Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (137 page)

After spending the night at the airport, the travelers were transferred to a detention center for illegal immigrants. (The aliens who normally were confined in the center tended to be poor job-seekers from Southeast and South Asia.) Mean-while Japanese officials wrangled over whether to (a) arrest the man and question him at length while trying to confirm the identities of all the group members, as the police and the Justice Ministry preferred, or (b) simply deport the group, which was the preference of the Foreign Ministry. Radio Moscow had quoted a denial by the North Korean embassy in Moscow that Kim Jong-il’s son had traveled to Japan with a forged passport. Thus it was clear that prolonging the inquiry would irritate Pyongyang. Along with the boy, who was thought to be his son, the man stayed in the facility for male detainees and uncomplainingly ate the regular meals provided. Officials noted the detainee’s “gentlemanly manner.”

Foreign Minister Makiko Tanaka, who wanted to avoid troubles with Pyongyang, won the argument on May 4 and the government decided to deport the group without charges. “Now that we have saved face for North Korea, there may be some positive reaction from the North,” a government official told the newspaper
Yomiuri.
The travelers then left the detention center for the airport and a flight to Beijing. The man who said he was Kim Jong-nam thanked immigration officials “for taking care of us.” At various times during his detention he had spoken to his captors in Japanese and in English.
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Thanks to journalists’ cameras at the airport, the world then got a good look at this possible heir to the North Korean throne. Not as unusual in his appearance as Kim Jong-il, he nevertheless showed in his round face and paunchy body a clear enough family resemblance. (A South Korean
newspaper columnist observed that the man walked like Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung.
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) There were several skin discolorations—perhaps moles or birthmarks—on his face. On his chin was a light stubble of beard, seen on enough other occasions to suggest that this was intended as a fashion statement. He wore his hair in a crew cut. His spectacles were the oblong metal-framed granny glasses favored by hip young Asians. He was dressed as a tourist, in a black knit shirt under a brown, quilted vest. He wore a gold neck chain and a gold wrist-watch.

As for the man’s retinue, the child wore jeans; new, white sneakers; and a red, white and blue jacket. (Those were the colors of the North Korean flag.) One of the women, a bit chubby and with a slight double chin, was holding the boy’s hand and seemed to be in charge of him. Her beige leather bag and high-heeled shoes matched and they looked expensive. The other woman was sleeker and wore sunglasses. Her shiny black bag was large enough to hold business papers.

An immigration official testifying later before a Japanese parliamentary committee identified the matronly looking woman as Kim Jong-nam’s wife, Shin Jong-hui, reportedly a daughter of the president of the North Korean airline, Air Koryo. The official identified the slimmer woman as Yi Kyong-hui, one of Shin’s relatives. News reports said the bags both women carried were of the Louis Vuitton brand while the man’s watch was a diamond-studded Rolex.
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Kim Jong-nam’s mother was Song Hye-rim, an actress who had made her screen debut in
Border Village.
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Kim Jong-il met her in the 1960s, after he started hanging around at the studios, and began living with her. Besides being several years older than Kim Jong-il, Song was already married to another man and had a young daughter. After a divorce, Kim had the husband sent abroad to work. “From what I heard, my aunt was disappointed in her marriage and was quite taken by Kim Jong-il,” her nephew, Li Il-nam, wrote decades later.

Kim Il-sung had hidden his own extramarital affairs while publicly espousing conventional family values. Kim Jong-il, according to Song’s nephew’s account, worried about the Great Leader’s reaction to the potentially scandalous situation he had gotten himself into. But the young father seems to have welcomed paternity. One story has it that he was so excited to learn that the new baby was a son that he honked his car horn to awaken everyone in the hospital.
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Li told of several instances that suggested Kim Jong-il was a doting father. Once when the child was two or three and dining with his father, he asked, “Papa, is it good?” “Of course,” Kim Jong-il replied. “Everything tastes good when you are around.”

Kim kept Song Hye-rim and little Jong-nam with him in a palatial
mansion, the No. 15 Residence, which was staffed by around 100 servants and 500 bodyguards. (Eight cooks worked there. One had been trained in Japan and specialized in sukiyaki, a favorite of Kim’s.) Song Hye-rim’s mother; her widowed sister, Song Hye-rang; and the sister’s two children, the boy Li Il-nam and a girl, Li Nam-ok, came and went in the household for varying periods. Song Hye-rang and her children all later left North Korea and gave public accounts of their lives in the palace.
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At home, Kim referred to Song Hye-rim as
yobo,
"wife, according to her sister, while to others he introduced her in the Korean way as “my son’s mother.” But around 1973, while living with Song Hye-rim and their son Jong-nam, Kim Jong-il got involved with Kim Yong-suk, who would become his recognized wife. (Sister Song Hye-rang has argued that it is a mistake to refer to Hye-rim as a mistress: “Outsiders say Kim Yong-suk is the lawful wife, but it has no other meaning than that she was acknowledged by President Kim Il-sung.”)

