Staff members had long been concerned about Trump’s time outside of the Oval Office, even when he was staying at the White House. “Once he goes upstairs [to the residence], there’s no managing him,” one administration insider said. It was also clear that staff were concerned about flows of information, including social media and television. And yet, the president was the president. “But if he wants to watch [television], it’s not like we can say, ‘Oh, the TV doesn’t work,’” a staffer remarked. Recognizing this problem, Francis sought to improve the overall quality of information available to the president, but he accepted that there would always be some things he could not control.
The president’s insistence on spending time at Mar-a-Lago made Francis’s job much harder, increasing the amount of unstructured time available to the president while physically isolating him from staff who might otherwise keep him engaged and focused. But Trump viewed his time at Mar-a-Lago as an escape from the pressures of the White House—and from Francis. The president rarely scheduled formal meetings during this time, opting instead to play golf.
While he was staying at Mar-a-Lago, it was also unusual for President Trump to receive a routine intelligence briefing, which would have required him to go down into the SCIF in the basement fallout shelter. Some aides suggested that this was because the president was uncomfortable walking down stairs, although others disputed that claim as “absurd” and indicated that Trump would go down to the SCIF when necessary.
In addition to isolating the president from his key staff, Trump’s time in Palm Beach placed him in close and often unpredictable contact with club members. In one case, a golf club member invited a New York Times reporter as a guest and then introduced the reporter to Trump—who then agreed to give a thirty-minute, on-the-record interview without a single aide present.
Francis understood the challenges posed by Mar-a-Lago, but he also understood that the president needed time away from the demands of serving as president and his mounting legal problems. As a result, the chief of staff did little to control Trump’s time at Mar-a-Lago beyond encouraging him to avoid the dining room. In retrospect, the chief of staff’s hands-off approach at Mar-a-Lago appears to have made it all the more attractive to the president as a home-away-from-home.
On the afternoon of Friday, March 20, Trump arrived at Mar-a-Lago alone. First Lady Melania Trump and their son, Barron, were in New York, at Trump Tower.
When Trump spoke briefly with Francis at 5:06 PM, the chief of staff encouraged the president to skip the dining room and take dinner in his room.
Francis was looking forward to a relatively uneventful Saturday. As usual during the president’s trips to Mar-a-Lago, no formal intelligence briefing was slated for March 21. The only item on Trump’s schedule was a round of golf with his old friend Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots.
Tee Time
The crash of an airliner in South Korea had been reported in the American press shortly after the loss of Flight 411 at 11:28 PM Eastern Daylight Time on Friday. But it was not public knowledge that the aircraft had been shot down until the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), the official news outlet of Kim Jong Un’s government, issued its statement more than an hour later, at 1:11 PM on Saturday in Seoul—just after midnight in Palm Beach.
After the North Korean announcement, Francis conferred with Kellogg about whether they should inform the president. It was unclear if Trump was still awake. They briefly discussed calling the residence at Mar-a-Lago. “I remember Jack looked at me and then looked down at his phone,” Kellogg recalled to this commission’s investigators, “and then he said, ‘We’ll know pretty shortly if he’s still awake.’” They both checked Twitter, but saw no new updates to Trump’s Twitter feed. The newest tweet was still an angry lambasting of John Bolton’s new memoir.
If Trump had gone to bed, Francis concluded, it would be a mistake to wake him. The president would need to be well rested and alert for the coming day of intense discussions with the South Koreans, Japanese, and other world leaders as they attempted to contain the crisis in East Asia.
Kellogg looked at the schedule and suggested that they let Kraft know that the president might be unable to keep their tee time. Francis disagreed. “We’re going to have to be very careful not to disrupt his normal routine,” the chief of staff recalled telling Kellogg. “This is dangerous business, and we need to keep him calm and focused.” They worried about the appearance of Trump playing golf during the crisis, but in the end they decided it would be easier to manage the fallout from the press than the fallout from the president.
Kellogg asked Francis what time they should inform President Trump of the North Korean attack. Francis said that they should allow him to continue with his normal routine, as he would on any normal day—that is, to awake around 5:30, turn on the news, and start making telephone calls. Invariably, his first call would be to Francis, who could then ask the president to come down into the SCIF for a briefing. The plan was simply to let the president sleep and try to treat the day as normally as possible, not interfering with his routine. “We saw it on foreign trips all the time,” Francis told investigators later. “When you disrupted his schedule, he got really cranky.”
In the meantime, Francis and Kellogg decided to move to the SCIF at Mar-a-Lago and begin a long, sleepless night of attempting to get ahead of the emerging crisis. Kellogg went there immediately so as to place a call to his South Korea counterpart, Chung Eui-yong. Chung’s office said that he was in a meeting and would call Kellogg back.
Francis, on the other hand, did not go immediately down into the SCIF with Kellogg. Instead, he first stopped by the rooms of the military aides traveling with the president. Among their other duties, these five mid-ranking officers took turns carrying the president’s Emergency Satchel—the bag, also known as the “football,” that contained the communications information that would allow the president to order a nuclear strike.
