Kim Jong-un: Condition Unknown.

Conflicting Reports Describing the Condition of Kim Jong-un

by Derek Dunn

Kim Jong-un was the Supreme Leader of North Korea, or perhaps he still is. Maybe Kim Jong-un died after fatal complications from botched heart surgery, or maybe Kim Jong-un is laid up on a beach in a foreign land innocuously sipping a martini. Nobody knows what Kim Jong-un is doing, or what condition he’s in.

A report by Katy Tur claimed that Kim Jong-un was braindead, but she later deleted the Tweet containing that report because she didn’t have verified information. Katy was criticized for the apparent oversight, but she was far from the only one reporting ominous information about the state of North Korea’s malevolent dictator.

CNN reported that the US was looking over intelligence that said Kim Jong-un was in grave danger following the surgery but declined to comment on the particulars of this. Unlike Katy Tur, CNN acted carefully about hedging their reporting. So, it was easy to take that with a grain of salt.

But, within days of that retracted Tur report and the CNN report, TMZ shared reports from Chinese and Japanese media that Kim Jong-un died, or on his death bed with no hope for recuperation.

Meanwhile, South Korea contradicted all of those reports by stating that it sees no unusual activity in North Korea. Reports from South Korea tend to be quite compelling because we rely on their intelligence services to get information from the North Korean regime.

Nobody knows what happened to Kim Jong-un with any reasonable degree of confidence. For all we know, this is an elaborate disinformation operation. Perhaps Kim Jong-un is mired in some hard-nosed political maneuvering and has good reason to make the world think he’s dead. Perhaps he’s actually dead, or perhaps he’s just close to it. Here’s what we do know:

Kim Jong-un just missed Army Day, a major holiday for the North Korean regime, and the Supreme Leader wouldn’t miss it without a compelling reason. It’s also the second major holiday that Kim missed in recent weeks, which confirms that something is happening. There is a satellite image of a train likely belonging to Kim parked at his compound, but that says absolutely nothing about the state of the Supreme Leader’s health.

As reported by CNN, North Korea’s media is implicitly denying the reports of Kim Jong-un’s demise by publishing a letter Kim reportedly sent to South Africa. But North Korea’s state-run media wouldn’t do anything to give away the death of the Supreme Leader unless someone else was ready to fill the vacancy without any domestic turmoil.

So, what do we know about the state of Kim Jong-un, and politics in North Korea? Concretely, very little.