[Correspondent’s Column] CIA Director’s comments show the insignificance of timelines on North Korea’s nuclear advancement

Posted on : 2018-01-28 17:45 KST Modified on : 2019-10-19 20:29 KST
Mike Pompeo said that President Trump is hoping for a diplomatic solution to NK nuclear issue
CIA Director Mike Pompeo gives a lecture at the American Enterprise Institute
CIA Director Mike Pompeo gives a lecture at the American Enterprise Institute

An article that Mark Seddon, a lecturer in international affairs at Columbia University, published with the Guardian on Dec. 4 caused quite a stir. According to Seddon, the CIA had told US President Donald Trump that he had three months in which to act to halt North Korea’s program to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM). Seddon was quoting John Bolton, a hardliner on North Korea who had served as US Ambassador to the UN under former President George W. Bush. This was early in December 2017, so nearly half of those three months are already over.

Even though Seddon’s article was several degrees removed from the source, some South Korean newspapers tried to stoke a sense of crisis by claiming that the US might carry out a preemptive strike on North Korea after this “deadline” passed in three months. Subsequently, they treated Seddon’s claim as a fact, without providing the source or the quotation, and leveled criticism at the current government for not taking any action.

More recently, Mike Pompeo, the director of the CIA, was taken to task during an interview with CBS This Morning on Jan. 22. When the host Norah O'Donnell

asked Pompeo how close Kim Jong-un was to gaining the ability to launch a nuclear attack on the US mainland, Pompeo said he was a “handful of months” away. But when O'Donnell pressed Pompeo, pointing out that he had said the same thing about six months ago, Pompeo was forced to admit that that was true. “I hope to be able to say it a year from now as well... The United States government is working diligently to extend that timeline.”

On Jan. 23, the next day, Pompeo delivered a public lecture at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a US think tank. During the opening remarks of this lecture, which lasted for about 15 minutes, he once again explained his remarks during the interview the previous day. “I had said the same thing several months before that. I want everyone to understand that we are working diligently to make sure that a year from now I can still tell you they are several months away from having that capacity,” he said. He had basically acknowledged that “a handful of months” was a rhetorical expression designed to emphasize the speed of North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons and missiles.

During the Q&A session, Pompeo was asked a question from the exact opposite angle: whether a year from now it would be acceptable for Pyongyang to be a few months away from completing their nuclear weapon and missile development. The point of this question was to determine whether the goal of the US’s policy on the North Korean nuclear issue is not denuclearization but rather just freezing the program.

Pompeo said that that was not the case. “US policy is that we’re going to [force North Korea to] denuclearize permanently… I want to say this, too: We often focus on timelines because it’s simple. It’s not the way we ought to think about it.” This means that, even inside the government, timelines are not taken that seriously.

There’s a simple reason why the timeline of “three months” or “a handful of months” prompted so many questions and why Pompeo spent so much time answering them. Intelligence agencies depend on their credibility, and Pompeo’s remark could erode trust in the CIA, just like the boy who cried wolf.

“We’re in a much better place today than we were 12 months ago [when Trump became president]. We are still suffering from having gaps” between what is unknown and what needs to be known, Pompeo ultimately confessed.

 a conservative US think tank
a conservative US think tank

Probably few would disagree that the speed of North Korea’s nuclear weapon and missile development last year defied expectations. But even the CIA can’t predict down to the month when North Korea will reach a point of technical completion.

Pompeo may have expressed his main point when he said, “The president is intent on delivering this solution through diplomatic means. It is the focus. It has been uniformly that for now 365 days.” At the least, that was the real “news” uttered by Pompeo, who is regarded as a hardliner on North Korea.

 

By Yi Yong-in, Washington correspondent

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]

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