The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States

by Jeffrey Lewis

  SCATHE JIGSAW was among the less aggressive proposals considered by the Trump administration for combating the challenge presented by North Korea. One faction, including former national security adviser John Bolton and speechwriter Stephen Miller, favored what some have called a “punch in the nose” or a “bloody nose”—a limited military strike to destroy a North Korean facility related to its missile program. (White House officials strenuously denied using either term. “The phrase has never, ever been uttered by anyone in the White House,” said one former administration official involved in Asia policy.) The other faction feared that North Korea would respond to such a strike with disproportionate force, creating a dangerous dynamic that could lead to rapid and uncontrollable escalation between the two sides. These officials proposed a psychological operations campaign as a less volatile, less public option—one aimed at frightening Kim Jong Un without forcing him to retaliate.

  The implications of this tactic do not seem to have been fully thought through by the officials who suggested it. According to one former Pentagon official, the original purpose behind the proposal for psychological operations was to dampen talk about a military strike within the White House. “You can’t beat something with nothing,” she explained. “The purpose of the psychological operations was to have a strong containment alternative to the military strike that Bolton kept pushing.” The proposal garnered widespread support within the Trump administration after it became evident that the main alternative—the so-called punch in the nose—​carried even greater risks.

  The White House, in a National Security Council (NSC) meeting on November 18, 2019, directed the Air Force to develop a psychological operations campaign against North Korea that would include air probes near and along the North Korean border. The program that the Air Force developed consisted of frequent but irregularly timed bomber flights in which small numbers of American aircraft would fly directly at North Korean airspace, forcing North Korean units to turn on their radars and aircraft to go on alert. Administration officials pointed to a tweet sent by President Trump as confirming, in a general way, the initiation of psychological operations.

  Donald J. Trump @tehDonaldJTrump

  If China doesn’t get little Rocket Man under control, we’re going to start RATTLING THE POTS AND PANS.

  After the tweet, officials inside the White House began calling the campaign “Pots and Pans.” The term appears to have originated with Secretary of Defense James Mattis. “The idea was to take the Reagan plan,” one official testified, “and to do the same thing to Kim Jong Un. Mattis said we should ‘rattle our pots and pans’ to frighten Kim and show the Chinese we mean business. The president just kind of tweeted that, verbatim.”

  It is important to note that there are differences between how the Pentagon and the White House saw SCATHE JIGSAW. In Air Force documents, the effort is described as a “ferret” mission to map North Korean radar sites and determine the readiness of North Korean air defense units. Such missions had been flown routinely during the early part of the Cold War, until they were suspended following a 1969 incident in which a US reconnaissance aircraft was shot down by North Korean MiG fighter jets.

  The emails and text messages of White House officials suggest, however, that for them the more important goal of SCATHE JIGSAW was to unsettle Kim Jong Un and his military leaders. A secondary objective was to persuade leaders in Beijing that a failure to resolve the crisis on the Korean Peninsula might result in a military conflict. The guidance to the Air Force provided by the White House, under Bolton’s signature, makes only passing reference to the military value of intelligence gained from such missions and describes the option nearly exclusively in terms of the impact it might have on Kim and other North Korean leaders. The guidance directs the Air Force to develop a plan to “deliver the message of war” to leaders in Pyongyang and Beijing and take steps to “win the battlefield of perception.” A clearer statement of the purpose of this effort is written in the margins of a draft copy of the order, retained by Bolton: “PRESIDENT SAYS KNOCK SOME SENSE INTO THAT FAT CRAZY KID.”

  White House and Pentagon officials were unanimous in their belief that the psychological operations campaign against the Soviets had been successful in frightening Soviet leaders, who had subsequently acted far more cautiously, and that it would similarly prove a workable approach for the current standoff with North Korea. In advocating for this tactic, Secretary of Defense Mattis sided with those officials in the administration who believed the bomber flights to be less provocative than the “bloody nose” approach.

  Yet this course of action also contained certain dangers that, by now, are obvious. Specifically, the White House was directly warned that previous psychological operations had resulted in the loss of both military and civilian aircraft and ships. A classified “memo to holders”—prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in response to a White House inquiry about the consequences of this possible course of action with regard to North Korea—noted that past efforts had carried significant risks:

  WE ASSESS THAT A ROBUST PSYOP CAMPAIGN CARRIES SOME RISK OF ESCALATION BASED ON PAST EXPERIENCE WITH SUCH MISSIONS. NORTH KOREA SEIZED A US INTELLIGENCE GATHERING VESSEL IN 1968 AND SHOT DOWN A US RECONNAISSANCE AIRCRAFT IN 1969. THE REAGAN-ERA EFFORT TO PROBE SOVIET AIR DEFENSES WAS ALSO A SIGNIFICANT FACTOR IN THE SOVIET SHOOTDOWN OF KAL 007 IN 1983, WHICH TRIGGERED THE WORST SUPERPOWER CONFRONTATION SINCE THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS.

