A demolitions expert attached to the CIA’s Special Activities Division had gone further. Over his many years in the military and then in the agency, Scott Voss had blown up enough stuff to take out a whole city. “No way was that an accidental gas explosion, Chris,” the big man had told him. “Not enough explosive power from natural gas, for one thing. Plus, there’s not enough fire damage. Ninety-plus percent of the time that you have a natural gas explosion, you’re going to get one hell of a fire.”
Instead, Voss believed it would have taken at least a thousand kilograms — a metric ton — of military-grade high explosives to destroy the assembly hall from within. A ton of explosives planted in one of those deep elevator shafts. “Nothing kills like overkill,” he’d said.
There were other clues.
All the satellite photos showed large numbers of emergency vehicles and military trucks surrounding the ruined building, with hundreds of civilians and soldiers swarming over the floodlit rubble pile. Rows of bodies were set aside, left waiting while ambulances took survivors to nearby hospitals. Sawyer winced, imagining the carnage. If the banquet hall was being used that night for a celebration, more than a thousand people could have been inside when it imploded.
Signals intelligence satellites had captured some of the radio transmissions made by emergency crews combing the wreckage. Most were the kinds of communications one would expect in any disaster — urgent requests for information on the scope of the emergency, reports on the numbers of potential victims, and finally, reports about the efforts being made to rescue survivors trapped in the rubble. But in this case, there had been a second thread, a series of frantic transmissions detailing a separate, panicked search for “higher priority” victims.
Since many of those buried in the ruins were likely to be among the North’s most powerful politicians and generals, who could possibly be “higher priority”?
Sawyer listened again to the audio files of those transmissions. The teams involved in this second search did not use any names of those they were seeking, just code words.
There. He stopped the playback.
One of the voices suddenly called out, “We’ve reached the dais! He is alive, but gravely wounded. The wife is dead. Four of the others are critically injured, the remaining six are dead.” That was the last snippet the satellites had picked up.
And the voice repeated it. “He is alive.”
Sawyer was sure they were talking about Kim Jong-un. It all fit, he thought. That bomb-shattered building, the near-simultaneous blackout of state media, and the failed mass defection attempt up at the DMZ. Someone had tried to kill — and he might die yet — the absolute ruler of North Korea. The “wife” they were talking about must’ve been Ri Sol-ju. The “others” were quite likely secretariat heads who helped Kim Jong-un rule as Supreme Leader. Sweet Jesus, he thought. Kim Jong-un, his wife, and the ten highest-ranking people in the DPRK government. The same number he’d just heard reported as dead or critically wounded on the dais.
He spun back to his keyboard, working through the possibilities again. Inside the paranoid police state of North Korea, it would take unparalleled access, information, and resources to pull something like this off. That meant a conspiracy set firmly in the regime’s inner circle.
Everything suggested a coup, and even a successful coup would be bloody. A failed coup might be even worse.
He pulled up the most recent report on that North Korean woman the military had rescued from the DMZ. The ROK National Intelligence Service had reported her name was Lee Ji-young, which placed her as a member of one of the ruling families; her father had been a senior politburo member. There was no way to know for certain which side her family had been on, but he had been a strong supporter of the Kim family in the past.
Were they Kim loyalists getting out ahead of a purge? Or were they conspirators fleeing a failed assassination attempt? According to the US Army colonel who’d carried her across the line, she’d kept talking about “the burning.” The CIA analyst was willing to bet that the violence that would necessarily accompany any coup — whether it succeeded or failed — was well underway.
Sawyer took another pull on his cold coffee, his second cup since a hurried lunch at his desk, and began typing. The White House and his own superiors were screaming for his best guesses about exactly what was going on in Pyongyang. It always made him itchy to make sweeping assessments with so little hard evidence, but that was inevitable for anyone trying to analyze the DPRK. Paranoid and ultra-secretive, what the West knew about North Korea might fill a thin volume. What they didn’t know was incalculable, but undoubtedly immense.
Despite that, it was Sawyer’s assessment, with high confidence, that an attempt had been made on Kim Jong-un’s life. But that bald statement raised more questions than it answered. Where was the North’s all-important Supreme Leader now? Was he alive or dead? Who were the plotters? Would North Korea’s armed forces hold together or splinter into different factions?
He added a number of indicators that would help produce answers to some of those questions. The rest would require additional collection. Some could be handled by the CIA, with its own resources, but most would require combined efforts by a host of organizations — the other US intelligence agencies, the military, the South Koreans, the Japanese, and many others.
Wrapping up the final paragraph in the report’s conclusions, he wrote, “The power struggle now apparently taking place could involve numerous factions armed with nuclear, chemical, and possibly biological weapons. Given the DPRK’s strategic location between two important US allies and two powerful US adversaries, and with US forces present in the Republic of Korea, there is a grave risk of violence spreading to any or all of these countries — threatening American interests and lives.”
Chris Sawyer sat back and read that passage over carefully several times. Its dry, analytic language was the type required in any official agency report, but it didn’t convey even half the anxiety he felt. At the moment, he could see only one possible future where the violence could be contained inside the boundaries of North Korea. There were at least a dozen more where death and chaos spread across the whole region… and maybe the whole world.
General Tae Seok-won had set up his battle headquarters in a courtyard just east of the mammoth Arch of Reunification. The Reunification Highway swept under the arch, heading straight north toward the center of Pyongyang.
He scowled. The arch, a project of Kim Jong-un’s father, showed two women in traditional Korean dress leaning forward to hold a sphere showing a united Korea. Given the circumstances, with the DPRK teetering on the edge of civil war, it was a painfully ironic piece of propaganda.
From the arch, Pyongyang’s skyline would be visible through the thick haze, with its spectacular, Stalinist-style hotels, universities, and government ministries dotting the horizon. He and his troops were just seven kilometers from the heart of the nation’s capital.
Tae had hoped to get farther faster, but both his luck and the willingness of troops from the Pyongyang Defense Command to accept his orders had run out at a checkpoint about a kilometer north of the arch. That was where loyalist soldiers had stopped the lead elements of the 33rd Infantry Division, demanding confirmation from the National Defense Commission itself before allowing his units into the city proper. They had refused to be bluffed, and, when Tae’s men tried intimidation, pushing and shoving had quickly escalated into shooting.