Full Force and Effect

18

President of the United States Jack Ryan would have normally called in his entire National Security Council to discuss a situation as important as the capture of the material for weapons of mass destruction on its way to North Korea, and he had intended to do just that. But when his chief of staff, Arnie Van Damm, contacted both Director of National Intelligence Mary Pat Foley and Director of the CIA Jay Canfield, he’d received requests from both to delay the meeting for a few hours while they worked on something that would be crucial to providing the President with a bigger and better picture of what was going on.

One does not normally tell POTUS “No” when he asks for a meeting, but Van Damm knew Ryan would have no problem allowing his top intelligence community officials more time to do necessary work, so he pushed the meeting back until nine a.m. the next day. The only problem with this from a scheduling standpoint was that the President had to fly to London for a NATO conference on Russia first thing in the morning.

They could have conducted the meeting via video conference, as Air Force One had the secure telecom necessary to keep the President in touch with Washington wherever he flew, but Mary Pat made the last-minute decision to go to Andrews early in the morning and fly along to Europe with her President so she could present her material in person. Mary Pat had known Jack for more than thirty years, and more than any public figure she had ever worked with, she knew how much he enjoyed rolling up his sleeves and putting his hands on the intelligence itself.

She had an objective with today’s meeting, and she knew she’d get a lot further with POTUS if he understood and agreed with all the intelligence she presented, and taking the flights to London and back would be a small price to pay for having his undivided attention for an hour or so.

Ryan agreed to the private conference with Mary Pat in the President’s office on Air Force One. The full National Security Council meeting could wait — for now.

As the plane taxied to the runway, Ryan sat at his desk working on some early-morning paperwork. He heard a knock at the open door next to him, and he looked up to see Arnie Van Damm.

“Aren’t you supposed to strap in for takeoff?” Ryan asked.

“Aren’t you?” Ryan’s desk chair had a seat belt, but it dangled off the side.

He said, “I’ve been doing this so long, I have it down to a science. Right when I hear us go throttle up I buckle up and clear my desk.” He snatched his coffee cup with a smile. “Then I grab my coffee so it doesn’t spill.”

Van Damm entered the room and sat in the chair across from the desk. It, too, had a seat belt. “For a guy who hates flying, I’d say you’ve got the hang of it.”

Ryan just chuckled and looked back down to his papers. He could tell they were still taxiing, and would be for another few minutes. “What’s up?”

Arnie said, “Secret Service wants to talk to you again about Mexico City.”

Ryan shook his head without looking up. “We’ve talked. I’m not canceling. They need to drop it.”

Arnie was the only member of Ryan’s staff who regularly argued with his boss. “I think you should reconsider. We’ve got some outs, don’t worry about that. Lots of problems in Asia and Ukraine that need attention. President Lopez will forgive you if you send regrets.”

Now Ryan did look up. “No, Arnie. I’m going. What’s Secret Service’s specific argument against the trip?”

“Well, I think they want to talk to you to make their case in person.”

“I’m asking you.”

“It’s the Maldonado thing.”

The President waved it away. “That was six months ago.”

“They are concerned that—”

Ryan called out to the hallway next to his office. “Andrea, can you come in here a second?”

His lead protection agent, Andrea Price O’Day, was in the room in two seconds. “Yes, sir?”

“I’d like to ask you to pistol-whip Arnie for me, but I bet you’ll give me some song and dance about you having rules against that.”

Andrea laughed and looked to Van Damm. “How about I just keep a close eye on him for now? He looks pretty harmless.”

Ryan said, “What’s this about you guys not wanting me to go to Mexico?”

Andrea replied, “That’s not me, Mr. President. I understand our threats and assessment advance division had some concerns.”

Ryan shrugged. “So as far as you’re concerned, I should go?”

“Didn’t say that, either. As far as I’m concerned, you’d never leave the White House. But it’s not my call to make, Mr. President.”

