Fear: Trump in the White House(33)

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James Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence, had begun his career commanding a signals intelligence listening post in Thailand during the Vietnam War. Now 75 years old, bald and bearded with a wide, expressive face, he was the granddaddy of American intelligence—gruff, direct, outspoken, seasoned.

Clapper rang the bell loud and clear with Obama: The reporting showed that the new North Korean weapon systems would work in some form. But what threat did they pose? To South Korea? Japan? The United States? How immediate? Was the North just looking for a bargaining chip?

The intelligence assessment showed an increasing level of effort, strongly suggesting that Kim Jong Un was building a fighting force of nuclear weapons, or at least he wanted to make it appear that way.

Despite the public cartoon that cast him as an unstable madman, sensitive intelligence reporting showed that Kim, now age 34, was a much more effective leader of the North’s nuclear weapons and missiles programs than his father, Kim Jong Il, who had ruled for 17 years from 1994 to 2011.

The elder Kim had dealt with weapons test failures by ordering the death of the responsible scientists and officials. They were shot. The younger Kim accepted failures in tests, apparently absorbing the practical lesson: Failure is inevitable on the road to success. Under Kim Jong Un, the scientists lived to learn from their mistakes, and the weapons programs improved.

Obama tasked the Pentagon and intelligence agencies with examining whether it would be possible to take out all of North Korea’s nuclear weapons and related facilities. Could they effectively target all of this? They would need to update the satellite, signals and human intelligence. So much was not known or certain.

Pakistan, which had nuclear weapons since 1998, had miniaturized their nukes and put them in mines and artillery shells. Did North Korea have that capability? Current intelligence assessments could not answer definitively.

The intelligence assessment also showed that a U.S. attack could not wipe out everything the North had. There would be lost targets because they did not know about them, and partial destruction of other targets.

The greater Seoul megalopolis was home to approximately 10 million people and went right up to the 2.5-mile-wide Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) dividing North and South Korea. North Korea had thousands of artillery pieces near the DMZ in caves. In exercises the North Koreans wheeled the artillery out, practiced shooting and went back into the caves. This was called “shoot and scoot.” Could a U.S. attack deal with so many weapons?

After a month of study, U.S. intelligence and the Pentagon formally reported to Obama that perhaps 85 percent of all known nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons facilities could be attacked and destroyed and that was only the identified ones. Clapper believed the projected success rate would have to be perfect. A single North Korean nuclear weapon detonated in response could mean tens of thousands of casualties in South Korea.

Any U.S. attack could also trigger the North’s potentially devastating artillery, other conventional weapons and a ground army of at least 200,000 and many more volunteers.

The Pentagon reported that the only way “to locate and destroy—with complete certainty—all components of North Korea’s nuclear program” was through a ground invasion. A ground invasion would trigger a North Korean response, likely with a nuclear weapon.

That was unthinkable to Obama. In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 2009 he said, “War promises human tragedy,” and “War at some level is an expression of human folly.”

Frustrated and exasperated, he rejected a preemptive strike. It was folly.



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Informal, backchannel diplomacy between the United States and North Korea continued. Former U.S. government officials met with current North Korean officials to keep a dialogue open. These were most often called Track 1.5 meetings. Government-to-government meetings were called Track 1. If both sides were nongovernment or former officials these meetings were called Track 2.

“We’re has-beens, but they’re not,” in the words of one former U.S. official deeply involved in the Track 1.5 meetings. One meeting had been held recently in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, with the vice foreign minister of North Korea. Former U.S. negotiator Robert Gallucci said the North Koreans warned him at this meeting, “they will always be a nuclear weapons state.”

A second Track 1.5 meeting with the head of North Korea’s American affairs division followed the 2016 election and took place in Geneva. “The North Koreans don’t take it seriously,” said one former U.S. official, because they know the U.S. representatives can’t propose anything new. “But they’re probably better than not having” the meetings.

Trump had a history of public statements about North Korea, dating back to an October 1999 Meet the Press appearance. “I would negotiate like crazy,” Trump said. In a 2016 campaign speech, he said, “President Obama watches helplessly as North Korea increases its aggression and expands even further with its nuclear reach.” In May of 2016, he told Reuters, “I would have no problem speaking to” Kim Jong Un. As president, in 2017, he called Kim a “smart cookie.”



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Without a tenable military option, DNI Clapper thought the U.S. needed to be more realistic. In November 2014, he had gone to North Korea to retrieve two U.S. citizens who had been taken prisoner. From his discussions with North Korean officials he was convinced that North Korea would not give up their nuclear weapons. Why would they? In exchange for what? North Korea had effectively bought a deterrent. It was real and powerful in its ambiguity. U.S. intelligence was not certain of the capability. He had argued to Obama and the NSC that for the United States to say that denuclearization was a condition for negotiations was not working, and would not work.