'She Was Cute With a Baby Face'

Apparently Kim Jong-il wasn't always so ronery. The pot-bellied psychopath looked to be quite the radies' man back in the day.

A LONELY grave in Moscow marks the resting place of the film star who was the first love of the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-il, and the mother of his eldest son.

She lies a few yards from the graves of Josef Stalin’s son Vassily and his wife, in the Troekurovskoe cemetery on the outskirts of the Russian capital. A plain black headstone inscribed with her name – Song Hye-rim – and her dates of birth and death adorns a slab decorated in oriental style.

In the twilight of Kim’s rule, the discovery has highlighted the plots and betrayals that govern the fortunes of his dynasty. According to the highest-ranking defector from North Korea, after hearing of gossip among the elite, Kim later ordered the execution of all the North Koreans who had been students in Moscow and knew of her presence.

After years of mental illness, Song died in exile seven years ago. She gave birth to Kim’s eldest son, Jong-nam, but lived to see him fall from grace.

The dictator’s third son, by another woman, Koh Yong-hee, who is also dead, is expected to inherit his mantle as “great leader”. That son, Jong-un, is thought to be backed by a hardline collective leadership and there are rumours that assassins acting in their name tried to kill Jong-nam in China this summer.

It appears to be the last act in a drama that began on a film set in the 1960s in Pyongyang, when a youthful Kim encountered a beguiling older woman who starred in patriotic movies. The two began an affair, even though Song was married to another man and had a daughter. They divorced and it was then that Song confided in her best friend, a dancer by the name of Kim Yong-sun, now 73.

“She was cute with a baby face,” Kim Yong-sun said. “But not too pretty because her jaw bordered on square and her face was not oval. She was good-natured, a very kind girl.” She gave her account to the South Korean news agency Yonhap, whose reporters contacted her in Seoul, where she lives since defecting from the north.

It was some time in 1969 when Song, her friend from school and university, came to tell her she was moving into Kim’s residence, staffed by eight cooks, 100 servants and 500 bodyguards. Kim Yong-sun recalled: “I asked her, ‘What about your husband?’ She didn’t answer and just said, ‘I may never see you again.’ I understood. How would that be possible?”

In 1971 Song gave birth to Jong-nam and the young father was apparently much enamoured, although her life from that moment was on a downward spiral. Kim’s father, whose word was law in North Korea, never approved of their liaison and it seems they never formally married.

Instead, Kim was obliged to wed another woman, Kim Yong-suk, with whom he had a daughter. Song’s relatives and friends said she fell into depression and suffered a series of mental breakdowns. Airbrushed out of North Korean history, she lingered in Moscow until her death at the age of 65 in May 2002, of unknown causes.