Kim Jong Un has played Donald Trump ‘like a fiddle,’ Ex-CIA Chief says

Former CIA Director John Brennan has blasted President Donald Trump’s criticism of his own intelligence community, claiming it has allowed foreign leaders like North Korea’s Kim Jong Un to play him “like a fiddle.”

The assessment from Brennan, who has been a fierce critic of the president, came on a day in which the president launched an extraordinary attack on United States intelligence chiefs. Responding to the attack, Brennan said the president’s actions posed a danger to the U.S.

“Your refusal to accept the unanimous assessment of U.S. Intelligence on Iran, North Korea, ISIS, Russia, & so much more shows the extent of your intellectual bankruptcy,” Brennan wrote on Twitter. “All Americans, especially members of Congress, need to understand the danger you pose to our national security.” Trump, Brennan said, “should be ashamed of himself” over the comments, “but I know he knows no shame.”

Brennan later appeared on MSNBC’s Hardball and was asked for specific ways that Trump’s ignoring of intelligence concerned him. “I don’t think he understands the complexities of the problems associated with North Korea’s nuclear program,” he told host Chris Matthews. “We have not gotten anything from the North Koreans.

“Kim Jong Un has demonstrated just how easy it is to play Donald Trump like a fiddle, which is what he has done, and there’s going to be another summit, and I think he has been duped by Kim Jong Un,” Brennan added.

North Korea has not conducted any missile tests since Trump became the first sitting U.S. president to sit down with a North Korean leader last June. However, experts have noted that Trump emerged from the historic summit with no firm commitment for North Korean denuclearization. Trump and Kim are set to sit down for a second summit next month.

[Newsweek]

Trump disputes US intelligence on North Korea

President Trump continues to plan a second summit meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un – date and location to be determined – and expresses confidence that Kim is committed to junking his nuclear weapons programs.

The U.S. intelligence community does not share that optimism.

During her Senate testimony, CIA Director Gina Haspel said the evidence shows that North Korea “is committed to developing a long-range nuclear-armed missile that would pose a direct threat to the United States.”

Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said that, while Kim is expressing “openness” to the idea of eliminating weapons of mass destruction, “we currently assess that North Korea will seek to retain its WMD capabilities, and is unlikely to completely give up its nuclear weapons and production capabilities.”

In tweets, Trump said the U.S. relationship with North Korea is “the best it has ever been.” He said they have stopped nuclear testing, and claimed a “decent chance of Denuclearization.”

Saying “I look forward to seeing Kim Jong Un shortly,” Trump claimed “progress (is) being made-big difference!” 

[USA Today]

North Korea reminds citizens they will be killed for watching South Korean TV

North Korea has been trumpeting its thawing relations with South Korea, with images of Kim Jong Un meeting his counterpart Moon Jae-in shown in state-controlled media. But that doesn’t mean its punishments will be any less harsh for citizens who dare to watch TV programs from across the border. People who commit that crime can still face prison, labor camp, or death, as police officials have been reminding residents during lectures in the South Hwanghae province this month.

Radio Free Asia recently reported on the lectures, in which officials demanded that residents “abstain from watching decadent video materials of capitalism … that have found their way in from the South,” according to one source.

Those materials can reach North Koreans in a variety of ways, including via black markets and even the skies above. South Korean activists have long used balloons to carry leaflets deriding North Korea’s government and USB flash drives loaded with South Korean soap operas. Such shows can reveal to North Koreans how much better off their southern counterparts are.

North Koreans close to the border with South Korea can also receive broadcast signals from the south by manipulating frequencies on their TVs.

The police, in their lectures, have reminded people that anyone, regardless of their status, will be punished. In 2014, 10 officials of the ruling party were reportedly executed for watching South Korean soap operas.

[Quartz]

What to keep in mind with anticipated second summit

As a State Department official, Joel Wit participated in face-to-face talks with North Korea, and in 1999 led the first American nuclear inspection. Now a senior fellow at the Henry L. Stimson Center and director of the 38North project, he shares his opinion:

With a second summit between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un expected in late February … a North Korean pledge to denuclearize will be eyed warily in the West. Verification will require more than just photos snapped by orbiting spy satellites. The United States will need to send inspectors on the ground to ensure Kim’s regime is living up to its word. I know from personal experience that will not be an easy task. Here are some lessons I learned:

