Inside the trucks, each crew followed the same checklist, completing each step by touching a key marked XMIT, or “transmit.” This key would send a confirmation back to Army Missile Command, allowing Major General Lee to follow along as the crew prepared to launch. Once the canister was vertical, the display read READY TO FIRE. The crew member touched XMIT. The display read ARM MISSILE. A crew member lifted a small cover on the control panel, flipped the arming switch, then touched XMIT again. The display read READY TO COMPLY. A crew member hit XMIT for a final time, and then they waited.
When the moment arrived, Major General Lee appears not to have hesitated. His order to fire arrived promptly on the display at 8:00 PM: FIRE MISSILE.
Within seconds, the ballistic missiles went streaking into the sky, one after the other. South Korea’s retaliation was, as President Moon had said, limited. There were now six missiles, no more, no less, heading toward North Korea.
3
HURRICANE DONALD
BY THE TIME DUSK settled over the Korean Peninsula on Saturday evening, the government of the United States had been on high alert for hours. As soon as the North Korean missile unit at Ongjin fired at Air Busan Flight 411, the launch had been detected by an American satellite. In that moment, a complex system within the US government had sprung into action, working to inform the nation’s leaders, including President Donald Trump, that the crisis on the Korean Peninsula had taken a dangerous turn. The same spy satellites and other classified intelligence systems that had detected the two surface-to-air missiles fired at BX 411 at 12:28 PM also registered the explosion that destroyed the aircraft minutes thereafter.
We now know that, although every one of these events was detected, assessed, and promptly passed up the chain of command, the overall system did not work as intended. The process broke down; information failed to reach the very top. The president was not informed that North Korea shot down BX 411 for more than six hours, and ultimately only learned about the event the following morning when he saw television reports. Nor did President Trump know at the time of his first public remarks on the events on the Korean Peninsula that South Korea had responded to the shootdown of Flight 411 with a limited missile strike against targets in North Korea.
This mismanagement of information within the Trump White House squandered several crucial hours during which American leaders might have otherwise managed the escalating crisis. This bureaucratic breakdown also resulted in confused messaging from the White House that, as we now know, dramatically increased the danger confronting the United States and helped to precipitate the cataclysm that followed.
The central problem, as has become clear in the course of this commission’s investigations, arose from the peculiarities relating to both process and place. It is impossible to grasp the reasons for the breakdown of the Trump administration’s executive functions without understanding both the process that was in place to provide the president with information and the unusual features of its implementation that arose from the fact that, as the crisis unfolded, the president was not in Washington, but in Palm Beach.
Mar-a-Lago proved a challenging location for President Trump to manage an international crisis. There is some irony in this, given that Mar-a-Lago’s original resident intended it for essentially this role. Although the property was built as a private residence in 1929, its owner, Marjorie Merriweather Post, had arranged for Mar-a-Lago to be transferred to the federal government for use as a “Winter White House” after her death. Although the US government held the title to the property from 1973 to 1981, the high cost of maintenance resulted in the government returning the property to her heirs. Donald Trump purchased it in 1985. With Trump’s election as president in 2016, Mrs. Post’s vision had in one sense come to pass.
But Mar-a-Lago was a very unusual presidential residence. Donald Trump, in the mid-1990s, reinvented Mar-a-Lago as a private club with fifty-eight guest rooms. At the same time, he maintained a private residence in the former “owner’s house” at the south end of the main building. As a result, Mar-a-Lago served as both a private members’ club and a private residence for the president, two functions that were often in obvious tension.
That tension was an early headache for the Secret Service. The agency had to provide for the security of the president, but it also had to accommodate the club’s fundamental business as a luxury resort for wealthy members, many of whom complained about the introduction of basic security screening measures. The club management fielded numerous complaints over the first year of the Trump administration about the imposition of such measures from members, some of whom began referring to presidential visits as “Hurricane Donald.”
The result was an uneasy compromise between protecting the president and protecting the club’s business model. Many workable solutions were found. For instance, the Secret Service determined that a service entrance off Southern Boulevard could provide the president with access to his residence, allowing him to slip in and out of the club with a bit more discretion, although it did not ease the security requirements on club members.
Yet such solutions created problems of their own. President Trump’s use of the Southern Boulevard service entrance required that he traverse a walkway that connected the main building to another in which weddings were held. (Sometimes surprised wedding-goers even had an unscheduled appearance by the president.) The use of the Southern Boulevard entrance also created significant traffic delays, particularly on the Southern Boulevard Bridge, which is one of the roadways connecting the barrier island of Palm Beach to the Florida mainland.
In addition to security measures, the president needed facilities to handle classified information. Fortunately, Mrs. Post, a vigorous advocate of civil defense, had built numerous fallout shelters at all her residences, including three shelters at Mar-a-Lago underneath the main building. Over the years, these shelters had been repurposed to serve as storage and, for a time, as an office for Trump’s butler. After Trump’s election, one of the fallout shelters was converted to a secure compartmentalized information facility (SCIF) for handling classified information. This facility—which staff sometimes called the “cone of silence” in jest—could only be accessed from the main building. While the basement facility was better than the terrace for holding classified briefings, club members could tell that a classified briefing was about to commence by the procession of staff in off-the-rack suits making their way down into the basement.
There were other ways in which Mar-a-Lago was simply not suitable as a presidential residence, particularly in regard to the large staff that had to travel with the president. For example, Mar-a-Lago offered a limited number of rooms, and its high rack rate substantially exceeded the General Services Administration (GSA) per diem of $195. As a result, the president’s senior staff, including his chief of staff, rarely stayed at Mar-a-Lago itself. Instead, senior staff booked rooms at the nearest hotel, Colony Palm Beach. The Colony is about ten minutes north of Mar-a-Lago by car. It does not have facilities to handle classified information.
Other staff stayed at the Hilton Palm Beach Airport, which is located in West Palm Beach on the mainland, a fifteen-minute drive west over the Southern Boulevard Bridge. This hotel, which is less expensive than either Mar-a-Lago or the Colony, offered staff easy access to the airport and to the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach—roughly five miles across Lake Worth Lagoon from Mar-a-Lago—but also kept them separated from Trump by a minimum of a quarter-hour’s travel.