They have one purpose: to earn money for Kim Jong Un’s regime however they can—malware, ransomware, spear-phishing, sneaking into gambling and gaming sites—as long as they meet their targets. The good ones can make $100,000 a year—$90,000 for the regime, $10,000 for themselves.7
These kinds of funds would become increasingly important for the Great Successor as revenues from more legitimate businesses were cut off by international sanctions. If he couldn’t earn, he would steal.
Kim Jong Un had been working on another way to get the attention of the outside world and, in particular, of the people the North Korean regime calls the “cunning American bastards.”
It was time to take some more hostages—some more US hostages. It had proven to be a good way of focusing American minds in the past.
Many of the people North Korea had previously detained were Korean Americans doing missionary work on the borders or using business activities as a cover for proselytizing.
A year into Kim Jong Un’s tenure, his regime had arrested Kenneth Bae, a Korean American missionary who was trying to spread Christianity in North Korea. He was accused of setting up bases in China with the aim of trying to overthrow Kim Jong Un’s regime and was sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor. He spent two years in detention, some of it working in the fields, some of it in the Friendship Hospital in the diplomatic quarter of Pyongyang being treated for various medical complaints. It’s the only place where foreigners are allowed to be treated.
Then the regime seized Matthew Miller, a troubled young man from California who had ripped up his passport on arrival at Pyongyang and asked for political asylum. He was taken into custody, apparently part of a plan to get arrested so he could document what life was like in a North Korean prison. He spent eight months in detention.
Next came Jeffrey Fowle, a fifty-six-year-old bespectacled road maintenance worker from Ohio. He traveled to North Korea as a tourist, packing into his luggage a basketball that he bought at a Harlem Globetrotters’ exhibition game in Dayton. He got the players to put their autographs on the ball, and as they were signing it, Fowle told them that he hoped to take it to North Korea.
In his imagination, he wanted to present it to Kim Jong Un himself. He also took with him a turquoise-covered Bible in Korean, which he left behind in a toilet in the Chongjin Seaman’s Club in the hopes that a secret Christian would find and share it. The North Korean who found it turned it in immediately, starting a process that would see Fowle spending almost six months in a North Korean detention center.8
Christians were unwelcome in a country with room for only one deity—Kim Jong Un himself. Korean American Christians were particularly unwelcome because they could speak the language and were traitors to the Korean people, in the eyes of the Kim regime. So they were prime targets for detention.
The regime had a well-established pattern. It would generally keep the detainees until a sufficiently senior envoy from the United States came to free them. Former presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were among those who had previously traveled to Pyongyang to spring American detainees. These visits could be heralded in the North Korean media as signs of important people coming to pay homage to and curry favor with the all-powerful North Korean leader.
But at the end of 2015, a young American college student did something that, at a frat party in the United States, might have earned him a reprimand from the campus police. But in North Korea, it turned out to be a deadly mistake.
Otto Warmbier had just turned twenty-one. He was an all-round good student from the suburbs of Cincinnati, a guy from a well-off family, someone who had a penchant for whacky thrift-shop shirts. He was an economics major at the prestigious University of Virginia, embarking on a study-abroad trip to Hong Kong. He’d seen a little of the world—going to Cuba with his family, London to study, Israel as he explored his Jewish faith—and decided he would go to North Korea on his way to Hong Kong.
Initially, three Warmbiers—father Fred and sons Otto and Austin—were going to go to North Korea with Koryo Tours, the most established of the Beijing-based travel companies that cater to foreign tourists. Independent travel in North Korea is not allowed, but the Brits who run Koryo had established a good reputation.
In the end, only Otto went. He joined Young Pioneer Tours, aimed at people of his age, an outfit that takes its name from the Soviet Union’s Communist youth league and markets tours to “destinations your mother would rather you stayed away from.” I’d encountered this tour group during one of my trips to Pyongyang. At about eleven o’clock one morning, I’d been walking through the café area at the water park, when I saw them ordering pints of beer. The tour leader was flirting wildly with a North Korean woman who was present. I remember thinking at the time that this was a recipe for disaster.
