The general was in a made-to-measure dark suit with shirt and tie – his choice – and his questioners had chosen the same. There were four of them, and two interpreters: an American scholar bilingual in Korean and a Korea-born earlier defector and thirty-years US citizen. Another twenty observers watched the meeting on CCTV screens.
The intention was to put General Li in a relaxed, comfortable, no-stress environment, five professional men having a friendly chat, as it were. The lead questioner was a professor of Korean studies who was fluent in the language after a lifetime steeped in his chosen subject. He had been briefed extensively on what the military needed urgently to know.
As it happened, General Li was one of that infinitesimally small percentage of North Koreans who spoke fluent English. The two interpreters checked for accuracy and occasionally helped with technicalities. All, including those outside the room, were security-cleared to a high level. One of them was an elderly Englishman who sat at the back and remained silent – his favoured position.
Even if, among politicians and the senior job-holders who could be ousted within the hour for a disagreement with the President, the mood for self-delusion reigned, the CIA still retained its core of full-time, long-haul professional realists. It was among these that the British counterparts from MI6 had very good contacts. It was they who had prevailed on their American colleagues to include the retired Brit on the very small guest list.
The moving force behind this was the Director of the CIA, who was informed in total confidence that, but for a teenager now tinkering with his computer in the heart of Warwickshire, General Li Song-Rhee would still be in Pyongyang. No one else in Washington had a clue that the cellphone message that had brought the North Korean to defect was a confidence trick, and that included the general himself.
These debriefings do not confine themselves to a single session, even a long one. They last for days. It was on the second day that General Li was allowed to lapse into his area of true expertise – Kim’s missile programme, of which he had had overall charge. That was when he dropped his bombshell, possibly without knowing what it was. He was unsure how much the Western allies really knew, and unaware they knew less than they thought they did.
On the first day he had confirmed what Sir Adrian, at least, had warned of: the destruction of the nuclear testing site of Punggye-ri had been a ruse. It had certainly fooled the world media, who had announced with delight to their readers, listeners and viewers a major concession by North Korea.
In fact, the testing base was already a ruin, the general averred. A victim of over-drilling, bomb-testing and an earthquake, it was a collection of collapsed tunnels, caverns and galleries. Behind the access entrances sealed by explosive charges were mere piles of rubble and roof-fall.
He also confirmed that the much-hyped Hwasong-15 intercontinental ballistic missile was far too weak to carry the thermonuclear warhead that would make North Korea a true nuclear power.
It was on the second day that he revealed two things the West truly did not know. The first was that the dictator Kim Jong-un was weaker than they all suspected. General Li swore he was a front man, held in place by the so-called ‘selectorate’ of about 2,000 generals and senior bureaucrats. These were the ones who owned and ran the country, living in extreme luxury as the people starved. This allowed Kim to do what he did best – posture for the media, wave at the adoration of the proletariat and eat.
His second revelation was that the inadequacy of Hwasong-15 was not the end of the line for the Korean nuclear programme. Deep beneath a secret mountain, unspotted by the outside world, was another cavern, where, even as he spoke, its mighty successor, Hwasong-20, was being prepared. It would certainly carry their heaviest thermonuclear warhead to any destination on the surface of the world. All it lacked were the multistage engines, and these were due to be working and available at any time.
By the end of the first day of interrogation a second announced meeting between Kim and the American President had been cancelled by Washington, alleging bad faith.
On the evening of the second day Sir Adrian flew back to the United Kingdom. He had a lady to report to but, first, a little more research.
Chapter Seventeen
EVERY MAJOR CITY has its libraries where scholars may pore over records and ancient texts, but London is a researcher’s dream. Somewhere in that sprawling metropolis are archives covering everything man has ever thought, written or done since the first troglodyte emerged from his cave.
Some are in bright new libraries of steel, concrete and plate glass. Others are ancient cellars where the skulls of those who died in long-ago plagues stare back at the living as if to say: ‘We were here once. We lived, loved, fought, suffered, died. We are your history. Discover us, remember us.’
Sir Adrian settled upon the Royal United Services Institute, tucked away off Whitehall, close to the rolling Thames. The man he sought after diligent enquiries was, he thought, remarkably young. But then, again, they always were nowadays. Advancing age is merciless. Professor Martin Dixon was forty and had been studying missiles since he became obsessed by them in his early teens. That led to a study of both Koreas.
‘The North Korean regime’s appetite for nuclear weapons and missiles to carry them began over fifty years ago with the founding father, Kim Il-sung,’ he said. ‘After 1945, as a defeated Japan withdrew from the Korean peninsula, it was Joseph Stalin who personally selected the first Kim to create the communist state of North Korea and invade the South. Three years later, the Korean stalemate led to the permanent division of the peninsula.
‘By the time Kim Il-sung died in 1994, he had created the world’s first communist dynasty and was able to hand over to his son, Kim Jong-il. He had also established a code of absolute worship of him and his family among a people propagandized, brainwashed and trained like puppets to adore him and never, ever, question his near-divinity. To do that he had sealed North Korea from all external influences, creating today’s hermit state.
‘In the process he had realized that a small, almost barren state of twenty-three million people unable to be self-sufficient even in food could never be a world-feared power unless it had nuclear weapons and the missiles to launch them worldwide. That became the abiding obsession and remains so under his grandson. Everything – absolutely everything that North Korea is or could have been – has been sacrificed to that lust to threaten the world.’
‘And the missiles?’
‘First came the bomb, Sir Adrian,’ said the young scholar. ‘The Koreans, North and South, are extremely intelligent people. The North cracked technical problem after problem, refining enough uranium-235 and then plutonium to create their own atomic and now thermonuclear weapons to have today reserves of both. Every penny of foreign exchange resources went on that quest.
‘But it became plain that having an atomic bomb serves no purpose if you can only detonate it under your own backside. To be truly threatening
, and thus to be kowtowed to, you have to be able to deliver and detonate it many miles away. They imported rocket technology at first and built a range of missiles they called Musudan. These could carry modest-sized bombs in their warheads, but only across limited distances.
‘In the West, we watched them test the atom-bomb programme over and over again, always underground, until they had blasted huge holes all over the country. In parallel, the missile programme progressed from the Musudans to a new type of missile – much bigger payload, much longer range. As you know, these are called Hwasong.’
‘How far exactly have they got?’
‘Kim Jong-il carried on his father’s policies. The scientists pushed ahead with the Hwasong missile programme until the second Kim died, in 2011. There was a brief power struggle, but the dead dictator’s favoured son won by a mile. Fat, ugly, insisting on a bizarre haircut – it doesn’t matter. His ruthlessness is total, his obsession with himself absolute.
‘Since he came to power he has forged ahead with both bomb and missile programmes with increased speed and urgency. Test after test, launch after launch. They were incredibly expensive and many of them failures, and his behaviour has become more and more weird. It does not seem to matter. Trade sanctions are imposed, then relaxed. The fact is, the world is frightened of him.
‘The USA could snuff out him and his regime by a first-strike onslaught, and so could his vast neighbour and patron, China. But both fear he would detonate enough thermonuclear devices to devastate the entire peninsula and much of north-eastern China. So … the constant indulgences, the elevation to world-class statesman.
‘As for the missile programme, that is my particular study. The latest, with the biggest range and payload, is the Hwasong-15. It is huge, but not quite big enough to carry the thermonuclear warhead Kim Jong-un wants to install on it to any part of the world – and, in particular, Washington. You know about the defection of General Li Song-Rhee?’