When a retired North Korean dancing girl crashed her Mercedes in Pyongyang a month ago, not a peep was heard from the world's most isolated Stalinist state about the scale of the tragedy to have befallen its paranoid leader Kim Jong Il.
Only yesterday, did it emerge that the 50-year-old woman who suffered severe head injuries and is now in a critical condition is the wife of the "Dear Leader" Mr Kim and mother of his heir apparent.
Until recently few had even known of Ko Yong-Hi's existence. She is not the 61-year-old dictator's "official wife". But clues gathered by North Korea watchers - including the fact that instructions have been issued to call her "the beloved mother" - lend weight to reports that her eldest son, Kim Jong Chul, 22, is in line to succeed Mr Kim. If the regime survives, that is.
Even as it struggles to extricate itself from the Iraqi quagmire the United States is turning up the pressure for "regime change" in Pyongyang. There is evidence that the personality cult that surrounds Mr Kim is teetering close to collapse. International food aid has been cut off on America's orders, and the country may soon see the famine conditions of a few years ago when three million people died of hunger and disease.
The crisis started to deepen a year ago when Kim Jong Il admitted running two covert nuclear weapons programmes, contravening a string of international agreements.
Under US pressure, China, Pyongyang's closest ally, is putting pressure on the North and it has now reportedly sent 150,000 troops to the border.
When the US attacked Iraq, Mr Kim, according to Korean sources, feared he would be the next target and defectors in Seoul say he fled to Russia in an armoured train. Certainly he disappeared from public view for several months.
But just last week, North Korea again set off international alarm bells by announcing that it had processed enough plutonium from 8,000 spent fuel rods to make up to six atomic bombs.
Yesterday, the Japanese daily newspaper Sankei Shimbun shed a chink of light on the lurid private life of the man behind the nuclear threat. It quoted a "Korean peninsula source" for its report on Ms Ko's road accident, but had no other details. Since the latest nuclear standoff began, growing numbers of high-ranking North Koreans have fled to the South, including Mr Kim's cook, his bodyguard and his hairdresser.
All have revealed astonishing details of a bizarre and feudal regime run as the private fiefdom of Mr Kim.
Kim Jong Il's younger sister runs the family's businesses which include gold, zinc and anthracite mining operations and the smuggling of opium, heroin and amphetamines. The CIA estimates that the family is worth $4bn [£2.4bn] apparently managed by a Swiss bank.
This wealth enables Mr Kim to lead the life of a leisured aristocrat with thoroughbred horses, speed boats, racing cars, a private pool in his residence and a cellar of vintage French wines and Hennessy Cognac plus a library with 16,000 films and a multinational team of personal chefs.
The most revealing stories have come from relatives of Sung Hae Rim, the former movie actress and a former wife. They reveal Mr Kim to be a man once tortured by romantic passion who later turned into a sex and food obsessed gourmet. Ms Sung was a glamorous starlet when she met the portly potentate in 1970, a time when he was obsessed with films.
Their love affair was kept secret for 20 years because she was the daughter of a wealthy South Korean landlord.
Kim Jong Nam, the actress's son by Mr Kim, was previously believed to have been the anointed heir to the leadership. His strange upbringing is described by his cousin Lee Nam-Ok who at 13 was called to Kim Jong Il's official residence to serve as the sole friend of Kim Jong Nam, then eight years old.
"We sometimes went around the city in a chauffeur-driven Benz but we were not allowed out of the car," Mr Lee said in an interview some years ago. They were restricted to a huge playroom stocked with every possible toy, book and film. Kim Jong Nam's favourite bedtime reading was Anne of Green Gables. At the age of 10, Kim Jong Nam was packed off to study at an international school in Geneva.
Sung Hae Rim herself gradually became terrified by Kim Jong Il's fits of rage and she fled to Moscow where she received treatment for depression, finally dying there in 2002.
When he returned from school in Geneva, Kim Jong Nam was given a job in the secret police, and turns up in defector's accounts as heading a team which carried out a purge in 1996 in which dozens of people were executed for running unauthorised trading businesses. In 2001, he was arrested in Japan after he and his entourage were discovered en route to Disneyland Tokyo travelling on Dominican Republic passports. After the incident in Japan, he fell out of favour and Kim Jong Il is now thought to favour the elder of Ko Yong-Hi's two sons.
Kim Jong Chul, like his half-brother, also studied in Switzerland where he lived under the assumed identity of the son of the driver and cleaning woman at the North Korean embassy.
He now works in the party's Department of Agitation and Propaganda.
Little is known about Ms Ko, other than that she is the daughter of parents who left Japan in the 1960s, lured by the promise of enjoying Mr Kim's socialist paradise.
Ms Ko reportedly caught Mr Kim's eye as one of 2,000 girls employed in the dictator's "pleasure groups". She was a dancer in the Mansudae Art Troupe in Pyongyang. Each "pleasure group" is composed of three teams - a "satisfaction team", which performs sexual services; a "happiness team," which provides massage and a "dancing and singing team".
These teams, recruited from girls' high schools, undergo a six-month training course before they are assigned to one of the dictator's 32 villas and palaces until the age of 25.
Reports filtering out early last month suggested that Ms Ko, had recently become obsessed about raising her profile into that of a national icon, on a similar footing to Kim Jong Il's revolutionary fighter mother. Before the accident she had begun styling herself the "Mother of Pyongyang" and insisted the state media broadcast propaganda about her.
According to a bodyguard to the regime who defected: "The National Security Department warns that anyone who criticises the 'Mother of Pyongyang' will be strictly punished as a political criminal."
There have been intriguing hints of a looming power struggle. One North Korea watcher in Seoul said: "To make her second son Jong-Woon the successor, Ms Ko has ordered the Workers Party and high officials to call Jong-Woon the 'Morning Star King'."
Yu Suk-Ryul at the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security think-tank in Seoul said yesterday that the North Korean dictator deliberately maintained a veil of secrecy around his dynasty.
"His royal families are hidden in a veil as a way of worshipping the Kim Jong Il family."
A FAMILY AFFAIR
Ko Yong-Hi
Born in Japan to ethnic Korean parents, she came to the dictator's attention when he saw her perform in a state dance troupe. The couple have two sons and since her elevation to being "the beloved mother" it is thought one of the sons is being groomed to succeed Kim Jong Il.
Sung Hae Rim
For two decades this North Korean film star lived secretly with the dictator and bore his eldest son. She eventually tired of Kim's whims and fled to Moscow where she died last year.
Kim Young Sook
Chosen as a suitable bride for Kim Jong Il by his father in the early 1970s, she is "the official wife".
Kim Jong Sook
One of the nation's heroes, Kim Jong Il's mother was born in 1917. She joined Kim Il Sung's fighters at the age of 18, later marrying him and bearing the present dictator. She died aged 32 when Kim Jong Il was just seven.
Kim Kyung Hee
The dictator's younger sister enjoys the title First Lady, and is one of the country's most powerful figures. She is married to Chang Song Taek.
Kim Jong Nam
Son of the dictator with the movie actress Sung Hae Rim, Kim Jong Nam had a bizarre upbringing lavished with toys but rarely allowed out. Previously seen as the heir apparent, he was arrested in Japan in 2001 as he attempted to travel to Tokyo Disneyland on a forged passport.
Kim Jong Chol
Possibly the favourite to succeed Kim Jong Il, this 22-year-old is Kim's son with the former dancing girl Ko Yong-Hi. He was educated in Geneva. His younger brother Kim Jong Woon was recently renamed "Morning Star King" by his mother, according to some defectors' reports, suggesting he may be her choice.