The Great Successor

by Fifield, Anna;

  The regime in Pyongyang didn’t know what to make of this new American president. Was he doing a Nixon and playing a madman? Or was he serious?

  North Korean officials began asking former American officials to decipher Trump’s tweets for them. They read The Art of the Deal. They read Fire and Fury, an explosive book about the chaos inside the White House. They asked about the United States’ nuclear attack protocol. They asked if Trump really had the sole authority to push the nuclear button.

  Kim Jong Un’s regime was taking the challenge from Trump extremely seriously. Officials began asking foreign diplomats and other intermediaries what they thought would happen if North Korea did go ahead and lob a missile near—or even onto—Guam. How would Trump react? They didn’t quite know where the red line was.

  Meanwhile, posters went up throughout Pyongyang showing a North Korean missile targeting the US Capitol building and an American flag, entitled “North Korea’s Response.”

  As 2017 turned into 2018, with two historic antagonists led by two bold and relatively inexperienced leaders who liked to boast about their nuclear buttons, the fragile peace on the Korean Peninsula seemed to be holding by a thread.

  CHAPTER 15

  THE CHARM OFFENSIVE

  “We will open our doors to anyone from South Korea… for dialogue, contact and travel, if they sincerely wish national concord and unity.”

  —Kim Jong Un, January 1, 2018

  KIM JONG UN HAD DONE ALL THE THINGS HE NEEDED TO DO TO consolidate his rule. He had obtained a credible nuclear deterrent. He had dispatched with rivals, real or imagined. He had created a group of people who had a strong interest in keeping him in power.

  Now it was time for the cruel, threatening, nuclear-armed tyrant to begin his metamorphosis into misunderstood, gracious, developmental dictator. In phase two, Kim Jong Un would seek to shore up his rule by improving relations with the outside world.

  To start this process, he unleashed his secret weapon: his younger sister, Kim Yo Jong. She would attend the opening of the Winter Olympics in South Korea at the beginning of 2018, marking the first time since the Korean War that a member of the ruling Kim family had gone south.

  It was a masterful decision from Kim Jong Un’s perspective. His younger sister has the same incentive as he does to ensure that the regime remains in power—she also wants to keep the family at the helm—but she doesn’t have his cartoonish qualities. In fact, she was almost entirely silent during the three-day trip south.

  Kim Yo Jong arrived in South Korea on February 9, 2018, the day that the Olympics was scheduled to open, wearing a Mona Lisa–type smile. South Korean television stations broadcast live coverage of her brother’s jet, Air Force Un, landing at Incheon airport outside Seoul. The North Koreans appreciate the power of symbolism. When Kim Jong Un’s jet arrived in the South with his sister onboard, it carried the flight number 615. The South Korean government took this as a sign of good intent. The first inter-Korean summit, held in 2000, had concluded on June 15, or 6/15.

  TV crews followed in a throng as the North Korean princess—together with the ninety-year-old Kim Yong Nam, the senior official who was technically the head of the delegation—came off the plane and glided into a VIP room to be welcomed by senior South Korean officials.

  From that moment on, the First Sister was an object of fascination among the South Korean public. She was demure and discreet. She wore plain black outfits and minimal jewelry and drew her hair back in a no-nonsense style. Young South Koreans, used to seeing their celebrities laden with bling and enhanced with plastic surgery, were surprised at how understated this princess was.

  She was so “humble,” the papers noted after she gestured to Kim Yong Nam to sit first, in line with Confucian hierarchical rules, even though she’s North Korean royalty. “Look at her posture,” the commentators observed. She sat so upright—maybe she’d been a dancer like her mother. Kim Jong Un could hardly have created a more mysteriously alluring goodwill ambassador for a country that has no goodwill.

  Kim Yo Jong cheered on the joint Korean team at the opening ceremony of the Olympics, where American vice president Mike Pence pointedly ignored her, making him look petty. She stood for the South Korean national anthem, an act that is a political crime in North Korea. She cheered on a combined North-South Korea hockey team at a game the next night.

