North Korea News Podcast by NK News - Brian Davis on how the US military collects intel: North Korea Unpacked

Episode Date: June 18, 2026

This month, retired U.S. Army Col. Brian Davis joins North Korea Unpacked with Jacco Zwetsloot to discuss lessons from his nearly 40-year career spanning some of the most consequential periods in U.S.-DPRK relations. He talks about how intelligence on North Korea is gathered and analyzed, how U.S. and South Korean military priorities shifted from conventional […]

Looking to go beyond the headlines on North Korea? Join the West Coast Exchange 2026, a Chatham House rules invitation-style gathering for the global North Korea professional community taking place from September 17th to the 19th. Hosted by NK Pro of Career Risk Group, the event brings together analysts, diplomats, former negotiators, military experts and researchers

for candid discussions, field visits and real exchange, including a visit to Iggy Bong, on the inter-Korean border. Confirm speakers include the mole who went undercover for a decade in North Korea. A former US ambassador to South Korea, a Blue House official who was in charge of the Inter-Korean Military Pact, journalists who visited North Korea a dozen times, and a former South Korean Special Warfare Commander.

Early-Byr tickets are now open with discount for NK Pro and NK News members. Space is limited to just 80 paying guests, so claim your seat. claim your scenes soon. Hello listeners and welcome again to the monthly episode of North Korea Unpacked with Jacko Swetzitt. I am, of course, Jackos Wetsett, and I am today speaking with Brian Davis, who's recently retired from the U.S. Army. He has lived off and on in Korea for the last 38 years ever since coming here during the 80s Olympics, as both a civilian and a soldier and has loved every minute of it. Every minute. Now, you're a retired colonel in the U.S. Army, is that right?

I am correct. Now, having lived here now for almost four decades, when did North Korea first becomes something more than just an abstract military problem for you. So I actually, I mean, my first introduction to North Korea was as part of the Cold War. Growing up, I was always very interested in international relations. I actually, at one point, even in high school, wanted to become a diplomat. I remember pre-Olympics when flight, was it 58, 585, 585 blew up before the Olympics? This is the one over the Andaman Sea between, gosh, was it Baghdad and Seoul, perhaps, by Kim Jong-hear, the North Korean spy? Exactly.

And to a male accomplice who killed himself? Yes. And that was kind of a, wow, that's a wake-up call. You know, it was spring of 88 when I was told, hey, you're going to go be a missionary in Korea. And, of course, my mom and dad were absolutely freaked out because, you know, in their mind, it's, you know, the precipice of World War III. And our son's going over there and the DMZ was a huge deal. And really, back then, everybody still thought of North Korea and South Great fighting in terms of 1950, right? this big conventional slug fest and then, you know, it would essentially be attrition and see who wins.

Obviously, everything has changed since that. And so I've always been interested in that aspect of the separation of North Korea. And to be honest with you, my dream, my hope, the thing I think about most of all is the reunification eventually of the Korea is. And unfortunately, as I'm getting older, that dream is getting dimmer. It is. You came as a missionary first. When did you join the military and come back and serve in that capacity?

So I graduated college in 1996 and I enlisted into the military because I wanted to jump out of airplanes. But I was able to get that angle because I spoke Korean. So I was able to pick the unit I was going to. It was a National Guard unit, but it was a special forces unit. And they needed Korean speakers. And so they actually contacted me through a friend. And of course, at first, I just laughed because I'd lived here as a civilian. And I'd seen what would essentially be the worst of the worst in terms of military.

And I just wasn't a fan. But as I started talking to my buddy who was in the military and I started hanging out with some of his friends, I realized that these might be my people. And then when I actually went with him to a training exercise and watched people fall out of an airplane, I thought, hey, I want to do that. And that set me on the path because I already spoke Korean. I didn't have to go to Korean school. So immediately I started doing Korean work with the National Guard, went to training and loved it so much.

I decided to go active duty. And that was in 99 that I commissioned. Actually, as an infantry officer, because I was trying to do. trying to get out of intelligence. As an enlisted soldier, I didn't love intelligence, but it wasn't that I didn't love the job. I didn't love my leaders. And I thought as an infantry officer, I will be with a better quality person, but also I'll be ground roots. What is it an army does? And that's what I wanted to learn. Of course, because I already had a clearance and I already spoke a language. They pulled me right back into military intelligence eventually. So I got four years

as an infantry officer, including the time in the JSA, I think we've talked about. And then became just completely focused on intelligence. So was there a point, a moment, an incident when you realized that North Korea was not going to be like any other intelligence target in the world? Quickly when, well, so I was told that and I accepted it as I made the transition coming out of the Joint Security Area in 2003 as an infantry officer and then going to work as the general, the SOC Corps commanding generals translator. But when we weren't translating or in a meeting with the Koreans, I was working in the

intelligence shop because Intel was about to become my new profession. And I was kind of learning the ropes. And I, you know, I would realize that, wow, we don't have really good understanding of what's going on in North Korea compared to, you know, the 70s and 80s have growing up and reading Robert Ludlam books and all of these spy versus spy networks gathering information. We didn't have anything like that. And so I realized we were constrained in what it was we could actually see. So over your years in the military and particularly in intelligence, what has been the biggest change that you've observed in the way that the U.S. and the South Korean militaries understand North Korea? So the biggest shift over the years has absolutely been the change from

tactical focus, right? You know, exactly how many troops are forward? Where's the towed artillery? And of course, nowadays you talk about where are the rocket systems, but not in the same level that we do compared to the focus that we have at a national level on their missile program and their nuclear program. So that was about, you know, after 2006 when they first detonated the nuke, you could kind of feel the shift because. And kind of is it a zooming out? You say from tech? It was a zooming out where we still have the people that were doing tactical intel, you know, back in the early 2000s, are still doing tactical intelligence. But it doesn't really trump the work that the people back at national organizations, three letter organizations, are doing on the missile and the

nuke problem. Lots more satellites involved, right? The things that we observe here, here in Korea, don't necessarily make it into the presidential daily briefing, but those bigger strategic targets do. And that's where I really felt the focus start to go, where the United States was more focused on North Korea as a strategic threat than as a tactical threat here on the peninsula. And that means also a regional threat, right? So the regional threat came a little bit later, and I would say, you know, about from 2006 through 2017, really, that focus was on the missile system. You know, the first intelligence brief, I believe that President Trump received when he was elected, was on North Korea. And, of course, you know, he immediately took to Twitter and we got very close.

