N. Korea’s biggest a**hole shoots Vice-Premier, sends second-biggest a**hole to weed the fields

Here at OFK, stories about kremlinology are usually page two material. Too often, we’ll read reports that some official or minor celebrity has been executed, only to read a year later that the target has risen like Lazarus from the KCNA crypt. As a general rule, the closer a story about North Korea is to the center of the power structure, the less I tend to believe it. Which is why I didn’t even tweet the report yesterday that His Porcine Majesty executed the former agriculture minister and a senior education ministry official with an antiaircraft gun. 

Still, I’m marginally more likely to believe reports from the semi-official news agency Yonhap about this particular type of story, where it’s marginally less likely than most sources to run with stories that turn out to be false. 

So, with those caveats dispensed with, Yonhap quotes an anonymous “Seoul official” as saying that His Porcine Majesty sent Vice-Premier Kim Yong-jin to the firing squad last month for being an “anti-party and anti-revolutionary element,” which, in reality, could mean about anything, but probably means he did something very bad. Kim Yong-jin does not make an appearance in the OFK archives, which may mean nothing more than the fact that he never attracted my attention.

But one person who makes many appearances in the OFK archives is Kim Yong-chol, who according to the same Yonhap story, was sent “to a rural farm for one month of reeducation starting in mid-July” for abuse of power and showing a “’heavy-handed’ attitude.”  Far be it for me to defend an a**hole like Kim Yong-chol, but isn’t that written into the job description?

Since January, Yong-chol’s job has been to head the United Front Department. Immediately before that, however, he headed the Reconnaissance General Bureau, North Korea’s external spy agency. As such, Kim Yong-chol was responsible for the 2010 Cheonan and Yeonpyong Island attacks, the 2014 Sony cyberterrorist attack, the 2015 land mine attack, and a whole series of assassination attempts against South Korean human rights activists and North Korean dissidents in exile.

You can read all about it in my report, “Arsenal of Terror,” which is not available in bookstores.

Kim Yong-chol’s d**k moves also come in the more petty variety. A year and a half ago, when DNI Director James Clapper visited Pyongyang on a hostage-fetching mission, Yong-chol invited Clapper to dinner, only to present him with a bill for his meal. For reasons I’m sure are unrelated to this, Kim Yong-chol was designated by the Office of Foreign Assets Control for a second time right about that time (he was first designated in 2010). Not reported is whether Clapper actually paid the bill, or whether the Treasury Department is investigating.

For more rumors about the latest purges in Pyongyang, The Joongang Ilbo has you covered.

All of which leaves me with two questions. First, do you suppose when a pezzonovante like Kim Yong-chol is weeding peas in the hot July sun, he’s thinking about how deeply sorry and humbled he is, and how much he loves and respects his morbidly obese thirtysomething boss who earned his chops in front of a Playstation? Neither do I.

Second, if Andrei Lankov is right, and the fear of purges is the main reason (or more probably, one important reason) why so many North Korean diplomats are rushing for the exits, will this push more diplomats, officials, bankers, and money launderers to reconsider their return travel plans?