  At that game, I snuck down from my seat in the press section above where the VIPs were sitting so that I could get a better look at her. She seemed a picture of decorum, in stark contrast to the image of her brother. She smiled politely and made chitchat when spoken to but otherwise remained an enigma.

  The next day, she went to South Korea’s presidential Blue House to deliver a message from her brother. The last time North Koreans had gotten close to the Blue House was in 1968 when a group of commandos tried unsuccessfully to assassinate the South Korean president.

  This time, they came through the front door, arriving in a government-provided luxury Hyundai Genesis car. Kim Yo Jong wore a pin of her father and grandfather over her heart, and she was carrying a blue folder that contained an invitation: Would the South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, like to meet with her brother?

  Just eight months before, Moon had been elected president after his hard-line conservative predecessor suffered a shocking fall from grace that landed her in prison, potentially for the rest of her life. Moon was the polar opposite in terms of temperament and policy. While his predecessor had been trying to strangle North Korea with sanctions, Moon wanted to engage. He had taken office pledging to talk to the North Koreans to try to broker an end to the tense standoff that has paralyzed the peninsula. Kim Jong Un realized that an opportunity had presented itself, and he sent his sister to capitalize on it.

  The signs had been there for a couple of months. On November 29, when the Kim regime conducted another intercontinental ballistic missile launch, it indicated it was ready to talk. “We have now completed our rocket program,” it said. That was the signal. Having amassed its bargaining chips, North Korea was now ready to play.

  This became clear on New Year’s Day, when Kim Jong Un stood up to give his annual address to the people, the North Korean equivalent of the American president’s State of the Union.

  “We should work together to ease the acute military tension between the North and the South and create a peaceful environment on the Korean Peninsula,” he said, urging South Korea to “respond positively to our sincere efforts for a détente.”

  Complicating matters was the fact that Kim had also used the speech to declare that North Korea would begin “mass production” of nuclear weapons and missiles in the year ahead. But for Kim, there was no contradiction: his messages were for different audiences, and they could point in different directions.

  Moon chose to ignore the nuclear bombast. He was poised for talks; his team had been secretly meeting with North Korean officials for several months, including on the sidelines of soccer matches in China, to lay the groundwork for North Korea attending the Olympics.

  Just as ping-pong diplomacy between China and the United States in the 1970s paved the way for a normalization of relations between those two adversaries, sports were now being used to provide an apolitical way into highly political talks.

  South Korea had dubbed the Olympics the “Peace Games,” a nod to the roots of the games in ancient Greece but a clear encouragement to the northern regime, especially since the venue stood in a province that straddles the border between North and South Korea. Athletes from the two sides marched into the opening ceremony together, wearing uniforms that said simply “Korea” and waving flags that showed a unified peninsula.

  To make the symbolism even more perfect, the International Olympic Committee was led by Thomas Bach, a former Olympic fencer from the once-divided, now-united country of Germany. During the opening ceremony, he heralded the cooperation of the two Koreas as a great example of the unifying power of the games.

  “I hope Pyongya
ng and Seoul will become closer in the hearts of Koreans and will bring unification and prosperity in the near future,” Kim Yo Jong wrote in the guest book at South Korea’s presidential Blue House. The seduction continued.

  Although she said nothing in public, in private Kim Yo Jong struck her hosts as refreshing and frank. “I never expected to come here on such short notice to be honest, and I thought it would be strange and different but it’s not,” she said when asked to make some remarks at a private farewell dinner. “There are many things similar and the same. I hope we can quickly become one and meet these good people again in Pyongyang.”

  The First Sister mesmerized the South Korean press, who called her “the Ivanka Trump of North Korea.” She was the approachable, moderate face of an oft-pilloried, immoderate male relative. Furthermore, just as Kim Jong Un had sent his sister to the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, President Trump was sending his daughter to the closing.