Shared it with the world. Yeah, we got very close to, well, in the Department of Defense, now, of course, the Department of War, we were very close to actually going to war with Korea. We were preparing for it. We were going through all the steps. We were convinced that, yep, this is it. You know, Chairman Millie had said, hey, we're going to solve this Korea problem and remove this threat from the United States. Is this the idea that the concept that was called sort of a bloody nose strike, a preliminary strike on or preemptive strike on North Korea to convince them, don't do anything more because it escalate further? I haven't heard or refer to that. And to be honest with you, I can't say for sure because we are providing intelligence for all types of opportunities. Is it, are you going to strike the regime leadership? Do you think that that would solve the problem? Are we going to try and go after their nukes?

both of those problems become very difficult from an intelligence support perspective because in order to actually take out a leader and we saw this in Iran recently, we saw it in Venezuela. You need to have custody of that target, meaning you need to know exactly where they are right now, right? That's hard to do in North Korea. And it's very hard to. Because we don't know where Kim Jong-un is at any more point. And we don't know where every single one of his missiles are. We have pieces.

There are times where we know exactly where they are. and some of them we can see them and other ones we're not sure where the rat. So it would be a very, very difficult task to go in and try and remove the nuclear threat or remove the leadership. But then, you know, as an intelligence professional, I look, though, at the bigger picture, I say, but then what if you, you know, what if you do that and fail, right? What if you don't get all the missiles, then what? What if you miss him, then what?

And, of course, changes now to their constitution codify the fact that, hey, if you even try it now, we reserve the right to attack first with nuclear weapons. Would it be accurate to say that at the time, time in 2016, 17, that you thought it was a bad idea to move kinetically against North Korea? I absolutely did, because A, I was living here with family. And to me, I just didn't really see the benefit of us potentially starting a war that even if it ground quickly to a stalemate, which I believe it would have similar to the lines that we have now, by the way, up to a million or more could have perished needlessly in that fight. And then what would we really do?

have accomplished from that. And so, you know, my job as the Intel guy was to provide the intel to try and answer the questions that are out there in conjunction with other intel professionals and present a picture that said, hey, look, if national leadership decides to go down this road, we have given you everything we can give you and we're going to keep updating it every day, trying to find more. But I can't give you the complete picture because North Korea is the hardest of hard targets. And I think everybody accepts that.

You know, when you think about the success that the U.S. and Israel have had against Iran, it's amazing to think of how much intel they must have had to be able to target specific people, specific locations. Yeah, it's clear they had people in institutions for years. For years, building that picture out. Building that picture out. And that is something, correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is we do not have any of that for North Korea. I wouldn't say any.

We do have information. We do get information. but obviously it's not at the scale that we had to map out something like what we had in Iraq, or even Venezuela for that matter, to be able to conduct a surgical precision strike like that and to capture somebody as opposed to having to kill them requires incredible amounts of pattern of life development, collateral damage estimates, right?

Because you don't want to start a wider conflict going after a smaller target. And I would just think it's obvious to state that we don't have that level of fidelity on the North Great situation. What we do have is at a very highly classified level, shared by a very small group of people because they need to protect the ways that they've got that information, and they don't let that out clearly or they don't let it out easily. And is there something about North Korea that has remained more or less remarkably unchanged despite all the technology and intelligence advances in the last few decades?

But everything is changing, isn't it? So, you know, clearly there was a big shift when Kim Jong-un took power, and the military first mindset was relaxed. In my personal opinion, his father, Kim Jong-il, needed that security because Kim Jong-il didn't have the personality. He didn't have the leadership. He didn't have the history that Kim Il-sung had. He's not served in the military. 100%.

And again, if you think of the famine years, 92 to 94 in the aftermath of that, he needed the military to be in charge to maintain control and keep order throughout the country, the way they wanted to keep it. As much as they were able to. Obviously, their focus was Pyongyang, because if you can keep the residence of Pyongyang, young happy, you keep, you keep all the support happy, you keep the regime leadership happy, everybody wins. The provinces were kind of left to themselves, and it was the military that was maintaining that control. Once all of that passed, and Kim Jong-un came in in 2010, he essentially shifted the focus back to the workers' party. The military was kind of being ignored at that point, but really, we watched a steady decline from after the famine years in their ability to train,

the resources they were getting. They really were just kind of becoming a labor force. They were still training, they were still an incredible threat, right? I mean, I think they could, I think, you know, their military numbers stand at about 1.3 million or something like that. That's a very big military force across all the services. Maintaining that force required a lot of resources, and they just didn't have those resources. So it felt as if from 2010 until recently that the conventional forces were just kind of being not left to rock because you can't look at a force that big that's armed and say, oh, they're no good, right? They can do all the damage in the world, even if they lose, ultimately, though, they're going to take a lot of us with them.

But now what I see happening is they're reinvesting in the conventional forces. So I think they've gotten to a point, North Korea has gotten to a point where, hey, our missile systems, not so bad. Our nuclear system, it's fine. We don't even need to test again. That's how confident we are. Or why bother, right? Because we've already sort of established that credibility. We've now had senior U.S. officials refer to them as a nuclear state. So we can set that aside now and go back to focus on making our conventional forces the best in Northeast Asia and you see them fielding new systems, it feels like monthly there's a new rocket system being deployed and mobile systems as well. And we see it in their parades that they rolled out too, right? You go back to the nighttime

parade of 2020. That was essentially, I mean, they did. They made a glamour catalog off of it that we thought, hey, this is to increase sales of North Great military equipment. It didn't quite turn around that fast in that sense because they were closed up for so many years. as a result of COVID. But I see going forward now that they are getting combat experience, they're testing those systems, we might to see that start to change.

And much like South Korea now is selling incredibly successful and efficient and in many cases cheaper weapon systems, North Korea might go down that same road as well. So I see now the conventional threat actually with the potential to start going back up again, something we have to watch very closely. Again, with I think the number we throw around

is 12,000 or so of the Storm Corps, right? their top forces going into Ukraine, fighting in Ukraine on behalf of Russia. And watching that story unfold as like every army and I didn't include the Russians going into Ukraine, you find out that war is hard, right? It didn't go the way they thought they would. Ukraine fought back. Ukraine had support. NATO supported them and they were able to hold the Russians, relatively speaking,

versus our expectations. We thought Russia was going to roll over them. Same thing with the North Koreans. We watched them deploy. We watched them actually start getting to fights. We watch them get killed a lot, and then we watch them adapt. And from what I've watched, even on YouTube, you can trace these videos, they got good and they got better and they were fighting better than the Russians.

