Little sister Kim Yo Jong appears to have taken over many of Kim Jong Un’s duties with the North Korean leader reportedly giving up on his diet, wallowing in alcoholism and unable to rule effectively.
Yo Jong, who’s often spoken for her big brother in the past, has again taken up the mantle and is projecting the image of the most powerful member of the ruling dynasty while Jong Un pigs out on expensive imported cheeses, drinks night and day and chain-smokes foreign cigarettes, according to intelligence reports
Although Jong Un holds on to his titles of general secretary of the ruling party, president of state affairs and, of course, “supreme leader,” Yo Jong has resumed her role as the voice of authority in a country mired in poverty, hunger, and disease.
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“Kim Yo Jong has always wanted to be a politician, according to reports from her early teenage years,” Bruce Bennett of the Rand Corporation told The Daily Beast. “Her brother has allowed her to play the ‘really bad cop’ to his ‘tough cop’—no good cops around.” Bennett believes Jong Un “trying to gain her some credibility with his military in case he ever wants or needs to elevate her role”—and “is not in good health.”
The most convincing evidence for Kim Jong Un’s failure to abide by the diet that doctors had prescribed for him consists of photographs released by the North’s state media from a public appearance on May 16.
South Korea’s pervasive National Intelligence Service, with an assist from artificial intelligence, says he’s packing 140 kilograms, about 310 pounds, on his 5-foot-7-inch frame. That’s up about 50 pounds from the weight to which he had descended while on the diet more than two years ago.
One image mentioned by North Korea-watchers was the resemblance between Kim Jong Un’s health and diet issues and those of Elvis Presley. At 5 feet, 10 inches, Presley weighed an astonishing 350 pounds when he died in 1977 at 42. At 39, Kim is catching up at an alarming pace.
Jong Un appeared with his beloved tween-aged daughter, Ju Ae, last month to watch the launch of a satellite capable of spying on the North’s enemies. It was another opportunity for Jong Un to present his daughter as a viable long-term successor, but the May 31 launch was a bust, with the satellite plunging into the Yellow Sea.
Afterwards, it fell to Yo Jong to cover for her brother, blasting the U.S. and the UN Security Council who spoke out against the North for another obvious effort at testing the technology for long-range missiles.
More important than the failure of the missile was the revelation of the complete breakdown of Jong Un’s will to control his weight as well as his drinking and smoking habits. “Her brother’s health is a big concern,” says Bruce Bechtol, a former intelligence analyst at the Pentagon. “He has the maladies of a 70-year-old man.”
Intel reports that North Koreans have been looking in foreign markets for medicine to deal with insomnia also suggests that Jong Un “is suffering from significant sleep disorders,” according to a report by the director of the South’s National Intelligence Service.
The NIS, briefing members of the South’s National Assembly, “stated that it is closely watching the possibility of Kim falling into a vicious circle of depending more on alcohol and nicotine and suffering worsening insomnia.”
While the rest of the country sinks into poverty and hunger reminiscent of the famine that killed approximately 2 million people in the 1990s, the report said, “the North has been importing large quantities of foreign cigarettes and high-quality snacks.”
Yo Jong, who is four years younger than her brother, avoided any mention of the failed satellite launch while justifying North Korea’s right to put one into orbit regardless of what the North’s enemies, the U.S., Japan and South Korea, might think.
“It is today’s universal reality that over 5,000 satellites with various aims and missions are now in their orbits around the Earth,” she said in a statement carried in English by Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency. “This being a hard reality,” she said, “the UNSC is continuously taking discriminative and rude action to take issue with only the launch of a satellite by the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.]”
Several days earlier, Yo Jong asked rhetorically, “Who is escalating the tension unnecessarily and destabilizing the regional security situation?” It was “neither surprising nor new” for the U.S. to be “letting loose hackneyed gibberish prompted by its brigandish and abnormal thinking,” she said, blaming the UNSC resolution on “U.S. gangster-style logic.”
While Yo Jong has issued colorfully harsh statements in the past, her latest outbursts seemed particularly significant considering her brother’s inability to discipline his eating, drinking and smoking habits.
Big bro’s “lifestyle” suggests he’s “not destined to live to a ripe old age,” said Evans Revere, a retired senior U.S. diplomat who still follows North Korea closely.
Yo Jong, said Revere, has made a strong case for being on the succession short list when the time comes by demonstrating fierce loyalty to her brother, by the experience she has gained working at his side in the Party and government, and by being part of the “Paektu bloodline,” a reference to the legend that Jong Un’s father, Kim Jong Il, was born on the slopes of Mount Paektu, a sacred mountain on the Chinese border.
The fact that Yo Jong was able to fire off two statements in rapid succession showed her potential as a power figure in the ruling Kim dynasty and also the need to publicize her for the benefit of domestic as well as foreign audiences.
Yo Jong holds the relatively modest title of vice department director of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea, but her power goes way beyond that level. She does not have to take over any of Jong Un’s titles to be recognized as the power behind the throne if not the occupant of a throne.
“What we are seeing is the pattern that has been taking place over the past five or six years,” said David Maxwell, a retired special forces officer now with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “The evil sister is continuing her role as the bad cop.”
Yo Jong must, however, resign herself to the place of a woman in an irredeemably male-chauvinist society.
She’s still “working at the pleasure, or sufferance, of her older brother,” observed David Straub, who analyzed North Korea as a political officer at the American embassy in Seoul while with the State Department. “North Korea’s dictatorship is still very much a man’s world, and she is unlikely to become a power in her own right.”
Just to show the need to adopt a veneer of relative modesty, Straub cited the assassination in 2017 of Jong Un’s older half-brother, Kim Jong Nam, at the airport serving the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur.
“Her older brother’s execution of their uncle,” Straub noted, “shows what happens when he feels his position threatened or even just upstaged.”
