Compared to these challenges, Sullivan’s order that the watch officer find Ja Song Nam, the North Korean ambassador, was a snap. Ja was asleep in bed. He had not been told about the emerging crisis. North Korea did not have an Ops Center.
Sullivan knew the State Department had used the New York channel before. He had watched it being used in 2017 to negotiate the release of Otto Warmbier, an American student whom North Korea had detained in North Korea on trumped-up charges. Warmbier had been terribly mistreated in North Korea: when North Korea returned him to the United States, he was in a coma and would die a few weeks later. (The Warmbier family subsequently emerged as favorites of Haley, who felt that the family’s grief and ongoing lawsuit helped illustrate the fundamentally evil nature of the North Korean regime.)
Sullivan’s intended use of the New York channel was less humanitarian than pragmatic. He saw the moment not simply as an opportunity to punish North Korea for killing innocent civilians, many of them children, but more importantly as a chance to further isolate the Kim regime. He was not the only senior State Department official with this hardheaded sensibility: during Tillerson’s tenure, one of his aides, Brian Hook, had written a memo suggesting that human rights were useful largely as a means to “pressure, compete with, and outmaneuver” US adversaries. While many of Tillerson’s aides had departed with Tillerson, Hook had stayed on, even traveling with Pompeo to Pyongyang. Now, in consultation with Hook, Sullivan came to see the shootdown of BX 411 less as a crime to be avenged than as an opportunity to pressure, compete with, and outmaneuver Kim Jong Un.
The loss of life was tragic, Sullivan reasoned, but North Korea had backed itself into a corner. He calculated that the resulting pressure on North Korea would offer him his best chance at negotiating an end to North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs. “John thought he would offer North Korea a way out,” according to Hook, “but he wanted that way out to be a loss for Kim and a victory for us.”
Connected by the Ops Center to the North Korean ambassador, Sullivan explained that Sydney Seiler, the newly appointed US special representative for North Korea policy, would be on the 3:15 AM Amtrak out of Washington, arriving in Penn Station at 6:40 AM. Would the North Koreans take a meeting with him?
Ja agreed to meet with Seiler. After a brief discussion, the North Korean diplomat also agreed to ask the Chinese to host the meeting, although Sullivan secured his assurance that it would be a bilateral affair between the two representatives. “The Chinese just bring the donuts,” explained Hook later. No one notified Haley or Lerner.
The Church Lady
President Trump chafed under the order imposed by Francis. Indeed, the president called his chief of staff the “Church Lady”—an insult that he had initially used against Kelly, but which he applied to Francis with even more regularity. In truth, however, Francis was less severe than this nickname implies. He knew he could not change the president. He simply had to try to steer Trump as best he could.
Among his many measures to impose order on the White House, one thing Francis did not try to do was to prevent the president from using Twitter or other social media—even though Twitter remained a constant source of information that Francis and Kellogg believed was often misleading or false and too often tempted the president to make ill-considered remarks that would disrupt days or sometimes weeks of his staff’s careful preparations.
Francis and Kellogg had worked hard to persuade other governments not to take the president’s tweets too seriously. Francis’s predecessor Kelly had once told reporters, “Believe it or not, I do not follow the tweets,” and Francis made a point of repeating that statement as often as possible. This was part of a strategy to downplay the importance of these often inflammatory, but technically official presidential statements.
In fact, Francis did attempt to impose some order on what the president tweeted. He asked for the same thing Kelly had asked for—to be informed of what Trump planned to tweet before he did so—and tried to discourage the president from using Twitter to make major policy announcements. Even so, Francis told colleagues, he knew there would always be late-night or early-morning tweets that he did not see. His overall goal was simply “pushing the tweets in the right direction.”
But even such mild attempts to direct the president’s Twitter habit had proven difficult, especially when it came to Trump’s remarks about foreign leaders. In particular, his social-media bullying of Kim Jong Un had reached a new nadir following the collapse of the diplomatic thaw with North Korea in 2018. Of all the people President Trump blamed for the failure of negotiations with the Kim regime—and Pompeo, Kelly, and Bolton received their share of his animus—the person Trump held most responsible was Kim himself.
Of course, Trump could not fire the leader of North Korea with a tweet. But he could express his disappointment that their negotiations had come to naught. Thus, the collapse of the 2018 diplomatic effort was followed by a string of aggressive, baiting tweets that were impressively personal in nature.
Donald J. Trump @tehDonaldJTrump
That SHORT and FAT kid in North Korea is all talk and no action. He is doing nothing to de-nuke. Great opportunity missed. Too bad!
Donald J. Trump @tehDonaldJTrump
I have offered Rocketman a wonderful deal. De-nuke now and things will be much better! Or not. Maybe I should push my big Button! IT WORKS!
Donald J. Trump @tehDonaldJTrump
Little Rocketman has totally misrepresented denuke plan we offered. Deals can’t get made when there is no trust! Fat kid blew it and will be sorry. Sad!
Donald J. Trump @tehDonaldJTrump
De-nuke issue is made increasingly difficult by the fact that Little Rocketman is too weak to stand up to his generals!