Francis spoke with each of the aides in turn. Later, he would insist that he was careful not to say anything that might be seen as disloyal or questioning the president’s competence. Instead, he simply informed the officers that the next few days were going to be stressful and that, if the president should ask any of them to do anything unusual, they should check with the chief of staff first.
Long Night in Turtle Bay
While President Trump slept and Francis and Kellogg readied for the day ahead, the staff of the State Department Operations Center—the hub that maintains around-the-clock communications for American diplomats—was busy with preparations of its own. Soon, one of the country’s top ambassadors would be working feverishly as well.
The “Ops Center” contacted Nikki Haley, at the time the US ambassador to the United Nations, at 11:22 PM on March 20 to inform her that a South Korean airliner had crashed and later to inform her that North Korea had taken credit for shooting it down. This call began an intense, nightlong period of diplomatic maneuvering by Ambassador Haley. Her diplomatic efforts, conducted in isolation from those of the White House, have come under scrutiny from critics who believe that the chaotic and uncoordinated response by the Trump administration may have allowed the crisis to careen out of control.
When the Ops Center called, Haley had been asleep in her apartment at United Nations Plaza, a residence leased by the Department of State. Haley rarely worked late. Instead, she had made a special effort to maintain a semblance of a normal family life, keeping regular hours, attending her son’s basketball games, and making time to see family.
Haley’s political ambitions, however, had often interrupted her family’s peace. Her campaign adviser when she ran for governor of South Carolina, Will Folks, later alleged that he’d had an affair with Haley during the campaign. She denied the rumors, but many people both in and outside of the US government believed Folks, particularly after he published text messages and phone logs between himself and Ms. Haley. Of particular interest was a list of late-night phone calls, inc
luding one that began at 2:24 AM and ended 146 minutes later. Haley was adamant that the lengthy calls were work-related. Folks was, after all, her campaign manager.
Once in office, even uglier rumors about Haley began to spread, owing in no small part to a thinly veiled allegation in a 2018 book, Fire and Fury by journalist Michael Wolff, that Haley was the object of the “special attention” of President Trump. The rumors were not true, and Haley found them disgusting and sexist. Even Folks had said he found them impossible to believe. And yet Haley felt compelled to deny them publicly.
“The worst part,” according to a foreign service officer who worked in Haley’s office, “is that she had to know Trump was the one telling people.” Trump had famously posed as his own publicist to spread rumors to gossip columnists about supposed affairs he’d had with a number of well-known women—including Carla Bruni, the first lady of France, who had been compelled to come forward to deny Trump’s boasts. Aides thought that Haley would have been a fool not to realize that it was Trump himself who was boasting to his friends about what she had done to stay in his good graces, both to boost his fragile ego and to diminish her standing.
As a result of this backbiting, Haley was careful not to do anything that would breathe life into the rumors about the nature of her relationship with President Trump. “Short of a nuclear war,” the foreign service officer explained, “Nikki Haley was not calling Donald Trump after hours.”
Nor did Haley, after learning of the North Korean attack on BX 411, attempt to contact John Sullivan, the acting US secretary of state. Trump, despite his tweet promising a new national security team, had failed to nominate a replacement for ousted secretary of state Mike Pompeo, leaving Sullivan in his second stint as acting secretary.
According to Haley, she did not attempt to contact Acting Secretary of State Sullivan on the night of March 20 because he was traveling. She was “not sure where John [Sullivan] was or what time it was there,” she later told commission investigators, and she did not want to expend valuable time trying to track him down. Others, however, have pointed to a general sense within Haley’s office that Sullivan’s staff was either nonresponsive or unhelpful. Some aides felt that Sullivan remained loyal to ousted secretary of state Rex Tillerson and was openly hostile to Haley, seeing her as ambitious and devious.
The lack of coordination within the State Department was in large part a function of the vast number of senior positions that remained unfilled during the Trump administration—including the top job. The State Department’s Policy Planning Office, which was normally charged with developing long-term strategy, had instead assumed control over day-to-day operations that should have been conducted by assistant secretaries—officials who did not exist because they had never been nominated, let alone confirmed. Even under Tillerson and Pompeo, decision-making would often grind to a halt owing to lack of staffing. “The State Department was like a ghost ship,” one foreign service officer explained.
Still, Sullivan was well liked within the State Department and generally seen as pragmatic and effective. His popularity, however, worked against him with Trump, who saw him as a holdover from Tillerson’s time as secretary of state. Sullivan’s relationship with the president made whatever support he enjoyed from State Department staffers irrelevant and, possibly, counterproductive. “She’s no idiot,” this foreign service officer said of Haley. “Trump thought Sullivan was a swamp guy. He hated those guys so much that the fact that she went around [Sullivan] and humiliated him would be a plus.”
Rather than contacting Sullivan, Haley called her deputy in Washington, Jon Lerner. Lerner had been appointed with no foreign policy experience—he was a political strategist who handled analytics on both of Haley’s campaigns for governor. To the extent that Lerner had a foreign policy outlook, he harbored a general anti-communism that, by his own description, had extended into a broad distrust of regimes that he saw as anti-American. Haley called him “Lemon” because of his dour demeanor.