  Perhaps because of this warning, the White House decided that the psychological operations campaign was best conducted in secret, and staff took unusual measures to guard against further leaks, such as the president’s tweet. “The idea was to keep ‘Pots and Pans’ limited to a small circle,” one of Bolton’s aides explained. “Only the core staff at the White House and Mattis’s people executing it would know about the program, along with the Chinese and North Koreans, of course.” White House officials discussed whether to approach civil maritime and aviation authorities about altering air and sea routes, but decided not to do anything that might result in the public disclosure of SCATHE JIGSAW. Moreover, the Trump administration chose not to notify South Korean authorities about the full extent of the program, although the South Koreans understood generally that the additional flights through their airspace were part of a more aggressive American military posture.

  “The whole point of the campaign was that it was supposed to be a secret,” one adviser explained. “If you start approaching shipping companies and airlines, then it will be in the paper the next day and Kim will be forced to respond.”

  It is unclear how many senior officials knew about this program. There are references in the emails of half a dozen White House staff members, including National Security Adviser Bolton. More ambiguous references appear in emails and text messages among a larger group that mention “Ivanka’s new line of kitchenware,” which one official claimed was a tongue-in-cheek reference to SCATHE JIGSAW. The program was sizable enough, and Trump’s tweet drew enough attention, that many officials believed that word of it must have spread around the White House.

  In the roughly four months that elapsed between the NSC meeting on November 18, 2019, and the BX 411 episode on March 21, 2020, the Air Force conducted a series of SCATHE JIGSAW sorties without incident. In general, the missions had the same profile, one similar to that of the Reagan-era program that inspired them. A small number of aircraft would directly approach North Korean airspace in a manner that appeared to be a bombing run against a location in North Korea that was considered high-value, usually either a military site or a leadership compound. This would force North Korean air defense units to turn on their radars and pilots to scramble to aircraft, as well as initiate a general alert that went up to the highest echelons of the North Korean command. At the last moment before entering North Korean airspace, the US aircraft would turn around and head home. The United States could, in this way, probe North Korea’s air defenses for weaknesses, while also conveying to
Kim Jong Un and his lieutenants that he was vulnerable to attack.

  Trump administration officials were adamant that the bomber flights in SCATHE JIGSAW were an evolution of previous missions begun under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The US Air Force had established a “continuous bomber presence” mission at Andersen Air Force Base on Guam in 2004 during the Global War on Terror. The goal was to ensure that the United States always maintained a significant number of bomber aircraft capable of conducting exercises in Asia on short notice to demonstrate that the United States remained instantly willing and able to conduct bomber strikes anywhere in the region.

  In particular, Trump administration officials made frequent references to former President Obama and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. “You are blaming us,” said one official, “but Obama did it all the time. He had dozens of bomber flights.” Another claimed, “This was Hillary Clinton’s brainchild.”

  In fact, the number of bomber flights around the Korean Peninsula remained relatively consistent through 2016. What changed following North Korea’s January 2013 nuclear test was the public prominence given to routine bomber exercises. After North Korea’s 2013 test, the Department of Defense developed a program to highlight ongoing training that might strengthen deterrence on the Korean Peninsula. This work fell to the Joint Information Operations Warfare Center (JIOWC) at Lackland Air Force Base near San Antonio, which is responsible for assisting US military commanders around the world with developing what JIOWC called an “integrated approach to information operations.” JIOWC worked with US Forces Korea, US Pacific Command (PACOM), Air Force Global Strike Command, and US Strategic Command (STRATCOM) to develop an information operations strategy.

  As a result, the United States began to publicize bomber flights following North Korean nuclear and missile tests. Pentagon officials highlighted a series of three flights involving B-1 and B-52 bombers in March 2013. Again, in 2016, the Obama administration publicized three more flights—one in January following the nuclear explosive test, and another two following the September 2016 nuclear explosion.

  The number of bomber flights increased in number only after the Trump administration took office, with twelve publicly announced flights taking place in 2017. The number of flights fell during the thaw in 2018, before increasing to eighteen in 2019 as tensions returned. Moreover, the profile of these flights changed. Starting in 2017, operations were in some cases conducted at night and much farther north than US aircraft had operated in decades. (Prior to 2017, US aircraft tended to stay south of the DMZ rather than flying north into the international airspace between the Korean Peninsula and Japan.) These activities occurred within full view of North Korean radars.

  Moreover, the mission profile of the bomber flights in the SCATHE JIGSAW air probes differed considerably from even the more aggressive bomber missions begun during 2017. The more aggressive flight plans reflected a sense that the United States needed to make an impression upon North Korea’s leadership. “There had been so many bomber flights already,” one administration official explained. “We wanted something new that would get [Kim Jong Un’s] attention.”

  In most SCATHE JIGSAW missions, the bomber would fly toward North Korea, turning around at the last moment before entering North Korean airspace. In a smaller number of cases, bombers would fly along the edge of North Korea’s airspace, dipping in and out of radar contact. The eleventh mission, on March 6, 2020, was one of these. A US bomber from Guam flew northward over South Korea. As the bomber approached the DMZ, the pilot banked to the west, flying out over the Yellow Sea, along the very edge of North Korea’s airspace.

