Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  When her interviewers asked how the boy had reacted to being isolated in the palace, Nam-ok said he had accepted the situation “because that was what his father had decided for him. He was totally submissive to his father and never criticized-what Kim Jong-il decided for him.” Jong-nam’s mother, her aunt, “was prone to sickness and was often away from home in Moscow for medical treatments. But Kim Jong-il poured his very deep love into his son in childhood, so I don’t think the child felt lonely. His mother’s absence was covered up by his father’s presence. Besides, he did get to see his mother on a regular basis.” Kim Jong-il occasionally shouted at the children when they disobeyed but he always had a reason for raising his voice and he never used violence at home.

  Kim Jong-il encouraged his son’s play with toy battleships and guns— all North Korean boys were expected to be militaristic in their play. He even gave the boy a real pistol at one point, instructing him to keep it locked up in his safe when he was not training with it. Jong-nam became “a sharpshooter,” according to his cousin. Kim Jong-il encouraged the children to exercise so that they could grow taller. “He was very proud of his son, who is tall,” Nam-ok said.13

  Kim Jong-il did have other family responsibilities elsewhere, even beyond the official family he had established with Kim Yong-suk, with whom he had a daughter. He got involved with a woman named Ko Yong-hui and in 1981 she gave birth to a son, Kim Jong-chol. The Dear Leader and Ko set up yet another mansion household. Jealous members of the Song family took to calling Papa’s new favorite “Hammer Nose.”14

  Coincidentally or not, it was around then that Kim Jong-nam was sent abroad for schooling. In 1980 he briefly tried one Soviet school but complained that the toilets were too dirty. Thereafter, he alternately attended Swiss and Soviet schools. For a while the boy posed as the son of the North Korean ambassador to Switzerland. Already good at mathematics, he eventually became fluent in French, English and Russian. Accompanying him were his cousin Nam-ok and her mother. His mother generally was with them when they lived in Moscow and Geneva. They lived comfortably in villas in those cities and Song Hye-rim was able to save substantial sums out of what Kim Jong-il gave her. The youngsters habitually returned to Pyongyang during school vacations.15

  The children were exposed to non-North Korean news media—in Geneva, to Western media—and what they saw by no means always agreed with Pyongyang’s official version of events. However, Nam-ok said, “when there were contradictions between what he had been told in Pyongyang and what he learned in Geneva, Jong-nam wanted to believe in what he had been told in his country because he was loyal to his father and to the Motherland. When something happened and North Korea was blamed for it, North Korea always denied the accusation, and he believed what North Korea said.”16

  Kim Jong-nam saw little of his grandfather in person as he was growing up. According to some analysts, this was because of the Great Leader’s disapproval—or feeling that he should disapprove—of the illicit relationship in which the boy had been conceived. Li Nam-ok said she did not know Kim Il-sung’s thinking, having met him only once as a little girl when she was chosen to present flowers to him. For whatever reason, she said, the youngster saw his grandfather “not at all.” She suggested that the decision was more Kim Jong-il’s than Kim Il-sung’s: “Probably Kim Jong-il did not want to show his private life to his father.”17

  According to Nam-ok’s older brother, Il-nam, Kim Jong-il found an opportunity to clear up the question of his first son’s pedigree. Kim Il-sung had fathered a boy with his young nurse and turned to Jong-il to advise on how to handle the potentially messy situation. Kim Jong-il arranged for his newborn half-brother, who was named Hyon, to be registered as the son of one of the siblings of Chang Song-taek, Jong-il’s brother-in-law and confidant. That instance of male bonding between first and second generations boded well for the status of the third. When told of Kim Jong-nam’s existence the Great Leader, according to Li Il-nam, “was angry at first, but he could not be harsh” in view of his own situation. Kim Il-sung, meeting Kim Jong-nam for the first time when the boy was a chubby and jolly four-year-old, “immediately liked him and gave him the name Jong-nam.” He recognized the child as his first grandson, although he never acknowledged the boy’s mother as his daughter-in-law.18

  * * *

  After he left school in Switzerland and returned to Pyongyang, Kim Jong-nam—a young man by then—still found himself isolated in his home, tightly restricted as to when he could leave the house and where he could go.

