The chemicals were seeping through his mucous membranes. They caused his muscles to continuously contract, starting with his heart and lungs. He died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, barely fifteen minutes after he was attacked.
In one of the many mysteries surrounding his death, it later emerged that Kim Jong Nam was carrying twelve vials of antidote for poisons—including VX—when he was killed.2 Why he didn’t use one of them will never be known.
Instead, he suffered an excruciatingly painful death, and it all happened in full view of airport security cameras.
Initially, I was skeptical that the North Korean regime was behind this. North Korea had assassinated people before but never in such a brazen manner and never using foreigners. It also struck me as strange that the women, Siti Aisyah and Doan Thi Huong, who were quickly picked up and charged with the murder, had lived to tell the story.
They said they had been tricked into carrying out the killing, told they were appearing on a TV prank show and promised one hundred dollars for their work. They faced the death penalty.
But I was thinking of the old North Korea. This North Korea, Kim Jong Un’s North Korea, was deliberately sending a defiant public message to defectors: wherever you are, we can get you—and it will hurt.
He was also laying down the gauntlet to the outside world. He had his own flesh and blood killed with a chemical weapon in a crowded public place. So what? The verbal condemnation was swift, but there was little other real effect on Pyongyang.
The Trump administration, in office for barely a month when the attack took place, had been on the brink of allowing North Korean diplomats to travel to New York for the first direct talks in years. Those plans were torn up when the administration blamed the attack on the Kim regime. There are few actors with access to this kind of chemical weapon, and even fewer with the motivation to use it. But apart from canceling the meeting and issuing a couple more sanctions, there was nothing more the United States could do.
The North Korean agents in charge of the operation had fled Malaysia immediately, taking a circuitous route—Jakarta, Dubai, Vladivostok, Pyongyang—to avoid going through China. They knew that the government in Beijing, which had protected Kim Jong Nam and was thought to be keeping him in reserve in case they needed to install a new leader next door, would be apoplectic.
The North Korean ambassador was expelled from Kuala Lumpur, his ignominy compounded by photos showing he flew out in a middle seat in economy class. But efforts to hold other North Koreans accountable failed after the North Koreans took Malaysian diplomats and their families in Pyongyang hostage.
Soon the countries were back to business as usual. Mahathir Mohamed, a man who’d long taken a soft approach to North Korea, was elected prime minister and showed no interest in pursuing the case. Lots of states kill, he said at a conference in Tokyo. Look at Israel and Palestine. What’s the big deal?
Kim Jong Nam was born in Pyongyang on May 10, 1971, the outcome of his father’s relationship with a very famous and very married actress, Song Hye Rim. Kim Jong Il made the actress divorce her husband, but he still kept the relationship secret from his father.
In North Korea, it was not the done thing to have a child out of wedlock with an older, divorced woman who hailed from an aristocratic southern family, especially not if you had designs on taking over a socialist revolution. The little boy never met his grandfather.3
Despite the secrecy, Kim Jong Il was besotted with his son for the first ten or so years—until Kim Jong Un and his siblings came along.
“Words cannot describe how deeply Jong Il loved his son,” Song Hye Rim’s sister wrote in her memoir of life inside the royal court.4 “The young prince rocked his fretting son on his back to sleep, carried him until he stopped crying, and mumbled to the baby the way mothers calm a crying baby.”
The child had everything he could ever want—everything except friends and freedom. He lived in walled-off compounds in Pyongyang, cared for by his maternal grandmother, his aunt, and a huge retinue of household staff, including two grown men—one of whom was a film technician, the other a painter—who were supposed to be his playmates. He called them “the clowns.” They were apparently appointed just as the sushi chef was assigned to Kim Jong Un.
His mother was mostly absent. She was depressed and anxious after giving up her glittering acting career only to be treated as a shameful secret. Such was her descent into mental turmoil that after she went to Moscow for medical treatment when Kim Jong Nam was three, she never really came back.
