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

by Jeffrey Lewis

  The Second Hole

  Francis realized that North Korea was conducting a nuclear attack, but he was not at all certain of its scope. American analysts had been able to determine some of the targets of North Korea’s attack by calculating the trajectories of a number of the missiles that were already airborne, but not all of them—and the launches seemed to be continuing. With so many missiles being launched, there was also a chance that the radar had missed some.

  Francis made a snap decision that at least a few of the missiles might be headed for the United States. Whatever his original motivations for seeking out President Trump at the golf club, at this point his focus shifted to a single, new objective: getting Trump to safety as quickly as possible.

  When his car arrived at the Trump International Golf Club, Francis walked into the dining room, where the president was still sitting, talking to guests, lingering over a leisurely lunch. The president, Francis later recalled, seemed upset at the intrusion; he did not rise to greet his aide. And so Francis knelt down next to the president and whispered in his ear: “North Korea is launching a major attack. We must seek shelter immediately.”

  There was, Francis knew, an old bomb shelter beneath the tee on the second hole. Trump in fact had bragged about it often. “It was built of four and a half feet of steel and concrete,” he told one reporter. “I got bids from demolition companies. It would have cost me three and a half million to rip it out. So instead of ripping it out, I fixed it up for $100,000. We used it for elevation . . . and now, when members tee off on the second hole, they’re teeing off from the top of a bomb shelter.”

  Francis quickly commandeered a golf cart and asked the president to get in. The president told Francis to get out and to sit in the passenger seat. As the president drove Francis toward the bomb shelter, golfers on the course—who were unaware of the impending attack—waved at the president. He waved back. One golfer posted a picture of the two driving to the shelter on his Instagram account with the caption: “Why does Jack Francis always look so sad? Smile like President Trump! He is MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. #MAGA.”

  As the president and the rest of his staff gathered in the shelter, which was now used for storage, Francis thought through what to do next. They were safe from all but a direct hit with a very large nuclear weapon, but there were no secure conference lines, and his cell phone didn’t work inside. This was just a makeshift solution, one that Francis realized would quickly need to give way to something better. They would need to return to Mar-a-Lago once it was clear that none of the more than thirty missiles that had been launched—the latest estimate from his military assistant—were headed toward Florida. Until then, he was stuck.

  Francis recalled that his first thought was to wonder how he could contact Mattis. He could turn, of course, to the military aide carrying the president’s Emergency Satchel. The “nuclear football” could communicate directly and securely with the National Military Command Center in the basement of the Pentagon.

  But Francis did not want to open the satchel. In fact, he did not even want to draw Trump’s attention to it. He resorted to walking out of the bunker to get reception on his cell phone, making a few short calls, then coming back in to manage the president’s growing discomfort. Someone asked Francis if he had taken up smoking, which he recalled finding amusing under the circumstances.

  The president, aides recalled, was becoming confused and disoriented. He wanted to know what was happening. Eventually, Francis realized that it would be better if Kellogg stood outside the shelter door, maintaining contact with the command center in Colorado Springs and with the Pentagon, while Francis focused on managing the president’s growing anger.

  Especially disquieting to Francis was one particular line of Trump’s questioning: he wanted to know why Mattis wasn’t retaliating immediately—and with nuclear weapons. After all, hadn’t Mattis promised in that morning’s briefing that, if Kim kept up his aggression, the United States would hit North Korea with “everything we’ve got”?

  Francis tried to explain to the president that as far as they could tell, North Korea’s attack was being conducted against South Korea, not the United States. That meant that North Korea had not yet used its nuclear-armed ICBMs, the big missiles that could reach the United States. American intelligence estimates suggested that North Korea possessed around a dozen of these missiles. Any nuclear strike against North Korea—any strike against North Korea at all—would have to be integrated into a full air campaign to find and destroy those missiles before they could be launched, Francis explained. That would require hundreds of aircraft and could not simply be ordered up on a moment’s notice.

  The president grew increasingly aggrieved, constantly returning to the meeting that morning, constantly invoking what he called “my general’s promise” that the United States was ready to “hit [Kim] with everything we’ve got.” At this point, Francis asked Kellogg to step back into the bunker to see if he could make headway with the president. Kellogg explained that mounting a major air campaign against North Korea, even with so many US aircraft already on the Korean Peninsula to participate in the war games, was not something they could order up in just a day or so. Kellogg’s explanation quickly appeared to turn into an argument with the president, who even on a normal day had little patience for his national security adviser. And this day was not normal.

  As the tension in the room grew, Francis realized that they had a major problem: the president simply did not believe that North Korea’s long-range missiles worked. Indeed, prior to this moment, aides had noticed that, from time to time, the president would make comments indicating that he was skeptical that North Korea could strike the United States. In a phone call with the president of the Philippines, Trump had said that “Kim’s missiles keep crashing.” And in tweets, he referred to the fact that Kim’s “button” might not work.

