Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (139 page)

The South Korean monthly
Wolgan Choson
suggested that Kim Jong-nam himself, upset at seeing his family’s dirty laundry aired abroad, ordered the assassination of his defector cousin Li Il-nam. Li was ambushed and fatally shot on February 15, 1997, in a suburb of Seoul. South Korean authorities later said they had learned that hit men sent by Pyongyang had done the job. The magazine’s claim of Kim Jong-nam’s involvement did not refer to those who had actually done the shooting but to a team that Jong-nam allegedly had ordered to kill his cousin earlier; the earlier team was said to have failed, whereupon its leader—a major general named Jang Pong-rim—had been executed as punishment for that failure.
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In 1996, as his mother was making her break as a defector, Li had emerged from seclusion and published his book on Kim Jong-il’s family life.
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His killing seemed intended in part to retaliate against South Korea and to demonstrate Pyongyang’s long reach immediately following the high-level defection of Hwang Jang-yop, an enormous loss of face for Kim Jong-il. But it was also a reminder to Song Hye-rang and her surviving child, daughter Li Nam-ok, wherever in the world they might be hiding, to be careful about what they might say regarding Kim Jong-il’s private life.

There was no smoking gun with Kim Jong-nam’s fingerprints on it. The evidence the magazine offered for his involvement in the alleged earlier, aborted attempt on his cousin’s life was contained in a memorandum from an unnamed North Korean defector in China.
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One might wonder whether, by early 1997, the Young General really-was in a position to send minions off on such a deadly and sensitive mission abroad. There were reports that Kim Jong-nam began working in State Security as early as 1996, although according to Lee Young-guk’s account it would be two or three years before Jong-nam would take charge of defector and refugee issues. And according to a high South Korean government official quoted by
JoongAng Ilbo,
“Kim Jong-nam traveled in Europe with five young women, without any particular task,” until early 1999. A State Security job that he took at that point was “the first step related to the succession,” that official was quoted as saying.
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Starting around 2000, the regime began publicly mentioning Kim Jong-nam in ways that suggested big things were expected of him. In August of that
year the first group of South Koreans who had been separated from their family members in the North arrived in Pyongyang for a visit. A guide showing them the Juche Tower said Kim Jong-nam had designed it.
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In April 2001, when pro-Pyongyang Koreans from Japan traveled to North Korea to celebrate Kim Il-sung’s birthday a party official surprised them by delivering a lecture on Kim Jong-nam’s “outstanding qualities,”
Newsweek International
reported.
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A human rights activist, reporting on a trend toward moderating the punishments inflicted on North Koreans caught trying to escape to China, told
Chosun Ilbo
that authorities had explained released prisoners’ good fortune by telling them: “You owe all this to Kim Jong-nam.”
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Easing the policy against defectors might well have seemed a no-brainer to someone who had as many defectors in his family as Kim Jong-nam still had, even after the murder of Li Il-nam. Still, it appears that the relaxation—-which probably encouraged more escapes—-was short-lived. In January 2003 Chinese police caught seventy-eight North Korean refugees who were planning to travel by ship to South Korea and Japan. A Los Angeles–based Christian minister involved in the aborted scheme asserted in Tokyo that Kim Jong-nam at the time was “in Beijing, taking care of the refugee roundup.”
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When Kim Jong-nam got caught at Narita Airport, some analysts suggested it would be the end of his chances to become the next Great Leader. The argument was that he had embarrassed his father, who at the time was playing host to a large group of European Union officials. Kim Jong-il reportedly canceled a trip that he had planned to China’s booming Shenzhen special economic zone—a journey on which Jong-nam had been scheduled to accompany him. They had planned to leave May 7, just three days after the Japanese deported their illegal visitor.
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Indeed, Kim Jong-nam seems subsequently to have spent quite a lot of his time traveling and living abroad. Seoul’s
Chosun Ilbo,
quoting an intelligence source in Seoul, reported in September 2002 that he had never set foot in North Korea in the more than a year following his expulsion from Japan, “probably because he has lost the confidence of the North Korean leader.”
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A Japanese daily,
Sankei Shimbun,
reported in 2002 that he had been making frequent trips to Moscow, where he dressed casually as a tourist, spent time with a young Russian woman and in general seemed to be on vacation rather than working.
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When he was not in Russia, it appeared he was living in a villa on the outskirts of Beijing.

