South Korea’s spy agency has told lawmakers that Kim Jong Un’s teenage daughter is now his designated successor, the clearest statement yet from Seoul about who would follow the North Korean leader — and the first time the agency has publicly confirmed the girl’s name.
The National Intelligence Service, known as the NIS, delivered the assessment on Thursday during a closed-door audit by parliament’s Intelligence Committee in Seoul. When Democratic Party lawmaker Youn Kun-young asked NIS Director Lee Jong-seok whether the leader’s daughter was really named Kim Ju-ae, Lee answered: “Kim Ju-ae is correct.”
North Korean state media has never used the name. Its bulletins refer to her only in honorific terms, as her father’s “most beloved” or “respected” child. That silence is part of why Thursday’s briefing mattered: for years, the outside world has known the girl only through photographs, never through an official North Korean word about who she is.
The agency’s judgment goes beyond the name. Lawmakers from both major parties who attended the briefing said the NIS now places Ju-ae at what People Power Party lawmaker Lee Seong-kweun called the “successor-designate stage” — a deliberate step up from its earlier description of her as merely in “successor training”.
The reasoning, as the lawmakers relayed it, rests on a chronological study of her public life since she first appeared beside her father in November 2022, holding his hand at an intercontinental ballistic missile launch. About 60 percent of her appearances since then have been military occasions, the agency said, and she has posed for commemorative photographs exclusively at military events. The pattern, in the NIS view, is a strategy: build her image as a future military leader first, and let public acceptance of a successor follow.
Her recent calendar fits that reading. In January she paid respects alongside her father at the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun in Pyongyang, where the embalmed bodies of state founder Kim Il Sung and second ruler Kim Jong Il lie in state. In September she travelled with him to Beijing, her first known trip abroad. On 11 October she walked with both parents past missiles on display at the National Defense Revolution Museum. Days later, state photographs showed her at a clothing and footwear exhibition, holding up a shoe for her father to inspect.
Ju-ae is believed to be about 13 years old, born in 2012 or 2013. The world first heard of her through an unlikely source: former basketball star Dennis Rodman, who said in 2013 that he had “held baby Ju Ae” during a visit to the secretive state. She is the only child of Kim and his wife, Ri Sol Ju, ever shown in public; the NIS believes Kim has an older son, but that son has never been acknowledged or shown.
Thursday was a crowded day for signals from Pyongyang. Kim spent it at a drone exhibition at the Wonsan-Kalma coastal area, urging his officials to seize what state media called “the absolute superiority in drone technology”, while test launches of drones, missiles and 600mm rocket launchers followed. South Korea’s military had already detected about 10 short-range ballistic missiles fired from Wonsan that same day, the North’s first ballistic launch in 17 days.
There are reasons to treat Seoul’s assessment with care. It is an intelligence judgment, not an announcement from Pyongyang, and North Korea has said nothing about succession at all. Ju-ae has always appeared beside her father, never on her own, and the NIS itself frames its conclusion as an analysis of staged appearances rather than a confirmed decision. The agency said it would watch closely what role, if any, she plays at the ruling Workers’ Party’s next major congress, and what protocol rank she is given there.
Why this matters goes beyond one family. North Korea has no public succession mechanism, and its nuclear arsenal makes the question of who holds power there a matter of direct concern to South Korea, the United States, China and Japan. Kim Jong Un himself was still in his twenties when he took power in 2011 after his father’s death, following a grooming process that was also read, at the time, through photographs and appearances. A teenage girl as designated heir would break the dynasty’s male-only pattern — Kim Il Sung to Kim Jong Il to Kim Jong Un — and would raise immediate questions about who would actually rule during any transition, and how the military’s loyalty would be secured. Seoul’s briefing does not answer those questions. It does, for the first time, put a name to the person at the centre of them — and say, on the record, that the succession plan is no longer just speculation.
Related coverage: North Korea Fires More Than 10 Short-Range Ballistic Missiles From Wonsan in First Launch in 17 Days and Kim Jong Un Crosses Into China on New Yalu River Bridge in Surprise Visit.
