The Fire Mission
Launching a ballistic missile strike is not as easy as simply pressing a button.
Each missile is carried by a massive truck. Those trucks are parked within massive earthen bunkers with a curious shape. They are called “drive-through” bunkers because they have an entrance on one side and an exit on the other so that the massive vehicle can drive in one side and out the other without having to turn around.
The bunkers in South Korea had the same distinctive shape as the ones that the United States built in Europe during the Cold War. The American bunkers, abandoned at the end of the Cold War, now sit empty—although one of the locations was used as a set for a Star Wars movie. A space ship sat in the same spot once occupied by a ground-launched cruise missile armed with a 100-kiloton nuclear warhead.
The bunkers in South Korea, by contrast, were neither abandoned nor empty.
After the teleconference between President Moon and the Army Missile Command, Major General Lee placed two missile units on alert, one located near the South Korean city of Wonju, the other sitting on the far edge of Baengnyeong Island. Both units received the same order: to fire three ballistic missiles at targets in North Korea, for a total of six missiles. The crews waited through the day until the sun set—first over Wonju and then, nine minutes later, at 6:52 PM, over Baengnyeong Island.
The order, called a “fire mission assignment,” contained three kinds of information. It told the crew where to go (the “fire point”), specified when the unit should launch (the “method of control”), and then told the crew where to go after the launch.
The crews did not have to go far to reach their fire points. Major General Lee’s order specified that the trucks should park on a series of pre-surveyed concrete pads just outside the massive earthen bunkers and launch their missiles from there.
The orders also gave the missile crew instructions as to the method of control. A missile commander can give a crew the freedom to “fire when ready,” but in this case Major General Lee told both the crew and the commander to launch “at my command.” That would give him one last opportunity to call off the strike before the missiles were airborne.
Finally, Major General Lee ordered the units to move to new positions several miles from each base once they had completed their fire missions. While his surviving aides all testified that they did not expect North Korea to retaliate, this final precaution makes sense in light of the fact that North Korea almost certainly knew the location of many of South Korea’s missile bases; prudence dictated that the launch vehicles move to safety and reload. “If things did get out of control,” Lee’s deputy explained, “we wanted to be prepared.” Had Major General Lee not given this final order, it is unlikely that the commission would have had the opportunity to interview the launch crews.
One by one, each truck drove out into the night and parked on a concrete square. Each vehicle was aligned along a heading specified in the fire order, pointing toward Pyongyang or Chunghwa. Each crew parked its vehicle in the darkness, with no lights, set the brake, and then extended the hydraulic jacks that would lift the vehicle just off its tires and ensure that it was perfectly horizontal.
Once the trucks were in place, the crews turned on their fire control systems. They did not have to type in the target coordinates themselves. Once the fire control computer was turned on, it automatically downloaded the target locations sent by radio and began to compute a firing solution—essentially aiming the missile. The computer also checked to ensure that the vehicle was level and aligned correctly, adjusting for any deviation that might otherwise put the missile off course, even by a few meters.
When the trucks’ computers had completed their firing solutions, the display inside one of the vehicles provided a different message than the others. It read:
INCORRECT HEADING MOVE VEHICLE
The vehicle had been aligned incorrectly, forcing the crew to stop what they were doing and repark the vehicle, a process that took several tense minutes. “I was really embarrassed,” recalled the driver of the vehicle that had been misaligned. “I felt very ashamed that I was holding up the entire mission.” Eventually, all the vehicles were correctly aligned and a firing solution had been found for each missile.
As the computer in each vehicle found a firing solution, the display inside the cab alerted the crew. One by one, in each of the vehicles, a crew member pressed a key marked LAY that confirmed to the unit commander that the vehicle was in the correct position. The computer completed the aiming process by telling the truck to raise the canister containing the missile into a vertical position. Soon, all three canisters were pointing upward into the night sky at Wonju. On Baengnyeong Island, three more did the same.
Inside the trucks, each crew followed the same checklist, completing each step by touching a key marked XMIT, or “transmit.” This key would send a confirmation back to Army Missile Command, allowing Major General Lee to follow along as the crew prepared to launch. Once the canister was vertical, the display read READY TO FIRE. The crew member touched XMIT. The display read ARM MISSILE. A crew member lifted a small cover on the control panel, flipped the arming switch, then touched XMIT again. The display read READY TO COMPLY. A crew member hit XMIT for a final time, and then they waited.
When the moment arrived, Major General Lee appears not to have hesitated. His order to fire arrived promptly on the display at 8:00 PM: FIRE MISSILE.
Within seconds, the ballistic missiles went streaking into the sky, one after the other. South Korea’s retaliation was, as President Moon had said, limited. There were now six missiles, no more, no less, heading toward North Korea.
