North Korea's Kim Jong Il dead at 69

Kim Jong Il, North Korea's mercurial and enigmatic longtime leader, has died. He was 69.

Kim's death was announced Monday by state television from the North Korean capital, Pyongyang.

Kim is believed to have suffered a stroke in 2008 but he had appeared relatively vigorous in photos and video from recent trips to China and Russia and during numerous trips around the country that were carefully documented by state media.

The communist country's "Dear Leader," reputed to have had a taste for cigars, Cognac and gourmet cuisine, was believed to have had diabetes and heart disease.

The news came as North Korea prepared for a hereditary succession.

Kim Jong Il inherited power after his father, revered North Korean founder Kim Il Sung, died in 1994. In September 2010, Kim Jong Il unveiled his third son, the 20-something Kim Jong Un, as his successor, putting him in high-ranking posts.

Kim Jong Il had been groomed for 20 years to lead the communist nation founded by his guerrilla fighter-turned-politician father and built according to the principle of "juche," or self-reliance.

Even with a successor, there had been some fear among North Korean observers of a behind-the-scenes power struggle or nuclear instability upon the elder Kim's death.

Few firm facts are available when it comes to North Korea, one of the most isolated countries in the world, and not much is clear about Kim.

North Korean legend has it that Kim was born on Mount Paekdu, one of Korea's most cherished sites, in 1942, a birth heralded in the heavens by a pair of rainbows and a brilliant new star.

Soviet records, however, indicate he was born in Siberia, in 1941.

South Korea has accused Kim of masterminding a 1983 bombing that killed 17 South Korean officials visiting Burma, now known as Myanmar. In 1987, the bombing of a Korean Air Flight killed all 115 people on board; a North Korean agent who confessed to planting the device said Kim ordered the downing of the plane himself.

After his father's death, Kim took the posts of chairman of the National Defense Commission, commander of the Korean People's Army and head of the ruling Worker's Party while his father remained as North Korea's "eternal president."

Kim also sought to build up the country's nuclear arms arsenal, which culminated in North Korea's first nuclear test explosion, an underground blast conducted in October 2006. Another test came in 2009.

Alarmed, regional leaders negotiated a disarmament-for-aid pact that the North signed in 2007 and began implementing later that year.

Kim often blamed the United States for his country's troubles and his regime routinely derides Washington-allied South Korea as a "puppet" of the Western superpower.

President George W. Bush, taking office in 2002, denounced North Korea as a member of an "axis of evil" that also included Iran and Iraq. Later, he described Kim as a "tyrant" who starved his people so he could build nuclear weapons.