On the menu today: In a world full of troubles and simmering foreign conflicts, it says something that Kim Jong-un and North Korea have slid to a second-tier issue for much of this year. The North Korean dictator’s sister, Kim Yo Jong, said earlier this year that the “personal relationship between our head of state and the present U.S. president is not bad,” and South Korean President Lee Jae Myung would love to see another Trump-Kim summit. But this morning, the New York Times revealed that back in Trump’s first term, the U.S. was so hungry for insight into what Kim was really thinking that they authorized a secret mission that sent U.S. Navy SEALs into North Korea, attempting to install a listening device. Read on.
What the SEALs Were After
This morning, New York Times national correspondent Dave Philipps and freelance contributor Matthew Cole unveiled one of the most dramatic scoops about U.S. covert military operations in a long while when they wrote about a 2019 aborted mission of U.S. Navy SEALs on North Korean soil, aiming to install an electronic listening device:
A group of Navy SEALs emerged from the ink-black ocean on a winter night in early 2019 and crept to a rocky shore in North Korea. They were on a top secret mission so complex and consequential that everything had to go exactly right. . . .
The mission had the potential to provide the United States with a stream of valuable intelligence. But it meant putting American commandos on North Korean soil — a move that, if detected, not only could sink negotiations but also could lead to a hostage crisis or an escalating conflict with a nuclear-armed foe. . . .
For the operation, the military chose SEAL Team 6’s Red Squadron — the same unit that killed Osama bin Laden. The SEALs rehearsed for months, aware that every move needed to be perfect. But when they reached what they thought was a deserted shore that night, wearing black wet suits and night-vision goggles, the mission swiftly unraveled.
A North Korean boat appeared out of the dark. Flashlights from the bow swept over the water. Fearing that they had been spotted, the SEALs opened fire. Within seconds, everyone on the North Korean boat was dead.
The SEALs retreated into the sea without planting the listening device.
The 2019 operation has never been publicly acknowledged, or even hinted at, by the United States or North Korea. . . .
Several of those people said they were discussing details about the mission because they were concerned that Special Operations failures are often hidden by government secrecy. If the public and policymakers become aware only of high-profile successes, such as the raid that killed bin Laden in Pakistan, they may underestimate the extreme risks that American forces undertake.
What’s more, deep in the article, Philipps and Cole reveal a second secret U.S. mission on North Korean soil. “In 2005, SEALs used a mini-sub to go ashore in North Korea and leave unnoticed, according to people familiar with the mission. The 2005 operation, carried out during the presidency of George W. Bush, has never before been reported publicly.”
The U.S. conducted operations in enemy territory during the Korean War, but sneaking into North Korea undetected and getting out represents an exceptionally difficult and dangerous task. Philipps and Cole write that the Times “proceeds cautiously when reporting on classified military operations. The Times has withheld some sensitive information on the North Korea mission that could affect future Special Operations and intelligence-gathering missions.”
Anna Fiefield’s The Great Successor: The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un is about as good a portrait of modern North Korea as you’re going to find, down to accounts of Kim’s partying with former NBA star Dennis Rodman. To put it mildly, just about everyone in North Korea who isn’t named Kim Jong-un lives in perpetual mortal terror of dissatisfying, irking, or appearing disloyal to Kim. No one speaks their mind, which makes it even tougher to learn what high-level officials are really thinking, or what they really believe.
A huge priority of the U.S. national-security establishment is knowing, and understanding, what a foreign leader is thinking. Foreign leaders, particularly dictators, bluster, bluff, and exaggerate their capabilities all the time. But if the consequences of overestimating a rival’s hostile intentions are bad, the consequences of underestimating them are even more dire. History is full of secretly plotted sneak attacks, from Pearl Harbor to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia to the Yom Kippur War to the Hamas attack on October 7.
And sometimes the North Korean regime’s idea of saber-rattling is to pull out the saber and stab somebody. In 2010, North Korea fired artillery shells toward the South Korean island of Yeonpyeongdo, killing civilians. That same year, a South Korean warship, the Cheonan, sank in the Yellow Sea, killing 46 sailors. South Korea accused North Korea of torpedoing the ship; the North Koreans denied responsibility.
Back in 2017, Politico laid out all the different ways that North Korea is a particularly difficult and thorny target for U.S. intelligence-gathering operations:
The U.S. collects intelligence on foreign nations and terrorist groups primarily using human spies, electronic eavesdropping, cyber espionage and spy satellites. And each is especially difficult in North Korea for various reasons, say those with direct experience.
One is the lack of diplomatic or commercial relationships, said Bruce Klingner, who spent 20 years at the CIA and DIA before joining the Heritage Foundation.
“We obviously don’t blend well into North Korea, and even South Korea has difficulty running agents, because of differences in dialect and pronunciation,” Klingner said. “Any strangers stand out, so in a country where people will report on their families and neighbors, certainly any stranger will get reported.” . . .
North Korea is probably the most restrictive human environment in the world. It’s far more restrictive certainly than pre-war Syria or Iran, more restrictive than China or Burma,” said Andrew Peek, a former Army intelligence officer and fellow at the Clements Center for National Security, a nonpartisan research center at the University of Texas at Austin. “I think we have less granularity on North Korea than we do on Syria or Iran. There’s very little osmosis in or out.”
Gathering intelligence through electronic means — in military parlance, signals intelligence — is also restricted because of the limited technology, internet access and cellphone use inside North Korea. And those who do use computer networks in North Korea, including government officials, use strong encryption. . . .
