The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States

by Jeffrey Lewis

  So it was in keeping with his prior statements that, practically as soon as he began reviewing OPLAN 5015 on March 21, Mattis decided that nuclear weapons were largely off the table. If the United States had a shot at Kim in some remote mountain bunker, Mattis told his commanders, and if there was no reasonable conventional alternative for getting at him, then he was willing to recommend using one or two nuclear weapons to kill the North Korean leader. Otherwise, Mattis said, the most important targets in North Korea were mixed in with cities and towns, and it was out of the question to use nuclear weapons against them—there were just too many innocent people around and the conventional invasion force would do the job soon enough.

  Over the course of the morning, Mattis had carefully reviewed and approved the primary details of OPLAN 5015 and ordered a series of steps to increase the military’s readiness to execute it. The United States really was about to hit North Korea with “everything we’ve got”—or something close to it.

  There was only one catch. OPLAN 5015 had been conceived of entirely as a preemptive strike—a massive effort by air, sea, and ground forces to invade North Korea and kill Kim Jong Un before he had a chance to order North Korea’s nuclear-armed missile units to fire. OPLAN 5015 was premised entirely—indeed, depended—on the United States going first.

  At 4:16 PM, around the time Francis received the call en route to the golf club, the same warning reached Mattis at the Pentagon: North Korea was conducting a massive surprise attack on US forces throughout South Korea and Japan. One thing, Mattis recalled, went through his mind: Fuck.

  Mar-a-Lago

  After the helicopter returned President Trump to Mar-a-Lago, Francis attempted to restore some semblance of normalcy around the president. But it was tough going. Francis noticed that the president was bleeding from a slight cut over his eye, a result of his fall in the bunker. Normally the president was loud and pushy. At his best, he was a big, fun blowhard. At his worst, he was a bully. But this, Francis observed, this was something different. Trump was sullen and withdrawn.

  Once Mattis appeared on the screen in the Situation Room, the president focused entirely on the military options that the secretary of defense explained to him. Francis was struck by how long the president was able to focus on what Mattis was saying. “Normally, after a minute or two, the president would look bored and start tugging at his ear,” an aide recalled. Not now. Trump seemed engaged and respectful, and he was asking questions—good questions. Francis would later recall, with all sincerity, that it was the most presidential he had ever seen Trump behave.

  It occurred to Francis that the president was fixating on the secretary of defense and his briefing because Mattis had not been in the shelter during the struggle with the military aide. “Mattis wasn’t there for the altercation,” another aide recalled. “He was the one person who hadn’t seen the president humiliated.”

  Mattis was not only unaware of what had transpired in the bunker but also distracted by the war he was having to improvise. Almost immediately, US and South Korean forces near the DMZ had returned the artillery fire that had rained down on Seoul, suppressing it. It was not clear whether the North Korean artillery pieces were destroyed or had simply been pulled back into caves, but one way or another the shelling had stopped.

  Mattis was now telling the president that the main goal was to shift from defense to offense. The war plan they had been considering was designed as a preemptive action, but North Korea had beaten them to the punch and now the United States had to catch up.

  Luckily, Mattis explained, while North Korea’s nuclear weapons had done enormous damage throughout South Korea and Japan, a number of important US airbases in the region had survived. These included—crucially—the airfields on Okinawa and Guam, whose bombers were intact and within striking distance of North Korea.

  The Air Force even now was targeting Kim Jong Un’s network of surface-to-air missiles, Mattis said. The goal was not to avenge BX 411, but to establish complete air superiority over North Korea. This mission was going to take twenty-four hours, Mattis explained, but they had no choice but to wait it out: the United States could not safely send pilots to find North Korean missiles as long as the air defenses remained in place. Once the air defenses were down, the really heavy air strikes would begin. As for the prospect of further North Korean nuclear attacks, Mattis was convinced that the worst was over. North Korea had already expended much of its small stockpile of nuclear weapons, he said, and he was confident that American airpower could find the rest of them, along with the leader who had ordered the holocaust. They would find and destroy North Korea’s remaining missiles and kill Kim Jong Un.