Kim Jong Nam stayed in the compound with his grandmother and the household staff. The little boy “was being raised in an abnormal way, totally secluded from the world outside the fence, without even one friend, and not knowing the joy of playing with friends,” his aunt wrote.5
When the boy reached school age, his aunt moved into the house to become something of a Victorian-era governess, teaching him Korean, Russian, math, and history. She brought her own two children: a boy who was ten years older than Jong Nam and a girl who was five years older. They couldn’t believe the contrast with their life in ordinary Pyongyang.
The older boy soon left for university, leaving just Jong Nam and the girl, whose name was Nam Ok. They had a very lonely childhood together, prohibited by Kim Jong Il from leaving the compound.
They also had a ridiculous number of toys. The pair, who essentially became siblings, could watch movies and shoot guns and careen around in golf carts. They lived in a weird alternate universe.6
More than a decade before Kim Jong Un had his ostentatious eighth birthday party, Kim Jong Nam had a similarly extravagant one of his own. There he was presented with a custom-made child-sized military uniform, which carried the rank of marshal. He bragged to real soldiers that his uniform was better.
The little boy was soon being referred to as Comrade General—the name his youngest half brother would receive more than a decade later when he was in the ascendency and Jong Nam was falling from favor. The First Son’s birthday would be celebrated with an ostentatious firework display and the words “Happy Birthday, Comrade General” written in the sky in gunpowder.
For other birthdays between the ages of six and twelve, Kim Jong Il would send a gift-purchasing team overseas to buy presents for his eldest son. They went to Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Germany, and Austria, spending $1 million a year on gifts for the little princeling. He had every electronic game that a child could want and a toy gun plated with gold.7
His grandmother worried about the “unfortunate circumstances” of the boy’s birth. So as he approached the age of nine, she raised the prospect of them all going to Moscow, ostensibly so the boy could visit his mother. But she wanted to lay the groundwork for them all to move there so that the boy could have a relatively normal life.
Off they went in the fall of 1978: grandmother, sister/cousin, and the youthful Comrade General. Leonid Brezhnev was at the helm of the Soviet Union, but it was a period of deep economic malaise, sometimes referred to as the Era of Stagnation.
It was a rough period for Jong Nam too. The boy, unused to being around other people, did not enjoy life in the last days of the Soviet Union. One day at school, he had refused to use the bathroom because it was so dirty and eventually wet his pants. His pants then froze as he walked home in the subzero temperature.
The Kims went home to Pyongyang.
As 1980 dawned, Jong Nam’s grandmother came up with plan B. Over a New Year’s Day feast so elaborate that the staff wondered if the table would buckle under the weight of all the food, she raised the prospect of sending the children to Switzerland. The country’s neutrality and discretion would provide a level of protection, she said, plus the bathrooms would doubtless be cleaner.
Kim Jong Il’s sister and brother-in-law were enthusiastic about the idea, so Kim Jong Il summoned a French-speaking foreign ministry official called Ri Su Yong. He introduced eight-year-old Jong Nam as his son—the first time he’d ever done so
—and told the diplomat to go to Geneva immediately to check out the International School of Geneva, a private institution that teaches in both English and French. Notable alumni include the Hollywood actor Michael Douglas and the former prime minister of India Indira Gandhi, as well as several Thai royals.
Uncle Jang went along too. When they returned, they declared it suitable. Plan B was put into action.8
The unusual family moved into a huge villa, complete with swimming pool and sauna, on the shores of Lake Geneva. That house cost North Korea $2 million. Kim Jong Il gave the group $200,000 in spending money initially, and from then on, they had to make do with $50,000 a month.9
Ri was appointed to the number-two position in the mission, and Jong Nam and his sister/cousin were registered as his children, Ri Han and Ri Ma Hy, or Henry and Marie. They studied in the French side of the school, mostly to keep away from the South Koreans, who flocked to the English-language stream.