Even more noteworthy than these broadsides was a series of tweets directed at Kim’s sister, Kim Yo Jong. This Twitterstorm appeared shortly after a Fox News segment on the collapse of US–North Korean negotiations and the possible role of Kim Yo Jong, all underneath a chyron reading, “NORTH KOREA’S IVANKA?”
Donald J. Trump @tehDonaldJTrump
Rocketman’s sister IS NOT North Korea’s IVANKA. Ivanka is 6 feet tall. She’s got the best body. Rocketman’s sister is flat as a board!
Donald J. Trump @tehDonaldJTrump
Some people say the problem is Little Rocktman’s sister. They think she’s a 10 but she’s a TOTAL ZERO.
Donald J. Trump @tehDonaldJTrump
Lightweight sister of Kim, a total ZERO, “begged” President Moon-SHINE to get me me to come to Pyongyang (and probably would do anything get me there). No THANKS!
At the time of these tweets, few in the United States regarded them as remarkable. Most Americans saw Trump’s remarks as simply the latest in a long line of inflammatory but politically inconsequential statements coming out of the White House, no different than the president’s occasional online feuds with Oprah Winfrey or Rosie O’Donnell. But in North Korea the tweets about Kim Yo Jong were seen as something altogether different.
The Narrow Stairs
At about 5:40 AM on the morning of March 21, the president awoke in his residence at Mar-a-Lago. He turned on the television but showered before finally sitting down before the screen.
Fox & Friends aired at 6:00 AM, about an hour before Moon was to begin his address. (In fact, Moon’s address one hour later would not be carried on any major American television stations because it was in Korean.) Instead, Fox & Friends, like other morning news programs, led with a general report on the shootdown of Flight 411.
Trump immediately called Francis. “What the hell is going on?”
“A South Korean civilian airliner was shot down,” the chief of staff remembered explaining to the president. “It may have been North Korea. We are in the lobby and can meet you in the Situation Room for a full briefing.”
“Okay. I have a . . .”
Francis said that Trump spent a moment searching for the right word.
“I have a . . . an a
ppointment with Bob.”
Francis explained to the commission that his goal was to keep the president calm and focused. “The briefing won’t take long, sir. We can schedule our work today around the tee time with Mr. Kraft. We can talk about it downstairs, sir.”
“Downstairs. Okay. Little Rocket Man won’t be around much longer if he keeps this up, huh?”
“No, sir, he’s really made a big mistake. See you downstairs.”
Trump put his phone down and got dressed. Because he was still planning to play eighteen holes with Bob Kraft, he picked out his typical golfing outfit of khakis, a white polo shirt, and a red hat. He put his phone in his pocket and then headed out toward the main lobby, where he could take a staircase down into the Situation Room.
When President Trump reached the steep, narrow stairs, he hesitated. A club member in the lobby saw him stop, then feel for his phone in his pocket.
Trump looked down the stairs, winding down into the basement. He often complained that he never got reception down there. The member saw the president do one last thing before going down. Trump took out his phone and tapped out a short tweet. Then he hit Send and began, ever so carefully, to walk down the stairs, one step at a time.
In the car on the way over to Mar-a-Lago, Francis’s phone buzzed, letting him know that the president had sent a tweet. Keith Kellogg was in the car.
“When General Francis read the tweet,” the national security adviser recalled later, “he put his head in his hands. I asked him what happened. He just said, ‘Clean up, aisle Trump.’”
4
The Noise of Rumors
The six South Korean missiles took about eleven minutes to reach their destinations in North Korea. At roughly 8:15 PM local time—7:15 AM in New York, long after President Trump had departed the basement at Mar-a-Lago—each missile slammed into its target, one after the other.
The South Korean missiles destroyed two buildings—the headquarters of the North Korean Air Force in Chunghwa and a villa at the primary Kim family leadership compound in Pyongyang. The exact number of fatalities is not known—nor will it ever likely be known, given the events that followed—but it seems that the loss of human life was minimal and confined to Air Force personnel and members of Kim Jong Un’s household staff.
With the strikes, South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in intended to send an unmistakable message of anger to North Korea’s leaders. He had wanted to make clear that he would not simply look the other way as they murdered so many innocents. But while it was born of anger, in the grand scheme of things the strike was a mere gesture. Moon had chosen to use only six long-range ballistic missiles against just two buildings because he wanted to avoid a war, not start one. A smaller strike would punish Kim Jong Un, Moon had concluded, but not at the cost of a wider war that might kill hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people.
Moon was, we now know, dead wrong.
“An Oppressive Silence”
The headquarters of North Korea’s Air Force was a large office building in an exurb of Pyongyang called Chunghwa. The main building was surrounded by smaller buildings. In front of the main building were a pair of statues—gleaming bronze likenesses of Kim Jong Un’s father and grandfather.
The three missiles that struck the main building at the Air Force headquarters left gaping wounds in the four-story structure. After a few seconds, it shuddered and then collapsed, burying everyone who was inside.
