By Jim Geraghty
Friday, September 05, 2025
This morning, New York Times national
correspondent Dave Philipps and freelance contributor Matthew Cole unveiled one of the most dramatic scoops about U.S. covert
military operations in a long while when they wrote about a 2019 aborted
mission of U.S. Navy SEALs on North Korean soil, aiming to install an
electronic listening device:
A group of Navy SEALs emerged from
the ink-black ocean on a winter night in early 2019 and crept to a rocky shore
in North Korea. They were on a top secret mission so complex and consequential
that everything had to go exactly right. . . .
The mission had the potential to
provide the United States with a stream of valuable intelligence. But it meant
putting American commandos on North Korean soil — a move that, if detected, not
only could sink negotiations but also could lead to a hostage crisis or an
escalating conflict with a nuclear-armed foe. . . .
For the operation, the military
chose SEAL Team 6’s Red Squadron — the same unit that killed Osama bin Laden.
The SEALs rehearsed for months, aware that every move needed to be perfect. But
when they reached what they thought was a deserted shore that night, wearing
black wet suits and night-vision goggles, the mission swiftly unraveled.
A North Korean boat appeared out of
the dark. Flashlights from the bow swept over the water. Fearing that they had
been spotted, the SEALs opened fire. Within seconds, everyone on the North
Korean boat was dead.
The SEALs retreated into the sea
without planting the listening device.
The 2019 operation has never been
publicly acknowledged, or even hinted at, by the United States or North Korea.
. . .
Several of those people said they
were discussing details about the mission because they were concerned that
Special Operations failures are often hidden by government secrecy. If the
public and policymakers become aware only of high-profile successes, such as
the raid that killed bin Laden in Pakistan, they may underestimate the extreme
risks that American forces undertake.
What’s more, deep in the article, Philipps and Cole
reveal a second secret U.S. mission on North Korean soil. “In 2005, SEALs used
a mini-sub to go ashore in North Korea and leave unnoticed, according to people
familiar with the mission. The 2005 operation, carried out during the
presidency of George W. Bush, has never before been reported publicly.”
The U.S. conducted operations in enemy territory during the Korean War, but sneaking into
North Korea undetected and getting out represents an exceptionally difficult
and dangerous task. Philipps and Cole write that the Times “proceeds
cautiously when reporting on classified military operations. The Times has
withheld some sensitive information on the North Korea mission that could
affect future Special Operations and intelligence-gathering missions.”
Anna Fiefield’s The Great Successor: The Divinely Perfect Destiny of
Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un is about as good a portrait of modern
North Korea as you’re going to find, down to accounts of Kim’s partying with
former NBA star Dennis Rodman. To put it mildly, just about everyone in North
Korea who isn’t named Kim Jong-un lives in perpetual mortal terror of
dissatisfying, irking, or appearing disloyal to Kim. No one speaks their mind,
which makes it even tougher to learn what high-level officials are really
thinking, or what they really believe.
A huge priority of the U.S. national-security
establishment is knowing, and understanding, what a foreign leader is thinking.
Foreign leaders, particularly dictators, bluster, bluff, and exaggerate their
capabilities all the time. But if the consequences of overestimating a rival’s
hostile intentions are bad, the consequences of underestimating them are even
more dire. History is full of secretly plotted sneak attacks, from Pearl Harbor
to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia to the Yom Kippur War to
the Hamas attack on October 7.
And sometimes the North Korean regime’s idea of
saber-rattling is to pull out the saber and stab somebody. In 2010, North Korea
fired artillery shells toward the South Korean island of Yeonpyeongdo, killing
civilians. That same year, a South Korean warship, the Cheonan, sank in
the Yellow Sea, killing 46 sailors. South Korea accused North Korea of
torpedoing the ship; the North Koreans denied responsibility.
