The language, of course, was Korean, but that accent did not come from the coast behind the dawn. It came from much further south. The fisherman peered out from under his nets and now saw the pennant flying from the stern: the twin-teardrop emblem of South Korea. They would not see their wives again, but they would not face a firing squad. They had made it, against the odds. They would be offered asylum. The North’s secret police would not have them after all.
The South Korean navy boat, one of the new Chamsuris, took them on board, and two seamen offered blankets. A third tied their waterlogged skiff to the stern. The helmsman powered up the engine and turned the prow south, towards Kaul-li. The young captain with the southern accent keyed in his radio and spoke to base. This was an incident; there would be an inquiry. Successful defections were impossible overland, extremely rare by sea. He needed to cover his back. No delay in checking in. He asked for names.
The older man, the one who had bribed the fishermen to bring him south despite the risks, sat under his blanket, still shivering. The chill? Fear? More like the relief that replaces the certainty of interrogation and death. The crew had established that three of their refugees were penniless fishermen. One of the navy men approached the man under the blanket.
‘What is your name?’ he asked, clipboard in hand.
The fourth man looked up. ‘My name,’ he said, ‘is Li Song-Rhee.’ The blanket slipped. The shoulder boards of his uniform, the dress that had secured him passage through the checkpoints on the road from Pyongyang to the coast, gleamed in the weak sun. This was not a frantic corporal looking for a better life in South Korea. This was a four-star general of the army of the DPRK, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, one of the ultra-elite of Kim’s dictatorship.
The captain listened to his crewman and checked the shoulder boards of the sea-stained uniform. Then he returned to his radio. They would not bypass Kaul-li island. It has a heliport. A chopper would be coming up from navy HQ at Incheon. The history of the peninsula of the two Koreas was about to change.
Nine hours and the same number of time zones to the west, it was also dawn when a phone rang in a modest apartment off Admiralty Arch. Sir Adrian picked it up.
‘Yes, Prime Minister.’
‘There has been a development. You recall what we were talking about a couple of weeks ago? Well, it seems a four-star general of North Korea has defected to South Korea. Something to do with Kim’s missile programme.’
From his years with SIS, Sir Adrian knew there was a procedure whereby matters considered of sufficient importance could be sent to Downing Street ahead of the usual morning briefing, the ‘flimsies’ which prime ministers read over breakfast. If the incoming news was pressing enough, the PM could be woken at any hour, not that it seemed to make any difference with this one. Her staff wondered when she ever slept anyway.
‘I’ll ask our people over there to keep on top of it,’ she said.
‘Very wise, Prime Minister.’
The phone went down. Sir Adrian sighed and replaced the receiver. He knew she meant the head of station of the British SIS team in the embassy in Seoul, South Korea. He rose, pulled on a robe and went to make himself buttered toast. And coffee. Of course coffee, his favourite strong black arabica.
There was no point in telling even the PM how many hours he had spent with the best brains on North Korea that the Royal United Services Institute could furnish. He had listened to hours of briefings before settling on General Li Song-Rhee. Even then, it had been a long shot that the mastermind of the missile programme would receive the phoney email, let alone believe it. Still, as they say, nothing ventured …
It was Luke Jennings who, once again bewilderingly, had secured the access codes to the North Korean mobile-phone database. They were very obscure and heavily guarded and, when it came to cyberspace, the North Koreans were no beginners. Indeed, they were brilliant, constantly attacking the West with malware, Trojan horses and every trick in the book. But they were not an eighteen-year-old with Asperger’s syndrome.
In this paranoid dictatorship, there are only 1.8 million landlines, and these are confined to the topmost layers of government and administration. Phones may be the source of plots, conspiracies; they are not for the masses. Even the trusted must fill out many forms to secure one, and all are permanently bugged. Checks on ownership of mobile phones are even more stringent.
The nationalized service is Koryolink, a partner with Egyptian-owned Orascom. An estimated 400,000 people are allowed a mobile phone, and these 400,000 consist almost entirely of the privileged living in the capital. Among the really elite there is an even smaller service. This was what Luke Jennings, after weeks of work, had penetrated. Then the fluent Korean-speakers of RUSI, the Foreign Office and SIS had taken over, prowling the database to discover the personal phone number of General Li Song-Rhee.
It was a North Korean defector, sequestered in a safe house under guard, who had composed the message. In 2013, Kim had ordered the arrest and execution of his uncle and mentor Jang Song Thaek, possibly the most powerful man in the state after himself, on trumped-up charges of treason. The mandarin was torn apart by heavy machine-gun fire. The message to General Li, anonymous but evidently from a friend inside the elite, warned him that this fate was planned and pending for him too.
No, there was no need as yet to tell the PM all this, mused Weston as he sipped his arabica. Need to know, and all that. The Americans would take Li, of course. He would be crazy to stay in South Korea. A safe house close to the CIA at McLean would be safer and just as comfortable. Hours and hours of careful debriefing in the Korean language.
