Unfortunately, technology had brought about another major shift in how the world interacts with information. The internet enabled Russian trolls to bring their conspiracy theories directly to the types of people who believe airline contrails are a government plot to poison everyone on the ground. Even as early as 1983, Russia knew that they didn’t have to prove their case or even present a viable theory to discredit known facts. All they had to do to raise doubts was throw out enough contradictory theories to obscure what really happened, and people who didn’t have the time or education to research the issue on their own would conclude they’d never know “what really happened.” Putin, particularly, understood how effective that strategy could be when carried out through the pervasive enabler of the internet. In 2007, Edelman, one of the largest marketing firms in the world, published a groundbreaking “trust barometer” study showing that—by far—people trusted “someone like me” over anyone else—more than “experts” and certainly more than “government officials.” In 2014, Russia was effectively putting the theory behind that study into practice, with their intelligence operatives going online and pretending to be everyday Ukrainians, sharing and retweeting fake news stories with “people like them.”
At the same time that we were coming to grips with the new reality of Russian online deception, we were still taking fire in the press and in Congress for allegations originating from the Snowden leaks. In September, at a meeting of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association and the Intelligence and National Security Alliance—the two largest professional organizations relating to the intelligence and national security arena—I rolled out the 2014 National Intelligence Strategy, which included the “Principles of Intelligence Ethics,” a positive statement about what intelligence professionals stand for, which we consciously wrote to be similar to the ethics principles that doctors try to uphold. While this unfortunately had the appearance of being a response to the Snowden affair, we’d in fact first tried to publish these principles in September 2012, but that effort had been sidelined by the Benghazi attack, and then world events and Washington politics; damage-control efforts had pushed off the publication for another two years. By the fall of 2014 the world felt so dark that I tried to make the most of the opportunity to inject some levity into our circumstances, at one point in the speech summing up the situation the IC had found itself in:
We are expected to keep the nation safe and provide exquisite, high-fidelity, timely, accurate, anticipatory, and relevant intelligence; and do that in such a manner that there is no risk; and there is no embarrassment to anyone if what we’re doing is publicly revealed; and there is no threat to anyone’s revenue bottom line; and there isn’t even a scintilla of jeopardy to anyone’s civil liberties and privacy, whether US persons or foreign persons.
We call this new approach to intelligence: “immaculate collection.”
The audience of intelligence professionals appreciated the remark. I also presented an update on IC ITE, noting that it had taken us about two years to lay the foundation to begin building the systems, that CIA and NSA had delivered their promised cloud storage and cloud computing capabilities, and that NGA and DIA had begun to supply common desktop interfaces. Combining a serious point with a gibe about how difficult my work had become, I said, “Making sure IC ITE sticks is one of the biggest reasons my principal deputy Stephanie O’Sullivan and I agreed to stick around for—maybe—another 122 weeks, or 855 days. But who’s counting?” For the first time in what seemed many years, I got some positive media coverage for something I’d said—not for the content of the ethics principles, but for my self-deprecating humor.
Those good feelings lasted all of ten days. On September 28, I was at home, watching Sunday football games, when during a break I flipped the station to President Obama’s interview on 60 Minutes. When asked about how the Islamic State had succeeded in seizing so much territory so quickly, he responded, “Well, I think our head of the Intelligence Community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that, I think, they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria.” Well, that’s not exactly what I remembered saying. I’d commented that we had a difficult time assessing the “will to fight,” and that no one—myself included—predicted the Iraqi Army’s folding overnight in the manner it did.
A few days later, I was in the Pentagon for meetings and stopped by the USD(I) section for a visit with the staff. Holding something behind his back, Mike Vickers announced that he had a presentation to make. He said he’d caught the president’s interview with 60 Minutes, and that, since I was once again under the bus, he thought I should look the part of someone who changes oil. With that, he placed a Jiffy Lube ball cap on my head. I wore it proudly.
By the fall of 2014, we had all fallen into a rhythm of working, trying to ignore what was being said about us in the media, and taking on each new crisis as it occurred. On November 3, I boarded an Air Force plane and flew north to discuss business with my counterparts in Canada. I was eager to have some time outside Washington, and so I’d planned to spend successive days in Boston and New York after the meetings in Ottawa. That Monday night, I was getting settled and preparing to attend a dinner hosted by the Canadians when I got an urgent call from Susan Rice: “Come home now.” North Korea was holding two US citizens as prisoners in hard labor, she explained, we finally had a small window to secure their release, and President Obama was sending me as his envoy.
Some aspects of our relationship with North Korea had changed since I’d served under General Livsey from 1985 to 1987. There had been a brief period when both sides began to trust each other. In 1994, Kim Jong-il signed an agreement that would provide food and economic assistance to his starving nation in exchange for stopping plutonium production. But Kim didn’t live up to his side of the deal, and in 2006 and 2010, North Korea conducted increasingly successful nuclear tests. After his death, his son Kim Jong-un presided over another in 2013. North Korea also continued to test increasingly longer-range missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads. By 2014 it had demonstrated it could reliably fire a missile as far as Japan and possibly launch something toward the United States West Coast. With everything else going on in 2014, the United States was treating North Korea as a noisy aggravation, and neither side had anything resembling diplomacy with the other. Unfortunately, that meant American citizens were caught between two nations giving each other the silent treatment.
