Kim Jong Un Is a God in North Korea

It was a thirty-minute ride to the drill site in the Chorwon Valley—the nominal center of the peninsula and one of the two major invasion corridors when the North Koreans streamed south in June 1950. As we approached the site, the pilots were unable to establish radio contact with the soldiers on the ground. It was a clear day, and we were flying under visual flight rules rather than using instruments and navigation aids. Even so, pilots were required to have both radio and visual contact when flying or landing near the narrow DMZ. The copilot, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Concetta Hassan, who had led a Horatio Alger–type life and had already been the subject of a made-for-TV movie a few months earlier, was on just her second flight mission since arriving in the ROK. Through my headset, I heard her suggest that we fly higher to gain radio comms. The other pilot agreed and ascended three hundred feet. Sure enough, we heard our contacts at the landing site. Unfortunately, during the maneuver, the pilot lost sight of the pond that served as the major landmark in the area, and inadvertently lined up on another pond—just north of the DMZ. I began to hear a sound like popcorn in a microwave, and looked out the side of the aircraft to see white puffs below us. At about the same time, I heard a very loud, persistent, and annoying automated broadcast coming through my earphones: “Red Dog Fox! Red Dog Fox!” repeated over and over, which meant someone had crossed the DMZ. That someone was us.

Up front, CW2 Hassan took the controls, dove, turned, and after some evasive maneuvering—an unnatural act for a Huey with a full load— wheeled us around and got us back to South Korean airspace. Her maneuvers used a lot of fuel, and because we’d already traveled a long distance, we landed at a field-deployed rubber fuel bladder, gassed up with the rotor blades still turning, and then returned home to Yongsan. We didn’t find out until the helicopter was back in its hangar that a round had penetrated its main rotor. Miraculously, the rotor stayed intact on the leg back to Yongsan, even with the weight of the additional fuel and a full passenger load. From the helicopter pad, my driver was waiting to take me back to my office, and I matter-of-factly told Gary that we’d need to reschedule the trip, since we never made it to the drill site. Still shaken, he gave me a quizzical look.

When I walked into my office, the red phone, a direct emergency line to the around-the-clock command post, was ringing. I had been in Korea about six months, and that was the first time it had ever rung. On the other end was a duty officer, who told me, “My God, sir, we thought you were a goner.” After I assured him we were fine, another phone rang, a direct hotline from General Livsey. I braced myself and answered, and what followed made General Pfautz’s Sunday morning phone call in Virginia seem like a pep talk. At high volume, General Livsey instructed me on an important distinction between practices of the Air Force and the Army. In the Air Force, the senior pilot is designated as aircraft commander, the official in charge of the safety of the aircraft, regardless of the rank of any passengers. That was not the case in the Army, so thereafter, whenever I flew as the senior-ranking officer in an Army helicopter, I made sure I always had a map and headphones and knew where I was.

To General Livsey’s relief, the incident didn’t get much media play outside of Korea. The United Nations Command conducted a standard investigation and conveniently determined that we’d only made a shallow penetration of the DMZ. A few days later a nervous ROK Army regimental commander showed up at my office to apologize. The incident investigation determined that the round that hit the rotor was from an M60 machine gun, a weapon the DPRK didn’t have. The commander explained that the rules of engagement called for ROK Army elements along the DMZ to assume that any aircraft flying north was defecting and to shoot them out of the sky. We’d been taking fire from both the north and south, and it turned out the ROK soldiers were better shots. I went home that night and hugged Sue and Andy.

I continued to study and to work at absorbing Army culture. I became more adept at reading General Livsey and grew to admire the way in which, with his Georgia accent, he conveniently played the “dumb Southern boy,” though I knew he’d graduated first in his class from the Army’s Command and General Staff College. When Secretary of the Army John O. Marsh visited and I gave him my well-honed briefing on North Korea, Marsh asked how I felt about serving as an Air Force officer in what was essentially an Army position. I told him I appreciated the institutional commitment the Army had made to intelligence and that I’d learned a lot about the intelligence profession by seeing it from the viewpoint of another service. I didn’t know it yet, but assigning midgrade and senior officers to “joint duty” tours across services would be one of the major features of the Goldwater-Nichols Act in October 1986, an effort in which Marsh was heavily involved.

As the senior intelligence officer in Korea, I eventually grew confident enough in my understanding of the situation that I could honestly admit to General Livsey that we could not meet the expectation he’d demanded of me on day one. I’d become convinced there was simply no way to provide him with an “unambiguous” warning that North Korea was going to attack. I told him the only unambiguous sign he would have is when North Korean artillery shells started falling on Seoul. He didn’t like my answer, but he accepted it. I also came to believe the whole idea of having warning before North Korea executed a planned invasion was moot, as the much more likely circumstance leading to a conflict would be some small incident spiraling out of control.

Thirty years passed between when I reached that conclusion and my diplomatic visit to North Korea as Director of National Intelligence in November 2014. As control of the regime passed from Kim Il-sung to Kim Jong-il to Kim Jong-un, my personal assessment of the threat posed by the Hermit Kingdom never changed. If anything, the actions and the public pronouncements of the “Dear Leaders” over the decades reinforced my conclusion that none of them wanted to go back to fighting, but that they’ve kept the mechanics of war set on a hair trigger, and that any sane US policy on North Korea needed to be based on an understanding of that dynamic.

