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COMMENT: 'Farewell Brother Kim Jong-nam - Job Done'

Charlie Xiaoping drinks 60% proof bailjiu in a drain-smelling bar off Poland Street, smokes fat, flat roll-ups and says the North Koreans had a number on Kim Jong-Nam since before Christmas.

He says two North Korean officials have checked out his body in the morgue in Kuala Lumpur to make sure it really is/was the half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

Charlie Xiaoping knows better than most about what goes on in the spook and waste trade in North Korea. He's from Tientsin, on the Chinese mainland.

He's got a second (maybe third - he's vague on this) cousin who works the night food can in America's Kunsan Air Base, in South Korea.

Charlie Xiaoping is 10 time zones away but he has spent the past 40 years waiting for the North-South Korea war and there isn't a cricket's chirp he doesn't hear.

It was Charlie who told me in 2013 that Kim Jong-un had ordered the execution of his uncle Chang Song-thaek. That was eight days before I read it in the New York Times.

Charlie Xiaoping knows, mostly. But this time? Kim Jong-nam was no threat to his brother.

Just liked playing the tables in the Macau casinos. Right?

Charlie says the CIA had got to him. Now that's different.

Got to him?

He says the Americans figured out five years back that there was no way that they were going to get a deal on nuclear weapon development with Kim Jong-un.

The Americans came to the conclusion that the options were difficult: get the Chinese to fix the problem, bomb the development facilities, or wait for the North Koreans to handle it.

The Chinese tried, but like the rest of the world had no influence.

The bomb option was too last resort and the North Koreans have a response bombing operation that includes a first strike on 35,000 US troops in South Korea, and on the same morning Hiroshima - with a second wave in Nagasaki.

The only realistic hope, says Charlie, was a palace revolution.

Hence the arrest and execution of Chang Song-t'aek. The Americans, he says, figured that the only hope was Kim Jong-nam.

No idealist and happy to play less dangerous tables, the CIA started to cultivate him during one of his trips.

Charlie stares into the distilled sorghum as if expecting a genie with the rest of the story. Only me.

If Charlie Xiaoping is just a bit right, then the CIA must figure there are some in North Korea who believe it can be done, but there isn't too much time to do it.

You get the nearest you will ever get to a nod from one whose grandpa was the famous itinerant apothecary of Tientsin, who administered mysterious powders to patients who never returned.

Could be this is what this is?

One of Charlie's potions that do little more than make you think?

On the other hand, Charlie is the only person I know who once watched movies in a bare apartment in Geneva with the man he says ordered the assassination of his brother Kim Jong-nam. Snake oil it is not.

He says Kim Jong-un has the number on those who still think palace revolution.

Remember, he says, Kim Jong-un executed Chang Song-thaek with a surface to air missile.

He says the dear leader has plenty left. Could be soon. And...?

And Mike Pompeo is the new Director of the CIA. The Kim Jong-nam file's on his desk.

Christopher Lee is the Forces Radio (BFBS) Defence Analyst. He can be heard every week on the only radio programme devoted to discussing matters of defence and security, Sitrep. To listen head here. To download, click here.