by Tom Clancy
Yes, Stephanie’s awful teenage-years behavior had an explanation, but Annette didn’t let her use it as an excuse.
—
After the trials of her daily morning ordeal getting her daughter up and out the door to school, Annette actually enjoyed the short drive down to Springfield to work. She was no longer in the Army, but shortly before eight a.m., she pulled through the gates of Fort Belvoir. A few winding roads took her to her destination: the third-largest government building in the Washington area behind the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
NGA is one of America’s sixteen intelligence agencies under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and certainly one of the least well known. Formerly the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, NGA is dual-hatted as a combat support agency for the Department of Defense as well as being a member of the U.S. intelligence community. The agency was only a few years old, but tremendous resources had been poured into this facility and another massive building in St. Louis.
The organization received $5 billion a year in federal funds, and employed thousands of personnel, both military and civilian.
After showing her badge to a guard and then running it over a scanner she put her purse on a table for inspection and went through a metal detector. A long walk down a hallway with other employees—about a third of whom wore military uniforms—took her to a down escalator, above which ran the motto of the organization written out high on the wall:
KNOW THE EARTH . . . SHOW THE WAY . . . UNDERSTAND THE WORLD.
She passed into the massive atrium of the building—she’d read somewhere you could lay the Statue of Liberty on its side in here—and she scanned her badge at a reader in front of one of a half-dozen glass doorways in the center of the room that led to a bank of elevators. She took a ride to the fourth floor, then crossed the suspended hall over the atrium, made her way down another corridor, and scanned her badge a fourth time to get into her small office.
Annette was an imagery specialist for the NGA; she spent her days looking over all types of pictures using imagery manipulation and enhancement software, as well as compiling and analyzing other bits of data. Then she wrote interpretative reports of what she found, and these were delivered to the NGA’s mission partners: policy makers, war fighters, and first responders.
Although she recognized her work wasn’t going to change the world, she found it interesting nonetheless, and she took solace in the fact she was damn good at it. Annette had spent her entire adult life focused on intelligence. After a full career in Army intel she had gotten hired here as a civilian analyst. She loved her work and her colleagues and the mission itself.
As fractured and stressful as her home life was—she was, after all, a widow with a teenage daughter with issues—Brawley took comfort in the fact she could come here every day, devote herself totally to the imagery and data points of a faraway place she would never visit personally, and build a coherent picture about what was going on there that just might help her country in some small way.
Her office was in the East Asia Department and her focus was North Korea, and while most of the others in her office spent their time on the “sexy stuff,” fixated on either the opaque and mysterious government there or the nuclear and missile programs, Annette Brawley was in the economic section, and she concentrated almost exclusively on the DPRK’s mining industry.
She’d become an expert on mining not out of any love for digging up rocks, but for the simple fact that she was tasked to North Korea’s economic sector and that was their principal industry.
NGA geospatial technology was much more than looking at pictures and maps. The agency used all manner of data: spaceborne, airborne, seaborne, and landborne intelligence platforms at their disposal, as well as pulling the activity on cell-phone towers and even social media.
But much of that didn’t apply in North Korea. NGA had little to no visibility on cell-phone data inside the Hermit Kingdom, and social media there was banned. But there were other geospatial analysis tools at her disposal—satellite photos and videos ferried out of the country by smugglers and defectors; even government propaganda information could be gleaned to find hidden nuggets of information.
This morning she decided she’d take a look at some new images from one of the National Reconnaissance Office’s KH-12 satellites. She pulled up the files on one of the three twenty-seven-inch monitors in front of her, and oriented herself with the global positioning information on the data screen next to it.
She spent a few minutes looking at a road project to a tungsten mine just outside Pyongyang, saw that nothing much had changed since she’d last looked in on the location a month earlier, and she noted it in her log.
Then she typed in the coordinates to the Chongju rare earth mineral mine.
A year earlier she had spent virtually all her time watching activities at the Chongju mineral mine. But that was when the Chinese were there, when there was real development going on. America’s policy makers were interested back then, because rumors out of China said the deposit in the mountain there could have amounted to trillions of dollars for North Korea. This was something that worried the U.S. government, so Annette had worked long hours tracking the progress on the site. She’d discovered small amounts of ore, just a few rail cars, traveling north from the open-pit mine to the Chinese border, presumably for processing at one of China’s rare earth refineries. When the Chinese were thrown out—Annette had received an intel briefing from the CIA that suggested they left because North Korean leader Choi invalidated their mining contract—interest in the mine quickly waned. Everyone concluded that the North Koreans wouldn’t be able to do much more than continue to dig a small amount of ore out of the rocks and then ship it up to China for processing. Through her own work she determined the mine would reach only about four percent of its yearly production output capability without help from the Chinese.