There is an unwritten, almost sacred writ of the intelligence profession that we in intelligence should avoid engaging in policy formation or execution. We support policy makers by providing them timely, accurate, relevant, even anticipatory intelligence, but we don’t participate in making the policy sausage. Our objective typically is to reduce uncertainty for decision makers as much as possible, whether they’re in the Oval Office, at the negotiating table, or on the battlefield. As DNI, I was careful not to advocate for specific policies in National Security Council meetings. However, Korea was one issue on which I let President Obama know—privately—that I thought his policy rationale of not discussing anything else until North Korea agreed to end its nuclear capability and ambitions was flawed, and after my 2014 mission to North Korea, I discussed my observations and views with analysts and policy makers in the national security field.

I had not fully appreciated the consuming siege mentality that pervades North Korea until I visited and engaged directly with senior officials there. The leadership elites in the North work hard to maximize paranoia among the population. Portraying the United States as an enemy that’s constantly on the brink of invading it is one of the chief propaganda themes that’s held North Korea together for the past sixty years. They are also deadly serious about any perceived affronts to the Supreme Leader, whom they literally consider a deity. The DPRK is a family-owned country and has been that way ever since it was founded in the 1940s. Because of its history, the DPRK sees developing nuclear weapons as its insurance policy and ticket to survival. North Korea wants to be recognized as a world power, and its entire society, including their conventional military forces, suffers for the relentless, single-minded commitment to develop and field these weapons and delivery systems to threaten the United States. Neither they nor we really know if their weapons work, but in many ways, it doesn’t matter. They achieved nuclear deterrence long ago, because we have to assume that if they do launch an ICBM at the United States, it will reach our shores and detonate. They have effectively played their nuclear hand to the hilt, for without even proving they have the relevant capability, they’ve capitalized on nuclear deterrence.

I believe, and have advocated, that to counter North Korea, the United States needs to consider capitalizing on our greatest strengths: openness and information. The DPRK survives because it fosters isolation. Outside the ruling clique, there is great interest in the outside world. Currently, we have limited means to satisfy their citizens’ hunger for information, something very difficult to do in the absence of a physical presence in the country. If we set aside for a minute our demand that they disarm before we’ll talk, we could establish a presence in Pyongyang in the form of a US “interests section,” modeled on the one we maintained in Havana for decades to deal with the Cuban government we didn’t recognize. We would not need to present this as a reward for bad behavior, but rather as an opportunity for direct physical access, which would enhance our insight and understanding and, perhaps even more importantly, foster interaction with the people of the DPRK and enable the flow of information from the rest of the world. We would, of course, reciprocate by allowing them to establish a similar mission in Washington. I don’t think this would represent a huge leap over their existing presence in the United States at the United Nations in New York.

I’m not naïve about the existence of formidable antibodies in the US government to what I’m suggesting, but I don’t see any other way to resolve the impasse. The DPRK won’t budge because they see us as an existential threat. If we are going to get out of the static, adversarial holding pattern we’re in now, we have to be the bigger partner and make the “breakthrough,” to use the preferred term the North Koreans used with me.

At this writing, the situation in North Korea seems poised for change—whether for better or for worse remains to be seen. Events and pronouncements in the first year of President Trump’s administration, including increasingly successful DPRK ballistic missile tests and an apparently successful thermonuclear test, heightened tensions between our two countries. Taunts between Trump and Kim Jong-un only serve to shorten the fuses of the military forces on both sides, as the DPRK Army stands ready to rain fire down on the 10 million residents of Seoul at a moment’s notice. Then, in March 2018, a South Korean envoy in Washington informed President Trump that Supreme Leader Kim was willing to discuss giving up North Korea’s nuclear program. Surprising everyone, Trump accepted the invitation to talk.

What I would hope (but doubt will happen) is that the United States will enter talks with a long-game strategy in mind. America has had a substantial military presence on the peninsula for almost sixty-eight years. If we can figure out a way, over time, with sequenced, mutually verified steps, to lead the DPRK government to where they don’t feel so threatened, we could move away from the rhetorical cusp of a cataclysmic war. If we can offer a road map to the US military’s withdrawing much of its forces from the peninsula, while the North Koreans reduce the large conventional forces they have along the DMZ, including the huge artillery and rocketry forces that are dug in ready to fire on Seoul, that would de-escalate the situation and lessen the danger of a minor incident quickly escalating to nuclear war.

In the late 1990s, when I was out of the government, I participated in the so-called Track II dialogue with members of the North Korean UN mission in New York. Over a dinner, one of the North Koreans spoke about transforming the United Nations Command into a peacekeeping force, to serve as buffer between the North and the South. So even they have considered a different arrangement on the peninsula. A reasonable first step might be to meet their demands for a peace treaty, as all we have now is a cease-fire, which began when the warring sides simply stopped shooting. In their minds, the war could resume immediately. We remain stuck on our narrative, and they are (or perhaps merely have been until recently) stuck on theirs. Only the bigger partner can change those narratives. I hope we can think ambitiously and be willing to go long, and perhaps this is our opportunity to do so. Unfortunately, I don’t think we’re postured—either philosophically or bureaucratically—to achieve that.