Ryan drummed his fingers on his desk for a moment. Then he said, “I’m going. I don’t duck and cover because some Mexican cartel psycho scumbag in the mountains goes on Twitter and threatens me. The office of the President is too important to show any reaction to a two-bit thug like that.”

Arnie said, “But—”

Ryan cut him off. “If Secret Service wants a meeting, I’ll give it to them, but only out of respect. I have no plans of canceling that trip. Tell them that, maybe they can save us both some time.”

He looked at Andrea. She nodded. As far as she was concerned, the matter was settled. “I’ll be right there with you.”

“Then everything will be fine.” O’Day returned to her seat, and Ryan looked back to Arnie. “We’re about five seconds from throttle up. You’d better fasten your seat belt.” Both men reached for their seat belts just as the massive 747 began to vibrate.

Right after takeoff at seven-fifteen a.m. Ryan sent down for his intelligence chief, who was just finishing an apple bran muffin and a cup of coffee in the senior staff meeting room while she worked on her iPad. She climbed the steps to the President’s office and found Ryan sitting behind his desk. He wore a dress shirt and a tie, but over that he wore his dark blue Air Force One flight jacket. He beckoned her over to a small rectangular conference table and grabbed a stack of papers from his desk. When he started to a chair opposite her, she reached out and pulled the chair around to her side of the table.

“Mind if we sit next to each other? I have to show you some things on my tablet.”

“As long as it doesn’t get back to Ed,” he joked.

Mary Pat laughed and they both sat down. More coffee was poured for them while they got settled.

Ryan asked, “Have you seen the reaction from the North Koreans about the interdiction of the Emerald Endeavor?”

Foley shook her head. “I missed it. I haven’t had a chance to turn on the TV.”

Ryan said, “Any guesses as to the wording?”

“I don’t know, something like ‘This illegal interdiction is an act of war perpetrated by America.’”

Ryan looked down at this morning’s Presidential Daily Brief, which contained an abbreviated transcript of the North Korean ambassador’s remarks from the evening before. He read it silently, then said, “Pretty good, Mary Pat.” He read from the transcript. “‘We regard this unlawful interception by the U.S. as an act of war.’”

Mary Pat waved away Ryan’s compliment. “Easy guess. It’s always the same with these guys.”

“So, what do we know about the material found? Definitely components to a missile?”

“Definitely. These tubes are the exact specs of a Dongfeng-3A. It is a Chinese single-stage medium-range nuclear ballistic missile.”

Ryan was confused. “Chinese? That doesn’t make sense. The Chinese could truck them over the border. Why would they sail them out into international waters where they could be interdicted?”

Foley replied, “The Chinese didn’t make them or deliver them.”

“But you just said—”

“These are knockoffs.”

Jack cocked his head. “Counterfeit?”

“Yes. They are exact reproductions of the tubes used for the fuselage of the DF-3A Chinese medium-range missiles. But these were made by a private aerospace company in France called Précision Aéro Toulouse.”

“That’s interesting. Why?”

“The theory we have is this: We all know the North Koreans are having problems fielding a long-range ICBM because their Taepodong-2, the closest one they have to being ready, keeps failing, either between first and second stage or between second- and third-stage separation. That means something could be wrong with the second stage they are using.”

“Right. Go on.”

Mary Pat slid her iPad along the table to where Jack could see it and she began scrolling through several photos and diagrams of missiles. Each picture was labeled and time-stamped and captioned, and Ryan saw some of the photos were from open-source intel, and others were from top-secret sources.

“The second stage they are using now is taken from their Rodong medium-range ballistic missile. Basically they just slapped a single-stage rocket into the middle of their three-stage rocket, and it’s not working out for them.”

“Imagine that.”

“Rocket science is tough,” Mary Pat said with a chuckle. “But what we know is the Chinese are doing something similar with their long-range missiles. They use their Dongfeng-3A single-stage rocket as the second stage of their long-range ICBM.”

