There is a spectre haunting Pyongyang, and it is not the ghost of Stalin. It is the spectral figure of Ko Yong-hui, Kim Jong Un’s mother, whose life and death remain shrouded in the kind of opaque silence that would make a Kremlinologist weep. An intelligence briefing, leaked to Western agencies, now suggests that her influence on the dynastic machinery of North Korea may have been far more pivotal than the official hagiography allows. We are asked to believe that the Dear Leader simply emerged, fully formed, from the loins of his father. This is historical nonsense.
Let us consider the facts. Ko Yong-hui was born in Osaka to Korean expatriates, a detail that the regime treats like radioactive waste. She was a dancer, a performer, a woman of aesthetic sensibilities in a state that pumps its resources into missile silos and nuclear warheads. She met Kim Jong Il in the 1970s, bore him two sons (Kim Jong Un and Kim Jong Chol), and died of cancer in 2004. That is the official narrative. But the intelligence community knows better. They whisper of her role as a gatekeeper, a confidante, a woman who understood that in a totalitarian state, the family is the ultimate power structure.
The Kim dynasty has always been a case study in hereditary succession, a throwback to the divine right of kings. But while Kim Il Sung was the founder, the Jupiter of the pantheon, and Kim Jong Il the paranoid Saturn, Kim Jong Un represents the third generation: a millennial autocrat with a Swiss education and a taste for luxury goods. How did this happen? How did the youngest son, not the eldest, ascend to the throne? The answer lies in the womb of Ko Yong-hui. She was the force that vaulted him over his older brother, Kim Jong Nam, who was deemed too soft, too Western, too much of a liability. Ko Yong-hui understood that in the North Korean game of thrones, you do not negotiate. You eliminate.
This is not mere conjecture. The briefing points to her role in the 2001 scandal involving Kim Jong Nam, who was caught trying to enter Japan on a fake passport. He was disgraced, exiled, and later assassinated in Malaysia by chemical warfare agents. Who orchestrated his fall? The intelligence suggests that Ko Yong-hui, already ill with cancer, whispered into Kim Jong Il’s ear that his eldest son was a traitor. She saw the future, and it belonged to her boy.
But there is a deeper historical irony here. North Korea is the last great hereditary dictatorship, a fossil from the age of monarchies. Yet even monarchies required queens. We remember Empress Dowager Cixi, who effectively ruled China for decades. We remember Agrippina the Younger, who poisoned her way to power for Nero. Ko Yong-hui is cut from the same cloth. She was the spider at the centre of the web, the woman who ensured that the Kim bloodline would continue, even as the country starves and its people worship her son as a god.
And what of Ko Yong-hui’s own family? Her brother, Ko Yong-suk, is said to be a high-ranking official in the party. Her relatives populate the state apparatus. This is not a cult of personality; this is a family business. The North Korean state is a corporation with the Kim family as the board of directors, and Ko Yong-hui was the chief strategist who made sure the shareholders did not revolt.
The West, of course, prefers to see North Korea as a monolith, a cartoonish villain state run by a madman. But the reality is more complex, more human, and therefore more terrifying. Kim Jong Un is not a madman; he is the product of a deliberate, dynastic project. His mother was the engineer of that project. To ignore her is to misunderstand the very nature of the regime.
So let us stop pretending that North Korea is simply a nuclear-armed hermit kingdom. It is a dynasty, and dynasties have mothers. Ko Yong-hui may be dead, but her influence is carved into the granite of the Juche ideology. She is the ghost in the machine. And until we acknowledge her, we will never truly understand the man who holds the world’s most dangerous arsenal.
In the end, the story of Kim Jong Un’s mother is not a footnote; it is the chapter heading. The intelligence briefing has merely confirmed what historians have long suspected: that behind every great tyrant, there is a woman pulling the strings. And she is more terrifying than any missile.