When Chongju went on “life support,” she refocused her attention on other mines in other parts of the DPRK, but she circled back every month or so to peek in on the sat images over Chongju. Each time she had done this over the past year she saw that the North Koreans were still trying to get something out of the site, but it was a shell of the operation it had been when they were partnered with those who knew what the hell they were doing.
Looking over the newest digital images from the KH-12 satellite, Brawley was happy to see there were no clouds over the site. The KH-12 sat had radar imagery capability, as well, but this wasn’t the same as looking directly at the site through an optical lens.
She scanned the images the way she always did, slowly and methodically. First she ignored the buildings around the mine and focused directly on the open pit gouged out of the mountainside. The resolution of the KH-12 satellite cameras was fantastic. She could make out bulldozers and other earth-moving equipment; she even saw individual men, their shadows a further indication of what a clear day it was.
But nothing much was going on in the pit, so she began scanning to the south; the small city of Chongju was here, a few kilometers from the site itself, and she always liked to take a look at the train station and the freight storage lots nearby to see if it looked like there was any new industrial or commercial activity anywhere in the town that might relate to the mine.
This morning she saw something immediately. That’s odd, she said to herself. Sixteen rectangles were lined up in a parking lot next to the one low and squat hotel near the train station. She never would have noticed the anomaly in the middle of the town if not for the fact she’d spent something in the neighborhood of two hundred hours looking at images of Chongju a year earlier, and her mind was programmed to burn images into it—she knew the layout of the town even now—certainly not every building, as there were hundreds, but the main clusters of development. These rectangles hadn’t been there even last month. She would pull up the older
images to double-check, but she was too sure of herself and too curious to do that now.
She knew what the rectangles were, because they were a common sight at mines and construction locations. They were portable buildings, like those used for temporary site offices or modular temp housing. Laid out as they were here, in neat rows lined up alongside the one hotel in the city and the train station, she knew this was housing brought in by the government for nonresident workers.
She could tell these were housing structures also because she saw a cluster of small outbuildings around an open-pit fire, and recognized it as a crude food-preparation facility.
Sixteen temporary buildings like these could house, Annette knew, a hundred fifty or more workers. But workers for what? There were a few factories in Chongju, but nothing that large. The only heavy industry around here was the mine.
She scanned back up to the mine. There was no major operation going on there, neither digging on the mine nor construction on other structures around it. She looked all over the city again, hunting for any signs that some new building or massive new statue of the Dae Wonsu was going up. When that turned up nothing, she scanned the roads around the town, and then the railroad tracks, trying her best to find any new project that would employ one hundred fifty workers.
It took her an hour to do this, but at the end of that hour, she had nothing to show for it.
But Annette Brawley had learned to be dogged and driven in the Army, and she had learned the nuances of her craft in intelligence school. She knew she was onto something, so she kept at it.
In a country like North Korea, where a lot of military activity takes place underground to stay hidden from satellites, she began to suspect she had uncovered something to do with the missile industry. The Sohae Satellite Launching Station was on a small peninsula jutting out into Korea Bay just twenty-five miles to the southwest; just maybe there was an underground secret project going on all the way over here.
It didn’t track with anything she knew about how the North Koreans operated, but she decided she’d talk to her colleagues in her analytical group who spent their days fixated on Sohae and get their take on it.
She was just about to break for lunch, a little frustrated that she felt like she’d wasted two hours on a futile hunt, when a thought occurred to her. There was a hydroelectric dam west of the Chongju mine, probably no more than ten minutes’ drive on the paved roads in the area. It was an hour away from where the temp housing was located, but still she wondered if perhaps the guest workers were doing some refurbishing on the dam there.
She had to pull away from the enlarged image on her monitor to find the general area of the dam, and then she zoomed back in. She scanned along the dam, looked for any sign work was going on, but again she found nothing.
Shit. It was the last large structure in the area she could recall.
Without thinking she moved the image around to the left and the right, tracing around the banks of the reservoir created by the hydroelectric dam. There was a tiny village of square buildings on the north bank of the reservoir, and then she panned left to the west bank, on the far side of the water from the dam.
She stopped panning and leaned her face halfway to her monitor.
“What the hell is that?”
A series of long metal roofs ran on either side of some sort of raised track. On the eastern side of the roofs were a series of circular structures. Annette thought they looked like some sort of tanks. She counted twenty-six individual structures in the entire complex, and several vehicles were parked nearby.
“No . . . freakin’ . . . way.”
She thought she knew what she was looking at, but to be certain she spun in her chair to the monitor on her right, typed something in a Google search, and then pulled up an image. This was the LAMP site in Malaysia. LAMP stood for Lynas Advanced Materials Plant; it was a rare earth mineral refinery owned by the Australian mining company Lynas.
She looked back to the location near the reservoir in the mountains of North Korea.
And then back to LAMP.
The two sites were virtually identical.
“What are you doing out there in the middle of nowhere?” she asked aloud.