They were taking out some of the harder fights, but they adapted so quickly, which was amazing to me to watch. And then as I thought about that experience and all that training coming back to Korea, that's terrifying for us, right? I have five combat deployments through my military had, five combat deployments. military career, all irrelevant because it's a different type of warfare. It's drone warfare. It's electronic warfare. We're dealing with a whole new type of fighting and North Korean soldiers that have deployed into that combat. No more about that than anybody

here on the U.S. side and certainly on the South Korean side as well. Okay. Now, I want to ask you about one of the more unusual stories from your military career. At one point, when you were working at the JSA, the Joint Security Area or the Truth Village of Piedmonton, you actually crossed the military demarcation money to to service a fax machine that had been given to North Korea. That's a remarkable story. Few people can say that they've done it. How on earth did that come about?

And when was this? So I was serving the Joint Security Area from 2001 to 2003. Actually, I was the solitary U.S. officer in the Rock Army Infantry Company. So my commander was Korean. And again, it was because I spoke Korean. And all of the equipment that the Rock unit was using at the time was American equipment. So I was there as the executive officer really in charge of beans and bullets, making sure our equipment is being maintained properly, being replenished properly and replaced properly. But that also meant that I was the U.S. officer that spent the most time up on conference row because those are my soldiers.

That was my company. That was our equipment. And so I took advantage of that, you know, having spent years in Korea, you know, almost at that point having spent, I think eight years in Korea. Well. Excuse me, six years. You were living at Camp Boniface? Yes. Camp Boniface, but to me, again, unification and putting these two halves back together, solving the great problem is just always in the back of my mind.

I loved going up on a conference row after the West Sea Battle of 2002 during the World Cup. During the World Cup, yeah. The United Nations. For those listeners who may not be aware, there was a firefight between a North Korean naval vessel and the South Korean naval vessel. The South Korean vessel was sunk with a loss of all or most on board. It was an ambush is what I'll call it. It was a planned attack that they drew the South Korean ship into and then sank it. Wow.

So that led to the United Nations Command, a military armistice commission, a component of the United Nations Command, to reach out to the Panmunjam mission, which is the North Korean equivalent. The North Koreans have administratively restructured for years, you know, starting back in the 90s when they kicked out their version of the NMSC. Chinese lift. And the Chinese pulled out. Essentially, the UNKMAC, though, is that ability to reach out and talk to. the North Koreans about military matters, armistice matters. I mean, we're still in an armistice situation. There's always the potential to have talks. And after that West Sea battle, United Nations Command, Military Administration Commission, or Uncmac, followed their protocol and they reached out and said,

hey, this is a violation of the armistice disagreement we would like to sit down and talk. And the North Koreans responded positively. And so they actually showed up to the blue buildings there on conference row. T3 was for staff officer level talks. T2 in the middle, which is where the tours used to go to, was for general. officer-level talks. So that building off to the right, that blue building was T-3. And they had a meeting. And I was so excited by this, wow, North Koreans actually talking to us. It's historical to me. I'm going to be up there. So I was on conference row. And I was just standing there. It was in the late afternoon, I think, and it was June, June or July. And the colonel in charge of

these talks came walking out during a break time. And he was just kind of scratching his head. And, you know, being a lieutenant at the time, fearless, I just walked right up to him. And I said, sir how's it going you need anything right water i don't know cigarettes what you need anything and he just said oh this is so frustrating you know he was talking about how the talks go and generally you know they were getting started kind of figuring each other out of course there was a transition period there but he looked at me and he said you're that lieutenant that speaks korean aren't you i said yes sir i am he said wow i'd be helpful to have you in there as an extra set of years and i said that yeah yes sir you know of course what i wanted to say was sir you just let me know what time what place

where do I need to be. Right. And he walked back in and I went back and was talking to my Korean soldiers and, you know, they came out of the building. We secured the buildings and end of the day. The next morning, my commander called me and he said, hey, I don't know what you did, but the Unkmaq Colonel wants you to accompany him into the building, even though you're part of the security battalion, you're going to switch your arm Brassard to the yellow Unkmak band and you're going to actually

go into the building and sit in the talks as a backup translator of some sort. Right. Just come back and tell me exactly what happened when it's done. That's all we care about. And so that was my first meeting. Over the next two years, I sat through two or 33 meetings over the course of the two years as a backup translator. That for me was the opportunity to participate in a whole bunch of really cool things, one of which was negotiating, being part of the negotiations, and then servicing a fax machine.

So the big discussion was how do we increase the ability to communicate between North and South to try and avoid problems? Now, when you say between North and South, is that between North Korea and Unkma? Between Unkmak and the North, the Pan Munjum mission. So it's a military to the military hotline for de-escalation. Exactly. They already had the Red Cross one between the North and South. I believe at that time, there were some other hotlines between South Korea proper and North Korea proper. As part of the, I think it was the, I can't remember the year.

I think it was either 92 or 96, but one of their first agreements, they said, hey, we'll have communications lines open, which now they don't, by the way. Right now, the only open line, if I'm correct on us, I think I am, is that connection between Uncback, which sometimes is through a phone call, through a phone line, or sending a fax. If those don't work, it's actually the bullhorn standing on the line until they respond or until they give up and go back because they didn't respond. Okay. So we recommended, hey, we should be able to send documents back and forth.

And so we recommend giving you a fax machine. Right. There's no email at that time. No email. Not with North Korea. There was not. And the North Korean said, okay, we'll think about it. And we said, okay, well, let's help them out. So we actually brought, you know, top of the line, I think it was a Samsung or something, but a top of the line fax machine for 2003 or 2002. And we brought it to one of the meetings. We said, hey, we'd like to give you this machine. And they said, we can't take that. But, but, you know, we'll go back and we'll ask. The very next meeting, they came back with, like an owner's manual, like a user's manual for this like 1992 RICO.

And actually the manuals in Japanese. And they said, 10 years older this time. 10 years older, they said, this is the machine that we want. And nothing else. That's all we want. And, you know, we're like, I don't think they make that anymore. We actually found one in electronics market in Japan through UNC Rear Command, you know,

which is the United Nations Command presence in Japan. I would have thought you could have got one at NAMDEMTA market just down the road here. So we went and checked, but we sent out a whole bunch of feelers at the same time because we realized, hey, if they're opening to taking a fax machine, we want to get it up there before they changed their minds. We got it up there. We presented it to them. They opened the box.

They took it back. They said, okay, our experts will look at it. And then we dug a separate line for it from the joint duty officer building there under Ankamaq there in the joint security area up into Panmungak, which is their building on the far side. It's underground. It was near ground. We didn't like a tunnel. Okay.

But it goes across that little concrete. 100%. When underneath the MDL marker all the way up and two. Actually, I know they planted a piece tree. I think I was about on that line. And it's been a while since I've been up there. But I think it was about on that same line right up into their building where they had that fax machine. Well, every three months or so, we would go and service the fax machine.