Foreshadowing the experiences that Kim Jong Un would later have in Bern, Kim Jong Nam struggled to interact with other children. That was partly due to his inability to speak the language, but it was also because he hated other children. “He was accustomed to adults that flattered him, saying, ‘Comrade general, was it this? Comrade general, was it that? Yes sir. Yes sir,’” his aunt wrote. He didn’t want to play with the other students. At recess, he stayed inside and drew cartoons of “American bastards,” just like those he’d seen back home.
But Jong Nam’s guardians were always terrified that something might happen to the boy. They put his sister/cousin into the same class as him, even though she was five years older. They rented a fifth-floor apartment across from the school so they could surveil it, and they tailed him on school field trips.
They stayed only a couple of years in Geneva before Ri Su Yong, who was called Ri Chol in the Swiss years of his career, thought it was too dangerous for the children. So the group returned to Moscow, where the two would attend a French school so as not to lose the language they’d acquired in Geneva.
Meanwhile, the diplomat Ri noticed that the royal winds were shifting, and he deftly switched his affiliation to the Kim Jong Un branch of the family. He was appointed ambassador to Switzerland and moved to Bern, where he remained throughout Kim Jong Un’s school years. It was a decision that paid off for him. He has flourished under Kim Jong Un, becoming his foreign minister in 2014 and then being promoted to even higher positions in the Workers’ Party.
The secret family stayed in Moscow for a few years. Then they returned to Geneva so Nam Ok could attend university and Jong Nam could finish his high school years there. By then, Jong Nam simply called himself Lee—a variation of his adopted surname, Ri—and said he was the son of the North Korean ambassador. No one paid him much attention. As Kim Jong Un would experience at private school in Bern, in that melting pot of diplobrats, everyone was from somewhere else, and everyone spoke a bunch of languages. Plus the European kids didn’t differentiate between North and South Korea.
Kim Jong Nam fell in with a teenage jet set that populated nightclubs. They included rich Arabs, Hilton hotel heirs, and the children of Charles Aznavour, the “Frank Sinatra of France.”
He never dealt well with authority, said Anthony Sahakian, a Swiss businessman who went to school with Jong Nam. “Rules weren’t for him. I’m not saying that he was an anarchist, but he would skip a lot of classes, and he was driving before he was legally allowed to.”
There were some things about “Lee” that stood out. He didn’t just drive around Geneva; he drove a Mercedes 600, the huge sedan that was a favorite among dictators. “At the time, all we wanted to do was drive, so we were very jealous. We’d skip class and go somewhere else during the day to drink coffee,” Sahakian told me.
It was a life of paranoia and privilege, secrecy and subterfuge. But Lee managed to enjoy being a teenager in Europe, going skiing with his friends, buying booze with his fake ID, and joyriding in the Merc.
It came to an end in 1989, however, when Jong Nam was eighteen. He returned to Pyongyang and to a life that could hardly have been more different from his freewheeling youth in Europe. Jong Nam had talked to his school friends in Geneva about “life in the palace” being oppressive. “He had everything he could possibly desire, but he was in a black depression there,” another old school friend told me.
Making matters worse, much worse, he discovered that the affection his father once had showered upon him was now directed at a new family. It included two little boys called Jong Chol and Jong Un. The younger boy was five by then.
Now his father hardly ever stayed at the compound where the Jong Nam branch of the family lived. The household pulsated with rivalry. They were convinced that the other woman, Kim Jong Un’s mother, was a manipulative shrew who was poisoning Kim Jong Il against them. They talked about whether the other woman was fat—unlikely, since she’d been a dancer—and derided her as “half Jap.” They nicknamed her Pangchiko, a pejorative mash-up of the words for “hammer nose” and pachinko, the gambling business in Japan that was dominated by Koreans.10
By the early 1990s, it was clear to Nam Ok—as it was to the Japanese sushi chef—that Kim Jong Il favored his youngest son, Kim Jong Un.
Rejected by his father, cooped up in the compound, and unable to imagine what kind of life he would lead, the First Son became unbearable, his sister/cousin Nam Ok would later say. He began to sneak out of the compound at night and to drink and sleep around. He made matters worse by showing himself publicly. In this way, he was defying his father’s ground rules, opening a window onto the Dear Leader’s private life.