What would General Li reveal? And would the Americans let a Britisher sit in? It had been so long, many of his best friends in the Company were, like him, retired. Or supposed to be. But some of the old alliances, forged behind the Iron Curtain, ‘back in the day’, as the expression has it, still ran deep. Hazards shared, toasts drunk. As the veterans said at the bar of the SF Club, we had some fun. He would have a word with a few.
Sir Adrian’s instincts turned out to be accurate. From the South Korean navy base at Incheon, the defector was rapidly flown the short distance to the capital, Seoul. No local commander wanted to be in charge of this potential grenade for any longer than necessary.
The same applied to the South Korean government. This was supposed to be a time of détente between North and South, massively publicized and lauded worldwide, and now the government of the South had found itself in possession of a diplomatic bomb that could blow the whole process from détente back to open war.
The loss of face in Pyongyang would be staggering, and the Northern government learned of its loss in the late morning. The demand that General Li be returned to the North was immediate. Far from being affronted, the South Korean regime was relieved when the CIA moved in, and in strength, from the US embassy in Seoul. Still in his salt-stained uniform, the general agreed with the Americans that he did indeed wish to be transferred to America.
The transfer, in a US Air Force jetliner, took place that very evening. Within an hour, while General Li was still airborne and, as it happened, fast asleep, Seoul was putting it about that the entire operation had been organized by the CIA. The Agency showed zero energy in denying this. Were it true, it would have been a masterstroke.
On his second private prediction the British veteran also turned out to be prescient. Within hours of landing, General Li Song-Rhee was lodged in very comfortable quarters, and heavily guarded by SAD hard men within the huge agency complex at Langley, Virginia.
Experts in North Korea, in its government, its weapons programme, its culture and language, culled from the Agency, the Pentagon, the State Department and academia, were hastily assembled to form the core interrogation team and its attendant body of observers. The general did not need to be advised, even delicately, that full cooperation would be the fee for his salvation and protection. He was no fool.
The White House demanded no delay.
Whatever the man at the very heart of the North Korean power and armaments machine had to reveal, the POTUS wanted it, and now.
The diplomatic and media worlds were in torment. It was soon impossible for the USA to plan for any more head-of-state-level summits. The palaver that had attended the meeting between the President and the Korean dictator on a small island off Singapore began to fade. Of more concern than another showbiz spectacular was the curiosity as to what the defecting general would have to say.
Menacingly, the government of North Korea went silent. The hermit state, after a single denunciation of the West and all its tricks, and a lame attempt to claim the defector was a phoney, lapsed into an enraged shutdown. Clearly, as Western media analysts told the world, the primary concern of Pyongyang was that the North Korean people not learn of the disaster. It worked for a while but, slowly, word spread.
The actual interrogation of General Li, politely referred to as a debriefing, began at the CIA base in a rigorously sealed environment guarded by SAD security forces two days later.
The general was in a made-to-measure dark suit with shirt and tie – his choice – and his questioners had chosen the same. There were four of them, and two interpreters: an American scholar bilingual in Korean and a Korea-born earlier defector and thirty-years US citizen. Another twenty observers watched the meeting on CCTV screens.
The intention was to put General Li in a relaxed, comfortable, no-stress environment, five professional men having a friendly chat, as it were. The lead questioner was a professor of Korean studies who was fluent in the language after a lifetime steeped in his chosen subject. He had been briefed extensively on what the military needed urgently to know.
As it happened, General Li was one of that infinitesimally small percentage of North Koreans who spoke fluent English. The two interpreters checked for accuracy and occasionally helped with technicalities. All, including those outside the room, were security-cleared to a high level. One of them was an elderly Englishman who sat at the back and remained silent – his favoured position.
Even if, among politicians and the senior job-holders who could be ousted within the hour for a disagreement with the President, the mood for self-delusion reigned, the CIA still retained its core of full-time, long-haul professional realists. It was among these that the British counterparts from MI6 had very good contacts. It was they who had prevailed on their American colleagues to include the retired Brit on the very small guest list.
The moving force behind this was the Director of the CIA, who was informed in total confidence that, but for a teenager now tinkering with his computer in the heart of Warwickshire, General Li Song-Rhee would still be in Pyongyang. No one else in Washington had a clue that the cellphone message that had brought the North Korean to defect was a confidence trick, and that included the general himself.
These debriefings do not confine themselves to a single session, even a long one. They last for days. It was on the second day that General Li was allowed to lapse into his area of true expertise – Kim’s missile programme, of which he had had overall charge. That was when he dropped his bombshell, possibly without knowing what it was. He was unsure how much the Western allies really knew, and unaware they knew less than they thought they did.
On the first day he had confirmed what Sir Adrian, at least, had warned of: the destruction of the nuclear testing site of Punggye-ri had been a ruse. It had certainly fooled the world media, who had announced with delight to their readers, listeners and viewers a major concession by North Korea.
In fact, the testing base was already a ruin, the general averred. A victim of over-drilling, bomb-testing and an earthquake, it was a collection of collapsed tunnels, caverns and galleries. Behind the access entrances sealed by explosive charges were mere piles of rubble and roof-fall.
He also confirmed that the much-hyped Hwasong-15 intercontinental ballistic missile was far too weak to carry the thermonuclear warhead that would make North Korea a true nuclear power.
