by Bob Woodward
You have come a long way, but we have had these hostilities for 70 years, Kim Yong Chol said. Yet Kim Jong Un has made four promises. He is willing to meet with President Trump. He intends to denuclearize. The leader will accept joint United States–South Korean military exercises. And he will abstain from testing.
South Korea, our ally, told us that was what Kim Jong Un had said, Pompeo acknowledged. We trust our ally but we need to verify. Without verification, we have a problem. Our mission is to hear from Kim Jong Un directly.
Why don’t you rest, Kim Yong Chol said, and I’ll let you know when and if Kim Jong Un will see you.
The tentativeness was maddening, but Andy Kim knew it was inevitable.
Kim Yong Chol left and came back quickly.
I think the chairman is ready to meet you so let’s go, he said.
Only two people could attend—no staff. Pompeo and Andy Kim went. After driving 15 minutes, they approached a regular-looking office building, and drove inside. Immediately they saw it was a fortress concealed inside what looked like an office building. There was a large wall with lots of guards and defenses.
In a conference room, Kim sat on one side of a table, and Pompeo took a seat on the other. Kim wore his trademark black suit and seemed a little nervous at first. He did not speak from any notes or talking points. That was when Kim told Pompeo, “We were very close” to war.
The South Koreans told us that you have intent to denuclearize, Pompeo said. Is that true?
I’m a father, the leader said. I don’t want my kids to carry nuclear weapons on their backs the rest of their lives. So, yes.
Pompeo and the leader quickly agreed they did not want the tensions to escalate. That was good for no one. So let’s come up with solutions.
You told the South Koreans that you’re willing to meet with President Trump, Pompeo said, and you saw the president openly say he accepts the idea. So can we talk about how to set up a working-level meeting to come up with the right agenda for the summit?
Kim seemed to agree.
Andy Kim thought that Kim quickly relaxed and seemed very natural.
The rest of the discussion focused on the four promises.
* * *
Trump and the North Korean leader exchanged short letters coinciding with Pompeo’s trip.
“Dear Chairman Kim,” Trump wrote in three paragraphs, “Thank you for extending an invitation for us to meet. I would be glad to meet with you.
“I would like to convey my thanks as well for hosting Director Pompeo in Pyongyang. He has my total confidence.
“I look forward to working with you toward greater improvement in our relations and to mutually creating a better and safer future.”
Kim’s letter was more enthusiastic.
“Dear Excellency,” Kim began. Trump later told me with pride that Kim addressed him as “Excellency.”
“I’m prepared to cooperate with you in sincerity and dedication,” the North Korean leader said, “to accomplish a great feat that no one in the past has been able to achieve and that is unexpected by the whole world.”
* * *
Pompeo traveled to North Korea a second time on May 8 and 9, just weeks after the Senate confirmed him as secretary of state in a 57 to 42 vote.
A key question was who really had influence with Kim Jong Un. At dinner, his sister Kim Yo Jong was deferential, calling him “Great Leader” and “Supreme Leader, never “My Brother.” That could reflect her discipline, Andy Kim reasoned. She was clearly devoted to him and a behind-the-scenes player, handling protocol, coordination of events. Often she was the key emissary. At the dinner she didn’t cross the line to demonstrate familiarity with her brother.
The contrast with Ri Sol Ju, Kim Jong Un’s wife, was stunning. Ri was in her early 30s with long dark hair. She was the mother of Kim’s children and as a teenager had reportedly been a member of a North Korean cheerleading team. At one point the Great Leader lit a cigarette.
That’s not good for your health, Andy Kim said matter-of-factly. He hoped it would be taken as just a friendly aside.
Kim Yong Chol and the sister froze up and seemed almost paralyzed, waiting for Kim’s reaction. No one spoke to the leader that way.
Yes, that’s right, said his wife, Ri. I’ve told my husband about the dangers of smoking.
At the dinner, course after course was served. The North Koreans wanted Secretary of State Pompeo to stay the night. We came at sunup and we have to leave at sundown, Pompeo said.
The dinner was dragging on. Finally Pompeo said, We’re not getting anywhere. We need you to give us a list of sites for developing and testing nuclear weapons. He did not make much headway and announced he was going to leave.
The North Koreans held up his plane for several hours but finally let him depart.
Following Pompeo’s departure, three Americans who were being held prisoner in North Korea—Tony Kim, Kim Hak Song and Kim Dong Chul—were released and safely returned to the United States.
Early on the morning of May 10, Trump greeted the freed detainees when they arrived at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland.
“We want to thank Kim Jong Un, who really was excellent to these three incredible people,” Trump said. “We’re starting off on a new footing.”
FOURTEEN
After former FBI director Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel to investigate Russia-Trump 2016 campaign links, Trump began a drumbeat of attacks. But Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican from South Carolina and Trump’s closest friend in the Senate, took a different tack.
“I respect the decision,” Graham said on Fox News. “He’s a good choice in terms of respect among members of both parties. He’s a seasoned former FBI director.”
