Kim Jong Un and the Looming Nuclear Crisis
The footage is grainy but chilling. On the morning of February 13, a portly, middle-aged man ambles through the main departure terminal at the airport in Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, preparing to board a flight to Macau. Kim Jong Nam was the eldest son of the late North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, and it is said that for a brief time he wanted that son to be his successor. But that was not to be—Kim Jong Nam turned out to be flighty, a playboy and gambler who once infuriated his father by trying to get into Japan on a phony passport to visit Tokyo Disneyland. (He was 30 at the time.) With his father’s permission, he chose to live in Macau, the former Portuguese colony that is now the gambling capital of China—under the watchful eye of Chinese security.
Kim Jong Nam was the half-brother of the current North Korean ruler, Kim Jong Un, but the two most likely never met. Kim Jong Nam was 13 years older, and his mother—a famous North Korean actress—had an affair with Kim Jong Il. “They were raised in separate households,’’ says a former South Korean intelligence analyst, “and [Kim Jong Nam] was shipped off to Switzerland for school as a boy. No way they ever met.”
Which makes what happened on February 13 that much more confounding and disturbing. Since about 7:30 that morning, four North Korean men and two women—a Vietnamese and an Indonesian—had been waiting in a restaurant in the main airport terminal. Shortly before
