Fear: Trump in the White House(61)

Less than two months later, September 3, North Korea conducted an underground test of its most powerful nuclear weapon, its sixth. This was at least 17 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945.



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During the campaign, on February 10, 2016, Trump said on CBS This Morning he would get China to make Kim “disappear in one form or another very quickly.” He called Kim “a bad dude—and don’t underestimate him.”

An executive order signed in 1981 by President Reagan stated, “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the U.S. government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.” But government lawyers had concluded that a military strike on a leader’s command-and-control headquarters during hostilities would not violate the assassination ban.

One of the early applications of leader-command-and-control targeting occurred near the end of the Clinton presidency. The military strike is little remembered because it came in the midst of the congressional debate on the impeachment of the president. In December 1998, Clinton ordered a military strike in Iraq.

The Desert Fox operation included 650 bomber or missile sorties against fewer than 100 targets over three days. It was billed as a large bombing attack to punish Iraq for failing to allow United Nations weapons inspectors to search for weapons of mass destruction.

Desert Fox was not explicitly designed to kill Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, but fully half the targets were his palaces or other locations he might use that were protected by special intelligence and Republican Guard units. Saddam was not hit, though many in the administration, particularly Secretary of Defense William Cohen, had hoped it would be the end of him.

In the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, President George W. Bush and his National Security officials again pondered whether it was possible to kill Saddam through covert action.

CIA officers in the demoralized Iraqi Operations Group—often referred to within the agency and among themselves as “The House of Broken Toys”—gave a dramatic no. It would be too hard; Saddam was too well protected. The security and intelligence organizations existed to keep him alive and in power. The Operations Group posed a military invasion as the only way to remove the dictator.

On the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, CIA human sources, code-named ROCKSTARS, reported with increasing certainty that Saddam was at Dora Farm, a complex southeast of Baghdad on the banks of the Tigris River. Told that Saddam was holed up in a bunker, Bush ordered a strike with bunker-busting bombs. Hours later, CIA director George Tenet called the Situation Room. “Tell the president we got the son of a bitch.” They had not.

Days later, the CIA base chief in northern Iraq visited Dora Farm, which looked like the ruins of a flea market. He found no bunker, just a subterranean pantry for food storage. One thing was clear: Saddam had escaped, or he had never been there. He was captured nine months later when U.S. forces found him hiding in a spider hole under a small shack.



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The CIA engaged in some high-level introspection over the next several years. Officials asked the crucial after-action question: Suppose Saddam had been killed by covert action or military strike? Would that have made the invasion and long war unnecessary? The cost in lives included more than 100,000 Iraqis by conservative count and 4,530 Americans. The U.S. cost was at least $800 billion and probably $1 trillion. How much Middle East instability did the war cause and enable Iran? The Middle East and world history seemed to pivot around the Iraq War for years.

This self-examination peaked years later during the time John Brennan was CIA director, 2013 to early 2017. An agency man to the core with a smooth, confident and austere manner, he had vast CIA experience and a track record for being right. On television he rarely smiled.

Brennan had been daily intelligence briefer for President Clinton; CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia; executive assistant and chief of staff to CIA Director Tenet. As the White House counterterrorism chief in Obama’s first term, he had developed a strong relationship with the president, who rewarded him with the CIA directorship in his second term. Brennan was known as “The Answer Man.” He read deeply in the intelligence reports, often asking to see agent reports and raw communications intercepts.

Mindful of the Iraq “mistake,” Brennan ultimately concluded that the CIA had not done its job. The House of Broken Toys had dodged its responsibilities, insisting, “You need troops! You need troops!” Well, that was not the CIA’s job. Their energy could better have been focused on what the CIA could do to present options. Given the magnitude of the mistake, Brennan concluded that the Saddam problem could have been solved with what he called “indirect assassination.”

So as the North Korean problem escalated during the Obama presidency, Brennan developed an aggressive argument. The CIA should not seek regime change, but “man change,” the elimination of Leader Kim Jong Un. Brennan concluded the Iraq Operations Group of the preinvasion period of 2002–03 had little guts, know-how and imagination. So the equivalent group for North Korea in the CIA operations directorate went to work. Was “indirect assassination” or “man change” possible? It was an option worth examining.

The CIA’s North Korea group came up with the Peninsula Intelligence Estimate (PIE), which would provide warnings that the North was going to initiate an attack. The Pentagon’s top secret contingency U.S. war plan, the response to an attack, was for regime change in North Korea and was called OPLAN 5027.