Serious misconduct has led to a major personnel reshuffle in a guard unit at North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s seaside villa in Kyongsong County, Daily NK has learned.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a source in North Korea told Daily NK last Thursday that the incident began when disciplinary violations and non-socialist behavior by a senior technician of the State Security Department under the 879th Brigade of the Supreme Guard Command and his subordinates were reported to the Supreme Guard Command by the brigade’s general staff and political departments in early April.
According to the report submitted to the Supreme Guard Command, the senior technician had repeatedly engaged in problematic behavior, such as sending two of his subordinates out in civilian clothes, putting them up in his own house, and excusing them from political classes and unit training to run errands for him.
The incident was considered very serious because the subordinates often watched foreign video content confiscated from the unit or obtained outside the base.
In the end, the brigade’s general staff and political departments officially raised the issue with the Supreme Guard Command headquarters in Pyongyang, which prompted an immediate response.
“The chief technician of the 879th Brigade in charge of guarding the Supreme Leader’s villa in Kyongsong has been detained by the prosecutors of the Supreme Guard Command and is being interrogated. The subordinates who ran errands for him have been sentenced to disciplinary labor under the State Security Bureau of the Supreme Guard Command for the crimes of watching and distributing foreign cultural materials,” the source said.
Incident suggests discipline in the military is weakening
The fact that such an incident occurred in a unit under the Supreme Guard Command – where discipline is unusually strict even for the North Korean military, given its responsibility for protecting Kim Jong Un – shows how lax discipline has become in the military recently.