When it was finished Colonel Peters turned away from the monitor and back to her. “So the Chinese companies, Chinalco and Minmetals, are back at Chongju, and they are going to process their ore? Why would they need to do that?”
“They wouldn’t. The Chinese have their own refineries over the border and the roads, rail, and bridges to get it there.”
“What’s your conclusion?” he asked.
“The only conclusion I can come up with is that the Chinese are not involved.”
“Are you saying the DPRK domestic mining operation has developed to the extent they can extract rare earths?”
Brawley shook her head. She considered herself a pretty “meat and potatoes” analyst. She didn’t speculate wildly about anything, because that was a surefire way to make errors. Still, when she was sure of herself, she expressed herself with vehemence. “Mike, I’ve been examining operations at this mine long enough to know this isn’t DPRK doing this work alone. They are getting help.”
“Who is doing the work?”
“That’s going to be impossible to tell from a satellite. CIA needs to get a man in there.”
Peters laughed. “Have they been showing Mission: Impossible in the break room or something?”
Brawley laughed as well. “Sorry, is that far-fetched? I don’t know HUMINT. I just look at roofs and heads. It’s up to somebody else to get all the answers on the ground.”
Peters liked Brawley’s work. She was careful, more careful than many of the twenty-somethings that worked at her level.
“This is good.”
“Thanks.”
“This might go all the way up to DNI. Who knows, it could make its way into the Presidential Daily Brief.”
Brawley’s eyes widened. She had a smiling picture of President Jack Ryan on her desk. Even the fans of the President in her office teased her about it. “Maybe I should work up another PowerPoint. More levels of distinction. More color.”
Peters shook his head. “Everyone in the IC knows Jack Ryan likes to look at raw data for himself, but DNI Foley won’t sit in the Oval with him and click through a PowerPoint. Don’t worry about your presentation. You’ve done great work, now get back to your office and produce something more.”
“Something more?”
“You aren’t done, Annette.” He tapped the open-pit mine with the tip of his pen. “As long as they keep digging, you keep digging.” Colonel Peters gave her a satisfied wink.
“Just thought that one up, Colonel Peters, or have you been saving that one for a while?”
“Just thought it up,” he said proudly. “Though you can expect me to reuse it hundreds of times. It’s pretty good, right?”
14
Mining director Hwang had met intelligence chief Ri just once, a week earlier when he showed up unannounced to his office, and at that time Ri had been wearing his military uniform. Hwang supposed the lieutenant general was always dressed as an officer in the Chosun Inmingun when he left his house, so Hwang found it surprising to see the fifty-two-year-old this morning wearing a light gray Western suit and a blue tie. Hwang had to admit that Ri was, if anything, even more impressive out of uniform. He obviously exercised regularly, unlike Hwang, who rarely seemed to find the time for evening walks with his family, and often got winded taking the stairs to his office of the Korea Natural Resources Trading Corporation.
The two men stood in front of each other in the business-class lounge at Pyongyang Sunan International Airport. Each man had his own small entourage with him; in Ri’s case it was colonels as well as bodyguards, and in Hwang’s case a single personal attendant as well as several assistant directors and high-level technical advisers. It was just five a.m., and the first commercial flight of the day wasn’t leaving until eight-thirty, so the military and government men had the place all to themselves, although General Ri could have shut down the entire airport if he had any concern about eyes on him that might threaten today’s operation.
Director Hwang Min-ho still could not believe he was leaving his country, even if it was just for twenty-four hours. Virtually no regular North Koreans ever set foot abroad, and even very few high-level government officials earned the opportunity. North Korea is as close to a closed society as exists in the world, and the government-imposed sheltering of its people from the outside world was a key component to the nation’s ability to control the message to its citizens.
But Ri had orchestrated this trip; he’d arranged the travel for Hwang and himself and a total of nine of their translators and assistants, and he’d smoothed out the highly unusual situation with the Ministry of People’s Security. A nation that regards unauthorized departure as an act of treason punishable by death clearly took foreign travel seriously, so Ri and his office had a lot of hoops to jump through to make this all happen. He forced his way through much of the bureaucracy by invoking the fact he was on an approved operation of the Dae Wonsu. He had, in fact, gone as high as Choi’s office to get approval for the travel, and only after a few days of meetings with security men, meetings where General Ri and Director Hwang were asked personal questions to vet their commitment to the Supreme Leader, were they finally allowed the opportunity to go abroad, and only then in the presence of several domestic security agents posing as subordinates.
In Hwang’s case it was a truly rare occurrence that such a high-ranking mineral executive would fly out of North Korea without being part of some sort of organized delegation replete with state security officials sent along to watch over him, lest he either be kidnapped by the West or, and all knew this would be more likely, attempt defection.
And as uncommon as it was for Hwang to travel abroad, the fact that General Ri was outside North Korea at all was utterly unheard of.
But Ri made it happen. The men were supremely motivated by the threat to their own lives if this operation did not succeed; ergo, the men had torn up the rule book.
After a call came through the radio of an airport official, the entire group filed down a back stairwell of the terminal to ground level, then they took a rickety bus ride out to a Tu-134 twin-engine jet painted in the red, white, and blue markings of Air Koryo, North Korea’s national carrier.
Hwang felt his legs shaking as he climbed the jet stairs. It was not from excitement — this was no thrill that he was getting to visit outside his country — this was real fear. He’d lived fifty-four years hearing stories about the outside world, all of them bad. There was a statue in his hometown showing American GIs spearing a screaming Korean baby with a bayonet — foreigners were evil — and the disease and rampant crime and moral and physical decay of South Korea and Japan were legendary.
He had spent the evening before holding his wife and children, fighting back tears, and telling them to be strong and have faith in the Dae Wonsu should he never return.
On board he had his choice of seats. The plane could accommodate up to eighty, and there were only sixteen on the flight. He strapped himself in next to Ri and sat silently, his hands trembling, thinking about the prospect of what he would face when they landed.
They took off toward the south and the aircraft climbed into the morning fog, and Hwang did little more than nod as Ri began discussing his strategy for the meeting later in the day.
Four hours later Hwang was deep into his work and past the terror of the unknowns of the trip. He barely looked up from his paperwork as the aircraft landed in Vientiane, Laos, to refuel and to obfuscate the origin of the flight. Within half an hour they were back in the air.
They landed a second time in Singapore during a mid-afternoon rain shower, and here they were met by local operatives of Ri’s intelligence service and driven to the Mandarin Oriental hotel.