  Cousin Li Nam-ok defected to Europe in 1992 “to live my own life.” In her interview with Bungei Shunju, the Japanese magazine, she told of an incident that occurred shortly before her defection in which Kim Jong-il cut off the food supplies to their mansion, because she and Jong-nam had gone out without permission. Kim Jong-il was so strict because, she explained, he “wanted to keep his private life hidden from the eyes of the public.” The Dear Leader “did not like other people to talk about him and make him a target of gossip or rumor,” she said. “He did not want people to know that he lived with my aunt or that he had a child from her. He did not like to draw attention.”

  She seemed to hint that there might be some truth in reports that the young man at that stage in his life was undisciplined, and that Kim Jong-il was trying to rein in his son’s hell-raising. “No doubt there was a change in his attitude toward his son,” she said. But she put it in the context of East Asian child-rearing practices, in which children typically find their parents catering to their every whim or tantrum—and then reach an age at which suddenly they are expected to learn to live by society’s rules. “Jong-nam being no longer a six-year-old kid, Kim Jong-il decided he should deal more strictly with, and demand more of, his son. In that sense his attitude did change, but I do not think that meant he did not love his son anymore.” If her analysis was correct, note that Jong-nam by the time Kim Jong-il cracked down on him was already around twenty. The more usual age to undergo such a forced transformation would be five or six.19

  Defector Kang Myong-do, son-in-law of a prime minister, said that Kim Jong-nam during his early manhood, like his father before him, had become known for showing too much of a liking for cars, nightlife and women. Kang told the South Korean newspaper JoongAng Ilbo that in 1993 a rumor went around among the Pyongyang elite that Jong-nam had grabbed his bodyguard’s gun and pointed it at another man with whom he was quarreling publicly over a woman.20

  I heard from Oh Young-nam, a former captain in State Security, what Oh described as his own eye-witness account of not only one but two such incidents. Oh’s family home was across the street from Pyongyang’s Koryo Hotel, he said. Lesser beings outside the young prince’s circle who used the Koryo Hotel coffee shop “had to bow to Kim Jong-nam and leave the shop” whenever he entered. “We did not like the extravagant way that Kim Jong-nam lived,” Oh told me. “I know Kim Jong-nam. He is younger than I am. Kim Jong-nam wears a military-style uniform even though he was not in any part of the service. He just dresses like that. On his shoulder flaps he wears four stars, suggesting he’s head of the joint chiefs. He goes around flaunting his power, saying he’ll be the next after Kim Jong-il. I didn’t like the way Kim Jong-il ran the country but I couldn’t imagine Kim Jong-nam taking over.

  “He’s violent. On April 26, 1993, the day after the anniversary of the establishment of the Korean People’s Army Kim Jong-nam drank heavily went to the Koryo Hotel and shot the place up. A cabbie had parked in Kim Jong-nam’s special parking place. King Jong-nam drove up in his car— license number 216822—and parked just behind the taxi.” (Having been a traffic policeman, Oh had no difficulty remembering and spotting high officials’ cars.) “Then he went in and shot up the ceiling of the lobby. After that he found the driver and kicked him in the shin.” Oh witnessed the incident because, he said, “I walked across from my house to take a taxi, and that was when Kim Jong-nam roared up and started shooting.”

  On the second occasion, “ar
ound June of 1994 Kim Jong-nam went to the disco and started shooting. That night, I was there at the nightclub. Actually I was with Kang Myong-do’s nephew. The manager of the nightclub was formerly part of the bodyguard service. I believe Kim Jong-nam and the manager had a relationship. Kim Jong-nam came in and shouted for everyone to leave. People like me did not leave so fast—I was irritated at this younger guy making such a demand. Kim Jong-nam is very rash, very impudent. Out of frustration, he started shooting.

  “Kim Jong-nam continued to visit the coffee shop at the Koryo every day. Then he would go to the forty-fourth-floor restaurant of the hotel. Choe Yong-lim, who fought with Kim Jong-nam in the nightclub incident, is in prison now.”

