N. Korea's rumoredheir an enigma

There is only one photograph available to the outside world that is thought to be that of the man South Korean officials think will inherit the world's most unpredictable regime, one armed with nuclear weapons.

In that picture, the man, Kim Jong Un, a son of ailing North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, is an 11-year-old.

"When Prince Jong Un shook hands with me, he fixed me with a vicious look," Kim Jong Il's former Japanese sushi chef wrote in a 2003 memoir describing his first encounter with the boy, then 7. He was dressed in a military uniform and was known as a "prince" among his father's aides.

"I still cannot forget the look in his eyes. It seemed to say, 'This is a despicable Japanese.'"

The lone photo and Fujimoto's memories form part of the few precious strands of information analysts and intelligence officials in South Korea and Washington rely on as they struggle to put together a dossier on Kim Jong Un, the youngest and least-known of Kim Jong Il's three sons.

They describe Kim Jong Un as a man in his mid-20s, of medium height, overweight, prone to high blood pressure, suffering from diabetes and with character traits similar to his father's.

"We picture a charismatic young man, authoritarian, politically astute, and precocious and ambitious," said Cheong Seong-chang, a researcher at the Sejong Institute, near Seoul. "We picture Little Kim Jong Il."

But the walls of secrecy that surround North Korean leaders make guessing about who is in and who is out in the succession game notoriously difficult.

Intelligence officials acknowledge that much of what they have gleaned is little more than conjecture, based on secondhand information from sources inside North Korea but not independently verified.

The North Korean media have never shown images of Kim Jong Un in public or mentioned him by name, said Kim Sang-kook, a senior North Korea analyst at the Unification Ministry in Seoul.

"We know almost nothing about the young man," said Andrei Lankov, a Russian-born North Korea specialist at Kookmin University in Seoul. "Very young, without any administrative experience to speak of, and without his own coterie - he had not had time to create a power base. He will be an obedient puppet in the hands of people who lobbied for this decision. Who are these people? I have no idea, to be frank."