SECTOR COMMANDER: American bomber coming into your sector, heading 275 degrees.
KN-06 UNIT: Okay, shoot it?
SECTOR COMMANDER: If you see it cross, shoot it.
KN-06 UNIT: Okay, if we see it, we will shoot it.
SECTOR COMMANDER: If it crosses. Don’t lose it.
KN-06 UNIT: Okay. We won’t.
The original Korean transcript leaves some doubt about whether the KN-06 crew understood that the order was a reiteration of a standing order to shoot aircraft that entered DPRK airspace without permission, or whether the crew believed that it was being told by the sector commander that BX 411 had already violated North Korean airspace and should be shot down if an opportunity presented itself. What is certain is that the KN-06 had a FLAP LID tracking and engagement radar that provided little information to the missile’s operators about what they were targeting. Thus, the KN-06 crew continued operating under the assumption that Air Busan Flight 411 was a bomber—rather than a jetliner with a payload of schoolchildren.
Neither can there be any doubt about what happened next. The missile unit at Ongjin tracked BX 411 out over the Yellow Sea. At 12:28 AM, the unit fired two surface-to-air missiles at its target. The first missile struck the Airbus A320 near the tail section, tearing the fuselage in two and sending the aircraft into the sea.
It remains unclear why the KN-06 crew concluded that the BX 411 had crossed into North Korean airspace and then chose to down the aircraft. Roh Pyong-ui, in his interrogation, insisted both that the aircraft had violated North Korean airspace and that it was a military aircraft sent as a provocation by the Trump administration. “We received an order that an American bomber was violating our airspace,” Roh told his interrogator. “For us, that is everything. It means we need to shoot it down.” Roh was asked repeatedly whether his crew made the determination itself that the aircraft had crossed into North Korean airspace or whether he understood the sector commander to have made that judgment. Each time, without answering the question, Roh insisted that the aircraft had violated North Korean airspace.
Roh also insisted that the aircraft was an American bomber or another type of military aircraft, despite being shown evidence that the aircraft was a civilian airliner. “That means nothing,” he responded when interrogators told him the aircraft was a civilian Airbus 320. “It is easy to turn a civilian type of plane into one for military use. We did it all the time.”
While it is impossible to understand what the North Korean crew was thinking, it is clear in retrospect that they were primed to see a bomber. The crew had specifically been moved to this location in the expectation of an American bomber flight; the crew was then told that the aircraft was a bomber; and in fact the aircraft was retracing, however inadvertently, the flight path expected for an American bomber. In the confusion, it seems the crew felt pressured not to let the aircraft get away.
A final factor may also have shaped the crew’s perception. North Korean military commanders worried that their radars were not detecting all US bomber flights. In some cases, North Korean radars did not detect bomber flights that were later reported in the press. In other cases, the North Koreans saw the aircraft only at the last moment and responded sluggishly. Captured documents indicate that the top leadership placed enormous pressure on air defense units to detect overflights and to be prepared to use force in the event of an incursion into DPRK airspace. It was in this context that Kim Jong Un and others reaffirmed that any American aircraft that strayed into DPRK airspace was to be shot down. The heads of the KPA Air and Anti-Air Force, as well as local air defense commanders, felt incredible pressure to demonstrate extraordinary levels of readiness.
Reporting indicates that some local commanders, in response to this extraordinary pressure from the top, offered bounties to air defense crews—bonuses promised both to crews that detected enemy aircraft approaching DPRK airspace and to any unit that shot down a US aircraft for violating it. Other prisoners confirmed that units were promised additional pay or rations for detecting or shooting down US aircraft, although the description of what was offered varies considerably.
Roh, too, claimed that his crew was offered a bonus. “Those who sat in chairs and stared at screens received double salary for seeing an airplane!” he complained to his interrogators. “At the time, monthly pay was 3,000 won. So I was expecting at least 6,000 for shooting down the American bomber. But the war started. I never got my bonus.”