Back in 2017, Politico laid out all the different ways that North
Korea is a particularly difficult and thorny target for U.S.
intelligence-gathering operations:
The U.S. collects intelligence on
foreign nations and terrorist groups primarily using human spies, electronic
eavesdropping, cyber espionage and spy satellites. And each is especially
difficult in North Korea for various reasons, say those with direct experience.
One is the lack of diplomatic or
commercial relationships, said Bruce Klingner, who spent 20 years at the CIA
and DIA before joining the Heritage Foundation.
“We obviously don’t blend well into
North Korea, and even South Korea has difficulty running agents, because of
differences in dialect and pronunciation,” Klingner said. “Any strangers stand
out, so in a country where people will report on their families and neighbors,
certainly any stranger will get reported.” . . .
North Korea is probably the most
restrictive human environment in the world. It’s far more restrictive certainly
than pre-war Syria or Iran, more restrictive than China or Burma,” said Andrew
Peek, a former Army intelligence officer and fellow at the Clements Center for
National Security, a nonpartisan research center at the University of Texas at
Austin. “I think we have less granularity on North Korea than we do on Syria or
Iran. There’s very little osmosis in or out.”
Gathering intelligence through
electronic means — in military parlance, signals intelligence — is also
restricted because of the limited technology, internet access and cellphone use
inside North Korea. And those who do use computer networks in North Korea,
including government officials, use strong encryption. . . .
When Xi Jinping hosted foreign leaders for that big
military parade in Beijing earlier this week, the presence of Vladimir Putin (and their chit-chat about longer human lifespans) was front
and center; less attention was paid to the presence of Kim Jong-un. (Even less
attention was paid to President Trump characterizing the trio as anti-American conspirators.
Whatever you think of Trump’s foreign policy, it’s easy to understand why he
would seethe over the three dictators, who Trump surely believes he has been
exceptionally nice to, getting together and not-so-subtly declaring that the
era of American geopolitical supremacy is over.)
Since returning to the Oval Office, Trump’s
administration has been forced to focus upon the potential or ongoing
foreign-policy crises of Iran, Israel, Gaza, Russia and Ukraine, China, India and Pakistan, and now it appears Venezuela as well. If the world had a hotline for
international crises, it would probably be answering, “All circuits are busy
now, please try again later.” So while this is the same generally hostile,
secretive, paranoid North Korean regime we’ve always known and worried about,
it’s shifted to the back burner, at least for now.
With that said, in late August, Trump met with South
Korean President Lee Jae Myung, and announced he intended to have another summit with Kim
Jong-un:
I will do that. And we’ll have
talks. He’d like to meet with me. He didn’t want to meet with Biden because he
had no respect for Biden. But we look forward to meeting with him. And uh,
we’ll make relations better. You’ll help that. You had a lot of leaders. I’ve
gone through a lot of leaders in South Korea.
The South Korean president favors outreach to the North Korean
regime, and welcomed the prospect of another Trump-Kim summit:
The only remaining divided nation
in the world is the Korean Peninsula. And I would like to ask for your role in
establishing peace on the Korean Peninsula. So I look forward to your meeting
with chairman Kim Jong Un and construction of a Trump Tower in North Korea and
playing golf at that place. I believe he will be waiting for you. Korea was
able to attain economic growth and development through our ironclad alliance.
Those comments came about a month after North Korean state media quoted the
dictator’s sister Kim Yo Jong declaring that a resumption of dialogue with
Washington was possible and that the “personal relationship between our head of
state and the present U.S. president is not bad.” But she also added that any
U.S. attempt to persuade her country to give up its nuclear weapons would be
regarded as “nothing but a mockery.”
As Kim’s trip to Beijing and increasingly close military
partnership with Russia demonstrates, North Korea isn’t as isolated as its
“hermit kingdom” nickname would suggest. You don’t need a secretly implanted
surveillance device to understand that a changing international order with China and Russia on the rise,
and the U.S. and other Western democracies on the decline, works out just swell
for Kim Jong-un.
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