Kim Jong Un appears to have become extremely unsettled while sitting in the basement in Kusong with little or no cell-phone service. He was not accustomed to the spartan accommodations of the makeshift shelter. He was in the dark, literally and figuratively. “The supreme leader was very uneasy. He really did not like being underground or uncomfortable,” explained Kim’s aide Jo Yong Won. “The easiest way to see if he was unhappy was to watch how much he smoked. It was hard to breathe in that little room, with him smoking so much. But of course no one dared ask him to stop.”
For Kim Jong Un and his aides, the sudden inability to communicate with Pyongyang appeared to be no coincidence. “We assumed it was an American cyber-attack,” Jo said, then added, “wouldn’t you?”
With the spotty cell-phone service in the Kusong shelter, Kim Jong Un had only intermittent and unreliable updates about the situation in Pyongyang. The absence of a steady stream of reliable information led Kim Jong Un to jump to a number of conclusions based on his strongly held beliefs about the United States and South Korea. Understanding these views is essential to understanding the decisions that Kim now made.
During the extensive military operation to stabilize the shattered, post-conflict Korean Peninsula, US and United Nations forces captured thousands of hours of secret recordings of meetings, phone calls, and conferences that detailed the decision-making process of the North Korean leadership in March 2020. It is unclear whether the participants knew they were being recorded, although surviving regime functionaries said that eavesdropping and surveillance were so pervasive that they expected monitoring to be the norm. Others said that the recording reflected a culture of documentation. Although aides were always photographed taking notes, apparently many recordings also were made by personnel who wanted a record of Kim’s decisions so that they could track the implementation of his edicts. Until this material became available, the United States had only a few minutes of clandestinely taped conversations of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il—and nothing from the era of Kim Jong Un—on which to base its assessment of North Korea’s decision-making.
The image of Kim Jong Un that emerges in these transcripts is that of a leader who, much like Saddam Hussein, was highly intelligent but also frequently ill-informed about the United States and the outside world. Kim was, to borrow a phrase used to describe Saddam, a “curious mix of shrewdness and nonsense.” It was this mix of shrewdness and nonsense that, in the basement at Kusong, filled in the gaps and connected the dribs and drabs of information that were trickling in.
Above all else, Kim believed that the United States in general and Donald Trump specifically were embarked on an active campaign to assassinate him. Moreover, Kim believed that the United States was conspiring with China to replace him with another more compliant member of his extended family. Kim frequently referred to Americans in the transcripts as 불쾌한 새끼—which translates roughly as “plotting bastards.”
The tapes make clear that, over the past years, Kim’s concerns about his personal safety led him to see plots and conspiracies lurking everywhere. And Kim acted on these concerns repeatedly, purging officials whom he believed to be disloyal. In 2013, a young Kim Jong Un concluded that his uncle, Jang Song Taek, was working with China to establish a kind of regency over him. Kim acted decisively, ordering security forces to publicly drag his uncle out of a meeting. Images of Jang being led away from the meeting and then appearing, badly beaten, before a North Korean court were published along with an announcement that Jang had been executed for treason. Kim then ordered a purge of dozens of Jang’s lieutenants. There were often grisly stories about how the aides had been executed, involving anti-aircraft machine guns and starving dogs. The North Koreans simply said that Jang had been shot.
Kim also ordered the murder of his half-brother Kim Jong Nam, a plan that took years to execute but was eventually implemented successfully in April 2017, when North Korean agents rubbed a nerve agent in his face at the Kuala Lumpur airport. Even after Kim Jong Nam’s murder, North Korean agents continued to make attempts on the lives of his children. Even by the standards of dictators, Kim was particularly motivated to eliminate threats from within his family, a tendency that some of the people close to him attributed to his mother’s background. “She was born in Japan, and her father worked for [the Japanese] during the war,” one former aide explained. “Just mentioning that…” The transcript notes that the aide finished the sentence with a gesture, drawing his hand across his throat like a knife.
The picture of Kim that emerges from these tapes is consistent with prewar intelligence assessments, although it is deeper and more complex. Intelligence assessments correctly judged that Kim was a “rational actor” motivated by clear, long-term goals that revolved around ensuring regime survival—that is, his own survival. Speaking about Kim’s behavior prior to the war, Yong Suk Lee, deputy assistant director of the CIA’s Korea Mission Center, said succinctly: “There’s a clarity of purpose in what Kim Jong Un has done.”
What the tapes and interview reveal, however, is that Kim’s clarity of purpose was not always matched with a clarity about the reality of the United States or South Korea. Kim was driven by a sense that plots against his life, both real and imagined, were constantly being hatched in Washington, Seoul, and Beijing. Sometimes these suspicions became public. In October 2017, for example, North Korea alleged that it had discovered a plot to assassinate Kim Jong Un that it claimed was carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency and South Korea’s National Intelligence Service.
Statements by American leaders stoked Kim’s fears. While campaigning for the American presidency in early 2016, for instance, Donald Trump had suggested that his administration would “get China to make that guy disappear in one form or another very quickly.” (The Office of the Director of National Intelligence [DNI] declined to make available documents relating to prewar intelligence operations within North Korea, although DNI did provide the commission with a letter strongly denying that there had been “any US-directed effort to assassinate Kim Jong Un” prior to the events of March 2020.) Trump’s aggressive stance on Kim was frequently on display in his tweets about the North Korean dictator.
The North Koreans had initially dismissed Trump’s angrier missives on Twitter. But Kim had, according to aides, expected that Washington’s talk of regime change would end once he obtained nuclear-armed missiles that could strike the United States. This assumption was rooted in history: China tested its first nuclear weapon in 1964, and within a few years Richard Nixon had opened relations with the People’s Republic. Kim had believed that the 2018 diplomatic thaw, brief though it was, proved that North Korea’s nuclear and missile capabilities left the United States with no choice but to accept him, just as it had accepted Mao’s China.
Once negotiations collapsed, however, Trump’s tweets took on a more ominous quality for the North Koreans. Far more than the bomber flights or military exercises, it was the slow accretion of personal attacks on Kim and his family that led the dictator to conclude that Trump could not deal with North Korea as an equal, as one nuclear power to another. And in particular, Trump’s personal attacks on Kim’s sister following the collapse of negotiations had disturbed Kim Jong Un deeply. North Korean propaganda, even at its most hateful and vitriolic, had never once mentioned the American president’s daughter or his family members.
From Kim Jong Un’s perspective, the meaning of Trump’s tweets—whether about Kim Yo Jong or Kim Jong Un himself—could not be more clear: the American president wanted to humiliate the North Korean dictator, remove him from power, and kill his entire family. Trump had hinted at such an outcome before, of course, but what Kim had once been able to dismiss as rhetoric he now viewed as a deeply personal feud.