During his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in July, Donald Trump doubled down on a well-worn riff about one of his administration’s major foreign policy achievements. Because he “got along very well” with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, he had convinced Kim to stop conducting ballistic missile and nuclear tests, claimed the former president. It’s “nice to get along with someone who has a lot of nuclear weapons,” he added.
It was a dovish aside during an otherwise hawkish speech. But it captures the extraordinary transformation of Trump’s public approach to North Korea. It’s a shift that, if Trump were to again win the presidency, could have profound consequences for peace on the Korean peninsula — and for the potential outbreak of nuclear war in East Asia.
Time may be running out. Some prominent observers believe that Kim, embittered by a lack of progress toward normalization with the United States, is preparing to launch an attack on Seoul. “The situation on the Korean Peninsula is more dangerous than it has been at any time since early June 1950,” two renowned Korea experts, Robert L. Carlin and Siegfried S. Hecker, wrote earlier this year. North Korea will use its nuclear arsenal in a surprise attack, say Carlin and Hecker. (Other analysts have been more skeptical.) Still, earlier this month, Kim threatened to use nuclear weapons against South Korea and the United States.
In 2017, many feared that such a war between the U.S. and North Korea was also likely. Harsh saber-rattling against Pyongyang dominated the early Trump presidency. Amid his administration’s strategy of “maximum pressure,” Trump threatened Kim — whom he nicknamed “little rocket man” — with “fire and fury like the world has never seen” if the country continued its missile launches. That same year, Trump ordered a top-to-bottom review of military options for North Korea; this included updating ultra-secret U.S. military plans for killing North Korean leadership as well as wholesale invasion and regime-change scenarios, according to Bob Woodward in his Trump-era book Rage. (The U.S. military has war plans for all kinds of scenarios, but these were distinct: precipitated by a president who seemed quite willing to strike Pyongyang, amid a deep crisis between the two nuclear-armed powers.)
Some of Trump’s ideas regarding North Korea were highly unconventional, to say the least. “Why don’t we take out the whole North Korean Army during one of their parades?” asked the former president, according to the new memoir from H.R. McMaster, who served as Trump’s national security advisor from February 2017 to April 2018. Trump reportedly even privately mulled dropping nuclear weapons on North Korea — and somehow blaming another actor for the strike. Then-Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis worried Trump’s policies toward Pyongyang could lead to “incinerat[ing] a couple million people,” according to Woodward in Rage.
Soon, however, Trump made an extraordinary about-face on North Korea, at least in public. In June 2018, amid warming ties, he met Kim in Singapore for the first-ever summit between a U.S. president and a North Korean leader. He later said that Kim had written him “beautiful letters” and that the two leaders had “fallen in love.” Another Trump-Kim tête-à-tête followed in Vietnam in 2019; Trump even briefly stepped onto North Korean soil for the third meeting between the two leaders later that year.
Now, with Trump running to reclaim the presidency, it’s unclear which Trump might materialize on North Korea policy, if he wins: the belligerent Trump who threatened “fire and fury” and a potential nuclear holocaust against Pyongyang, or the conciliatory Trump who exchanged “love letters” with the North Korean dictator.
“When President Trump is back in office, he will restore his peace-through-strength policies that secured peace around the globe,” Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt tells Rolling Stone.
Regardless, if elected again, Trump will inherit the U.S. military’s regime-change plans for North Korea, modernized during his own prior administration. But he will also inherit updated, ultra-secret plans for CIA assistance in any such invasion, according to three former CIA and U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the agency’s North Korea overhaul.
Then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo hinted at these revived plans in a 2017 talk at the Aspen Institute, where Pompeo also pointedly suggested the administration was mulling pathways to regime change in Pyongyang. CIA will “deliver a range of options that can do what ultimately needs to be achieved,” said Pompeo in Aspen.
When it came to North Korea, “I took it as my mission to build a set of clandestine capabilities that could be deployed in case the president found diplomacy and conventional military power insufficient,” Pompeo writes in his 2022 memoir Never Give an Inch. (Pompeo did not respond to a request for comment.)
