Mary Louise Kelly (NPR): Is there a Stuxnet for North Korea?
John Brennan (CIA director under President Obama): [Laughter] Next question.
—December 2016 In the spring of 2016, North Korea’s missiles started falling out of the sky—if they even made it that high.
In test after test, Kim Jong-un’s Musudan missile—the pride of his fleet—was exploding on the launch pad, crashing seconds after launch, or traveling a hundred miles or so before plunging prematurely into the Sea of Japan. For a missile that Kim imagined would enable him to threaten the American air base on Guam and form the technological basis for a larger missile that could reach Hawaii or Los Angeles, the failures were a disaster.
All told, Kim Jong-un ordered eight Musudan tests between mid-April and mid-October 2016. Seven failed, some spectacularly, before he ordered a full suspension of the effort. An 88 percent failure rate was unheard-of, especially for a proven design. The Musudan was based on a compact but long-range missile the Soviets had built in the 1960s for launching from submarines. Its small size but high power made it perfect for Kim’s new strategy: shipping missiles around the country on mobile launchers and storing them in mountain tunnels, where American satellites would have trouble finding them.
As part of his effort to boost the range and lethality of the North’s missile fleet, Kim had invested heavily in modifying the Soviet engines. The Musudan was far more complex than the Scud, the short-range missiles the North had made billions selling to Egypt, Pakistan, Syria, Libya, and Yemen, among other nations. Developing the Musudan technology was critical for Kim: He hoped it would pave the way for a whole new generation of single-stage and multistage missiles. With those in his arsenal, he could make good on his threat that no American base in the Pacific—and ultimately no American city—would be beyond his reach.
The North had been in the missile-launching business for a long time and had gained a reputation for mastering the art. So the serial run of Musudan failures in 2016—three in April, two in May and June, then two more in October, after the North had taken a pause to figure out what was happening to them—was confounding. The history of missile testing suggested that everyone suffered a lot of failures in the beginning, then figured it out and made things work. That’s what happened during the race between the United States and the Soviet Union to build intercontinental ballistic missiles in the 1950s and ’60s, an era marked by many spectacular crashes before the engineers and missileers figured out the technology. The Musudan experience reversed the usual trend. After years of successful tests of other missiles, it was as if North Korea’s engineers forgot everything they’d learned.
Kim and his scientists were highly aware of what the United States and Israel had done to the Iranian nuclear program, and they had tried to insulate themselves from the same kind of attack. But the high failure rate of the missiles forced the North Korean leader to reassess the possibility that someone—maybe the Americans, maybe the South Koreans—was sabotaging his system. By October 2016, reports emerged that Kim Jong-un had ordered an investigation into whether the United States had somehow incapacitated the electronic guts of the missiles, perhaps getting inside their electronics or their command-and-control systems. And there was always the possibility that an insider was involved, or even several.
After each North Korean failure, the Pentagon would announce that it had detected a test, and frequently would even celebrate the missile’s failure. “It was a fiery, catastrophic attempt at a launch that was unsuccessful,” a Pentagon spokesman told reporters in April 2016, after the first full test of the Musudan, timed to celebrate the birthday of the country’s founder, Kim Il-sung. When subsequent attempts failed, the official news release from the Pentagon included dryly worded boilerplate that “The North American Aerospace Defense Command determined the missile launch from North Korea did not pose a threat to North America.” The statements never speculated about what went wrong.
But there was a lot of speculation inside the Pentagon, the NSA, and the White House, among the select group who knew about the classified US program to escalate cyber and electronic attacks against North Korea, with a particular focus on its missile tests. Each explosion, each case of a missile going off course and falling into the sea, prompted the same urgent question: “Was this because of us?”
Copyright © 2018 by David E. Sanger. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
