The REAL power behind the North Korean throne revealed: Explosive new book exposes Kim Jong-un's little-known sister as a ruthless psychopath who executes officials for 'getting on her nerves' and is tipped to succeed him as dictator
By TOM LEONARD FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
PUBLISHED: 08:37 EDT, 25 June 2023 | UPDATED: 09:03 EDT, 25 June 2023
Always careful to walk at least several paces behind her baby-faced brother and keep out of shot if cameras are around, she looks so pale and fragile that its seems a strong wind might knock her down.
Indeed, compared to her obese and surly-looking sibling – North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un – she seems a gentle soul, charming even, who couldn’t hurt a fly.
When her brother met President Trump for a historic summit in 2019, she was seen shyly peering out from behind a wall. Observers thought it almost adorable.
And yet – according to a ground-breaking and revealing new book – those who judge Kim Yo-jong on appearances may be making a fatal mistake.
Believed to be 35, the youngest child of former North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il is actually a ruthless political operator (even by her brutal family’s standards) who some tip to succeed her brother and who their father regarded as the most able of his offspring.
Yo-jong may even be heading for an explosive power struggle with her niece – Jong-un’s daughter Ju-ae – who is thought to be just 10 but has already been publicly hailed as her father’s heir apparent.
But judging by what this new book reveals about Aunt Yo-jong with her ‘trademark Mona Lisa smirk’, it would be foolish to assume that little Ju-ae will one day be sitting on the throne of the Hermit Kingdom.
For Yo-jong, say North Korea experts, is ‘the brains behind the operation’ – and terrifying brains, at that.
According to US academic Sung-Yoon Lee, whose new book ‘The Sister’ provides the first detailed insight into Yo-jong, it’s not for nothing that some Pyongyang officials have nicknamed her ‘bloodthirsty demon’ and ‘the devil woman’.
The de facto second-in-command to her brother, Yo-jong can have even the most senior government officials executed on just a word.
In 2021, she was elevated to the nation’s most powerful body – the State Affairs Commission. And since then, Lee says, she has had ‘the ultimate power of the cruel dictator; the power to play God and decide who lives and who is killed’.
Doted on from childhood, Yo-jong was largely hidden from public view for decades. But in 2018, she sparked a media frenzy when she attended the Winter Olympics in South Korea as her country's official representative and was pictured sitting close to Vice President Mike Pence.
Journalists hailed a glamour, delicacy and charm so lacking in her dumpy brother and many wondered if North Korea could finally be veering away from its dreadful past.
Instead, predicts Lee, Yo-jong is her 39-year-old brother’s zealous and spittle-flecked chief propagandist and is potentially ‘fiercer and more ruthless’ than him.
And, given his health problems with suspected heart disease, diabetes and obesity – the regime as good as admitted he was nearly killed by Covid-19 – North Korea may need a new leader sooner than expected.
Of course, obtaining information about the ferociously secretive dictatorship is immensely difficult but in 2021 Yo-jong reportedly ‘ordered several executions of high-ranking government officials for merely “getting on her nerves”.’
Those she found ‘less disagreeable’ were simply banished – along with their entirely innocent families – to detention camps and gulags, ‘where a life of grueling forced labour, beatings, torture and starvation rations awaited’.
According to Lee, rumors of Yo-jong’s ‘impulse to purge and kill’ soon became so rife that top officials started holding their breath in her presence. If she approached them they would avert their gaze or stare at the floor.
Ignoring her is apparently far safer than trying to win her praise – for ‘just being recognized by her might in due course lead to a fall from favor and a brush with death’.
A computer science graduate, Yo-jong doesn’t reserve her bloodthirsty impulses just for cowering officials. On the few occasions she’s been allowed to show her teeth on the international stage, she’s left little doubt that her finger on Pyongyang’s nuclear button would be every bit as unsettling as her saber-rattling brother’s.
In April last year, the First Sister dropped the sweetness act and warned South Korea that if its military ‘violated even an inch of our territory, our nuclear combat force will have to inevitably carry out its duty… and a dreadful attack will be launched’.
The South Korean army, she added, ‘will have to face a miserable fate little short of total destruction’.
As the head of propaganda, she has also demonstrated a knack for concocting particularly vile blasts against her nation’s enemies.
When, 2014, South Korea elected their first female leader, Pyongyang state media carried quotes calling her a ‘wicked sycophant’, ‘dirty old prostitute’ and ‘capricious whore’.
President Obama was outrageously branded a ‘wicked black monkey’, and a gay High Court justice in Australia was labelled a ‘disgusting old lecher with a 40-odd-year-long career of homosexuality’.
All of the comments were either written or signed off by Yo-jong.
Certainly, she’s come a long way since 2011 when her brother succeeded their father. At the time, few people outside Pyongyang even knew her name.
North Korea is also a staunchly patriarchal society. And one in which, for all its socialist pretensions, women generally look after the family at home while the men handle the politics.
