The Great Successor

by Fifield, Anna;

  CHAPTER 3

  ANONYMOUS IN SWITZERLAND

  “I have formed a close attachment with planes and warships since my childhood.”

  —Kim Jong Un, from “Anecdotes of Kim Jong Un’s Life”

  KIM JONG UN WAS STILL VERY MUCH A CHILD WHEN HE DEPARTED for Bern, the capital of Switzerland, in the summer of 1996 to join his older brother Kim Jong Chol at school. The twelve-year-old had a pudding-bowl haircut and the start of what would one day become a very pronounced double chin.

  He found himself in a chocolate-box picturesque city that felt more like a quaint town than an international capital. Bern was famous for its clock tower, known as the Zytglogge, which had led a young patent clerk called Albert Einstein to discover the theory of relativity some ninety years earlier. Einstein, riding home from work on a tram one evening in 1905, looked back at the clock, getting farther away from him, and wondered what would happen if he were traveling at the speed of light. The thought led him to solve the mystery of “space-time” that had been bothering him for years.

  Kim Jong Un went on his own enlightening journey, traveling from famine-struck North Korea to one of the richest countries in Europe.

  That August, Mission Impossible was on at the movies, and Trainspotting was about to open. Top-of-the-line personal computers used floppy disks and ran on MS-DOS.

  The Summer Olympics were wrapping up in Atlanta. Bill Clinton was campaigning to be reelected president of the United States. The author George R. R. Martin that month published a fantasy novel called A Game of Thrones.

  The North Korean princeling emerged from his compound cosmos into this new terrestrial world. It wasn’t his first time abroad—he had traveled to Europe and Japan before—but it was the first time he had lived outside the confines of the North Korean royal court.

  He joined his older brother, who had been living in Liebefeld, a decidedly suburban neighborhood on the outskirts of Bern, for two years with their maternal aunt, Ko Yong Suk, and her husband, Ri Gang.

  “We lived in a normal home and acted like a normal family. I acted like their mother,” Kim’s aunt told me when I tracked her down in the United States almost twenty years later. “Their friends would come over, and I would make them snacks. It was a very normal childhood with birthday parties and gifts and Swiss kids coming over to play.”

  They spoke Korean at home and ate Korean food, and the boys’ friends didn’t know that Imo—as Jong Chol and Jong Un called her—was Korean for “Aunt,” not for “Mom.”

  They enjoyed living in Europe and having money. Their family photo albums contain pictures of the future leader of North Korea swimming in the Mediterranean on the French Riviera, dining al fresco in Italy, going to Euro Disney in Paris—it wasn’t Kim Jong Un’s first trip there; his mother had already taken him a few years before—and skiing in the Swiss Alps.

  They relaxed at a luxury hotel in Interlaken, the swanky resort town outside Bern that is the gateway to the Jungfrau mountains and home to a famous amusement park. He went twice to the Olympic museum in Lausanne, the Swiss city on the edge of Lake Geneva and the home of the International Olympic Committee. One exhibition at the museum really stuck with this machine obsessive: it was a feature where a visitor could request a video about an athlete or sporting event, and a robot in the basement would collect the video.

  This was in the era before digital storage, and the robot machine made an impression on the boy who spent hours playing with planes and ships in his bedroom. Two decades later, when hosting the head of the International Olympic Committee in Pyongyang, he would ask if the exhibition still existed. It did not.1

  In Switzerland, all the members of the Kim family had carefully constructed identities to conceal who they really were. Ri was registered as a driver at the North Korean embassy and went by the name Pak Nam Chol. Pak is one of the most common Korean surnames after Kim. Ko, in keeping with Korean practice whereby women keep their surnames after marriage, had paperwork naming her as Chong Yong Hye.

  Kim Jong Chol was officially Pak Chol, and Kim Jong Un was Pak Un. But the aliases were not new. All of them had been accredited to the North Korean mission to the United Nations in Geneva since 1991, and these diplomatic documents would have allowed them to travel freely in Europe.

  The photo that was submitted to the Swiss authorities shows a young Kim Jong Un with chubby cheeks and puffy hair that appears to have been permed, just as Kim Jong Nam did when he went to Switzerland. It was apparently so they wouldn’t stand out so much. He’s wearing a navy-blue velour jacket zipped up over a white turtleneck—the finest ’70s fashion but in the 1990s.

  “Pak Un” also had another passport he could use to travel around Europe. A new Brazilian passport issued in 1996, perhaps specifically to allow him to move without being detected as North Korean, identified him as Josef Pwag—apparently the Portuguese rendering of Pak.

  North Koreans on diplomatic passports can travel across borders but not without standing out. North Korea, then as now, was a pariah state with nuclear ambitions. Plus, North Koreans were a rarity, a novelty even. But an ordinary family of Asian Brazilians—Brazil has the largest Korean population in South America—on vacation in Europe rang no alarm bells.

  The passport said that the teenager, shown in an unflattering photo with puffy hair and clearly identifiable as the young Kim Jong Un, was born in Sao Paolo on February 1, 1983. It listed his parents as Ricardo and Marcela Pwag.2

  Ricardo Pwag was a North Korean who traveled frequently and extravagantly around Europe, flying first class on Swiss Air and staying in luxury hotels in Bern, Geneva, and Zurich. He appears to have been charged with buying buildings for the North Korean ruling class. Ricardo Pwag was probably Kim Jong Un’s uncle, Jang Song Thaek.

  With his new alias, Kim Jong Un settled in Liebefeld, where the architecture is more ’70s concrete block than Alpine village. It is not dissimilar to the brutalist style of Pyongyang. Behind the main street in an “industrial alley,” as the sign puts it, next door to a large wine trading company that looks like a monastery, is Number 10 Kirchstrasse. This was Kim Jong Un’s home while he was in Switzerland. It’s in a three-story, light-orange sandstone building surrounded by hydrangeas.

  The North Korean regime had bought six apartments in the building shortly after their construction in 1989 for a price of four million francs—a little over $4 million at the time—for the family and some of the other North Korean dignitaries living in the Swiss capital. The family had three cars, with diplomatic plates and darkened windows, which they kept in the underground carpark.

  Kim Jong Un joined his older brother at the International School of Berne, a private, English-language school attended by the children of diplomats and other expats in the Swiss capital. Tuition cost more than $20,000 a year.

  The school was just a five-minute drive from the North Korean embassy, which was, and still is, located in a big house on a normal residential street, Pourtalèsstrasse, across the river from the city center. It’s a well-to-do neighborhood lined with ambassadors’ residences.

  No one batted an eyelid when Kim Jong Un, sometimes wearing the school T-shirt, complete with Swiss flag and a bear, the symbol of the capital, was delivered to school in a chauffeur-driven car. Many other diplomats’ kids arrived at school the same way.

  The school, whose student population contains about forty nationalities, touts itself as being “perfectly situated in a neutral country.” Indeed, Switzerland, famous for its discretion about everything from bank accounts to the schooling of dictators’ children, was the ideal location for the secretive North Koreans.

  When the news first emerged that Kim Jong Un would be the successor to Kim Jong Il, there was so much confusion that many reported tidbits of information that were in fact about his brother. Classmates recounted how the North Korean was introverted but was relatively fluent in English, but it turned out they were remembering the wrong North Korean, “Pak Chol” instead of “Pak Un.”


  One snippet—a penchant for the action star Jean-Claude Van Damme—did, however, appear to apply to the two boys, both of whom apparently loved to watch movies featuring him. In a coincidence that would play out later, Van Damme costarred in a Hollywood movie called Double Team with a certain basketballer called Dennis Rodman. The film came out in 1997, while Kim Jong Un was in Switzerland.

  Kim Jong Chol even found a way to work the Belgian movie star into his schoolwork. “If I had my ideal world I would not allow weapons and atom bombs any more,” he wrote in a school project while in Bern. “I would destroy all terrorists with the Hollywood star Jean-Claude Van Damme. Everybody would be happy: no more war, no more dying, no more crying.”