Why you? I mean, why your team? So they asked me to go. And I kept asking to go. But North Koreans were happy with this? Totally fine with that. They just wanted people from our side, in this case, Unk-Mack, to go in and service the machine. And it was really funny, too, because we would.

bring toner, extra toner, tons of paper, right? Everything you need to run a fax machine, but every time we'd go back, it would all have been used up. And on our end, we're like, we didn't send you any faxes the last three months, but okay, here's six more reams of paper, here's three more cartons of toner, here you go, and we would set up for them. So I got put in charge of one of the missions because I was constantly asking to go. And he said, yep, North Crane said, okay, you can go. So I got to cross the line, walk up the stairs, go through the doors. What was it like just physically crossing that line? Did you feel like...

It was euphoric. If this goes wrong, you know, I'm in the wrong place. I knew it wasn't going to go wrong, but for me it was such a culmination of my time in Korea, my time there in the joint security area. And just kind of the closest, at the time I didn't realize it, but almost the closest I was going to get to fulfilling my dream of visiting the North and one day watching North and South Korea come back together, right? That's how happy I was.

And we went up there, we went in, the doors opened and deported. Han Mung-Gak. I was just stunned by how they've used the same granite on the floors, the banister and the staircase. So it's almost like one of those magic eye photos where you have to adjust for a second because everything kind of blends together. And we went upstairs to the fax machine. Did they pat you down? Did you go through a scanner? Nothing. We just walked right through what sat down. You weren't holding a piece? Oh, absolutely not. Nope, completely unarmed. You know, according to our misdisc disagreement, only five officers at a time may be armed in the DMC. And enlisted personnel, there's no limit to it, right?

But as far as the officers, it's down to five. And generally, the officers aren't armed anyways when they're up there. Went across, when in the bill, we went and sat down under the pictures of Kimmer-sung and Kim Jong-il. And, you know, they offered me bottled water, which I'm so happy to drink Korean bottled water. Didn't even think twice about it. I was just going to just get into my system as fast as I could to say, hey, look, I'm taking something back from North Korea. And we were there for about 30 minutes while the, The texts were working on the machine, gave them the new paper, the new toner.

Okay, so you're there more in a supervisory capacity. Really, and just small talk. Right. Yeah, which is ultimately what my role was as a backup translator and all those negotiations. If the negotiation went well, we would retire to the other room of T3 on the southern side, and we would have Tongdaq, yak, yak, yankandu, you know, fried chicken. We'd offer them a cold beer. We would actually very informally have a friendly discussion, and that's where it would break

into four or five little discussions. And then I would, as a captain, I would generally work with the lower ranking, the captains, I don't think there are any lieutenants, but the captains on the north side and the United Nations command side. And I would help translate, facilitate the discussion between them. And so, you know, walking out of the building, I looked back one last time. I just thought, you know, I hope this isn't the first time this ever, or the last time that I get to do this. And of course, it was. I haven't been back since. At that time, you're living on Camp Boniface, which is named after one of the two officers who was. was bludgeoned to death in axe handles back in 1976.

Were you one of the first, if not the first American officer to go across the military demarcation line into the northern half of the JSA since the Hunman-John-X murder incident? I doubt it. And I say that because I think during the 90s, there were a couple times where they had meetings. Back in the 80s and 90s, if they had like an incursion or some sort of like a misfire event or a violation of the armed disagreement, they would send officers to go and observe. So I'm sure there were some others in there.

I haven't thought about it that way. Actually, now you piqued my interest. I might have to go look into that before I start claiming it. Well, what do you remember about your interaction, the small talk with the North Koreans, while you're over there watching the fax machine being serviced? How was that? Did it feel human to human?

100%. Minus 1% of the time, where we were sitting and we were in T3, having one of our informal discussions one time. And I had my notebook out. I was taking note. And I'm having a really good discussion with North Korean captain.

And I said, hey, look, I want to make sure I'm using the right language. Can you help me out with the proper terminology I would use for Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il? I just want to make sure I get it right.

And so I think it was a Widehan Sudya meme and something else. I wrote it down. Well, I didn't use it. I accidentally, I referred to him again as Kim Jong-il. instead of the great general.

And, you know, we were actually drinking beer at the time. Everything's great. Everybody's happy. It's a great atmosphere. And the North Korean officer kind of glared at me. He says, hey, I told you, do not say that again. And he was dead serious. And I said, yeah, I'm so sorry, right.

I'm just trying to make sure I get it right. Well, as I'm talking about it, and I'm using the terms to make sure I've got them right, I knew these terms from before, but I'm making sure I'm integrating them into my discussion. I did it again. And he slammed down his beer on the table, which, made quite a loud noise in a quiet room of a bunch of people talking. The room got really quiet. He went to his feet.

He stood up and he said, Captain Davis, I have warned you. I won't warn you again. If you insult the great general, I cannot be held responsible for what I will do to protect his honor and the honor of our country. Did you take it as a threat? So at this point, well, I'm sure about getting fired at this point, right? So I'm looking at him. I'm looking up at him.

I'm like, huh, this is, we haven't been here before. previous, you know, 22 meetings. And all of the American officers, mostly, actually all of them senior ranking, are looking at me like, what did you do? And the North Korean officers are looking at him. And after he said that, they all just kind of nodded and said,

okay. And he sat down and everybody went back to business as usual on the North Korean side. They all acted like nothing had happened. They went right back into their conversations. Meanwhile, the American side is all like, what just happened? Davis, what did you do?

and we just kind of played along like, hey, I guess we won't do that again, you know, lesson learned. And at the end of the discussion, we usher them out. We say our goodbyes, our handshakes, they walk out. And close the door. We relocked the door on the north side. And then, of course, every looks at me and says, what did you do? And I explained it. And we just kind of chalked it up to experience and said, wow, that was really interesting.

The fact that all the North Queen officers, almost in unison were watching him while he was saying it. And then as they all kind of nodded, okay, in agreement, that ended it. I mean, they made the statement, the show, if you will, concurred that, yep, that's pretty good. And then they went right back into business. Did it feel like a mixture of performativity and sincerity at the same time? Very well said. It felt exactly like that. He absolutely meant it.

But the way he expressed it was clearly following a formula. And I think that the senior North Korean officers were responding to the formula. hey, yep, good. That's the way you do it. So he earned some brownie points by responding to your... Oh, he did. He stood up to, I guess they would turn American aggression. It was really was just American ignorance, right? Right. An honest mistake.