In the course of their late-night phone call, Haley and Lerner settled on a strategy to use the shootdown, and North Korea’s belligerent response, to drive a deep and permanent wedge between China and North Korea. And so Haley’s second call after Lerner was to the Chinese mission and its ambassador, Ma Zhaoxu.
If Haley’s political career had rewarded her for her obvious passion, Ma’s had taught him to keep his composure. Ma had first won notoriety as a college student in China when that country was slowly opening to the outside world. Improbably, he had been named best speaker in an international debate competition in 1985. In the 1980s, to Chinese people, who were generally unable to even travel outside the country, the sight of a slim Chinese student beating foreigners in debates was a source of real pride and brought him a kind of celebrity. (Ma still met people on the street in China who remembered him from the 1980s.) From there, Ma rose steadily through the ranks of the Chinese foreign ministry, eventually serving as its spokesperson. Where many of his predecessors had been prickly, Ma had a way of appearing completely unruffled, remaining calm in the face of hostile questions. When asked about Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Prize–winning author imprisoned by the Chinese authorities, Ma calmly asserted that “there are no dissidents in China.” Ma was never defensive as the press spokesman. His appointment as ambassador to the UN was intended to signal China’s confidence in its suddenly very important place in the world.
Ambassador Haley’s effort to make the shootdown a turning point in relations between Beijing and Pyongyang fell flat. She implored Ma to think about the schoolchildren on Flight BX 411, but he was unruffled. Ma merely noted that the loss of life was regrettable, but that there had been many regrettable aviation accidents over the years. Haley even tried a veiled threat, warning that this was the sort of event that might very well prompt a military response from the United States. Ma said that this, too, would be regrettable—one senseless tragedy begetting another. He remained utterly unmoved.
In retrospect, it seems unlikely that any Chinese diplomat—whether possessed of Ma’s talents or not—would have allowed himself to be drawn into colluding with the United States against his own foreign ministry. “I have no idea what Haley was thinking,” admitted a former State Department official. “She had to realize that Ma wasn’t going for a walk in the woods with her.” Instead, Ma suggested that Haley speak with the North Koreans directly, offering to host the meeting in his office.
Ma’s proposal appears to have caught Ambassador Haley by surprise. The United States did not have diplomatic relations with North Korea. Within North Korea, Sweden was the “protecting power” for US interests, serving as an embassy by proxy. In the United States, North Korea had a mission at the United Nations, a line of communication that diplomats sometimes called “the New York channel.” Now Ma was suggesting that Haley activate this channel.
Haley was unsure how to respond. She ended the call, telling Ma she would call back.
The ambassador and Lerner conferred again by phone about whether to take the meeting offered by Ma. Lerner was strongly against it: using the New York channel would reward North Korea for the shootdown, he argued, and holding the meeting at the Chinese offices would convey weakness on the part of the Americans. They decided that they needed to give the Chinese time to worry—for the possibility of a military response to set in. Some of Haley’s aides have said that her political ambitions clouded her judgment about what she might achieve. Haley and Lerner dispute this strenuously. Meeting with the North Koreans would, in their view, have sent the wrong signal.
Haley called Ma back at 2:42 AM and said that, without a formal apology from North Korea, no meeting would be possible. Ma said that he regretted her decision, and that he would miss her presence in the morning. This was when Haley became aware that the State Department had agreed to meet with North Korea’s representatives without informing her.
The New York Channel
Although Haley did not know “where John [Sullivan] was or what time it
was there,” the Ops Center did. At the same time that one watch officer at the communications hub had contacted Haley, another had reached Sullivan as he was traveling abroad. The officer had quickly informed the acting secretary of state about North Korea’s attack on BX 411.
Sullivan, after thinking about it for a few minutes, settled on an unusually aggressive step: he asked the Ops Center to call the North Korean ambassador in New York immediately.
While the State Department’s uncoordinated attempts to manage the emerging crisis have come under considerable criticism, we feel obliged to note that, by all accounts, the State Department Operations Center functioned efficiently through the night of March 20. This commendable performance is in keeping with the center’s record of fast and effective management of communications between diplomats. Several historical examples can help to contextualize the center’s performance on March 20 and throughout the turmoil that followed.
For instance, Hillary Clinton has often told a story—which she repeated for the benefit of this commission—about being patched through to a visiting ambassador during her tenure as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013. Only later would she learn that, at the time she had asked to be put in touch with him, the ambassador did not have his cell phone, his staff knew he was out to dinner but not where, and the hotel concierge did not know which of three restaurants he had recommended the ambassador had chosen, if any. The Ops Center called all three, texted a picture of the ambassador to each manager, and found him. The Ops Center tracked down the ambassador so quickly that Clinton wasn’t even aware there had been a problem. Similarly, at one point during her own service as secretary of state from 1997 to 2001, Madeleine Albright needed to reach a diplomat who was out of contact at a football game. The Ops Center arranged to have the scoreboard flash a message for him to find a pay phone.
The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States Page 6