It is possible to believe almost anything about Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s erratic, unpredictable and little-known leader. And people do. In line with the regime’s tradition of obsessive secrecy, firm facts about the 33-year-old who rules the world’s last Soviet-style totalitarian state are as rare as a Pyongyang apology. Thus one of the most chilling tales about Kim is also largely unsubstantiated: how the young dictator, having inherited power and determined to be his own man, deliberately set about eliminating the senior apparatchiks who had grown rich and powerful under the tutelage of his late father, Kim Jong-il. As if unwitting actors in a devious, internecine plot from a Godfather movie, the pall-bearers who carried the elder Kim’s coffin during an elaborate state funeral ceremony in the capital in December 2011 have disappeared, died of unknown causes, or been purposefully eliminated, one by one, in the past five years. One of them, Jang Song-thaek, Kim’s uncle, former mentor and reputedly the second most important official in the country, was denounced, publicly humiliated and put to death in 2013. State media condemned Jang as a “traitor to the nation for all ages” and “despicable human scum”. Chinese newspapers reported gleefully that…