  Aides had generally chosen not to confront the president on this issue. One reason for their reticence was that it was rarely a good idea to correct the president. But aides also felt that it was better to err on the side of letting the president underestimate North Korea. He had, after all, said quite publicly—in a tweet—that he would never allow North Korea to develop the ability to strike the United States. And so, after North Korea tested a series of missiles that could do just that—testing one missile in July 2017 that could strike most of the United States and then, in November 2017, testing an even larger missile that could reach them here at Mar-a-Lago—aides appear to have developed a tacit strategy of not contradicting the president when he said the missiles did not work. After all, no one knew what he might do when confronted by the fact that North Korea had done the one thing he had said would never happen while he was president—test a missile that could strike the United States.

  Instead, aides subtly redefined what it meant for missiles to “work.” Mike Pompeo, who had lasted in the president’s inner circle as long as anyone, had figured out, when he was the director of the CIA, how to carefully move the goalposts by referring to North Korea’s ability to build a reliable ICBM. What was a reliable ICBM? Using this vague and malleable term allowed aides to keep putting off the day of reckoning. They could constantly refer to North Korea’s growing stockpile of nuclear-armed ICBMs as a future threat rather than force the showdown that each of them dreaded. But it left the president continuing to think that North Korea’s missiles did not work.

  Now this strategy was backfiring. Aides were franticly trying to explain to Trump that while, yes, they had said the missiles were not reliable, neither were they completely unreliable. Some would surely reach the United States, Kellogg explained, with terrible consequences.

  The president was undeterred. He insisted that the missile defense systems deployed in Alaska would simply shoot down any missiles that North Korea managed to launch at the United States. “We have missiles that can knock out a missile in the air 97 percent of the time,” he insisted, “and if you send two of them, it’s going to
get knocked down.”

  “It was weird,” one aide explained. “Normally we just didn’t correct him, especially not when it was an excuse not to do something crazy. But now, all of a sudden, all this stuff was working against us. And we didn’t know how to push back. Every time Francis or Kellogg corrected the president, he grew more stubborn.”

  “Out of the blue,” the aide continued, “he said, ‘I want to hit them both right now.’ And Francis just asked, ‘Both?’”

  Trump, according to multiple people we interviewed from the bunker, was adamant that China was behind the attack. Wasn’t China giving the North Koreans their missiles? Wasn’t China not enforcing sanctions? Wasn’t China really responsible for what was happening? “Isn’t that what Steve told us was happening all along?” the president asked, referring to a frequent theme of his former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, who famously believed that China, not North Korea, was the main threat to the United States.

  Over the past few years, aides had seen Trump claim that North Korea was a Chinese puppet or that Kim Jong Un never acted without the approval of China’s leader, Xi Jinping. Those who briefed the president had long stopped pushing back on these theories. Crazy or not, there was no talking Trump out of them. But now the president’s theorizing had taken a dangerous turn. Trump was now proposing to fight two nuclear-armed adversaries.

  Not only was the president now suggesting that the United States retaliate with nuclear weapons against both China and North Korea, but he was also standing less than twenty feet from a military aide who was holding the communications device designed specifically to allow him to give such an order.

  Using the “football,” the president could, on his own authority and with no second vote, bypass the secretary of defense and directly instruct the National Military Command Center to order a nuclear launch. The NMCC would transmit his orders directly to launch units. The entire system was designed to allow the president to fire all of the land-based nuclear-armed missiles sitting in silos throughout the Great Plains in the tiny window of time between the moments when satellites detected the launch of enemy missiles and when those missiles arrived. There was no requirement to notify the secretary of defense or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, let alone to seek their authorization. The entire system was designed around the possibility that there might not be any time for such actions.

  The only check on the president’s authority was the requirement that he authenticate his voice by reading an alphanumeric code printed on the “biscuit”—a card sealed in a foil wrapper. Some presidents had asked an aide to carry the biscuit. Other presidents kept it themselves. Jimmy Carter famously sent a suit coat to the cleaner with his biscuit in a pocket. Trump had marveled at the little card and the power it represented. It was in his pocket. All he needed to do was call the NMCC using the football, which he was legally entitled to do.

  The president now seemed to recall the briefing he had received about these procedures—or perhaps to become aware of the military aide standing in the bunker with him. Because he suddenly turned his full attention to the soldier. “I just remember the president said, ‘Come over here!’ to the major with the football, gesturing with his hands,” one aide recalled.

  What happened next is a matter of some dispute. The president, Francis, and others have asserted that the president was simply asking for the football so that he could review the briefing book located inside it, the book that contained the different options for a nuclear attack.

  The military aide, however, in the Article 92 hearing for his court-martial, explained that he was uncomfortable with the president’s tone and demeanor. He said that he was concerned that he was about to be given an order that he believed was unlawful. He understood the president’s gesture to be a request for the football to order a launch, not merely to review the options.

  Everyone present agreed that the major took a few steps toward President Trump, but then paused and looked at General Francis. “What are you looking at him for? I am the president,” Trump said, according to another aide who was in the bunker. “And then,” this aide added, “he kind of lunged for the briefcase.”