  But the North Koreans made sure to give only what they wanted to give during this trip, both in terms of politics and intelligence. Kim Yo Jong had stayed in the presidential suite of a five-star hotel, but she had brought her own cot to sleep on. When she checked out, her room was left spotlessly clean. She left behind not a single fingerprint, not a single strand of hair. South Korean intelligence would not be getting any Kim family DNA.

  As one of the few people who Kim Jong Un trusts, Kim Yo Jong has come to play a crucial role in her brother’s regime, acting as a kind of chief of staff, protocol officer, and executive assistant all in one. She is his right-hand woman and gatekeeper.

  In this way, the siblings are following the example set by their father. Kim Jong Il was very close to his younger sister, Kim Kyong Hui, the one who married Uncle Jang. He adored her, one family member would later say.1 After he sent his half brother into exile, she was really the only family he had. She played a crucial advisory role to her brother and held important positions within the Workers’ Party right up to her disappearance at the time her husband was executed by Kim Jong Un.

  The two women were seen together at Kim Jong Un’s equestrian center at the end of 2012, both of them wearing brown jackets and riding white horses. Kim Kyong Hui appeared to be grooming her niece for the role of First Sister, just as Kim Jong Il had groomed his son.

  Kim Yo Jong is several years younger than her brother; exactly how many years is anyone’s guess. The South Korean intelligence service says she was born in 1988; the US government thinks it was 1989. When she joined her older siblings in Bern, registered as Pak Mi Hyang, her birthdate was declared as April 28, 1991. That seems too late and may have been changed to get her into a younger class in Switzerland as she learned a new language.

  A photo from this time shows a girl of about eight or nine with a bright smile and chubby cheeks that are a stark contrast to her angled face of today. She is wearing a choker necklace, the kind that was fashionable in the late 1990s, and a red dress. Like her mother, she loved to dance.

  She led a cloistered life, growing up in the royal palaces of North Korea. Her father called her “sweet, sweet Yo Jong” and “Princess Yo Jong” and thought she was quick-witted and possessed good leadership skills. Kim Jong Il identified both Kim Jong Un and Kim Yo Jong as having an aptitude for political life.2

  She was also sent to Switzerland to join her brothers in Bern. She stayed there until late 2000, having completed the American equivalent of sixth grade. She is thought to have finished her schooling with a private tutor and then to have studied at Kim Il Sung University.

  We didn’t see her again until it was time for her brother to take the reins. She appears in the grainy family photo taken under the tree in Wonsan in 2009, and she was at the same Workers’ Party conference in 2010 where her brother emerged as their father’s successor. She stood alongside Kim Jong Il’s fifth “wife,” who worked in the leader’s personal secretariat. This suggested that the First Sister was working in the secretariat too.

  Then she was seen at her father’s funeral, a gaunt figure in a black dress, her face down as she walked behind her brother toward their father’s body. But so little was known about her that no one was sure who she was, leading to the speculation that she might be Kim Jong Un’s wife. At that stage, no one knew about First Lady Ri Sol Ju.

  From the earliest days of her brother’s leadership, Kim Yo Jong has been there, supporting him.

  While the glamorous Ri Sol Ju is at Kim Jong Un’s side to make him appear a more modern leader and convey a sense of aspiration, Kim Yo Jong is working. The first lady may swan about in bright outfits and clutch her husband’s arm, but the First Sister is usually seen in the background, making sure everything goes smoothly.

  She could be seen popping out from behind a pillar on a balcony overlooking a huge military ceremony in Pyongyang in 2017, bringing documents to her brother that were apparently related to the spectacle taking place in the square and sky in front of them. At the opening of a flagship residential district in the capital, she was there on the stage, making sure that the photographers were in place and everything was ready before her brother arrived. She’s often checking her phone.

  She has accompanied Kim Jong Un to on-the-spot guidance visits at military sites, factories, and museums. She often has a smile on her face and a notebook in her hand, like the other cadres. She is always dressed like a functionary.

