North Korean ruler Kim Jong Un’s aunt has been secretly living a few hours from New York City — the same place her powerful nephew threatened to blast with a hydrogen bomb, according to a fascinating new report.

The diminutive dictator’s 60-year-old aunt, Ko Yong Suk, once dined on caviar and sipped cognac — but she traded a life of luxury for a modest one in the United States nearly 20 years ago, she told The Washington Post.

With the help of the CIA, Suk — whose sister was one of Kim Jong Il’s wives — defected from North Korea in 1998.

She moved anonymously within driving distance of the Big Apple with her husband, where they work long hours hemming pants and sometimes visit Times Square and Central Park.

Her middle-class home — which was partly bought with $200,000 the CIA gave the couple upon arrival — is full of family photos, including one of Kim Jong Un.

“He and my son were playmates from birth. I changed both of their diapers,” Suk said of the budding dictator.

“He wasn’t a troublemaker but he was short-tempered and had a lack of tolerance. When his mother tried to tell him off for playing with these things too much and not studying enough, he wouldn’t talk back but he would protest in other ways, like going on a hunger strike,” she said of Kim Jong Un as a child.

Kim Jong Un knew from the time he was a kid that he would one day be king, she said.

“It was impossible for him to grow up as a normal person when the people around him were treating him like that,” she said.

Suk fled the country after her sister, their link to the regime, became sick with breast cancer in the early 1990s.

She claims she was no longer needed by the regime and that their privileged status would have been threatened if her sister died.

She also left the country believing that her sister would find better health services outside of North Korea, she claims.

But while she once lived lavishly, sipping sparkling water and jetting around in a Mercedes-Benz with Kim Jong Il, that changed when she moved to America, she said.

“The only thing I could do without speaking the language was dry cleaning,” she said.

She and her husband, Ri Gang, worked hard, raised three kids and have achieved the “American dream,” her husband said.

“My friends here tell me I’m so lucky, that I have everything…My kids went to great schools and they’re successful, and I have my husband, who can fix anything. There’s nothing we can envy,” Suk said.

Suk broke her silence about living in the U.S. because she wants to eventually return to North Korea, she said.

She was hesitant to say anything negative about Kim Jong Un.

But she she admitted, “In history, you often see people close to a powerful leader getting into unintended trouble because of other people.I thought it would be better if we stayed out of that kind of trouble.”

Suk, who sports a perm and a buttoned-up style, looks a lot like her sister Ko Yong Hui, who was one of Kim Jong Il’s wives and the mother of Kim Jong Un.

She helped raise Kim Jong Un and Kim Jong Chol, her sister’s first son, while they attended school in Bern, Switzerland in the 1990s.

“We lived in a normal house and acted like a normal family. I acted like their mother. I encouraged him to bring his friends home because we wanted them to live a normal life. I made snacks for the kids. They ate cake and played with Legos,” Suk said.

She took Kim Jong Un to Disneyland Paris, skiing in the Swiss Alps and swimming on the French Riviera.

Around that time, Kim Jong Un developed a fixation on basketball, she said.

“He started playing basketball, and he became obsessed with it. He used to sleep . . . with his basketball,” his aunt said, who has since hosted basketball former NBA player Dennis Rodman at his compound.

Kim Jong Un was shorter than his friends — and his mother told him that if he played basketball, he would become taller, she said.

Suk’s husband showed The Washington Post a never-before-seen-photo of a 13-year-old Kim Jong Un, sporting a basketball uniform and holding a gold trophy.

In one of her scrapbooks, also has a photo album featuring a photo of Kim Yo Jong, Kim Jong Un’s younger sister, who runs the propaganda division of the North Korean Workers’ Party.

She also claimed Kim Jong Un was born in 1982, the same year her son was born, not 1984, which is widely believed.

The Kim family has ruled North Korea for 70 years through a system built on fear.

Watch Kim Jong Un supervise some dubious North Korean military drills