Red Phoenix Burning (6 page)

16 August 2015

Foreign Intelligence Service Headquarters

Moscow, Russia

Pavel Ramonovich Telitsyn read the morning worldwide intelligence summary with great interest and concern. Initial reports indicated that something very wrong had occurred in North Korea, but they contained almost nothing beyond vague references to fighting on the outskirts of the capital, and the complete lack of national level broadcasting. He sighed. It was useless. As the Asian Department chief for Directorate S of the Foreign Intelligence Service, he knew his superiors were going to be demanding more. And soon.

He was right.

Deputy Director Alexei Fedorovich Malikov arrived in Telitsyn’s office fifteen minutes later. He looked agitated and worried.

“Good morning, sir,” greeted Telitsyn. “Please, sit down. May I offer you a cup of fresh tea?”

“You may,” Malikov nodded, glowering. “I could use something fit to drink. That lukewarm bilge water they serve in the main conference room is hardly satisfying.”

Telitsyn fought down a laugh. His superior’s naval past tended to slip out whenever he was annoyed. “I take it the morning staff meeting was more arduous than normal,” Telitsyn observed.

“That, my dear Pavel, would be a gross understatement.”

“North Korea?”

“Of course!” Malikov snapped. “What else could it be?” The deputy director took the tea offered him by the younger man. He sighed. “I’m sure you saw that pathetic report from our embassy in Pyongyang?”

“Yes, sir,” Telitsyn replied. Shrugging, he added, “It was lacking in depth and specifics.”

“Polite, Pavel. Very polite. It was a worthless piece of shit!” Malikov said bluntly. “We need reliable information on exactly what the devil is happening there. The president and the premier are deeply concerned. Which means the director is seriously disturbed, and that means I’m greatly troubled. Which means you should be practically pissing in your pants.”

Telitsyn waited patiently. The deputy director might be bad-tempered, especially after a night spent reliving old memories with former shipmates and a bottle of vodka apiece, but he was no fool.

“Very well,” Malikov said finally. He eyed his subordinate. “Do you still have that pet North Korean on a leash?”

“Cho Ho-jin? Yes, he is still operational,” Telitsyn answered hesitantly. He was not sure he liked where this was going. Cho was one of his best deep-cover agents—an agent Telitysn had groomed ever since the renegade North Korean stumbled into Vladivostok as a starving teenager more than twenty years before. Ruthless, cunning, and highly intelligent, Cho was too useful to risk lightly.

“Well?”

“He’s done very good work for us recently,” Telitsyn said. “His reports on those new North Korean missile silos near the frontier were most informative—”

“And you don’t want me or some other damned bureaucratic fool interfering with him, eh?”

There was no way to answer that question honestly, Telitsyn knew. Not and keep his post.

Malikov nodded, as though he’d read his subordinate’s mind. “Unfortunately, your wishes do not count in this matter, Pavel Ramonovich. Nor do mine, frankly. Our masters want accurate answers from inside North Korea. Our task is to supply those answers. Understand?”

Slowly, reluctantly, Telitsyn nodded.

“Good! Then contact this agent of yours. Tell him to get his skinny yellow ass to Pyongyang and find out what the hell is going on.”

Chapter 3 - Plunge

16 August 2015

Office of Asian Pacific, Latin American, and African Analysis

Directorate of Analysis, Central Intelligence Agency

Langley, Virginia

Chris Sawyer kept the CNN news channel on while he worked, although he’d muted the sound as soon as he was sure the anchors weren’t saying anything new. The satellite photo the networks were all showing didn’t need much in the way of explanation.

What had once been a building the size of a city block was now a huge mound of broken concrete and twisted steel. Any disaster on that scale would have made the news. But what had all the news anchors and talking heads in a lather was that this building had been identified as part of the massive Korean Workers’ Party office complex in Pyongyang, North Korea.

With all of the DPRK’s official media off the air, speculation that had first focused on sinkholes or shoddy construction was now shifting quickly to more ominous and sinister causes for the apparent implosion. Before he’d hit the mute button, they were also zeroing in on the possible significance of this catastrophe, as it occurred on August 15.

