I know the man’s name, his nationality, and where he lives. He told me a few vague details about his work. Like so many people involved in this murky underworld, he was extremely cagey.
But he wouldn’t let me use any of these details, so I’ll call him Mark here.
Mark is a specialist in internet security. One day, at the upscale Shangri La hotel in Bangkok, he was introduced to a man who called himself Johnny Kim and needed an IT specialist to help him keep his servers secure.
Mark had no idea who the man was or even where he was from, but he knew he was a bit dodgy. The work he was doing was “not legitimate.” He was running gambling websites, a lot of them. Casinos in general, and online casinos in particular, are well-known ways to launder illgotten money.
One day in 2009, when they were watching TV, Johnny turned to Mark and said, “I want to tell you who I am. I’m the son of Kim Jong Il. My name is Kim Jong Nam.” Mark wasn’t sure how to respond. He didn’t know much about North Korea. They carried on working together, as before, on the many online gambling sites that Johnny ran.
There were two North Korean cyberspecialists who worked with Kim Jong Nam a lot, Mark said. In Macau, he had close dealings with two titans of the gambling scene: Stanley Ho, the “King of Gambling” who owned about twenty casinos in Macau and even one in Pyongyang, and Chan Meng Kam, a former legislator who also owned casinos. Kim Jong Nam liked to hang out at the Lisboa, one of Ho’s casinos in Macau, or at Chan’s casino, the Golden Dragon. They ordered vodka and whisky by the bottle, Mark said.
“He knew a lot of influential people,” Mark told me. “Chinese, English, Portuguese, Americans, Singaporeans. Everyone in Macau knew him.”
Macau was the optimal place for Kim Jong Nam to launder the counterfeit one-hundred-dollar bills that North Korea was mass producing in the early 2000s, Mark said. One time, Kim Jong Nam even paid Mark with these fake Benjamins, called “superdollars” because they were so well forged. The US government sanctioned a Macau bank, Banco Delta Asia, in 2006, accusing it of helping the North Korean government launder money and distribute counterfeit American currency.
In Macau, the First Son enjoyed being a man about town, going to gentlemen’s clubs and drinking heavily. He had girlfriends all over Asia. He had huge dragon and koi tattoos on his body in a style common in organized criminal gangs in Asia. And he had a “fascination” with the Japanese mafia, called the yakuza, and the Chinese triads, Mark said.
Throughout his time in quasi-exile, Kim Jong Nam maintained links to the regime. He remained particularly close to his uncle, the economic reformer Jang Song Thaek, and talked to him often.
He went home infrequently. He flew to Pyongyang in 2008, when his father had a stroke. He also went to France to find out about medical treatment for his father. During that trip, he also met Eric Clapton, Kim Jong Nam told Mark. It seems that the love for Clapton runs strong through the whole Kim family.
He visited North Korea again in the weeks after his father died, although he didn’t see his younger half brother, by then the Supreme Leader, or go to the funeral.13
“He was a bit concerned about what would happen to him” after his brother took over, Mark said, adding that Kim Jong Nam never talked about wanting a role in North Korea. “He was happy living the life that he was living. He was happy that his children and wives and mistresses were not in North Korea.”
When he met old school friends in Geneva and Vienna, he told them he was in town on business. That business, he said, was consulting for very wealthy Asian clients in Europe, like Chinese nouveaux riches who wanted to spend $30,000 on wine or buy property in Switzerland. “Things like that. Nothing sordid,” said Sahakian, his old classmate at the International School of Geneva.
Kim Jong Nam enjoyed drinking wine and smoking cigars. He was a bon vivant who wore expensive watches. But Sahakian said he never saw the alcoholic/playboy/gambler of his reputation.
His friend didn’t pry, but he had the sense that Kim Jong Nam was really working for a living, that his brother had cut him off. On his last trip to Geneva, Kim Jong Nam stayed in an Airbnb, not at the Four Seasons.
Sahakian sent me a selfie they took together in Geneva. It showed two aging men with stubble, sunglasses tucked into their shirts, smiling into the camera in front of a gourmet hotdog joint called Mischa.