The two friends continued to disagree in public and in private.
In April 2018, Graham cosponsored a bill to protect Mueller and his work. Cosponsored as well by a bipartisan group of moderates—Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, and Democrats Cory Booker of New Jersey and Chris Coons of Delaware—the bill was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee 14 to 7. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said it was unnecessary, and Graham knew he would not bring it to the floor.
Trump’s opposition to the probe went beyond Twitter outbursts. The president called White House counsel Don McGahn at home twice on June 17, 2017, and ordered him to have Mueller removed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. “Call Rod, tell Rod that Mueller has conflicts and can’t be the special counsel,” Trump said in the second call. “Call me back when you do it.” McGahn did not follow through on the president’s orders.
Graham didn’t buy Trump’s attacks on Mueller and the Russia investigation. Over the years, Graham had watched Mueller as FBI director and concluded he was independent and fair-minded.
If Trump had colluded or coordinated with the Russian government in 2016, it would be a disaster for Trump and the Republican Party.
“Listen,” Graham told Trump, “if you actually did this, even though it was before you were president, you cannot serve.”
“I didn’t do it,” Trump told Graham. “I’ve done a lot of bad things, but I didn’t do this.”
“I believe you on both counts,” Graham said. The denial, in his view, had the ring of truth.
In private conversation with the president, Graham repeatedly urged Trump to let Mueller’s investigation take its course. If Trump was being honest with the country and had done nothing wrong, Graham argued, he should let the investigation go forward.
There’s only one man in the country with the ability to clear you of working with the Russians, Graham told Trump in early 2019. “I can’t clear you of working with the Russians. You can’t clear you of working with the Russians. If you didn’t work with the Russians, there’s one of two things going to happen. He’s going to make shit up to prove that you did when you didn’t,” which was Trump’s fear. Or he’s going to tell the truth.
Graham continued to see Mueller as a st
raight shooter.
“If you’re being honest with me and I’m right about Mueller, you’ll be fine,” he told the president. “Now, if I’m wrong about Mueller, then I’ll be the first to say it. If you’re not honest with me, I’ll be the first to say that.”
“I didn’t make phone calls,” Trump told Graham. The president was insistent: “I didn’t work with Russians!”
“Mr. President, there’s only one thing that would turn me against you, and that is if you actually worked with the Russians.”
“I didn’t,” Trump said.
“I believe you,” Graham replied. “Because you can’t work with your own government. Why should you be working with the Russian government?”
Trump laughed. “Yeah, that’s true,” he said.
But there was nothing funny about the Mueller investigation. In the media, as well as among Democrats and many Trump critics, the Mueller probe was widely held out as Trump’s Watergate.
“You can see evidence in plain sight on the issue of collusion, pretty compelling evidence,” House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff said in a February 2019 interview on CNN.
In Washington there was an expectation that Mueller’s report was the other shoe to drop and could potentially lead to Trump’s impeachment.
Mueller’s team supposedly did not leak, which only increased expectations that he had something big.
The Washington Post and The New York Times continued the media investigation, publishing dozens of front-page stories about many of the same questions Mueller was investigating.
FIFTEEN
Pompeo returned from Pyongyang in April with a letter from Kim expressing an openness to meet, and passed it to Trump. The president wasted no time writing back.
“I agree with everything you said,” Trump wrote in a letter to Kim dated April 3, “and have very little doubt that our meeting will be a momentous one for both our countries and for the rest of the world.”
Plans for their meeting got under way. It was a remarkable pivot in relations between the chairman and the president, who just months earlier had been exchanging insults that were unusually personal.
The diplomatic courtship between Trump and Kim in 2018 and 2019 is captured in 27 letters that I obtained and 25 are reported here for the first time. Florid and grandiloquent, they trace how the two forged a personal and emotional bond.
Trump has personally said they are “love letters.” They are more than that—they reveal a decision by both to become friends. Whether genuine or not, probably only history will tell.
The language is not out of the traditional diplomatic playbook. They resemble declarations of personal fealty that might be uttered by the Knights of the Round Table, or perhaps suitors.
A first meeting was nearly scuttled after Trump was quoted suggesting in a May 17, 2018, meeting that if Kim didn’t make a deal with Trump, he could meet a fate similar to slain Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi, who was overthrown in 2011.
“The model, if you look at that model with Qaddafi, that was a total decimation,” Trump said publicly. “We went in there to beat him. Now that model would take place if we don’t make a deal, most likely. But if we make a deal, I think Kim Jong Un is going to be very, very happy.”
North Korea’s vice foreign minister, Choe Son Hui, responded: “Whether the U.S. will meet us at a meeting room or encounter us at a nuclear-to-nuclear showdown is entirely dependent upon the decision and behavior of the United States.”
On May 24, Trump wrote Kim a letter canceling the summit.
“Sadly, based on the tremendous anger and open hostility displayed in your most recent statement, I feel it is inappropriate, at this time, to have this long-planned meeting,” Trump wrote. He tweeted out a copy of the letter.