As the CIA’s senior analyst for North Korea, Sawyer knew the talking heads were right. That pile of rubble had been the Party Banquet Hall, used for formal dinners and celebrations by the North’s ruling political and military elite. And August 15, Liberation Day, was a national day of celebration set aside for parades, pomp, and parties to commemorate the end of Japan’s decades-long occupation of Korea.

He also knew a few other things he fervently hoped would
not
appear on CNN or the other channels. Leak investigations were always hell. And the last thing he needed right now was to have his team wired up to polygraph machines and cross-examined.

He stared again at the image of the ruined building plastered across the screen.

A network of tunnels ran under Pyongyang, connecting Kim Jong-un’s offices and residence with other official buildings. Extending for dozens of miles, it included escape routes out of the city and a lavishly appointed underground bunker, a refuge against air attack. Many of the tunnels had been bored through solid rock to a depth of three hundred meters, and they were wide enough for cars and other vehicles to use. In peacetime, they provided passage for Kim and other members of the regime to move about in secrecy and safety.

The fact that these tunnels existed was public knowledge, but Sawyer and his people, by piecing together overhead imagery, defector reports, and other information, believed they had about two-thirds of the network mapped. If the US ever went to war with North Korea, the air force would suddenly find a few dozen new targets added to its bombing list: innocuous-looking buildings or subway stations that were the entrances and exits to Kim’s secret labyrinth.

And one of those tunnels ran right under the Korean Workers’ Party office complex. From defector reports, Sawyer and his team knew that the banquet hall itself ran deep underground, with multiple basements filled with kitchens, storage areas, and air raid shelters. Analysts also believed that a set of internal high-speed elevators connected the building with the deeper tunnel system. It was an obvious destination for Kim’s private transportation system.

So what had caused a massive steel-and-concrete structure to collapse in a matter of seconds?

Sawyer was convinced that it had to be a bomb—a very big one. He’d had weapon effects experts from the agency examine all the available images, both the commercial ones shown by the networks and the more detailed photos taken by US spy satellites. Their reports showed that the lowest point in the rubble matched the estimated location of those elevators. They also argued that only an explosion that completely destroyed some of the hidden underground basements could account for so much damage to the banquet hall itself.

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.

16 August 2015

Headquarters, 33rd Infantry Division, IV Corps

South of Pyongyang, North Korea

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.

After a brutal, close-quarters melee that left bodies and burning trucks strewn across the highway, both sides had sought cover among the apartment buildings, shops, warehouses, and small factories on Pyongyang’s outskirts. A wide avenue, Tongil Street, intersected the highway at the checkpoint, offering any defending force a ready-made kill zone.

Now Tae could hear sporadic gunfire. They were sniping at each other while scouts from the 33rd’s lead regiment, the 162nd, probed for loyalist strongpoints. His men were not well-trained for urban combat, and they were making slow progress. But they were still moving. The closest bridge across the Taedong River was just a few hundred meters beyond Tongil Street.
Take that bridge
, he thought,
and we’ll have a clear road to the inner city
.

Meanwhile, Tae was trying to contact Vice Marshal Koh Chong-su, chief of the General Staff, and the first among equals in their coup against the Kim family and the other factions. Tae’s troops were fighting their way into position, and he was supposed to have received further instructions by now. The problem was that Koh wasn’t answering. Not by radio. Not by cell phone. Not even by dispatch rider.

And the clock was ticking.

Aware of the nervous glances being exchanged by the staff officers clustered around map tables and radios, Tae tried to buy time to think by pretending to study the most recent situation reports.

Time
, he thought bitterly. A few of his fellow conspirators had advocated waiting for confirmation of Kim Jong-un’s death before acting, but Tae and the others knew that time was too precious. It was all about control. Three generations of North Koreans had been raised to look to the party and the armed forces, and they, in turn, looked upward to their own leaders, rising higher and higher through the hierarchy until all eyes rested on Kim Jong-un. For a few brief hours, if they were lucky, there would be no one to give orders—no one to stop them.

But as soon as it was confirmed that Kim Jong-un was dead, others would vie to take his place. So it was essential that Tae and his fellow plotters were organized and in charge before their rivals from the other factions sorted themselves out.

The plan had worked so well at the beginning, he remembered. Perhaps that should have worried him. Every separate piece had run smoothly, like a well-oiled killing machine—starting right from last night’s nerve-wracking helicopter flight to the 33rd Division’s headquarters just outside Kaseong . . .