Nonetheless Yo-jong’s own parents were said to be the first to recognise she was special. Even if they felt they couldn’t acknowledge it in public – her father instead elevating her underwhelming, basketball-obsessed brother.
Kim Jong-il had seven children by four women, either wives or concubines, but he reserved his chief affection for a dancer named Ko Yong-hui who bore him both Jong-un and Yo-jong.
Yo-jong’s own parents were said to be the first to recognise she was special. Even if they felt they couldn’t acknowledge it in public. (Pictured: Female North Korean soldiers march in parade).
They and elder brother Kim Jong-chul lived in the ruling family’s gated compound, given every luxury including the best food and toys money could buy, while their countrymen and women languished in poverty.
Up to the early 2000s, Jong-chul was all but set to succeed their father – until it was announced in 2009 that he wasn’t.
According to the family’s sushi chef, his father suddenly decided Jong-chul was ‘no good because he is like a little girl’.
And while Jong-chul reportedly now lives a quiet life in Pyongyang, appearing at occasional Eric Clapton concerts as far afield as Singapore and London, the actual ‘little girl’ in the family was clearly made of sterner stuff.
As a child, she was addressed by her proud parents as ‘sweet princess’ despite having a reputation for being strong-willed and stubborn.
Interestingly, the couple referred to their sons as ‘Big Brother’ (Jong-chul) and ‘Little Brother’ (Jong-un), in other words from the perspective of their sister.
Soon after she was born in 1987, she became the ‘axis of the royal family’, always sitting next to her father at meals while her brothers sat further down the table.
By the age of eight she was sufficiently sure of herself to fire her personal aide. Aged nine, she physically dragged her older brother – who was 16 – out of a women-only theatre on their family estate after he sneaked in.
She and her brothers were sent to be schooled in Switzerland, using pseudonyms and pretending to be the children of North Korean diplomats.
Her father was a psychopath who had his own half-brother Hyon murdered in 2007 to protect his children’s succession right. In the 1980s he attempted to assassinate the South Korean president and blew up a passenger plane in mid-air as one of many terrorist acts.
Lee says Jong-un and Yo-jong have clearly both inherited his murderous instincts. Indeed, Jong-un is suspected of having his own half-brother, Kim Jong-nam, assassinated in Kuala Lumpur airport with nerve agent in 2017.
Quite what his sister would be capable of is yet to be seen. But in the meantime she remains an increasingly powerful and vindictive presence in the background.
Even aged 21, when she was spotted trailing her father to an important meeting with Bill Clinton, it is thought she was already playing a key role in government.
And, unlike her Supreme Leader brother, she can speak English – a notable advantage when it comes to global politics.
When, during a meeting with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in 2018, the US delegation cracked a joke, she laughed while Kim Jong-un stared blankly ahead, clearly not understanding.
This may be one of the reasons as to why Jong-un clearly depends on his sister and keeps her close.
During the funeral eulogy for Kim Jong-il in 2011, his daughter – evidently overcome with emotion – suddenly left the official line-up.
For anyone else, such an outrageous break with protocol at a sacred ceremony would have been considered even worse than ‘half-hearted clapping’ and punishable by death.
But, from the earliest days of her brother’s rule, Yo-jong has been ‘untouchable’, says Lee.
Not that ordinary North Koreans would have known: state media never mentioned her once until March 2014 and that was only to say she’d cast a vote for her brother in an ‘election’.
She was mentioned twice more that month when she accompanied Jong-un to concerts. On both occasions, her name came last in the list of more than a dozen attendees and with no reference to her ‘blue blood’.
All considered then, it’s hardly surprising that her private life remains a mystery.
In 2018, during the trip to South Korea for the Winter Olympics, she appeared on one occasion without a coat and seemed to have a slight bulge around her abdomen.
Intelligence analysts speculated that she might be pregnant and South Korean media claimed she confirmed as much to Olympics officials. As to the likely father, she reportedly married Choe Song, a government official’s son, in 2014. It’s also claimed she had a child in 2015.
According to Lee, Yo-jong and her brother have devised a ‘good cop, bad cop’ strategy on the world stage whereby she employs her femininity and deceptive charm to offset Jong-un’s surly aggression.
But while it might publicly appear that she’s in a subservient role – standing happily aside and handing her brother a pen for him to sign the historic joint statement with President Trump in Singapore in 2018, for example – once again, appearances can be deceptive.
In 2019, Jong-un took a long train ride to Vietnam for a second meeting with Trump. He and his sister were caught on camera at a rest-stop during the journey, standing by themselves as he had a smoke and she held up a crystal ashtray for him with both hands.
Some commentators said it smacked of her subservience but in fact, says Lee, she was making sure he left no cigarette butts bearing traces of his DNA for foreign intelligence services to examine.
‘No one else, aside from his wife, has such intimate access to the Supreme Leader,’ says Lee.
But will she be loyal forever?
Just as her butter-wouldn’t-melt appearance hides a woman who kills on command and revels in vile abuse, perhaps nothing about Kim Yo-jong can be taken for granted.