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.
Everyone around President Trump appears to have had a method for managing the chief executive. Many resorted to stalling—agreeing with the president in the moment, but then failing to take any actions to follow up and hoping he would simply forget any action items they had agreed upon. Tillerson had, famously, tried this strategy with the president’s proposals to withdraw from the nuclear deal that limited Iran’s nuclear energy program. But when the president did not forget, he grew increasingly angry with Tillerson for slow-rolling him and ultimately fired the secretary of state.
Mattis, on the other hand, had survived multiple staff purges with his ability to spin the president around, then gently send him off in the opposite direction. When Trump suggested something crazy, Mattis would compliment the president on his strong instincts. But then, ever so slightly, he would complicate the story, eventually convincing the president that he wanted to do the opposite of what he had just said. Mattis understood that between the president’s susceptibility to flattery and disinterest in details, there was ample room to maneuver. Francis was counting on Mattis to use these skills to full effect in case they needed to talk Trump out of doing something crazy, like starting a nuclear war.
Normally, National Security Adviser Keith Kellogg would have been responsible for briefing the president. But Trump disliked long briefings, especially if they began to sound like a lecture. Francis thought that Kellogg’s briefings were always too long. So Francis took the lead, succinctly summarizing the situation: The North Koreans had shot down a South Korean jumbo jet, killing everyone aboard. South Korea’s president had, to everyone’s surprise, announced a limited missile strike on North Korea, which was now under way.
President Trump, Francis explained, needed to put out a statement as soon as possible, condemning the shootdown and urging the parties to stand down. After that, there would be an effort at the United Nations to dramatically increase the pressure on North Korea, with tough new sanctions to punish Kim for what he had done. (Later, Francis admitted to deliberately mentioning the United Nations, knowing that Trump was far more likely to approve of an idea if he thought it came from Nikki Haley instead of Sullivan.)
Francis recalled being surprised that he got as far as he did before Trump started fidgeting and then talking over him. According to Francis, the president was agitated and appeared to still be working through some of the frustration he had expressed during his tirades against Sullivan and Robbins. Trump started by pointing out that he had been right all along: “I told Rex and what’s-his-name [Sullivan] that they were wasting their time trying to talk sense into that guy [Kim Jong Un]. He only understands one thing!”
Francis recalled bracing for the request for military options.
“Why don’t we hit that little fat kid with everything we have?” the president asked. “What’s the point of having all the best nuclear if we don’t use it?”
As Francis had hoped, Mattis steered the president back to the proposal for another round of sanctions. “Your instinct, sir, is right on the money,” said the secretary of defense, according to a note-taker that Mattis allowed to witness the call from the Pentagon. “Kim Jong Un has to know that if he keeps this up, we will hit him with everything we’ve got. The South Koreans have just given him a good spanking. We’re ready to go too. Now we just need to tell Kim Jong Un that, if he doesn’t back down, there is more where that came from.”
This seemed to mollify the president, so Francis turned the discussion back to New York. The president’s attitude changed when Francis brought up the United Nations for a second time.
“What about Nikki?” Trump asked. “Where is Nikki?” Francis explained to the president that Ambassador Haley was, at that moment, on her way to a meeting with the North Koreans. He did not tell Trump that Sullivan had arranged the meeting, or that Haley had insisted on an invitation only after learning of it from the Chinese ambassador. He certainly did not mention that the Chinese were hosting the meeting. (“Any mention of China,” one aide explained, “and BOOM! You were off on a journey to God knows where. Some old Steve Bannon conspiracy theory, usually.”) The president indicated that it was good that Ambassador Haley was on the case, then made an off-color remark regarding the ambassador’s attributes as an interlocutor.
At that moment, Francis realized that the president was finished with the meeting. “Jack told me that Trump started rehearsing his locker-room talk for later—his golf-game banter,” one aide told us later. “That’s how he [Francis] knew he had moved on.” The president, according to Francis, repeated the remark about Ambassador Haley a second time. “I did wonder how many times his golf buddies would laugh as Trump said it over and over again, as he invariably would.”
With the shift in tone, Francis concluded that Trump was now behind his strategy for managing the crisis. The president had agreed, albeit in general terms, to a diplomatic effort. Francis would issue a statement, one that would reframe the president’s tweet in a less inflammatory context. The nation’s diplomats would go to work in New York. And Trump was off for eighteen holes of golf, followed by a long lunch with his friends.
