The secret Trump plan on Nth Korea

US Cyber Command targeted hackers in the country’s military spy agency after directive

Early in his Administration, US President Donald Trump signed a directive outlining a strategy of pressure against North Korea that involved actions across a broad spectrum of government agencies, and led to the use of military cyber capabilities, according to US officials.

As part of the campaign, US Cyber Command targeted hackers in North Korea’s military spy agency, the Reconnaissance General Bureau, by barraging their computer servers with traffic that choked off Internet access.

Trump’s directive, a senior Administration official said, also included instructions to diplomats and officials to bring up North Korea in virtually every conversation with foreign interlocutors and urge them to sever all ties with Pyongyang.

When Vice-President Mike Pence called on one country to break relations during a recent overseas visit, officials there reminded him that they never had relations with Pyongyang. Pence then told them, to their own surprise, that they had US$2 million in trade with North Korea. Foreign officials, who asked that their country not be identified, described the exchange.

The directive also instructed the Treasury Department to outline an escalating set of sanctions against North Korean entities and individuals, and foreigners who dealt with them. Those instructions are reflected in a steady stream of US and international sanctions in recent months.

The directive was not made public at the time it was signed, following a policy review in March, because “we were providing every opportunity as a new Administration to North Korea to sit down and talk, to take a different approach,” said the official.

That door remains open, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said yesterday in Beijing. Speaking to reporters following talks with Chinese officials, Tillerson for the first time acknowledged that the US was in direct communication with North Korea. “We are probing, so stay tuned. We ask, ‘Would you like to talk?’ . . . We’re not in a dark situation, a blackout. We have a couple, three, channels open . . . we can talk to them; we do talk to them.”

The senior Administration official said: “The US has always maintained some kind of channel, kept some channel open even in the darkest days of previous administrations.” Those channels include conversations between the State Department’s special representative for North Korea, Joseph Yun and Pak Song Il, a senior member of Pyongyang’s delegation to the United Nations.

The Cyber Command operation was due to end yesterday, officials said.Eric Rosenbach, who led the Pentagon’s cyber efforts as assistant secretary of defence in the Obama Administration, said the operation “could have the advantage of signalling to the North Koreans a more aggressive posture. However, there’s accompanying risk of an escalation and a North Korean cyber counterattack”. Rosenbach said he was not aware of the actual operation. Aaron Hughes, a former senior Obama cyber official, said he, too, was not aware of the actual operation. But “if I was still in my [Pentagon] seat, I would actively be advocating we do these types of things”.

Others said they would be cautious about using even minor cyber capabilities against North Korea and doing it openly because of the risk of retaliation. “I wonder what the disruptive payoff is that we’re getting that’s worth even a marginal extra chance of nuclear war?” said Jason Healey, a former military cyber operator.