  Like a good North Korean socialist, or maybe just as an idealistic teenager, the poet says that everyone should have the same amount of money. “Only in my ideal world can the people have freedom and live very happily,” it concluded.3

  The apartment on Kirchstrasse was more modest than what he was used to back home, but Kim Jong Un could live a relatively normal existence there. And he could devote himself to his favorite pastime: basketball. It was his mother who first sparked his interest in the sport. There’s an old tale that Korean mothers, North and South, like to tell their children: if you play basketball, you’ll grow taller.

  Kim Jong Un was short as a child, and his father was not a tall man—he was only five foot three, and famously wore platform shoes to try to compensate—so Ko Yong Hui encouraged her son to play basketball in the hope the tale was true. He grew to be five foot seven, so maybe it worked a bit.

  She was thrilled to see her son taking to basketball, a sport that she believed would help him clear his mind and loosen his childhood obsession with planes and engines. Instead, Kim Jong Un’s mother and aunt soon saw that basketball had become an addiction too—the boy was sleeping with his basketball in his bed—and one that came at the expense of his studies. His mother would visit Bern regularly to scold her son for playing too much and studying too little.

  She arrived on a passport that declared her to be Chong Il Son, assigned to the North Korean mission at the United Nations in Geneva since 1987, but the Swiss knew exactly who she was. After all, she arrived in the country in a Russian-made Ilyushin 62 jet bearing the insignia of Air Koryo, the North Korean state airline. The plane, which bore the tail number P882, was for VIPs only. It even had a full bedroom onboard.

  All sorts of bags and merchandise would be loaded on and off the plane, watched carefully by Swiss intelligence. They monitored Ko Yong Hui closely, keeping records of everything from her shopping expeditions on Zurich’s Bahnhofstrasse, one of the world’s most exclusive shopping avenues, to her hospital bills at fancy private clinics on Lake Geneva.

  They also knew who her children were. They called Kim Jong Chol “the tall, skinny one” and Kim Jong Un “the short, fat one.” But the new Swiss attorney general, Carla Del Ponte (who would later become chief prosecutor in the international criminal tribunals on Yugoslavia and Rwanda), had forbidden the Swiss authorities to monitor the children. In famously discreet Switzerland, they were allowed to just be children—even if they were the children of one of the world’s most notorious tyrants.

  When Kim’s mother arrived in Bern, she would bring handwritten notebooks containing one thousand Chinese characters, which form the basis of most Korean words, that she had made and photocopied so the children could keep up with their language skills. She told her sons that they had to memorize five or six pages a day, the kind of homework that torments Korean children the world over.

  She was what we today would call a tiger mother, pouring a lot of energy into her children’s education and going through their journals and homework no matter how late she returned to the apartment at night.

  But Kim Jong Un had other priorities.

  Although he had come to think of himself as above everybody else since being anointed his father’s successor at the age of eight, he knew he still had to obey his parents. He wouldn’t talk back to his mother but would storm off in a huff and often refuse to eat his dinner as a way of showing his anger. Even then, he was short-tempered and intolerant. “He is stubborn,” his aunt told me. “He wants to do what he wants to do.”

  Unsurprisingly, Kim Jong Un was also delighted when the summer approached and the school year finished so that he could go back home, where there was no studying, just basketball and beach.

  Kim Jong Un’s world was turned upside down in 1998. His mother had been diagnosed with advanced breast cancer and was starting intensive medical treatment in France. Her prognosis wasn’t good.

  The illness could also prove terminal for Kim Jong Un’s guardians. Their link to the regime, the relationship that had vaulted them into this privileged position, was becoming weaker by the day.

  They decided to abandon their charges and make a dash for freedom.

  So after nightfall on Sunday, May 17, Kim Jong Un’s aunt and uncle packed their three children into a taxi and went to the US embassy. Only their oldest, who was then fourteen, the same age as Kim Jong Un, knew what was going to happen next.