Typically, with golf and lunch on the agenda, Trump was easy to manage. He might make calls from the golf course, but those calls would be to Francis. As he had the night before, Francis worried that there might be some negative press to the president playing golf amid a crisis. But the White House had dealt with this problem in the past. The White House would often simply refuse to confirm whether the president was playing golf, even if it would later emerge that he had. In one case, a white panel truck just happened to appear parked in a spot that blocked a camera crew from being able to film the president on the green. The truck, it later turned out, was parked in a spot reserved for the Palm Beach County sheriff. Francis declined to discuss these incidents with our investigators, noting that they had occurred before he was chief of staff, but he acknowledged that he had felt confident that he could manage the “optics” of the president’s golf outing. And anyway, like most of the president’s missteps, it would quickly be buried in the relentless news cycle.
The only other challenge that Francis expected were the mealtimes. Lunch or dinner in an open dining room did raise the possibility of uninvited interactions in which Trump might say something compromising about the situation in Korea. But Francis felt that he could manage those.
There was every chance they might all get through this in one piece, one aide remembered Francis suggesting, and in the long run maybe they would even come out with a big win. “Maybe this is a turning point,” the aide recalled Francis saying. “When the Soviet Union shot down a Korean airliner in 1983, what happened?” According to the aide, Francis believed that the international outrage that followed the Soviet Union’s 1983 shootdown of a Korean airliner had strengthened the hand of reformers within the Soviet Union, leading to the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. “Getting rid of North Korea was not quite winning the Cold War,” the aide admitted, “but with this president? Jack would take what he could get.”
As US envoy Sydney Seiler was pulling into Penn Station shortly after 7 AM, he read about Moon’s address—and the South Korean military strike—on his phone. Seiler was a career intelligence analyst who spoke fluent Korean; his background was in translating and analyzing propaganda. He read Moon’s remarks in the original Korean and understood immediately that Moon had acted unilaterally. Seiler was pretty sure his meeting was shot. He was not even sure whether the North Koreans would show up to the meeting or not. After all, they would probably want to wait for instructions from Pyongyang, and those orders probably had not yet arrived, given the likely chaos situation on the ground in North Korea.
The North Korean diplomats did in fact attend the meeting, but Seiler was right—it was a total loss. The North Korean ambassador, Ja Song Nam, was unsure what to do. Between the time that Ja had agreed to Sullivan’s request for a meeting and the actual meeting, North Korea had come under attack. The North Koreans believed this was an American attack, or at least one carried out with Washington’s blessing. Ja, like many North Korean officials at the time, simply could not imagine that South Korea would have taken such an aggressive measure without the backing of its most powerful ally.
Ja, who now lives in California, recalled that his mind was spinning as he entered the Chinese mission. Surely Kim Jong Un would be weighing a retaliation of some sort. But the North Korean Foreign Ministry in Pyongyang was cut off from Kim Jong Un, who at the time was still hiding in the basement at Kusong with limited cell service, and thus Ja’s superiors were completely unable to issue instructions to their ambassador in New York. And then there was the matter of the Americans. What diplomatic goals might they have now that they had already used force against North Korea? Ja could only guess. All he knew at the outset of the meeting was that he would have to improvise.
Seiler, for his part, recalled being relieved that the North Koreans had shown up at all—relieved, at least, until the North Korean ambassador opened his mouth. As soon as they sat down in a conference room in the Chinese mission’s faux wood-paneled offices decorated with the obligatory traditional landscape painting, Ja launched into a long lecture concerning the various misdeeds of the United States on the Korean Peninsula, starting with the division of the Korean Peninsula in 1945 by Dean Rusk and “that pirate Bonesteel.” Seiler smiled. The late Charles Bonesteel III had worn an eye patch later in life that did in fact make him look a little like a pirate, although Seiler understood that Ja was really just using the word as an all-purpose insult, like “brigand.”
As Ja’s diatribe continued through the Korean War, Seiler calculated how long it was going to last—Ja was progressing at a rate of about two years every three minutes by Seiler’s reckoning. At this pace, Ja was likely to go on for more than an hour. Seiler considered his options. He had endured harangues like this before, but he preferred reading them to listening to them. Yet he knew he had no choice but to sit and take it. If he got up and left, it would be the United States that had walked out of the talks—even if there was, at the moment, only one person talking.