As far as the humanity piece goes, we had wonderful discussions. Obviously, we didn't really go down the lane of, so how many people are on your side? How many guys you hang out with on the weekend? It was all very informal discussions. We would talk about family. We would talk about being in the military, the thing that we had in common and training and whatnot. But being a Korean speaker, did they ever say, did the North Koreans ever say to you,

you know, we think you're CIA or something like that? Nothing like that. Okay. Actually, I got that from when I was an English teacher in the early 90s. I got that from one of my students one time and I tried to convince him otherwise, but he never came back to class. So looking back on the totality of your experience there in the JSA, in those meetings in T3 and also across in Panmun Gak looking at the fax machine, does that tell us something important or interesting or useful about the strange mixture of, on the one hand, hostility, but also

this sort of mundane cooperation that has often existed on the Korean Peninsula between North and South or North and Unkmak. It did up until like the last couple of years, right, because I think now everything has changed. There was a, I used the word before, but I'll use it again, but kind of in a different way, a formula. And, you know, the armistice disagreement is there because we never did really, I mean, the war is still technically going on. That created opportunity.

for engagement between, you know, essentially the Americans as the leaders of Unkmaq and the North Koreans, they took advantage of that when they wanted to and they ignore it the rest of the time. I feel like it has really changed now. I feel like we've gone to a totally different place, unfortunately, on the ability to talk to them at all. I feel like North Korea is taking steps now to essentially create the conditions of almost eliminating the need for the armist disagreement, the demilitarized zone, because if you look at some of the actions they've taken since demolishing the arch, and blowing up the building in...

The Azoan building in Kaysong? Yeah. In the Ksung Industrial Complex. If you go back and look at all of these actions they've taken, I look at the tactical things that they've done where you've really got them... First, they wiped out the transportation corridors, right? Which the biggest thing that came out of those two years of negotiations from O2 to 2004...

Right in the early 2000s. ...was the Kaysung Intestrial complex and the two transportation corridors. Eastern West Coast. Right. And so, you know, that was always for me, this incredible thing that I was able to participate in. I took great pride in that. As the North Koreans, they retrench those roads, they remind those access points, they rebuild firing points, and you see them essentially saying, hey, there is no connection between North and South

anymore. We don't even care about reunification. You are just that hostile country to the north or to the South. As we see North Korea saying those things, on the one hand, we see South Korea politically trying to figure out how they respond to that. But we also see the fact now that everything has changed. And it's almost as if North Korea just wants to pretend like there never was an armed misdiscrement. I look at some of the moves that they're making in blocking the corridors and also remining some of the avenues of approach and some of those open areas that were demined during the years that we were trying to rebuild the relationship. I look at them now as almost essentially saying, hey, the military demarcation line, which is the line that goes down the center

of the demilitarized zone, about essentially two kilometers on each side of that line, buffering the two nations. I almost look at them now as trying to say, hey, this is actually our southern border. Which, by the way, is an armistice violation, but essentially they're saying, yeah, we don't care. Because it's unilaterally declared as that, yeah. To re-clify or to restate what you said earlier, there is, as far as you know, still one military-to-military hotline between North Korea and the UNKMAQ-I. I believe that there is. Okay. To deal with incidents and unintended escalations, right? Okay, getting back to how we know what we know about North Korea, the most basic question, when

people hear that the U.S. or South Korea, quote, know something about North Korea. What does that actually mean? So it depends on the context you're using it in. Like, are you referring to intelligence that we have? Yeah, how does intelligence become knowledge? Oh, that's interesting. Well, okay, you know, first, we get information on North Korea, right? Information is out there. I mean, to be honest with you, Korea Risk Group, NKPro, NKPro, NK News is one of the best sources of information out there. Open source intelligence, OScent? Open source intelligence or OSINT is when you especially have a hard target like North Korea, you can pick up things in through those sources because somebody's focused on it full time. But also Korea Risk Group and standing up NKPro and NK News has created almost a forum for people to come and share information and share stories and other people to go and quickly access it. So it's a great service you guys provide, but also it shows the importance of OSINT in understanding a hard target like North Korea. But it's information, right? And at what point, even with the assessments and your writers and then you guys do incredible assessments on the information that are, they

are logically based and they totally make sense when you read them. And that's great. When you take other assets to corroborate or to accentuate information that you have and then do analysis on it and produce an assessment, now becomes intelligence. And so that intelligence, And, of course, because you use means that might be classified or you have a source that might be classified at a certain level, you have to keep it classified. And it stays in those classified channels so it doesn't really get out. It's really that information and that OSIN lane that drives so much of the understanding between the two. Of course, there are information sharing agreements between, or excuse me, intelligent sharing agreements between the U.S. and South Korea. We share just about everything that we have, right? And they share what they have with us for that holistic. picture, and that's essentially the Intel machine that drives or feeds combined forces command, CFC, which is the warfighting headquarters if we were to go back to war. Most often the way that we would get a hold of that kind of intelligence is when somebody from the NIS gives a briefing at the National Assembly, and then one of the National Assembly

members who's present there then speaks to the media afterwards and shares that information. I mean, as a rule, we don't get access, or my colleagues at NK News and NKPro don't get access to classified information on a regular basis. It's only when someone from the National Assembly chooses to share that. Yeah, it's, I've seen a couple of those times. I've seen government officials have sometimes spoken very openly about things relating to the North on all sides. It's never created a huge problem, but it's just something that we watch closely.

You have to protect how you got that information because obviously North Korea watches every bit of information that we poured on and talk about. And they try to extrapolate how did they get that information. Yeah, I think they have a team in North Korea that listens to the podcast and reads the websites. Hey, hi. Hi, if you're listening. When someone in government says that they're highly confident of an assessment about North Korea, what does that mean in practice?

So in practice, there's a very rigorous methodology to get to those words that you just said. I mean, there's a spreadsheet, right? And there's differences in percentage of certainty that give you either a different color of a different shade of orange or, you know, red or green. But the differences between probable and possible and likely and sort of likely. I don't think that's one of them officially. But you have all these things structured out. And the Defense Intelligence Agency has just really codified exactly how we talk about globally,

every situation and the level of surety that we have. You know, a lot of this ability, this requirement, if you will, to standardize and codify that came from some of the blunders of the intelligence community. And I'd go back to WMD in Iraq as the biggest one. I was thinking of exactly that. How did that blunder impact intelligence gathering and analysis work on North Korea? And this is around the time that you were in Intel. Yep, yep.

That's when I was, actually, I got to the GSA six days after 9-11, actually. So I was able to watch from within the government that changed. The first thing that happened after 9-11 was all the stove pipes between existing organizations that do intelligence, you know, the 17 organizations that make up the intelligence community, the inter-eatients. the interagency agreements and the interactions that drive so much of what feeds the information requirements for the U.S. government. They were very stovepiped up until 9-11. When 9-11 happened and we went and did the post-mortem on, hey, how did we miss this, right? There were indicators.

