Like the Iraqis before them, the North Koreans had concluded that digging a tunnel for their missile launchers to hide in might well draw the suspicion of US spy satellites. When possible, therefore, the truck drivers parked underneath highway overpasses or inside road tunnels.
During the Cold War, the Red Army had trained to launch Scud missiles within about ninety minutes of an order. But North Korean crews, like the Iraqis and others, knew that they had no such luxury when fighting the United States. They trained to reduce that launch time to about twenty minutes.
Of course, the North Koreans need not have been so careful. There was no coming air attack. And the launch preparations were being conducted in the dead of night, underneath a thick blanket of clouds, which explains why they were not spotted by US satellites and aerial surveillance.
As the designated launch window approached, the units drove out from their hiding places, parked in pre-surveyed launch spots with their trucks pointing in the direction of their designated targets, and raised their missiles.
North Korean units at nine different locations all over the country fired fifty-four nuclear-armed ballistic missiles against targets in South Korea and Japan, as well as eight more missiles at American forces stationed in Okinawa and Guam. From the first launch to the last, the entire attack occurred in a span of about half an hour.
After each vehicle launched its missile, its location was revealed to American satellites, whose sensors could see the bright burning plumes of the missiles. Kim’s military planners knew this would happen, and so North Korean crews had practiced what they called the “double fifteen”: within fifteen minutes, the unit needed to move 15 kilometers away—about 9 miles. At the next location, the unit could load another missile, this one armed with a conventional warhead, and fire again. The unit was ordered to repeat this process over and over again until it ran out of missiles or was destroyed.
5
SUNSHINE STATE
AS TRUMP DESCENDED THE stairs leading to the Situation Room beneath Mar-a-Lago shortly after 6:00 AM on the morning of March 21, the crisis had not yet reached the point of no return. Time was slipping away, and quickly, but American officials, even once they became aware of the strike launched by South Korea, simply did not believe that the situation was spiraling out of control.
For the American officials managing the crisis, it was still morning and it was spring. The contrast with Kim’s surroundings could not have been greater. In Kusong, it was the middle of the night and there was still snow on the ground. In Palm Beach, on the other hand, March 21 was the kind of bright sunny spring day that illuminates hopes and blots out dark thoughts.
The president and his aides simply did not anticipate that, within less than twelve hours, North Korea would launch a full-scale nuclear attack against US forces throughout South Korea and Japan. In the more than three years that have passed since this historic oversight, many commentators have compared the intelligence failure that struck the United States that day to the US government’s failure to anticipate the surprise attack by Japan on Pearl Harbor in 1941, or to take steps to prevent Osama bin Laden from carrying out the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In some quarters, there is even a persistent belief that the senior officials deliberately ignored the warning signs of an impending North Korean attack, or that the attacks were a “false flag” operation designed to justify the postwar impeachment proceedings against President Trump.
We have concluded that there is no evidence of any conspiracy—just a tragic series of mistakes and errors of judgment. The signals of the coming nuclear attack were simply blotted out by the sun that spring day.
Jack Francis was in an optimistic mood. All in all, he later explained, the timing of the crisis was fortuitous. So much of his job was keeping bad information, and bad influences, out of the president’s ear. If there was to be a serious crisis with North Korea, he recalled thinking at the time, then it was better to have it happen over a weekend in Florida than during the White House workweek.
Francis’s reasoning was simple. In Palm Beach, the president was usually isolated. The staff typically remained in Washington. The first lady and their son Barron were in New York. Nor were Trump’s other children present. Because it was Saturday morning, his son-in-law and daughter were out of contact while observing Shabbat in Washington, DC, as a family, with their television and smartphones turned off. Of course, exceptions to the electronics ban self-imposed by Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump could be made in case of emergency, but Francis had arranged to be the person who would decide when to call the White House and ask someone to walk over to the Kushner home. “It was really the best possible situation,” said a member of the National Security Council staff who was staying nearby, across the lagoon in West Palm Beach. “There were no obsequious factotums like Stephen Miller and it was up to Francis when and if to awaken the Jarvanka.”
Francis wanted the briefing in the Situation Room beneath Mar-a-Lago to be a small affair, one that would settle the president and allow him and the professional staff to manage the crisis playing out between North and South Korea. Francis limited participation in the meeting to just four people: himself, National Security Adviser Keith Kellogg, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis (who joined by video conference from the Pentagon), and of course the president. Not present was Acting Secretary of State John Sullivan.
The decision to exclude the acting secretary of state from the briefing was not, as press reports initially claimed, the result of technical problems with the video conferencing equipment at Mar-a-Lago. Francis had chosen not to include Sullivan. Trump seemed to dislike Sullivan, possibly because he associated him with Tillerson. The president still resented press reports that Tillerson had called Trump a “fucking moron.” More often than not, however, Trump simply pretended not to know who Sullivan was at all.
Francis worried that including Sullivan on the call might provoke Trump to do something unwise, merely out of spite. Francis spoke briefly with Sullivan by phone before the meeting to explain his reasoning. But in the basement beneath Mar-a-Lago, Francis decided to tell the president a different story: he claimed that only Secretary of Defense Mattis would be joining them because the secure video conference software was having some difficulty connecting to the State Department. “They told the president that we were having some trouble connecting to State,” according to a Defense Department employee who watched the call with Mattis. “The president made a couple of jokes about Sullivan not being so smart because he couldn’t figure out how to work the ‘gizmo.’ Then the president started ranting about Chuck Robbins.” The secure video conference hardware in the Mar-a-Lago Situation Room was made by CISCO, whose CEO, Chuck Robbins, had been critical of a number of Trump initiatives, including the deportation of undocumented immigrants who came to the country as children. The president seemed to hold Robbins personally responsible for what he’d been told were technical problems. “He blew off a lot of steam over John and then Chuck,” according to Francis, “but that was okay. Sometimes it helped settle him down.”
Francis believed that Mattis was essential to making sure the briefing went smoothly. Although Kellogg and Francis were perpetually rumored to be on thin ice with Trump, Mattis was generally regarded as the most adroit handler of the president’s ego. “Mattis somehow managed to moderate Trump’s worst impulses,” reflected former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon during his appearance before this commission. “I don’t know how he pulled it off while getting so much fawning press coverage—the adult babysitting the man-child in the Oval Office and all that.” Somehow, as Bannon and other White House insiders had observed, Mattis succeeded in not running afoul of a president who otherwise saw positive coverage of any staff or cabinet member as coming at his expense.