Seiler then recalled looking at his Chinese hosts. “They were sitting stone-faced, not moving an inch,” he later told investigators. “I admired their discipline.” The members of his own delegation appeared to be holding up too. The faces of the foreign service officers who had come with UN ambassador Nikki Haley were impassive; even Haley herself, a politician and not a diplomat, was doing tolerably well, although Seiler could tell she was growing impatient. He found himself looking at the painting. It was a reproduction, but not bad.
Ja later confirmed to investigators that he was stalling in the hope that instructions from Pyongyang might arrive during the meeting. In the meantime, he did not want to give even the slightest impression that he was anything but extremely outraged over the US attack on his country. After all, he recalled, the political officer assigned to his mission would send his every word back home, where it would be scrutinized. “It goes without saying that I had a good relationship with my minder,” he later explained, “because no one lasts long if the minder has it out for you. But still, part of getting along is making his job easy. He has to write a report, so you give him something to work with, to prove your loyalty.”
After an hour, Ja decided that no instructions would arrive. Having done his duty, he stopped talking. It was now the Americans’ turn.
Seiler was brief. Whatever he said, he knew, mattered little. Ja would have to wait for further instructions before offering any real reply. So the US envoy simply expressed outrage over the shootdown of a civilian airliner, demanded that North Korea issue an apology, and explained that the United States had been neither involved in the South Korean launch nor consulted. Seiler glanced at the Chinese ambassador. He noticed an ever so slight note of confusion cross the otherwise steady grimace maintained by the Chinese ambassador when he mentioned this last fact.
Seiler urged Ja to take a message back to his leadership. He very pointedly decided not to issue any threats. The threat of force is often an essential part of a diplomatic process, but as Seiler knew, threats can also backfire, especially if the other side feels that their issuer intends to humiliate the threatened party—or worse. On the train up from DC, Seiler had seen the president’s tweet. With South Korea’s missiles slamming into North Korea and the president openly taunting the leader of North Korea, Seiler was worried that the United States might be overdoing it already, although at the time he kept those concerns to himself.
As the meeting came to an end, Seiler assured the North Koreans that he would remain in New York and would be willing to meet wherever and whenever the North Korean ambassador suggested. Ja recalled being grateful that Seiler had understood his position, but extremely confused about the American’s claim that the US government had had nothing to do with the attacks on his homeland. Yet at the moment, there was little he could do. So the North Korean thanked his Chinese hosts, stood up, and walked out with the rest of the members of the North Korean mission trailing him, returning to his office to wait for further instructions.
The Americans held back, initially just to avoid an awkward elevator ride with the North Koreans, according to one of the US foreign service officers who was present. When the coast was clear, Seiler stepped out of the offices, walked down the hall, and pushed the button for the elevator.
Haley, still furious at having been cut out of the planning for the meeting and resentful of Seiler’s role, stopped short of the elevator and took out her phone. She called the Ops Center and asked to speak to the acting secretary of state. According to one witness, as Haley loudly expressed her disappointment to John Sullivan, the Chinese diplomats stepped out of their offices and into the hallway one by one to see what the commotion was about. There they stood, watching the spectacle unfold, as Haley’s shouts rang out and echoed down the hallway. Ambassador Haley vehemently denies the story, saying she never lost her temper.
In Florida, the spring morning had blossomed into a glorious day. At 10:00 AM local time, Jack Francis and Keith Kellogg were in the Situation Room under Mar-a-Lago, reading a cable from Sydney Seiler recounting the meeting with the North Koreans. The envoy described the meeting as having been inconclusive and unproductive—but he was careful how he framed it. He attributed the inconclusive nature of the meeting to the surprising missile strikes by South Korea, which occurred just before the diplomats convened.
If anything, the cable was boring. A vivid cable, one that tells a good story, can race around an administration as gossip and end up on the front page of the Washington Post or the New York Times. But Seiler was biding his time, and the last thing he wanted was a headline declaring that the talks were dead. He had delivered his démarche to Ja; now they would wait. The atmospherics were irrelevant.
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.*