Kim Jong Nam was CIA informant, according to new book

The older brother of North Korea dictator Kim Jong Un, who lived in Macau for about a decade before his assassination in a Malaysian airport, was a CIA informant according to a new book, which also claims he laundered counterfeit money through casinos and associated with gangsters.

According to those familiar with his lifestyle in Macau, the elusive Kim Jong Nam developed a reputation for living low-key despite being well-endowed financially. He was murdered at the Kuala Lumpur airport in February 2017 after being smeared with a deadly nerve agent by two Asian women, who said that they had been tricked into thinking it was a television prank show.

According to Anna Fifield, a journalist at The Washington Post and author of the book, “The Great Successor: The Secret Rise and Rule of Kim Jong Un”, the dictator’s brother was killed because of the threat he posed of one day being parachuted in to replace Kim Jong Un.

The fear, writes Fifield, was accentuated by Nam’s meetings with U.S. spies.

“Kim Jong Nam became an informant for the CIA, an agency with a track record of trying to bring down dictators it didn’t like,” Fifield writes in the book, according to New Zealand’s Sunday Star Times.

She cites as her source “someone with knowledge of the intelligence.” DB