Why aren't those darned North Koreans more cooperative with our intelligence gatherers?

After the 51-hour Window of Cluelessness in Washington and Seoul, the departed Dear Leader was abundantly on display Monday in this Seoul electronics emporium.

In Kim's Death, an Extensive Intelligence Failure
By MARK LANDLER and CHOE SANG-HUN
For South Korean and American intelligence services to have failed to pick up clues right away about Kim Jong-il's death attests to the secretive nature of North Korea.

-- item in Monday morning's NYT "Today's Headlines" e-mail

by Ken

There's going to be a certain amount of making fun of the New York Times in a moment, but I hope that doesn't detract from a fairly interesting story. As Don Rickles might say, I kid because I care -- well, that plus it's fun. It did strike me, though, that the paper seemed the least tad uncertain about where the real story was: crappy intelligence operation or gosh-darned impenetrable intelligence target.

What caught my attention Monday morning was this NYT "Today's Headlines" e-blast:

For South Korean and American intelligence services to have failed to pick up any clues to this momentous development -- panicked phone calls between government officials, say, or soldiers massing around Mr. Kim's train -- attests to the secretive nature of North Korea, a country not only at odds with most of the world but also sealed off from it in a way that defies spies or satellites.

I don't think it's my imagination that the head and the blurb don't seem to be telling quite the same story. The head suggests that the story is about our intelligence failure, while the blurb speaks to the confounded inscrutability of those dastardly North Koreans. That was enough to get me to click through to the story -- and regular readers know how parsimonious I am with my allotted NYT free clicks.

Well, my gosh! The story itself displays the very same bifurcation. The head is exactly the one we've already seen in the "Today's Headlines" post -- son of a gun, it actually turned out to be one of the day's headlines! But then, after an only moderately scrutable opening paragraph, delineating the 51-hour Window of Cluelessness concerning the death of Kim Jong-Il at the highest levels of officialdom in Seoul and D.C., the NYT's Landler (reporting from Washington, with additional contributions from David E. Sanger) and Sang-Hun (reporting from Seoul) wrote:

For South Korean and American intelligence services to have failed to pick up any clues to this momentous development -- panicked phone calls between government officials, say, or soldiers massing around Mr. Kim's train -- attests to the secretive nature of North Korea, a country not only at odds with most of the world but also sealed off from it in a way that defies spies or satellites.

We were quickly reminded that this isn't the first time those sneaky North Koreans have hidden out from prying intelligence eyes.

Asian and American intelligence services have failed before to pick up significant developments in North Korea. Pyongyang built a sprawling plant to enrich uranium that went undetected for about a year and a half until North Korean officials showed it off in late 2010 to an American nuclear scientist. The North also helped build a complete nuclear reactor in Syria without tipping off Western intelligence.

Apparently North Korean inscrutability would be of little interest or concern if not for that confounded nuclear capability.

As the United States and its allies confront a perilous leadership transition in North Korea -- a failed state with nuclear weapons -- the closed nature of the country will greatly complicate their calculations. With little information about Mr. Kim's son and successor, Kim Jong-un, and even less insight into the palace intrigue in Pyongyang, the North's capital, much of their response will necessarily be guesswork.

"We have clear plans about what to do if North Korea attacks, but not if the North Korean regime unravels," said Michael J. Green, a former Asia adviser in the Bush administration. "Every time you do these scenarios, one of the first objectives is trying to find out what's going on inside North Korea."

For intelligence-confusion fans, it's a throwback of sorts to the days when the whole damned People's Republic of China was as closed and mysterious to Western intelligence, which seemed reduced to trying to extract from wall posters in Hong Kong clues as to what might be happening, and especially who might be making it happen, and to whom, inside that vast country. (Now, of course, we often seem to know more than we wish we did about goings-on in the PRC.)

And while the NYT report undoubtedly only skimmed the surface, it was interesting for its setting out of the general hows-and-whys of all that we don't know about what goes on inside the "Democratic People's Republic" of North Korea. For example, the story I heard Monday morning on Morning Edition about the under-cover transfer of power taking place in Pyongyang made the point that this is only the second such transfer in the half-century-plus history of the North Korean state. The underlying reality is that we haven't known any more about what was going on between the transfers of power.