3
Hurricane Donald
By the time dusk settled over the Korean Peninsula on Saturday evening, the government of the United States had been on high alert for hours. As soon as the North Korean missile unit at Ongjin fired at Air Busan Flight 411, the launch had been detected by an American satellite. In that moment, a complex system within the US government had sprung into action, working to inform the nation’s leaders, including President Donald Trump, that the crisis on the Korean Peninsula had taken a dangerous turn. The same spy satellites and other classified intelligence systems that had detected the two surface-to-air missiles fired at BX 411 at 12:28 PM also registered the explosion that destroyed the aircraft minutes thereafter.
We now know that, although every one of these events was detected, assessed, and promptly passed up the chain of command, the overall system did not work as intended. The process broke down; information failed to reach the very top. The president was not informed that North Korea shot down BX 411 for more than six hours, and ultimately only learned about the event the following morning when he saw television reports. Nor did President Trump know at the time of his first public remarks on the events on the Korean Peninsula that South Korea had responded to the shootdown of Flight 411 with a limited missile strike against targets in North Korea.
This mismanagement of information within the Trump White House squandered several crucial hours during which American leaders might have otherwise managed the escalating crisis. This bureaucratic breakdown also resulted in confused messaging from the White House that, as we now know, dramatically increased the danger confronting the United States and helped to precipitate the cataclysm that followed.
The central problem, as has become clear in the course of this commission’s investigations, arose from the peculiarities relating to both process and place. It is impossible to grasp the reasons for the breakdown of the Trump administration’s executive functions without understanding both the process that was in place to provide the president with information and the unusual features of its implementation that arose from the fact that, as the crisis unfolded, the president was not in Washington, but in Palm Beach.
The Mar-a-Lago Club
Mar-a-Lago proved a challenging location for President Trump to manage an international crisis. There is some irony in this, given that Mar-a-L
ago’s original resident intended it for essentially this role. Although the property was built as a private residence in 1929, its owner, Marjorie Merriweather Post, had arranged for Mar-a-Lago to be transferred to the federal government for use as a “Winter White House” after her death. Although the US government held the title to the property from 1973 to 1981, the high cost of maintenance resulted in the government returning the property to her heirs. Donald Trump purchased it in 1985. With Trump’s election as president in 2016, Mrs. Post’s vision had in one sense come to pass.
But Mar-a-Lago was a very unusual presidential residence. Donald Trump, in the mid-1990s, reinvented Mar-a-Lago as a private club with fifty-eight guest rooms. At the same time, he maintained a private residence in the former “owner’s house” at the south end of the main building. As a result, Mar-a-Lago served as both a private members’ club and a private residence for the president, two functions that were often in obvious tension.
That tension was an early headache for the Secret Service. The agency had to provide for the security of the president, but it also had to accommodate the club’s fundamental business as a luxury resort for wealthy members, many of whom complained about the introduction of basic security screening measures. The club management fielded numerous complaints over the first year of the Trump administration about the imposition of such measures from members, some of whom began referring to presidential visits as “Hurricane Donald.”
The result was an uneasy compromise between protecting the president and protecting the club’s business model. Many workable solutions were found. For instance, the Secret Service determined that a service entrance off Southern Boulevard could provide the president with access to his residence, allowing him to slip in and out of the club with a bit more discretion, although it did not ease the security requirements on club members.
Yet such solutions created problems of their own. President Trump’s use of the Southern Boulevard service entrance required that he traverse a walkway that connected the main building to another in which weddings were held. (Sometimes surprised wedding-goers even had an unscheduled appearance by the president.) The use of the Southern Boulevard entrance also created significant traffic delays, particularly on the Southern Boulevard Bridge, which is one of the roadways connecting the barrier island of Palm Beach to the Florida mainland.
In addition to security measures, the president needed facilities to handle classified information. Fortunately, Mrs. Post, a vigorous advocate of civil defense, had built numerous fallout shelters at all her residences, including three shelters at Mar-a-Lago underneath the main building. Over the years, these shelters had been repurposed to serve as storage and, for a time, as an office for Trump’s butler. After Trump’s election, one of the fallout shelters was converted to a secure compartmentalized information facility (SCIF) for handling classified information. This facility—which staff sometimes called the “cone of silence” in jest—could only be accessed from the main building. While the basement facility was better than the terrace for holding classified briefings, club members could tell that a classified briefing was about to commence by the procession of staff in off-the-rack suits making their way down into the basement.
There were other ways in which Mar-a-Lago was simply not suitable as a presidential residence, particularly in regard to the large staff that had to travel with the president. For example, Mar-a-Lago offered a limited number of rooms, and its high rack rate substantially exceeded the General Services Administration (GSA) per diem of $195. As a result, the president’s senior staff, including his chief of staff, rarely stayed at Mar-a-Lago itself. Instead, senior staff booked rooms at the nearest hotel, Colony Palm Beach. The Colony is about ten minutes north of Mar-a-Lago by car. It does not have facilities to handle classified information.
