She drives tanks. She fires pistols. She shows up to military parades in a nation that has never once been led by a woman. And according to South Korea’s top spy chief, she may be next in line to run all of it.
South Korea’s National Intelligence Service director Lee Jong-seok told lawmakers in a closed-door National Assembly briefing Monday that it is now fair to view Kim Jong Un’s teenage daughter as the North Korean leader’s heir — his strongest and most definitive assessment yet on the girl widely believed to be named Kim Ju Ae.
Lawmaker Lee Seong Kweun, who attended the session, relayed the remarks to reporters, citing what the NIS described as unspecified “reliable intelligence.”
The NIS has been inching toward this conclusion for over a year. In early 2024 it called her the likely heir — its first official public assessment.
By February this year it said she was close to being formally designated as the country’s future leader. Monday’s briefing dropped the hedging almost entirely.
The girl, estimated to be around 13, first surfaced publicly in late 2022 when she began appearing alongside her father at high-profile state events.
North Korea’s tightly controlled state media has since taken to calling her Kim’s “most beloved” and “respected” child — language no one in Pyongyang chooses carelessly.
Her recent public appearances have read less like a childhood and more like a curriculum. Driving a tank during army exercises. Firing pistols alongside her father at a light munitions factory.
Attending military parades in a country that builds its legitimacy almost entirely on armed might.
The NIS told lawmakers Monday that Pyongyang appeared to have deliberately orchestrated these appearances to build her military credentials and, in the agency’s own framing, “reduce skepticism about a woman successor.”
That skepticism runs deep. North Korea’s deeply patriarchal society has never produced a female leader, and some analysts flatly reject the NIS assessment, arguing a woman would not be accepted at the top.
Others point out that Kim Jong Un is only 42 — young by the standards of authoritarian succession — and that formally anointing an heir this early could weaken his grip on power by creating a rival center of loyalty.
Also quietly significant in Monday’s briefing: the standing of Kim Yo Jong, Kim’s sister and long regarded as the regime’s number two figure.
The NIS director told lawmakers she currently holds no substantial powers — a striking assessment of a woman once considered the most influential figure in North Korea after her brother.
North Korea has been an unbroken male dynasty since its founding in 1948 — Kim Il Sung to Kim Jong Il in 1994, Kim Jong Il to Kim Jong Un in 2011. If Kim Ju Ae follows her father, she would be the fourth Kim to rule and the first woman.
Whether North Korea’s system allows it remains the open question. What is no longer in question, at least in Seoul, is that she is being prepared for exactly that. —reports from Associated Press
