Have you seen Tom. That was the eternal question at SAD, Sara mused. Everybody always seemed to be looking for Tom. What was it about him that enchanted everyone, including her? For Sara it was his hazel eyes which seemed to change color based on what he was wearing. What intrigued her was that his heart rate never seemed to go above 60 — no matter what was happening in the office or around him. Sara could not maintain that level of calm. She was not neurotic, but she did get stressed on the job. This was after all one of the most secret and dangerous wings of the CIA. Plenty of things could get a desk analyst’s heart rate up. Yet Tom, who actually had to go on missions, somehow never let anything get to him. Maybe it was the SEAL training he went through she thought. But mix his calm with his charming smile, she thought, and there was the likely reason everyone was always looking for him. He did not seem to need it though. Sara remembered at group parties how in the chaos of everyone talking, eating, drinking and laughing, she would spot Tom standing alone with his drink. But he was not standing there out of shyness like she caught herself doing once in a while. His eyes would be half-closed and he had an expression that seemed to say that he owned the building. Others must have felt it because he was never standing alone for long — people were always coming up to him asking him questions — his opinion on something — or asking about his war stories. She always had a thousand questions she wanted to ask him.
Just then she saw a large-framed, dark-haired figure leisurely stroll past her door.
Tom!
She ran out of her door with her files and coffee.
“Tom, good you’re here”
Tom looked back, smiled at her and then kept walking to his office as she caught up to him.
“How was your weekend Sara?”
“Good. Anderson wants you in the secure conference room. He wants to start the briefing right away.”
“Let’s go”
They walked to the end of the hall. On the interior side of the building was a conference room specially built to prevent sound leakage. The CIA’s internal security staff constantly monitored it for electronic surveillance. Sara remembered learning that the basic way electronic bugs worked is that they recorded the sounds around them and transmitted the recordings to a device outside the room. The transmission could either be continuous, meaning it was sent through a live feed, or the bug could record for a number of hours and then send the transmission in one batch. Ultimately an electronic signal needed to be sent outside of the room. In the secure conference rooms, the CIA had devices that monitored whether electronic signals were transmitting out of the room. This conference room was also in the interior of the building and windowless. Foreign intelligence services had developed a technology in the 1970’s that sensed the vibrations a window made from the voices inside and translated those vibrations into words. This allowed someone sitting in a car outside to listen to what was being said in the conference room. Windowless conference rooms were more secure.
When Sara and Tom walked in, several people were already sitting inside. Sara thought one was from the technology group — she recognized him but did not know him. He introduced himself as Eric.
“Are you here for Anderson’s briefing” She asked
“Yes” Eric replied.
The other man, who introduced himself as Sam said he was a lawyer from the White House. Sara noticed that lawyers snuck around and got into SAD meetings from time to time.
Matt Smith was sitting by a laptop at the head of the conference table. Matt was the group’s IT specialist and was charged with communications — often with the military.
There was an ominous map of North Korea on the screen. As they were getting settled, Anderson walked in with an older looking South Korean man — one of the people Sara saw in the other conference room earlier. Anderson was in a dark suit, white shirt, and dark tie.
“I thought I saw you come in,” Anderson said to Tom.
“Yes, sir. Luckily it was smooth driving over here this morning”
Anderson introduced the man he came in with.
“Tom, Sara, this is Mr. Park. He is South Korea’s National Intelligence Service’s director of their deep cover program in North Korea. He just got in yesterday. You probably saw his team in the other conference room.”
The three shook hands and sat down. Anderson closed the door and began the briefing immediately.
“Well, we have an interesting situation. Two days ago, one of Mr. Park’s officers who was operating in Pyongyang was compromised. He took his own life rather than allowing himself to get captured. However before he died, he sent back a message. As background, this officer had been tasked with finding a hidden base where North Korea conducts most of its nuclear weapons research. We along with the South Korean NIS have known for a number of years about several sites where North Korea was supposedly doing nuclear research. But all of those sites were decoys. We have suspected for some time that they must be doing most of their research and bomb building in one secret location. This is for a number of reasons. They only have a handful of nuclear scientists, so it would make sense for them to be all in one place rather than spread out. Also with the electricity shortages and power outages they have, it would be easiest for them to do all their research in one place and be sure to provide that location with the power they need. Lastly, after years of UN inspections and negotiations, they know that the world is watching them closely. So they likely wanted to have a secret facility where they could do research covertly to avoid scrutiny. Mr. Park’s officer — what was his code name?”
“Officer 1414” Park replied.
“Officer 1414 was working on finding that facility and as a secondary mission, he was tasked with determining their level of nuclear capability. Three days ago, he messaged that he was going to meet a cousin of a regime insider. He had that meeting two days ago and we believe he was told the location of the facility and possibly what was in it. The message he sent back was the following — I’ll read it to you:
‘41.160167,129.612440. Mission accomplished. Officer 1414 compromised. Last resort will be used. Error in how we think about Jewels.’
Everyone except Tom squinted his or her eyes and looked in different directions as if it made thinking easier. Tom sat motionless. Anderson went on.
“Obviously ‘mission accomplished’ means he figured out this facility’s location. The numbers seem to be GPS coordinates which we can pull up on the map here.”
Anderson moved behind Matt as he typed the GPS coordinates into the mapping program. The big screen zoomed in on an area in the Northeastern part of North Korea. The spot was south of the city of Chongjin and North of Kilju. It was hundreds of miles on the other side of the peninsula from Pyongyang. The spot was in the middle of what looked like a forest in a hilly or slightly mountainous area. The group leaned forward in their chairs and squinted their eyes further. The location 1414 gave looked like a simple dirt plot.
“This is not just a pile of dirt in the middle of nowhere,” Anderson went on. “This spot in the center we have identified as a structure — probably containing an elevator and a set of stairs. We believe this is the entrance to the facility. About a mile away, we can see the presence of trucks, which are rare in this number in North Korea. They look like they are loading and unloading something. Our satellites have also seen troop movements in the area. The military presence is mostly the counter-intelligence unit of the Korean People’s Army, or KPA. We can tell this from the type of uniform they wear and the weapons they carry. This strange facility seems to be completely underground.”
Sara was always impressed with the level of satellite imagery the SAD routinely saw. The number of US Government imagery satellites was classified and only a few people knew exactly how many there were — maybe Anderson was one of them. But these satellites were so powerful that they could spot a golf ball on the ground and read whether it was a Titleist or TaylorMade. This is how the imagery analysts at the agency had figured out what uniforms and weapons the local military had.