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

by Jeffrey Lewis

  One of Harris’s favorite chestnuts had been that Pacific Command was ready to “fight tonight.” Harris had repeated the mantra often in speeches; it appeared in press releases and was popular on social media. In one case, the phrase caused a minor panic when, after a North Korean missile test, Trump retweeted a tweet from Pacific Command with #FightTonight and briefly caused reporters to think the United States might be about to strike North Korea. Davidson wasn’t flashy like that. He lacked Harris’s showmanship. But now Davidson was tasked with making “fight tonight” more than a hashtag.

  Davidson understood that it was not possible to plan an air campaign from scratch in so little time. He would have to work from existing plans for contingencies on the Korean Peninsula. If the Pentagon does one thing, it develops and continuously updates plans, including rapid reaction plans in the event of a surprise attack. Still, every plan rests on certain assumptions, and North Korea’s nuclear strike was invalidating many of those assumptions. As Davidson recalled to the members of the commission, “There is an old adage: no plan survives first contact with the enemy.” Davidson was now leading an effort to review these plans, decide what was still possible and what was not, and figure out how it might all fit together.

  Davidson counted himself lucky on two counts. First, the United States had an unusual number of aircraft and naval assets in the region already, thanks to the ongoing war game. These assets included three aircraft carrier groups that contained all the forces called for in the various war plans he was weighing against each other.

  Second, neither Okinawa nor Guam had been seriously damaged in the North Korean attack, despite the fact that Kim had fired two nuclear-armed missiles at each base. The major hubs for American military effort were still in action.

  Even with these advantages, however, it didn’t seem like enough—but then again, no commander, Davidson explained to us, ever thinks he has enough. And while he wished that his force was bigger, it was nevertheless a formidable assemblage that could and would bring the fight to Kim Jong Un. “Fight tonight” was for real.

  Davidson’s first task would be to use his aircraft to destroy North Korea’s surface-to-air missiles. Without these missiles, Kim Jong Un would be naked, with no way to defend himself against air attacks. North Korea’s fighter aircraft would be easy enough to shoot down; the country’s Air Force, American pilots used to joke, was one of the finest aviation museums in the world.

  Kim Jong Un might have a million soldiers, but once his air defenses were down, those units would be pinned down by heavy bombardment that would destroy their morale. Davidson expected American soldiers to march across the border with almost no resistance, encountering only North Korean troops exhausted from heavy bombing. After all, that was what happened in 1991 when the United States entered southern Iraq. After the First Gulf War, military analysts were confused by a strange inconsistency. Although bombardment had destroyed enormous amounts of equipment, like tanks, the number of people killed was surprisingly low. It turned out that Iraqi units, facing heavy bombardment, had simply deserted their equipment, leaving it to be destroyed. Davidson was hoping that when South Korean and eventually American ground troops moved into North Korea, they would find burning tanks and surrendering crews.

  Davidson designed a second set of strikes, using smart bombs, to destroy so-called high-value targets in North Korea. These would include communications, infrastructure to produce nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, and—if the Americans were lucky—the highest-value target of them all: Kim Jong Un himself. But Davidson knew that killing Kim or catching some of the ballistic missiles would be like winning the lottery. A man or a missile can move around and hide. What airpower was really good at was pinning these targets down and cutting them off from communications. Then ground forces could sweep in and finish the job.

  The Americans would need to move fast. The longer the war dragged on, the greater the chance that Kim Jong Un would use his nuclear-armed missiles against the United States. Everything depended on speed.

  The Twin Lakes Incident

  Just before the first missiles struck Seoul, the North Korean Foreign Ministry finally had sent instructions to their chief diplomat in New York, Ambassador Ja Song Nam. The supreme leader demanded an immediate cessation of hostilities from the United States. Moreover, the instructions contained a clear threat that Ja was to deliver: if the United States did not cease its attacks on the DPRK, the supreme leader would “reduce the US mainland into ashes and darkness.”

  Ja had read the instructions with some discomfort. They implied that Pyongyang believed that South Korea’s missile strikes on Pyongyang and Chunghwa were the beginning of a larger American military operation. He had dutifully cabled back home reports covering both President Moon’s speech, which clearly described the strikes as limited, and US envoy Sydney Seiler’s assurance that Seoul had not informed Washington before launching the attack.

  The North Korean ambassador received no immediate reply. He remembered wondering if he should send the cables again when he saw the first reports of massive explosions in Seoul and Tokyo on television. “My heart sank when I saw what happened,” Ja recalled. “I wondered how anyone could make such a mistake.”

  Ja had his instructions, and he intended to fulfill his responsibilities. But first, he decided, he needed to leave New York City immediately. He was worried for his own safety, and that of his staff. The North Korean mission was a small, nondescript office in a drab building on the East Side of Manhattan with a greeting card shop on the first floor. It was hardly a well-defended embassy compound in the event that outraged local citizens decided to avenge Seoul or Tokyo. And of course, New York City was certainly one of the places Kim Jong Un would target for “ashes and darkness” if things continued to get out of hand.