Kim Jong-il deputized his sister to break the news to Song that she would never be able to become his recognized wife and must leave the No. 15 Residence, according to Li Il-nam’s account. The sister, Kim Kyong-hui, would take care of Jong-nam, she told the boy’s mother, while Song herself would be provided for throughout her life. Song was terrified that she was about to have her son taken from her, so she ran away with the boy. But the two were soon found and brought back to No. 15.

Having grown up motherless, Kim Jong-il was moved by Song’s determination not to leave the child, the nephew related. Kim, whom Li described as “a cultured person and a thinker,” also retained an intellectual bond with the former actress. He reserved mansion number 15 as the home of that family. (Kim had other mansions, of course, and around 1982 he built one designated No. 55 as his new official residence.) But during the decades that remained to her Song was to be hospitalized in Moscow for long periods, treated for ailments that reportedly included depression, nervous exhaustion, diabetes and hypertension.
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Whatever health problems were involved in her move, high-ranking defector Hwang Jang-yop alleged that there was another factor: Kim Jong-il exiled her in an effort to stifle gossip within North Korea about their relationship. “Naturally, rumors started spreading among the North Korean students studying in the USSR,” Hwang wrote. “Kim Jong-il ordered the security commander of the People’s Army to punish the gossipers. The commander interrogated the North Korean students living in Moscow, and executed all the students who simply replied that they knew that Song Hye-rim was living in Moscow.”
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Like-wise because of concern about gossip, Kim Jong-nam as a boy was isolated in the No. 15 Residence, lacking the relationships with playmates his own age that even his father had known. In partial compensation Kim Jong-il appeared at No. 15 for supper three times a week, emerging as if by magic
from a tunnel that connected the residence to his office. When he slept in the mansion, after working late, he liked to creep into his little son’s bed. Kim Jong-il pampered the boy as Kim Il-sung had pampered him. Even after Li had become a student in Moscow, he had to return to Pyongyang each May to join in the annual grand celebration of the new little prince’s birthday. At No. 15 Residence Jong-nam had a playroom full of electronic game machines. On his birthday aides packed the playroom with clothes, shoes, diamond-studded wrist-watches, model guns and other foreign-made goods. “They had a special team to purchase birthday goods for Jong-nam,” Li wrote. Li had a toothache once. The dentist had run out of the gold needed for a top-quality filling. When Jong-nam learned of that he opened his safe and handed his older cousin a 10-kilogram gold bar, telling him to use some of it for his dental work. The safe also contained wads of U.S. bills, Li said.
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Apparently the boy was denied nothing. Once when he suffered a toothache of his own, he defiantly said that his price for going to the dentist would be a car as big as his father’s. Soon “a dark blue Cadillac was delivered to No. 15,” according to Li. “I used to spend a lot of time with Jong-nam on my summer vacations. We would ride in the Cadillac when we went along on inspection tours.” Jong-nam was permitted to read South Korean books and watch both South Korean and Japanese television. When he was eight, the boy took a liking to one South Korean comedian and ordered the mansion retainers to bring the entertainer to him. Fortunately they did not kidnap the comedian. Instead they searched until they found a North Korean farmer who looked just like him and had the farmer trained in comic routines before presenting him to Jong-nam. The impersonation worked briefly but Jong-nam soon saw through it. “I know this is fake,” he said, leaving for his room.
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In 1979, the year Jong-nam turned eight, his thirteen-year-old female cousin Li Nam-ok moved into No. 15 Residence to become the boy’s full-time playmate and Kim Jong-il’s “adopted daughter.” In a 1998 interview with the prestigious Japanese monthly
Bungei Shunju
she offered further details on life in the household, beyond those provided by her older brother Il-nam. (The brother had been only a visitor in the palace. He was usually away— first at a North Korean boarding school and eventually in Moscow, where he continued his studies while living with his ailing aunt Song Hye-rim.) “We did not use dollar bills for wallpaper, but we did have a very comfortable life,” Li Nam-ok said. “Kim Jong-il was a man who loved a comfortable life.”

Nam-ok’s mother and grandmother, who were Jong-nam’s aunt and grandmother, also moved in. The boy’s aunt became his teacher. The grandmother looked after him for a while, but as he grew older and livelier it was hard for her to keep up. “After that I was by him all the time,” Nam-ok said.

Otherwise, Jong-nam’s isolation continued. “We sometimes went around the city in a chauffeur-driven Benz, but we were not allowed to get out of the car,” she said. “Attendants always came with us when we went outside.” Still, she thought her cousin had some idea of the reality of the common people’s lives. “We could make guesses by looking at people from a moving car. Besides, there were employees at the official residence and we could hear stories from them. Jong-nam was a very curious person. My view is that he knows a lot.”

Kim Jong-nam “has a good mind and sense of humor,” Nam-ok said. “He is very energetic. He is a permanent optimist and a pleasant young man who can laugh all day long from morning to evening. He also has an artistic sense like his father’s.” Jong-nam, she added, “was a very early riser and led a well-regulated life. He always found something to do. He liked to draw pictures when young. He watched movies and read many books.” Like his father, Jong-nam loved watching movies and videos for days on end. He “was very much interested in taking videos, too.”

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.
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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.”
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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.
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