That December 29, Otto flew from Beijing to Pyongyang on a five-day, four-night New Year’s Party Tour. For the first few days, everything was normal. Otto posed for photos with his tour mates in front of the seventy-foot bronze statues of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il in the center of Pyongyang as locals trudged through the snow to pay their compulsory respects. He went to the weird musical performances that North Korean children put on for outsiders. A big smile on his face, he threw snowballs with some local kids in a freezing parking lot.
On New Year’s Eve, the tour group traveled down to the demilitarized zone that separates the two Koreas, another regular stop on the North Korean tourist itinerary. When they got back to Pyongyang, they went for dinner, had some beers, and headed into Kim Il Sung Square for a huge firework display. The group kept on drinking, as twentysomethings are wont to do on New Year’s Eve.
It was after midnight when things started going wrong for Otto Warmbier. We may never know what happened in the hours between midnight and 4:00 a.m., when Otto’s roommate, Briton Danny Gratton, returned to their room and found the American man asleep in bed.
Kim Jong Un’s regime says that, in the small hours of the morning, Otto went to a staff-only floor in the hotel and is alleged to have pulled down a large propaganda sign that read “Let’s arm ourselves strongly with Kim Jong Il’s patriotism!” The regime labeled this a “hostile act” against the state and stopped Otto at Pyongyang airport on January 2 as he went to board his flight out.
But it wasn’t until three weeks later—after a nuclear test and a long-range missile launch—that the regime announced it had Otto. And it wasn’t until the end of February that he was seen. The distraught young man was brought before the cameras in Pyongyang to deliver a bizarre confession that had all the hallmarks of being written for him.
He said that his family was cash strapped—they weren’t—and that he’d been asked by a member of his Methodist church in Ohio—he’s Jewish—to steal the sign as a “trophy” in return for $10,000. He also said that the Central Intelligence Agency and a secret student group at the University of Virginia called the Z Society were behind his gambit.
Otto looked extremely shaken and, after saying he had made the “worst mistake of my life,” bent at his waist into a deep and awkward bow of apology.
Did Kim Jong Un know what was going on with Otto? Probably not at the beginning. Regime officials don’t require his permission to defend the leader’s honor. But at some stage after Otto’s arrest, Kim would have been informed about the new hostage—a white American, an important fact because North Korea makes a distinction between white and ethnically Korean Americans. Kim Jong Un would have known that this young man could become a crucial bargaining chip heading into a presidential election year in the United States.
Two weeks after that first bizarre display, Otto appeared before the cameras again. On March 16, he was led, handcuffed, into a courtroom for an hour-long show trial. At the end of it, he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison with hard labor. It was an unimaginable prospect for a twenty-one-year-old man who had already spent ten weeks alone in North Korean detention.
The following day, the regime released a grainy s
ecurity camera video with a timestamp on the video: 1:57 a.m. on New Year’s Day. It shows a tall figure—his face cannot be made out—walking into a hallway and taking a sign down from the wall. The person puts the sign on the floor in front of him, and the video cuts out. It’s impossible to say whether the person is Otto, and everything about the video is strange: the way the person walks directly to the poster without looking around to see if anyone is there, the way he places it straight on the floor, the fact that the lights were on in an electricity-starved country. I’ve never been in a building with the lights on unnecessarily. In fact, I’ve been in many buildings in North Korea where the lights should have been on but were not.
By the time the North Korean regime released that video, Otto had already suffered the injury that would lead to his death, for something happened to the student on the night of his sentencing. The North Koreans said that he had a case of botulism after eating spinach and pork and had a bad reaction to some medicine they gave him. Some observers think that the young man, in his distress, might have tried to kill himself in his cell and was discovered too late. It is unlikely that we will ever know for sure what happened to Otto that night.