  Ja announced to his staff that they needed to leave immediately. He told them to quickly “secure” the office, and they obliged—shredding the most sensitive documents, destroying computers, and smashing their phones. He then brought the entire delegation downstairs and crowded them into a few embassy cars. He told his driver to wait a moment, then stepped into the card shop.

  Back inside the car, he gave the driver an address and then he called Sydney Seiler. “I was worried,” Ja later recalled, “but as a diplomat I knew how to play a role. I told him that since the supreme leader would soon totally destroy New York City and the other imperialist outposts throughout the country, he would need to drive to Haskell if he wanted to meet with us.” Ja gave Seiler the address of a Holiday Inn Express in Haskell, New Jersey.

  Seiler was caught off guard. He recalled confirming that Ja was on his way to Haskell by asking, “Like Eddie?”

  Ambassador Ja had picked the site because it was as far from New York City as North Korean diplomats were legally allowed to travel—almost exactly twenty-five miles from the center of Columbus Circle. He also liked the fact that the hotel was sandwiched between two large hills. Even if a North Korean nuclear-armed ICBM missed New York City by many, many miles, the hotel would be safe.

  Seiler and Ambassador Haley argued about whether they should take the meeting. Seiler felt that it was his obligation to hear the North Koreans out. The situation, he said, was spiraling out of control. Haley, on the other hand, thought there was nothing further to discuss. She was needed in New York, moreover, to channel the international outrage over the nuclear strikes into a concrete plan to remove Kim Jong Un from power.

  They agreed that Seiler would be the one to drive to meet Ja. Haley declined to allow him to take any of her staffers to serve as a note-taker. “She said that she wasn’t going to send anyone on a fool’s errand,” Seiler recalled, “and that everyone wanted to stay in New York—where the action was.”

  As Seiler crossed the George Washington Bridge on the way to New Jersey, he noted that traffic was extremely heavy for a Saturday evening. The news of nuclear explosions in South Korea and Japan had not produced a full-blown panic in American c
ities, but clearly plenty of people were beginning to leave New York all the same. On a normal day, the drive to Haskell might take forty-five minutes, but it took Seiler that long just to get across the river and into the Garden State.

  As Seiler sat in traffic, he recalled, he felt a growing sense of anger about the North Korea attack. It would be hard, he worried, not to hold the ambassador personally responsible. “As a diplomat, you have to sort of learn to mentally separate the person from the policy,” Seiler said. “But this was really hard. I had lived in Seoul and was so sick and angry about what had happened. I was trying to keep my composure. I am not at all a violent person, but I worried I might punch him.”

  When Seiler finally arrived at the Holiday Inn Express in Haskell, a clerk at the front desk smiled at him and asked if he was looking for “Mr. Eddie.” Ja had been confused by Seiler’s question. When Seiler said yes, the clerk directed him to the hotel’s meeting room. Seiler wandered around a bit before he found the “Twin Lakes Meeting Room.” There was a small sign on the door, left over from a law enforcement seminar.

  “I just thought having the meeting in the ‘Twin Lakes Room’ was going to sound a heck of a lot better in the inevitable State Department history than the ‘Holiday Inn Express Summit,’” Seiler remembered. “And then I laughed out loud. I mean, what were the chances that we’d even live to write a history? Why was I worrying about that? I guess everyone reacts to stress differently.”

  Seiler recalled that he knocked once, just as a courtesy, then opened the door. The entire North Korean mission to the United Nations was in the room, milling around. Ambassador Ja stepped up to him and, without a word, handed him a card. It said, “HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MOM.”

  Seiler was very confused. “I was experiencing a lot of emotions: anger, sadness, black humor,” Seiler recalled. “And then that card. What could I do? I opened it.”

  The ambassador’s handwriting was messy, and the message had been scribbled in haste. It read:

  “I would like to seek asylum for myself and my staff. This is my decision alone. No one else knows this yet.”

  Seiler was stunned. In retrospect, he later admitted, the ambassador’s decision was an obvious possibility, but one that he had neglected to consider in the rush of emotions. Defection simply had not occurred to him. “Initially, I had no idea how to react. I just thanked him for the card and asked where the restroom was,” Seiler explained. “Then I stepped outside and called the State Department Ops Center.”

  The mass defection of the Korean mission surprised not only Seiler but also the State Department and the US intelligence community. From time to time, of course, North Korean diplomats had defected. But never in a large group. In fact, there had been only a single mass defection of North Koreans—a group of thirteen restaurant workers in Ningbo, China, who fled to South Korea in 2016.

  Ja had read about this defection, and its details had informed his planning. In organizing the defection, the restaurant manager had not told the twelve young women working as waitresses the purpose of their exciting trip abroad until the very last moment. Some probably guessed what was happening, but his ruse was designed to protect them as well as their families back in North Korea, who could plausibly claim that their sisters and daughters had been tricked into following him. “I probably didn’t need to be so cautious in this circumstance,” Ja told interrogators, “but I had carefully planned how I might leave for a long time. In fact, the only detail I didn’t plan was which card to buy. With so much stress, I couldn’t choose! I said to myself, ‘Ja, don’t be stupid, it doesn’t matter, just pick any one.’”

