Foley replied, “The Chinese didn’t make them or deliver them.”
“But you just said—”
“These are knockoffs.”
Jack cocked his head. “Counterfeit?”
“Yes. They are exact reproductions of the tubes used for the fuselage of the DF-3A Chinese medium-range missiles. But these were made by a private aerospace company in France called Précision Aéro Toulouse.”
“That’s interesting. Why?”
“The theory we have is this: We all know the North Koreans are having problems fielding a long-range ICBM because their Taepodong-2, the closest one they have to being ready, keeps failing, either between first and second stage or between second- and third-stage separation. That means something could be wrong with the second stage they are using.”
“Right. Go on.”
Mary Pat slid her iPad along the table to where Jack could see it and she began scrolling through several photos and diagrams of missiles. Each picture was labeled and time-stamped and captioned, and Ryan saw some of the photos were from open-source intel, and others were from top-secret sources.
“The second stage they are using now is taken from their Rodong medium-range ballistic missile. Basically they just slapped a single-stage rocket into the middle of their three-stage rocket, and it’s not working out for them.”
“Imagine that.”
“Rocket science is tough,” Mary Pat said with a chuckle. “But what we know is the Chinese are doing something similar with their long-range missiles. They use their Dongfeng-3A single-stage rocket as the second stage of their long-range ICBM.”
“And the North Koreans want to use the Dongfeng on their Taepodong-2?”
“It appears so. Back in the early nineties the Chinese gave the North Koreans one Dongfeng-3A missile. They never deployed it, they just took it apart to cobble pieces together in their own equipment. Now that China has refused to give Choi the ICBM technology that he wants, we think they are using this French aerospace firm to build replicas of the Dongfeng-3A.”
“Off Chinese plans?” Ryan asked.
“We don’t think so. We think this company in France actually reengineered these missile components by using the tube of the one Dongfeng-3A in the North Koreans’ possession.”
Jack looked over the photos of the tubes pulled off the Emerald Endeavor. “Wow.”
Mary Pat said, “‘Wow’ is right. In order to reengineer these tubes, they would have had to have built proprietary tools and high-tech machines.”
Ryan said the obvious. “And that didn’t come cheap.”
“Not cheap at all. We’ve spent the past couple of days looking into this. Précision Aéro received a payment of seventeen million euros eight and a half months ago. That’s nearly twenty-five million U.S. dollars.”
Ryan sipped his coffee. “Should it bother us North Korea has twenty-five million U.S. to drop on a project as speculative as this?”
“It bothers me. We don’t know what all they expected for that payment, or what all Précision Aéro has already shipped them.”
“We need to find out. Have we talked with the French government?”
“No, and there’s a problem with doing that. We need to go carefully so they don’t know we are looking into the bank accounts of one of their companies. Anyway, I know what they will say. The deal wasn’t done with the North Koreans. It was with a shell company out of Luxembourg.”
Ryan sighed, looking again at the tubes taken from the Emerald Endeavor. “This equipment must violate international nonproliferation treaties.”
“That’s debatable.”
Ryan turned to Mary Pat, and she put her hands up quickly. “I’m not debating it. Of course the commerce in these kinds of ‘dual-use’ parts should be banned by international treaty, but companies make the argument that as long as it is not overtly going to end users who are going to make ICBMs, then it should be fair game. There are enough private satellite companies on earth today to where firms like Précision Aéro can dip their toe into weapons proliferation with plausible deniability.”
Ryan rubbed his eyes under his glasses. “I’ll call the French president and let him know what we know. I’ll play it like we got tipped off. He might not believe me, but he won’t be able to challenge me.”
Foley said, “The real issue here, Mr. President, is not the material we found on board the Emerald Endeavor. It is the fact North Korea had the hard currency to buy this material on the world market in the first place.”
“I can tell by that look on your face you know something.”
“I do. CIA has been working on North Korean banking practices for a while now, and this fits right in with this new information. We traced the payment to Précision Aéro back to a bank account in Dubai. There was thirteen million in the account even after the purchase.”
“What is North Korea doing with that kind of cash?”
“We have a theory, and this is why Jay and I weren’t able to meet with you yesterday. We’ve been working on this for three days solid, even before the Emerald Endeavor.”
Ryan leaned closer. “Tell me.”
“Mr. President, there is strong evidence North Korea has restarted production on their rare earth mineral mine at Chongju.”
Ryan just said, “Shit.”
Mary Pat continued, “Analysts at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency say there are indications that the rare earth mine in the northwest of the nation is up and running again. Further, they think it is happening without Chinese help.”
Ryan said, “The Chinese were booted from that mine a few months back.”
“A year ago now, yes. Our contacts in China report no change in that relationship, so we find it curious the North Koreans are advancing with the program there. Especially because there is evidence they are actually building up the capacity to process the rare earth ore into refined materials. That’s something light-years ahead of the current level of DPRK sophistication. Even the Chinese had planned on processing the ore at refineries in China.”
“Do the Chinese know the DPRK is going around them?”
“Virtually all of what we know about facts on the ground in North Korea comes from the Chinese, either intercepted communications, the odd HUMINT asset, or open sources. We see nothing about Chongju in any of these resources, so we feel the Chinese are in the dark on this, for now at least.”
Ryan asked, “Do you have the NGA images?”
Mary Pat had learned long ago to expect Ryan to ask to see primary intelligence. She began flipping pages on her tablet, displaying a series of overhead shots of a cluster of buildings.
“What do you think?” Mary Pat asked after a moment.
“I think I’m glad we’ve got analysts at NGA to decipher this for us. I see the strip mine, obviously, but all the tanks and buildings look like they could belong to just about any sort of factory.”
Mary Pat reached to the tablet computer and brought up another page. On it were two images. One was captioned “Chongju dam” and the other “LAMP.”
“The one on the left is the ore-processing facility in North Korea. We are calling it ‘Chongju dam’ because that is the closest named structure, it’s just north of Chongju and west of the mine. And the image here is of the LAMP rare earth — processing plant in Malaysia. Look at the oxidation tanks in both photos.”
Ryan looked them over and agreed the two installations were very similar.
Mary Pat said, “We learned from Chinese intercepts last year that Chongju could bring North Korea as much as twelve trillion dollars in hard assets in the next two to three decades. With that kind of a potential haul, it’s no big surprise they found someone new to help them build and run it.”