The trio behind North Korea’s missile programme
SEOUL: After successful missile launches, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un often exchanges smiles and hugs with the same three men and shares a celebratory smoke with them.
The three, shown with Kim in photographs and TV footage in North Korean media, are of great interest to security and intelligence agencies since they are the top people in the secretive country’s rapidly accelerating missile programme, South Korean officials said.
They include Ri Pyong Chol, a former top air force general; Kim Jong Sik, a veteran rocket scientist; and Jang Chang Ha, the head of a weapons development and procurement centre.
The three have been individually identified previously but the photographs and TV footage show they are clearly Kim’s favourites.
Their behaviour with him is sharply at variance with the obsequiousness of other senior aides, most of whom bow and hold their hands over their mouths when speaking to the young leader.
Unlike most other officials, two of them have flown with Kim in his private plane Goshawk-1, named after North Korea’s national bird, state TV has shown.
The North Korean government does not provide foreign media with a contact point in Pyongyang for comment by email, fax or phone.
The North Korean mission to the United Nations was not immediately available for comment.
With their ruling Workers Party, military and scientific credentials, the trio is indispensable to North Korea’s rapidly developing weapons programmes — the isolated nation has conducted two nuclear tests and dozens of missile launches since the beginning of last year, all in violation of UN resolutions.
“Rather than going through bureaucrats, Kim Jong Un is keeping these technocrats right by his side, so that he can contact them directly and urge them to move fast. It reflects his urgency about missile development,” said An Chan-il, a former North Korean military officer who has defected to the South and runs a think tank in Seoul.
Kim Jong Sik and Jang are not from elite families, unlike many other senior figures in North Korea’s ruling class, North Korean leadership experts say.
They said Ri, the former air force commander, has been to one of the better-regarded schools in North Korea, but he and the other two were hand-picked by Kim Jong Un.
“Kim Jong Un is raising a new generation of people separate from his father’s key aides,” said a South Korean official with knowledge of the matter, referring to Kim Jong Il, who died in late 2011 leaving the younger Kim in charge.
The official requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.
The most prominent of the three is Ri, according to leadership experts.
Always shown smiling in photographs, he is now deputy director of the Workers’ Party Munitions Industry Department, which oversees the development of North Korea’s ballistic missile programme, according to the South Korean government and US Treasury.
The department was blacklisted by the US Treasury in 2010 and Ri was named by the South Korean government last year for activities related to the country’s weapons programmes.
“The big potato in that trio of people is Ri Pyong Chol,” said Michael Madden, an expert on the North Korean leadership.
“He’s been around since before Kim Jong Un was even talked about with any seriousness”.
Born in 1948, Ri was partly educated in Russia and promoted when Kim Jong Un started to rise through the ranks in the late 2000s, Madden and the South Korean government official said.
Ri has visited China once and Russia twice.
He met China’s defence minister in 2008 as the air force commander and accompanied Kim Jong Il on a visit to a Russian fighter jet factory in 2011, according to state media. — Reuters