Both friends said that the First Son was always very security conscious. He would make sure that all the web cameras on computers were covered, and he often had offices and his homes swept for bugs, Mark said.
He knew secret pathways between buildings where there were no security cameras, enabling him to duck about town undetected. He would spot Japanese people and steer clear of them in case they were reporters. He was especially paranoid in Beijing, Mark said. He used a very old Nokia phone from the early 2000s, a cell phone that couldn’t be used to track his location.
But for someone so secretive, Kim Jong Nam was also surprisingly open.
All the while he was in exile, he maintained a Facebook page under the name Kim Chol, one of his aliases. He freely posted photos of himself there, including a whole slew of him outside various Macau casinos. “Living Las Vegas in Asia,” he captioned one.
When the Facebook account was revealed, I immediately sent messages to all 180-odd of his friends. That’s how I found Sahakian. I would also later discover that I had contacted Kim Jong Nam’s brother-in-law.
The First Son also talked an awful lot to reporters. Japanese journalists waited for him at the Beijing airport, thrusting their business cards at him. In 2004, when there had been no public declaration about the succession, Kim Jong Nam emailed a few of them to say that his father had the “absolute right” to choose whomever he wanted.
With his father getting noticeably frailer, Kim Jong Nam, wearing sweatpants, was dismissive to a Japanese TV crew that tailed him in Macau in 2009. “Would I be dressed like this if I was the successor?” he responded.
Later, after his father chose Kim Jong Un, the jilted older brother said that he was opposed in principle to third-generation leadership, but he wished Kim Jong Un the best. “I hope my brother does his best to make the lives of North Koreans better,” he said, adding that he was happy to offer his help from abroad.14
Later, he became even more critical, calling the disastrous currency denomination of 2009 a “mistake” and saying it was time for North Korea to “reform and open up” like China.
His sharpest critique came at the start of 2012, just a month after his younger half brother had become the leader of North Korea. “I have my doubts about whether a person with only two years of grooming as a leader can govern,” Kim Jong Nam wrote to Yoji Gomi, a Japanese reporter who met the First Son on two occasions and exchanged more than 150 emails with him.
That kind of criticism would not be tolerated by the Great Successor.
A year after Kim Jong Nam’s death, I found his sister/cousin, Nam Ok. It had been a quarter century since she’d escaped from the clutches of Kim Jong Il, the man she called Papa, boiling with frustration over the way her life had been sacrificed for her “brother.” She hadn’t had a proper schooling because of him. She couldn’t go to university because of him. She was punished because of him, punished because he—as a twenty-year-old—was drinking and sleeping around.
Nam Ok slipped away. She became French, married a Frenchman she’d met at the Lycée in Moscow, and had two good-looking, fun-loving French sons.
She is still living a life of privilege, but it is a different kind of privilege. She and her husband have started a successful business, in no small part due to her good political connections. They have a very comfortable lifestyle. Her paperwork says she was born in Vietnam. She tells people her background is simply “Korean.”
She is intensely private. There are no photos of her on the internet from recent decades. There are still photos of her with her “brother” from those years they lived together. She’s in a mink coat or traditional Korean dress.
Or they are in matching sailor suits in Wonsan. Or out shooting, at the beach, or in the swimming pool in North Korea.
Those photos come from a memoir that she worked on with Imogen O’Neil, a British-French writer whom she met through old Lycée connections. O’Neil had completed the book, which was to be called The Golden Cage: Life with Kim Jong Il, a Daughter’s Story. But Nam Ok got cold feet, and the book was never published.
I had tracked her down to the city where she lived with her husband and left a letter for her at her company. Her husband agreed to meet me and tried to explain why Nam Ok couldn’t and wouldn’t talk to me herself. She had to remain quiet about the North Korean regime for her safety, her husband told me.
Her real brother had been killed by the regime, shot in the head and chest in his apartment building outside Seoul. He’d defected to South Korea and had lived a secret if troubled life there, untouched by the regime. Then, bankrupt, he published a book about the royal court. He was dead a few months later.
