It was a thirty-minute ride to the drill site in the Chorwon Valley—the nominal center of the peninsula and one of the two major invasion corridors when the North Koreans streamed south in June 1950. As we approached the site, the pilots were unable to establish radio contact with the soldiers on the ground. It was a clear day, and we were flying under visual flight rules rather than using instruments and navigation aids. Even so, pilots were required to have both radio and visual contact when flying or landing near the narrow DMZ. The copilot, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Concetta Hassan, who had led a Horatio Alger–type life and had already been the subject of a made-for-TV movie a few months earlier, was on just her second flight mission since arriving in the ROK. Through my headset, I heard her suggest that we fly higher to gain radio comms. The other pilot agreed and ascended three hundred feet. Sure enough, we heard our contacts at the landing site. Unfortunately, during the maneuver, the pilot lost sight of the pond that served as the major landmark in the area, and inadvertently lined up on another pond—just north of the DMZ. I began to hear a sound like popcorn in a microwave, and looked out the side of the aircraft to see white puffs below us. At about the same time, I heard a very loud, persistent, and annoying automated broadcast coming through my earphones: “Red Dog Fox! Red Dog Fox!” repeated over and over, which meant someone had crossed the DMZ. That someone was us.
Up front, CW2 Hassan took the controls, dove, turned, and after some evasive maneuvering—an unnatural act for a Huey with a full load—wheeled us around and got us back to South Korean airspace. Her maneuvers used a lot of fuel, and because we’d already traveled a long distance, we landed at a field-deployed rubber fuel bladder, gassed up with the rotor blades still turning, and then returned home to Yongsan. We didn’t find out until the helicopter was back in its hangar that a round had penetrated its main rotor. Miraculously, the rotor stayed intact on the leg back to Yongsan, even with the weight of the additional fuel and a full passenger load. From the helicopter pad, my driver was waiting to take me back to my office, and I matter-of-factly told Gary that we’d need to reschedule the trip, since we never made it to the drill site. Still shaken, he gave me a quizzical look.
When I walked into my office, the red phone, a direct emergency line to the around-the-clock command post, was ringing. I had been in Korea about six months, and that was the first time it had ever rung. On the other end was a duty officer, who told me, “My God, sir, we thought you were a goner.” After I assured him we were fine, another phone rang, a direct hotline from General Livsey. I braced myself and answered, and what followed made General Pfautz’s Sunday morning phone call in Virginia seem like a pep talk. At high volume, General Livsey instructed me on an important distinction between practices of the Air Force and the Army. In the Air Force, the senior pilot is designated as aircraft commander, the official in charge of the safety of the aircraft, regardless of the rank of any passengers. That was not the case in the Army, so thereafter, whenever I flew as the senior-ranking officer in an Army helicopter, I made sure I always had a map and headphones and knew where I was.
To General Livsey’s relief, the incident didn’t get much media play outside of Korea. The United Nations Command conducted a standard investigation and conveniently determined that we’d only made a shallow penetration of the DMZ. A few days later a nervous ROK Army regimental commander showed up at my office to apologize. The incident investigation determined that the round that hit the rotor was from an M60 machine gun, a weapon the DPRK didn’t have. The commander explained that the rules of engagement called for ROK Army elements along the DMZ to assume that any aircraft flying north was defecting and to shoot them out of the sky. We’d been taking fire from both the north and south, and it turned out the ROK soldiers were better shots. I went home that night and hugged Sue and Andy.
I continued to study and to work at absorbing Army culture. I became more adept at reading General Livsey and grew to admire the way in which, with his Georgia accent, he conveniently played the “dumb Southern boy,” though I knew he’d graduated first in his class from the Army’s Command and General Staff College. When Secretary of the Army John O. Marsh visited and I gave him my well-honed briefing on North Korea, Marsh asked how I felt about serving as an Air Force officer in what was essentially an Army position. I told him I appreciated the institutional commitment the Army had made to intelligence and that I’d learned a lot about the intelligence profession by seeing it from the viewpoint of another service. I didn’t know it yet, but assigning midgrade and senior officers to “joint duty” tours across services would be one of the major features of the Goldwater-Nichols Act in October 1986, an effort in which Marsh was heavily involved.
