North Korea News Podcast by NK News - Mark Sauter: What to make of the reported US Navy SEAL mission into North Korea

Episode Date: September 11, 2025

This week, the NK News podcast explores the New York Times’ recent revelations about a 2019 U.S. Navy SEAL mission on North Korea’s coast. The operation reportedly aimed at installing surveillance equipment but went awry, resulting in the death of unarmed North Koreans and raising escalation risks. Mark Sauter, a former U.S. Army soldier with […]

You're listening to an exclusive episode of the NK News podcast, available only to subscribers. You can listen to this and other episodes from your preferred podcast player by accessing the private podcast feed. For more detailed instructions, please see the step-by-step guide on the NKNews website at NKNews.org slash private-feed. Hello, listeners, and welcome to the NK News podcast. I'm your host, Jack O'Swetsuit, and I'm recording this episode via Streamyard on Wednesday, the 10th of September 2025, and I'm joined on the line by Mark Sauter. He's a return guest. He's the founder and president of the POW investigative project and author of American trophies. He's been investigating American POWs for almost 30 years and previously served as a soldier in the U.S. Army, including as a guard post commander at the Demilitarized Zone here in Korea. Now, we're here to talk today because last week, the New York Times broke a story on September the 5th title,

How a Top Secret Sealed Team 6 mission into North Korea fell apart about an apparent 2019 mission. to infiltrate a Navy SEAL team into coastal North Korea to set up a piece of listing equipment. So Mark's kindly come back on the show to talk about that story and about previous secret missions into North Korea. So welcome back, Mark. Yeah, it's great to be here, Jacko. So in plain terms, Mark, what exactly matters most about the 2019 mission as reported by the New York Times? Is it targets, tactics, or consequences? And why should the public care now six years later on?

Well, I think for the last point, a covert military operation in the North Korea has potential consequences that you and your listeners know well, which could be catastrophic. So one question I have is, you know, was the ultimate aim of the mission worth the risk? According to the New York Times, President Trump thought it was. I'm intrigued by reading between the lines about what was actually happening there. And I have to say from my perspective, as someone who was operated against the North Koreans and the Korean DMZ, and separately ran a Green Beret Combat Diver A-Team, so I was trained in underwater infiltration techniques, that one part of this story really sent shivers up my spine, probably not a part of the story that would jump out to your listeners, but perhaps one that occurred to other former special operators. And that is the idea

of being on a secret mission and running into civilians in a denied area. And I'll never forget during my special operations training when we were being instructed and practicing operating in denied areas and behind enemy lines that the instructors put a scenario in where we were operating in East Germany and we ran across some children in the forest who were out playing or, you know, gathering nuts or whatever East German kids were doing. And they saw us. And what do you do? You have a mission. Right. By definition, if you, if you have been put into the type of mission these seals were put in, it is of highly consequential national interest. And you run across civilians, according to New York Times, the SEAL Team, SEAL Team 6, our best special

operators in many ways, you run across civilians and you have a choice. You can try to get away, but if you're in a place like North Korea or the former Soviet Union, the second that you start trying to escape and evade and get out of there, the civilians are going to turn you in. And in those type of police states, the odds are that they may catch you. So not only are you in a position where your mission has been interrupted, but you're in a position where you may end up being captured. And so just thinking about the claim in the New York Times that this seal team was on the beach and saw a boat with some people that at least some on the seal team thought might be North Korean military and then engage them.

and it turned out, according to New York Times report, that they were just civilian fishermen. Yeah. Yeah. To come back to that training that you had there, do I understand you correctly, Mark, that there was no specific doctrine you must engage or not engage, that the choice was given up to the commander in the, on the field at the time? That's true. They never told us what we should do. However, every American military man or woman is instructed in the law of land war. which states that you cannot execute civilians. So at the tip of the spear, when things like that happen, instantaneous decisions have to be made.