  It was Air Busan’s bad luck that, on March 21, 2020, its crew, working to restore power to the ailing electrical systems, banked hard to avoid flying into North Korea, then followed a path out into the Yellow Sea that retraced the route flown by a US bomber less than a month before.

  The View from TALL KING

  Despite the troubles on board BX 411 and the provocative nature of US bomber flights under SCATHE JIGSAW, responsibility for the loss of BX 411 and all of its passengers rests squarely with North Korea. Why did North Korea mistake BX 411 for a SCATHE JIGSAW bomber mission, and why did the crew choose to shoot it down?

  The answer may rest atop a high mountain, near the North Korean city of Sariwon. In 1987, the Soviet Union supplied the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) with two batteries of SA-5 Gammon long-range surface-to-air missiles (SAMs). Each of these batteries came equipped with a P14 TALL KING radar. It was these two radars—one atop the mountain near Sariwon and the other situated to the east, near Wonsan—that provided the primary means by which North Korea detected aircraft approaching its airspace. Communications intercepts made available by the Department of Defense indicate that it was the TALL KING radar that first saw BX 411 approaching North Korea.

  The view from the TALL KING radar was limited. What the radar operators saw was a blip on a screen—in this case, an aircraft flying without a transponder and traveling along a path that resembled that of a previous bomber flight.

  Communications intercepts show that the TALL KING radar near Sariwon detected BX 411 just as the electrical problems began. At around 11:50 AM, the commander of the SA-5 missile unit placed a call to the sector commander to report a strange apparition on the TALL KING screen.

  SA-5 UNIT: Track 37, unknown.

  SA-5 UNIT: Bearing 3-3-0, north.

  SECTOR COMMANDER: Can you identify it?

  SA-5 UNIT: Transponder off. Looks like another American bomber.

  SECTOR COMMANDER: Okay. I’ll send it up.

  The detection was noted and passed up the chain of command. Communications intercepts show that the sector commander promptly contacted the Korean People’s Army (KPA) Air and Anti-Air Force, headquartered in Chunghwa. For SCATHE JIGSAW flights, the protocol in place required the duty officer at Chunghwa to put the sector commander in direct communication with the commander of the Air Force. But at this moment, shortly before noon on March 21, the commander was not available, so one of his subordinates took the telephone call instead.

  SECTOR COMMANDER: Tell the boss we have another one.

  ANTI-AIR COMMAND: He’s asleep.

  SECTOR COMMANDER: It’s the morning. You might want to wake him up.

  ANTI-AIR COMMAND: He had . . . a meeting. It went late. He took a pill.

  SECTOR COMMANDER: Okay.

  ANTI-AIR COMMAND: Don’t shoot unless it comes into our airspace.

  SECTOR COMMANDER: Okay, we’ll shoot if it comes in our airspace.

  The order handed down to the SA-5 unit from Chunghwa reflected standing orders to shoot down foreign aircraft that entered DPRK without permission. In 1994, when a US helicopter strayed into DPRK airspace, the North Koreans shot it down. Until now, none of the US bomber missions had crossed this threshold—but clearly Kim’s air commanders were on alert for such an incursion.

  As the aircraft turned westward, the SA-5 unit handed tracking of the target over to another missile unit, this one deployed near the city of Ongjin. The crew of this unit was inexperienced. They had been deployed with a brand-new system, which the North Koreans called the Pongae-5 surface-to-air missile. One member of the crew, Roh Pyong-ui, was captured as a POW and subsequently debriefed. “It was the first time we had seen such a target in real life,” Roh said. “It looked just like training.”

  Within the US intelligence community, the Pongae-5 SAM was known as the KN-06. North Korea had begun development on it in 2009, but that effort was plagued with problems, as were the attempts to construct the missile’s accompanying radar and engagement software. When North Korea announced mass production of the KN-06 in May 2017—“to be deployed all over the country like forests”—North Korean state media openly referenced the “defects” that had slowed its development.

  As a consequence of the delays in the missile system’s development, the KN-06 unit that now took over the tracking of BX 411 had only begu
n training with the new system in February 2020, just after the lunar new year. This training was cut short following the eleventh and penultimate SCATHE JIGSAW bomber flight on March 6, at which point military authorities rushed the KN-06 unit to Ongjin.

  The deployment of the unit seems to have been part of a general repositioning of North Korean air defenses using a limited number of KN-06 batteries. Following the initiation of SCATHE JIGSAW, North Korea probably repositioned the units to prevent their locations from being compromised by air probes. A minority within the US intelligence community believed that North Korea was positioning KN-06 units to improve the chances of shooting down an American aircraft.

  But in either case, the pressure on the inexperienced crew of the KN-06 unit near Ongjin explains why they behaved as they did in the crucial minutes that followed their acquisition of the unidentified target. The sector commander made contact with the unit, passing along identifying information about the target and reiterating the standing order to shoot down any American aircraft that crossed into North Korean airspace. Communications intercepts show that the call, by radio, was hurried and brief: