After an hour, Ja decided that no instructions would arrive. Having done his duty, he stopped talking. It was now the Americans’ turn.
Seiler was brief. Whatever he said, he knew, mattered little. Ja would have to wait for further instructions before offering any real reply. So the US envoy simply expressed outrage over the shootdown of a civilian airliner, demanded that North Korea issue an apology, and explained that the United States had been neither involved in the South Korean launch nor consulted. Seiler glanced at the Chinese ambassador. He noticed an ever so slight note of confusion cross the otherwise steady grimace maintained by the Chinese ambassador when he mentioned this last fact.
Seiler urged Ja to take a message back to his leadership. He very pointedly decided not to issue any threats. The threat of force is often an essential part of a diplomatic process, but as Seiler knew, threats can also backfire, especially if the other side feels that their issuer intends to humiliate the threatened party—or worse. On the train up from DC, Seiler had seen the president’s tweet. With South Korea’s missiles slamming into North Korea and the president openly taunting the leader of North Korea, Seiler was worried that the United States might be overdoing it already, although at the time he kept those concerns to himself.
As the meeting came to an end, Seiler assured the North Koreans that he would remain in New York and would be willing to meet wherever and whenever the North Korean ambassador suggested. Ja recalled being grateful that Seiler had understood his position, but extremely confused about the American’s claim that the US government had had nothing to do with the attacks on his homeland. Yet at the moment, there was little he could do. So the North Korean thanked his Chinese hosts, stood up, and walked out with the rest of the members of the North Korean mission trailing him, returning to his office to wait for further instructions.
The Americans held back, initially just to avoid an awkward elevator ride with the North Koreans, according to one of the US foreign service officers who was present. When the coast was clear, Seiler stepped out of the offices, walked down the hall, and pushed the button for the elevator.
Haley, still furious at having been cut out of the planning for the meeting and resentful of Seiler’s role, stopped short of the elevator and took out her phone. She called the Ops Center and asked to speak to the acting secretary of state. According to one witness, as Haley loudly expressed her disappointment to John Sullivan, the Chinese diplomats stepped out of their offices and into the hallway one by one to see what the commotion was about. There they stood, watching the spectacle unfold, as Haley’s shouts rang out and echoed down the hallway. Ambassador Haley vehemently denies the story, saying she never lost her temper.
The Nineteenth Hole
In Florida, the spring morning had blossomed into a glorious day. At 10:00 AM local time, Jack Francis and Keith Kellogg were in the Situation Room under Mar-a-Lago, reading a cable from Sydney Seiler recounting the meeting with the North Koreans. The envoy described the meeting as having been inconclusive and unproductive—but he was careful how he framed it. He attributed the inconclusive nature of the meeting to the surprising missile strikes by South Korea, which occurred just before the diplomats convened.
If anything, the cable was boring. A vivid cable, one that tells a good story, can race around an administration as gossip and end up on the front page of the Washington Post or the New York Times. But Seiler was biding his time, and the last thing he wanted was a headline declaring that the talks were dead. He had delivered his démarche to Ja; now they would wait. The atmospherics were irrelevant.
As Francis and Kellogg reviewed Seiler’s readout in the Situation Room at Mar-a-Lago, the president was across the lagoon, at his golf course in West Palm Beach. This disposition—the president in West Palm Beach and his senior staff over the bridge at Mar-a-Lago—held through the morning and into the early afternoon.
Kellogg and Francis spent the day working out of Mar-a-Lago. At 1:16 PM, the National Security Agency (NSA) informed Kellogg that it had detected an unusual pattern of communications in North Korea.
The NSA has a vague, nondescript name because it is charged with one of the most sensitive intelligence-gathering tasks—the collection of “signals” intelligence, or eavesdropping. For many years, even the existence of the NSA was not acknowledged, with employees joking that the acronym stood for No Such Agency. Yet the agency’s role in national defense is critical, and there is no clearer testament than its intervention in the unfolding crisis on March 21.
Signals intelligence involves not merely collecting intelligence but also analyzing it. Signals must be separated from noise, and then interpreted. This process may involve breaking codes or recognizing patterns. History now hinged on the latter.
The NSA analysts could not read the North Korean communications because they were encrypted, but the pattern had stood out. These communications looked like nothing that anyone at NSA had ever seen. A report had been made, warning that something unusual was happening. This report had gone up the chain of command and had finally prompted Admiral Michael Rogers, the agency’s director, to phone Kellogg.
Kellogg thanked Admiral Rogers for the report, then hung up and discussed the matter with Francis.
The two decided to take no action.
The report was, according to senior officials, “vague and not specific.” And the timing was a challenge. After his briefing in the Situation Room, the president had traveled from Palm Beach to the mainland, where he had a 9:30 AM tee time. Typically, Trump’s outings on the golf course would last for about four and a half hours, including lunch. At 1:16 PM, when the report arrived, Trump would have been nearly finished with the round of golf, but would not have eaten lunch yet.
Neither Kellogg nor Francis believed that it was wise to interrupt the president, particularly when he was so close to finishing his outing. “We were told [the president] was shooting really well. Sometimes he struggles with his wedge game,” explained an NSC staffer. “Our goal was keeping him on an even keel—and no one could see how yanking him off the course would help.”
Other White House staffers dismissed the unusual pattern of communications as “chatter,” reasoning that it could be anything. It was easy enough for these officials to imagine that the communications warned of some familiar danger when, in fact, it was a warning of an entirely new kind of threat—as we now know.
This is what the historian Roberta Wohlstetter called the “background of expectation”—the assumptions and beliefs that allow us to make sense of confusing and contradictory information. Francis and Kellogg were, at that moment, focused on the possibility that North Korea might respond with another provocation. They were particularly worried about the possibility that North Korea would conduct a nuclear weapons test designed to be shocking—such as placing a live nuclear warhead on a missile and firing it over Japan and out to sea. Testing a live nuclear weapon over the ocean would be very unlikely to cause much long-term harm, but it would demonstrate North Korea’s nuclear capabilities in the most vivid way.
Because the background expectation of senior officials was that North Korea was likely to conduct a provocative missile test in response to South Korea’s strike, they interpreted the unusual signal pattern as a warning of this expected danger—not as an indication that the crisis had taken a new and dangerous turn. Neither Francis nor Kellogg considered the possibility that the unusual pattern of communications was warning of a large-scale North Korean nuclear attack against US forces throughout South Korea and Japan.
This is not a new or novel problem. Both the Roberts Commission, which was charged with understanding why the United States was unprepared for Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, and the 9/11 Commission observed that background expectations had helped blind policymakers to these surprise attacks. While there was sufficient evidence to anticipate both attacks, it was only with hindsight that the signals clearly separated themselves from the noise. In 1941, and then again sixty years later in 20
01, policymakers were expecting different sorts of attacks in different places—and those expectations blinded them to warnings that seem clear in hindsight.
Something very similar was now happening in 2020. It was inconceivable to American policymakers that North Korea would start a nuclear war with the United States, a war that North Korea was certain to lose. After all, officials knew that Kim Jong Un had no incentive to start a nuclear war unless the United States was about to invade North Korea. And they both knew that no such invasion was planned.
Francis and Kellogg understood that the South Koreans had conducted the missile strike on their own. And they knew that the president’s tweet was little more than an offhand comment before a day of golf and banter. It seems not to have occurred to either of them that Kim Jong Un, cowering in a basement and struggling with only intermittent access to communications, might not share their clarity on these points. Nor did it occur to them that his own background expectations might be shaping his decisions in a profoundly different way.
And so the strange pattern of communications was noted by Francis, Kellogg, and a small circle of aides, but nothing was done. The information was too vague. And the president was too close to completing his game. It was better, they all agreed, to let him finish his round of golf, then go to lunch in the clubhouse.
The president shot a 71.*
6
A False Dawn Breaks
For millions of people in South Korea and Japan, dawn broke early on Sunday, March 22. More than thirty-one North Korean nuclear weapons, lifted into space on ballistic missiles, now fell silently back to earth through the night sky before suddenly igniting the day—first with flashes, each brighter than a thousand suns, and then with spontaneous fires that in some cases grew into firestorms. These conflagrations swept through the cities and towns of South Korea and Japan, burning brightly enough to keep the darkness at bay for days.
It is not possible, with mere words, to fully convey the scale or the horror of the suffering to those who did not live through those difficult days. But some accounting of the destruction is necessary in this report. Thus, we have chosen to share the stories of three survivors. It cannot be said that the experiences of these individuals were typical, for there was no typical experience for the millions of survivors, each of whom has endured their own private horror. But perhaps these three stories can begin to explain the struggle for life that followed North Korea’s nuclear attack on its neighbors.
Survivors are, by definition, an unusual group. To this day, each wonders why he or she lived when so many others perished. They count and count again the many small items of chance or caprice—a decision to stay at work in one case, a decision to stay home in another—that spared their lives. For observers, however, there is neither rhyme nor reason for who lived and who died. Instead, there is only chance, or perhaps luck—although more than one survivor objected to our investigators’ use of that term.
For many of the people who survived, and who saw more death in those two days than they might have expected to see in a dozen lives, the luckiest ones were those for whom morning never came.
Seoul
After delivering his television address announcing the missile strike against North Korea, President Moon Jae-in and his aides faced a long night. None of them believed that they were on the threshold of a nuclear war, although they did worry—indeed, they were certain—that Kim Jong Un would retaliate in some form. More than anything, they were anxious that the tit-for-tat should remain under control. “We were definitely worried that Kim might punch back,” according to Im Jong-seok, Moon’s aide, “but our mind-set was all about keeping things from getting too crazy.”