1.Mutual distrust runs deep.
2.Assemble the right team – [Back in 1999] a team of 10 inspectors was assembled quickly. It included scientists from American nuclear weapons labs but was dominated by a contingent of intelligence analysts. Because the North Koreans were allergic to anything that smacked of spying, we tried to hide the identities of the intelligence contingent by issuing new diplomatic passports to everyone, standard procedure for State Department employees. However, the North Koreans were not fooled. Once we arrived, one of our escorts — an old Foreign Ministry friend — asked me in private with a wry smile, “Why are all of the team’s diplomatic passports completely new except yours?” Nothing more was said, at least not initially.
3.Set detailed ground rules – Then, the details of what the team could inspect had to be worked out with the North Koreans. Talks almost collapsed over the North’s suspicions that a high-tech laser device we wanted to use to measure tunnels was really meant to secretly gather intelligence.
4.Know what to look for – American intelligence agencies had been watching [the nuclear site] for months so we had a great deal of information on activities at the site. Days before leaving for Asia, analysts from the Defense Intelligence Agency who believed North Korea was cheating briefed our team. They rattled off secret information they thought proved the site was intended to house a secret nuclear facility. That information covered everything from satellite photography to calculations on the volume of dirt piles near the suspected site that helped them reach conclusions about the size of the underground areas. It was impressive but proved wrong.
5.Expect the unexpected (and be prepared to deal with it).
6.Inspections can’t guarantee compliance – Inspections can reduce uncertainty but not eliminate it. The trick for any American president will be to judge whether uncertainty warrants breaking the deal or whether U.S. security is better served by keeping it.
7.Build trust. – The most important lesson is that verifying a denuclearization deal between Washington and Pyongyang will be impossible without trust-building and reconciliation between the two countries. North Korea will not be a defeated country. Its cooperation will be essential. That will only happen if there is a denuclearization deal that also paves the path away from Cold War confrontation toward an improving relationship with the United States.

[Read full NPR article]

US and North Korean spies have held secret talks for the past decade

The Washington Post reports that U.S. intelligence officials have met with North Korean counterparts secretly for a decade, a covert channel that allowed communications during tense times, aided in the release of detainees and helped pave the way for President Trump’s historic summit last year with Kim Jong-un.

The secret channel between the CIA and spies from America’s bitter adversary include two  missions to Pyongyang during the Obama administration by the then deputy CIA Director Michael Morell.

The channel appears to have gone dormant late in the Obama administration. Mike Pompeo re-energized it while CIA director, sending an agency officer to meet with North Korean counterparts in Singapore in August 2017. By early 2018, a whirlwind of secret and public talks were underway.

The U.S. and North Korea have never had diplomatic relations and don’t maintain embassies in each other’s capitals. They have long exchanged messages through the North Korean U.N. mission in New York. In contrast, before the new era of summits, the intelligence channel was a way to communicate directly with regime hard-liners.

North Korea’s key interlocutor was Gen. Kim Yong Chol, former head of Pyongyang’s Reconnaissance General Bureau spy agency. Now the senior North Korean negotiator, he met last Friday with President Trump and Secretary of State Pompeo.

[Washington Post]

Trump’s dual Korean challenges

The White House announced on Friday that President Trump will meet with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, in late February. A White House official said the date and the location of the meeting would be announced later.

The announcement came after a 90-minute meeting in the Oval Office between President Trump and Kim Yong-chol, a former North Korean intelligence chief, who has acted as the top nuclear negotiator for Kim Jong-un.

Meanwhile, President Trump’s demands that South Korea take on far more costs for hosting U.S. troops is straining the alliance and potentially playing into North Korea’s hands ahead of a second summit.

South Korea has about 28,500 U.S. troops on more than 20 sites and paid $855 million last year toward the total $2B cost. But the cost-sharing pact expired at the end of last year after 10 rounds of negotiations that left — in the words of one foreign ministry official in Seoul — a “huge gap” between both sides.

South Korean lawmakers and experts worry that Trump is so obsessed with Seoul paying more that he could take the previously unthinkable step of withdrawing some troops if a deal is not reached. That would be an indirect gift to North Korean leader Kim, undermining one of the most important cards the United States has during negotiations over North Korea’s nuclear program, experts say.

South Korean lawmakers called Trump’s demand unacceptable. Many members of Moon’s administration began their political careers as left-wing pro-democracy student activists, who were inclined to see the U.S. troop presence as more motivated by American strategic interests than South Korea’s views.

In “Fear,” Bob Woodward’s account of the Trump White House, the U.S. president is described as being obsessed with the cost of the U.S. troop presence, angrily threatening to pull them out on more than one occasion. At various times, he was talked down by a host of insiders, including former defense secretary Jim Mattis, former secretary of state Rex Tillerson and Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Victor Cha, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said, “There’ll be nothing to filter what Trump wants to do, nothing to filter a very uniformed view on how he wants things done.”

[From a Washington Post analysis]