As the senior intelligence officer in Korea, I eventually grew confident enough in my understanding of the situation that I could honestly admit to General Livsey that we could not meet the expectation he’d demanded of me on day one. I’d become convinced there was simply no way to provide him with an “unambiguous” warning that North Korea was going to attack. I told him the only unambiguous sign he would have is when North Korean artillery shells started falling on Seoul. He didn’t like my answer, but he accepted it. I also came to believe the whole idea of having warning before North Korea executed a planned invasion was moot, as the much more likely circumstance leading to a conflict would be some small incident spiraling out of control, something like the events that had preceded Operation Paul Bunyan in 1976.
Thirty years passed between when I reached that conclusion and my diplomatic visit to North Korea as DNI in November 2014. As control of the regime passed from Kim Il-sung to Kim Jong-il to Kim Jong-un, my personal assessment of the threat posed by the Hermit Kingdom never changed. If anything, the actions and the public pronouncements of the “Dear Leaders” over the decades reinforced my conclusion that none of them wanted to go back to fighting, but that they’ve kept the mechanics of war set on a hair trigger, and that any sane US policy on North Korea needed to be based on an understanding of that dynamic.
There is an unwritten, almost sacred writ of the intelligence profession that we in intelligence should avoid engaging in policy formation or execution. We support policy makers by providing them timely, accurate, relevant, even anticipatory intelligence, but we don’t participate in making the policy sausage. Our objective typically is to reduce uncertainty for decision makers as much as possible, whether they’re in the Oval Office, at the negotiating table, or on the battlefield. As DNI, I was careful not to advocate for specific policies in National Security Council meetings. However, Korea was one issue on which I let President Obama know—privately—that I thought his policy rationale of not discussing anything else until North Korea agreed to end its nuclear capability and ambitions was flawed, and after my 2014 mission to North Korea, I discussed my observations and views with analysts and policy makers in the national security field.
I had not fully appreciated the consuming siege mentality that pervades North Korea until I visited and engaged directly with senior officials there. The leadership elites in the North work hard to maximize paranoia among the population. Portraying the United States as an enemy that’s constantly on the brink of invading it is one of the chief propaganda themes that’s held North Korea together for the past sixty years. They are also deadly serious about any perceived affronts to the Supreme Leader, whom they literally consider a deity. The DPRK is a family-owned country and has been that way ever since it was founded in the 1940s. Because of its history, the DPRK sees developing nuclear weapons as its insurance policy and ticket to survival. North Korea wants to be recognized as a world power, and its entire society, including their conventional military forces, suffers for the relentless, single-minded commitment to develop and field these weapons and delivery systems to threaten the United States. Neither they nor we really know if their weapons work, but in many ways, it doesn’t matter. They achieved nuclear deterrence long ago, because we have to assume that if they
do launch an ICBM at the United States, it will reach our shores and detonate. They have effectively played their nuclear hand to the hilt, for without even proving they have the relevant capability, they’ve capitalized on nuclear deterrence.
I believe, and have advocated, that to counter North Korea, the United States needs to consider capitalizing on our greatest strengths: openness and information. The DPRK survives because it fosters isolation. Outside the ruling clique, there is great interest in the outside world. Currently, we have limited means to satisfy their citizens’ hunger for information, something very difficult to do in the absence of a physical presence in the country. If we set aside for a minute our demand that they disarm before we’ll talk, we could establish a presence in Pyongyang in the form of a US “interests section,” modeled on the one we maintained in Havana for decades to deal with the Cuban government we didn’t recognize. We would not need to present this as a reward for bad behavior, but rather as an opportunity for direct physical access, which would enhance our insight and understanding and, perhaps even more importantly, foster interaction with the people of the DPRK and enable the flow of information from the rest of the world. We would, of course, reciprocate by allowing them to establish a similar mission in Washington. I don’t think this would represent a huge leap over their existing presence in the United States at the United Nations in New York.