  The longer Mattis talked, the more the White House aides began to notice what he was not saying: his remarks contained no mention of nuclear weapons. North Korea had just launched a massive and surprise nuclear attack on US troops and US allies. The loss of life had been catastrophic. Kim Jong Un had precipitated the bloodiest day in human history. And yet, as Mattis laid out for the president a massive air campaign against North Korea that would be followed in short order by ground troops flowing into the region and then into the hermit kingdom, he did not mention nuclear weapons. Only at the end, with the question lingering unasked, did Mattis mention in the most offhand way that this would all be done with conventional forces.

  “We’re going to win either way, with or without nukes,” Mattis explained. “Kim [Jong Un] is the guy wearing the black hat. We’re wearing the white hat. We’re there to liberate the North Koreans, not murder them.” Mattis said that the United States did not need nuclear weapons to knock down North Korea’s air defenses, destroy any remaining ballistic missiles that threatened the United States, and ultimately remove Kim Jong Un. In fact, he said, nuclear weapons might get in the way.

  Mattis had anticipated more argument, or at least debate, about the plan he was proposing. But he was unaware of the events that had transpired at the golf course—although he would recall sensing that there was something strange about the mood in Mar-a-Lago. Then again, he explained later, he always found video conferences off-putting.

  The aides in the Situation Room at Mar-a-Lago, meanwhile, waited to see how President Trump would respond. “The president had talked about ordering a nuclear strike on China,” an aide explained, “so yes, we were worried about his reaction. Everybody just wanted to leave it to Jim [Mattis].” Every aide who was in the room told this commission that they believed the altercation in the golf course bunker had colored the deliberations. But in the moment, they could not be sure how.

  Finally, Mattis finished. Trump thanked him. “Okay, general,” the president said. Then Trump stood up and walked out of the Situation Room.

  An aide asked Francis whether someone should accompany the president. Francis said no. He instructed the kitchen staff to send the president dinner, whether he asked for it or not. The President later ordered dinner himself. The staff, largely immigrants, later explained that no one knew who Francis was or precisely what his relationship to Mr. Trump was.

  Only then did Francis ask another military aide to find the president’s Emergency Satchel and the missing major. The aide to whom he gave this order seemed confused about why the satchel wasn’t with the president, but Francis didn’t explain. According to Francis, he simply repeated what he had said already: “The satchel was separated from the president at the golf course. You need to drive over and get it, and sit with it in the Situation Room.” The aide recalled that Francis was more succinct the second time: “He just said, ‘Football, golf course, sit in room. Understand?’ I understood well enough to stop asking stupid questions.”

  After the aide left to retrieve the satchel, Kellogg asked Francis if, given the events of the past few hours, it was really a good idea to bring the football back into play. “Where else can we put it?” Francis said, not really asking.

  Francis later explained that he was no longer worried about the president giving any unexpected orders. The U
nited States was at war, but that war was being run out of the Pentagon. “We were just snowbirds,” Francis explained, “wintering over in Florida.”

  There was a second reason why Mattis did not propose using nuclear weapons—a reason that he withheld from the president. The North Korean strike had been a massive attack against US forces throughout South Korea and Japan. It had killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. But Kim had held back those of his nuclear missiles that could strike the United States.

  These missiles were a real danger, and Mattis knew it would be next to impossible to find them all. Nor did he have much confidence in the missile defense system in Alaska. The odds were far better that one of the big missiles would deliver its powerful thermonuclear weapon all the way to New York or Los Angeles or Palm Beach than the odds that they could shoot it down. Kim knew that as well as he did. Yet Kim had been reluctant to use them. Why?

  Mattis reasoned that Kim still thought he might wriggle out of this. Perhaps, thought the secretary of defense, Kim was hoping the Chinese or the Russians would negotiate a way out for him. Mattis had no intention of letting that happen. He was pissed.