  She has been elevated up the Workers’ Party ranks since her brother took over.

  Toward the end of 2014, Kim Yo Jong was made vice director of the Workers’ Party’s Propaganda and Agitation Department. The department controls all the media in North Korea, deciding what airs on television and over the radio waves, which stories appear in the newspapers, and which books are fit for publication. It is the guardian of the personality cult.

  Within the department, she controls Documentary #5 Office, the propaganda unit that produces reports and photos about the Supreme Leader’s activities that are then used in state media. Her father undertook the same role for his father.3

  Kim Yo Jong’s title in the propaganda department is somewhat misleading. She is no deputy. She was put in that position to ensure that her brother, like their grandfather, comes across as a benevolent leader to be adored. She took over from an eighty-nine-year-old who had been such a key figure in the regime that he had walked alongside the hearse during Kim Jong Il’s funeral, a man who suddenly disappeared in mid-2016. But the First Sister was suddenly everywhere.

  In 2016, she was made a member of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party. The next year, she became an alternate member of the Worker’s Party politburo, taking her aunt’s position there. The photo of the new politburo shows Kim Jong Un at the center, flanked by dozens of men old enough to collect their pensions and one waiflike woman in her twenties.

  She’s never been revealed as the leader’s sister, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure it out. Even among the North Korean elite, there’s no clear path for a young woman to rise so rapidly up the ranks of power. Plus, Korean naming conventions—they both have a “Jong” in their given names—suggest that she’s closely related to Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un.

  She became prominent enough to earn herself a place on American sanctions lists. In 2017, she was accused of human rights abuses because of her role in enforcing a system of rigid censorship in North Korea. Being on the list blocks American citizens from doing business with her, and her assets were frozen in the United States—a symbolic designation since she doesn’t do business with or own anything in that country. But it underlines her role at the center of the regime.

  It made no difference to her. She continued to gain influence in North Korea and make her way up the communist hierarchy, just like Kim Jong Il’s sister before her.

  There is no obvious heir to Kim Jong Un. If he has a son, he is still a very young child. That has led to speculation that he might be grooming his sister to take over in case anything should happen to him.

  One day, I m
et a South Korean expert on North Korea’s leadership and asked him if Kim Yo Jong could be in line to succeed her brother. He looked at me like I was crazy. “She can’t be leader. She’s a female,” he responded. He politely left off the “duh!”4

  He has a point. It would be exceptional in highly chauvinist North Korea for a woman to play anything other than a supporting role. Most likely, a man in the family would take over. Maybe their unseen-in-North-Korea brother, Kim Jong Chol. Kim Yo Jong would turn her formidable skills to promoting him as the rightful heir to the family dynasty while continuing to pull the strings from behind the scenes.

  The First Sister also appears to have been working on creating the next generation of Paektu offspring. She has been seen with a band on her wedding ring finger and is reportedly married to the son of Choe Ryong Hae, her brother’s chief lieutenant. Her husband is said to work in Office 39, the Workers’ Party unit that raises money for the leader’s slush fund.

  When Kim Yo Jong visited South Korea for the Olympics, some noticed that she had a slight belly on an otherwise slender frame and wondered if she might be pregnant. Southern officials later disclosed that she’d given birth a few months earlier.

  The First Sister’s visit to the South triggered a frenzy of contacts between the two Koreas. Officials started laying the groundwork for a summit that would take place in Panmunjom, the truce village in the middle of the DMZ, within two months.

  But first, there was some very surprising soft power. A huge South Korean artistic troupe went to Pyongyang to perform for Kim and his cadres in a concert called “Spring Is Coming.”

  The troupe included a whole raft of singers whose music was officially banned in the North, including K-pop stars like Red Velvet, a girl group whose members sport dyed hair and revealing outfits. They sang hits including “Bad Boy” in the presence of the ultimate Korean bad boy. “Every time I come around, another bad boy down. Got ’em like ooh ooh,” they sang, their choreography less provocative than usual.