I’m not naïve about the existence of formidable antibodies in the US government to what I’m suggesting, but I don’t see any other way to resolve the impasse. The DPRK won’t budge because they see us as an existential threat. If we are going to get out of the static, adversarial holding pattern we’re in now, we have to be the bigger partner and make the “breakthrough,” to use the preferred term the North Koreans used with me.
At this writing, the situation in North Korea seems poised for change—whether for better or for worse remains to be seen. Events and pronouncements in the first year of President Trump’s administration, including increasingly successful DPRK ballistic missile tests and an apparently successful thermonuclear test, heightened tensions between our two countries. Taunts between Trump and Kim Jong-un only serve to shorten the fuses of the military forces on both sides, as the DPRK Army stands ready to rain fire down on the 10 million residents of Seoul at a moment’s notice. Then, in March 2018, a South Korean envoy in Washington informed President Trump that Supreme Leader Kim was willing to discuss giving up North Korea’s nuclear program. Surprising everyone, Trump accepted the invitation to talk.
What I would hope (but doubt will happen) is that the United States will enter talks with a long-game strategy in mind. America has had a substantial military presence on the peninsula for almost sixty-eight years. If we can figure out a way, over time, with sequenced, mutually verified steps, to lead the DPRK government to where they don’t feel so threatened, we could move away from the rhetorical cusp of a cataclysmic war. If we can offer a road map to the US military’s withdrawing much of its forces from the peninsula, while the North Koreans reduce the large conventional forces they have along the DMZ, including the huge artillery and rocketry forces that are dug in ready to fire on Seoul, that would de-escalate the situation and lessen the danger of a minor incident’s quickly escalating to nuclear war. In the late 1990s, when I was out of the government, I participated in the so-called Track II dialogue with members of the North Korean UN mission in New York. Over a dinner, one of the North Koreans spoke about transforming the United Nations Command into a peacekeeping force, to serve as buffer between the North and the South. So even they have considered a different arrangement on the peninsula. A reasonable first step might be to meet their demands for a peace treaty, as all we have now is a cease-fire, which began when the warring sides simply stopped shooting. In their minds, the war could resume immediately. We remain stuck on our narrative, and they are (or perhaps merely have been until recently) stuck on theirs. Only the bigger partner can change those narratives. I hope we can think ambitiously and be willing to go long, and perhaps this is our opportunity to do so. Unfortunately, I don’t think we’re postured—either philosophically or bureaucratically—to achieve that.
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• • •
In July 1986, I was finally sure I’d earned General Livsey’s trust when he asked me to accompany him on a field trip with only his wife, Bena, and his aide-de-camp. We rode a Huey to the eastern side of the peninsula and then a truck from the landing zone into the mountains. When the truck could go no farther, we walked. Finally, wearing “battle rattle” armor—helmets, heavy Kevlar vests, canteens, and other items that all clanked as we moved—we climbed three wooden ladders to reach a mountaintop.
There we found the battle position Livsey’s platoon had held when the cease-fire went into effect thirty-three years earlier. He walked around and began to describe that final day of combat in a way that reminded me of the scene in the movie Patton where George C. Scott, playing George Patton, recounted the battle of Carthage. Livsey looked down at the terrain and pointed to where the waves of Chinese troops had come at his platoon. He described how they’d concentrated fire to repel the attacks. He recalled the sounds and smells as they held their ground and called in air strikes. Just before the cease-fire took effect at 10:00 P.M. on July 27, both sides had opened up a massive artillery barrage, lighting up the night and making the mountainside shake. As he relived the experience and shared it with us, I felt as though I was in the presence of a demigod, returned from Hades to recount an experience that could never really be understood by mortal man.
