South Korea’s spy agency, the National Intelligence Service, is reported to have issued an assessment earlier this month that Kim Jong Un has settled on a daughter of about 13 as his successor.

It’s possible the future will play out the way the government analysts are now predicting. The NIS, after all, does have vast resources to call upon before making such a determination. And the agency’s vision got a publicity boost when the daughter and Kim appeared in matching leather jackets at the Workers’ Party Congress, held in Pyongyang during the week just ending.

That said, however, in view of the history of previous successions in Pyongyang we shouldn’t be surprised to wake up one morning to find things turning out differently: A son shows up and starts to join his father frequently for appearances – appearances like those of the daughter that form, along with the propaganda surrounding them, much of the basis for the NIS judgment.

The NIS, after all, made it a point not to rule out that there is at least one son in the royal family. (Some have claimed there is an elder son, but nobody seems to know for sure.) It’s not hard to imagine good reasons why, if there’s a son and that son has the inside track to become the successor, he isn’t as of this moment the focus of a public buildup exercise.

He could be away in school, not in a position to be shown off publicly during vacation time at home because the photos would get back to teachers, schoolmates and others in some place such as Switzerland (that’s where his father studied) – people who know him under his false identity as the nephew of the ambassador or the son of the ambassador’s chauffeur, or whatever other role he might be playing to disguise his real identity from the prying eyes of the world.

Another possibility is that there is a male heir who is inside North Korea being prepared to succeed to the top job – but who is invisible now because regime handlers worry about his personal safety and on that account are determined to keep his identity secret.

A head fake directed at enemy surveillance capabilities is a distinct possibility in a regime whose paranoia was justified even before what happened to Maduro in Venezuela. Paranoia is even more justified now in view of what Trump has been thinking of doing to the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his son Mojibata in Iran.

The administration in Washington is making nice to Kim Jong Un for the moment, as the president wants a summit with photo opportunities, but by now everyone who cares has been made aware of how erratic Trump is. (Unpredictable is not the right word. He’s predictably erratic.)

Pyongyang’s security apparatus would know that, even if the US president considers a ruler’s male heir fair game for kidnap or assassination, the prospects of a severe hit to the Republican party’s image in the runup to midterm elections and to his own legacy might deter him from signing off on a “decapitation” order targeting a girl.

That’s especially the case when the girl is only 13 – about the same age as was an alleged abuse victim, the subject of some US Justice Department Epstein files whose disappearance has just become a new Washington scandal.

Female royals

Since we can’t definitively rule out that there is a male North Korean heir, the next step is to analyze the reasons why – besides the fact she seems to be the affectionate apple of the current ruler’s eye – Kim Jong Un’s daughter is getting the celebrity treatment.

What we’re witnessing could turn out to be simply the introduction of a female member of the royal family to the public and the outside world. That’s done by monarchies elsewhere – including the one that Kim Jong Un’s late father, the second-generation leader Kim Jong Il, told US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright he considered a model: the one in Thailand.

There’s room and use for more than one royal in such an establishment. The Thais in particular know very well the PR value to the royal household, as an institution, of having a princess who’s beloved of the people, highly visible to the subjects. Princess Sirindhorn’s popularity probably eased the way for Thailand’s Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn when, beset by reputational issues, he was taking over in 2016 as King Rama X.

Elevating the stature of a female royal is not unprecedented even in North Korea. Kim Jong Il, for example, is reported to have built up the role of his daughter Sol Song (Seol Song in the South Korean romanization). She accompanied him (sometimes in an army lieutenant colonel’s uniform, later dressed like him in civilian garb) when he left the palace to provide “on-the-spot guidance” to his subjects .

But Jong Il didn’t make Sol Song the successor. Nor, ultimately, did he hand the torch to her brother Jong Nam, the early frontrunner – who also accompanied him on guidance tours – but that’s another story.)

Jong Il in the end chose his truculent youngest son, said by the Kim household’s Japanese sushi chef to have glared suspiciously at strangers even as a small boy, to succeed him. I think Jong Il – a vicious infighter who had beaten out his uncle and a half-brother for the top job – felt that one needed to be really mean in order to carry off the dictator’s role.

It would be natural for Kim Jong Un to agree that ferocity is the number one qualification for a successor, having benefited from that choice – and then, taking full advantage of the power his selection had given him, having confirmed his father’s judgment to the extent of making brutally sure he’d outlive his own uncle Jang Song Taek and his half-brother Kim Jong Nam.

But even assuming that Kim Jong Un, regarding his own succession choice, is following the family playbook (which he does follow in so many matters), that playbook certainly permits what he has done in elevating three females close to him: a queen – wife Ri Sol Ju – and a couple of princesses – sister Kim Yo Jong and, now, this daughter whose name may or may not be Kim Ju Ae.

We don’t know a great deal about the daughter’s personality. When pictured with her father, she does appear affectionate toward him. On the other hand, some observers examining footage of her public appearances have noted that when she receives tributes she does so not with displays of grateful humility but with an evident sense of entitlement.

That latter trait, though, pretty much goes with the Kim family rule franchise. The real question is whether she’s as ruthless and politically cunning as her father Kim Jong Un, her grandfather Kim Jong Il and her great-grandfather, the dynastic founder Kim Il Sung.

In short, is she capable of leading with an iron fist in a male-dominated society in the limited tradition of such figures as China’s Empress Wu Zetian and Russia’s Catherine the Great?

If she’s not, and if there is available a healthy and mentally competent son whose personality leans more to the dominant side than his sister’s, we may yet see reports of such a lad – easier to sell to officials and ordinary people as the next leader than a lass would be – showing up to accompany his dad for guidance tours and ceremonial and diplomatic occasions.

Among other Pyongyang watchers who agree with the general drift of what you’ve read here is Leonid Petrov, dean and senior lecturer at International College of Management Sydney, who just messaged as follows:

I suspect that the whole ploy to showcase Kim Ju Ae (Hae?) is designed to 1) attract people’s curiosity and sympathy; 2) deflect people’s attention from the real successor, a son who is being groomed in secrecy and will be introduced much later, when/if necessary. This will keep him safe, obscure and influence-free.

Bradley K. Martin has watched North Korea since 1977. He is the author of the prize-winning Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty, a history of the Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il eras. His later book Nuclear Blues is speculative fiction – a financial-theological spy thriller set in North Korea and featuring Kim Jong Un as a major character.