Other staff stayed at the Hilton Palm Beach Airport, which is located in West Palm Beach on the mainland, a fifteen-minute drive west over the Southern Boulevard Bridge. This hotel, which is less expensive than either Mar-a-Lago or the Colony, offered staff easy access to the airport and to the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach—roughly five miles across Lake Worth Lagoon from Mar-a-Lago—but also kept them separated from Trump by a minimum of a quarter-hour’s travel.
The layout of President Trump’s properties in Palm Beach scattered his staff around Palm Beach. In a time of crisis, Trump and his senior staff were spread across three different locations, with the president himself on an island—both literally and figuratively.
Executive Time
Jack Francis was President Trump’s fourth chief of staff. It was not an easy job. Reince Priebus had lasted only six months, John Kelly a little over a year, and then Dan Scavino for another year after Kelly’s departure. Francis had more in common with Kelly than Priebus or Scavino. Like Kelly, Francis was a retired Marine four-star general. And like Kelly, he made it his mission to manage a chaotic White House. As Francis saw it, any chief of staff would behave in exactly the same way. Indeed, one of Francis’s first priorities after taking over as chief of staff from Scavino was putting an end to the power struggles that had plagued the Trump administration and imposing some control over who the president saw and how he received information.
In this task, Francis worked closely with Keith Kellogg, a retired Army three-star general who became Trump’s fourth national security adviser following Michael Flynn, H. R. McMaster, and John Bolton. Kellogg, who had previously served in the same role for the vice president, had no idea how long he would be around, but he was determined to help Francis keep things together for as long as he could. That was a tall order, as the myriad scandals and investigations swirling around the president and key members of his staff created a constant sense of crisis within the White House.
Mostly Francis and Kellogg focused on keeping the president’s legal woes from overwhelming everything else. They also worked to keep various international crises, like the threat posed by North Korea’s growing nuclear and missile programs, from spiraling out of control. But Francis and Kellogg also knew they needed to tread carefully. After all, it had been North Korea that did in their predecessors. In fact, it had been the issue of negotiations with North Korea that had led Trump to show their predecessors the door.
During the brief thaw in relations in 2018, Donald Trump had relied heavily on Mike Pompeo to do the legwork in advance of his summit with Kim Jong Un. Pompeo’s role began while he was still the director of the CIA and continued after he replaced Rex Tillerson as the secretary of state. Pompeo had a reputation at CIA for giving Trump a steady stream of rosy intelligence assessments about the impact of sanctions on North Korea. “Pompeo kept feeding Trump assessments that US military threats will force Kim to bow to US demands for nuclear disarmament,” one former White House official said. Some officials felt that Pompeo’s characterizations went far beyond what the CIA analysts actually believed and were in fact an effort to flatter Trump. It was Pompeo who traveled to Pyongyang to meet with Kim Jong Un. And it was Pompeo who took the blame when it became clear that Kim Jong Un had no intention of abandoning his nuclear weapons.
But, according to aides, the president also blamed Bolton. Trump never enjoyed sharing the spotlight with the combative Bolton, who often seemed to give the impression that he was calling the shots. The president came to think that Bolton had undermined him.
Trump blamed his entire national security team for the failed effort to negotiate with Kim’s regime. This deep dissatisfaction underlays one of the strangest moments in American political history: the president of the United States firing practically his entire national security team with a single tweet:
Donald J. Trump @tehDonaldJTrump
I wanted a Summit! But Little Rocketman won’t de-nuke!
No more Mr. nice guys! Thank you to Mike Pompeo, John Bolton and John Kelly for your service! Tomorrow we announce a GREAT new national security team! Going to the mattress! I need a war time consillary!*
#MAGA
After the “Twitter Massacre,” as it came to be known, only Secretary of Defense James Mattis remained on the president’s national security team, which otherwise had to be entirely rebuilt. In short order, Trump chose Francis and Kellogg to pick up the pieces.
As chief of staff, Francis attempted to impose a semblance of order around the life of a man who, prior to being elected president, was used to having large blocks of unstructured time. The president would rise around 5:30 AM and start the day by watching news on television. The White House typically scheduled a block of “executive time” from 8:00 AM to 11:00 AM. Official schedules listed that time as occurring in the Oval Office, but in fact staff at the time indicated that, while he was staying at the White House, Trump often “spends that time in his [executive] residence, watching TV, making phone calls and tweeting.” Trump would not appear in the Oval Office until his first scheduled meeting of the day, which was typically his intelligence briefing at 11:00 AM.
Early on, Francis revived one of John Kelly’s pet projects—an effort to encourage the president to spend more time in the Oval Office rather than the executive residence, located between the East and West Wings of the White House. Francis attempted to schedule regular meetings with family and close advisers of the president to establish a routine. On a typical day, Trump would have meetings with Kellogg, his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner, his legal team, and Kellyanne Conway, who was then serving as the president’s counselor. Trump typically took an hour-long lunch at 12:30, followed by another block of either “executive time” or “policy time.” The president’s day typically ended around 4:15, at which point he was most likely to return to his residence. Dinner was usually served at 5:30.
The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States Page 5