Sometime later, Livsey summoned me to his office to ask for my thoughts on whom he should pick to become the next commanding general of the 2nd Infantry Division. He gave me three names and explained that he wanted my judgment, which he felt would be neutral and unpolluted by Army politics. I offered my thoughts, which he ultimately agreed with. A few months later, when Livsey was asked to stay for a third year as commander of US Forces Korea until he retired, I asked him if I could also remain. The tour in Korea, which I’d been so skeptical of, had turned out to be one of the most rewarding assignments for both me and my family. Livsey said he appreciated the offer, but for the sake of my career, it was time for me to move on.
In July 1987, Sue, Andy, and I moved back to Hawaii, where I was assigned to US Pacific Command as what amounted to the senior intelligence officer for all US forces across the surface of more than half the globe. In Hawaii, I quickly realized just how much the world had changed in the two years I’d been so heavily focused on the Korean Peninsula. In 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev had come to power as the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, giving a speech that May in which he talked about major reforms that sounded shockingly democratic and capitalist. In 1986 he introduced the Russian words glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) to the Western vocabulary. The Soviet Union had been our primary adversary, our archenemy, through most of my life, and now there was open talk of our relationship changing.
I also found that the Goldwater-Nichols Act had profoundly changed the relationship between combatant commanders and the military services. USPACOM commander Admiral Ron Hays, and then, in 1988, Admiral Hunt Hardisty reported directly to the secretary of defense, enjoying more official access and autonomy than Admiral Gayler had. As their senior intelligence officer, I liked and respected both men, but never had as close a relationship with either as I felt I had had with General Livsey.
Sue and I also found that Oahu had changed a lot since we’d left in 1978. High-rise hotels had sprung up all over Waikiki, and the island was choked with traffic and tourists. Because Hawaii was more of a magnet for visitors than Korea, I found that a great deal of my time was taken up with “distinguished visitors,” either foreign dignitaries who’d come to the island on their way to the mainland, or US officials whose planes were stopping at Hickam Air Force Base, adjacent to the Pearl Harbor Naval Base, to refuel. I spent countless h
ours in the small auditorium that we fondly called the “blue bedroom,” where polished young briefers presented the “Pacific Area Update,” a scripted briefing that they had memorized. One of the many command performances was delivered to the King of Tonga, a remarkably massive man of at least three hundred pounds. Mid-briefing, the king fell asleep and began snoring loudly. Admiral Hays gestured to the briefers to keep going. The rest of us remained quiet so as not to disturb the king’s slumber.
Perhaps the most bizarre VIP visit was from Vice President Dan Quayle at the very end of my assignment. His plane was stopping at Hickam in the middle of the night, and en route the VP said he wanted to play a pickup basketball game while it refueled—he and his security detail against a PACOM team . . . at 3:00 A.M. We scrambled to find five players, and the only reason it was competitive was that our side had Colonel Jack Graham, who’d played varsity basketball for the Air Force Academy a few decades earlier. We ensured the vice president’s team won, but only by a little.
In 1988, I was promoted to major general. My heart’s desire was to take command of the Air Force Electronic Security Command. Not only would that make for a poetic bookend for my career, taking me back to the command where I started as a young lieutenant in 1963, but it would be an especially meaningful assignment, putting me in charge of a large portion of Air Force intelligence assets and focusing them on tracking the great changes taking place in the Soviet Union, just as cracks were appearing in the Iron Curtain. But that was not to be. Instead, I received orders to report to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska to be the deputy chief of staff for intelligence for Strategic Air Command. Sue and I were preparing for the move when the already tense situation in China flared up.
On April 15, 1989, we monitored from US Pacific Command as students from several Beijing universities spontaneously gathered in Tiananmen Square—the massive, hundred-acre public space just outside the Forbidden City. Demonstrations against the government grew, and several thousand students demanded the party recognize them. As the somewhat sympathetic General Secretary Zhao Ziyang left on a scheduled trip to North Korea, the militaristic Premier Li Peng denounced their actions as an antigovernment revolt, promising to crack down. On the following day, close to a hundred thousand students responded with a massive protest in the square.
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