Spy Novel: This is Real Life

Asia Pacific
Kim Jong-nam, the Hunted Heir to a Dictator Who Met Death in Exile

By CHOE SANG-HUN FEB. 15, 2017 NYT

SEOUL, South Korea — When North Korea held a state funeral for its leader, Kim Jong-il, in 2011, one son was conspicuously absent.

The absence of Kim Jong-nam — the eldest son of the family, who was bound by Korean tradition to preside over the funeral — was all the evidence outside analysts needed to see how isolated he had become from the center of power in North Korea, the world’s most secretive regime.

Never fully accepted into his family, sidelined by his powerful stepmother and haunted by fears of assassins, Mr. Kim lived much of his life wandering abroad from Moscow to Geneva, Beijing, Paris and Macau, the Chinese gambling enclave.

On Monday, Mr. Kim, 45, met his end at Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia. According to the National Intelligence Service of South Korea, he was poisoned by two women who appeared to be carrying out an assassination order from Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. Mr. Kim died on his way to the hospital.


It remained uncertain whether Mr. Kim was traveling alone and whether any bodyguards were present. It also was unclear how many people were involved in the attack and whether it was captured on video by airport cameras.

As the police hunted for his killers, grainy footage released Wednesday showed a woman suspected of being one of the assassins, who appeared to be of Asian descent and was wearing a shirt emblazoned with “LOL” in large letters, before she fled the airport.

The Royal Malaysia Police announced Wednesday afternoon that they had arrested a woman carrying a Vietnamese passport in the same terminal where the attack occurred. They said she was “positively identified” from closed-circuit video. She was alone at the time of her arrest. The police statement gave no explanation for her returning to the same terminal.

She was identified as Doan Thin Hoang, 28, according to the inspector general of the police, Khalid Abu Bakar.

At Kuala Lumpur International Airport’s bustling Terminal 2 on Wednesday, no markers or police tape were present to indicate that there had been a murder.

Airport workers who had seen Mr. Kim said on Wednesday that they had been ordered not to discuss the case.

South Korea’s acting president, Hwang Kyo-ahn, said Wednesday that his government was working with the Malaysian authorities to find the killers. But officials here quickly pointed fingers at Mr. Kim’s half brother, the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, who has executed a number of senior officials, including his own uncle, deemed a potential challenge to his authority.

Ever since Kim Jong-un succeeded his father in 2011, “there has been a standing order” to assassinate his half brother, Lee Byung-ho, the director of the South’s National Intelligence Service, said during a closed-door briefing at the National Assembly, according to lawmakers who attended it.

“This is not a calculated action to remove Kim Jong-nam because he was a challenge to power per se, but rather reflected Kim Jong-un’s paranoia,” Mr. Lee was quoted as saying.

Kim Jong-un wanted his half brother killed, Mr. Lee said, and there was an assassination attempt against him in 2012. Mr. Kim was so afraid of assassins that he even begged for his life in a letter to his half brother in 2012.

“Please withdraw the order to punish me and my family,” Mr. Kim was quoted as saying in the letter. “We have nowhere to hide. The only way to escape is to choose suicide.”

Mr. Lee said Kim Jong-nam had no power base inside North Korea, where Kim Jong-un had swiftly established his monolithic rule with what the South called a reign of terror.

Kim Jong-nam had arrived in Malaysia last week, Mr. Lee said. He was in line at the airport to check in for a Macau-bound flight on Monday morning when he was attacked by the two women, Mr. Lee said, citing closed-circuit TV footage from the airport. The women fled the airport in a taxi but were still believed to be in Malaysia, Mr. Lee said.

If North Korea’s involvement is proved, the United States could face intense international pressure to put the country back on its list of terrorism-sponsoring countries, said Cheong Seong-chang, an analyst at the Sejong Institute, a think tank in South Korea.

North Korea was first put on the terrorism list after South Korea caught a woman from the North who confessed to planting a bomb on a South Korean airliner that exploded over the Indian Ocean near Myanmar in 1987. The North was taken off the list in 2007 as part of a deal aimed at ending its nuclear program.