We might well wonder how much leadership, budding or otherwise, Kim Jong-nam could exert back home while spending so much of his time globetrotting and shopping. Any one of the high-level jobs he had been said to hold in his father’s regime could require a full-time commitment.

On the other hand, some of Kim Jong-nam’s travels might have been an expression of the Confucian filial piety that Kim Jong-il often went out of his way to promote. Song Hye-rim was dying in Moscow, and apparently her son spent much of his time in that city. Using a Russian first name and the surname Oh, Song had been in and out of a downtown hospital before she was taken there the final time on May 17, 2001. After her funeral in a Moscow cemetery ethnic Koreans reported watching Kim Jong-nam send off his wife and son on a flight to Beijing.
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In any case, traveling incognito was something that Kim Jong-il himself had done, as he had hinted to Kim Dae-jung in 2000,
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so he should have been aware it was risky behavior. Besides the mere fact that Kim Jong-nam got caught, and thereby focused media attention on the secretive Kim Jong-il’s private affairs, it would seem the son while in Japan did nothing extraordinarily embarrassing to his father. Indeed, Kim Jong-nam showed himself very much his father’s son in some of his interests at home and abroad.

“Chairman Kim and his son are similar not only in appearance but also in personality,” Jong-nam’s defector aunt, Song Hye-rang, told a South Korean magazine in 2000. “Their similarities include being hot-tempered, sensitive and gifted in arts. Kim Jong-nam is an excellent writer. Since he was young, he has written movie scripts and made movies.” Kim Jong-il even had a small movie set built for Jong-nam to practice with, she said.
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Japanese news articles reported speculation that Kim Jong-nam’s visits to Tokyo were not only for sightseeing but also for his education—either as heir to the leadership or as head of North Korea’s push to develop information technology and build high-tech weaponry Other news reports said he had begun traveling to Japan incognito as early as 1995, when members of Chongryon met him at the airport and escorted him on sightseeing excursions that took him to Tokyo Disneyland, among other places.
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Shukan Shincho,
one of Japan’s popular weeklies, eventually reported that the young North Korean had become a familiar figure at a Korean nightclub in the Akasaka entertainment district and at a bathhouse in Yoshiwara, a red light district in the Japanese capital. A bathhouse attendant, described as “curvaceous,” was quoted as saying he had visited her before his ill-fated May 2001 trip. When his picture appeared in the news media, she said, she recognized him as an enthusiastic customer. “He visited the shop and asked for me three days in a row,” the woman said.

The customer, a big tipper who paid with a credit card, told her that he did business in Hong Kong. “He showed me photos of his children and invited me to accompany him to Chinatown in Yokohama, but I begged off,” she said. “Who knows? There’s all that talk about Japanese being abducted to North Korea; it might have happened to me, too.” The masseuse said the man she called “Wong” had a tattoo of a dragon on his back. The magazine
quoted a Tokyo-based Pyongyang-watcher as saying Kim Jong-nam had such a tattoo.
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An article in a sister publication,
Shincho 45,
told of another Tokyo nightlife worker, a Korean who said she had spent a night with Kim Jong-nam in 1998. The woman painted a picture of a classic East Asian big spender at table. Kim, she said, sang Japanese songs until he was covered with sweat. He ate three plates of flounder sashimi, washing it down with many glasses of Hennessey Extra cognac. She said he reminded her of a yakuza godfather in the movies, speaking softly and slowly and treating her politely and with respect. She was impressed with his Japanese language ability and his knowledge of Japanese culture.
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What were we to make of the Young General? He might be considered just a tad undisciplined, by the standards normally applied to rising world leaders. But let’s play optimist one more time and consider the half-full glass analogy. At least the youthful jet setter had somewhat more experience than his father with the realities of the outside world—indeed, it appeared he was a linguist. And he had that affinity for high technology. A dispatch by South Korea’s wire service when he was detained at Narita airport put it this way: “Diplomatic sources say that although he is not thorough in personality, he has a certain degree of knowledge in international affairs and state-of-the-art industry.
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Still, it seemed worth noting that Jong-nam’s aunt in an interview with a South Korean magazine in 2000 said flatly that her nephew “does not wish to succeed his father.” Kim Jong-il, she said, “seized power not because he is the son” of Kim Il-sung. “It is because he was the most capable person and he could carry on President Kim’s task better than anyone else. However, hereditary governance is against the true nature of socialism and his mother does not want it, either.”
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We might well doubt that Kim Jong-il would wish at such a late stage to alter the North Korean tradition of father-to-son inheritance, which he had helped to establish. But it also seemed important to recall that Jong-il’s raw desire for power and his strength at behind-the-scenes maneuvering had been important factors in his ultimately being named Kim Il-sung’s heir. He might be looking over his own youngsters to see which if any of them displayed that fire in the belly that American political commentators look for as a sign that a U.S. presidential candidate is prepared to do whatever it takes to get elected.