“The more time [Kim Jong Il] spent with the other family, the more things became difficult with my brother,” Nam Ok said in a memoir that was never published. “It became easier for Papa to stay with the other family.”
Jong Nam and Nam Ok lived in luxury in comparison to the rest of North Korea, which was tipping into the famine, but they felt like they were in a “high-class prison” and that they would be prisoners for life. So when Kim Jong Il offered a deal to his eldest son—if he got married and had a child, he could leave North Korea—Kim Jong Nam accepted with gusto.
Kim Jong Nam married by 1995 and had a son, Han Sol, and then a daughter, Sol Hui. The family moved to Macau and occupied two villas in an exclusive gated community.
Then he took up with another North Korean woman and had three children with her. They were installed in an exclusive gated community in Beijing.
In 2011, he had another child with a third woman, his associates said. Like father, like son.
Even after the embarrassment of being caught at the airport in Tokyo and being deported in full view of the cameras, or perhaps because of it, Kim Jong Nam became an object of fascination. He was the only member of the North Korean royal family who was out and about in the world and who was recognizable.
The South Korean press was full of experts, defectors, and government officials who spoke with misleading certainty about Kim Jong Nam’s role in the regime. He was a high-ranking military official. Or a Worker’s Party official. Or head of the half-billion-dollar Korea Computer Center in Pyongyang, the headquarters for computer hacking.
There were reports that the younger brothers banded together to dispatch their rival, arranging a plot to have Kim Jong Nam assassinated while he was visiting Austria at the end of 2002. Two years later, there were rumors about another assassination attempt, this time in China. Then another and another.
After his death, the head of South Korea’s intelligence service told lawmakers that Kim Jong Nam had contacted his younger brother, pleading to be spared. “We have nowhere to go and nowhere to hide. Our only escape is suicide,” he is said to have written.11
Kim Jong Nam and his aunt, Kim Jong Il’s sister, were said to have long, drunken phone calls lamenting the state of the country. Other experts said that Kim Jong Il was sending his eldest son out into the world to test his abilities. As late as 2007, there were reports t
hat he had returned to Pyongyang and was working at the Organization and Guidance Department of the Workers’ Party.
Much of Kim Jong Nam’s life remains shrouded in mystery. What is known is that he lived in the shadows amid gamblers, gangsters, and spies. He appeared to keep some links to the regime at the same time as living outside it.
Kim Jong Nam used multiple aliases, including Kim Chol, and had several passports, including two North Korean passports and a Portuguese one. A former business acquaintance said he had a Chinese passport too. As well as Korean, he spoke Chinese, passable Japanese, English, French, and Russian.
But throughout these years, Kim Jong Nam had used his unique skill set to his own advantage—in dangerous ways that would have angered the regime back home and contributed to his demise.
Kim Jong Nam became an informant for the CIA, an agency with a track record of trying to bring down dictators it didn’t like. His brother would have considered talking to American spies a treacherous act. But Kim Jong Nam provided information to them, usually meeting his handlers in Singapore or Malaysia.12
After that last fateful trip, security camera footage showed him in a hotel elevator with an Asian-looking man who was reported to be an American intelligence agent. Kim Jong Nam’s backpack from the airport contained $120,000 in cash.
It could have been payment for his intelligence-related activities. Or it could have been earnings from his casino businesses.
For at least a decade before he died, Kim Jong Nam was running gambling websites across Southeast Asia, including Malaysia, according to a former business associate turned friend who began working with him in 2007.
I first talked to the business associate on the day Kim Jong Nam died. We’d been put in touch by a mutual acquaintance. He was on a plane, and he was terrified. He was crying down the line to me, barely intelligible as we talked on FaceTime over in-flight Wi-Fi. He told me about additional questioning at immigration points and strange people hanging around his office.
The Great Successor Page 23