As Francis and Kellogg reviewed Seiler’s readout in the Situation Room at Mar-a-Lago, the president was across the lagoon, at his golf course in West Palm Beach. This disposition—the president in West Palm Beach and his senior staff over the bridge at Mar-a-Lago—held through the morning and into the early afternoon.
Kellogg and Francis spent the day working out of Mar-a-Lago. At 1:16 PM, the National Security Agency (NSA) informed Kellogg that it had detected an unusual pattern of communications in North Korea.
The NSA has a vague, nondescript name because it is charged with one of the most sensitive intelligence-gathering tasks—the collection of “signals” intelligence, or eavesdropping. For many years, even the existence of the NSA was not acknowledged, with employees joking that the acronym stood for No Such Agency. Yet the agency’s role in national defense is critical, and there is no clearer testament than its intervention in the unfolding crisis on March 21.
Signals intelligence involves not merely collecting intelligence but also analyzing it. Signals must be separated from noise, and then interpreted. This process may involve breaking codes or recognizing patterns. History now hinged on the latter.
The NSA analysts could not read the North Korean communications because they were encrypted, but the pattern had stood out. These communications looked like nothing that anyone at NSA had ever seen. A report had been made, warning that something unusual was happening. This report had gone up the chain of command and had finally prompted Admiral Michael Rogers, the agency’s director, to phone Kellogg.
Kellogg thanked Admiral Rogers for the report, then hung up and discussed the matter with Francis.
The two decided to take no action.
The report was, according to senior officials, “vague and not specific.” And the timing was a challenge. After his briefing in the Situation Room, the president had traveled from Palm Beach to the mainland, where he had a 9:30 AM tee time. Typically, Trump’s outings on the golf course would last for about four and a half hours, including lunch. At 1:16 PM, when the report arrived, Trump would have been nearly finished with the round of golf, but would not have eaten lunch yet.
Neither Kellogg nor Francis believed that it was wise to interrupt the president, particularly when he was so close to finishing his outing. “We were told [the president] was shooting really well. Sometimes he struggles with his wedge game,” explained an NSC staffer. “Our goal was keeping him on an even keel—and no one could see how yanking him off the course would help.”
Other White House staffers dismissed the unusual pattern of communications as “chatter,” reasoning that it could be anything. It was easy enough for these officials to imagine that the communications warned of some familiar danger when, in fact, it was a warning of an entirely new kind of threat—as we now know.
This is what the historian Roberta Wohlstetter called the “background of expectation”—the assumptions and beliefs that allow us to make sense of confusing and contradictory information. Francis and Kellogg were, at that moment, focused on the possibility that North Korea might respond with another provocation. They were particularly worried about the possibility that North Korea would conduct a nuclear weapons test designed to be shocking—such as placing a live nuclear warhead on a missile and firing it over Japan and out to sea. Testing a live nuclear weapon over the ocean would be very unlikely to cause much long-term harm, but it would demonstrate North Korea’s nuclear capabilities in the most vivid way.
Because the background expectation of senior officials was that North Korea was likely to conduct a provocative missile test in response to South Korea’s strike, they interpreted the unusual signal pattern as a warning of this expected danger—not as an indication that the crisis had taken a new and dangerous turn. Neither Francis nor Kellogg considered the possibility that the unusual pattern of communications was warning of a large-scale North Korean nuclear attack against US forces throughout South Korea and Japan.
This is not a new or novel problem. Both the Roberts Commission, which was charged with understanding why the United States was unprepared for Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, and the 9/11 Commission observed that background expectations had helped blind policymakers to these surprise attacks. While there was sufficient evidence to anticipate both attacks, it was only with hindsight that the signals clearly separated themselves from the noise. In 1941, and then again sixty years later in 2001, policymakers were expecting different sorts of attacks in different places—and those expectations blinded them to warnings that seem clear in hindsight.
Something very similar was now happening in 2020. It was inconceivable to American policymakers that North Korea would start a nuclear war with the United States, a war that North Korea was certain to lose. After all, officials knew that Kim Jong Un had no incentive to start a nuclear war unless the United States was about to invade North Korea. And they both knew that no such invasion was planned.
Francis and Kellogg understood that the South Koreans had conducted the missile strike on their own. And they knew that the president’s tweet was little more than an offhand comment before a day of golf and banter. It seems not to have occurred to either of them that Kim Jong Un, cowering in a basement and struggling with only intermittent access to communications, might not share their clarity on these points. Nor did it occur to them that his own background expectations might be shaping his decisions in a profoundly different way.
And so the strange pattern of communications was noted by Francis, Kellogg, and a small circle of aides, but nothing was done. The information was too vague. And the president was too close to completing his game. It was better, they all agreed, to let him finish his round of golf, then go to lunch in the clubhouse.
The president shot a 71.[2]
6
A FALSE DAWN BREAKS
FOR MILLIONS OF PEOPLE in South Korea and Japan, dawn broke early on Sunday, March 22. More than thirty-one North Korean nuclear weapons, lifted into space on ballistic missiles, now fell silently back to earth through the night sky before suddenly igniting the day—first with flashes, each brighter than a thousand suns, and then with spontaneous fires that in some cases grew into firestorms. These conflagrations swept through the cities and towns of South Korea and Japan, burning brightly enough to keep the darkness at bay for days.
It is not possible, with mere words, to fully convey the scale or the horror of the suffering to those who did not live through those difficult days. But some accounting of the destruction is necessary in this report. Thus, we have chosen to share the stories of three survivors. It cannot be said that the experiences of these individuals were typical, for there was no typical experience for the millions of survivors, each of whom has endured their own private horror. But perhaps these three stories can begin to explain the struggle for life that followed North Korea’s nuclear attack on its neighbors.
Survivors are, by definition, an unusual group. To this day, each wonders why he or she lived when so many others perished. They count and count again the many small items of chance or caprice—a decision to stay at work in one case, a decision to stay home in another—that spared their lives. For observers, however, there is neither rhyme nor reason for who lived and who died. Instead, there is only chance, or perhaps luck—although more than one survivor objected to our investigators’ use of that term.
For many of the people who survived, and who saw more death in those two days than they might have expected to see in a dozen lives, the luckiest ones were those for whom morning never came.
2
Former president Trump was emphatic that the commission note his score, which was one stroke under par. While the commission understands that the step of noting the president’s golf score may seem out of place in such a document, the former president, after a draft was shared with him for his comment, expressed his concern that “the fact that you didn’t publish the number proves that you are just like all the biased reporters who are part of the anti-Trump fake news media that never gives me as much credit as I deserve.”