Why Kim Yo Jong is the Most Dangerous Woman in the World
BOOK REVIEW: The Sister: North Korea’s Kim Yo Jong, the Most Dangerous Woman in the World
By Sung-Yoon Lee / PublicAffairs
Reviewed by Ambassador Joseph R. DeTrani
The Reviewer — Ambassador DeTrani is the former Special Envoy for Six Party Talks with North Korea and is former Director of the National Counterproliferation Center. The views below are his and do not represent any government agency or department.
REVIEW —Sung-Yoon Lee’s The Sister: North Korea’s Kim Yo Jong, the Most Dangerous Woman in the World is a powerful and well-researched commentary on the brutality of the Kim family dynasty and the unique – and dangerous – role of Kim Yo Jong, the younger sister of the supreme leader, Kim Jong Un.
The book is a treatise on the rule of the Kim family and their indifference to the welfare of their people, while enriching themselves and intimidating and threatening South Korea.
The focus is on the system that Kim Jong Un inherited from his father, Kim Jong-Il, in December 2011, when the elder Kim died. Kim Jong Un and his younger sister, Kim Yo Jong – who studied in Switzerland and inherited a hermit state that enriches the elite through its illicit activities and, rather than feeding and caring for their people, they instead build weapons of mass destruction. Predominantly, this is the story of Kim Yo Jong, who the author argues has taken on the persona of a vile and mean-spirited deputy chairwoman of a criminal state.
Professor Lee is meticulous in his research for The Sister and walks the reader through the three summits with South Korean leaders including Kim Dae Jong in 2000, Roh Moo-Hyun in 2007, and Moon Jae-In in 2018, and the amount of money these South Korean leaders paid for the honor of a summit with Kim Jong-il in both 2000 and 2007. It also walks the reader through how his son, Kim Jong Un, handled this in 2018. It wasn’t only the money paid, but it was also about a sense that the Kims were treating these South Korean leaders –of a prosperous liberal democracy — as supplicants. You only need to look to the headlines for evidence. The details of Kim Yo Jong’s visit to South Korea to attend the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics (aka Peace Games) were riveting, with the media and elements of the public fawning over her presence.
Readers will find the discussion of North Korea’s Songbun system (birth status) particularly interesting, given that the mother – Kim Yong Hui – of the Kim siblings was born in Japan.
For those who follow developments with North Korea, and those interested in learning a bit more, the book elaborates on the brutality of the regime, the five of seven pallbearers at Kim Jong-il’s funeral who were either executed or disappeared; the executions and the gulags for political prisoners and others in the lower, hostile (Songbun) caste system; the millions of people who starved to death in the mid-to-late 1990s, while the regime used its revenue – much from illicit activities – to build weapons of mass destruction, while expecting food aid from South Korea and others, rather than fixing its broken agricultural system.
The author zeroes in on how Kim Yo Jong, starting in 2014, took on a unique and ugly persona, as the Vice Director of the Propaganda and Agitation Department. Her trademark was her fluency with profanities, initially directed at Michael Kirby, author of the UN Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in North Korea; South Korean President Park Geun Hye and President Barack Obama, to name just a few.
In future years, and as the Vice Director of the Korean Workers’ Party Central Committee, Kim Yo Jong was the only person close to the supreme leader, as the world witnessed during the Singapore and Hanoi summits of Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un.
She was at Kim’s side at both summits and at the signing of the Singapore Joint Statement. The author notes the difference in the terminology used in the Singapore Joint Statement – denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula — as compared to the Six Party Talks Joint statement – dismantlement of all nuclear weapons and operating nuclear facilities. The former – denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula — according to the author, means the removal of all U.S. military personnel and facilities in South Korea and Japan. Many have that view, especially given some of the comments of Kim Yo Jong on this subject. Indeed, this is something that should have and must be discussed with North Korea, assuming they return to negotiations. (If that is what North Korea means by “denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” then, in my view, there is no reason for any future negotiations).
Kim Yo Jong traveled for 69 hours on the train with the Supreme leader to attend the Hanoi Summit in February 2019 – only for the supreme leader to return on this long ride with nothing in hand. It was a bust; a humiliation for Kim Jong Un, who thought he would prevail in Hanoi but didn’t – with the world watching.
The book is rich with details of Kim Yo Jong’s prominent role with the outside world, with lots of media coverage of the destruction of the Joint Liaison Office in Kaesong, South Korea; her public vile comments about Moon Jae-in, despite his hospitality to her during the Winter Olympics and her overall power to play God and decide who lives and who dies.
As noted in The Sister, the Kim family rules forever, not confined by term limits. The book details cruelty on a grand scale, the hallmark of the Kim dynasty.
It’s a fascinating read.
The Sister earns a prestigious four out of four trenchcoats
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