Of course, discomfort could not be entirely eliminated for the supreme leader. At the moment he was informed of the explosions around Pyongyang, for example, Kim was standing in an unheated warehouse near Kusong, watching a crew prepare a long-range missile for a test the next day.
The United States was completing an annual war game hosted with South Korea, and an enormous number of forces were massed in South Korea for the exercises. From a North Korean point of view, the presence of so many enemy forces was indistinguishable from preparations for an invasion, and so North Korea always placed its own armed forces on alert for the duration of the exercises. Indeed, in recent years North Korea had begun staging missile launches to show that two could play at war. “Every year, you practiced invading us,” Jo Yong Won, a close aide to Kim, explained to his interrogators. “So every year, we practiced repelling your invasion with our nukes. It was balanced, like the Taeguk,” he added, referring to the national Korean icon that resembled the yin and yang. This ancient symbol represented interdependence and complementarity—principles that, in retrospect, were vital to the tenuous peace that had been maintained on the Korean Peninsula until this fateful moment.
The Third Channel
The missile test whose preparations Kim Jong Un was observing on the night of March 21 was to be part of North Korea’s response to the annual American war games. A long-range missile launch, it was intended to simulate a nuclear attack against Guam. During the war game, American bombers had taken off from Guam, flown to a South Korean bombing range, and simulated a strike on the North. It was now North Korea’s turn to simulate striking Guam, demonstrating the ability to destroy those bombers with nuclear weapons before they could even take off.
In the warehouse near Kusong, Kim was watching a group of soldiers bolting a dummy warhead to a long-range missile when Choe Ryong Hae, his most important aide, whispered in his ear that there were reports of explosions in Pyongyang. Choe suggested that they immediately seek shelter. Kim agreed.
A small party was traveling with Kim—Choe, a handful of important missile engineers, and Kim’s sister, Kim Yo Jong. They immediately walked out of the warehouse and then into the basement of a nearby building. A table and chairs were brought in so that Kim could sit down while his aides tried to figure out what was happening in Pyongyang.
In the basement, Kim and his aides discovered that their cell phones were not working. They were largely cut off from any communication with Pyongyang.
Despite the common impression of North Korea before the war as a “hermit kingdom” cut off from the outside world, there were in fact more than three million cell-phone users in North Korea by 2015, largely located in and around Pyongyang. These users relied on a single state telecommunications network that was provided by a North Korean joint venture with an Egyptian firm called Orascom. The North Korean cellular network was called Koryolink.
Koryolink was a single cell-phone network that offered three separate services—one service for local North Koreans, a second service for foreigners, and a third service for government officials that was encrypted. This “third channel” was in fact the primary method used by senior leaders to communicate with one another because it was the only encrypted communications channel that North Korean leaders believed was secure from American and South Korean eavesdropping. According to Ahmed El-Noamany, an Egyptian national who served as technical director of the network from 2011 to 2013, only high-ranking officials had SIM cards that could access the third channel. North Korea relied on this channel, El-Noamany explained, because sanctions had prevented North Korea from building its own secure military communications system.
The “third channel” was not immune to disruption, however. As soon as people in and around Pyongyang saw and heard the explosions at the Kim family compound there, rumors began to spread. Cell-phone users in Pyongyang began calling and texting one another, quickly generating a mass call event that overloaded the telecommunications system. Because all three channels—domestic, foreign, and governmental—relied on the same physical network, as the calls flooded Koryolink the third channel became largely unavailable to North Korea’s leaders. Apart from sporadic text messages and calls, cell communication all but ground to a halt.
Kim Jong Un appears to have become extremely unsettled while sitting in the basement in Kusong with little or no cell-phone service. He was not accustomed to the spartan accommodations of the makeshift shelter. He was in the dark, literally and figuratively. “The supreme leader was very uneasy. He really did not like being underground or uncomfortable,” explained Kim’s aide Jo Yong Won. “The easiest way to see if he was unhappy was to watch how much he smoked. It was hard to breathe in that little room, with him smoking so much. But of course no one dared ask him to stop.”