How did we miss it? We found out that actually there was a report that people were concerned about, but it didn't get shared out to the right agencies. They tried to remove all the stove pipes and allow information to be shared more freely. Well, that unfortunately led to disgruntled, confused members of the U.S. military, sharing information with WikiLeaks, for example, and releasing secrets and things who shouldn't have been released. And so some of those stope pipes kind of came back. Recently, they're trying to attack, not let them come back as strongly as they did, but put those protections back in place for information by sharing documents and assessments between organizations. And you try and get as many organizations that have North Korea-focused teams to read your assessment and then put their two cents in there and either provide a counterpoint that needs to be included in the assessment or corroborative information that actually builds the assessment.

And they share it amongst themselves and then they will actually publish it after it has been through a peer review of all these organizations because we don't want to get them wrong. Obviously, WMD and Iraq was probably one of the biggest blunders of my generation. as far as government intelligence goes. And it hurt the morale and credibility of the intelligence. So it was crushing that we had missed it. There have been other ones since then related to over-release of information. But clearly that showed that we had missed it. We just sort of, I think, started recovering from missing the fact that the wall was about to come down in Germany

and the Soviet Union was about to collapse. That was our, of course, sort of the grandfather of mistakes of intelligence. There have been many others. There are some great books written on that. But that really was the point where we said, okay, we've got to fix this. and it's in that process since we realized, hey, we made mistakes, how do we fix that, that we came up with this system that the DIA is great at where they look at every assessment or every piece of information corroborated with other organizations.

They share it, peer review it. They get a stamp on it. And then they say, this is the level of certainty we have on this with a percentage and something like, likely, right? That's a pretty high level of certainty to use the word likely versus possibly versus probable, right? They're all different levels of assurance. and they make sure it is standardized.

So the leaders of national security and also the military when they're reading these reports, they know exactly what it means when they see relatively certain, for example. I'm conscious that we're running close to our time there, but there's a few things I still want to ask you about. Can we do a lightning summary of the different types of int or intelligence? We've already mentioned OSENT, open source intelligence. I know there's Sigint, which is signals,

so that's listening to radio waves and, and stuff. Hugh Mint, which is, I think in Korea as often involves interviewing defectors and learning from them. Or sources. Or people who are willing to share information, you know, maybe working with North Korea, but outside of North Korea for a time that we can talk to. Defectors being the biggest one, obviously.

Right. What have I missed? Well, measurement and signals intelligence. I think that's what it is, Mazint. Mazint. Yeah, where we can actually measure the different signals, but not for like, you know, what would be listening to the message or what's in. side of the message. It would be how that signal is displayed. But a signal can come, that type of listening

can come from an engine, you know, explosions. Right. So when North Korea does a test a nuclear device, that's something that's picked up and measured. Censors pick that up and that's Mazant. Right. That's Mazant. Okay. Measured and signals intelligence. Are there any more? There's electronic intelligence, which is Eilent, which is also looking at electronic, electromagnetic spectrum radiation and analyzing where it's coming from. And this would be like but you're just focused on the signal itself. You're not touching. what's within the signal. You're figuring out where that signal came from and what is it a radar, is it a radio? You're looking at those things and figuring out what it is.

So other than learning the locations of possible radar or radio stations, what else can we learn from Elin? Well, you can learn in certain cases where they're testing systems as well, and there might be electromagnetic emissions coming off of those tests. Now, when we first met several years ago during COVID, we spoke about the sinking of the Chonam and the confidence that a North Korean submarine was responsible rather than, an accident or perhaps a stray Chinese mine or a U.S. sub. You're quite certain, as was the International Commission of Inquiry at the time, that this was a nuclear sub. Why are you so certain about it?

A North Korean sub. Thank you, Pat. North Korean sub. So, I mean, I saw the smoking gun, if you will, which was, if you remember, the South Koreans spent weeks dredging the ocean floor, looking for some evidence. And they found it in the propeller shaft from the torpedo. Which some people found to be a little bit too, what's the word, convenient that it had, you know, writing on it that was clearly Korean. But from other pieces of, I mean, I don't know if you remember this, I was the military lead for recovering the space launch vehicle or the intercontinental ballistic missile space launch vehicle that fell into the West Sea back in, I guess that was 23, May of 2023. there were markings on those things too.

I mean, they mark their things, and that's a way to categorize them, a way to catalog them, a way to put them in the inventory and then move them through the inventory. So I never questioned the markings on it. We had other photographic evidence at the time back in 2010, or I think it was at 11, when I actually got to go and see it. I'll never forget. They rolled in the propeller and the shaft, and it was kind of on a wheeled-like display. And then they took a roll of paper, and they unrolled it, holding it steady,

back there at the propeller where that shaft would enter into the torpedo. And it went on and on and on. It was the size of the room. It was a huge torpedo. Oh, so this role of paper was to show the length of the torpedo. It was to show, it was that torpedo body rolled up and they unrolled it, they unraveled it, and showed how big that torpedo was to create that bubble underneath the ship and essentially break the ship in half, bend it and break it in half and sink it as quickly as it did, which led to the massive loss of life.

And yeah, I never had any doubts about that. And it's funny you bring that up, under intelligence failures, the fact that they were able to get that submarine in that position to take that shot and then get away again without being captured. That was frustrating. And we went back and looked at imagery. We went back and spent weeks, months maybe, actually, looking at everything they had done leading up to that to try and identify and to actually nail down, hey, this is who we think

did it. Looks like this is where they came from. to do the post-mortem on that. It was a lot of people, both here and back in the States, working very long and hard. Because you remember, there were a lot of questions at first. I don't know if you were in Korea then. I was. But that night and the next day, for I think about maybe 48, about 24 hours, people were blaming the South Korea Navy.

Hey, you screwed up and you screwed up, right? What did you guys do? And nobody really questioned that North Korea had done that because it was so out of the blue. Yeah. Pailed in comparison to what happened in November when they shelled YPido. Well, that was a no-brainer. But that was clearly attributable to North Korea. Yes.

I mean, you're aware because you were living in Korea at the time that for years, I mean, it's died down now a bit. For years, there were conspiracy theories in South Korea that this wasn't the North Korean sub. It was pinned on the North Koreans. And it was simply to cover up either a Chinese or an American or a South Korean sab or failure or something. And I recall when the North Korean general, who's supposed to have been in charge of the ammunition there, I forget his name, but he's close to Kim Jong. And when he came down here for maybe it was around the time of the time of the war, the Pyongchung Olympics that he was asked by South Korean journalists whether he'd been responsible for the sinking of the China.

And he sort of said, absolutely not. Yeah, they're sticking by their story. They're not going to change it. I'll point out, though, if there had been a U.S. or a Russian submarine in that area, we would have tracked that. A Russian submarine, sorry, a U.S. submarine doesn't sail onto the West Sea without China taking notice. Right.