2
South Korea Hits Back
As soon as BX 411 disappeared from South Korean air traffic control radars at 12:28 PM, it was clear that the aircraft had crashed. Crashes are tragic, but they do happen. There was no reason for South Korea’s civilian air traffic controllers to suspect that the loss of the aircraft was anything other than an accident. The air traffic controllers initiated the standard procedures for responding to a civil aviation accident and notified their superiors. The message that an aircraft had been lost moved swiftly up and out to various government agencies.
South Korean military authorities, meanwhile, had initiated standard procedures of their own. They had detected the missile launch and explosion. These officials also began notifying their superiors and sending their message up and out. These two messages—that a civil airliner had been lost and that North Korea had shot it down—began racing through South Korea’s government, winding their way up and up the chain of command and ultimately reaching the office of the South Korean president himself.
The Blue House
The President of South Korea lived in an elegant palace with the lilting name Cheong Wa Dae, which is literally translated as the Pavilion of Blue Tiles—a reference to the azure tiles of its distinctive, traditional Korean roof. In English, however, South Koreans simply called it “the Blue House.” This name was easier to remember and pronounce for the American military officers and diplomats who arrived in-country knowing little or nothing about Korea and speaking only a few words of the language. But like many things in Korea, this simple name obscured a fundamentally different reality.
The White House, for example, is a single building in which the president’s key advisers are close at hand. The chief of staff, national security adviser, and essential White House staff cram themselves into tiny offices that have no redeeming feature except proximity to the Oval Office—and in the toughest moments, the Situation Room. In Washington, proximity is what matters.
The Blue House had little in common with the White House. It wasn’t even a house. There was a house, to be sure, but Cheong Wa Dae was a complex of buildings, spread across a kind of campus. Key staff members, including the president’s chief of staff, had workspaces in a series of contemporary office buildings that looked nothing like the traditional main building that sheltered the president’s office under those beautiful blue tiles. The president’s residence was in yet another building, a short walk away. In the event of an emergency, the president’s aides had to converge on the main building, where they would gather in the Crisis Room that sat beneath it. To do so, they had to walk ten minutes or more across the palace grounds, passing through two gates and a guard post, before entering the main building and descending into the small bunker beneath.
South Korean officials had long complained that this layout made it take far too long for officials to gather in an emergency. As Kwon Hyuck-ki, former chief secretary to the president of South Korea, said, “It is retrogression of sorts that the president’s office exists as a small Cheong Wa Dae within Cheong Wa Dae.” In 2010, after North Korea began shelling a South Korean island, it took some twenty minutes for the key national security staff to assemble in the bunker.
South Korean president Moon Jae-in, too, had complained about the luxurious palace that housed his predecessors—including Park Chung Hee, the dictator who had jailed a young Moon for participating in a student protest. One of Moon’s campaign pledges had been to relocate his office and other functions to a government facility about a mile south of Cheong
Wa Dae. But even after the move to the Central Government Complex was largely completed in early 2020, the Cheong Wa Dae complex retained two very important government functions: it remained the president’s residence, and it continued to house the underground Crisis Room, known simply as “the bunker.”
Early in the afternoon of Saturday, March 21, President Moon was at his residence, thinking about ships, not aircraft. He was looking over remarks that he would deliver a few days later at a shipyard—where he would announce progress on a public corporation that would aid South Korea’s struggling shipbuilding industry—when the message arrived.
At 12:35, Im Jong-seok, Moon’s chief of staff, knocked on the door and told Moon that a South Korean airliner en route from Busan to Ulan Bator had disappeared from radar screens over the Yellow Sea and was presumed lost. Moon asked Im to convene his security council. A few minutes later, Im returned with a second message. The South Korean military had detected a surface-to-air missile launch from North Korea that was believed to be the cause of the loss of the aircraft. At this point, Moon went immediately to the underground Crisis Room.