The South Korean military had not anticipated the total collapse of the main headquarters building. Although each Hyumoo-2 ballistic missile carried one ton of conventional high explosives, a modern steel-and-concrete structure can take a tremendous amount of punishment. But perhaps not if that steel and concrete are North Korean: according to defectors, construction workers in North Korea routinely failed to follow safety regulations, ignoring building codes and diluting cement mixtures with dangerous amounts of sand. Poorly constructed North Korean buildings had collapsed under far less strain than a missile strike. In May 2014, a residential tower in Pyongyang suddenly fell to the ground, its foundation totally disintegrating under the weight of the building.
When the structure of the Air Force office building slumped down on itself, the collapse severed Kim Jong Un’s link to North Korea’s air defense forces. As North Korea’s leader struggled to make sense of the strike, it would be some time before he was able to communicate with anyone in Chunghwa. Military personnel on site, as well as local civilians who heard the explosions and the sound of the building collapse, immediately began attempting to dig out survivors still trapped in the rubble. “When the building fell down, it was total chaos,” according to one survivor. “We just ran to the rubble and started digging people out with our hands. Soon, more senior officers arrived to direct our work, ordering some of us to move the statues and others to go into the bunker.”
According to accounts provided by prisoners of war, after several minutes of frantic digging, some troops were ordered to stop and instead evacuate the two monumental statues to safety. The adoration of objects representing members of the Kim family was a peculiar feature of the cult of personality that prevailed in North Korea at the time. No distinction was made between Kim and a likeness of him. This may be hard for those who are not North Korean to understand. In 2013, a traffic warden was awarded the title of “Hero of the Republic” for protecting the leader in an “unexpected situation.” Dissidents immediately speculated that she had foiled an assassination attempt, perhaps one disguised as a traffic accident. In fact, she had merely extinguished a trash fire next to a poster with an image of Kim Jong Un. The threat to the image was, in North Korea, synonymous with a threat to the man.
And so, amid the confusion at Chunghwa, airmen brought out a mobile crane to move the two statues to safety. They carefully lifted the statue of Kim Jong Il off its pedestal and placed it lying down, on its back, on a truck bed. They then hooked the crane to the statue of his father, Kim Il Sung, which was sunk in the mud where it had toppled during the strike. They hoisted it up and then laid it down next to the statue of Kim Il Sung in the truck bed. One soldier, later captured as a POW, told his interrogators that as the two statues were driven to the underground storage site, Kim Il Sung’s outstretched hand, damaged in the fall, appeared to wave to the soldiers still working frantically to rescue their comrades buried in the rubble.
Only once the statues had been moved to safety did the surviving commander send staff into the nearby underground bunker outfitted to serve as an alternate command center in the event of an attack—but the surviving personnel were not able to set up operations inside it and reconnect with Pyongyang for more than an hour. Some of this delay was due to the confusion and shock in the immediate aftermath of the building collapse as the search for survivors was organized and the statutes evacuated. But most of the time was lost to simple procedural steps; it took time to staff and activate the alternate facility. Much as some readers might like to think otherwise, this problem was not exclusive to North Korea. After smoke began pouring into the National Military Command Center (NMCC) beneath the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, the US Department of Defense took more than an hour to activate its alternate command center at Site R in rural Pennsylvania.
The scene at the Kim family residence was similarly chaotic. Kim’s lakeside villa was badly damaged in the strike, suffering direct hits by two of the three South Korean missiles. The explosions that ripped through the building killed a number of cooks, maids, and other household staff. Others were deafened by the explosion, knocked down by the blast, and pelted with debris. Still, the building remained standing, and the survivors who could do so stumbled out into the night. “After the blast, I couldn’t hear, and I could only breathe with a tremendous amount of pain,” one recounted. “Walking out of the building, there was an unbearable, oppressive silence.”
Neither Kim Jong Un nor any important members of his family were at the residence. Nor had anyone in South Korea expected them to be. M
embers of the Kim family were, after all, routinely spread across a vast web of palaces that stretched throughout North Korea: an enormous complex near the Chinese border at Samjiyon, for example, or an oceanside palace near Wonsan, or a lakefront compound near Kusong. Kim Jong Un had an entire administrative office dedicated to the upkeep of his estates and the management of their staff. When Kim took up piloting small airplanes, he had runways added at no fewer than five of his primary residences.
Despite South Korea’s designation of the Kim family residence outside Pyongyang as L-01 (“leadership target one”), President Moon and his aides had selected this site for attack not because North Korea’s dictator was likely to be there, but because he was likely not to be. At the same time, they chose it because it symbolized Kim just as much as any poster or statue.
The flesh-and-blood Kim vastly preferred being outside Pyongyang, either at the beach in Wonsan or in the mountains near Kusong. And because its leader was a dictator, the entire country bent to accommodate these and all of his other whims as well. North Korea’s Strategic Rocket Force even mothballed its main missile testing site in the country’s far, freezing north in order to shift test launches of long-range missiles—always big events under Kim Jong Un—to friendlier terrain where Kim might view them in comfort. Kim had watched one missile launch from atop a ski resort near Wonsan. Another launch was conducted from a lakeshore shared with his retreat in Kusong.
The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States Page 7