Lightweight sister of Kim, a total ZERO, “begged” President Moon-SHINE to get me me to come to Pyongyang (and probably would do anything get me there). No THANKS!
At the time of these tweets, few in the United States regarded them as remarkable. Most Americans saw Trump’s remarks as simply the latest in a long line of inflammatory but politically inconsequential statements coming out of the White House, no different than the president’s occasional online feuds with Oprah Winfrey or Rosie O’Donnell. But in North Korea the tweets about Kim Yo Jong were seen as something altogether different.
At about 5:40 AM on the morning of March 21, the president awoke in his residence at Mar-a-Lago. He turned on the television but showered before finally sitting down before the screen.
Fox & Friends aired at 6:00 AM, about an hour before Moon was to begin his address. (In fact, Moon’s address one hour later would not be carried on any major American television stations because it was in Korean.) Instead, Fox & Friends, like other morning news programs, led with a general report on the shootdown of Flight 411.
Trump immediately called Francis. “What the hell is going on?”
“A South Korean civilian airliner was shot down,” the chief of staff remembered explaining to the president. “It may have been North Korea. We are in the lobby and can meet you in the Situation Room for a full briefing.”
“Okay. I have a…”
Francis said that Trump spent a moment searching for the right word.
“I have a… an appointment with Bob.”
Francis explained to the commission that his goal was to keep the president calm and focused. “The briefing won’t take long, sir. We can schedule our work today around the tee time with Mr. Kraft. We can talk about it downstairs, sir.”
“Downstairs. Okay. Little Rocket Man won’t be around much longer if he keeps this up, huh?”
“No, sir, he’s really made a big mistake. See you downstairs.”
Trump put his phone down and got dressed. Because he was still planning to play eighteen holes with Bob Kraft, he picked out his typical golfing outfit of khakis, a white polo shirt, and a red hat. He put his phone in his pocket and then headed out toward the main lobby, where he could take a staircase down into the Situation Room.
When President Trump reached the steep, narrow stairs, he hesitated. A club member in the lobby saw him stop, then feel for his phone in his pocket.
Trump looked down the stairs, winding down into the basement. He often complained that he never got reception down there. The member saw the president do one last thing before going down. Trump took out his phone and tapped out a short tweet. Then he hit Send and began, ever so carefully, to walk down the stairs, one step at a time.
In the car on the way over to Mar-a-Lago, Francis’s phone buzzed, letting him know that the president had sent a tweet. Keith Kellogg was in the car.
“When General Francis read the tweet,” the national security adviser recalled later, “he put his head in his hands. I asked him what happened. He just said, ‘Clean up, aisle Trump.’”
4
THE NOISE OF RUMORS
The six South Korean missiles took about eleven minutes to reach their destinations in North Korea. At roughly 8:15 PM local time—7:15 AM in New York, long after President Trump had departed the basement at Mar-a-Lago—each missile slammed into its target, one after the other.
The South Korean missiles destroyed two buildings—the headquarters of the North Korean Air Force in Chunghwa and a villa at the primary Kim family leadership compound in Pyongyang. The exact number of fatalities is not known—nor will it ever likely be known, given the events that followed—but it seems that the loss of human life was minimal and confined to Air Force personnel and members of Kim Jong Un’s household staff.
With the strikes, South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in intended to send an unmistakable message of anger to North Korea’s leaders. He had wanted to make clear that he would not simply look the other way as they murdered so many innocents. But while it was born of anger, in the grand scheme of things the strike was a mere gesture. Moon had chosen to use only six long-range ballistic missiles against just two buildings because he wanted to avoid a war, not start one. A smaller strike would punish Kim Jong Un, Moon had concluded, but not at the cost of a wider war that might kill hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people.
Moon was, we now know, dead wrong.
The headquarters of North Korea’s Air Force was a large office building in an exurb of Pyongyang called Chunghwa. The main building was surrounded by smaller buildings. In front of the main building were a pair of statues—gleaming bronze likenesses of Kim Jong Un’s father and grandfather.
The three missiles that struck the main building at the Air Force headquarters left gaping wounds in the four-story structure. After a few seconds, it shuddered and then collapsed, burying everyone who was inside.
The South Korean military had not anticipated the total collapse of the main headquarters building. Although each Hyumoo-2 ballistic missile carried one ton of conventional high explosives, a modern steel-and-concrete structure can take a tremendous amount of punishment. But perhaps not if that steel and concrete are North Korean: according to defectors, construction workers in North Korea routinely failed to follow safety regulations, ignoring building codes and diluting cement mixtures with dangerous amounts of sand. Poorly constructed North Korean buildings had collapsed under far less strain than a missile strike. In May 2014, a residential tower in Pyongyang suddenly fell to the ground, its foundation totally disintegrating under the weight of the building.
When the structure of the Air Force office building slumped down on itself, the collapse severed Kim Jong Un’s link to North Korea’s air defense forces. As North Korea’s leader struggled to make sense of the strike, it would be some time before he was able to communicate with anyone in Chunghwa. Military personnel on site, as well as local civilians who heard the explosions and the sound of the building collapse, immediately began attempting to dig out survivors still trapped in the rubble. “When the building fell down, it was total chaos,” according to one survivor. “We just ran to the rubble and started digging people out with our hands. Soon, more senior officers arrived to direct our work, ordering some of us to move the statues and others to go into the bunker.”
According to accounts provided by prisoners of war, after several minutes of frantic digging, some troops were ordered to stop and instead evacuate the two monumental statues to safety. The adoration of objects representing members of the Kim family was a peculiar feature of the cult of personality that prevailed in North Korea at the time. No distinction was made between Kim and a likeness of him. This may be hard for those who are not North Korean to understand. In 2013, a traffic warden was awarded the title of “Hero of the Republic” for protecting the leader in an “unexpected situation.” Dissidents immediately speculated that she had foiled an assassination attempt, perhaps one disguised as a traffic accident. In fact, she had merely extinguished a trash fire next to a poster with an image of Kim Jong Un. The threat to the image was, in North Korea, synonymous with a threat to the man.
And so, amid the confusion at Chunghwa, airmen brought out a mobile crane to move the two statues to safety. They carefully lifted the statue of Kim Jong Il off its pedestal and placed it lying down, on its back, on a truck bed. They then hooked the crane to the statue of his father, Kim Il Sung, which was sunk in the mud where it had toppled during the strike. They hoisted it up and then laid it down next to the statue of Kim Il Sung in the truck bed. One soldier, later captured as a POW, told his interrogators that as the two statues were driven to the underground storage site, Kim Il Sung’s outstretched hand, damaged in the fall, appeared to wave to the soldiers still working frantically to rescue their comrades buried in the rubble.