Monthly Chosun: ROK Intelligence Intercepted Kim Jong Il’s Brain Scan

No, I am not making this up. There’s no permlink to the story, but if you read Korean, you can read it here.

The Monthly Chosun, quoting the South Korean intel leak ticker, is claiming that the Korean National Intelligence service, while doing electronic eavesdropping on North Korea last August, intercepted several encrypted electronic files being transmitted from Pyongyang to one Doctor Francois-Xavier Roux in France. It took three days to crack the encryption, at which point the intelligence officers realized that the files showed MRI and tomography scans of a brain showing stroke damage and partial paralysis. The Monthly Chosun’s source believes that the images are of the warped and clotted cerebellum of His Porcine Majesty.

The source did not specify what leads him to believe the scan images are of Kim Jong Il’s brain, or why all of the data files were named “Abby Someone.”

The brain scans suggest that Kim Jong Il has no more than five years left, which ought to make for some ferocious office politics in the National Defense Commission. I won’t give you the entire translation, but I thought you’d like this quote:

[Reporter:] Do you mean Kim Jong Il has five years to live or five years to govern?

[Anonymous Intelligence Officer:] Those two are very closely related.

For several weeks, since reports first emerged that Kim Jong Il had had a stroke, the foreign press has swirled with stories based on speculation, anonymous sources, and quite possibly disinformation. This story is probably the latest of them.

The source also told the Monthly Chosun that the ridiculous reporting in September that Kim Jong Il was now able to brush his own teeth misquoted South Korean doctors, who had hypothesized that Kim would probably be able to brush his own teeth based on their reading of the reports of his condition. Glad to have cleared that up for you.