South Korea’s military plans to use loudspeakers along the shared Korean border to inform North Koreans of Mr. Kim’s killing and their government’s brutality, the Yonhap news agency reported on Wednesday. The Defense Ministry declined to confirm the report.

“By assassinating Kim Jong-nam, Kim Jong-un may have removed a thorn in the side, but it will further isolate his country,” Mr. Cheong said. “It is also expected to worsen his country’s relations with China, which has been protecting his brother.”
Photo
In a 1981 family portrait, Kim Jong-il with his oldest son, Kim Jong-nam, front right; his sister-in-law Sung Hye-rang, left rear; and her daughter, Lee Nam-ok, and son, Lee Il-nam. Credit Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Kim Jong-nam’s life illuminates the hidden intrigue inside the Kim family, which has ruled North Korea for almost seven decades.

While the lives of the rest of his family remained shrouded in mystery, Mr. Kim, the oldest of three known sons of Kim Jong-il has been the closest thing the isolated Stalinist state has had to an international playboy.

He was often seen with fashionably dressed women in international airports and spent much of his time in Las Vegas-style casinos in Macau, where he also kept an expensive house.

Outside analysts often saw him as a possible candidate to replace Kim Jong-un if his half brother’s leadership imploded and China, North Korea’s traditional ally, sought a replacement head in its client state.

But in reality, Mr. Kim was a prince in exile with little chance of returning home, analysts and officials in South Korea said.

Mr. Kim’s wife and a daughter and son are currently in Macau under Chinese protection, Mr. Lee said.

The South Korean intelligence agency did not disclose how it acquired the letter from Mr. Kim begging his half brother to spare his life. But government sources said that Mr. Kim’s emails sent home through North Korean embassies abroad had been leaked through hacking attacks. In one of the emails, they said, Mr. Kim bitterly complained that the North Korean government stopped sending him cash after his father died and Kim Jong-un took over. In 2012, a news report said Mr. Kim was thrown out of a luxury Macau hotel, unable to pay a $15,000 bill.

The Kim family has never been known for its togetherness.

Kim Jong-nam’s mother, Sung Hae-rim, a decorated “people’s actress,” was already married with a child when Kim Jong-il forced her to divorce his novelist husband and marry him. Kim Jong-il adored his first son, Kim Jong-nam. He once seated his young son at his office desk and told him, “This is the place where you will one day give orders,” according to Lee Han-young, a relative who defected to the South in 1982.

But Kim Jong-nam’s grandfather, the North’s founding president, Kim Il-sung, never approved of the marriage.

“My father was keeping highly secret the fact that he was living with my mother, who was married, a famous movie actress, so I couldn’t get out of the house or make friends,” Mr. Kim was quoted as saying in a 2012 book by a Japanese journalist. “That solitude from childhood may have made me what I am now, preferring freedom.”

Mr. Kim was born in secret and spent part of his childhood in the Soviet Union under the care of his mother’s sister. He returned home in the 1970s but was later sent abroad again, this time to Geneva, where he learned English and French.

His mother, Ms. Sung, soon fell out of favor with Kim Jong-il. (She was alone in Moscow when she died in 2002.)

Kim Jong-il would later begin a relationship with Ko Young-hee, a star of Pyongyang’s premier opera, who gave birth to Kim Jong-chol and then Kim Jong-un. According to a Japanese sushi chef who in 2003 published a memoir about his experience working for the Kim family, Kim Jong-un was by that time the father’s favorite.

Kim Jong-nam squandered what little chance he may have had to succeed his father when he embarrassed Pyongyang in 2001; he was caught trying to enter Japan on a fake Dominican Republic passport. He told Japanese investigators that he wanted to visit Tokyo Disneyland.

But rumors of intrigue never left Mr. Kim, as analysts speculated that should the young, inexperienced Kim Jong-un fail to meet the expectations of hard-line generals in Pyongyang, they might summon home the eldest brother. In a way, Mr. Kim helped fuel such rumors.

In the 2012 book by the Japanese journalist, Mr. Kim called his younger brother “a figurehead.” “Without reforms and liberalization, the collapse of the economy is within sight,” he said. “I have my doubts about whether a person with only two years of grooming as a leader can govern.”