He was born into the ruthless North Korean dictatorship and could never quite escape it.
SEOUL — Kim Jong Nam led a life of loneliness and fear and seclusion, rejected by his father, orphaned by his mother, stuck in a shadowy exile where he had to constantly worry about spies and secret agents and reporters.
And it all came to a pitiful end, with Kim slumped in a chair in a Malaysian airport clinic, his belly protruding from his navy blue polo shirt, then dying in an ambulance en route to the hospital. He had been smeared with VX, a lethal nerve agent that is used as a chemical weapon.
“He’s like a country and western song — it’s sad, sad stuff,” said Michael Madden, editor of the North Korea Leadership Watch website.
Kim Jong Nam’s painful demise is a blow for the United States and South Korea, which have lost a potential source of intelligence on the world’s most secretive regime. They have also lost a potential replacement for his half brother Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader who has again thrown down the gauntlet to the outside world.
“Kim Jong Un is testing nukes and missiles like crazy,” said Alexandre Mansourov, a North Korea leadership expert who once studied at Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang. “Now he feels confident enough to send his goons around the world to assassinate people he doesn’t like.”
Kim Jong Un feels this emboldened because he keeps challenging the outside world, especially the United States, and it does nothing to stop him, Mansourov said. “It’s a sign of supreme confidence that he can get away with anything, that he can literally get away with murder.”
The blame for the well-planned attack on Kim Jong Nam in a Kuala Lumpur airport terminal on Feb. 13 is, however, being directed squarely at the leader of North Korea.
[ North Korean diplomat wanted in killing of Kim Jong Un’s half brother ]
Malaysia says that Kim Jong Nam died because of exposure to VX and has implicated eight North Koreans, including a diplomat and a scientist, in the attack.
South Korean intelligence officials have said that Kim Jong Un put out a “standing order” for his older half brother’s assassination some years ago, but even so, analysts agree that he would have had to give the green light for this attack.
“The fact that so many North Korean agents were involved shows that the operation was planned well in advance and was done with Kim Jong Un’s blessing,” said Sue Mi Terry, a former North Korea analyst at the CIA.
It wouldn’t be the first time Kim Jong Un has acted in such a ruthless way. The 33-year-old has ordered the purge or execution of several hundred officials during his five years at the helm. These included his uncle, Jang Song Thaek, who had been a mentor to Kim Jong Nam and was accused of amassing too much of his own power.
“This fits into the larger narrative of what Kim Jong Un wants to do,” said Ken Gause, a North Korea leadership expert at CNA, a Virginia-based consulting firm. “He’s getting rid of potential contenders to the throne.”
Kim Jong Nam was the result of a secret relationship between North Korea’s second generation leader Kim Jong Il and his consort, an actress named Sung Hye Rim.
He led a lonely childhood in Pyongyang, “without even one friend,” Sung’s sister wrote in her memoir.
When he was 8, he moved to Moscow with his aunt and grandmother, but hated it. He then moved on to Geneva. There, he seemed to fit in better, although he still lived in a cloud of half-truths.
