The few surviving meeting attendees all remember that the statement changed the tone of their deliberations immediately. “I remember when the military aide brought in the North Korean statement,” said one survivor. “He handed it to the president, which was a very strange thing to do and, in fact, a breach of protocol.” “He should have handed it to me,” Im Jong-seok recalled. “The president read the paper, and then he put it down. And then he turned the paper over, like he didn’t want to look at it. That was when he asked for options.”
“That message changed the meeting,” recalled Kang Kyung-wha, a career diplomat then serving as South Korea’s foreign minister. “Moon wanted to know what his military options were, to hurt Kim Jong Un. I don’t know why, but up to that point I had only thought about this as an accident, and about trying to rescue the survivors. After that, we realized there weren’t going to be any survivors. We only talked about kill chains.”
“I don’t know, in my mind, I always remember it as two different meetings, maybe even on different days,” recalled Chung Eui-yong, South Korea’s national security adviser at the time. “Are you sure it was just one meeting? I guess things changed after the statement. We stopped talking about a rescue and started talking about revenge. It was a strange meeting in that way.”
The Kill Chain
When President Moon Jae-in asked for military options, Air Force general Jeong Kyeong-doo, chairman of South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, was ready. Ever since his confirmation hearing in August 2017, General Jeong had taken a very tough line on responding to what he called North Korea’s relentless “strategic and tactical provocations.” Asked during his confirmation hearing whether President Moon should set red lines with North Korea, his answer had given the impression of a man far more hawkish than the president: “President Moon seems to have meant that we ought to be doing everything we can to prevent a crisis situation in which we find ourselves at a dead end.”
In the Crisis Room, according to the memorandum of the meeting, General Jeong used that same word—“dead end.”
The military plan that General Jeong presented to President Moon during the emergency meeting on March 21 should not have come as a surprise. It had been developed a decade earlier, after a terrible year in which North Korea had engaged in a pair of high-profile provocations. In March 2010, a North Korean submarine used a torpedo to sink a South Korean naval corvette, the ROKS Cheonan, tearing the ship in half and sending forty-six South Korean sailors to a watery grave. (North Korea, of course, denied responsibility.) Then, in November, North Korea unleashed an artillery bombardment against Yeonpyeong Island, killing four South Koreans and injuring twenty-two more.
South Korea’s president at that time, Lee Myung Bak, had been enraged by the attack and ordered a retaliation against North Korea, but was frustrated by American officials who restrained him. Lee wanted a big and bold response, but military officials pushed him to consult with the United States, which retained wartime control over South Korea’s military forces. The Americans pressured Lee to scale back his plans for a retaliation. “South Korea’s original plans for retaliation were, we thought, disproportionately aggressive,” wrote Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. “We were worried the exchanges could escalate dangerously.” South Korea’s eventual response was anemic: satellite images later showed that its retaliation had done little or no damage to the North Koreans.
In the wake of this crisis, Lee pushed for South Korea to develop its own plans and capabilities to retaliate against North Korea in the event of a serious provocation such as a nuclear attack. These plans still required consultation with the United States, but Lee hoped that his successors would have more options to respond boldly to future aggressions by the North.
It was these capabilities that General Jeong presented to President Moon in the Crisis Room as a “three-axis” response to the downing of Flight 411. The military option featured a plan of attack, intelligence and strike capabilities to execute that plan, and missile defenses to limit the damage North Korea could do in retaliation.
The plan of attack presented by General Jeong was called “Korea Massive Punishment and Retaliation” and had been publicly described in some detail after 2016. It described an effort to “decapitate” North Korea’s government and military by using hundreds of long-range missiles and special forces to kill North Korea’s leadership, including Kim Jong Un. The plan named seventy-two distinct targets, including leadership targets in Pyongyang, military headquarters, and sites linked to North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs. The goal, according to one former Ministry of Defense official, was “wiping a certain section of Pyongyang completely off the map.” Pyongyang, a second official explained, would “be reduced to ashes.”
After presenting President Moon with the option of killing North Korea’s senior leaders, General Jeong explained that the plan would be carried out using what he called the “kill chain”: a series of military capabilities designed to detect and locate North Korea’s leaders and military forces linked to precision-strike capabilities to kill them. These capabilities included aircraft, long-range ballistic and cruise missiles, and a regimental-sized special forces team called SPARTAN 3000 that could be inserted into North Korea within twenty-four hours. General Jeong also offered a brief description of South Korea’s missile defense program, called Korea Air and Missile Defense (KAMD).
“Massive punishment, kill chains, KAMD—I don’t like things explained with military jargon,” Chief of Staff Im Jong-seok recalled. “But when General Jeong put it in plain words, I wasn’t sure it was an improvement.”
President Moon questioned General Jeong about the size of the strike and the number of targets. “President Moon was really surprised at how long the list of targets was,” Im recalled. “But General Jeong explained that the plan was based on an American operation against Saddam.” In 1998, the United States conducted Operation Desert Fox against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, striking ninety-seven targets over four days, including three presidential palaces and the headquarters of the Iraqi Ba’ath Party. The two plans bore a striking similarity to each other.