  Oh’s wife worked at the cashier’s counter in the Koryo coffee shop, he told me. “One tower of the Koryo is for guests, the other for bodyguards. Kim Jong-il comes through the back door, the bodyguards’ private entrance. The sixteenth floor in the right tower is exclusively for Kim Jong-il. Among Kim Jong-il’s other children, his daughter also came often to the Koryo. She drove herself and didn’t make a fuss.”

  Li Nam-ok said she never saw any explicit sign that Kim Jong-il planned for Kim Jong-nam to inherit his power. “Of course Jong-nam is Jong-il’s eldest son, and it is always the oldest son who succeeds to the house,” she told Bungei Shunju. Thus Jong-nam was educated “to have self-awareness and sense of responsibility as the oldest son. But I cannot think preparations were being made for a transfer of power. Even if Kim Jong-il was warming up that thinking in his heart, he never would have revealed that to anyone else. I personally have great doubts he had that thinking.”

  Indeed, it seemed logical from what we knew of Kim Jong-il that he would not have made any overt moves to position his son or anyone else as his successor as long as Kim Il-sung remained alive. After all, a period of testing as his own father’s successor remained before he could consider his consolidation of power totally successful. The image of the selfless, absolutely filial son that he projected before and after Kim Il-sung’s death was subject to being tarnished if too many secrets of his private life became widely known. Such considerations might help to explain why he was determined to keep Jong-nam under wraps, at least for the time being.

  And then there was the fact that Kim Jong-nam’s family background left something to be desired. Aside from the scandalous aspects of his parents’ original liaison, relatives on the maternal side had developed the intensely disloyal habit of defecting. The first to jump was male cousin Li Il-nam, who disappeared in 1982 while in Switzerland. Although the fact escaped public notice, he defected through the South Korean embassy there and moved to South Korea. There he underwent plastic surgery and changed his name. Over the succeeding years he told the authorities much of what he knew about Kim Jong-il and his household.

  In 1992 Li Nam-ok, tired of being locked up in the fenced mansion compound with her cousin, made her own break, to Europe. “I’d wanted to study,” she explained later. “But there was no way to learn or to work in North Korea. I’d just wanted to choose my own life.”21 For several years before then, Kim Jong-nam had not even visited his mother in Moscow. There was suspicion among his relatives that Kim Jong-il had intensified his son’s confinement out of fear the young man also would defect.22

  The Seoul authorities found Li Il-nam a good job with a broadcasting organization but he gave it up to go into business. The business failed. Adjudged a bankrupt, he served ten months in prison.23 In his effort to start again, Li Il-nam needed money. Having spoken not a word to his mother in ten years, he phoned her in Moscow and encouraged her to defect and publish a tell-all memoir. For her the notion was by no means out of the question. She had grown tired of the surveillance to which her family was subjected, even in Moscow. Il-nam taped his phone conversations with her, perhaps hoping to use what she told him in his own attempt to make money by showing himself once again as someone who possessed fresh and valuable information about North Korea.24

  Li’s mother, Kim Jong-nam’s aunt Song Hye-rang, did defect to an undisclosed country in the West. Out of the surviving members of the Song family only Kim Jong-nam and his mother, Song Hye-rim, did not defect. (The grandmother had died and been buried in North Korea.) Although a flurry of press dispatches at the time her sister defected claimed that Hye-rim had gone with Hye-rang, in fact she continued to live in Moscow until she died in May 2002. Her niece explained that the former movie star had stayed put out of consideration for the future of her son, Kim Jong-nam.25

  According to one report it was on Kim Jong-nam’s twenty-fourth birthday in 1995 that Kim Jong-il gave him a People’s Army uniform with general’s badges. Thenceforth Jong-nam was addressed as “Comrade General.” According to Lee Kyo-kwan, Pyongyang watcher for the Seoul newspaper Chosun Ilbo, the gesture had to do with a supposed incident in the early 1990s when Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-nam visited Mount Paektu together. Jong-nam’s horsemanship impressed the old man, who supposedly remarked, “Another general has been born in our family.” In North Korea, a successor would need a personality cult, and this story has the ring of propaganda devised for that purpose.