They might. I'm not in the Navy. I'm not sure what they're doing every day. But that's something I think that would be noticed. and would be carefully followed. It was a North Korean sub. And if you go back and look at just the fact that it was so hard for us to identify

where that sub had moved until we went through almost image by image day by day going back weeks to identify where that had come from, it was actually really, really hard to believe that something would be able to move

without being detected like that. But a large, you know, Chinese, Russian or American system would absolutely be noticed. Similarly, in the early 2000s, the North Koreans towed or somehow moved the U.S. Pueblo from one son in the east coast all the way around the southern part of the peninsula to Pyongyang on the west coast. How did that happen? And how was that missed?

Yeah, I... You were here around that time, weren't you? Yeah, but I wasn't tracking it at all. Okay, but have you ever spoken to people who would have been or should have been and how that got missed? Because it wouldn't have been a fast tow. So, no, it would have taken a lot of time. I'm not sure how they did. And actually, I'm glad you asked me about this because that's something I really should be familiar with. But you can get, you remember, the last time a U.S. ship went up into Pyongyang was the, I believe it was the Sherman. Mm-hmm. Yeah, in the 1960s.

Didn't work out well for them. No, it didn't work out well. And when you go to see the Pueblo in Pyongyang, they have a cannon or something, they have a piece of the Sherman there right next to it. Do they really? Do you look at the two at the same time? Because they link them in the narrative, right? This is the last time the Americans came and we burnt them to the ground. and this is the most recent time that the Americans came,

and we shelled that ship and we took it in. So, you know, they very much make that part of a unified story. Yeah, obviously I'm not a fan. I want our ship back at some point. I think we should sink it, to be honest. You're still a U.S. ship. It would just be us taking care of some unfinished business. It has not been decommissioned.

It is still actually in service. Were you in Korea? Oh, no, of course you weren't. But in 96 and 97, there were two other North Korean submarine incidents, one where the ship got, the submarine got grounded. grounded on rocks off the coast of Kangnan, I think, and then the second time in 97 it got caught in some fishing nets

and everyone on board drowned. I'm just wondering, are there lessons that were learned or were not learned from the totality of those incidents that are still relevant today? There were, and yeah, there absolutely were. As a matter of fact, one of my first jobs, as a Korean speaker,

was our unit received a portion of the diary that was kept by the North Korean soldiers that was recovered after the last gun battle. Between the South Korean army and the fleeing North Koreans. Yes. And, um, because they were running loose for about a month in the mountains of Pangwon province. And they were, they showed, they proved to be very adept at blending in, very

adept at surviving. And, and in translating that, and of course, it had been translated by national agencies. This was just kind of a side project they had handed to us. Hey, Ukraine speakers, go do something Korean. And, and we started going through it. Yeah. It was fascinating. They recorded how many grams of sorghum bean they had eaten that day.

And they found some rice. I mean, just the level of the survival instinct and the ability to survive on so little for so long, it was actually intimidating, right? These guys, I mean, these guys came, they were ready, not intimidated, and they fought to the end because they could do it. And they were going to survive, come hell or high water, they were going to somehow get out. And I believe one of them actually, we believe, did get back at Ross. One was never caught or accounted for. Never counted for it. Yeah.

And that kind of leads back to what we're talking about, about North Koreans fighting in Russia on the side of Russia against Ukraine, right? that they adapt, they survive, they're going to go home or die trying. They're hearty, right? We talk about the North Korean people remember. They transitioned from the Joseon dynasty into colonialism into this same regime of communism. It's a, it is an unbroken chain of people struggling to survive. And the ones today look back to the famine of the 90s as almost a badge of honor. They survived the arduous march.

They were the toughest of the tough. That mentality defined those Koreans that I would. translating in that diary and you can see it on YouTube, them fighting against the Ukrainians under difficult conditions, but then figuring out how to actually how to improve and how to survive. Do you think the U.S. and the South Koreans are better now at tracking positions of North Korean submarines as they move around? 100%.

We have better assets now. Better than in 2010. This is 16 years ago. We do. We have better assets now. We're using them better now. But Northeast Asia has more focus now. And this is, we talk about strategic flexibility.

and we don't just think about Korea as Korea anymore. We look at Korea as the heart of Northeast Asia. Another big thing that's changed since 2002 and when China came into the WTO is the incredible growth of the economies of all the countries here, particularly South Korea, right? Look at the role that they were playing in 2002 economically versus what they're doing now globally.

And this is, in fact, the heart of Northeast Asia. And because of that, we have more assets looking at the broader picture. And so while we're looking at, say, the People's Republic of China, we also think you get airtime to look at North Korea and watch them. So I think we have a much better, clear understanding of what's going on now. Again, for me, being an army guy, tactical ground guy, I want to focus more on what the front forward cores are doing, right? What training are they doing that makes them more lethal or more efficient or more ready to

come across the DMZ? Not that I think it's going to happen, but those are the things that we track and focus on. National intelligence agencies are more focused on the bigger pieces, further back in the rear with missile development and the nuclear program. I imagine that you might have some kind of grudging admiration for the training of the North Korean conventional forces, that they're able to be so hardy and adapt so well to perilous circumstances. Well, I would apply that idea to specifically the ones that deployed to Ukraine because they're better fed, better trained, they're a higher level of elite soldier in their resourcing than the rest. The credit I would give to the North Korean Army as a whole is their survival.

ability. You know, we watch them gardening. Every spring they plant a garden, right? Because that augments the rations that they get from from the Army. Right. They're helping to feed themselves. Right. And they figure out how to garden as efficiently they can on the land that they've got. Everybody takes a turn. Everybody helps out. It's fascinating to me that they have figured out how to create the ability to sustain themselves when their government can't do it completely. I'm having trouble marrying that idea of elite North Korean forces. Did you ever meet or or see the interviews with the North Korean. I think he was a sergeant, perhaps,

who fled across the demilitarized zone in late 2017 and was shot at and barely seen. Oh, yeah, yeah. And he had a lot of intestinal worms and he wasn't that tall and he wasn't that high. And he laid out there. He was out there forever, right? Well, he was, yeah, he'd been, what, shot five, seven times?

I think it was seven times. He did survive, but, I mean, for the son of a general, he wasn't quite as, as, as, as, He wasn't gardening on, you know, in the mornings and the evenings. He was living a slightly better life, obviously. I think he probably had access to way more resources, but still very hardy, right? To get shot that many times, you know, just lie there while the South figured out how to recover him and get him back. And thank God they saved him.

That was a miracle. And yeah, I'd be curious what he's up to now. I think that might be an interesting podcast episode. Compared with when you first arrived here during the Olympics, do you think that we're better informed about North Korea than ever before, despite all these changes that have happened? So I do, and I assume you're asking from the intelligence perspective, again, I go back to the fact that we have more resources now in Northeast Asia, in general.

