Kim Jong Un’s half brother was working for the CIA. That may explain why the North Korean leader had nerve agent-wielding assassins murder Kim Jong Nam in a Malaysian airport, but it leaves open a number of other questions. The Daily Beast got a copy of Anna Fifield’s blockbuster new biography of Kim Jong Un, The Great Successor: The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un, that has the CIA scoop. So who was Kim Jong Nam talking to? Did Kim Jong Un know? And why did North Korea want him dead?
Welcome to Rabbit Hole.
Our man (not) in Pyongyang: According to a copy of the book obtained by The Daily Beast, Kim Jong Nam met with his CIA handlers in Singapore and Malaysia, the country where North Korea later sent assassins armed with VX nerve agent to murder the jilted dynasty heir.
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As Fifield notes in the book, news accounts in the wake of Kim’s assassination reported that he was seen in the company of a Korean-American man in the hotel where he was staying at the time of his death. Gooi Soon Seng, a defense lawyer for one of the defendants accused of carrying out the assassination, claimed that the $138,000 found on Kim after his death was payment in exchange for unspecified data he had stored on a thumb drive.
Kim Jong Fredo: It’s not hard to figure out why the CIA would want to talk to someone like Kim Jong Nam. North Korea is the most closed-off and tightly surveilled country on planet Earth, which makes traditional human intelligence collection—running spies—on the elite inner circle of North Korean leadership nearly impossible.
Of course, Kim Jong Nam was the black sheep of his family, exiled from power and the line of succession because his father, Kim Jong Il, viewed him as too “feminine,”according to a book written by Kim Jong Il’s former sushi chef. He didn’t help matters when he tried to sneak into Japan on a Dominican passport in 2001 to visit Tokyo Disney, got caught, and got deported, very publicly, to China.
When it comes to sources on the throne of Pyongyang, the pickings are slim and we take what we can get. Just look at Dennis Rodman. Rodman said the FBI hit him up for information after he met with Kim during a trip to the North in 2013. Rodman hasn’t been able to get a meeting with Kim for some time now—his drinking and public outbursts may not have helped. But during President Donald Trump’s Singapore summit with Kim Jong Un, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper described himself as an “advocate of involving Dennis Rodman” in North Korea diplomacy as he’s “someone who does understand Kim Jong Un.”
Motive + opportunity: Why would North Korea want Kim Jong Nam dead? Is it because they knew about his CIA relationship? Those are good questions we don’t quite know the answers to. But by the time assassins finally killed him, Kim Jong Nam had already given the Kim dynasty plenty of reasons to want him dead, whether or not they knew he was meeting with the CIA. Most important: he was a public critic who, at least in Pyongyang’s thinking, could’ve been used as a figurehead in a push for a post-Kim North Korea.
Unhappy in exile: Kim Jong Nam’s friendliness with the press and willingness to criticize his half-brother would not have endeared him to authorities in Pyongyang or tamped down fears that foreign countries could groom him as a future successor.
He sat for seven hours of interviews and exchanged 150 emails with Japanese journalist Yoji Gimbo over a period of several years. Gimbo turned the exchanges into a 2012 book My Father, Kim Jong Il and I, an act which is unheard of among those hoping to stay on the Kim family’s good side. Gimbo wrote that Kim Jong Nam had called the Kim family dynastic succession that brought his half-brother to power “a joke.” After North Korea sank a South Korean corvette, Kim Jong Nam publicly slammed the attack. Pyongyang never admitted responsibility but some believe that the move was designed to bolster Kim Jong Un’s credibility with the military as his father groomed him for succession.
Foreign relations: North Korea and the Kim dynasty of course don’t take kindly to family members, senior officials, or just about anyone defecting or flirting with the intelligence services of foreign countries. In the early '80s, a Kim family nephew, Yi Han Yong, born to one of Kim Jong Il’s mistresses, defected to South Korea via Switzerland. Like Kim Jong Nam, North Korean assassins went after him. Two North Korean gunmen caught up with Yi in 1997, shot him in Seoul, and disappeared.
Nor is it just dalliances with adversaries like the U.S. or South Korea that can get you in trouble in North Korea. Getting too close to allies can earn you a death penalty.
When Kim Jong Un first came to power, he had his uncle, Jang Song Thaek, a long time adviser to Kim Jong Il, arrested in the middle of a politburo meeting and then executed on charges that he had committed “anti-party, counter-revolutionary factional acts” in a bid to overthrow Kim Jong Un’s regime. No analysts really believe Jang was actively plotting to kill Kim Jong Un, but many do think his closeness to Beijing may have added to Kim’s suspicions of his uncle at the very least. Grandpa Kim—dynasty founder Kim Il Sung—did something similar in the late '50s after the Korean War when he purged the military of officers he viewed as either too pro-China or too pro-Soviet, lest his allies gain too much leverage in the North.
China problems: It’s entirely possible that the time Kim Jong Nam spent in China could’ve given his half brother heartburn, too. In his Kim Jong Nam biography, Yoji Gimbo wrote that Kim made the luxury hotels of Beijing his “home base” and preferred to stay in the Hotel Kunlun, which was “reportedly run by the Chinese Ministry of Public Security.”
In emails with the Japanese reporter, Kim Jong Nam wrote that, "I would assume that the South Korean National Intelligence Service and the Chinese Ministry of Public Security are interested in my behavior. Be it at the surveillance level or protection level, I find it to be my unavoidable destiny.” Nonetheless, he denied speculation that China’s protection of him was tied to expectations that he could one day be a North Korean leader.
Heir not so apparent: If Kim Jong Un was worried about the possibility that a foreign country could use his half-brother in a coup someday, he’s probably even less pleased about his half-nephew, Kim Jong Nam’s son. Like his father, Kim Han-sol has given interviews to foreign countries trashing the other members of the Kim family. “I really never met them in real life,” he told Finnish TV of Kim Jong Un in 2012, “so I really don't know how he became a dictator.”
After assassins murdered Kim Jong Nam in a Malaysian airport on North Korea’s orders, Kim Han-sol surfaced in a video online published by a group calling itself Cheollima Civil Defense. The group, also known as Free Joseon, calls itself the “sole legitimate representative of the Korean people of the north” and calls for an end to the Kim regime.
The Washington Post reported that Cheollima was behind a break-in at the North Korean embassy in Spain right before President Trump’s Vietnam summit with Kim Jong Un. In February, 10 assailants rushed into the North’s embassy in Madrid, assaulted diplomats, demanded the ambassador defect, and made off with a handful of materials stolen from the complex. Spanish authorities later claimed that one member of the group offered the FBI videos and other unspecified materials the group had taken.
