Only once the statues had been moved to safety did the surviving commander send staff into the nearby underground bunker outfitted to serve as an alternate command center in the event of an attack—but the surviving personnel were not able to set up operations inside it and reconnect with Pyongyang for more than an hour. Some of this delay was due to the confusion and shock in the immediate aftermath of the building collapse as the search for survivors was organized and the statutes evacuated. But most of the time was lost to simple procedural steps; it took time to staff and activate the alternate facility. Much as some readers might like to think otherwise, this problem was not exclusive to North Korea. After smoke began pouring into the National Military Command Center (NMCC) beneath the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, the US Department of Defense took more than an hour to activate its alternate command center at Site R in rural Pennsylvania.
The scene at the Kim family residence was similarly chaotic. Kim’s lakeside villa was badly damaged in the strike, suffering direct hits by two of the three South Korean missiles. The explosions that ripped through the building killed a number of cooks, maids, and other household staff. Others were deafened by the explosion, knocked down by the blast, and pelted with debris. Still, the building remained standing, and the survivors who could do so stumbled out into the night. “After the blast, I couldn’t hear, and I could only breathe with a tremendous amount of pain,” one recounted. “Walking out of the building, there was an unbearable, oppressive silence.”
Neither Kim Jong Un nor any important members of his family were at the residence. Nor had anyone in South Korea expected them to be. Members of the Kim family were, after all, routinely spread across a vast web of palaces that stretched throughout North Korea: an enormous complex near the Chinese border at Samjiyon, for example, or an oceanside palace near Wonsan, or a lakefront compound near Kusong. Kim Jong Un had an entire administrative office dedicated to the upkeep of his estates and the management of their staff. When Kim took up piloting small airplanes, he had runways added at no fewer than five of his primary residences.
Despite South Korea’s designation of the Kim family residence outside Pyongyang as L-01 (“leadership target one”), President Moon and his aides had selected this site for attack not because North Korea’s dictator was likely to be there, but because he was likely not to be. At the same time, they chose it because it symbolized Kim just as much as any poster or statue.
The flesh-and-blood Kim vastly preferred being outside Pyongyang, either at the beach in Wonsan or in the mountains near Kusong. And because its leader was a dictator, the entire country bent to accommodate these and all of his other whims as well. North Korea’s Strategic Rocket Force even mothballed its main missile testing site in the country’s far, freezing north in order to shift test launches of long-range missiles—always big events under Kim Jong Un—to friendlier terrain where Kim might view them in comfort. Kim had watched one missile launch from atop a ski resort near Wonsan. Another launch was conducted from a lakeshore shared with his retreat in Kusong.
Of course, discomfort could not be entirely eliminated for the supreme leader. At the moment he was informed of the explosions around Pyongyang, for example, Kim was standing in an unheated warehouse near Kusong, watching a crew prepare a long-range missile for a test the next day.
The United States was completing an annual war game hosted with South Korea, and an enormous number of forces were massed in South Korea for the exercises. From a North Korean point of view, the presence of so many enemy forces was indistinguishable from preparations for an invasion, and so North Korea always placed its own armed forces on alert for the duration of the exercises. Indeed, in recent years North Korea had begun staging missile launches to show that two could play at war. “Every year, you practiced invading us,” Jo Yong Won, a close aide to Kim, explained to his interrogators. “So every year, we practiced repelling your invasion with our nukes. It was balanced, like the Taeguk,” he added, referring to the national Korean icon that resembled the yin and yang. This ancient symbol represented interdependence and complementarity—principles that, in retrospect, were vital to the tenuous peace that had been maintained on the Korean Peninsula until this fateful moment.
The missile test whose preparations Kim Jong Un was observing on the night of March 21 was to be part of North Korea’s response to the annual American war games. A long-range missile launch, it was intended to simulate a nuclear attack against Guam. During the war game, American bombers had taken off from Guam, flown to a South Korean bombing range, and simulated a strike on the North. It was now North Korea’s turn to simulate striking Guam, demonstrating the ability to destroy those bombers with nuclear weapons before they could even take off.
In the warehouse near Kusong, Kim was watching a group of soldiers bolting a dummy warhead to a long-range missile when Choe Ryong Hae, his most important aide, whispered in his ear that there were reports of explosions in Pyongyang. Choe suggested that they immediately seek shelter. Kim agreed.
A small party was traveling with Kim—Choe, a handful of important missile engineers, and Kim’s sister, Kim Yo Jong. They immediately walked out of the warehouse and then into the basement of a nearby building. A table and chairs were brought in so that Kim could sit down while his aides tried to figure out what was happening in Pyongyang.
In the basement, Kim and his aides discovered that their cell phones were not working. They were largely cut off from any communication with Pyongyang.
Despite the common impression of North Korea before the war as a “hermit kingdom” cut off from the outside world, there were in fact more than three million cell-phone users in North Korea by 2015, largely located in and around Pyongyang. These users relied on a single state telecommunications network that was provided by a North Korean joint venture with an Egyptian firm called Orascom. The North Korean cellular network was called Koryolink.
Koryolink was a single cell-phone network that offered three separate services—one service for local North Koreans, a second service for foreigners, and a third service for government officials that was encrypted. This “third channel” was in fact the primary method used by senior leaders to communicate with one another because it was the only encrypted communications channel that North Korean leaders believed was secure from American and South Korean eavesdropping. According to Ahmed El-Noamany, an Egyptian national who served as technical director of the network from 2011 to 2013, only high-ranking officials had SIM cards that could access the third channel. North Korea relied on this channel, El-Noamany explained, because sanctions had prevented North Korea from building its own secure military communications system.
The “third channel” was not immune to disruption, however. As soon as people in and around Pyongyang saw and heard the explosions at the Kim family compound there, rumors began to spread. Cell-phone users in Pyongyang began calling and texting one another, quickly generating a mass call event that overloaded the telecommunications system. Because all three channels—domestic, foreign, and governmental—relied on the same physical network, as the calls flooded Koryolink the third channel became largely unavailable to North Korea’s leaders. Apart from sporadic text messages and calls, cell communication all but ground to a halt.