“And the North Koreans want to use the Dongfeng on their Taepodong-2?”

“It appears so. Back in the early nineties the Chinese gave the North Koreans one Dongfeng-3A missile. They never deployed it, they just took it apart to cobble pieces together in their own equipment. Now that China has refused to give Choi the ICBM technology that he wants, we think they are using this French aerospace firm to build replicas of the Dongfeng-3A.”

“Off Chinese plans?” Ryan asked.

“We don’t think so. We think this company in France actually reengineered these missile components by using the tube of the one Dongfeng-3A in the North Koreans’ possession.”

Jack looked over the photos of the tubes pulled off the Emerald Endeavor. “Wow.”

Mary Pat said, “‘Wow’ is right. In order to reengineer these tubes, they would have had to have built proprietary tools and high-tech machines.”

Ryan said the obvious. “And that didn’t come cheap.”

“Not cheap at all. We’ve spent the past couple of days looking into this. Précision Aéro received a payment of seventeen million euros eight and a half months ago. That’s nearly twenty-five million U.S. dollars.”

Ryan sipped his coffee. “Should it bother us North Korea has twenty-five million U.S. to drop on a project as speculative as this?”

“It bothers me. We don’t know what all they expected for that payment, or what all Précision Aéro has already shipped them.”

“We need to find out. Have we talked with the French government?”

“No, and there’s a problem with doing that. We need to go carefully so they don’t know we are looking into the bank accounts of one of their companies. Anyway, I know what they will say. The deal wasn’t done with the North Koreans. It was with a shell company out of Luxembourg.”

Ryan sighed, looking again at the tubes taken from the Emerald Endeavor. “This equipment must violate international nonproliferation treaties.”

“That’s debatable.”

Ryan turned to Mary Pat, and she put her hands up quickly. “I’m not debating it. Of course the commerce in these kinds of ‘dual-use’ parts should be banned by international treaty, but companies make the argument that as long as it is not overtly going to end users who are going to make ICBMs, then it should be fair game. There are enough private satellite companies on earth today to where firms like Précision Aéro can dip their toe into weapons proliferation with plausible deniability.”

Ryan rubbed his eyes under his glasses. “I’ll call the French president and let him know what we know. I’ll play it like we got tipped off. He might not believe me, but he won’t be able to challenge me.”

Foley said, “The real issue here, Mr. President, is not the material we found on board the Emerald Endeavor. It is the fact North Korea had the hard currency to buy this material on the world market in the first place.”

“I can tell by that look on your face you know something.”

“I do. CIA has been working on North Korean banking practices for a while now, and this fits right in with this new information. We traced the payment to Précision Aéro back to a bank account in Dubai. There was thirteen million in the account even after the purchase.”

“What is North Korea doing with that kind of cash?”

“We have a theory, and this is why Jay and I weren’t able to meet with you yesterday. We’ve been working on this for three days solid, even before the Emerald Endeavor.”

Ryan leaned closer. “Tell me.”

“Mr. President, there is strong evidence North Korea has restarted production on their rare earth mineral mine at Chongju.”

Ryan just said, “Shit.”

Mary Pat continued, “Analysts at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency say there are indications that the rare earth mine in the northwest of the nation is up and running again. Further, they think it is happening without Chinese help.”

Ryan said, “The Chinese were booted from that mine a few months back.”

“A year ago now, yes. Our contacts in China report no change in that relationship, so we find it curious the North Koreans are advancing with the program there. Especially because there is evidence they are actually building up the capacity to process the rare earth ore into refined materials. That’s something light-years ahead of the current level of DPRK sophistication. Even the Chinese had planned on processing the ore at refineries in China.”

“Do the Chinese know the DPRK is going around them?”

“Virtually all of what we know about facts on the ground in North Korea comes from the Chinese, either intercepted communications, the odd HUMINT asset, or open sources. We see nothing about Chongju in any of these resources, so we feel the Chinese are in the dark on this, for now at least.”