She typed something on her keyboard and her third monitor displayed schematics of a typical rare earth refinery. Within a minute she had identified the round tanks as part of a rare earth oxide separation unit.
That confirmed it for her. North Korea was back in the rare earth mining game, and in a big way. They were cutting the Chinese out, even from the processing stage of the equation.
That would require high-tech equipment and massive amounts of expertise and skilled labor.
And Annette didn’t think for one second that the North Koreans were doing this on their own.
—
Annette Brawley had worked through lunch, running down to one of the two cafeterias in the atrium only to grab a banana and a bag of animal crackers. She ate while she worked, compiling her astonishing findings and creating a quick but impactful PowerPoint presentation.
In Army intelligence her main weapon had been the PowerPoint slide show. It garnered a lot of insults from the soldiers devoted to combat operations, and rightly so, she admitted. She wasn’t a shooter or a door kicker, she was an intel geek. But even though the door kickers she presented her slide shows to sometimes rolled their eyes, she took solace in the fact she’d done her best, and her best had helped the troops in harm’s way.
Annette’s superior at NGA was a Marine colonel named Mike Peters. He was younger than Annette by a few years and she found him roguishly handsome, and even though sometimes she felt he deferred unfairly to her colleagues in the armed services at the expense of his civilian employees, he did seem to appreciate Annette for her hard work and the lack of drama she brought to the workplace as compared with some of her younger colleagues, both in uniform and out.
She rapped on the door to his office at three-thirty in the afternoon. She’d checked his online agenda and saw he had a half-hour till his next appointment.
Peters looked up from his paperwork. “Hey, Brawley. What’s up?”
“I’ve got something good. You have ten minutes?”
“Got more than that. There’s a meeting on five at sixteen hundred, but I’m yours till then.”
If only, she thought.
She pulled up her PowerPoint on his computer and sent it to a monitor on the far wall of his office. They went through it together over the next ten minutes; she showed her boss the temporary housing in Chongju near the hotel, new cars parked throughout the town, and then finally the processing plant near the dam north of Chongju.
When it was finished Colonel Peters turned away from the monitor and back to her. “So the Chinese companies, Chinalco and Minmetals, are back at Chongju, and they are going to process their ore? Why would they need to do that?”
“They wouldn’t. The Chinese have their own refineries over the border and the roads, rail, and bridges to get it there.”
“What’s your conclusion?” he asked.
“The only conclusion I can come up with is that the Chinese are not involved.”
“Are you saying the DPRK domestic mining operation has developed to the extent they can extract rare earths?”
Brawley shook her head. She considered herself a pretty “meat and potatoes” analyst. She didn’t speculate wildly about anything, because that was a surefire way to make errors. Still, when she was sure of herself, she expressed herself with vehemence. “Mike, I’ve been examining operations at this mine long enough to know this isn’t DPRK doing this work alone. They are getting help.”
“Who is doing the work?”
“That’s going to be impossible to tell from a satellite. CIA needs to get a man in there.”
Peters laughed. “Have they been showing Mission: Impossible in the break
room or something?”
Brawley laughed as well. “Sorry, is that far-fetched? I don’t know HUMINT. I just look at roofs and heads. It’s up to somebody else to get all the answers on the ground.”
Peters liked Brawley’s work. She was careful, more careful than many of the twenty-somethings that worked at her level.
“This is good.”
“Thanks.”
“This might go all the way up to DNI. Who knows, it could make its way into the Presidential Daily Brief.”
Brawley’s eyes widened. She had a smiling picture of President Jack Ryan on her desk. Even the fans of the President in her office teased her about it. “Maybe I should work up another PowerPoint. More levels of distinction. More color.”
Peters shook his head. “Everyone in the IC knows Jack Ryan likes to look at raw data for himself, but DNI Foley won’t sit in the Oval with him and click through a PowerPoint. Don’t worry about your presentation. You’ve done great work, now get back to your office and produce something more.”
“Something more?”
“You aren’t done, Annette.” He tapped the open-pit mine with the tip of his pen. “As long as they keep digging, you keep digging.” Colonel Peters gave her a satisfied wink.
“Just thought that one up, Colonel Peters, or have you been saving that one for a while?”
“Just thought it up,” he said proudly. “Though you can expect me to reuse it hundreds of times. It’s pretty good, right?”
14
One year earlier
Mining director Hwang had met intelligence chief Ri just once, a week earlier when he showed up unannounced to his office, and at that time Ri had been wearing his military uniform. Hwang supposed the lieutenant general was always dressed as an officer in the Chosun Inmingun when he left his house, so Hwang found it surprising to see the fifty-two-year-old this morning wearing a light gray Western suit and a blue tie. Hwang had to admit that Ri was, if anything, even more impressive out of uniform. He obviously exercised regularly, unlike Hwang, who rarely seemed to find the time for evening walks with his family, and often got winded taking the stairs to his office of the Korea Natural Resources Trading Corporation.