N. Korea keeps U.S. intelligence guessing
Tue Mar 11, 2003
John Diamond USA TODAY
WASHINGTON -- The tone of the CIA (news - web sites) report is confident: A North Korean invasion is ''unlikely'' unless the communist army improves significantly to match South Korean forces.
The date of the report: Jan. 13, 1950. Six months later, North Korean forces surged toward Seoul, overwhelming the South Korean military and beginning a bloody three-year war. That intelligence report, the CIA's present-day deputy director, John McLaughlin, observes dryly, ''had a fairly short shelf life.''
Half a century later, as North Korea (news - web sites) ignores U.S. protests and moves to establish a nuclear arsenal, U.S. intelligence agencies are once again assessing the risk of war on the Korean peninsula. They predict an escalating series of North Korean provocations but stop short of a firm judgment on the likelihood of war.
Though there have been no intelligence lapses in the region quite so spectacular as the CIA's overconfident 1950 war assessment, North Korea remains one of the most secretive and dangerous regimes on the planet, quite capable of catching U.S. intelligence experts off-guard.
The CIA and the Pentagon (news - web sites) have a trove of classified information on North Korean conventional forces, combat strategy and tactics, missile production and testing, nuclear weapons development, even the personality of its unpredictable dictator-playboy leader, Kim Jong Il. But despite an intense focus on North Korea and dramatic improvements in collection capabilities, U.S. intelligence struggles to extract key information and read the reclusive communist dictatorship's intentions.
For example, the CIA knows North Korea is building a uranium-enrichment plant but doesn't know where, according to two senior intelligence officials. And the CIA thinks North Korea has one or two nuclear weapons, but it can't find hard proof.
The CIA has been saying publicly for two years that North Korea probably has one or two nuclear bombs. But the few human sources available to the CIA inside North Korea have been unable to confirm that, according to two U.S. intelligence officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.
''This is all a guesstimate. Nobody really knows what they have,'' says Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment, a Washington-based think-tank.
Electronic noise hushed
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has complained privately that electronic eavesdropping on North Korea yields less and less because Pyongyang has installed underground fiber-optic cables for its sensitive military communications. The cables are impervious to listening systems geared to pick up radio and microwave signals.
Rumsfeld is also concerned about a scarcity of human intelligence sources inside North Korea, where tight control of information and severe repression make spying an extremely dangerous occupation.
If, as the Bush administration fears, North Korea begins reprocessing spent reactor fuel rods for nuclear weapons at its Yongbyon nuclear complex 60 miles north of the capital of Pyongyang, U.S. intelligence may have no way to keep track of the resulting plutonium or newly minted weapons.
''It is entirely implausible that we could effectively prevent a few baseball-sized lumps of plutonium from being smuggled out of Yongbyon,'' says Ashton Carter, who worked North Korea issues as a senior Pentagon official under President Clinton (news - web sites). ''Not only is a nuclear weapon-sized quantity of plutonium-239 small in size, but it is not highly radioactive and does not emit a strong signature that could be detected.''
One way to pick up traces of nuclear activity is with the special sensing equipment carried by an Air Force RC-135S ''Cobra Ball'' aircraft. But in the latest example of Pyongyang's impulsive brinkmanship, four North Korean fighter jets on March 2 intercepted a Cobra Ball aircraft in international airspace off the Korean peninsula. The fighters flew as close as 50 feet to the U.S. plane, signaled unsuccessfully for the U.S. craft to follow them to North Korea, and shadowed the plane for 20 minutes before disappearing.
The Pentagon, fearful of further confrontations, has temporarily suspended the reconnaissance flights, worsening an already considerable intelligence blind spot.
A key challenge for U.S. intelligence is determining what North Korea really wants. Is the desperately poor nation using the threat of a nuclear arsenal as a bargaining chip to get money, oil and food for its starving people and political recognition for the regime? Or does it really want nuclear weapons to dominate the peninsula and deter any U.S. pre-emptive attack?
Reluctantly, the Bush administration appears to be accepting the pessimistic assessment of top intelligence officials, who contend that Pyongyang won't negotiate away weapons acquired at great cost after decades of effort.
CIA Director George Tenet told lawmakers last month that Kim Jong Il's nuclear maneuvers ''suggest he is trying to negotiate a fundamentally different relationship with Washington, one that implicitly tolerates the North's nuclear weapons program.'' Vice Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), agreed: ''Pyongyang's desire for nuclear weapons reflects a long-term strategic goal that will not be easily abandoned.''
Such assessments involve the most difficult challenge posed by North Korea: getting inside the mind of a reclusive and unpredictable dictator.
''I was in the CIA for 30 years, and I used to call (North Korea) the longest-running intelligence failure in the history of American espionage,'' says Donald Gregg, who became U.S. ambassador to South Korea (news - web sites) after retiring from the CIA. In a 1998 interview, Gregg said, ''It's an extraordinarily difficult target to go after. We have marvelous satellites and aerial photography and so forth, but it still doesn't get you inside people's heads.''
Isolation hinders spying
North Korea's diplomatic isolation makes it extremely difficult to gather intelligence there.
