Fear: Trump in the White House

Clapper was a voice in the wilderness. No one agreed. Obama was hard-line: North Korea would have to agree to give up its nuclear weapons. Obama, a determined advocate for reducing nuclear weapons worldwide, wanted to turn the clock back. He condemned the North’s September 9 nuclear test in a long public statement, repeating U.S. policy: “To be clear the United States does not, and never will accept North Korea as a nuclear state.”

The overriding fact, Clapper argued, was that no one really understood what drove Kim Jong Un. “No one knows his ignition point,” he said. That was the assessment they needed and didn’t have. Instead the analysts debated whether Kim Jung Un was a brilliant, strategic genius manipulating other countries, including the U.S., or an inexperienced, impulsive fool.

As the Obama administration fanned through possible options, the discussion turned to the possibility of increasing the cyber attacks on North Korea. Some viewed cyber as the below-the-radar magic wand that might mitigate the North Korean threat.

To launch broader cyber attacks effectively, the National Security Agency would have to go through servers that North Korea had in China. The Chinese would detect such an attack and could conclude it was directed at them, potentially unleashing a cataclysmic cyber war.

“I can’t promise you that we can absorb a cyber counterattack,” one senior Obama cabinet member told Obama. And that was a big problem. The use of cyber could trigger escalation and set off a round of attacks and counterattacks that could cripple the Internet, financial systems like banking and credit cards, power grids, news and other communications systems, potentially bringing the American or even the world economy to its knees.

The administration lawyers who had the top security clearances and were involved in the discussion objected strenuously. It was too risky. Little new happened.

North Korea’s cyber capability had been demonstrated powerfully in a 2014 attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment designed to stop the release of a satirical movie about Kim Jong Un. The movie, a comedy called The Interview

, depicted two journalists going to North Korea to assassinate the youthful dictator.

Investigators later discovered that North Korean hackers had lurked inside Sony’s networks for three months waiting to attack. On November 24, North Korea took over Sony’s computer screens. To maximize shock value, the screens displayed a menacing red skeleton coming at the viewer and the text “Hacked by #GOP,” short for “Guardians of Peace,” stating, “We’ve already warned you, and this is just a beginning.” North Korean hackers destroyed 70 percent or more of Sony’s computers, including laptops.

Employing thousands of hackers, the North was now regularly using cyber programs to steal hundreds of millions of dollars from banks and others on a global scale.

Two days after the election, Obama and Trump met at the White House. The meeting was intended to last for 20 minutes, but it continued for over an hour. Korea is going to be the biggest, most important thing you’ve got going, Obama told the president-elect. It’s my biggest headache. Trump told staff later that Obama warned him that North Korea will be your biggest nightmare.

One intelligence analyst with vast experience and who also had served in South Korea said, “I’m shocked that the Obama administration closed their eyes and acted like the deaf, mute and blind monkey on this issue. And now I understand why the Obama team said to Trump that the major problem you have is North Korean nukes. They’ve been hiding the problem.”

CHAPTER

13

In February, General Dunford stopped by the office of Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, for a private talk.

Probably few in the Senate worked harder on military matters than Graham. A bachelor and colonel in the Air Force reserve, he seemed always on duty. He had built a vast bipartisan network in Washington. Former vice president Joe Biden, who had served 36 years in the Senate, said that Graham had the “best instincts” of anyone in the upper chamber. Graham, 61, a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was best friend and virtual permanent sidekick to the committee’s chairman, the outspoken Senator John McCain.

When Dunford arrived at Graham’s office, Graham could see that the chairman was shaken. Trump was asking for a new war plan for a preemptive military strike on North Korea, Dunford confided.

The intelligence on North Korea was not good enough, Dunford said. “We need better intelligence before I give the president a plan.”