For Kim Jong Un and his aides, the sudden inability to communicate with Pyongyang appeared to be no coincidence. “We assumed it was an American cyber-attack,” Jo said, then added, “wouldn’t you?”
“Plotting Bastards”
With the spotty cell-phone service in the Kusong shelter, Kim Jong Un had only intermittent and unreliable updates about the situation in Pyongyang. The absence of a steady stream of reliable information led Kim Jong Un to jump to a number of conclusions based on his strongly held beliefs about the United States and South Korea. Understanding these views is essential to understanding the decisions that Kim now made.
During the extensive military operation to stabilize the shattered, post-conflict Korean Peninsula, US and United Nations forces captured thousands of hours of secret recordings of meetings, phone calls, and conferences that detailed the decision-making process of the North Korean leadership in March 2020. It is unclear whether the participants knew they were being recorded, although surviving regime functionaries said that eavesdropping and surveillance were so pervasive that they expected monitoring to be the norm. Others said that the recording reflected a culture of documentation. Although aides were always photographed taking notes, apparently many recordings also were made by personnel who wanted a record of Kim’s decisions so that they could track the implementation of his edicts. Until this material became available, the United States had only a few minutes of clandestinely taped conversations of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il—and nothing from the era of Kim Jong Un—on which to base its assessment of North Korea’s decision-making.
The image of Kim Jong Un that emerges in these transcripts is that of a leader who, much like Saddam Hussein, was highly intelligent but also frequently ill-informed about the United States and the outside world. Kim was, to borrow a phrase used to describe Saddam, a “curious mix of shrewdness and nonsense.” It was this mix of shrewdness and nonsense that, in the basement at Kusong, filled in the gaps and connected the dribs and drabs of information that were trickling in.
Above all else, Kim believed that the United States in general and Donald Trump specifically were embarked on an active campaign to assassinate him. Moreover, Kim believed that the United States was conspiring with China to replace him with another more compliant member of his extended family. Kim frequently referred to Americans in the transcripts as 불쾌한 새끼—which translates roughly as “plotting bastards.”
The tapes make clear that, over the past years, Kim’s concerns about his personal safety led him to see plots and conspiracies lurking everywhere. And Kim acted on these concerns repeatedly, purging officials whom he believed to be disloyal. In 2013, a young Kim Jong Un concluded that his uncle, Jang Song Taek, was working with China to establish a kind of regency over him. Kim acted decisively, ordering security forces to publicly drag his uncle out of a meeting. Images of Jang being led away from the meeting and then appearing, badly beaten, before a North Korean court were published along with an announcement that Jang had been executed for treason. Kim then ordered a purge of dozens of Jang’s lieutenants. There were often grisly stories about how the aides had been executed, involving anti-aircraft machine guns and starving dogs. The North Koreans
simply said that Jang had been shot.
Kim also ordered the murder of his half-brother Kim Jong Nam, a plan that took years to execute but was eventually implemented successfully in April 2017, when North Korean agents rubbed a nerve agent in his face at the Kuala Lumpur airport. Even after Kim Jong Nam’s murder, North Korean agents continued to make attempts on the lives of his children. Even by the standards of dictators, Kim was particularly motivated to eliminate threats from within his family, a tendency that some of the people close to him attributed to his mother’s background. “She was born in Japan, and her father worked for [the Japanese] during the war,” one former aide explained. “Just mentioning that . . .” The transcript notes that the aide finished the sentence with a gesture, drawing his hand across his throat like a knife.
The picture of Kim that emerges from these tapes is consistent with prewar intelligence assessments, although it is deeper and more complex. Intelligence assessments correctly judged that Kim was a “rational actor” motivated by clear, long-term goals that revolved around ensuring regime survival—that is, his own survival. Speaking about Kim’s behavior prior to the war, Yong Suk Lee, deputy assistant director of the CIA’s Korea Mission Center, said succinctly: “There’s a clarity of purpose in what Kim Jong Un has done.”
