North Korea’s Kim Jong-un keeps people guessing as to whether he’s alive or dead. The Rocketman is equally adept at confusing analysts about the very different women in his life.
Three formidable and beautiful women inhabit the tubby, 38-year-old despot’s inner circle, and one is both a pop star in the Hermit Kingdom and a possible Kim mistress.
In recent weeks, Kim’s powerful younger sister, Kim Yo Jong, current head of the North’s powerful Organization and Guidance Department, which runs all aspects of North Korean life, has been front and center in the media. Many reports say she could succeed him if he died or was too sick to govern.
But it’s his wife, Ri Sol-ju — who has been showcased in public much more than the wives of Kim’s father and grandfather — who has accumulated more influence than many realize, experts say.
Their marriage was arranged, as is the custom in North Korea, and have two young children, possibly three. Ri Sol-ju is a former singer and cheerleader.
In fact, a new book by former CIA analyst Jung H. Pak claims that Kim sees himself as a dashing Korean John F. Kennedy and his wife as a fashionable and chic Jackie whom he groomed to look and act like the iconic American First Lady.
“I don’t think Kim’s wife has any ambitions of being a real political player but she has respect from the elite,” North Korean analyst Bruce Bechtol, a former member of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Post.
“She’s absolutely beautiful and I think she and the kids would be safe if anything happened to Kim. They wouldn’t kill her like Kim’s uncle was killed. They might move her out of the country but that’s as far as they would go.”
But complicating the roles of wife and sister is a woman named Hyon Song-Wol, roughly 43, who may or may not be what Koreans call a “big sister wife” — a mistress who is older than her married lover.
Hyon, who fronts the all-female Moranbong Band, which has been likened to the Spice Girls of North Korea, was, like Kim earlier this month, also said to be dead at one point. She was thought to have been publicly executed by a firing squad along with members of her first band in 2013 for vague charges involving pornographic videos.
But like Kim, reports of her death were greatly exaggerated. She surfaced not long after her apparent demise and is now a key aide to Kim — professionally and perhaps personally.
She’s taken over the job once held by Kim’s sister, which is called “Director of the Event” in North Korea, involving organizing all major public events where Kim appears.
Depending on whom you ask — and rumors and misinformation about the secretive North Korean regime are common — Hyon is merely an old friend of Kim from their teenage days or she may also be the last lover of his late father Kim Jong Il as well as the mother of one of Kim’s children.
Some media reports have claimed that Kim and Hyon’s youthful affair was halted by his father but then rekindled after Kim Jong Il’s death in 2011 and Kim’s anointment as North Korea’s new leader.
Both Hyon and Kim’s sister were part of the North Korean delegation that entered South Korea in 2018 in advance of the 2018 Winter Olympics.
“Hyon is a very powerful woman,” said Jason Lee, a North Korean-born defector now living in the US who grew up as the son of political elites in Pyongyang and has many friends in common with the Kim family.
“She’s definitely more powerful than the wife but she still may not be as powerful as the sister.”
Unlike Kim’s wife and sister, however, Hyon would have the most to lose if Kim died or lost his grip on power, they said.
“He loves his wife,” Michael Madden, the director and founder of NK Leadership Watch, an intelligence organization focused on North Korea, told the Post. “Kim’s almost sort of modern that way. But Hyon is definitely in the picture on some level.”
At least for now.
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May 10, 2020 at 03:32AM
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Inside Kim Jong-un's circle of powerful women - New York Post
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