Kim arriving at Singapore Airport
North Korea dictator Kim Jong Un arrived in Singapore for his summit with President Trump with security on his mind — dispatching decoy planes from Pyongyang to thwart anyone who might try to attack him and packing his own food for his visit to try to prevent poisoning.
USAtoday reports that the North Korean leader also took defensive measures to prevent intelligence agencies from trying to glean information about his health: He’s packed his own toilet.
The regime dispatched a commode to “deny determined sewer divers insights into to the supreme leader’s stools,” The Chosunilbo, one of South Korea’s biggest circulated newspapers, reports.
It’s not unusual for the hermetic kingdom’s leader to travel with his own toilet in his infrequent travels.
For his April meeting with South Korean President Moon Jae-in in the border village of Panmunjom — the first meeting between North and South Korean leaders in more than a decade — the North Koreans also dispatched a portable toilet for Kim.
He brought his own pens and pencils to the Panmunjom meeting and his staff wiped off anything he touched so as not leave even a fingerprint, according to the New Yorker magazine.
Kim takes similar precautions during his travels inside North Korea to inspect military bases and state-run factories, according to South Korea news agency DailyNK.
The North Korean leader’s concerns that spies might seek to investigate his bodily waste might have some historical precedent.
In 2016, former Soviet agent Igor Atamanenkos said that while doing research in the archives of the Russian secret services he found evidence that the secret police in the 1940s under Joseph Stalin analyzed excrement of foreign leaders — including China’s Mao Zedong — as part of its effort to construct psychological portraits.
Trump and Kim are set to meet Tuesday morning (Monday evening in the United States). The two will hold a one-on-one meet, with translators only, an expanded meeting with aides and a working lunch, according to the White House.
Trump is expected to offering to lift economic sanctions on North Korea and provide other forms of economic assistance if it agrees to give up its nuclear weapons programs.