What the tapes and interview reveal, however, is that Kim’s clarity of purpose was not always matched with a clarity about the reality of the United States or South Korea. Kim was driven by a sense that plots against his life, both real and imagined, were constantly being hatched in Washington, Seoul, and Beijing. Sometimes these suspicions became public. In October 2017, for example, North Korea alleged that it had discovered a plot to assassinate Kim Jong Un that it claimed was carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency and South Korea’s National Intelligence Service.
Statements by American leaders stoked Kim’s fears. While campaigning for the American presidency in early 2016, for instance, Donald Trump had suggested that his administration would “get China to make that guy disappear in one form or another very quickly.” (The Office of the Director of National Intelligence [DNI] declined to make available documents relating to prewar intelligence operations within North Korea, although DNI did provide the commission with a letter strongly denying that there had been “any US-directed effort to assassinate Kim Jong Un” prior to the events of March 2020.) Trump’s aggressive stance on Kim was frequently on display in his tweets about the North Korean dictator.
The North Koreans had initially dismissed Trump’s angrier missives on Twitter. But Kim had, according to aides, expected that Washington’s talk of regime change would end once he obtained nuclear-armed missiles that could strike the United States. This assumption was rooted in history: China tested its first nuclear weapon in 1964, and within a few years Richard Nixon had opened relations with the People’s Republic. Kim had believed that the 2018 diplomatic thaw, brief though it was, proved that North Korea’s nuclear and missile capabilities left the United States with no choice but to accept him, just as it had accepted Mao’s China.
Once negotiations collapsed, however, Trump’s tweets took on a more ominous quality for the North Koreans. Far more than the bomber flights or military exercises, it was the slow accretion of personal attacks on Kim and his family that led the dictator to conclude that Trump could not deal with North Korea as an equal, as one nuclear power to another. And in particular, Trump’s personal attacks on Kim’s sister following the collapse of negotiations had disturbed Kim Jong Un deeply. North Korean propaganda, even at its most hateful and vitriolic, had never once mentioned the American president’s daughter or his family members.
From Kim Jong Un’s perspective, the meaning of Trump’s tweets—whether about Kim Yo Jong or Kim Jong Un himself—could not be more clear: the American president wanted to humiliate the North Korean dictator, remove him from power, and kill his entire family. Trump had hinted at such an outcome before, of course, but what Kim had once been able to dismiss as rhetoric he now viewed as a deeply personal feud.
Kim Jong Un was not irrational. But he was vigilant, to a fault, about threats to his person and to his rule. He had learned that, in the rough-and-tumble politics of North Korea, the survivor was the person who acted decisively, eliminating his adversaries before their plots could take shape. And it is clear from recordings and interviews that, by March 21, 2020, Kim absolutely believed that attempts on his life were real and ongoing—and that his aides were unwilling to question this belief out of fear that Kim would conclude that they too were plotting against him. Now every lesson that Kim Jong Un had learned about how to preserve his grip on North Korea was pushing him inexorably toward the abyss.
The View from the Basement
Sitting in a cold basement after a missile attack on his family compound, Kim Jong Un quickly concluded that the United States was making good on its threats: the air strikes were an attempt to kill him, the most brazen attempt yet. The evidence before him, at least as he understood it, was quite persuasive on this score.
First, Kim believed that the United States had engineered this crisis, staging the provocation with an American bomber. His aides were adamant that the aircraft had been a military plane, not a civilian airliner. After all, the aircraft had no transponder. What civilian airliner didn’t use a transponder? And had it not followed exactly the course of a bomber overflight from only a few weeks before? Moon’s speech, whose text Kim’s staff in Pyongyang finally managed to relay to him, changed no minds in the basement. Kim saw the speech as more evidence that Moon was no different than any other South Korean leader, that he was simply doing what American leaders told him to do. “Moon’s speech, in which he played along with the American ruse, just showed that he could not be trusted,” Kim’s close aide Jo Yong Won told his interrogators, still insisting that the aircraft had been a military plane. “He was a puppet like the rest.”
