Special to WorldTribune.com

By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com

WASHINGTON — The big brother of North Korea’s fledgling “supreme leader” Kim Jong-Un is in hiding, on the run and fearful of losing his life as a result of his persistently critical view of what’s happening in his native land.

That’s the assessment of South Korean intelligence analysts after quotations attributed to Kim Jong-Nam, oldest son of the late Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il, revealed extreme misgivings about what’s going on within the mysterious ruling elite.

“He’s talking in order to get attention,” said a one-time South Korean intelligence analyst. “He thinks that’s the only way to survive.”

Kim Jong-Nam, at 40 more than a decade older than Kim Jong-Un, has made the former Portuguese colony of Macau, a gambling enclave on China’s southeastern coast, his official residence for years, but it’s not clear now whether he’s really there.

A South Korean professor recently spotted him in a lounge in Beijing International Airport — and was actually able to exchange a few words with him. He seemed distinctly unsentimental about the passing of his father — so much so as to suggest he shared little of the purported grief shown by his countrymen weeping and wailing on North Korean state TV during the funeral for his father and at events since then.

Jong-Nam, not known to have attended the funeral, responded laconically, “Oh, [that’s] nature,” when Park-Seung-Jun of Incheon University asked if he was shocked by his father’s death, according to Yonhap, the South Korean news agency. His answer to whether he would take care of his younger brothers and sister, according to Korean tradition, was still more unenthusiastic.

“I guess so,” big brother responded, but he’s also been saying that he has actually never met Kim Jong-Un, They are, in fact, half brothers — Jong-Nam’s mother, actress Song Hye-Rim, died mysteriously in a hospital in Moscow in 2002 after having gone there to get away from under Kim Jong-Il, who evidently wanted her out of the way.

While Song Hye-rim was fading as Kim Jong-Il’s number one lover, he was beginning his relationship with the lady who should theoretically have been Jong-Nam’s stepmother, Ko Yong-Hui. She, however, is believed to have thought it would be a good idea if Jong-Nam just “disappeared” during travels to Europe. Ko was pressing for the succession of one of the two sons she had during her relationship, never quite a marriage, with Kim Jong-Il, before she too died overseas — of cancer in Paris in 2004.

By that time, Kim Jong-Nam had more or less been ruled out of the succession thanks to his profligate lifestyle, which was revealed in 2001 when he was caught trying to enter Japan through Tokyo’s Narita airport carrying a phony Dominican passport. He only wanted, he said, to take his four-year-old son to Disneyland, but he never really lived down that incident.

More or less in exile, however, Jong-Nam still poses a threat that North Korea’s paranoid regime doesn’t need. The regime by now has mentioned Ko, who was born in Japan, a member of a North Korean dance troupe when Kim Jong-Il first spotted her, as Kim Jong-Un’s mother. While memories of Jong-Nam’s late mother have faded into total oblivion, he lives on as a persistent critic who might some day want to be a contender for power.

Jong-Nam’s case, though, might seem to be so special as to place him out of the danger zone. Does he not have the Chinese on his side, at least to the extent of protecting him from assassination attempts? The Chinese may not appreciate his making odd deprecatory comments to Japanese reporters who’ve spied him in casinos, on the street, even on one occasion in a Macau bus, but it’s assumed they would prefer not to have to endure the embarrassment of such a high-profile killing on their turf.

“If Kim Jong-Nam were not the son [of Kim Jong-Il],” said Michael Green , who served on the national security council during the presidency of George W. Bush, “he would have serious security problems.”

Green, now a professor at Georgetown University, recalled numerous North Korean plots to eliminate high-level critics abroad. Several months ago, a North Korean who had gotten into South Korea posing as a defector was arrested carrying poisoned needles purportedly to be used to assassinate the activist responsible for launching balloons bearing leaflets filled with vitriolic attacks on the regime.

And before that, as Green reminded an audience at Georgetown, North Korea had been plotting the assassination of the Hwang Jang-yop, the former North Korean party secretary who defected to the South Korean embassy in Beijing in 1997 and died of natural causes in 2010 in the lodging provided by South Korea’s national intelligence service.

Against this background, Kim Jong-Nam’s critical remarks, far from being reckless, are seen by some analysts as an attempt to draw attention to his vulnerability while gaining support among those who see the regime in Pyongyang as facing major internal problems. Moreover, he may well have contacts inside North Korea who share the same sentiments.

Under the circumstances, Jong-Nam’s comments have been exactly what those responsible for making a hero of Kim Jong-Un do not want to hear.

A week ago, for instance, he reportedly told the Tokyo Shimbun in an e-mail that he expected “the existing ruling elite to follow in the footsteps of my father while keeping the young successor as a symbolic figure.” It was “difficult,” he was quoted as saying in a burst of frankness that he has displayed in earlier encounters with the Japanese media, “to accept a third-generation succession under normal reasoning.”

Finally, this week he’s been quoted in a newly published book by Japanese journalist Yoji Gomi as having been still more critical in an e-mail exchange and in interviews last year. In the book, entitled My father Kim Jong-Il and Me, he is quoted as having said, “North Korea is very unstable” and “the power of the military has become too strong”. As if that were not enough, he also told Gomi, “If the succession ends in failure, the military will wield the real power for sure.”

Given the anger that Kim Jong-Nam has presumably aroused in Pyongyang, analysts wonder if the Chinese can always shield him as he moves anonymously about China, from one hiding place to another. North Korean security people “don’t care what the Chinese think,” said the former South Korean intelligence analyst. “They don’t think the Chinese can do much if they find him and kill him.”

The inside story of what’s going on, though, could not be more elusive. “I don’t think any of us know what to make of it,” said Victor Cha, who like Michael Green served on the national security council during the George W. Bush presidency and now teaches at Georgetown. “You have the makings of a novel or movie, but we really don’t know.”

  George W. Bush, Hwang Jang-yop, Kim Jong-Il’s first-born, Kim Jong-Nam, Kim Jong-Un, Ko Yong-Hui, Macau, prodigal son speaking out ‘to survive’, riles Pyongyang, Song Hye-Rim, Yoji Gomi