It was on the second day that he revealed two things the West truly did not know. The first was that the dictator Kim Jong-un was weaker than they all suspected. General Li swore he was a front man, held in place by the so-called ‘selectorate’ of about 2,000 generals and senior bureaucrats. These were the ones who owned and ran the country, living in extreme luxury as the people starved. This allowed Kim to do what he did best – posture for the media, wave at the adoration of the proletariat and eat.
His second revelation was that the inadequacy of Hwasong-15 was not the end of the line for the Korean nuclear programme. Deep beneath a secret mountain, unspotted by the outside world, was another cavern, where, even as he spoke, its mighty successor, Hwasong-20, was being prepared. It would certainly carry their heaviest thermonuclear warhead to any destination on the surface of the world. All it lacked were the multistage engines, and these were due to be working and available at any time.
By the end of the first day of interrogation a second announced meeting between Kim and the American President had been cancelled by Washington, alleging bad faith.
On the evening of the second day Sir Adrian flew back to the United Kingdom. He had a lady to report to but, first, a little more research.
Chapter Seventeen
EVERY MAJOR CITY has its libraries where scholars may pore over records and ancient texts, but London is a researcher’s dream. Somewhere in that sprawling metropolis are archives covering everything man has ever thought, written or done since the first troglodyte emerged from his cave.
Some are in bright new libraries of steel, concrete and plate glass. Others are ancient cellars where the skulls of those who died in long-ago plagues stare back at the living as if to say: ‘We were here once. We lived, loved, fought, suffered, died. We are your history. Discover us, remember us.’
Sir Adrian settled upon the Royal United Services Institute, tucked away off Whitehall, close to the rolling Thames. The man he sought after diligent enquiries was, he thought, remarkably young. But then, again, they always were nowadays. Advancing age is merciless. Professor Martin Dixon was forty and had been studying missiles since he became obsessed by them in his early teens. That led to a study of both Koreas.
‘The North Korean regime’s appetite for nuclear weapons and missiles to carry them began over fifty years ago with the founding father, Kim Il-sung,’ he said. ‘After 1945, as a defeated Japan withdrew from the Korean peninsula, it was Joseph Stalin who personally selected the first Kim to create the communist state of North Korea and invade the South. Three years later, the Korean stalemate led to the permanent division of the peninsula.
‘By the time Kim Il-sung died in 1994, he had created the world’s first communist dynasty and was able to hand over to his son, Kim Jong-il. He had also established a code of absolute worship of him and his family among a people propagandized, brainwashed and trained like puppets to adore him and never, ever, question his near-divinity. To do that he had sealed North Korea from all external influences, creating today’s hermit state.
‘In the process he had realized that a small, almost barren state of twenty-three million people unable to be self-sufficient even in food could never be a world-feared power unless it had nuclear weapons and the missiles to launch them worldwide. That became the abiding obsession and remains so under his grandson. Everything – absolutely everything that North Korea is or could have been – has been sacrificed to that lust to threaten the world.’
‘And the missiles?’
‘First came the bomb, Sir Adrian,’ said the young scholar. ‘The Koreans, North and South, are extremely intelligent people. The North cracked technical problem after problem, refining enough uranium-235 and then plutonium to create their own atomic and now thermonuclear weapons to have today reserves of both. Every penny of foreign exchange resources went on that quest.
‘But it became plain that having an atomic bomb serves no purpose if you can only detonate it under your own backside. To be truly threatening
, and thus to be kowtowed to, you have to be able to deliver and detonate it many miles away. They imported rocket technology at first and built a range of missiles they called Musudan. These could carry modest-sized bombs in their warheads, but only across limited distances.
‘In the West, we watched them test the atom-bomb programme over and over again, always underground, until they had blasted huge holes all over the country. In parallel, the missile programme progressed from the Musudans to a new type of missile – much bigger payload, much longer range. As you know, these are called Hwasong.’
‘How far exactly have they got?’
‘Kim Jong-il carried on his father’s policies. The scientists pushed ahead with the Hwasong missile programme until the second Kim died, in 2011. There was a brief power struggle, but the dead dictator’s favoured son won by a mile. Fat, ugly, insisting on a bizarre haircut – it doesn’t matter. His ruthlessness is total, his obsession with himself absolute.
‘Since he came to power he has forged ahead with both bomb and missile programmes with increased speed and urgency. Test after test, launch after launch. They were incredibly expensive and many of them failures, and his behaviour has become more and more weird. It does not seem to matter. Trade sanctions are imposed, then relaxed. The fact is, the world is frightened of him.
‘The USA could snuff out him and his regime by a first-strike onslaught, and so could his vast neighbour and patron, China. But both fear he would detonate enough thermonuclear devices to devastate the entire peninsula and much of north-eastern China. So … the constant indulgences, the elevation to world-class statesman.
‘As for the missile programme, that is my particular study. The latest, with the biggest range and payload, is the Hwasong-15. It is huge, but not quite big enough to carry the thermonuclear warhead Kim Jong-un wants to install on it to any part of the world – and, in particular, Washington. You know about the defection of General Li Song-Rhee?’
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