Ryan asked, “Do you have the NGA images?”

Mary Pat had learned long ago to expect Ryan to ask to see primary intelligence. She began flipping pages on her tablet, displaying a series of overhead shots of a cluster of buildings.

“What do you think?” Mary Pat asked after a moment.

“I think I’m glad we’ve got analysts at NGA to decipher this for us. I see the strip mine, obviously, but all the tanks and buildings look like they could belong to just about any sort of factory.”

Mary Pat reached to the tablet computer and brought up another page. On it were two images. One was captioned “Chongju dam” and the other “LAMP.”

“The one on the left is the ore-processing facility in North Korea. We are calling it ‘Chongju dam’ because that is the closest named structure, it’s just north of Chongju and west of the mine. And the image here is of the LAMP rare earth — processing plant in Malaysia. Look at the oxidation tanks in both photos.”

Ryan looked them over and agreed the two installations were very similar.

Mary Pat said, “We learned from Chinese intercepts last year that Chongju could bring North Korea as much as twelve trillion dollars in hard assets in the next two to three decades. With that kind of a potential haul, it’s no big surprise they found someone new to help them build and run it.”

Ryan said, “And that someone new is paying them in hard currency for the opportunity. And that connects this to the missile tubes on the Emerald Endeavor.”

Foley nodded. “Right. The North Koreans are taking the offshore money they are getting for future mineral rights and they are using it to buy the ballistic missile technology they need to make their ICBMs operational, because the one thing they do not yet have is an ICBM that can reach the continental United States.”

Ryan almost mumbled to himself. “A matter of time.”

“Yes. It is a cold fact of economics that if North Korea manages to earn just a fraction of the money we think they can earn from that rare earth mineral mine, then they will be able to buy the technology and expertise they need to threaten us.”

Ryan said, “So often in diplomacy, there is a tendency to oversimplify things. Most situations are not the zero-sum games people make them out to be. But this is one such case. Success for North Korea means failure for us. We stop the mining and we stop the spigot of cash that’s fueling their missile program.”

“Exactly. But as long as North Korea has access to banks where they can transact with shell companies for hard currency, we won’t be able to stop them.”

Jack looked out the porthole next to him. They were just off the coast of Maine, heading northeast. The Atlantic looked impossibly blue below. “We’re not going to fire cruise missiles into North Korea to destroy a strip mine. We just have to find out who in the West is bankrolling them and how they are doing it.”

“The ‘how’ is no problem. CIA has compiled a list of thirty banks in ten nations where we have found North Korean offshore accounts.”

“Where are they?”

She looked down at her iPad and found a file, then opened it and read aloud. “Hong Kong, Vanuatu, Brunei, Singapore, Mexico, Switzerland, Malta, Belize, Nicaragua, and the Cayman Islands.”

“Not necessarily places we can apply direct pressure to get the assets frozen.”

“Not at all.”

Frustrated, Ryan said, “What about identifying who is working with North Korea on the mine?”

“Easier said than done, Mr. President. This transaction with Précision Aéro is a dead end. It won’t lead back to the actual mining partners. It only leads to a shell company, which I’m sure was set up by the North Koreans to procure overseas equipment for their missile program.”

Jack turned and looked at his DNI with a grave face. “Mary Pat, I do hate to sound like a broken record, but you know what I’m going to say.”

“You want me to get you more information.”

He nodded. “However you can. A North Korea with an ICBM that can reach the U.S. is a game changer. Not just in Asia, but in the entire planet. We can’t punish the North for violating sanctions because we are already doing that. I might be able to push the UN for a new round of sanctions that will squeeze their accounts in those offshore banks, but that’s a long shot, and it won’t happen overnight. But if you can find out who is helping them with their rare earth mine, I will go after them with a vengeance, and that will, at least, slow down their new source of income.”

Mary Pat saw the task before her as nearly impossible, but she had her assignment from her superior. “Yes, Mr. President.”