What is not in doubt is that he fell into a coma. He was taken to the Friendship Hospital, where Kenneth Bae had also been treated. For all their depravity and provocations, the North Korean regime does not want American blood on its hands. Previously, with elderly or ill detainees like Bae, it has freed them or treated them in the hospital. A dead prisoner is a useless bargaining chip.
But in this case, the security services appear to have panicked and tried to cover their tracks. Instead of informing the relevant authorities of Otto’s condition and allowing him to be returned home for medical treatment, they hid it. Maybe they thought he would recover. Maybe they realized too late that he wouldn’t.
When I arrived at the Yanggakdo Hotel six weeks after his sentencing, I immediately requested an interview with Otto. I thought this might be possible, given that previous detainees had been trotted out for visiting journalists. I also asked whether I could see the floor where he had allegedly gone to steal the poster. I got neither.
Weeks turned into months, and there was still no sign of Otto Warmbier. The North Korean foreign ministry officials stopped responding to Swedish diplomats in Pyongyang, who represent the United States there in the absence of diplomatic relations.
An intermediary told me the North Koreans had declared Otto and three other men being held, all Korean Americans with missionary links, to be prisoners of war. But he also told me that the North Korean diplomats seemed to be completely cut out of the loop.
With the US presidential election approaching, there was speculation that the hostages were being held as pawns until after the vote. Perhaps they would be released to the next administration as a way to embarrass President Obama, in the same way that the Iranian students snubbed Jimmy Carter by releasing the American embassy hostages just hours after Ronald Reagan was inaugurated in 1981.
But the election came and went. Donald Trump was sworn in as the new president of the United States, yet still there was not a peep about the hostages. Things would not start to change until early in May 2017, some sixteen months after Otto was detained.
Madame Choe, the foreign ministry official, was traveling to Norway for talks with former American officials, a not irregular type of meeting at which the North Koreans ask about US policy and the Americans encourage them to behave better.
Joseph Yun, the US State Department’s point man on North Korea, obtained permission to travel to the talks in Oslo specifically to ask about getting the four Americans freed. During the talks at a fjord-front hotel, Yun convinced Choe to allow consular access to the four men, none of whom had been seen in months, as a gesture of goodwill.
Choe flew back to Pyongyang and told the security services about the agreement she’d reached. It was only then that she discovered there was a very big problem. The security services told her that Warmbier was in a coma and had been in that condition for fifteen of the seventeen months he’d been held.
Choe immediately grasped the gravity of the problem. She alerted a North Korean diplomat at the United Nations, who delivered the news to Yun. This led to a frenzied effort to medically evacuate the young man. At President Trump’s direction, Yun prepared to travel to North Korea with an American doctor.
The North Koreans wanted a decoy to distract the media. They clearly realized how serious this was going to be. Relations between the two countries reached a nadir. There was strong concern in Washington and in Seoul that the war of words could escalate into actual military conflict.
Into all of this walked Dennis Rodman.
The NBA champion had become strangely relevant since his last drunken trip to North Korea. In the intervening months, the former host of Celebrity Apprentice had become president of the United States; Dennis Rodman had twice appeared on Celebrity Apprentice. That made him the only person in the whole world who knew both Trump and Kim.
This time, Rodman’s appearance was even more bizarre than usual. He arrived in Pyongyang wearing a T-shirt for the marijuana cryptocurrency PotCoin, his latest sponsor. There was speculation that he was going to North Korea as a presidential envoy. He even took a copy of Trump’s The Art of the Deal with him.
It turned out that Rodman had been invited to North Korea at precisely the same time as the American diplomatic team was going in to retrieve Warmbier. The basketballer had been trying to return to Pyongyang that summer, but the North Koreans delayed the trip by a few weeks so that his visit exactly coincided with the secret American delegation. It appeared that the North Koreans wanted Rodman to unwittingly stage a diversion.