  The strikes on South Korea and Japan were not simply among the worst atrocities in human history. They were also a cowardly attack on America and those who served it. Kim had killed tens of thousands of US service personnel and their family members. Whatever happened, Mattis later recalled, he was going to make sure that Kim Jong Un died in North Korea. There would be no comfortable exile and no negotiated settlement. This was to the death.

  Still, if Kim wanted to delude himself, Mattis was happy to let him. The ex-Marine thought he might be able to string along the young dictator, buying valuable time for the Air Force to find those missiles. If Kim waited too long in hopes of saving his own skin, it might be too late for him to order a follow-on strike against the United States. By the time he realized that the United States would never accept a diplomatic solution, Mattis hoped, Kim’s missiles would be gone, lost to air strikes or cut off from communications networks. “If we hit North Korea with nukes that day,” Mattis recalled, “then Kim would have used his [nuclear weapons] for sure. I needed to give the Air Force time to find them. I knew it was a long shot, but we had to try.”

  8

  A World Without North Korea

  Kim Jong Un wasn’t going to just sit in a basement, waiting to die. As he saw it, he had the upper hand. His missile units had delivered a terrible blow against US forces throughout South Korea and Japan, leaving Seoul, Tokyo, and Busan in flames. The launch units had almost immediately relocated, reloaded, then begun launching missiles armed with high-explosive warheads into the areas they had just struck with nuclear weapons. North Korea’s artillery force had also opened up on Seoul. South Korean forces returned fire to suppress the artillery strikes, but for most of the day it was North Korea that was on the offense, delivering one punishing blow after another.

  Now Kim intended to press his advantage. Immediately after giving the order to launch the attacks on South Korea and Japan, he changed locations and then spent the day waiting for the United States, reeling from the shock of the attack, to seek some sort of settlement. He believed that as soon as the American public saw the horror unfolding in South Korea and Japan, they would collectively demand a cease-fire to save their own cities from the same fates.

  Kim was hardly the first world leader to misjudge an opponent. While he waited throughout the day for word that his diplomats in New York had reached a cease-fire, an American military commander was putting in place the pieces of the campaign to topple Kim.

  The supreme leader was expecting a response. It would come when night fell.

  Kim Goes to Myohyang

  As soon as Kim had ordered his missile units to repel the invaders massing in South Korea and Japan, he had decided to move to safety. He was in the middle of the country, but his wife and children were in Wonsan, a port city on the coast. As they sat in the basement in Kusong, Kim’s aide Choe Ryong Hae had suggested that the family compound in Wonsan would surely be a target. They should all move to safety. But where?

  Kim had choices. There was no shortage of palaces throughout North Korea, almost all of which were equipped to allow him to wait out a conflict in relative comfort. There was a large palace complex along the border with China, with tunnels leading into the mountains around Mount Baekdu. Kim’s father, Kim Jong Il, had overseen the construction of a massive underground complex there over the course of many years. This was where the elder Kim had always planned to evacuate in case of an emergency.

  To Kim Jong Il, the residence near Mount Baekdu had represented North Korea’s strategic depth. Even in 1950, during the Korean War, when United Nations forces drove northward and were on the verge of capturing the entire peninsula, they were still nearly forty miles from this strategic spot when Chinese troops poured across the border and saved Kim Jong Il’s father, Kim Il Sung, and with him the Kim family dynasty. For Kim Jong Il, then, the residence near Mount Baekdu was as far as possible from the threat posed by South Koreans and their American masters. He was certain that if American forces approached this location, China would intervene again. And in the worst case, he could simply slip across the border and into a comfortable exile. After all, Kim Jong Il had been born in the Soviet Union, at a Soviet military camp where his father was training as a guerrilla. Kim Jong Il knew that his life might end as it had begun—outside Korea. He had prepared carefully for this eventuality, hiding assets abroad to ensure that any exile was far more comfortable than his childhood in that Soviet military camp.