  North Korea had traditionally combated defections with the carrot-and-stick approach of choosing loyal people with strong ties to the regime, while threatening retribution against family members as a deterrent. Ja and his family had done very well for themselves under Kim Jong Un, far better than the vast majority of North Korean citizens. But all that was over now, Ja reasoned. To Ja, Kim was finished. Dead men offer no inducements and threaten no punishment. Defunct countries don’t need ambassadors, and they can’t kill defectors. His main concern was whether his family would survive the coming war. Ja was certain that the United States would prevail, but he wasn’t so sure about what would come next. In particular, he was concerned that his surviving family members might be targeted by their neighbors.

  More than anything else, Ja was motivated by a strong desire to resettle his family abroad, ideally in the United States. “I was a big shot in Pyongyang,” Ja explained. “Not everybody likes a big shot, especially one from the big city.”

  Some critics have charged that the loss of the DPRK mission eliminated an important channel for diplomacy. Some press reports even speculated that the Central Intelligence Agency continued to run the mission in the hours that followed, in an effort to deceive North Korea. There is no evidence to support these notions. By the time Seiler reported the defection, the president and his advisers had already settled on an air campaign to remove Kim Jong Un from power. Moreover, the North Korean diplomats had already destroyed the communications equipment in their Manhattan office, so there was no way for US intelligence to pretend that the mission was still operational. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) did not plan to secure the North Korean office space until early the next morning. They never got the chance.

  Myohyang HDBT

  When night fell on North Korea, the United States began striking targets throughout the country. High on the list were the palaces where Kim Jong Un might be hiding.

  Throughout the course of the war, the United States never had an accurate fix on Kim Jong Un’s location. The Myohyang complex was deemed a secondary target; US planners had assumed that Kim Jong Un would most likely do what his father would have done: flee to the complex near Mount Baekdu.

  Still, US military planners covered their bases, drawing up plans to heavily strike multiple palace complexes, including Myohyang. In doing so, they were guided by a single analytic insight. Kim Jong Il had been deathly afraid of flying and took trains everywhere, but Kim Jong Un was an avid fan of aviation, having even learned to fly his own plane. Kim had ordered the construction of runways at his most important palaces—in Pyongyang, Wonsan, and, of course, Myohyang. The North Koreans had laughed at how careless the South Korean military officers had been when they revealed the location of so many missile bases on social media. No one told Kim that his runways, often set next to the train stations built for his father, would be used to guide American missiles and bombs to him and his family.

  At 6:48 PM Pyongyang time, only a few minutes after sunset, explosions began to rip through the newly constructed palace complex at Myohyang. The site was struck with no less than a dozen cruise missiles. They targeted not only the palace’s buildings but also the systems that provided electricity and ventilation to Kim’s bunker beneath the mountain. Although he was far too deep for American missiles or bombs to reach directly, there was another possibility—what the military calls “functional defeat,” or effectively turning the bunker into a tomb. At the very least, the bombs would make life very unpleasant for those inside by striking the entrances and the life support systems. With no electricity, it would be dark in the bunker. The increasingly foul air would be hard to breathe. Food would spoil, and toilets would not flush. Kim would be cut off from communications. The explosions might also trigger avalanches that would send rocks cascading over the entrance of the bunker, blocking the door.

  The strike on the Myohyang HDBT (“hard and deeply buried target”) was only partially successful. The explosions did not bury Kim in his bunker. They did, however, knock out the bunker’s electrical systems. Without power, there was no heat and the air filtration system stopped working. Personnel on-site opened up doors and vents to let in fresh air. Kim could breathe and was still in contact with his forces, but over the course of the night the temperature in the bunker dropped. His children in particular found the extreme cold of the March night difficult to
endure.

  The strikes, according to transcripts of the meeting recovered from the Myohyang bunker after the war, caught Kim and his family off guard. They had believed that a diplomatic effort was under way in New York. They expected the Americans to try to reason with the supreme leader, not kill him—not when he still had so many ICBMs up his sleeve.

  KIM JO YONG [KIM JONG UN’S SISTER]: Do we have an answer from New York?

  CHOE RYONG HAE [KIM’S AIDE]: I think this is the answer. It is fairly clear to me.

  KIM JO YONG: [inaudible]

  KIM JONG UN: They were just stalling. Trump doesn’t care about South Korea or Japan. He said so himself.*

  KIM JO YONG: [inaudible]

  KIM JONG UN: He needs to know Americans will die too. We have to show him we have the will to see this through.

  CHOE RYONG HAE: What good is a world without [North] Korea!

  The last statement is one that we find elsewhere in the historical record as well. Several North Korean prisoners of war made it when asked why Kim Jong Un had been willing to use nuclear weapons or to escalate the conflict at crucial moments. The phrase came up again and again in interrogations, much to the confusion of the interrogators. “What good is a world without North Korea?” Former regime officials would simply repeat this rhetorical question, as though its meaning was obvious. “You think it sounds crazy, but you are totally wrong,” Choe Ryong Hae later explained to this commission’s investigators from his holding cell at [REDACTED]. “You don’t understand anything about war. How many people did you kill just because you don’t want to understand?”