Kenneth Bae was a naturalized US citizen born in South Korea, with children in Arizona and Hawaii. He had been living in China with his wife and stepdaughter and running a tourism service into North Korea, which the North Koreans later claimed was a Christian missionary program. In November 2012, while escorting five tourists into North Korea, he was arrested by the DPRK government, which charged him with “hostile acts against the republic.” American and South Korean press speculated that he’d taken pictures of starving North Korean orphans whom he wanted to help. Bae had a number of health issues, including diabetes and high blood pressure, which likely wouldn’t be treated in North Korea. In April 2013, despite intercession from the Swedish embassy in Pyongyang, Bae was sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor. For two years, the US government had tried to free him, but to no avail. After visiting Pyongyang and meeting the Supreme Leader, former NBA star Dennis Rodman even tweeted out that he’d asked his friend Kim Jong-un to “do him a solid” and let Bae go, but basketball diplomacy didn’t help Kenneth Bae.
Matthew Miller was a California native who’d traveled to South Korea in 2010 and had taken a job there teaching English. He appeared to have lived a somewhat solitary life, and in April 2014 had traveled unaccompanied to North Korea as a tourist. Several reports said that upon arriving in the Pyongyang airport, Miller had promptly ripped up his visa, loudly asked for political asylum, caused a scene, and was arrested. In September he had been sentenced to six years of hard labor. Based on his erratic behavior, US officials were concerned about Miller’
s mental health and, through Sweden, had asked for his release.
In October, North Korea had quietly released a third American, Jeffrey Fowle, to a quiet, lower-level American delegation who’d flown him out of Pyongyang. Fowle had been convicted of bringing a Bible into the country after it had been found, with his name and contact information written inside the cover with pictures of him and his family, in a North Korean nightclub where he’d left it. After Fowle was freed, the government in Pyongyang had said they would only release Bae and Miller to a Cabinet-level US official who was an active member of the US National Security Council and who came bearing a letter from President Obama to Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un.
Even today, whenever the subject of this mission to North Korea comes up, I’m asked, “Why you?” Why on earth would the president send the director of national intelligence—especially this DNI—on so delicate a diplomatic mission? The truth is, the operation had been in the works for quite a while, and the White House knew I had a long history of working Korea issues. When they put my name forward as the president’s representative, I think we were all surprised when the North Koreans agreed. That’s the official story, although Mark Sanger of the New York Times may have had the best explanation: “Gruff, blunt-speaking and seen by many in the Obama administration as a throwback to the Cold War, the retired general is an unlikely diplomat but, in the words of one American official, ‘perfect for the North Koreans.’” That’s about the nicest thing the New York Times has ever written about me.
Complicating the mission was the fact that President Obama was scheduled to arrive in China on Monday of the following week. To avoid “distractions,” the White House wanted me in and out of North Korea before then, which left me six days to reach Pyongyang, secure Bae and Miller, and get out. If I failed, it was not clear if we’d have another opportunity to free them. Not only would that be bad for the two Americans, but it could be an embarrassing backdrop for the president’s China visit. So—no pressure.
I hastily canceled dinner plans and flew back to Andrews. My security detail drove me to the White House, where a half dozen or so hastily assembled Cabinet deputies and NSC staff members had gathered in the Situation Room. Susan chaired the meeting, and Wendy Sherman, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, connected by secure video.
We were under an additional time crunch because the longer we took to secure the Americans, the likelier it was news of the mission would leak, which could scare off the skittish North Koreans. The agenda for that late-night meeting was to discuss the trip itself, review my talking points for discussions with North Korean interlocutors, and, importantly, to cover diplomatic “dos and don’ts”: Don’t bow, don’t smile, don’t accept flowers, and generally, avoid any appearance of obsequiousness toward the North Koreans, particularly if photographers are present. The amount of information I had to process was overwhelming, and I was asking myself if I was really the right choice when Wendy spoke up. “I think we can trust Jim to do the right thing.” If she’d have been physically present, I would have hugged her.
After the meeting, my security detail drove me home to repack. Sue, who had spent so much of her life being discreet and flexible, was unfazed when I told her where I was headed and that I wasn’t sure when I’d be back. At Andrews I boarded a specially modified Air Force 737, accompanied by a small personal security detail; a specially trained Air Force security detail to protect the aircraft; communications specialists; a medical doctor; NSC Korea director Allison Hooker; my executive assistant, “Neil K”; and a couple of other staff officers with special skill sets I won’t go into. It was, in short, a dream team.
We left Andrews at 2:00 A.M. on Tuesday, November 5. After stopping in Hawaii for repairs, losing a day to the international date line, and swapping to a less-broken plane in Guam—a testament to the resourcefulness of Air Force and Navy maintenance crews coping with sequestration and budget cuts—we launched on the final leg of our trip on Friday afternoon. Thanks to the professionalism of our armed services and Intelligence Community, no news of our mission had leaked to the press in the almost three days since we’d left Washington.