  Kim Jong Un was a different man from his father and grandfather. He had been raised amid incredible wealth and privilege. He could not have imagined life as a normal person if he tried—and there is no evidence that he ever did. There was not going to be any comfortable exile for Kim Jong Un. China, looming just over the border, looked nearly as threatening as South Korea. Kim had ordered the execution of his uncle and the assassination of his half-brother because he believed both were conspiring with Beijing to overthrow him. He was careful to manage the relationship with China, but he wasn’t going to just show up on China’s doorstep and plead for mercy.

  Instead, Kim Jong Un decided that he would head to the interior of the country, to the Myohyang Mountains. Kim’s grandfather had kept a large lakeside palace there, surrounded by steep and fog-shrouded mountains. It was a beautiful and historic location, but it had other advantages as well.

  Kim Il Sung had died in a residence near the lake—suddenly, of a heart attack—in 1994. Kim Jong Il, disliking any place associated with death, had avoided it in the following years. Kim Jong Un, the grandson, knocked it down. He then ordered the construction of a new airstrip nearby. The airstrip was placed right next to the train station built by his father, who was afraid to fly. The runway was at the mouth of a valley dotted by large and luxurious hotels meant to lure foreign visitors. The lakeside villa was all the way up the valley, and over the hill. In 2019, Kim ordered the construction of a magnificent new palace at the site. The high peaks were beautiful to look at, but they also provided protection. North Korean workers had dug tunnels deep into the shelter of the soaring mountains.

  This new palace complex at Myohyang would be Kim Jong Un’s final redoubt: in the middle of the country, surrounded by more than a million North Korean soldiers under arms, and shielded beneath a thousand feet of granite. Invaders from the south, or the north, would have to fight their way through hundreds of kilometers to reach him. In the meantime, Kim would be safe from air strikes and even the largest American nuclear weapons—if it came to that. Kim’s calculation was simple: He would hold out as long as possible. Once Trump realized that there was no easy victory, no quick decapitation, the American president would have to face an ugly reality. If the Americans did not cease their provocations, the horror Kim Jong Un had inflicted on South Korea and Japan would arrive on Trump’s doorstep.

  And so Kim Jong Un flew fift
y miles toward the interior of the country, to the site of his grandfather’s death, with the confidence of a man who had been born to rule. When his plane touched down, he climbed into a car that followed a winding road up to the magnificent palace. The car parked in front of what looked like the mouth of a cave, but with a pair of heavy steel doors just ever so slightly ajar. Kim slipped between the massive steel doors and disappeared beneath the mountain.

  The Air Campaign Takes Shape

  While Kim hid beneath a mountain, the man responsible for finding and killing him sat in a large, comfortable office with a commanding view of Pearl Harbor. Admiral Philip Davidson was the commander of US Pacific Command. It would be his responsibility more than anyone else’s to rid the earth of North Korea and Kim Jong Un. He had about twelve hours to figure out how to do it.

  Davidson had found himself commanding US forces throughout the Pacific with almost no background in Asia. In his previous job, Davidson had the unenviable task of sifting through hundreds of disciplinary cases arising from a bribery scandal. He had to dole out punishments to officers who were implicated in the scandal but had escaped federal prosecution. This wasn’t the sort of job that makes a man many friends. But it did require making unpopular decisions and seeing them through to the end.

  By contrast, Davidson’s predecessor, Harry Harris, was a celebrity—popular with the press and fawning politicians for his blunt remarks, which made perfect headlines. At times, Harris had ruffled feathers. The Chinese government in particular reportedly had sought Harris’s removal after a number of remarks that Beijing viewed as inflammatory. (Both the Chinese embassy and the Trump administration officials deny that any specific request had been made for Harris’s removal.) Although some found Harris undiplomatic, Trump did not: he eventually nominated Harris as the US ambassador to Australia, before changing his mind and sending him to South Korea.