But the dispute was short-lived. South Korean president Moon Jae In helped arrange talks between American and North Korean diplomats on the North Korean side of the border on May 27, and the summit was back on schedule just days after Trump had canceled it.
Kim wrote to Trump on May 29 that he had “great expectations” for the summit, “an event the entire world is focusing on.” He added: “I sincerely hope that our first meeting, about to happen at no small pains, will lead to more wonderful and meaningful meetings.”
* * *
On June 12, 2018, Trump and Kim finally met at the Capella Hotel in Singapore, beginning their summit at 9:05 a.m. local time.
The two shook hands before the news media for about 12 seconds before turning to the cameras.
“Holy shit,” the president later told me he said to himself. The moment made a memorable impression on him. He claimed the wall of news cameras was among the largest he had ever seen in his life, even more than he had seen in Hollywood at the Academy Awards.
After shaking hands, the two retreated to a one-on-one meeting. Trump later said he found Kim to be “far beyond smart.”
In their initial meeting, Trump said, the two leaders talked about “the tremendous potential” North Korea had. Trump said he told Kim he didn’t want to remove him, alluding to the Qaddafi threat, and he wanted him to lead the country to greatness. “It could be one of the great economic powers of the world,” Trump recalled saying. “It’s locationally situated between China, Russia and South Korea.”
By end of the meeting, Trump and Kim signed a short, four-point agreement. The most consequential part of the agreement said that North Korea, reaffirming its earlier agreement with South Korea, “commits to work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”
Kim did not return from the summit empty-handed. Trump said he would guarantee North Korea’s security. In a news conference after the meeting, Trump made a surprise announcement: The United States would be ending joint military exercises with South Korea. The North Korean regime had long seen the joint exercises as a threat.
“We will be stopping the war games, which will save us a tremendous amount of money, unless and until we see the future negotiation is not going along like it should,” Trump said. “But we’ll be saving a tremendous amount of money. Plus, I think it’s very provocative.”
While the détente with North Korea was far from complete, Trump was quick to declare the trip a success.
“Just landed—a long trip, but everybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office,” Trump wrote in a tweet the morning of June 13. “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.”
In a second tweet, Trump added: “Before taking office people were assuming that we were going to War with North Korea. President Obama said that North Korea was our biggest and most dangerous problem. No longer—sleep well tonight!”
Trump’s 391-word agreement with Kim did not end the nuclear threat from North Korea—it simply reaffirmed a loosely worded declaration that Kim had signed with South Korea in April 2018. The agreement was less specific regarding denuclearization than prior agreements Kim’s predecessors had signed in 1992 and 2005 during the Clinton and Bush administrations.
“Saying it doesn’t make it so,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic minority leader, said in remarks on the Senate floor on June 13. “North Korea still has nuclear weapons. It still has ICBMs. It still has the United States in danger. Somehow President Trump thinks when he says something it becomes reality.”
* * *
Mattis was taken completely by surprise that Trump had canceled the training exercises with South Korea.
In accordance with Trump’s announcement, Mattis suspended major military exercises such as Ulchi-Freedom Guardian, an annual exercise which involved 18,000 U.S. troops and up to 50,000 South Korean troops.
Smaller units, however, needed to train, Mattis told Trump. “We’re not going to have the troops sitting in the barracks. That’s no good. The troops are worthless to you as president, they’re worthless to me as secretary of defense if they are not out there training.” He reminded the president that these troops in South Korea rotated to and fro
m Iraq and Afghanistan. They needed to be battle-ready.
There is too much emphasis on terrorism and fighting the old Bush wars, Trump said.
That is so the terrorists can’t come after the United States here, Mattis replied, as happened with the 9/11 attacks.
“I always hear that,” Trump complained. “That means we’ve got to fight everywhere in the world.”
“No, it doesn’t, sir.”
* * *
Back at the Pentagon, Mattis ordered a workaround. “All platoon, company, battalion, brigade level exercises, regimental exercises continue,” he said. “Air group continues. Naval exercises continue. The president doesn’t mean we’re all going to sit in the barracks now and look at the walls, okay guys. So let’s not everybody suck their thumbs.”
Smaller exercises with regiment-sized units made up of several thousand troops didn’t have to be briefed back to Washington. Only the high-level exercises were in the president’s crosshairs. Mattis reduced those to command post and communication network exercises. “They won’t have troops in the field.” No field maneuvers, nothing that could be called a war game.
In South Korea, the U.S. and South Korea commander General Brooks quickly worked to reduce the visibility of the exercises. He immediately scaled back the size of units, changed the timing and lowered the volume of communications so there was less public news about the training and less in view of Kim and Trump.
Mattis was frustrated with the message being sent to China, Russia and North Korea. “What we’re doing is we’re actually showing how to destroy America,” he said later. “That’s what we’re showing them. How to isolate us from all of our allies. How to take us down. And it’s working very well. We are declaring war on one another inside America. It’s actually working against us right now.”