Second, over the past month the United States had massed a large number of troops, aircraft, and ships on and around the Korean Peninsula as part of the annual FOAL EAGLE/KEY RESOLVE military war game conducted with South Korea. While those troops were present as part of the annual military exercise, North Korean officials had long believed that any war would begin under the cover of this exercise. As a result, Kim’s military aides were hypervigilant in looking for any evidence that the war games were no exercise. The fact that the US–South Korean war games in 2020 were bigger than ever loomed large in their estimation.
Third, why was the cell-phone network not working? For many years, the United States and North Korea had engaged in a battle to hack into and disrupt each other’s computer networks. In December 2014, North Korea suffered a massive distributed denial-of-service attack that knocked down its internet after President Barack Obama promised a “proportionate response” to allegations that North Korea had hacked the company Sony Entertainment in retaliation for an unflattering portrayal of Kim in the film The Interview. And in late 2017, the United States accused North Korea of conducting another large-scale cyber-attack called Wanna Cry. US officials declined to specify what steps the United States took in response. But it is clear that, as a result of the ongoing campaign of hacking and counter-hacking, North Korean military officials had long concluded that any American attack on North Korea was likely to begin with a cyber-attack against North Korea’s critical infrastructure, particularly the communications channel used by North Korea’s senior leaders.
It is conceivable that aides might have presented Kim with reasons for doubt. Perhaps the aircraft had suffered some kind of electrical problem that disabled the transponder? Maybe the larger war games were nothing more than a reflection of the unusually tense atmosphere? And wouldn’t explosions in Pyongyang be expected to result in a huge volume of calls and text messages that might overload the network? But there is no evidence in any of the transcripts that his aides attempted to contradict Kim. This should not be surprising, given that he was already convinced that a plot on his life
was afoot. After all, an attempt to deny the existence of a plot would have only led Kim to suspect that the denier was one of the conspirators.
In fact, the small number of Kim’s surviving aides remain convinced to this day that the aircraft was in fact a bomber and that the United States staged the provocation as a pretext for an invasion under the cover of the annual FOAL EAGLE/KEY RESOLVE exercise. “History is written by victors,” Kim’s aide Jo told his interrogators. “And even if this was all a coincidence, how do you explain the missiles?”
Neither Kim nor his aides seriously considered the possibility that the missiles were South Korean or that they had been launched without the approval of the United States. The immediate assumption around Kim was that the missiles were either American or fired on orders from the United States. “We actually did discuss the fact that Moon claimed that he ordered the strike,” Jo told his interrogators. “Kim just laughed when Choe said that.”
Kim’s sister Kim Jo Yong was one of the few North Koreans other than Kim to have spoken with Moon or to have met the South Korean president in person. She played an impor-tant role in shaping Kim’s thinking at this point. According to Jo, “She smiled and said, very sweetly, ‘Don’t forget that I too spoke privately with [Moon] Jae-in during the Olympics. He doesn’t take a shit without permission from the Americans.’ I had never heard her swear before. I was very shocked.”
Kim was also receiving inaccurate information from beyond the basement. South Korea had launched only six missiles against two targets, but in the rumors racing through a panicked Pyongyang, the attack had grown to involve dozens of missiles against a much larger number of targets. It is quite common for rumors in a crisis to provide a distorted picture of events, all the more so in a closed society like North Korea, where the most important news usually arrives in the form of a rumor. Even the supreme leader had to pay attention to informal information networks. In the first thirty minutes after the attacks, with sporadic cell-phone service, Kim received conflicting information about the size of the attack and the intended targets, in some cases in reports that were dramatically exaggerated. “I think at one point Choe got a text saying that the zoo had been destroyed and one of the lions had gotten loose,” Jo recalled. “We talked for a long time about why the Americans would target a zoo and whether the lion would kill anyone.”
The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States Page 8