  Kim Jong-nam as he grew up was by all accounts an enthusiastic computer geek, especially fond of electronic games. In his late twenties, some say in 1998, in recognition of his skills and interests in information technology he was named chairman of the country’s Computer Committee. And around 1997 he reportedly took up the study of economics; his aunt Kim Kyong-hui, Kim Jong-il’s younger sister, tutored him, passing along some of what she had learned as director of the Workers’ Party Light Industry Department. Before his death, Kim Il-sung was concerned that the ruling family find a way to compensate for Kim Jong-il’s lack of economic expertise, and was said to have suggested that Jong-nam “study economics to lead the nation.”

  Note that the four-year-old boy who traveled with Kim Jong-nam in May of 2001 would have been born in 1996 or 1997. As fixated as Kim Jong-il appeared to be on the subject of male heirs, it seems possible he might have taken the birth of his first grandson as a signal to draw closer to the child’s father and start preparing him for an eventual succession. Kim Jong-nam perhaps had started to settle down a bit by then, in keeping with his new paternal role; his wife and son often traveled with him when he went abroad.

  In 1998 someone bearing the name Kim Jong-nam but otherwise unidentified was elected Supreme People’s Assembly delegate for constituency number 685. Jong-nam was occasionally sighted in filmed documentaries, accompanying his father on visits to local areas to provide guidance. So was his younger half-sister, Kim Sol-song, born in 1974 to Kim Jong-il’s recognized wife Kim Yong-suk. Sol-song reportedly “was trained in economics.26

  Kim Jong-il gave his son sensitive posts in the army, the secret police and the party. Jong-nam became an instructor in the central party’s Propaganda and Agitation Bureau, then got an additional job with the Organization and Guidance Bureau. The Young General got to pull rank in a high-level job in the Security Bureau of the Ministry of People’s Armed Forces. He also began climbing the ladder at the State Security Ministry. His mentor there was a three-star general who had been one of his father’s Kim Il-sung University classmates. His special assignment at State Security starting around 1999 was to deal with the increase in defectors and refugees, according to reported testimony by Lee Young-guk, who had been one of Kim Jong-il’s bodyguards before he defected.27

  The South Korean monthly Wolgan Choson suggested that Kim Jong-nam himself, upset at seeing his family’s dirty laundry aired abroad, ordered the assassination of his defector cousin Li Il-nam. Li was ambushed and fatally shot on February 15, 1997, in a suburb of Seoul. South Korean authorities later said they had learned that hit men sent by Pyongyang had done the job. The magazine’s claim of Kim Jong-nam’s involvement did not refer to those who had actually done the shooting but to a team that Jong-nam allegedly had ordered to kill his cousin earlier; the earlier team was said to have failed, whereupon its
leader—a major general named Jang Pong-rim—had been executed as punishment for that failure.28

  In 1996, as his mother was making her break as a defector, Li had emerged from seclusion and published his book on Kim Jong-il’s family life.29 His killing seemed intended in part to retaliate against South Korea and to demonstrate Pyongyang’s long reach immediately following the high-level defection of Hwang Jang-yop, an enormous loss of face for Kim Jong-il. But it was also a reminder to Song Hye-rang and her surviving child, daughter Li Nam-ok, wherever in the world they might be hiding, to be careful about what they might say regarding Kim Jong-il’s private life.

  There was no smoking gun with Kim Jong-nam’s fingerprints on it. The evidence the magazine offered for his involvement in the alleged earlier, aborted attempt on his cousin’s life was contained in a memorandum from an unnamed North Korean defector in China.30 One might wonder whether, by early 1997, the Young General really-was in a position to send minions off on such a deadly and sensitive mission abroad. There were reports that Kim Jong-nam began working in State Security as early as 1996, although according to Lee Young-guk’s account it would be two or three years before Jong-nam would take charge of defector and refugee issues. And according to a high South Korean government official quoted by JoongAng Ilbo, “Kim Jong-nam traveled in Europe with five young women, without any particular task,” until early 1999. A State Security job that he took at that point was “the first step related to the succession,” that official was quoted as saying.31