There is no U.S. embassy in Pyongyang, and therefore no opportunity to place CIA operatives in the country under diplomatic cover. Instead, the CIA must rely heavily on South Korean intelligence or diplomats from other countries with access to Pyongyang. Kim Jong Il limits sensitive information to a select few, and they are allowed little if any contact with U.S. diplomats. North Korea is no longer a Soviet client state, making it tougher to get secondhand information from Moscow on Kim's thinking.
Even with daily spy satellite coverage, electronic eavesdropping, a steady stream of defectors, regular feeds from South Korean intelligence and a handful of human sources inside North Korea, U.S intelligence struggles to answer such key questions as:
* Where is the enrichment plant that could soon be capable of producing weapons-grade uranium? North Korea's admission last fall that it had a uranium-enrichment program is what touched off the current crisis. Expert tunnelers, the North Koreans have likely built the plant underground. Spy satellite imagery specialists are looking for a large -- and unexplained -- electricity supply, essential for the uranium-enrichment process.
* How many tunnels have North Korean forces dug under the Demilitarized Zone that separates North and South Korea? The U.S. military command in South Korea estimates there may be 30; only four have been found, either by accident or by sophisticated ground-penetrating radars and acoustic sensors that can detect faint sounds of digging. Some are more than a mile in length.
* Assuming the CIA is correct that North Korea has one or two nuclear weapons, are they light enough to place atop a multistage Taepo Dong 2 rocket that could reach the western United States? The latest CIA assessment is no.
Last November, U.S. intelligence agencies reported to Congress that North Korea's new Taepo Dong 2 ICBM might be ready for testing at any time. Cobra Ball surveillance aircraft are equipped to collect data on missile launches or tests, and one reason for the regular missions off Korea was to be in position to collect that information.
''North Korea is a very hard target,'' says Robert Gallucci, former ambassador-at-large under President Clinton and chief U.S. negotiator of the 1994 Agreed Framework that won North Korea's now-broken pledge to freeze its nuclear program. ''The only sources were South Korean intelligence sources, and for a long time there was great suspicion of what the South Koreans were telling us.''
A concern through the latter years of the Cold War was that, depending on the changing political climate, South Korea tended to either exaggerate or to downplay the threat posed by the North.
Even in an area of strength for U.S. intelligence ---- counting enemy forces ---- there have been lapses. In 1979, when the Carter administration was considering pulling U.S. forces out of South Korea, the CIA and DIA doubled their estimate of the size of North Korea's army based on a report leaked by China, which was concerned about the instability that a U.S. pullout might entail. Again in the mid-1980s, U.S. intelligence sharply increased its estimate of the North Korean force, according to Kent Harrington, a former CIA analyst who specialized in Korea and East Asian matters until the late 1990s. ''I don't have great confidence that we have a handle today on'' the size and capability of the North Korean military, Harrington says.
In another lapse, the CIA was surprised in 1998 when North Korea launched a three-stage Taepo Dong 1 rocket. The rocket crashed into the Pacific after flying nearly 4,000 miles and failing to launch its civilian satellite payload into space. But North Korea's ability to design and launch a multistage rocket stunned U.S. intelligence officials and raised fears that Pyongyang might be able to field an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of hitting the United States.
To be sure, U.S. intelligence has scored some successes against North Korea. On Feb. 26, U.S. spy satellites captured images of a plume of steam coming from a formerly mothballed nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, enabling the CIA to alert the White House that the North Koreans had restarted the reactor, a key part of Pyongyang's plutonium operation.
And last June, information from a defector enabled U.S. intelligence to sharply increase internal warnings about the then-secret North Korean uranium-enrichment program for nuclear weapons. U.S. intelligence had information from trade records and from the Pakistani government indicating that North Korea was researching uranium enrichment. But the new intelligence indicated that North Korea was beyond research and completing work on a full-blown production facility.
Signaling defiance?
Some of the recent intelligence successes may have had more to do with North Korea's desire to send a hard-line signal to Washington than with growing U.S. intelligence skill. The point of having nuclear weapons is to deter an adversary, so it is essential for a country to demonstrate that it has them -- hence the deliberately provocative steps Pyongyang has been taking to kick out international nuclear inspectors and restart its plutonium operation.
The appearance of a truck convoy at the Yongbyon reactor last month, for example, was clearly visible to U.S. spy satellites. It set off concern in Washington that Pyongyang had ordered the reprocessing of long-stored spent reactor fuel rods into weapons-grade plutonium to make nuclear bombs. Since then, U.S. intelligence has warned that reprocessing could begin at any time.
What neither the vast array of technical intelligence nor the slight but steady flow of information from defectors can determine is how Kim Jong Il might react to a surgical strike intended to take out his nuclear facilities. The Bush administration has pointedly said that ''all options,'' including military action, are on the table to counter North Korea, but that there is ''no intention'' of attacking North Korea.
On one point there is little doubt within the U.S. intelligence community. With a million-man North Korean army poised north of the Demilitarized Zone, and a U.S.-South Korean force nearly as large on the opposite side, nowhere else on earth is the threat of catastrophic war so immediate.
''War on the peninsula,'' DIA's Jacoby says, ''would be violent, destructive and could occur with very little warning.''