With Rodman putting on the sideshow, Yun and the doctor went into hours of meetings and eventually to the hospital where Warmbier was being held. He had a feeding tube in his nose and was not responsive. After arguments and going through the motions of having his sentence commuted at his bedside, the doctor readied Otto for the long trip home. But before they let Otto go, the North Koreans presented Yun with a bill for Warmbier’s medical treatment. It was for $2 million.
Kim Jong Un’s regime—having taken a healthy young man hostage over a minor infraction and rendered him brain dead and then having held on to him for well over a year, denying him proper medical treatment—now had the audacity to expect payment for his “care.”
Yun called the then-secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, from the hotel phone. Tillerson called Trump. They instructed Yun to sign the piece of paper agreeing that he would pay the $2 million. The first priority was getting the young man home.
Otto Warmbier died six days later in a hospital in Cincinnati, not far from the leafy suburb where he grew up. The $2 million hospital bill went to the US Treasury Department. And there it stayed—unpaid.
CHAPTER 13
THE UNWANTED BROTHER
“Kim Jong Un is still just a nominal figure and the members of the power elite will be the ones in actual power. The dynastic succession is a joke to the outside world.”
—Kim Jong Nam, 2012
AUTOCRATS ARE A PARANOID BUNCH BY NATURE. BUT NO ONE makes an autocrat more paranoid than his brother. After all, the brother shares the same background and the same blood; he is, by definition, a leader in waiting.
Since Romulus killed Remus to found Rome, since Cain killed Abel in a pique of jealousy, and since Claudius killed King Hamlet, brothers have found themselves on the chopping block. The Ottomans codified fratricide: Mehmed the Conqueror passed a law allowing whichever of his sons who ascended to the throne to “kill his brothers for the common benefit of the people,” a way to stave off power struggles. The recommended method was to have them strangled with silk cords by men who were deaf and mute.1
Kim Jong Un, having already ruthlessly dispatched his uncle, decided to take the Conqueror’s advice and get rid of his older half brother, Kim Jong Nam.
Their father had felt the same way about
his own half brother. When he was becoming heir to the throne, Kim Jong Il felt threatened by his younger half brother, Kim Phyong Il, who was said to hold sway within the military.
In the late 1970s, as he was being groomed as their father’s successor, Kim Jong Il had his younger brother sent on what would become a four-decade-plus diplomatic posting. Kim Phyong Il has been ambassador in various countries in eastern Europe—Yugoslavia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland, and now the Czech Republic. He remains in Prague to this day.
Kim Jong Nam, the firstborn son in a culture that prizes firstborn sons, posed a greater threat to the Great Successor. It didn’t matter that he’d been living outside North Korea in a kind of exile for some fifteen years. Kim Jong Un clearly did not want the First Son, a man who also had mythical Paektu blood coursing through his veins, to be part of North Korea’s story.
On February 13, 2017, just before 9:00 a.m., Kim Jong Nam became the target of a most audacious public assassination.
He was at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport’s terminal for budget airlines, a seething mass of humanity and overstuffed bags. He was checking himself in for a flight to Macau, his main base for the previous fifteen or so years, on AirAsia, the EasyJet of the region. He had no luggage, just a backpack, and no entourage. For a man with a reputation as a high-rolling international playboy, the balding forty-five-year-old looked decidedly ordinary.
As he stood at the kiosk, a young Indonesian woman approached him from behind, reaching up to cover his eyes and then wiping her hands down his face and over his mouth. As she ran off to wash her hands, another woman, this one from Vietnam and wearing a white top with LOL across it, came up and repeated the action before she rushed to the washroom and then out of the airport.
They had smeared him with two chemicals that, when combined, formed the deadly nerve agent VX, an internationally banned chemical weapon. Kim approached the airport staff for help and was escorted to the airport’s medical clinic. There, he slumped in the chair with his belly exposed and soiled his pants.
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