According to survivors who had been present at the meeting, President Moon explained to General Jeong that he did not want to start a general war, but that he did want to find a small number of targets whose destruction would punish Kim Jong Un for the downing of BX 411. President Moon also suggested using only long-range missiles for this retaliatory attack. There was no reason, he said, to ask the special forces team to carry out a suicide mission or to put pilots at risk. Besides, it was important to hold something back to give Kim Jong Un something to think about. A small strike would shake Kim’s confidence, while the possibility of a larger strike to follow would box him in. “The general idea was to start with one or two targets,” Im explained. “Kim would know we were holding back the rest of the plan if he tried to escalate.”
President Moon looked over the list of targets. He asked about the first entry on the list of leadership targets, labeled L-01. It named the main Kim family compound on the outskirts of Pyongyang. Some of General Jeong’s military officers were uncomfortable with the idea of targeting Kim’s family home, but appeared reluctant to say so. “No one said, ‘I think this is too dangerous,’” Im explained, “but General Kim Yong-woo, the chief of the Army, and Admiral Um both said, ‘The Americans won’t like that.’”
General Kim suggested that, instead of hitting the Kim family compound, the missile strike should destroy the headquarters of North Korea’s Air Force, which was located in Chunghwa and commanded the air defense troops who shot down the aircraft. Chunghwa was a small military town about eleven miles south of Pyongyang. The Air Force headquarters there was a large compound with an office building and a pair of statues of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Un. These could be struck with little chance of civilian casualties. Admiral Um pointed out that North Korea’s Air Force bore responsibility for the mistake and that targeting it was a proportionate response.
“Moon got very angry,” Im explained. “He asked, ‘What’s a proportionate response for more than one hundred schoolchildren? I don’t think there is such a thing.’” Moon then turned the meeting back to Kim Jong Un’s residence. “I think Kim Jong Un must bear some responsibility too. He can’t always get away with things,” Moon finally said.
The South Korean president instructed General Jeong to hit both targets—to use a limited number of long-range missiles to strike both the Air Force headquarters and L-01, the Kim family compound outside Pyongyang.
Foreign Minister Kang made one last effort to take L-01 out of the strike package, raising the idea of consulting with the United States. But Moon turned the discussion aside by stating that this was his responsibility. Im recalled that Moon’s response to Kang’s suggestion that they contact Washington was ambiguous. “What he actually said was, ‘I’ll take responsibility.’ That might have meant that he would personally consult with the Americans, or it might have meant that he would be responsible for not consulting them.”
Moon then asked to speak directly to the commander of South Korea’s Army Missile Command. The subject, Im realized, was no longer up for discussion.
ROK Army Missile Command
Prior to the events of March 2020, very few people were aware that South Korea maintained an elite military unit armed with long-range ballistic and cruise missiles. Once in a while, a South Korean leader might attend a missile test. But the military units assigned to launch these weapons in wartime were shrouded in secrecy. The South Korean press might allude to the fact that the Republic of Korea (ROK) Army had long-range missiles of its own, but the idea that there were about one hundred such missiles deployed to a half-dozen operational bases scattered across the country was almost never directly acknowledged.
US and South Korean officials did, of course, visit the headquarters of the ROK Army Missile Command in Eumseong County from time to time. Even so, the South Korean military emplaced security measures to conceal the location of this unit, and its precise location was never mentioned in South Korean press reports. When VIPs visited, the location was never described. The main headquarters was also obscured with digital trees in the apps Naver and Daum, South Korea’s versions of Google Maps. Army Missile Command’s soldiers were even required to remove their unit patches, fixed to their sleeves with Velcro, before any photograph could be taken.
On March 21, Major General Lee Jin-won was sitting in his office at the main Army Missile Command outpost when, at 1:42 PM, his secure phone rang. It was President Moon’s staff, informing him that the president wanted to speak with him and that he would soon be in charge of launching a counterstrike. As soon as the call ended, Major General Lee gathered his aides and went into the underground bunker behind the main administrative building.
Photographs from that day show that Major General Lee wasn’t wearing his patch. According to officers under his command, the unit was preparing for yet another VIP visit in a few weeks. The unit was regarded as a “spit-and-polish” unit, although this was largely a function of seemingly endless VIP visits that constantly disrupted training and wreaked havoc on any effort to establish a regular schedule. As Lee walked into his command bunker, the only evidence that he commanded an arsenal of long-range missiles was his dark blue baseball cap with an interlocking A-M-C. The cap was a security violation, but only a very well informed outsider would know what those letters stood for. Most South Koreans did not.
According to transcripts provided by the South Korean Army, in the short teleconference that followed, President Moon directed General Lee to develop a plan to strike L-01, the Kim family compound, as well as the North Korean Air Force headquarters in Chunghwa, with the minimum number of missiles. Moon left it to Major General Lee to determine which units would carry out the strike. All he asked was that the number of missiles be kept to the minimum necessary. He did not want Kim Jong Un to think this was the start of a war.
