his late 20s, to be his successor.

Despite his ill health, he was reported to have visited one of the military units that attacked the South, to hand out medals, and recently even managed one last visit to his benefactors in China. But it is unclear whether his son, and presumed successor, accompanied him on the trip.