Thus various analysts suggested that the succession would go not to Kim Jong-nam but to another of Kim Jong-il’s children. Daughters were never mentioned in those scenarios. Confucian tradition would militate against naming a woman, and the propaganda about the third generation specifically mentioned grandsons.

One supposed candidate who was put forward was a newly discovered “son” of Kim Jong-il’s named Kim Hyon or Kim Hyon-nam, whose mother was unidentified. The Japanese wire service Jiji Press in September 2002, citing unnamed sources in Beijing, reported that Kim Hyon, thirty years old, had been appointed head of the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the Workers’ Party. Actually it seems likely that Jiji got the story at least partly wrong and that Kim Hyon was not Kim Jong-il’s son at all but Kim Il-sung’s secret, late-life progeny. Recall the elder Kim’s child by his nurse, a boy named Hyon, whose future Kim Jong-il undertook to arrange in tacit exchange for his father’s recognition of his own son, Jong-nam.

Was there any propaganda that might be intended to prepare for the rule of another son of Kim Il-sung? An article in
Nodong Shinmun
whose focus was praise of Kim Jong-il said he “accomplished the heavy task given by history that can be shouldered and discharged only by a partisan’s son.” Of course a half-brother of Kim Jong-il’s also would be “a partisan’s son,” whether acknowledged by his father or not. But that article was the same one that pointed to succession by a grandson.
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In any case, it might seem a long shot that Kim Jong-il, having fought his uncle Kim Yong-ju and half-brother Kim Pyong-il for the top job, would pass over his own offspring and name a younger and illegitimate half-brother as his heir. If Kim Hyon was indeed Kim Il-sung’s love child, his career in service of the regime—like that of my old acquaintance Kim Jong-su— seemed unlikely to place him at center stage.

Seemingly closer to the mark were the analysts who suggested the succession would go to one of the sons of Kim Jong-il’s third wife, Ko Yong-hui.
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Those theories were based in part on the reported fact that Ko was Kim Jong-il’s favorite among his live-in women. Envious relatives of Jong-nam’s in Moscow and Seoul noted in one 1990s telephone conversation that “Hammer Nose” was living well, apparently getting better treatment than Papa accorded Jong-nam’s mother.
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In Confucian societies, it had often happened that a favored junior wife or concubine maneuvered to have her son chosen over the first-born as heir. (Recall that Kim Il-sung’s last wife was reported to have initiated such an effort on behalf of her son Kim Pyong-il. Perhaps she might have succeeded if her stepson Kim Jong-il had not, as former official Kang Myong-do told me, attacked her power base directly by introducing his father to two new women.
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Ko Yong-hui by most accounts was born in Osaka of a Korean family that had migrated to Japan from Cheju island, off the southern tip of the Korean peninsula. Her parents reportedly took her with them to North Korea around 1961, during the great homecoming of Koreans from Japan. There she became a folk dancer, working in the Mansudae Art Troupe, the country’s most prestigious. According to the Japanese magazine
Aera,
she met Kim Jong-il in the mid-1970s when she performed at a party he hosted. She
gave birth to their first son, Kim Jong-chol, in 1981, a second son, Kim Jong-un, two years later and a daughter after another four years.