WATCH: (Scroll Down For Video) Wandering through Times Square, past the Naked Cowboy and the Elmos and the ticket touts, she could be any immigrant trying to live the American Dream.
A 60-year-old Korean woman with a soft perm and conservative clothes, she’s taking a weekend off from pressing shirts and hemming pants at the dry-cleaning business she runs with her husband.
But she’s not just any immigrant. She’s an aunt to Kim Jong Un, the young North Korean leader who has threatened to wipe out New York with a hydrogen bomb.
And for the past 18 years, since defecting from North Korea into the waiting arms of the CIA, she has been living an anonymous life here in the United States, with her husband and three children.
“My friends here tell me I’m so lucky, that I have everything,” Ko Yong Suk, as she was known when she was part of North Korea’s royal family, told The Washington Post on a recent weekend. “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.”
Her husband, previously known as Ri Gang, chimes in, laughing: “I think we have achieved the American Dream.”
This is the story of how one family went from the top of North Korea to middle America.
Breaking their silence in the United States, Ko and Ri spent almost 20 hours talking to two Washington Post reporters in New York City and then at their home several hours’ drive away. They were nervous about emerging from their anonymity; after all, there are Americans who analyze North Korea for a living and do not even know that the couple are here.
They asked The Post not to publish the names they use in the United States or to reveal where they live, mainly to protect their grown children, who live normal professional lives.
Ko bears a striking resemblance to her sister, Ko Yong Hui, who was one of Kim Jong Il’s wives and the mother of Kim Jong Un, the third-generation leader of North Korea. And she had a particularly close relationship with the man now considered one of the United States’ top enemies: She took care of Kim Jong Un while he was at school in Switzerland.
But in 1998, when Kim Jong Un was 14 and older brother Kim Jong Chol was 17, Ko and Ri decided to defect. Ko’s sister, their link to the regime, was sick with terminal breast cancer – although she did not die until 2004 – and the boys were getting older. The couple apparently realized that they would not be needed by the regime much longer and fled, concerned about losing their privileged status.
The Kim family has ruled North Korea for 70 years, through a repressive system built on patronage and fear. The royal family and top cadres in the Workers’ Party benefit from this system – and have the most to lose if it collapses, or if they run afoul of the regime.
So the couple decided to flee – not to South Korea, as many North Koreans do, but to the United States.
They have worked long hours running their dry-cleaning store, and their three children have come of age here, going to good colleges and getting good jobs.
The family home is a large, two-story house with two cars in the driveway, a huge TV in the living room, a grill on a rear deck. They’ve been to Las Vegas on vacation, and two years ago went to South Korea, where Ko enjoyed visiting the palaces she had seen in TV dramas.
They look like a normal family.
But look closer. That photo of her eldest son on a jet-ski? It’s at Wonsan, where the Kim family has its summer residence. That girl in the photo album? It’s Kim Yo Jong, Kim Jong Un’s younger sister, who runs the propaganda division of the Workers’ Party.
And the house? It was bought partly with a one-time payment of $200,000 that the CIA gave the couple on their arrival, they said.
Even though Ko and Ri have not seen Kim Jong Un in almost 20 years and do not appear to have held official positions, U.S. intelligence on North Korea is so thin that this couple still represents a valuable source of information on the family court.
They can reveal, for example, that Kim Jong Un was born in 1984 – not 1982 or 1983, as has been widely believed. The reason they’re certain? It was the same year that their first son was born. “He and my son were playmates from birth. I changed both of their diapers,” Ko said with a laugh.