Major General Lee asked President Moon about his obligation to notify his American counterpart. “General Lee hesitated about taking military action,” explained Lee’s assistant. “He said the plan required him to consult with the Americans. President Moon said that he would take responsibility to inform the Americans. [Major General Lee] seemed uncertain for a moment, but ultimately agreed to follow the order.”
A significant question is why Major General Lee followed President Moon’s directive to disregard established procedures for consultation and ordered South Korean units to launch without informing US Forces Korea, as dictated in contingency plans that had been agreed between Seoul and Washington. The answers offered by officers from the Army Missile Command vary: some blamed Washington, and others observed that in a serious crisis the interests of even close allies may differ. All agreed, however, that the Americans had been slow to recognize that South Koreans no longer saw themselves as junior partners in the defense of their own country and its citizens.
South Koreans of all political stripes had long been irked that, in the event of another war, they would have to surrender control of the country’s military forces to the Americans—the same arrangement that had existed during the Korean War so many decades ago. The humiliation of this arrangement was driven home in November 2017, when South Korean forces had not even been allowed to return fire as North Korea fired heavy weapons across the DMZ to stop the defection of a North Korean soldier. Moon had expressed his frustration with these constraints. “The issues on the rules of engagement . . . should be discussed, although it is under the [United Nations Command’s] control,” President Moon publicly said. “The people would generally think of a rule of engagement as something that permits our soldiers to at least fire warning shots if a bullet from the North Korean is fired at us.”
On March 21, those frustrations helped drive the crisis forward. The military officials who opposed the strike tried to do so by suggesting that they consult with the Americans. And those who supported the strike wanted to avoid telling the Americans and deal with the consequences later.
Crucially, the officer responsible for actually carrying out the counterattack found himself much closer in his views to the latter camp. Major General Lee saw the choice starkly: following the consultation procedures outlined in the contingency plan would simply result in American pressure to do nothing. “The Americans were just going to tell us no, and we knew that,” his assistant explained. “They said no in 2010. They dragged their feet when we asked for wartime control of our own forces. They came up with reasons why we couldn’t use our rules of engagement in the DMZ. It was always ‘no,’ or ‘maybe later,’ or ‘be reasonable.’ Think of all those dead kids. What’s a reasonable response to that?”
Moreover, in the end, President Moon was Major General Lee’s commander. Whatever ties of professional respect bound Lee to his American counterparts, he was a Korean officer, not an American one. “I think sometimes you know there are rules, but this is still your country,” explained his deputy. “Those students were Korean. President Moon was our commander. We followed his order.”
Major General Lee selected two units to conduct the attack, one based in central Korea near Wonju and the other on the far western edge of Baengnyeong Island. He ordered his staff to prepare an attack plan that would be ready to execute within about six hours—at 8:00 PM. This launch time would enable the missile launch units to conduct their launch preparations under the cover of darkness—and also give the president a chance to change his mind.
President Moon had no intention of changing his mind. Nor did he have any intention of informing the Americans, let alone asking for permission. When Moon learned that the attack would be ready at 8:00 PM, he asked his aides to schedule an address to the nation from the press hall, known as the Chunchugwan, located on the Blue House grounds. He also instructed them to not take any calls from the Americans. “[Moon] thought American officials might try to restrain us,” Chief of Staff Im explained. “Trump could learn
about the strike the same way that everyone else did—when it was announced on television.”
Moon’s remarks that night were brief enough. He stated simply that North Korea had shot down a civilian airliner, one filled largely with children. He said that the attack “crossed all lines of human decency” and described North Korea’s claim that the aircraft was on a reconnaissance mission as a “pathetic lie.” He expressed his profound grief over the loss of so many innocent lives, over the pain their families were suffering, and over the senselessness of North Korea’s crime. And then he announced that military operations had begun:
“As I speak, Republic of Korea armed forces are responding to this cruel and unjust act. Our grief at this moment knows no bounds. But our response does, as it has been carefully limited to those responsible for perpetrating this horrible crime. The armed forces also stand ready to expand our operations if North Korea persists in attacking our citizens.”
When his remarks were finished and the television cameras were turned off, Moon walked back down to the Crisis Room and asked his staff to place a call to the White House. Now that the strike was under way, Moon wanted his national security adviser to smooth things over. At this point, Moon and his advisers were mainly worried about the American reaction, not the North Korean one. They worried that the Trump administration would be angry about not having been consulted, but they also assumed that US leaders would fall into line now that the counterstrike, a limited operation, was a fait accompli. None of Moon’s surviving aides appear to have believed that the strike would escalate into a general war. The targets had been carefully selected, the number of missiles was small, and Moon’s speech had made clear that he was holding the full strike in reserve.
“We were so worried that the Americans might try to stop us,” Im explained, “that it never occurred to us they might make things worse. I don’t even use Twitter.”
The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States Page 4