Across all the different types of intelligence. All the types of intelligence. Really, though, I'm focused more on some of the, we have more things in space that can take more pictures, that can pick up more emissions. Add at a higher resolution. Higher resolutions. We've got better capabilities now, but not even counting that. We have more commercial imagery of North Korea than we ever have.

Of the kind of my colleagues use. A hundred percent. And they do some very good assessments off of that. And so we do have, I think, a better understanding of what's going on in the North. It still is the hardest of the hard targets. Yeah, because as you pointed out before, we still don't know from a day-to-day basis where Kim Jong-un is. Or he's top echelon of people. We can identify things of North Korea you want to focus on, and we can hold it as long as we can.

And then sometimes that works, but in other times they'll find a way to move it and we missed it. We're like, doggone it. And you go back to scratch again on finding it until the next time. Hopefully you don't have to wait until the next parade, but sometimes you do to find all their assets. If you could wave a magic wand and answer one unresolved question about North Korea, what would it be? Okay, I guess I'm retired now, so I'm not an intelligence professional. It really would have been, where is Kim Jong-un right now? That's the question, because North Korea rolls off of what Kim Jong-in is thinking and doing. And if we could understand where he is, who he's

talking to, we can understand what they're going to do next. Can't you, I mean, I'm a complete ignorant is on this, but can't you just follow his motorcade and see where they all go to? You can, but imagine a situation where he might have multiple motorcates for that very reason. To throw you off the scent. There have been a number of leaders of countries that the United States has targeted successfully, and you can imagine that the North Koreans respond to that. As a matter of fact, the North Korean army has proven to be one of the most adaptive and resilient forces, even going back into the 90s, when I really started looking at this.

And I'm actually going to talk about that at the West Coast Forum. Right. If you haven't yet signed up, you'll find details on the NK News website about the West Coast Exchange happening this September. Do you imagine that North Korea has learned a lot from the experiences of Venezuela and Iran in the last couple of months? I think they have, but I don't think that they weren't already thinking of scenarios like that. I mean, just the fact that we were able to target Osama bin Laden and Abbottabad was essentially it was almost an impossible task that we proved possible. That level of fidelity on a target to be able to strike that target, not to mention. Al-Zahiri who followed him, all of the leaders for numerous organizations through the Levant, through the McReb, into Somali.

We've hit tons of leaders through those areas. And that sends a message that if the United States puts its unblinking eye on you, we have the ability to establish that ownership of that target. And once we have custody of that target, and as long as we can hold on to it, we can pick the time and the place. After nearly four decades of watching North Korea and being involved in North Korea, as a civilian, as a military expert. What's the biggest puzzle that remains for you? It has nothing to do with the military and intelligence.

It really comes down to what I think is the Korea problem. How do we find a way to put these two countries back together again when they're way further apart than they were when I got here back in 1988? When I was here in 98, we had very strict rules because we were talking to people about religion, the purpose of life, and things like that. We didn't talk about movies.

We didn't watch movies. We didn't listen to music. strict rules as a missionary for our listeners who weren't paying attention. Strict rules that we had to follow, you know, about the only other thing you could talk about if they didn't want to talk about religion was reunification. And in 1988, Koreans would engage in discussions on how sad it is that we're apart. We have to get back together. You can't find people that even would know how to talk about that topic today. And it has been watching that lack of interest, disinterest, excuse me, grow.

So it's been watching the disinterest in reunification rise. And the fact that it's really old people that even talk about it and political leaders on one side that still talk about it. And now North Koreans don't even officially now, they don't talk about it. And I think that's a tragedy. You must have met Koreans both North and South through the years who saw you and your country, the United States, as being the biggest obstacle to Korean unification. How would you normally respond to them? I go to the history.

And if you look at Korean history, Korea is 5,000-year history, right? there was a reason that they developed, I guess it would be an idiom, you know, the whale or the shrimp between two whales. Geographically, they're in a very different, they're kind of like Poland geographically, right? The country that was surrounded by two huge powers would often go to conflict with each other. That's exactly where Korea has always been. But with the United States here, they are now friends with the shark. And did the shark have to keep the whales?

Not necessarily because, you know, the whale to the east, Japan is actually becoming a better ally now. with South Korea in response, I think, to what the one in the West was doing, what China has been doing. And so I think this relationship has actually proved very beneficial. You can go back through history and identify times where the Koreans might feel like the Americans weren't treating them the way they should be. But I also believe that has changed. You hear General Brunson, the USFK, UNC and CFC commander, talk about the bilaterally agreed to op-cons based transition. And, hey, it's coming. So let's get these conditions met and then we can do it. And you hear some people on the south saying, hey, we'd still like to have that op-con transition. Within this presidential period, I don't know if that will happen.

If we make the conditions, then absolutely will happen. Korea is taking ownership of the relationship from a military perspective, but I think the U.S. will still provide great capabilities to them, which is about enforcing the security instability of all of Northeast Asia, not just about the Korean Peninsula. And that's the biggest change that has happened since I got here in 88. It's not just a Korea problem. The Korea problem now influences all of the stability of Northeast Asia and it increases the stakes for making sure we maintain it. Okay, but you don't see America and Unkmak as an obstacle for Korean unification. I personally don't. And I, if I had a dollar, if I had a quarter, you know, Obegon, for every single time that somebody has engaged me on that, I understand it.

And I certainly am not going to fight them on it, but I would just offer what I think are the benefits that have come with this relationship between us. It hasn't always been easy. Obviously, there's differences like in any great relationship, great alliance, but you don't, you know, we're learning, but you don't get anywhere without your partners. If you really want to be successful, you're going to create alliances, you're going to find partners and you're going to find ways to work together. And I think it is ultimately, I think it's led to the South Korea we see today. And I think one of the strongest parts of our relationship that we have right now, we've got a very pragmatic South Korean president. He is managing relationships between all the partners, almost

better than any president and South Korean president I've seen. I wish we had more interest coming from the U.S. side towards Korea right now, but I think they've got a lot of other irons in the fire that they're focused on. And so I think the relationship is set at a good spot right now. I'd always like it if we did more to make it better, but I think it's pretty good. And I think great benefits have to come to both countries as a result of it. Well, thank you very much, Brian Davis, for coming on the North Korea Unpacked with Jacko's Wetsuit podcast. Thanks. Ladies and gentlemen, that brings us to the end of today's episode of North Korea Unpacked

with me, Jacko's Wetslute. Thanks go to Brian Betts. and David Choi for facilitating this episode and to our post-recording producer genius Alana Hill. Thank you and listen again next time.