It's been convenient to personalize all lines of power in the persons of North Korea's two previous leaders, the newly departed Dear Leader, Kim Jong-Il, and his father, North Korea's founding father, the Great Leader, Kim Il-Sung, who ran the show from 1948 until his death in 1994. But while it's obviously true that there's a fanatically tightly controlled as well as all-controlling state apparatus, as far as I can tell we've known astonishingly little about how power has actually been concentrated and exercised -- and presumably even less during the reign of the Dear Leader than during that of his Great father.

Now we seem to have only vague clues, perhaps more accurately described as wild guesses, as to the nature of the power struggle going on. The NYT reporters note that even though we do have some spy-plane and satellite surveilance of the country,

remarkably little is known about the inner workings of the North Korean government. Pyongyang, officials said, keeps sensitive information limited to a small circle of officials, who do not talk.

"This is a society that thrives on its opaqueness," said Christopher R. Hill, a former special envoy who negotiated with the North over its nuclear program. "It is very complex. To understand the leadership structure requires going way back into Korean culture to understand Confucian principles."

Confucian principles, eh? Oh, I'll bet our intelligence people are great at applying those! Meanwhile, a former CIA official ("speaking on condition of anonymity about classified matters") told the Times team:

What's worst about our intel is our failure to penetrate deep into the existing leadership. We get defectors, but their information is often old. We get midlevel people, but they often don't know what’s happening in the inner circle.

Ah yes, the inner circle. Whatever and whoever that may be. It appears that we don't have much more than a scattering of names, and don't even know whether we have many (any?) of the right names, and certainly not who has the power to do what to whom.

So naturally our wisefolk busily imagine scenarios.

None of the situations envisioned by American officials for North Korea are comforting. Some current and former officials assume that Kim Jong-un is too young and untested to step confidently into his father's shoes. Some speculate that the younger Mr. Kim might serve in a kind of regency, in which the real power would be wielded by military officials like Jang Song-taek, Kim Jong-il's brother-in-law and confidant, who is 65.

Such an arrangement would do little to relieve the suffering of the North Korean people or defuse the tension over its nuclear ambitions. But it would be preferable to an open struggle for power in the country.

"A bad scenario is that they go through a smooth transition, and the people keep starving and they continue to develop nuclear weapons," said Jeffrey A. Bader, a former Asia adviser to President Obama. "The unstable transition, in which no one is in charge, and in which control of their nuclear program becomes even more opaque, is even worse."

You'd think the South Koreans might have better intelligence. As already suggested, they don't.

[I]n the 51 hours from the apparent time of Mr. Kim's death until the official announcement of it, South Korean officials appeared to detect nothing unusual.

During that time, President Lee Myung-bak traveled to Tokyo, met with the Japanese prime minister, Yoshihiko Noda, returned home and was honored at a party for his 70th birthday.

A hint came when North Korean media announced Monday morrning that there would be a "special announcement" at noon. South Korean officials, we're told, "shrugged when asked whether something was afoot," even though the last such advance warning of a special announcement in Pyongyang turned out to be for the announcement of the death of the Dear Leader's dear daddy the Great Leader.

Regarding Monday's 51-hour-old bombshell, the Times team quotes "a government official who monitored the North Korean announcement" as saying, "'Ohmygod!' was the first word that came to my mind when I saw the North Korean anchorwoman's black dress and mournful look."

At least in the old days of trying to divine doings inside the mysterious People's Republic of China we had those wall posters in Hong Kong. Now apparently we get our information from the outfits worn by North Korean telepersons.

Far be it from me to beat up on our beleaguered intelligence folk. Actually, I wish we had more frequent reminders of how, er, incomplete our "intelligence" may be regarding the rest of the world, even as we blunder so often into trying to remake it according to our wishes. Of course far too often in the Clinton, Bush II, and Obama administrations, it has turned out that better intelligence was available; we just didn't use it because we didn't like it. (I believe the technical term is Cheney Syndrome.) But that's another story. Sort of.

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