While it is impossible to understand what the North Korean crew was thinking, it is clear in retrospect that they were primed to see a bomber. The crew had specifically been moved to this location in the expectation of an American bomber flight; the crew was then told that the aircraft was a bomber; and in fact the aircraft was retracing, however inadvertently, the flight path expected for an American bomber. In the confusion, it seems the crew felt pressured not to let the aircraft get away.
A final factor may also have shaped the crew’s perception. North Korean military commanders worried that their radars were not detecting all US bomber flights. In some cases, North Korean radars did not detect bomber flights that were later reported in the press. In other cases, the North Koreans saw the aircraft only at the last moment and responded sluggishly. Captured documents indicate that the top leadership placed enormous pressure on air defense units to detect overflights and to be prepared to use force in the event of an incursion into DPRK airspace. It was in this context that Kim Jong Un and others reaffirmed that any American aircraft that strayed into DPRK airspace was to be shot down. The heads of the KPA Air and Anti-Air Force, as well as local air defense commanders, felt incredible pressure to demonstrate extraordinary levels of readiness.
Reporting indicates that some local commanders, in response to this extraordinary pressure from the top, offered bounties to air defense crews—bonuses promised both to crews that detected enemy aircraft approaching DPRK airspace and to any unit that shot down a US aircraft for violating it. Other prisoners confirmed that units were promised additional pay or rations for detecting or shooting down US aircraft, although the description of what was offered varies considerably.
Roh, too, claimed that his crew was offered a bonus. “Those who sat in chairs and stared at screens received double salary for seeing an airplane!” he complained to his interrogators. “At the time, monthly pay was 3,000 won. So I was expecting at least 6,000 for shooting down the American bomber. But the war started. I never got my bonus.”
2
SOUTH KOREA HITS BACK
AS SOON AS BX 411 disappeared from South Korean air traffic control radars at 12:28 PM, it was clear that the aircraft had crashed. Crashes are tragic, but they do happen. There was no reason for South Korea’s civilian air traffic controllers to suspect that the loss of the aircraft was anything other than an accident. The air traffic controllers initiated the standard procedures for responding to a civil aviation accident and notified their superiors. The message that an aircraft had been lost moved swiftly up and out to various government agencies.
South Korean military authorities, meanwhile, had initiated standard procedures of their own. They had detected the missile launch and explosion. These officials also began notifying their superiors and sending their message up and out. These two messages—that a civil airliner had been lost and that North Korea had shot it down—began racing through South Korea’s government, winding their way up and up the chain of command and ultimately reaching the office of the South Korean president himself.
The President of South Korea lived in an elegant palace with the lilting name Cheong Wa Dae, which is literally translated as the Pavilion of Blue Tiles—a reference to the azure tiles of its distinctive, traditional Korean roof. In English, however, South Koreans simply called it “the Blue House.” This name was easier to remember and pronounce for the American military officers and diplomats who arrived in-country knowing little or nothing about Korea and speaking only a few words of the language. But like many things in Korea, this simple name obscured a fundamentally different reality.
The White House, for example, is a single building in which the president’s key advisers are close at hand. The chief of staff, national security adviser, and essential White House staff cram themselves into tiny offices that have no redeeming feature except proximity to the Oval Office—and in the toughest moments, the Situation Room. In Washington, proximity is what matters.
The Blue House had little in common with the White House. It wasn’t even a house. There was a house, to be sure, but Cheong Wa Dae was a complex of buildings, spread across a kind of campus. Key staff members, including the president’s chief of staff, had workspaces in a series of contemporary office buildings that looked nothing like the traditional main building that sheltered the president’s office under those beautiful blue tiles. The president’s residence was in yet another building, a short walk away. In the event of an emergency, the president’s aides had to converge on the main building, where they would gather in the Crisis Room that sat beneath it. To do so, they had to walk ten minutes or more across the palace grounds, passing through two gates and a guard post, before entering the main building and descending into the small bunker beneath.
South Korean officials had long complained that this layout made it take far too long for officials to gather in an emergency. As Kwon Hyuck-ki, former chief secretary to the president of South Korea, said, “It is retrogression of sorts that the president’s office exists as a small Cheong Wa Dae within Cheong Wa Dae.” In 2010, after North Korea began shelling a South Korean island, it took some twenty minutes for the key national security staff to assemble in the bunker.
South Korean president Moon Jae-in, too, had complained about the luxurious palace that housed his predecessors—including Park Chung Hee, the dictator who had jailed a young Moon for participating in a student protest. One of Moon’s campaign pledges had been to relocate his office and other functions to a government facility about a mile south of Cheong Wa Dae. But even after the move to the Central Government Complex was largely completed in early 2020, the Cheong Wa Dae complex retained two very important government functions: it remained the president’s residence, and it continued to house the underground Crisis Room, known simply as “the bunker.”
Early in the afternoon of Saturday, March 21, President Moon was at his residence, thinking about ships, not aircraft. He was looking over remarks that he would deliver a few days later at a shipyard—where he would announce progress on a public corporation that would aid South Korea’s struggling shipbuilding industry—when the message arrived.
At 12:35, Im Jong-seok, Moon’s chief of staff, knocked on the door and told Moon that a South Korean airliner en route from Busan to Ulan Bator had disappeared from radar screens over the Yellow Sea and was presumed lost. Moon asked Im to convene his security council. A few minutes later, Im returned with a second message. The South Korean military had detected a surface-to-air missile launch from North Korea that was believed to be the cause of the loss of the aircraft. At this point, Moon went immediately to the underground Crisis Room.
Moon sat at the head of an empty table, waiting for his national security team to arrive. As he waited, he appeared to grow anxious and then irritated at the delay. “He wasn’t the sort of man who fidgeted,” recalled Im. “This was the first time I saw him tapping his pen on the table. That’s the memory of him that stays with me, him sitting in that room, just waiting.”
Weighing on Moon were the political dangers of appearing indecisive. “I am sure the Sewol was in his mind,” Im explained, “because he made a bitter comment about ‘seven hours.’” “Seven hours” referred to the long period of inaction on the part of the South Korean government that followed the sinking in 2014 of the South Korean ferry MV Sewol. Then-president Park Geun Hye had waited most of the day before convening an emergency meeting of her security advisers, a delay that permanently turned public opinion against her. Many of her political opponents, including Moon, had demanded to know what became of the “seven missing hours” when the passengers of the Sewol, most of them students, were drowning. Park’s aides had not offered a convincing explanation, allowing wild rumors to spread. She had been in an assignation with an aide, one tabloid claimed, while another reported that she was having plastic surgery.