“Before we do that, we’re coming up to the six o’clock hour here on the US East Coast, but Korea is thirteen hours ahead of us. Most of us were drinking our morning coffee when we heard about Kim Jong-un’s very public death — no, assassination — by nerve gas, just as that country began its first night dealing with the incontrovertible proof of their absolute dictator’s demise. Now, it’s seven in the morning, a little after daybreak in Pyongyang.” She turned to a bearded man in his forties sitting with her at the desk.
“Dr. Russel Hayes is from the Brookings Institution, and the author of several books on North Korea. His latest is Criminal Kingdom, which was published last year. Doctor, virtually everybody on the planet that has access to the Internet has seen the images. It’s the first video on YouTube to get over a billion views. It’s not pleasant to watch, but is there anything in that clip that you feel has been missed, or that people should be noticing?”
Hayes had obviously been prepared for the question, because he answered immediately, “Almost as important as Kim’s death was the death of the others in the room, representing the upper two or three tiers of his regime — his reconstituted regime, I might add, since many of the original members were killed either in the explosion on the fifteenth, or in the violence since then.”
“Is the Kim regime wiped out, then?” Donner asked.
“No, although they are obviously weakened. Even with the coup attempt on the fifteenth, Kim’s faction had the advantage, because they were already in control. The next strongest group, the General Staff, had more raw power, but their lines of communication were broken at the top.”
Donner prompted, “And the Korean Workers’ Party was the third faction?”
Hayes nodded and answered, “They were actually the most numerous, with the most potential power. Everybody from a government economist to the street sweepers had to be a member of the party, and while technically loyal to Kim, the party organization has always been a law unto itself. Kim may have the steering wheel, but the party was everything else, from the economic engine to the infrastructure wheels to the workers in the gas tank. All three groups of course are corrupt, and are riddled with informers allied with the other two factions.
“When Kim reappeared, alive, many of the ringleaders of the other factions, who of necessity had been forced to reveal themselves, were arrested and shot. According to the refugees my contacts have interviewed, the arrests easily number in the thousands, while the executions before yesterday were in the high hundreds, all of leaders or important members of each faction.”
“And now Kim’s faction is leaderless as well,” Donner concluded.
“Which means it’s a mad scramble, with every man for himself. The diehards will remain, but anybody who can will try to get out or go to ground until the South Koreans get to them.” Hayes shrugged. “There are a lot of party officials that are watching the advance of the ROK Army the way the German civilians waited for the US and Britain in World War II.”
“And do the Chinese take on the role of the Russians this time?” she asked.
“No, the analogy doesn’t hold,” Hayes responded. “Beijing is very worried, and I wish I had a nickel for every Chinese press release reminding us that North Korea is a ‘sovereign nation.’ But as long as the US doesn’t go north of the thirty-eighth parallel, China can’t justify her own intervention.
“The challenge for the South Koreans will be to move quickly, before the giant that is China decides what it wants to do. If the PRC is presented with a fait accompli, it may simply accept Korean unification as a done deal. Because if China intervenes, then the US has to back up its ally, and unifying the two Koreas will no longer be the goal.”
“What takes its place?” Donner asked.
“Avoiding a nuclear war,” Hayes answered flatly.
Cho Ho-jin ducked into the angle formed by a collapsed wall and checked the GPS on his phone. The city had been so badly torn up by the fighting that many landmarks were gone, converted into rubble that covered the streets. Choking smoke from dozens of fires had mixed with the August heat and humidity to form a permanent cloud. Visibility in places was down to a hundred meters, sometimes less.
The phone was his lifeline. He reported by voice now, no coded messages. That took too long. The signal was heavily encrypted, and he doubted that the North Korean security services, even if there were anyone watching for unauthorized cell phone use, would try to track him down in the middle of a battlefield.
Every building bore the marks of combat, and Pyongyang could join Beirut, Karbala, and Sarajevo in popular memory as urban battlefields.
Since arriving at noon yesterday, he’d identified some of the army units fighting in the city, with troops from all three sides vying for the possession of the capital. He intended to pass that information on as soon as he found a more secure place to spend the night. Roving patrols made it dangerous to use his phone in daylight, as he had to have an unobstructed view of the satellite — a little hard to do when one was scurrying from one wrecked building to another.
His last report of two days ago was one of his more revealing observations. The Ministry of State Security’s troops had allied themselves with the Korean Workers’ Party faction. Although rated as a paramilitary force, he’d seen them with heavy weapons and armored fighting vehicles. His last order was to “identify the Kim and KWP factions’ leaders,” as if he was a journalist who could ask for an interview.
The key would be to find the respective headquarters for each faction, then surreptitiously take photographs of anyone who looked to be in charge. It was impossible, of course. His handlers either had a poor grasp of the situation in the North Korean capital, or had been watching too many movies.
He’d been on the move all night, watching tracers arcing over different parts of the city. The night offered some concealment for somebody moving with purpose in a place where everyone who moved was an enemy.
His last meal had been rations looted from the backpack of a dead soldier. He’d wolfed them down while he watched a rocket barrage that fell like a river of fire. It landed somewhere to the west. Cho had no idea of the identity of the firer or the target. The canteen on the corpse’s belt was only half full, and Cho was saving the last few swallows against dire need.
The Potong River lay a few blocks to the east. He’d considered heading there to refill his canteen, but the Potong and other rivers that ran through the city had become boundaries and defensive lines. Instinctively, he avoided the open ground near the water’s edge. Even at night, there was too great a risk of a sniper with a night vision scope.
Many of Pyongyang’s two dozen bridges were down, either collateral damage or dropped deliberately. The party faction held this side of the river, and a respectable swath of the city, but Kim’s faction occupied several key buildings to the north, and in spite of attacks by both the party and the General Staff, they fiercely resisted.
With the General Staff to the east and Kim’s people to the north, the party faction’s headquarters had to be somewhere south or west of here. It wasn’t much to go on, but he’d been living on luck so far. He’d just hoped he had a little more left.
An armored vehicle came up the street toward his position, rumbling on eight wheels across the rubble and cratered surface. Already hidden, Cho pulled back farther into the shadows and watched the soldier manning a heavy machine gun in a small turret on top. He seemed more worried about rooftop snipers than ground-level threats, because he kept looking up, and never noticed Cho. The vehicle passed, like a tiger in search of prey, and once it was out of sight, Cho left and headed one block west, and then south, keeping well away from any troops that might be dug in along the river’s edge.