Moon sat at the head of an empty table, waiting for his national security team to arrive. As he waited, he appeared to grow anxious and then irritated at the delay. “He wasn’t the sort of man who fidgeted,” recalled Im. “This was the first time I saw him tapping his pen on the table. That’s the memory of him that stays with me, him sitting in that room, just waiting.”
Weighing on Moon were the political dangers of appearing indecisive. “I am sure the Sewol was in his mind,” Im explained, “because he made a bitter comment about ‘seven hours.’” “Seven hours” referred to the long period of inaction on the part of the South Korean government that followed the sinking in 2014 of the South Korean ferry MV Sewol. Then-president Park Geun Hye had waited most of the day before convening an emergency meeting of her security advisers, a delay that permanently turned public opinion against her. Many of her political opponents, including Moon, had demanded to know what became of the “seven missing hours” when the passengers of the Sewol, most of them students, were drowning. Park’s aides had not offered a convincing explanation, allowing wild rumors to spread. She had been in an assignation with an aide, one tabloid claimed, while another reported that she was having plastic surgery.
Park was eventually impeached for corruption and sentenced to twenty-four years in prison. But Moon and his aides believed that the public anger toward Park had its roots in the Sewol disaster. They had seen evidence of her malfeasance firsthand: upon taking office, Moon’s staff found a cache of documents that showed that Park’s aides had lied about when she was notified about the disaster. They turned the documents over to investigators and filed a complaint with the Seoul prosecutor’s office. Moon’s surviving aides all believe that he was determined not to repeat Park’s mistakes. “Moon was so hard on Park over her failure with the Sewol,” Im recalled. “He was not going to open himself up to the same criticism.”
This crisis was precisely what Moon had tried to avoid. The president had thought that North Korea’s participation in the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, might offer the chance to fundamentally change the relationship between the two countries. President Moon had been an unapologetic advocate for reviving the “Sunshine Policy” of South Korea’s first progressive president, Kim Dae Jung. The idea was simple: hostility toward North Korea would only make Kim Jong Un cling to his nuclear weapons, the same way a cold wind might make a man draw a heavy winter coat around him. If you want the man to take off the coat, the warm sunshine is far more effective.
It was inevitable that the new version of the policy would be nicknamed “Moonshine.” The term was a pun on the president’s name, of course, but it also conveyed a certain weary skepticism about the enterprise. It wasn’t an indictment of diplomacy per se, so much as a weary acceptance that all of the policies tried to date, both hard and soft, had failed to deliver a Korean Peninsula free from nuclear danger. It is only with hindsight, perhaps, that the brief and intense period of summit diplomacy that followed the 2018 Olympics seems like a heroic effort to avert a catastrophe.
In the end, however, it had come to nothing. For Moon and his advisers, persuading Kim Jong Un to abandon his nuclear weapons would take time. Reduce tension, get a peace agreement, and Kim would eliminate his nuclear arms just as a man would take off his coat in the hot sun. But President Trump wanted Kim to give up his nuclear weapons right away—permanent, irreversible, and verifiable disarmament, without delay and, in any event, no later than the end of the president’s first term. Kim had suspended nuclear and missile tests in the hope that summits with Moon and Trump marked the beginning of a new relationship between North Korea and the rest of the world. Those around Trump, though, continued to insist upon what Bolton called a “Libya-style” disarmament agreement. The notion that Kim would surrender his weapons as Muammar Gaddafi had, only to suffer a grisly death at the hands of opposition forces supported by American airpower, was a nonstarter. More than a few White House staffers believed that was precisely why Bolton, who was generally thought to oppose the negotiations, kept bringing it up. Kim ordered his scientists and engineers to resume missile and nuclear tests in order to make the point as clear as possible: North Korea was, and would remain, a nuclear power.