Afterward, “Uncle” Jang, the man who arranged for her to go to school in Switzerland and had been one of the few figures of fun when she was cooped up in Pyongyang, had been publicly humiliated and sent to his death.
And most recently, her adopted brother had just been killed by the regime in a grisly and public way. She couldn’t risk speaking out and suffering the same fate, her husband told me.
I didn’t entirely believe this explanation for Nam Ok’s reticence. There were plenty of signs that she still had links to the regime, that she was still benefiting from being North Korean.
I wrestled with my discovery of Nam Ok. I could have published a story disclosing her new name and where she lives and her businesses and why I think she’s still in cahoots with the regime or at least the regime’s supporters. It would be a bona fide journalistic scoop. In twenty-five years, no one has found her.
But just as I honor ordinary escapees’ requests for anonymity to protect their families, I chose to preserve Nam Ok’s. Her children have done nothing to deserve the kind of attention that this disclosure would bring them, the hordes of South Korean and Japanese reporters who would follow them to their universities or on their ski trips.
Out of this whole dysfunctional greater Kim family, she was the only one who’d managed to make a normal life. I didn’t want to be the one who blew that apart.
The person most obviously at risk after Kim Jong Nam’s death, however, was not his sister/cousin, but his outspoken son, the only one of his children with any kind of public profile.
Han Sol, who uses the English name Donald, had also been surprisingly critical for a member of the North Korean royal family. Although he was born in Pyongyang, he grew up in Macau, living a variation of the wealthy-expat-kid life that his father had experienced. It was one that looked happy. He went to a private school and spoke perfect, slightly British-accented English. He bleached his hair, pierced his ear, wore a cross around his neck, and had a pretty girlfriend named Sonia.
He had posted photos on Facebook and comments on YouTube videos. “I know my people are hungry,” he wrote in a comment on a YouTube video showing starving North Koreans. “I’d do anything to help them.” But he also revealed on another post that he was “related” to the ruling family. “LONG LIVE DPRK,” he wrote on another video, using the official abbreviation for North Korea.15
In 2011, just months before his uncle took over the running of North Korea, Han Sol moved to Bosnia to attend the United World College in Mostar. He lived in relative isolation for a few months before South Korean media found him and started tailing him.
He gave an extraordinary interview to the former Finnish defense minister and one of the founders of the college. It aired on Finnish television and showed a cosmopolitan young man trying to lead a normal life despite his abnormal family.
He said he didn’t know how his uncle became the “dictator” of North Korea but, like his father, said he hoped things would improve. “I’ve always dreamed that one day I would go back and make things better and make things easier for the people back there. I also dream of unification,” he said. He also said he went back to North Korea every summer “to keep in touch with my family.”
After Bosnia, Han Sol’s next stop was France, where he enrolled at the Le Havre campus of Sciences Po, the elite university, in the fall of 2013. When Uncle Jang was executed at the end of that year, he’d been placed under the protection of the French police.
He has reason to fear. He is male, and he is a direct descendent of the fictional Paektu bloodline. That gives him the same birthright as Kim Jong Un and could make him a rival—in the leader’s mind, at least.
Han Sol was reportedly in Macau when his father was killed. While I was in Kuala Lumpur and the Malaysian police were insisting on a DNA sample before releasing Kim Jong Nam’s body, there was intense speculation that Han Sol would come to provide it. Television crews swarmed every twentysomething Asian man with geek-chic glasses coming off the AirAsia flight from Macau.
But he never arrived. He, his mother, and his sister instead embarked on a frantic escape, first to Taiwan, where they spent thirty hours awaiting visas for their onward travel, with the help of the United States, China, and the Netherlands. Several parties reportedly tried to interfere with the evacuation, attempting to stop a young man with Paektu blood from escaping into anonymity and potentially continuing to criticize Kim Jong Un—or, even worse, to plot against him.16
Once they were all safe, Han Sol released another extraordinary video. “My father has been killed a few days ago. I’m currently with my mother and my sister,” he said, wearing a black sweater and sitting against a white backdrop that could be anywhere in the world. He held up his North Korean passport as proof of identity, although the information page was blacked out. Still, he didn’t need proof. He was the spitting image of his father.
In the video, he thanks a number of people for his family’s safety, including the Dutch ambassador to Seoul. That sparked speculation that he was in the Netherlands. But there were also rumors about France, China, and inevitably the CIA.
The video was stamped with the seal of the Cheollima Civil Defense, a group that appeared to be established for the purpose of airing the video—perhaps by South Korea’s intelligence service. It took its name from a mythical Korean horse but pointedly used the South Korean spelling.
Han Sol ended the video with the words “We hope this gets better soon.”
There is, however, one direct male descendent of the Paektu line who appears to be safe, thriving even.
Kim Jong Chol, the leader’s older, full brother, appears to be living within the cloistered walls of the royal compounds. He is someone that Kim Jong Un knows well and clearly trusts. Plus, the brother, who’s been described as “effeminate” and even “bosomy” over the years, doesn’t seem to pose any kind of threat. He just wants to play guitar. So he gets to live.
One day in 2015, Thae Yong Ho, then the deputy ambassador in London, received an encrypted message from Pyongyang telling him to buy tickets for Eric Clapton’s Seventieth Birthday Celebration Tour concert at the Royal Albert Hall.
He wasn’t told who they were for, but he didn’t need to be told. Everyone knows who’s the biggest Eric Clapton fan in North Korea.
The VIP would be coming to London for four days and three nights, arriving on an Aeroflot flight from Vladivostok via Moscow.
Thae had readied a two-bedroom suite in a five-star hotel—the Chelsea Harbor Hotel, where the penthouse suite costs more than $3,000 a night—for his charge, who seemed to be quite sick. He traveled with a doctor, who needed to stay close, and took a big pile of pills three times a day, Thae said, cupping his hands.
A nervous Thae had also prepared a list of top sightseeing places to go to and, like a good North Korean official, learned lots of facts and figures about each place. A visitor can’t go anywhere in North Korea without a guide describing how many bricks were used to build a tower or when the Great Lea
der first visited. So there Thae was, brimming with trivia about the Tower of London and Parliament Square.
But all Kim Jong Chol wanted to do was look at guitars on Denmark Street, a row of specialist stores in London’s Soho, that is renowned among guitar enthusiasts.
There, in the shops, Kim Jong Chol tried out guitars. He was very serious and intent, Thae said, and impressed the store owners with his skills. He had calloused fingertips on his left hand, a sign of how much he played.
But none of the shops had the specific guitar Jong Chol wanted, so Thae was dispatched to locate one that did. He found another specialist dealer in a small town about twenty-five miles outside London, and off they went.
They had the guitar, and Jong Chol bought it. It cost about 3,000 pounds, or $4,500 at the time. Thae kept his distance while the transaction was taking place. Jong Chol’s English was good enough for the job. “He was mad about that guitar,” Thae recalled.
Then Jong Chol went to see Clapton at the Royal Albert Hall not once but two nights in a row. Photos show him wearing a black leather jacket and sunglasses, accompanied by Thae, another man, and a woman. She was also dressed to rock, in a green leather jacket and sunglasses. She wasn’t his girlfriend or his wife, Thae said. She was a guitarist from the Moranbong Band.
Despite the throngs of journalists and cameras waiting for him on the second night, the North Korean VIP was in his element at the Clapton concerts, which featured hits from throughout Slowhand’s career, including “Layla,” “Tears in Heaven,” and “Wonderful Tonight.”
“He was having a great time, singing along to all the words,” said one fellow concertgoer.17
Thae said that Kim Jong Chol seemed to be overtaken by the music, standing up, clapping wildly, and raising his hands in the air. He snapped up T-shirts and other souvenirs. Back at the hotel, still on a high, the North Koreans emptied their minibars.
The Great Successor Page 24