  When they arrived at the embassy, they explained that they were North Koreans, that Ko was the leader’s sister-in-law, and that they were seeking asylum in the United States. The US government didn’t know at that stage who Kim Jong Un was, so they didn’t initially mention that part.

  The first thing the next morning, the Americans informed Swiss intelligence of the incredible defection, and together they worked out a plan: if the North Korean embassy came to their Swiss hosts and asked about the family, the government would plead ignorance.

  The family spent all day Monday in the embassy answering questions. The following day, they were loaded into a minivan to make the four-hour journey over the border into Germany and north to the US Air Force base at Ramstein. They stayed in Germany for about two months while they were being debriefed and intelligence officials were checking out their story.

  The interrogators wanted to know all their “secrets,” but Ri Gang, Kim Jong Un’s uncle, said they didn’t know anything about North Korea’s military operations, only about the ruling family’s life. “We were just looking after the children and helping them study,” he told me. They were granted asylum in the United States and settled down in Middle America, starting a dry-cleaning store like so many other Korean immigrants and watching their children flourish in their new environment.

  I had tracked down the couple and spent a weekend with them, talking about the nephew who once passed as their son. I went to their dry-cleaning store and then back to their house, nearly identical to the others that lined their suburban street, with a neatly cut lawn and two cars parked in the driveway.

  As we sat on their overstuffed black couches, the South Korean news broadcast on their television showed their former charge smiling with his cronies as they celebrated a missile launch. The newsreader uttered ominous warnings about the young North Korean leader. “They never say anything good about him,” Ri muttered.

  I asked the couple about the reason for their defection. They said it was because they wanted to get medical treatment for Kim Jong Un’s mother. They had heard that the medical care in the United States was the best in the world, and they were prepared to take any steps to procure it for her, Ko told me.

  Ri added that they believed that if they could convince the US government to allow Ko Yong Hui into the country, it could have helped to foster a better relationship between Washington and Pyongyang. Ri likened the idea to President Nixon’s “ping-pong diplomacy” with China, which opened a new era of relations between the previously hostile countries.

  This period was something of a high point in relations between the United States and North Korea. The Clinton administration had struck a nuclear deal with North Korea, and Bill Clinton had sent former defense secretary William Perry to Pyongyang to deliver a letter to Kim Jong Il.

  This put in motion a series of meetings that led to the e
xtraordinary sight of Kim Jong Il’s second-in-command traveling to Washington as a special envoy. Wearing his North Korean military uniform, rows of ribbons across his chest, and his distinctive moon-shaped military hat with a red Communist star on the front, the vice marshal went into the Oval Office and posed for photos with President Clinton.

  So it wasn’t preposterous to imagine that a member of an “enemy” regime might come to the United States for medical treatment. But when Ko Yong Hui applied for a visa, her application was rejected. The thaw could happen only so quickly, it seemed.

  But I could not believe that this was the full story of their reason for defecting. Ri and Ko’s place at the heart of the North Korean regime depended entirely on their relationship with Kim Jong Un’s mother. And now that she was dying—and her sons were getting older and outgrowing the need for a guardian—their position also appeared to be in danger.

  After years of traveling and living in Europe, the couple—like tens of thousands of other North Koreans who have gotten a glimpse of the outside world over the past few decades—must have realized that North Korea was not the socialist paradise it was cracked up to be. Stories about the couple in the South Korean press—which admittedly does not have a stellar relationship with the truth—suggested that they sought asylum in the United States because they were concerned about what could happen to them after Ko’s sister died or after Kim Jong Il died.

  In fact, Kim Jong Un’s mother lived for another six years, dying in a hospital in Paris in 2004, while his father defied strokes and other illnesses to make it to the end of 2011.

  When he returned to Bern after the summer of 1998, Kim Jong Un did not go back to the private international school across the river. Instead, he made a new start at the public school in his neighborhood, Schule Liebefeld Steinhölzli. Starting a new school meant he wouldn’t have to explain why his “parents” had changed.

  The school was less than four hundred yards from the apartment block where the North Koreans lived, a five-minute walk down the concrete staircase, past the supermarket and other shops, and around the traffic circle.