The few surviving meeting attendees all remember that the statement changed the tone of their deliberations immediately. “I remember when the military aide brought in the North Korean statement,” said one survivor. “He handed it to the president, which was a very strange thing to do and, in fact, a breach of protocol.” “He should have handed it to me,” Im Jong-seok recalled. “The president read the paper, and then he put it down. And then he turned the paper over, like he didn’t want to look at it. That was when he asked for options.”
“That message changed the meeting,” recalled Kang Kyung-wha, a career diplomat then serving as South Korea’s foreign minister. “Moon wanted to know what his military options were, to hurt Kim Jong Un. I don’t know why, but up to that point I had only thought about this as an accident, and about trying to rescue the survivors. After that, we realized there weren’t going to be any survivors. We only talked about kill chains.”
“I don’t know, in my mind, I always remember it as two different meetings, maybe even on different days,” recalled Chung Eui-yong, South Korea’s national security adviser at the time. “Are you sure it was just one meeting? I guess things changed after the statement. We stopped talking about a rescue and started talking about revenge. It was a strange meeting in that way.”
When President Moon Jae-in asked for military options, Air Force general Jeong Kyeong-doo, chairman of South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, was ready. Ever since his confirmation hearing in August 2017, General Jeong had taken a very tough line on responding to what he called North Korea’s relentless “strategic and tactical provocations.” Asked during his confirmation hearing whether President Moon should set red lines with North Korea, his answer had given the impression of a man far more hawkish than the president: “President Moon seems to have meant that we ought to be doing everything we can to prevent a crisis situation in which we find ourselves at a dead end.”
In the Crisis Room, according to the memorandum of the meeting, General Jeong used that same word—“dead end.”
The military plan that General Jeong presented to President Moon during the emergency meeting on March 21 should not have come as a surprise. It had been developed a decade earlier, after a terrible year in which North Korea had engaged in a pair of high-profile provocations. In March 2010, a North Korean submarine used a torpedo to sink a South Korean naval corvette, the ROKS Cheonan, tearing the ship in half and sending forty-six South Korean sailors to a watery grave. (North Korea, of course, denied responsibility.) Then, in November, North Korea unleashed an artillery bombardment against Yeonpyeong Island, killing four South Koreans and injuring twenty-two more.
South Korea’s president at that time, Lee Myung Bak, had been enraged by the attack and ordered a retaliation against North Korea, but was frustrated by American officials who restrained him. Lee wanted a big and bold response, but military officials pushed him to consult with the United States, which retained wartime control over South Korea’s military forces. The Americans pressured Lee to scale back his plans for a retaliation. “South Korea’s original plans for retaliation were, we thought, disproportionately aggressive,” wrote Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. “We were worried the exchanges could escalate dangerously.” South Korea’s eventual response was anemic: satellite images later showed that its retaliation had done little or no damage to the North Koreans.
In the wake of this crisis, Lee pushed for South Korea to develop its own plans and capabilities to retaliate against North Korea in the event of a serious provocation such as a nuclear attack. These plans still required consultation with the United States, but Lee hoped that his successors would have more options to respond boldly to future aggressions by the North.
It was these capabilities that General Jeong presented to President Moon in the Crisis Room as a “three-axis” response to the downing of Flight 411. The military option featured a plan of attack, intelligence and strike capabilities to execute that plan, and missile defenses to limit the damage North Korea could do in retaliation.
The plan of attack presented by General Jeong was called “Korea Massive Punishment and Retaliation” and had been publicly described in some detail after 2016. It described an effort to “decapitate” North Korea’s government and military by using hundreds of long-range missiles and special forces to kill North Korea’s leadership, including Kim Jong Un. The plan named seventy-two distinct targets, including leadership targets in Pyongyang, military headquarters, and sites linked to North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs. The goal, according to one former Ministry of Defense official, was “wiping a certain section of Pyongyang completely off the map.” Pyongyang, a second official explained, would “be reduced to ashes.”
After presenting President Moon with the option of killing North Korea’s senior leaders, General Jeong explained that the plan would be carried out using what he called the “kill chain”: a series of military capabilities designed to detect and locate North Korea’s leaders and military forces linked to precision-strike capabilities to kill them. These capabilities included aircraft, long-range ballistic and cruise missiles, and a regimental-sized special forces team called SPARTAN 3000 that could be inserted into North Korea within twenty-four hours. General Jeong also offered a brief description of South Korea’s missile defense program, called Korea Air and Missile Defense (KAMD).
“Massive punishment, kill chains, KAMD—I don’t like things explained with military jargon,” Chief of Staff Im Jong-seok recalled. “But when General Jeong put it in plain words, I wasn’t sure it was an improvement.”
President Moon questioned General Jeong about the size of the strike and the number of targets. “President Moon was really surprised at how long the list of targets was,” Im recalled. “But General Jeong explained that the plan was based on an American operation against Saddam.” In 1998, the United States conducted Operation Desert Fox against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, striking ninety-seven targets over four days, including three presidential palaces and the headquarters of the Iraqi Ba’ath Party. The two plans bore a striking similarity to each other.
According to survivors who had been present at the meeting, President Moon explained to General Jeong that he did not want to start a general war, but that he did want to find a small number of targets whose destruction would punish Kim Jong Un for the downing of BX 411. President Moon also suggested using only long-range missiles for this retaliatory attack. There was no reason, he said, to ask the special forces team to carry out a suicide mission or to put pilots at risk. Besides, it was important to hold something back to give Kim Jong Un something to think about. A small strike would shake Kim’s confidence, while the possibility of a larger strike to follow would box him in. “The general idea was to start with one or two targets,” Im explained. “Kim would know we were holding back the rest of the plan if he tried to escalate.”
President Moon looked over the list of targets. He asked about the first entry on the list of leadership targets, labeled L-01. It named the main Kim family compound on the outskirts of Pyongyang. Some of General Jeong’s military officers were uncomfortable with the idea of targeting Kim’s family home, but appeared reluctant to say so. “No one said, ‘I think this is too dangerous,’” Im explained, “but General Kim Yong-woo, the chief of the Army, and Admiral Um both said, ‘The Americans won’t like that.’”