But details of the CIA’s review of its role in a potential war with North Korea, and wider planning within the agency surrounding enhanced covert action in service of the administration’s “maximum pressure campaign,” have never been told.
The 2017 review, which was overseen by the CIA’s paramilitary Special Activities Center (SAC), did not begin auspiciously. Agency officials reached out to their counterparts at the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command-Korea (SOCKOR), which had developed war plans involving CIA paramilitaries and other special operations forces in case conflict were to erupt between the U.S. and North Korea.
But when CIA paramilitaries reviewed SOCKOR’s plans, they were “stunned,” recalled a former senior CIA official. They hadn’t been updated for decades. SOCKOR planners hadn’t even ever actually spoken with anyone at CIA about them.
And, to make matters worse, they “were just outright ludicrous,” recalled the former official. It was, “‘OK, so we’ll take three CIA people with us, and they’ll ride in the tank with us as we’re rolling through.’ And I’m like, that’s fucking dumb. That’s actually not going to happen. There were plans that were like, who the fuck thought this out, Wile E. Coyote?”
Further conversations with top SOCKOR officials did nothing to allay CIA paramilitaries’ fears about their plans. “Talking with one of the generals, he’s like, ‘We’ll just . . . rendezvous with the mountain people in North Korea because mountain people typically don’t get along with city dwellers in Pyongyang,” recalled the former official.
“And I said, this is not a spaghetti western movie… and you can’t just make a war plan based upon your hoping that the people you’re going to link up with in the mountains of North Korea are just going to roll in with you into Pyongyang,” said the former CIA official. “That sounds like a really bad bet. I hope you don’t go to fucking Las Vegas and spend all of your wife’s money.”
Some of the military’s plans were solid, but many seemed like they were the result of “too many martinis,” said the former official.
CIA paramilitaries also pried open, and overhauled, the CIA’s own in-house contingency plans in case of war with North Korea — its “holiest of secret plans,” said the former senior official.
These plans, too, had not been updated for decades, according to the former official, and had been left to molder over time. The attitude at Langley had been, “in case of emergency break glass and open up this book, and this is the operation,” recalled the former official. But these plans also had long been rendered obsolete — or were simply “nonsensical,” said the former official.
The authors of the North Korea overhaul tried to replace these archaic contingency plans with updated, viable wartime operations dealing with issues like emergency communications, according to the former official.
But to some, aspects of the CIA’s new Korea schemes were also outlandish. “Korea got weird, man,” said a former CIA contractor, who recalled “a variety of strange plans” emanating from CIA’s Special Activities Center at the time, many of them focused on penetrating North Korean tunnels and underground facilities. Some of “it was like, ‘Alright, 80 percent of you are gonna die, but then four of you might make it through,’ and so you’re like, what the fuck.”
Because these underground facilities were so difficult to gather intelligence on — say, via satellite imagery or drones — other suggestions for “weird” plans kept percolating, recalled the former CIA contractor, such as sending trained dogs underground to conduct reconnaissance and other missions alongside U.S. operatives in case of an invasion. “It was, how much can a dog haul? Can a dog carry ammo? I think they were even asking about [night-vision] goggles for dogs. We were like, ‘What the fuck, do you want us to chase down vets?’”
The CIA declined to comment on a list of detailed questions provided by Rolling Stone. The Pentagon referred all questions to CIA.
The agency’s North Korea overhaul dovetailed with a larger, previously-unreported CIA enterprise called the “Expeditionary Initiative.” The initiative, which was overseen by a senior CIA officer based in the agency’s Special Activities Center, was launched at the end of the Obama administration. One goal of the campaign was to try and develop ways of integrating new tech-focused and paramilitary capabilities across the agency, including outside of war zones, recalled former officials.