And according to the New York Times, and I found this really interesting, that they singled out that the steel who opened fire first was a non-commissioned officer. So not an officer. And they said that the seal team on the beach did not have communications with the commanding officer. the commanding officer of the mission who was off in a submarine and they had to make up their

own mind and i i i don't know just as a former military guy had made me wonder whether there was some rear end covering by the sources of the new york times implying that maybe that that non-commissioned officer made a mistake the non-commissioned officers that we have in our special operations units are superb and in many cases are either as effective or more effective effective than the commissioned officers. But it was sort of an interesting point about when this mission started going sideways and one of those seals opened up on what he thought could be a threat. And of course, in that kind of situation, if your senior NCO or officer fires on something, then you're probably going to fire on it too. There were some, you know, other interesting

to me elements that came up. One really prosaic one was the claim that the seals were confused by the occupants of this North Korean boat, not knowing whether they were security, military, or innocent civilians. And part of the problem was that they had wetsuits on, which made it hard for the Seals Night Vision gear to see them. And a potential interest to your listeners is that about a thousand years ago, when I was operating in the DMZ, our intelligence indicated that the North Koreans wore wetsuits on land in the D&C, and for a couple of reasons, one was to reduce our ability to see them with our thermal imaging devices. We had good thermal imaging devices. We now have great thermal imaging devices, which can be used day or night, and they pick up the

heat from a person. And so the idea was the wetsuits would keep down the thermal profile, making it harder for our technology to see them. And that also it would hold in blood or tissue if the North Korean infiltrator was shot because one of their, at that time, one of the key parts of the mission was for the North Koreans who were infiltrating, who were their special operators not to be captured.

And so the wet suit would hold down the blood trail. We were also told that they would sometimes rope themselves to one another so they could pull each other back if something happened. But, you know, that jumped out at me. It occurred to me that this might have been what's called a tailored access operation. Tailored access. Okay, what does that mean?

So tailored access, and just again, for your listeners, this is all me reading between the lines based on my military and research and in journalism experience. I don't have any inside knowledge of this. A tailored access is a program started at the National Security Agency, which is America's largest security agency, which is generally in charge of signal intelligence, intercepting signals, and also now cyber and interactive intelligence. And these tailored access programs involve the national security agency tech geniuses figuring out ways to steal information or pick up information or pick up signals working with the CIA and military to go in and

install devices or intercept device. So a prosaic example, and again, this is based on open source reporting, would be tapping in undersea cables. So the NSA are the technology experts, they come up with the technology and it requires maybe a CIA officers or special operators to actually put the devices in. And these operations have ranged. Some of them are entirely interactive. Some of them are, for instance, intercepting computers going to adversaries and putting malware in it, but it goes all the way up to hardware. And one thing that struck me was the New York Times said that there had been a previous landing in North Korea by U.S. operators in 2005. And I've seen very little comment on that. It was sort of a throwaway line. And it made me wonder

whether there. I'm just going to give a little bit more detail from the story there for our listeners who may not have read the New York Times story. So apparently when George W. Bush was president, there was a smaller mission in 2005 when a mini submarine was apparently used to successfully infiltrate and then exfiltrate a team of Navy SEALs. And that mission hadn't been discussed publicly before it was mentioned just in one line in the New York Times article. So we don't know what the purpose of that mission was or what was achieved, but that they were infiltrated and next will try it with a mini submarine. Absolutely.

So it makes me wonder whether, because there have been other incidents reportedly where a piece of technology may be an intercepting device that or a tap on a cable or that sort of thing. So hardware, right? So hardware designed to intercept signals had to be replaced or a new power source had to be put on it. So it made me wonder whether the 2019 mission was a follow-up related replacing based on the 2005 operation. But again, that's just reading between the lines.

Let me pick you up on that for a second there, Mark, because that's one issue that, yeah, I've heard from some ex-military people that what seemed fishy to them about the story from the New York Times is that these days, the U.S. military has so many other ways to pick up communication. and to tap into communications from the North Korean side, that it seems unlikely that they would need to physically infiltrate agents on shore into North Korea, one of the most difficult terrains in the world for intelligence gathering, to either install something or to change a battery. And it reminded me of a few years ago I was talking to somebody who's still in the USFK, in the intelligence side, who told me about when the Chonan ship was sunk in 2010, by North Korea that yes the US military had I'm not sure what the detective