The implosion of negotiations between the United States and North Korea put unbearable pressure on Moon Jae-in. Moonshine simply could not work without a simultaneous improvement in relations between Pyongyang and Washington. The issues were simply too closely intertwined. “Neither South-North relations nor US-North relations will go far if the other fails,” explained South Korean diplomat Suh Hoon following the short-lived thaw. “They are like two wheels on a wagon that must roll together.” Without a deal between Trump and Kim, and with North Korea resuming its nuclear and missile testing, the wheels came off.
Once North Korea resumed missile and nuclear tests, support for Moon’s efforts collapsed. Jokes about the Moonshine policy had a sharper edge to them. The political center in South Korea had shifted, and Moon was forced to shift with it. “Dialogue is impossible in a situation like this,” Moon lamented in one interview. “International sanctions and pressure will further tighten to force North Korea to choose no other option but to step forward on the path to genuine dialogue.”
It is hard to recall that, at the time, Moon’s decision to step back from his policy of engagement was widely lauded as a return to realism rather than the collapse of the last real diplomatic effort to head off a crisis. This sense that Moon was adopting a pragmatic policy was particularly strong among national security experts in Washington, many of whom believed that the Moonshine policy was dangerously naive. Some suggested that Moon had been “mugged by reality” and would now adopt a more traditional approach.
But according to those who knew Moon, he was still seeking a path toward dialogue with North Korea even until the very end. What was no longer clear to him was how to get to that path from the bunker in which he was now sitting.
“Fixed Will”
It was cold enough on March 21 that there was still snow on the ground in Seoul. Perhaps because of the inclement weather, Moon’s aides trickled in slowly, and he was not able to convene the meeting until 1:00 PM—some twenty-five minutes after he had been notified of the downing of Flight BX 411 and more than thirty minutes after the aircraft had been lost. By this time, Moon was upset and let the others know it, according to a memorandum of the meeting. He wanted to know what had happened and what was being done to look for survivors.
Moon’s actions that day are essential to understanding why events unfolded as they did. There are some discrepancies between the memorandum summarizing the meeting and the recollections of Moon’s surviving aides. The memorandum records that the first few minutes were dedicated to simply explaining what had happened—the flight itself, the problems in the cockpit, the detection of the missile launch.
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sp; “Moon had been given fragments of information while waiting for the meeting to start,” Im Jong-seok explained, “and we didn’t take time to go back over what we thought he knew. This was maybe a mistake, but it was very stressful, very upsetting.” Moon seemed focused on the emergency response, asking about search-and-rescue operations, apparently in the hope that the aircraft had been damaged but somehow survived a water landing. Moon’s aides appear to have been reluctant to explain that there was no realistic hope of survivors. “I remember when the navy chief, Admiral Um [Hyun-seong], finally told President Moon that he didn’t think any of the kids had survived,” one aide recalled. “President Moon flinched at the word ‘kids.’ I could see on his face that he hadn’t known the plane was full of students.”
At 1:11 PM, North Korean state media released a statement confirming that the state’s missile forces had deliberately shot down the aircraft, which it called a bomber. A military aide brought a printout of the statement into the meeting room.
IT IS THE HEROIC [NORTH] KOREAN PEOPLE’S ARMY’S METTLE TO MERCILESSLY PUNISH ANY PROVOKERS WHO HURT THE DIGNITY OF THE DEMOCRATIC PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF KOREA, NO MATTER WHERE THEY ARE. AT ABOUT 11:45 ON MARCH 21, A US BOMBER INTRUDED DEEP INTO THE SKY ABOVE KANGRYONG COUNTY, SOUTH HWANGHAE PROVINCE OF THE DPRK, BEYOND THE MILITARY DEMARCATION LINE IN THE WESTERN SECTOR OF THE FRONT. A SURFACE-TO-AIR MISSILE UNIT OF THE KPA ANTI-AIR FORCE SHOT DOWN THE AIRCRAFT WITH A SINGLE SHOT, DISPLAYING ITS FIXED WILL TO SHOW NO MERCY TO THE AGGRESSORS.
The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States Page 3