But as the Trump administration pursued its maximum pressure campaign against North Korea, punching at Pyongyang became a major focus of the Expeditionary Initiative, and the CIA’s paramilitary wing more broadly. Though couched as a broader campaign, it “didn’t take a fucking rocket scientist” to figure out that the initiative was focusing on worst-case scenario planning for North Korea, recalled the former CIA contractor.
Within the Expeditionary Initiative, the war-plan overhaul was complemented by aggressive new plotting to sabotage ships carrying illicit goods for Pyongyang, whose economy was then being choked by multilateral sanctions on key exports like coal and seafood, according to former officials.
Orders to do so came from the top. Trump believed that “maybe we need to go total old school against the North Koreans,” recalled the former senior agency official.
It is unclear to what extent the agency actually carried out its sabotage campaign against North Korean ships. The thinking was, “let’s at least train for that, in case we need to do it,” recalled the same former CIA official. (In Never Give An Inch, Pompeo brags elliptically about how as CIA director he altered the “rules of engagement” for agency paramilitaries in Syria and other unnamed countries.)
The sabotage plotting was a small, if key, component of the administration’s much-broader maximum pressure campaign against Pyongyang at the time, which included employing overt diplomatic and financial levers of U.S. power, as well as covert intelligence-led efforts, recalled another senior CIA official.
“All the options were on the table” when it came to North Korea, said the former official, “including some that we looked at, and you’re like, ‘Goddamn, that’s pretty spicy.’” Sabotage operations were “5 percent of the overall effort” against Pyongyang — but it was integral to the larger maximum pressure campaign, according to the former official.
“All that was [part] of what we were doing because — stopping a coal ship, well, you could stop a coal ship in a hell of a lot of different ways,” said the former official, who declined to provide further details about the potential covert action campaign.
One senior Trump administration official expressed disappointment in the lack of covert disruption or sabotage of North Korean ships during Trump’s prior tenure in the White House. “We looked at a lot of those things. . . . We had various technologies that could do that, but never could get the decision to actually do it,” recalled the former official. “Trump talks a big game a lot, but in terms of really making a hardcore decision to pull a trigger, he was very reticent.”
Still, the maximum pressure campaign didn’t cease when Trump began gushing over Kim in public — far from it, according to the second former senior CIA official. “We were getting the guidance to amp it up, and really calibrate it the president’s negotiations,” recalled the former official. It was, “‘Hey, we’re gonna negotiate with the kid, let’s bring as much heat as we can, to give the president as much leverage as we can.’”
During the Trump era, the CIA helped identify and interdict millions in illicit goods (such as coal) being secretly exported by North Korea; or other goods (like oil, and luxury products such as caviar) being smuggled into the country, according to the former official. The agency also helped seize money from sanctions-busting North Korean overseas construction and fishing conglomerates. “We were pounding them,” said the former official.
But Trump’s favorite part of the CIA’s campaign? Freezing North Korean funds from U.S. companies unwittingly doing business with Pyongyang — and then quietly letting those firms keep the money, according to the former official. In these cases, U.S. officials would swoop in, inform the shocked American firms about the true identity of the end-user of their products, and return the firms’ goods, which U.S. officials had seized before they made their way to North Korea.
The American companies thus recouped their products and kept North Korea’s payment for them. “Trump loved [that] the most,” said the former official, who estimated these U.S. companies ultimately pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars in illicit North Korean funds.
Ultimately, the CIA-led campaign — which had notched some successes — faced difficult headwinds. The CIA had helped claw back a million here and there from Pyongyang, recalled the former senior official. But by 2018, North Korean hackers began “knocking over Crypto exchanges left and right” — in one case netting hundreds of millions of dollars in a single heist, recalled the former official. The CIA’s covert battle became increasingly Sisyphean.
Whether a newly-elected Trump offers Kim Jong Un the gun or the olive branch, he would be reckoning with a North Korea that’s learned a few things since his last stint in office. Even if the CIA’s war and sabotage plans for North Korea haven’t changed, “Maximum Pressure 2.0” won’t look the same as it did during Trump’s first term.
