IT took no more than five seconds and one fluid move to kill Kim Jong-nam, the estranged half brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, at klia2 on the morning of Feb 13.
Jong-nam was standing idle in a small crowd in front of the airport’s self check-in counter when his assailants struck.
They had been watching him… and when opportunity presented itself, they moved in.
Within that five seconds, one of them stood in front of him to distract him. This was when the other, who had been lurking behind Jong-nam, had him locked in a chokehold, to administer the poison that killed him soon after.
Obviously Kim Jong-nam needed a higher degree of surveillance awareness, because he likely had an enormous amount of NK surveillance prior to the attack. He really should have moved to a Western nation and surrounded himself with Caucasians, to make surveillance by Korean agents more difficult and more likely to stand out from the background. They could have hired local talent, but that increases the risk of exposure. There is a simple exercise you can do to help harden yourself against attacks like this.
When you are out and about, train yourself to trigger on the breaks in your expectations, and when you trigger check behind you quickly. Breaks in expectation are anything which you did not see coming, and which grab your attention as a result. It could be the guy in the parking lot who stops you to ask you for the time, it could be the broad with the ridiculously big breasts jumping up and down on the sidewalk in a tank top. It could just be the girl in the airline checkout line who turns around to flirt with you unexpectedly. Train yourself now to reflexively check your six the moment your amygdala registers that unexpected stimulus pop up in front of you.
At first, you’ll trigger on the big and unusual distractions, like a guy stopping you to ask a question. But as time goes on, you’ll begin reflexively checking your six with each interruption or distraction. That will fill out your situational awareness nicely.
This will give you an advantage in spotting and repelling an attack, but it may actually offer more advantage just in making you violate the expectations of any potential attackers. Kim Jong-nam’s attack was carefully prepared and practiced based upon an expectation he would be distracted by the distraction in front of him. That means by being distracted, he lowered the amygdala agitation of his attackers, and cleared the way for their attack in their mind.
You, by reacting differently and violating expectation will tend to trigger your attacker’s amygdala, and that will create the opportunity to thwart their plans. Had Kim Jong-nam simply turned around when the distraction began and checked behind him, he would have probably locked eyes with the girl who intended to put him in a headlock and spray him with the drug. A girl, who had prepped to spray an unsuspecting man from behind, would suddenly find herself locking eyes with her target, in a situation she was not prepared for mentally.
Does she attack a man twice her size, directly head on? Does she abort? Has he made her as an attacker? Is he ready for her? Is it a set up? Is he about to attack her? Does she need to defend against an impending attack? If she sprays him will he grab her, drag her to the ground, and get the drug on her skin in the process, killing her?
Ignoring a carefully-planned distraction, and turning to scan elsewhere creates a lot of stressful thoughts in the attacker who expected you to be distracted. All of those stressful thoughts crowd an already overloaded amygdala, and all are demanding to be processed simultaneously in the microsecond the attacker has to make the go/no-go decision. It is overwhelming mentally. If, as the girls now claim, they were innocent, untrained civilians false-flagged into the operation, your chances of triggering a misstep increase significantly. (Though the report that one wore a glove and discarded it after the hit might indicate at least one knew whatever was in the bottle was bad juju.)
The key at that point, is to have programmed yourself to recognize and focus upon the unusual in your environment, and especially the inappropriate surprise and discomfort in those you see. It is not normal for someone who falls under your gaze to appear highly stressed, frightened, shocked, surprised, or otherwise uncomfortable. When you see that, recognize what you may have inadvertently stumbled upon. Never, ever, dismiss such a moment out of fear of being paranoid.
What Kim Jong-nam would probably have noticed in his casual, over the shoulder glance, would have been a girl, wide eye’d at being face to face with him, paused in mid motion, strangely stressed and frozen for a second in shock and surprise, as she tried to figure out what to do. That in itself would be an advantage over being blindsided, but the real advantage would have been if she had then quickly walked off, leaving him with the realization something had been about to happen. That is the golden moment you want to seize.
Training yourself to trigger on breaks in expectation is not a cure-all. It will not magically prevent you from ever being attacked. It will not turn every attack into a brilliant counter-attack. But it can thwart efforts at distraction and open up opportunities which would not open up otherwise, and thus increase your chances of survival in the Apocalypse. The real key comes in recognizing when you interrupted something, and realizing how you need to harden your defenses in the future in response to the newly uncovered threat.
Tell everyone about r/K Theory, because it will distract the rabbits, and throw them off their game
[…] Kim Jong-nam Killed In Five Seconds […]
There’s a disturbing about of news suggesting instability and a haste that’s not normal coming out of the DPRK. Another happening is the absence of the Internal Security General who should have been present at the missile launch, but wasn’t. His aunt, who was Kim-Il’s sister, has also not been seen lately…and I think she was also a General, obviously ceremonial….something’s up.
