The North Korean message in a bottle
So metimes you are born i nto the Game of Thrones. Kim Jong Nam, the 45- year- old eldest brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, was by all accounts nothing more than a good- natured, pleasure- loving fellow who skipped like a stone among the great cities of the Chinese imperial periphery. He was known to have an inherited devotion to the arts, to favour the sybaritic pleasures of glittering Macau, and to regret his family’s role in turning half a country into a miserable, isolated socialist super- prison. For a brief period around the turn of the century, he was thought by Western Koreanists to be the most likely successor to his father, Kim Jong Il.
But he came from the wrong mother — a beautiful actress who became the original bed warmer of the Dear Leader. His existence had to be concealed from his grandfather, Kim Il Sung, for many years after his birth. This detached him from the innermost circles of the ruling clan, and created the possibility that he might develop independent thoughts about the future of North Korea. He would express these thoughts carefully, fleetingly, during his later, nomadic years.
After Jong Nam’s mother died in 2002, the North Korean military publicly licensed a later companion of Kim Jong Il as the official consort — the “Respected Mother.” The Respected Mother was, of course, the biological parent of Kim Jong Un. She was also a half-Japanese professional dancer, which involves some awkwardness for a regime that dwells on racial purity. But in the ultra-weird North Korean propaganda environment, this public- relations problem solved itself: once a historical person is admitted to the pantheon, the real details of their life and identity acquire a powerful bodyguard of taboo.
I mention all this because, aside from the fact that it makes a good yarn, it seems worth emphasizing that poor Kim Jong Nam, murdered on Feb. 13 at the airport in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, probably had no intention of endangering the North Korean ruling caste or anybody within it. The threat was his mere existence — as if he were the brother of an Ottoman sultan, or a stray royal offspring during the Wars of the Roses. If you are someone whose death will make an absolute monarch sleep more soundly, innocence and naiveté cannot make you harmless.
We should not even assume that Kim Jong Un had anything to do with the killing personally. Kim Jong Il took a strong role in the foreign relations of North Korea, at a time when it decided to go ahead and have some. We know from this that he was a genuine authoritarian ruler who had ideas and gave orders, rather than a helpless prisoner of deep-state manoeuvring.
It is not so clear that this is true of Kim Jong Un, who bears a strong resemblance to his late brother and to their cognac-glugging father. South Korean claims about the North Korean government are noisy, often selfcontradictory, and subject to constant revision; our most reliable public source of information about Jong Un’s personality and habits is probably Dennis Rodman. Which is not exactly ideal.
Because of the multilayered news fog around North Korea, it is still early for a final understanding what happened in Kuala Lumpur. It does not help that Malaysian aviation, itself a global byword for doubtful competence, has been introduced to the mix. The murder, allegedly perpetrated by actresses unwittingly hired to smear poison on Kim Jong Nam’s face for a faked television prank, has the hallucinatory, zany quality that is a trademark of North Korean spycraft. Other countries may have assassination squads, but in no other place would such a plan even find its way into a movie script, let alone the real world.
The oddity was magnified on Friday when Malaysian police announced that the poison used to kill Jong Nam was VX, a liquid organophosphate that disables the nervous system’s control of the muscles. VX is a strange choice for an up-close assassination. Gram for gram, it is the deadliest nerve agent that science will admit to knowing about. And its synthesis does not require the full resources of a nationstate, either. It is forbidden by international law, but if there had been another season of Breaking Bad, Walter White would probably have gotten around to whipping some up.
The deadliness of VX — if it was really used here — is the entire problem with using it in a face-to-face killing; any assassin equipped with it is quite likely to die himself. On the other hand, if you are a known target for assassins, as Kim Jong Nam was, your life can be saved in the event of exposure. Every doctor who carries a bag has injectable atropine in it. The Malaysians are apparently convinced that Kim’s killers were tricked into participating. But if that is true, how did they survive hitting him with a lethal and up-close dose of VX, knowing nothing of the toxin’s biological properties? And could the killing be some sort of message to foreign powers, as well as a fillip to Kim Jong Un’s peace of mind?
VX, cheap to make in mass quantities under industrial cover, is above all a weapon of chemical warfare: the U.S. and the USSR kept tons of the stuff lying around to put in missiles for mass dispersion on the battlefield, and both still have some. Did Kim Jong Un or his elite add a bizarre molecular wrinkle to the killing of the dictator’s brother in the hope that it would frighten Seoul, and chasten America?