SEOUL—The mystery of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s absence from view for more than two weeks has deepened amid signs he may not be showing up any time soon.
Officially, North Korea's state media have not had a word to say about the missing 36-year-old whose obesity, eating, smoking, drinking and working habits make him a prime candidate for heart disease, diabetes, and probably a few other ailments, including a severe case of COVID-19.
Unofficially, however, several reports indicate something has happened to him since his last appearance at a session of the political bureau of the ruling Workers’ Party in Pyongyang on April 11. It was right there that he made his last public address, as reported by the state media, exhorting his top aides to work harder to eradicate the novel coronavirus, even though North Korea has never acknowledged a single infection.
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Might he have caught the bug himself—speaking out knowing that urgent medical treatment was needed the next day, April 12, when he would miss the Supreme People’s Assembly? If he wants to keep the world guessing, he certainly has succeeded.
Most recently, 38 North, the Washington think tank that closely monitors North Korea, showed satellite imagery of a train standing at a station “reserved for use by the Kim family” in the east coast port city of Wonsan where Kim has ordered construction of a modern tourist complex.
Might Kim have been staying near Wonsan at one of his many villas, perhaps under watch by a team of doctors? And might the train have arrived to carry him, dead or alive, back to Pyongyang? Or could it have been intended as a diversion for the eyes in the sky the North Koreans know are up there?
Or was there a chance that he was having prolonged medical attention for a reason that was not all that serious? In September and October of 2014, Kim was out of sight for 40 days amid similar speculation. He finally emerged, smiling and carrying a cane, while state media reported he had had a cyst removed from an ankle.
Ominously, however, Reuters reported on Saturday that a group of doctors had left China for Pyongyang. Was their mission to keep Kim alive with the latest miracles of modern medicine? The team, led by a senior member of the Chinese Communist Party’s international liaison department, according to Reuters, arrived “amid conflicting reports” about Kim’s health but there was no telling if it was responding to a medical emergency.
That report jibed with another report that the senior official was the liaison department’s director, Song Tao, and that the group of doctors was a “high-level delegation” whose mission was more than medical. The arrival of Song Tao “is a significant datapoint,” said Evans Revere, a veteran U.S. diplomat specialized in Korean affairs.
Embellishing on this report came word that the Chinese were closing all cross-border rail traffic, most of which had been halted in the first place when the coronavirus was first reported in North Korea.
“I was under the impression that such traffic had been stopped long ago because of the pandemic, but they say otherwise,” said Revere. What makes the total closure particularly important, Revere was told, is that after the death of Kim’s father, Kim Jong Il, in December 2011, cross-border rail traffic was also temporarily suspended.
There were, moreover, plenty of other reports, rumors and innuendos, none of which could be confirmed. To give some idea of the type of speculation going around, Bruce Bennett, Korea expert at the Rand Corporation, offered two quite different stories.
A former South Korean official “wrote that he had heard from Chinese sources that Kim Jong Un is in a coma, unlikely to recover,” said Bennett. “Another report suggests that he was attending a military exercise, that an accident occurred in which he was injured but that he is recovering well.”
Then there was even “one report that Kim may have angered one of his guards who shot him,” said Bennett.
Reports of an accident of some sort were not without explanation, if not much foundation. A Korean source with extensive knowledge of affairs in the North says that Kim might have been injured while witnessing a critical exercise on April 14 in which warplanes fired projectiles into the sea near Wonsan in tandem with the test-firing of missiles from a site up the coast.
True, on April 12, the day after his politburo appearance, at which his younger sister, Kim Yo Jong, was named as an alternate member, he had skipped a session of the Supreme People’s Assembly, but that could be explained away as not really a biggie. The SPA, after all, is a rubber stamp body of less than huge importance.
The missile test on April 14, the day before the 108th anniversary of the birth of Kim’s grandfather, Kim Il Sung, who founded North Korea after the Japanese surrender in 1945, was a much greater occasion.
Kim was there, said the source, and there was definitely an accident at the same scene where a similar accident had occurred in an exercise six years earlier. The source maintained that Kim was not in critical condition—and that sister Yo Jong, widely regarded as the country’s second most powerful leader, was at his bedside along with his wife, Ri Sol Ju.
All of which would conveniently explain, if true, why Kim wasn’t photographed as usual witnessing the test and why he wasn’t present the next day, April 15, at the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun in Pyongyang, lined up with a coterie of toadies bowing before the embalmed body of Kim Il Sung, the revered “great leader” under glass.
As time goes by, however, that kind of cover story about an accident appears more than a little doubtful. The latest sign that all was not well came on Saturday, April 25, when Kim missed the 88th anniversary of the founding by his grandfather of the Korean People’s Revolutionary Army. Sure, the North’s state media extolled the armed forces, repeating Kim’s earlier calls for building up the country’s military strength, but why not even a message from the missing Kim?
“KJU was AWOL at 4/25 military holiday. He missed 4/15 (which is a bigger deal),” tweeted Victor Cha, who runs Korean issues at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “There are now more than one source on his incapacitation compared with 24 hrs ago. Still, can’t assume anything yet but watch this space…”
David Maxwell, who served multiple tours in South Korea as an officer in the army’s special forces, offers three possible scenarios: “Poor health led to heart surgery that went bad, He left Pyongyang because senior members of the regime had been exposed to the coronavirus. He is conducting deliberate deception to cause a reaction in the international community because he is being ignored.”
The report of the train parked near Wonson “supports all three scenarios,” said Maxwell. “He could have been in Wonsan where his surgery took place. He could have been there to escape the coronavirus in Pyongyang, and he could be there to conduct another missile and rocket launch.”
Or, yes, the train “could be there to return his body to Pyongyang,” said Maxwell. “The bottom line: we just do not know. “
As evidence of just how easy it is to jump to the wrong conclusions, Maxwell cites an article by the Tokyo bureau chief of The New York Times on November 17, 1986, under the headline, in all capital letters, “KIM IL SUNG, AT 74, IS REPORTED DEAD.”
That Kim died nearly eight years later.