Once airborne, I checked that we had the all-important letter from President Obama to Kim Jong-un, which simply stated that I was the president’s envoy and that it would be considered a positive gesture if Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un released our two citizens to me. I reviewed the talking points the White House had given me. The first was uncompromising—the United States would not negotiate on any other issue until North Korea agreed to denuclearize. I knew that was a nonstarter, so the rest of the points were somewhat academic.
It was well past sunset when we landed at Sunan, the major airport for the capital city of Pyongyang. The scene outside my window made me think of the famous satellite picture of the Korean Peninsula at night. In the photo, the DMZ demarks a sharp line between the electric commotion of the South and the impenetrable darkness of the North, broken only by a small spot of light emanating from Pyongyang. As we landed, I wondered where the lights of Pyongyang were, because the city was dark. On the ground, even the runway and taxiways were sparsely lit and so rough that we damaged a tire while taxiing. The only real source of illumination was a floodlight behind a small spray of DPRK press cameras.
For security and logistical reasons, the aircraft would remain occupied, and Air Force regulations on crew rest stated that the flight team could only sit in a “ready” state on the plane for the next twenty-four hours. With the clock in mind, I stepped out onto the eerily silent tarmac in a land intelligence officers only talk about visiting, the first Cabinet-level US official to visit North Korea since Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in October 2000.
A smiling, uniformed officer greeted me with a quick handshake; we posed briefly for the cameras (Don’t smile, don’t show deference), and then I was whisked into a 1990s-vintage Mercedes limousine and seated in the place of honor—the right rear, next to General Kim Won-hong, then the minister of state security and commander of the notoriously brutal state secret police. (In 2017, the general would fall out of favor with Kim Jong-un, be purged from leadership, and removed from public view.) Sitting on a jump seat in front of General Kim was a younger Korean man, a translator who spoke flawless English with an incongruous British accent. My senior protective detail officer sat in the front passenger seat next to the North Korean driver. A glass partition separated us, and we could not hear each other—which made both of us uneasy.
Through the translator, General Kim got right to business. He said that the DPRK government expected my visit would constitute a “breakthrough” in its stagnant relations with the United States and that it further expected that it could dispatch a comparable senior envoy to the US. This, perhaps, would lead to negotiations culminating in a peace treaty to end the sixty-year-plus armistice. He barely waited for the translation and spoke glowingly about what we would accomplish. When I finally got a chance to respond, I said that, while I hoped for a productive dialogue, my principal objective was to secure the release of our two citizens. The atmosphere darkened, even in the dim back of the limo, and I wondered if I’d blown it already.
We rolled along slowly—maybe twenty-five miles per hour—as General Kim continued to hold forth on the unique opportunity we had to bring peace to our nations. I searched for ways to engage him on safe conversational ground—touching on my long-standing interest in the peninsula, my experiences as the senior intelligence officer in South Korea, even my seventy-two combat reconnaissance missions in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam conflict—but it was like talking to a television screen; he just continued with his monologue.
Glancing out of the window into the pitch blackness, I asked where we were, where we were going, and when we might get there. The general was busy lecturing me about the great place I’d have in history if I could bring about a peace, and how history would consider me a failure if the United States didn’t take a
dvantage of this great opportunity. This disjointed discourse, every word of which was translated back and forth with a British accent, continued for what seemed a lot longer than the forty-five-minute drive. We finally stopped at an attractive, pagoda-style building, set back in a park beside the Taedong River. General Kim announced we’d arrived at the state guesthouse, clearly disappointed in me and in our lack of a “breakthrough.” We shook hands perfunctorily and parted company.
The exterior of the guesthouse was impressive, imparting a sense of stately Korean history and hospitality. Inside, the foyer, stairs, and wide hallways were dominated by a garish green rug patterned with large, intertwining, bright red roses—the kind of rug I wouldn’t want to encounter the morning after heavy drinking. The rooms were clean, but the furnishings were spare and left me with the same sense of heaviness I’d experienced in Eastern Europe. I was assigned a two-room suite with an elaborately decorated bed in ersatz French Provincial style, but the thin mattress lay on plywood. The phone next to the bed had no dial tone. I also had a bookcase filled with volumes and volumes of English translations of the writing of Kim Il-sung, the founder of the DPRK.
We had just enough time to unpack before the Mercedes limo returned with the British-accented translator, at around 8:45 P.M. Greeting me this time was another General Kim, Kim Yong-chol, the head of what the North Koreans call the Reconnaissance General Bureau, the RGB, which is an organizational amalgam of intelligence and special operations that conducts missions ranging from clandestine activities to cyberattacks to overseas intelligence collection. I judged he was just a few years younger than I, and his demeanor comported with his reputation as a “knuckle-dragger”—more relentless than bright. He introduced himself as my DPRK counterpart, which wasn’t precisely right, but I thought of Bae and Miller and tactfully did not correct him.
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