Whatever his true character, Kim faces a problem peculiar to dictators. His power in North Korea is so great that not only does no one dare criticize him, no one dares advise him. If you are too closely associated with the king, your head might someday share the same chopping block. Safer to adopt a “Yes, Marshal” approach. That way, if the king stumbles, you are simply among the countless legion who were obliged to obey his orders. One way to read the confusing signals from Pyongyang in recent years is that they show Kim, isolated and inexperienced, clumsily pulling at the levers of state.

Kim is, in fact, playing a deadly game, says Andrei Lankov, a Russian expert on Korea who attended Kim Il Sung University, in Pyongyang, in 1984 and 1985, and now teaches at Kookmin University, in Seoul. “He has had a spoiled, privileged childhood, not that different than the children of some Western billionaires, for whom the worst thing that can happen is that you will be arrested while driving under the influence. For Kim, the worst that can actually happen is to be tortured to death by a lynch mob. Easily. But he doesn’t understand. His parents understood it. They knew it was a deadly game. I’m not sure whether Kim fully understands it.”

Running with the Bulls

We’re not even sure how old he is. Kim was born on January 8 in 1982, 1983, or 1984. To tidy up their historical narrative, Pyongyang’s propagandists have placed his birthday in 1982. The original Kim, the current leader’s grandfather and national founder, Kim Il Sung, for whom universal reverence is mandatory, was born in 1912. As the story goes, in 1942 his son and heir, Kim Jong Il, came along; for this second Kim, a slightly lesser wattage of reverence is mandatory. In truth, Kim II was born in 1941, but in North Korea myth trumps fact to an even greater extent than elsewhere, and numeric symmetry hints at destiny, like a divine wink. That is why 1982 was seen to be an auspicious year for the birth of Kim III. For reasons of their own, South Korean intelligence agencies, which have a long history of being wrong about their northern cousins, have placed his birthday in the Orwellian year 1984. Kim himself, who occasionally shows magisterial disdain for the slavish adulation of his underlings, has said that he was born in 1983—this according to the American statesman, rebounder, and cross-dresser Dennis Rodman, who had been drinking heavily when he met Kim, in 2014 (and who shortly afterward went into rehab). Whichever date is correct, the Sun of the 21st Century has walked among us for three decades.

Understanding Kim Jong Un, The World’s Most Enigmatic and Unpredictable Dictator



1 / 8 Chevron Chevron Kim Il Sung and his son and successor, Kim Jong Il, 1992.

What do we know for sure about those years? About enough to fill one long paragraph. We know that Kim is the third and youngest son of his father, and the second-born son of Kim II’s second mistress, Ko Young Hee. In the last half of the 1990s, he was sent to two different schools in Switzerland, where his mother was secretly being treated for breast cancer, ultimately to no avail. The first of these was the International School of Berne, in Gümligen, and the second was the Liebefeld Steinhölzli school, near Bern. At the latter, he was introduced to his teenage classmates as “Un Pak,” the son of a North Korean diplomat. His classmates remember him on his first day of upper school, a skinny boy dressed in jeans, Nike trainers, and a Chicago Bulls sweatshirt. He understandably struggled in classes taught in German and English. He was undistinguished academically, and apparently unbothered by it. He is remembered as having been fond of video games, soccer, skiing, basketball (in which he was able to hold his own on the court), and those Bulls, who were in the process of winning the last three of their six N.B.A. championships behind Michael Jordan, one of Kim’s heroes. In 2000, he returned to Pyongyang, where he attended the military academy that bears his grandfather’s name. At some point, around 2009, Kim II decided that Kim Jong Un’s older brothers were unsuited for leadership, and he selected the youngest son as his heir. At about this time, Kim III began putting on weight—literally and figuratively. Some believe that in order to more closely resemble his revered grandfather, whom he resembles anyway, he was “encouraged,” or ordered, to do so. He assumed power when Kim II died, in December 2011, and at around the same time he was wed, in an arranged marriage, to Ri Sol Ju, a former cheerleader and singer about five years his junior. He is said to be genuinely in love with his wife. The Kims have a daughter, whose birth is believed to have been induced so that she would be born in 2012 rather than 2013. Mrs. Kim is often seen with her husband in public, a clear departure from his father’s practice. Kim II’s women were usually kept offstage. (A notorious womanizer, he was known to be officially married once and kept at least four known mistresses.) Kim stands five feet nine inches, taller than most North Koreans, and his bulk is now estimated to be upwards of 210 pounds. He already shows signs of the heart problems that killed his father, and also possibly of diabetes, and seems to regard modern notions of healthy living as Western nonsense. He openly chain-smokes North Korean cigarettes (unlike his father, who smoked Marlboros), drinks a lot of beer and hard liquor, and evidently approaches mealtimes with gusto. There is no picture of him jogging.

His Majesty the Child

Nothing better defines Kim than how little we actually know about him. When asked, even the most respected outside experts on North Korea in the United States and in South Korea—not to mention inside the White House—invariably provide details that turn out to be traceable to Dennis Rodman or to a Japanese sushi chef named Kenji Fujimoto, who was employed by the ruling family from 1988 to 2001, and who now peddles trivial details about them (such as how Kim II once sent him to Beijing to pick up some food at McDonald’s).