  The major jumped back, but the president had his hand on the handle. “They pulled back and forth,” the other aide recalled, “with the president screaming, ‘You’re fired! You’re fired!’ at the poor guy.” From prison, the major confirmed that there was a brief struggle. “His grip was really strong for a seventy-year old man. He was very angry. I just kind of jerked the satchel out of his hands, really hard, maybe too hard, then he fell over.” During the scuffle, President Trump sustained minor injuries.

  After the major recovered possession of the satchel, he quickly left the bunker, in violation of normal procedures for the handling of the device. The president’s Emergency Satchel would remain outside the normal requirements for custody for the next few hours, until Francis sent one of the other military aides to retrieve it.

  Following the major’s flight from the bunker, an awkward hush fell over the group. President Trump remained on the floor, seated, with one hand on his head. Francis recalled that the normally combative president appeared to be avoiding eye contact with his aides. The chief of staff felt relieved when, after several long minutes, the stillness was interrupted by a message from the Pentagon: no missiles were believed to be headed toward the United States, and a helicopter was en route to the fairway outside the bunker entrance to retrieve the president and his closest aides.

  Francis helped the president to his feet, and then a small number of them exited the bunker. At 6:02 PM, a US Marine Corps helicopter landed near the second hole. They climbed in and flew the few minutes back to Mar-a-Lago in silence.

  The Tank

  The Joint Chiefs of Staff conference room is located deep inside the Pentagon. Occasionally a news story refers to it as the “Gold Room,” but almost no one calls it anything other than “the tank.”

  The room was small, dominated by a large conference table. Throughout the morning of March 21, Secretary of Defense James Mattis had sat at the head of this table. The retired Marine general was surrounded by senior military officials and civilian staffers. On the table in front of them were stacks of briefing books that detailed the operations plan for defending South Korea, a plan that called for US forces to drive deep into North Korea to remove Kim Jong Un from power.

  Mattis had spent the morning looking over the plans, “just in case this Korea thing got out of control,” he later told investigators. An aide in the room joked that the scene was a kind of tableaux, like Leonardo’s The Last Supper. “Except that we’re the ones planning the crucifixion,” he recalled Mattis noting dryly.

  The operations plan for defending South Korea had evolved over the years. The current plan, OPLAN 5015, was a preemptive attack—it called for a surprise attack with airpower and special forces to remove Kim Jong Un and pave the way for a rapid ground invasion of North Korea to nip any threat in the bud. As North Korea’s nuclear and missile capabilities had grown, planners in the United States had increasingly come to think that the best defense of South Korea was a good offense. The entire operations plan was premised on the United States acting decisively to kill Kim Jong Un before he could order his rocket forces to use their nuclear-armed missiles.

  The plan described a conventional invasion; it did not require the use of nuclear weapons any more than had the invasion of Iraq. There was, of course, an annex to the plan that provided for the limited use of nuclear weapons, but Mattis had quickly rejected that on the morning of March 21, for the same reasons that his predecessors did in Iraq in 1991 and again in 2003. After the First Gulf War, Air Force officials made clear that the possibility of using nuclear weapons in the conflict had never been seriously considered. “The nuclear weapon’s only good against cities,” observed retired general Chuck Horner shortly after the end of that war. “It’s not any good against troops in the desert, I mean it takes too many of ’em, so the problem you have i
s, you have a war where if you kill a lot of people, particularly women and children, you lose the war no matter what happens on the battlefield.” In fact, although it was not widely known at the time, President George H. W. Bush had ruled out the use of nuclear weapons in 1991. “No one advanced the notion of using nuclear weapons,” wrote Brent Scowcroft, who had served as Bush’s national security adviser, “and the President rejected it even in retaliation for chemical or biological attacks.” The Bush administration’s public statements, however, had been ambiguous. Why clear things up for Saddam?

  Mattis had much the same outlook as Horner, Bush, and Scowcroft. During the counterinsurgency in Iraq, he famously told his Marines to “take off your sunglasses and let them get to know you. Play soccer with the kids, and don’t worry if you lose. Shake a lot of hands and chat them up.” Mattis, like Horner in 1991, could see no upside in killing large numbers of civilians indiscriminately. He had seen up close, and painfully, the brutal insurgency that gripped Iraq once the local population started to turn against their liberators.

  But like Bush and Scowcroft, Mattis was reluctant to be completely clear about this outlook, for fear of encouraging Kim Jong Un. To be sure, he had dropped hints about his attitude toward nuclear weapons. When Mattis was out of government, he worked closely at Stanford with George Shultz, Ronald Reagan’s former secretary of state. Shultz believed in the elimination of nuclear weapons. Later, as secretary of defense, Mattis was careful to talk about the importance of nuclear deterrence, but he also voiced a Marine’s skepticism that a bomb could do what muddy boots could not. Asked about a proposal for a new tactical nuclear weapon, he responded, “I don’t think there’s any such thing as a tactical nuclear weapon. Any nuclear weapon used any time is a strategic game changer.” Mattis had also deflected questions about whether the United States might place nuclear weapons in South Korea.