At the same time, there was not much for the South Koreans to do. There were no survivors from BX 411, and the missiles had been launched. When Moon and his advisers reconvened in the bunker, they found themselves just sitting there, silently, waiting to learn whether the strike had been a success and checking their phones. Kang Kyung-wha, the foreign minister, noticed Trump’s tweet first. She read it aloud, first in English and then translated into Korean.
Kang had studied in the United States, and her English was excellent. But she was never really sure how to translate the taunt implied in “Rocketman”—Mr. Rocket? Rocket Boy? The others around the table quizzed her about the rest of her translation. Did Trump really just suggest that he was about to kill Kim Jong Un? It was ambiguous. “He’s really a fool, isn’t he?” she said, to no one in particular.
Eventually, a preliminary damage assessment arrived—a few sheets of paper in a folder marked “SECRET,” carried by a military aide in a smart uniform. The aide handed the folder to General Jeong, who opened the folder, scanned the contents, then distributed them to the rest of the group in the bunker.
The damage assessment was a single page, but General Jeong nonetheless provided an impromptu briefing. South Korea’s intelligence assets were not as extensive as those of the Americans, and they would need to wait for daylight to take clear satellite pictures of the damage. But it seemed that the missiles had reached the targets. There were six large explosions. And based on intercepted cell-phone conversations, it seemed the big building at the Air Force headquarters had fallen down and that there were casualties at the Kim family residence. He also noted that, despite the strike, North Korea’s military—already on alert for the duration of the US–South Korean war games—was acting normally, although he cautioned that it was too early to know exactly how the North would respond.
Moon asked a few questions. “General Jeong felt obligated to brief the president, and in turn, Moon felt obligated to ask at least one question to show he was listening,” Im recalled. “But there was really no point. We all had copies of the same piece of paper.”
They waited in the bunker for at least another hour before General Jeong pointed out that it might be several days before North Korea responded. After all, he said, it would probably take until the morning for the North Koreans to give Kim Jong Un a full and accurate picture of what had happened, and they would likely need a day or so to plan a calibrated response. “I know the president felt some responsibility to see the strike through,” Im recalled, “but there really wasn’t anything to do in that bunker. General Jeong was doing us a favor, hinting that we could all go home.”
Eventually, at 11:24 PM, after sitting in the bunker for nearly three hours, Moon relented and suggested that they all go home and try to get a good night’s sleep. He asked his aides to inform him immediately if the military detected any unusual movements in North Korea, such as preparations for a missile test or an artillery barrage. They all agreed that, in that case, they would reconvene immediately. If not, Moon told them, they were to treat the next day like any other Sunday. General Jeong asked for all the copies of the damage assessment, counted them, and slid them back into the folder before locking it in his briefcase.
Moon retired to his residence. Im Jong-seok, the president’s aide, telephoned his wife to say that he would stay overnight in a guest room at the Blue House. Im later recalled that he was uneasy, convinced that he was in for a sleepless night. “I decided not to go home,” he said later. “I didn’t think I was going to sleep much anyway. I don’t know why, but I knew the phone would wake me.”
The call came at 2:16 AM, when General Jeong woke Im Jong-seok to inform him that the military had intercepted an unusual pattern of communications in North Korea. The communications were mostly encrypted, but the pattern was still unusual enough that General Jeong thought the president should know. South Korean military intelligence had intercepted a great many communications since North Korea’s military went on alert at the beginning of the US–South Korean war games a month earlier. But this order looked different. General Jeong said that they had never seen anything like it before. He suggested that some North Korean units, such as the country’s missile units, might be moving to a higher state of readiness. Im said that he would wake President Moon.
Moon’s residence was only a short walk from the guesthouse where Im was staying. He walked across the courtyard, then asked the household staff to wake the president. Moon emerged from his quarters after a short delay. “I suggested that he call General Jeong,” Im recalled later. “Moon said it was enough to reconvene.”
Moon and Im briefly discussed where the security council should gather. The Crisis Room was secure, but it was also small and cramped. Moreover, it was cut off from the rest of the government now housed in the Central Government Complex, which was in downtown Seoul and separated from the Blue House by an ancient palace complex. Moon decided that it was better that they meet downtown. They could evacuate back to the bunker if things got out of hand. “Then he said I looked terrible, like I had not slept at all,” according to Im. “I told him about my premonition about the phone call. [Moon] Jae-in looked at me a long time, and I got the sense he worried that the stress was starting to get to me. He suggested that I go back to bed for a few more hours.”
Im recalled weighing the president’s offer before acquiescing, telling himself that it was unlikely that he would have another chance to rest in the next twenty-four hours. “I didn’t know that was the last time I would see him,” he explained to investigators.
Moon arranged for a motorcade to take him to the Central Government Complex, about a mile away. He was still downtown, with most of his national security team, when, at 5:48 AM, a single nuclear weapon exploded over the city center.
The explosion reduced the Central Government Complex to rubble. President Moon and all of the advisers who had gathered with him apparently were killed in the blast. Like more than one million people in Seoul that day, they simply disappeared—incinerated in the fireball or ground into nothing as the massive government building collapsed.
The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States Page 11
