Kim Jong Un was not irrational. But he was vigilant, to a fault, about threats to his person and to his rule. He had learned that, in the rough-and-tumble politics of North Korea, the survivor was the person who acted decisively, eliminating his adversaries before their plots could take shape. And it is clear from recordings and interviews that, by March 21, 2020, Kim absolutely believed that attempts on his life were real and ongoing—and that his aides were unwilling to question this belief out of fear that Kim would conclude that they too were plotting against him. Now every lesson that Kim Jong Un had learned about how to preserve his grip on North Korea was pushing him inexorably toward the abyss.
Sitting in a cold basement after a missile attack on his family compound, Kim Jong Un quickly concluded that the United States was making good on its threats: the air strikes were an attempt to kill him, the most brazen attempt yet. The evidence before him, at least as he understood it, was quite persuasive on this score.
First, Kim believed that the United States had engineered this crisis, staging the provocation with an American bomber. His aides were adamant that the aircraft had been a military plane, not a civilian airliner. After all, the aircraft had no transponder. What civilian airliner didn’t use a transponder? And had it not followed exactly the course of a bomber overflight from only a few weeks before? Moon’s speech, whose text Kim’s staff in Pyongyang finally managed to relay to him, changed no minds in the basement. Kim saw the speech as more evidence that Moon was no different than any other South Korean leader, that he was simply doing what American leaders told him to do. “Moon’s speech, in which he played along with the American ruse, just showed that he could not be trusted,” Kim’s close aide Jo Yong Won told his interrogators, still insisting that the aircraft had been a military plane. “He was a puppet like the rest.”
Second, over the past month the United States had massed a large number of troops, aircraft, and ships on and around the Korean Peninsula as part of the annual FOAL EAGLE/KEY RESOLVE military war game conducted with South Korea. While those troops were present as part of the annual military exercise, North Korean officials had long believed that any war would begin under the cover of this exercise. As a result, Kim’s military aides were hypervigilant in looking for any evidence that the war games were no exercise. The fact that the US–South Korean war games in 2020 were bigger than ever loomed large in their estimation.
Third, why was the cell-phone network not working? For many years, the United States and North Korea had engaged in a battle to hack into and disrupt each other’s computer networks. In December 2014, North Korea suffered a massive distributed denial-of-service attack that knocked down its internet after President Barack Obama promised a “proportionate response” to allegations that North Korea had hacked the company Sony Entertainment in retaliation for an unflattering portrayal of Kim in the film The Interview. And in late 2017, the United States accused North Korea of conducting another large-scale cyber-attack called Wanna Cry. US officials declined to specify what steps the United States took in response. But it is clear that, as a result of the ongoing campaign of hacking and counter-hacking, North Korean military officials had long concluded that any American attack on North Korea was likely to begin with a cyber-attack against North Korea’s critical infrastructure, particularly the communications channel used by North Korea’s senior leaders.
It is conceivable that aides might have presented Kim with reasons for doubt. Perhaps the aircraft had suffered some kind of electrical problem that disabled the transponder? Maybe the larger war games were nothing more than a reflection of the unusually tense atmosphere? And wouldn’t explosions in Pyongyang be expected to result in a huge volume of calls and text messages that might overload the network? But there is no evidence in any of the transcripts that his aides attempted to contradict Kim. This should not be surprising, given that he was already convinced that a plot on his life was afoot. After all, an attempt to deny the existence of a plot would have only led Kim to suspect that the denier was one of the conspirators.
In fact, the small number of Kim’s surviving aides remain convinced to this day that the aircraft was in fact a bomber and that the United States staged the provocation as a pretext for an invasion under the cover of the annual FOAL EAGLE/KEY RESOLVE exercise. “History is written by victors,” Kim’s aide Jo told his interrogators. “And even if this was all a coincidence, how do you explain the missiles?”
Neither Kim nor his aides seriously considered the possibility that the missiles were South Korean or that they had been launched without the approval of the United States. The immediate assumption around Kim was that the missiles were either American or fired on orders from the United States. “We actually did discuss the fact that Moon claimed that he ordered the strike,” Jo told his interrogators. “Kim just laughed when Choe said that.”
Kim’s sister Kim Jo Yong was one of the few North Koreans other than Kim to have spoken with Moon or to have met the South Korean president in person. She played an important role in shaping Kim’s thinking at this point. According to Jo, “She smiled and said, very sweetly, ‘Don’t forget that I too spoke privately with [Moon] Jae-in during the Olympics. He doesn’t take a shit without permission from the Americans.’ I had never heard her swear before. I was very shocked.”
Kim was also receiving inaccurate information from beyond the basement. South Korea had launched only six missiles against two targets, but in the rumors racing through a panicked Pyongyang, the attack had grown to involve dozens of missiles against a much larger number of targets. It is quite common for rumors in a crisis to provide a distorted picture of events, all the more so in a closed society like North Korea, where the most important news usually arrives in the form of a rumor. Even the supreme leader had to pay attention to informal information networks. In the first thirty minutes after the attacks, with sporadic cell-phone service, Kim received conflicting information about the size of the attack and the intended targets, in some cases in reports that were dramatically exaggerated. “I think at one point Choe got a text saying that the zoo had been destroyed and one of the lions had gotten loose,” Jo recalled. “We talked for a long time about why the Americans would target a zoo and whether the lion would kill anyone.”
Eventually, Choe received a text message informing the party gathered in the basement that the Air Force headquarters had been destroyed. That explained why the Air Force was not in contact with air defense units around the country and was unable to say whether a general attack was under way or not. “The cyber-attack on our communications, the destruction of our air defenses—isn’t that how Americans always start wars?” Jo said to his interrogators.
Then, a few minutes later, word reached Kim’s sister that the family residence had been hit by another strike. This time Kim’s staff in Pyongyang had succeeded in placing a call to Kim Yo Jong in the bunker. She informed her brother that the residence had been targeted and that a small number of staff had been killed or injured. This news marked an important turning point for Kim. “In Kim’s mind, there wasn’t really any difference between an attack on his house and an attack on him,” explained one of Kim’s aides in a postwar debriefing.“You have to remember, back then, in North Korea, it was treason to even deface a poster with his picture on it. And you went and blew up his house with a missile!”