True. It seems Jong-Un may be a little unstable himself. Wouldn’t be surprising. He lives a life of hyper r, and looks like he may not have had much K to begin with.
If so, big changes may be coming, if he doesn’t do something crazy himself before it does.
Note once again that it was the killer’s LEFT hand that was gloved.
Add this to your ability to spot facial asymmetry, and you may be able to read people much better than before.
The best self-defense advice ever came from a detective who had interviewed thousands of convicted muggers and armed robbers. One theme — none of them, not a single one, said they would attack someone who saw them first. Anyone who makes eye contact with them as soon as they see the potential target is safe. It’s someone who is too aware.
Muggers and assassins have one thing in common — they have to think like apex predators. Apex predators don’t do fair fights. They can’t afford the risk of a fair fight. Why? Because there is always another chance. Apex predators, muggers and assassins only try when they know they will win. Otherwise, they break off.
Great advice.
Also, just watched this scene (yeah, I’m late to the scene) but thanks to this blog I knew everything that was going to happen before it happened.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsLSX-RzQGk
I am not clear what different types of surveillance today there are. Maybe local PD narcotics is still like that. I do know the upper level stuff in major cities now is actually much worse than that. For starters, those vehicle guys would be second string on Avon. The primary surveillance would be people on the street, who appeared to be doing their thing. You always hear the story, “I used to see this homeless guy every day in the same spot. One day I saw him after he left to go home, and he got into a brand new SUV and drove off!” Sometimes it is just a professional Hobo, but I thing more often than not, the dude is probably wired up and ending his shift from that posted position. Look at all the people standing on the street in that video. Nobody looks at them as the cars drive by, but that is today’s surveillance state. If TIPS had made 1 in 24 into assets, in NYC that would be over 300,000 assets. You could have easily, many more than one per street 24/7.
So as Avon sped around, every street’s static foot surveillance person would cover their mouth as if wiping it, taking a smoke, rubbing their nose, etc, and report his movement into their hidden mic. Vehicles would tag along at the margins, mainly in case he began to head somewhere which wasn’t effectively covered.
Him parking and sitting, before flipping and heading the other way and jumping a light would have been great in the eighties, but now high end surveillance wouldn’t care. He’d be picked up and handed off from either people on the street, or on buildings, and surveillance would have all day. He wants to sit, they can sit, there’s no pressure because the old lady behind the second floor window on the building opposite him is watching his lap to see what he is reading, or doing with his hands, and she is going to be there whether he sits or not, so best to use her. He disappears down a side street, there is probably a guy raking his lawn there or trimming his hedges who keeps everybody apprised, and if there isn’t, a “mail carrier” in full uniform will go walking down there shortly, towing his little hand cart behind him as he slowly goes door to door dropping junk mail in everyone’s slots.
This is why I think the drug situation in urban areas is more than meets the eye. They could shut it down very fast, but don’t. More and more I think the machine is running everything for profit.
I know that’s true. Does intra-species predation correlate with r?
I know that real life rabbits will each each other in a heartbeat. It’s usually wrapped up in mating, like mothers eating their babies, males eating the babies (to cause the mother to go back into season earlier) or (this one is fun) a mother eating the father’s penis. Run that one through the r/K thought exercise and it gets really fun.
Oh shit. I don’t think I can go there.
I need another case of #6.
In relation to attentional processing, there is another skill that should be trained. It is a well known fact that sharp spikes in adrenaline often cause a “tunnel vision” effect, a mechanism to exclude irrelevant stimuli. This makes the flanking manoeuvre extremely effective: An aggressive individual advances, posturing and providing threat indicators while an accomplice approaches from the side.
This tunnel vision acts on a pre-conscious level, so you cannot simply assume your normal range of visual attention will exist under stressful or dangerous situations. . A compensatory method is to consciously scan the environment back and forth. It is a skill taught to soldiers who are taught to move their head back and forth, scanning the environment habitually after engaging a target.
Good info, thanks.
This is the first major political assassination that I can think of that was carried out by women, other than the stumblebum attempts on Gerry Ford by the Manson family girls. It always seemed to me that women would make the best assassins because they could use their looks and womanly wiles to get in close to the target and gain his confidence. Any examples from history that you know of?
I would assume there are many, but they were almost all poisonings, so we never heard of them.
It would be interesting if this required a manly, “empowered woman,” and the reduced danger and aggression of men that happens in an r-world, so it would only be seen in a time of r. In this case, the pudgy, soft target who would never think to respond violently and immediately, and the aggressive women who are cool with aggressively attacking a guy and killing him would both seem to not be conducive to an age such as right after WWII. Of course the Manson girls were part of the whole post WWII boom, hippie era.
Wasn’t Cleopatra famous for her killing some of her family memebers and later use her charms on Julius Caesar to get rid of her brother so that she can rule.
Also Muhammad was poison by a Jewish women. Though this is not long after he conquerer her city, enslaving her and ordered the torture and beheading of her husband, so it was personal.
I am sure there are more