When Xi Jinping hosted foreign leaders for that big military parade in Beijing earlier this week, the presence of Vladimir Putin (and their chit-chat about longer human lifespans) was front and center; less attention was paid to the presence of Kim Jong-un. (Even less attention was paid to President Trump characterizing the trio as anti-American conspirators. Whatever you think of Trump’s foreign policy, it’s easy to understand why he would seethe over the three dictators, who Trump surely believes he has been exceptionally nice to, getting together and not-so-subtly declaring that the era of American geopolitical supremacy is over.)
Since returning to the Oval Office, Trump’s administration has been forced to focus upon the potential or ongoing foreign-policy crises of Iran, Israel, Gaza, Russia and Ukraine, China, India and Pakistan, and now it appears Venezuela as well. If the world had a hotline for international crises, it would probably be answering, “All circuits are busy now, please try again later.” So while this is the same generally hostile, secretive, paranoid North Korean regime we’ve always known and worried about, it’s shifted to the back burner, at least for now.
With that said, in late August, Trump met with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, and announced he intended to have another summit with Kim Jong-un:
I will do that. And we’ll have talks. He’d like to meet with me. He didn’t want to meet with Biden because he had no respect for Biden. But we look forward to meeting with him. And uh, we’ll make relations better. You’ll help that. You had a lot of leaders. I’ve gone through a lot of leaders in South Korea.
The South Korean president favors outreach to the North Korean regime, and welcomed the prospect of another Trump-Kim summit:
The only remaining divided nation in the world is the Korean Peninsula. And I would like to ask for your role in establishing peace on the Korean Peninsula. So I look forward to your meeting with chairman Kim Jong Un and construction of a Trump Tower in North Korea and playing golf at that place. I believe he will be waiting for you. Korea was able to attain economic growth and development through our ironclad alliance.
Those comments came about a month after North Korean state media quoted the dictator’s sister Kim Yo Jong declaring that a resumption of dialogue with Washington was possible and that the “personal relationship between our head of state and the present U.S. president is not bad.” But she also added that any U.S. attempt to persuade her country to give up its nuclear weapons would be regarded as “nothing but a mockery.”
As Kim’s trip to Beijing and increasingly close military partnership with Russia demonstrates, North Korea isn’t as isolated as its “hermit kingdom” nickname would suggest. You don’t need a secretly implanted surveillance device to understand that a changing international order with China and Russia on the rise, and the U.S. and other Western democracies on the decline, works out just swell for Kim Jong-un.
ADDENDUM: Todd Shapiro, campaign spokesman for New York City Mayor Eric Adams, Wednesday: “Mayor Adams has not met with Donald Trump — don’t believe the noise. He is not dropping out of the race.”
Your first clue should be the specificity of the denial. How likely is it that the president of the United States would take time out of his day to meet, in person, with the incumbent mayor?
In private, Mr. Adams has told a small group of friends and advisers that he is seriously considering job opportunities that could prompt him to suspend his re-election campaign, according to people familiar with the conversations.
The talks about Mr. Adams’s future have involved intermediaries for President Trump, including Steve Witkoff, a New York real estate investor who is one of Mr. Trump’s closest advisers. The mayor and Mr. Witkoff conferred in Florida this week in a previously undisclosed meeting, according to four people briefed on it.
From the NBC affiliate in New York City:
President Donald Trump said Thursday that he thinks Democrat Zohran Mamdani is likely to become New York City’s next mayor unless two of the three major candidates running against him drop out of the race. But the Republican didn’t say which two candidates he’d like to see quit.
Trump said “No” when he was asked by a reporter Thursday night if he’d urged or encouraged any of the candidates in the race to drop out, but went on to say he would like to see that happen.
“I don’t think you can win unless you have one-on-one, and somehow he’s gotten a little bit of a lead,” Trump said of Mamdani. “I have no idea how that happened.”
The president, who spoke as he hosted a dinner at the White House with tech executives, went on and said, “I would like to see two people drop out and have it be one-on-one, and I think that’s a race that could be won.”
As discussed on yesterday’s Three Martini Lunch, I am not convinced that the typical Curtis Sliwa supporter can be easily persuaded to vote for Andrew Cuomo, nor the typical Cuomo supporter can be easily persuaded to vote for Sliwa. A recent poll asked about the scenarios:
The poll also asked likely voters what would happen if some of the contenders were to drop out. In every scenario, Mamdani maintained his comfortable lead in the race.
- If Cuomo drops out, Mamdani rises to 48.4% support, ahead of Sliwa by 27.6 points (48.4 percent-20.8 percent)
- If Adams drops out, Mamdani leads Cuomo by 14 points, 42.6 percent -28.3 percent
- If Sliwa drops out, Mamdani leads Cuomo by 16.8 points, 45.1 percent -28.3 percent
Mamdani is also ahead of all challengers in theoretical head-to-head matches, with Cuomo emerging as the closest contender but still behind – with an important caveat.
- If everyone but Sliwa drops out, Mamdani leads by 22.9 points, 44.3 percent -21.4 percent
- If everyone but Adams drops out, Mamdani leads by 24.4 points, 44.4 percent – 20 percent
- If everyone but Cuomo drops out, Mamdani leads by 11 points, 42 percent -31 percent
In a theoretical head-to-head matchup with Mamdani and Cuomo, however, 27 percent of likely voters remain undecided – meaning they make up a key group that could decide the race in that scenario.
I would just note that by giving up on Sliwa, who’s actually right-of-center, New York City Republicans would get the consolation prize of . . . Mayor Andrew Cuomo, and his presidential ambitions. Ugh.