South Korean Missile Tracking

Jeffrey Lewis 0:05

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk Podcast, the leading podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog, and a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Aaron Stein 0:22

And I'm Aaron Stein, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East. Hey, Aaron. How's it going, Jeffrey? Good. I got a book out. I know. And so today we're going to do a reading of the book, one section about South Korean missiles, and then link that to all of the backend work that informed all of your, basically all the work of fiction about how you guys built the geolocation and how that went into the writing process.

Jeffrey 0:48

Yeah, so this will be essentially spoiler free because we're going to talk about something that's very close to the front of the book. And there's almost no plot points in it. I mean, it's just merely an acknowledgement that there is a scene that plays out at a South Korean missile base, which is real. Which is nominally secret and which we know about here at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies because we geolocated it.

So it'll be a fun geolocation podcast that, you know, helps illustrate some of the work that went into the book.

Aaron 1:24

Yeah, and I think for listeners, it is pages 42 through half of 44. Do I have that right? Just about, yep. All right, so please, after you.

Jeffrey 1:37

Prior to the events of March 2020, very few people were aware that South Korea maintained an elite military unit armed with long-range ballistic and cruise missiles. Once in a while, a South Korean leader might attend a missile test. But the military units assigned to launch these weapons in wartime were shrouded in secrecy. The South Korean press might allude to the fact that the Republic of Korea Army had a long-range missile of its own, but the idea that there were about 100 such missiles deployed to half a dozen operational bases scattered across the country was almost never directly acknowledged.

U.S. and South Korean officials did, of course, visit the headquarters of the ROK Army Missile Command in Eomseong County from time to time. Even so, the South Korean military emplaced security measures to conceal the location of this unit, and its precise location was never mentioned in South Korean press reports. When VIPs visited, the location was never described.

The main headquarters was also obscured with digital trees and apps such as Naver. Army Missile Command soldiers were even required to remove their unit patches fixed to their sleeves with Velcro before any photograph could be taken. On March 21st, Major General Lee Jin-hwan was sitting in his office at the main Army Missile Command outpost when at 1.42 p.m. his secure phone rang.

It was President Moon's staff informing him that the President wanted to speak with him and that he would soon be in charge of launching a counter-strike. As soon as the call ended, Major General Lee gathered his aides and went into the underground bunker behind the main administrative building. Photographs from that day show Major General Lee wasn't wearing his patch.

According to officers under his command, the unit was preparing for yet another VIP visit in a few weeks. The unit was regarded as a spit and polish unit, although this was largely a function of seemingly endless VIP visits that constantly disrupted training and wreaked havoc on any effort to establish a regular schedule. As Lee walked into his command bunker, the only evidence that he commanded an arsenal of long-range missiles was his dark blue baseball cap with an interlocking AMC.

The cap was a security violation, but only a very well-informed outsider would know what those letters stood for. Most South Koreans did not.

Aaron 3:41

So I think what, okay, so for listeners, I bought this book two days ago. We recorded this on a Friday. I read this in about five hours. And because I am an informed listener, sorry, an informed person, and because we do this podcast, I know that a lot of what went into the book was your own geolocation work with your team over in Monterey.

And a lot of, you know, Things that happened in history that you then superimposed into your scenario. But this missile base, I think, is worthy of talking more about because it actually exists.

Jeffrey 4:18

Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, the backstory to this, which I think we've told a kind of brief version of it on the pod. I think we have. I want to talk about it in a little bit more detail. Is a couple years ago, we noticed that the South Koreans were really doing the thing I mentioned about the Velcro patches.

They really would take the patch off for any photograph. And it just enraged me because it struck me as the most irresponsible kind of security theater. Like they're doing VIP visits to this site and they're pretending that it's very secret and they're going through this ridiculous patch thing. And my guess was that if I spent, I don't know, a couple of hours some morning, I could probably find it.

And I did. And, you know, for listeners who are concerned, we told the South Koreans years ago that we could find these sites, and we explained on multiple occasions to different officials how they had compromised it and how easy it would be, and they don't care. And I think the reason they continue to keep it secret now is mostly about avoiding embarrassment and not actually any concern for the operational security of the bases.

Aaron 5:34

Yeah, you know, in some ways, when you take a patch off, you know, there are units in the U.S. military that do that. You actually give away that they're important, and so that should trigger your spidey sense. You know, whereas a nondescript patch... You know, does not elicit closer scrutiny. You know what I mean?

Jeffrey 5:53

Oh, I absolutely know. The other thing, which is, I mean, pretty much every sentence in that is based on reality, but it's true about Naver and Daum. I don't really actually know how to say it. The two South Korean mapping applications, they put digital trees over sensitive South Korean locations, which means when we found the headquarters, we can talk about how we did that.

The first thing I did was open Naver and Not because I thought I would see a picture of it, but because if there were digital trees over it, I would have additional confirmation I was right.

Aaron 6:27

Right. And so, I mean, maybe this is the good segue into how you guys found it, but I assume that your first kickoff came from photos, then Google Earth, and then when you then went to Naver. Sorry, I've actually never used this app. Is sort of the final nail in the coffin.

Jeffrey 6:48

Right, so, I mean, the farce unfolds in three parts. The first part of the farce is all of the pictures that they release from VIP visits, which are really distinctive. The buildings are very unusual, and just kind of the layout of the place, and so it's very easy to... Create a list of signatures because they visited it on multiple occasions.

And so, you know, the second piece is you just really have to know where to look, right? And that's kind of a big problem. I think people get focused on satellite images when we do geolocations, but really the big problem is narrowing your search area because... You don't want to just try to brute force your way through the whole flipping country.

It's terrible. Absolutely. Although, footnote about future brute force ways. We'll talk about that in a second. So we started collecting information, and it turns out that although they are largely careful about not saying where the location is, there were some hints. So one genius put a place name in his LinkedIn account,

Aaron 8:08

Yeah, which is actually a really good place to start looking. I mean, I've done a lot of work in LinkedIn for engineers who keep an up-to-date profile page.

Jeffrey 8:17

Yeah. And by the way, these place names are not all consistent because in some cases there's a town, in some cases there's a county, and in some cases there's a province. But it was a kind of nested thing where you get the LinkedIn account. Someone put it in a State Department spreadsheet where they did a training. For someone from the unit and they mentioned a place name associated with the unit.

And then there is, once we had the place name and we sort of started searching on the place name, there was an additional reference in Korean that was part of like a local governance body that was talking about development. Of the site. Because, you know, obviously it impacts local development issues by bringing in a bunch of soldiers.

So suddenly we had a general area to look at. Umsungun? Sorry, I can't speak Korean, but Umsung County. And we knew what the thing looked like. So phase two, once you have a place to look, bang, right? You see it right away. And then kind of the interesting thing, the way it plays out is... It has very distinct signatures that look very similar to the cruise missile sites that the U.S. built in Europe during the 1980s.

Aaron 9:41

Yeah, which is also featured in your book, don't they?

Jeffrey 9:46

Yes, because then once we saw the headquarters, the structure of that site is so distinctive, we were able to basically draw a range ring out of Pyongyang and then follow that arc and pick out missile bases that all have the same signature.

Aaron 10:06

And those signatures, again, look like the U.S. cruise missile bases from the 1980s. Yeah.

Jeffrey 10:11

And, I mean, we haven't done it, but, like, we've been thinking about, like, applying some machine learning to this problem.

Aaron 10:17

Oh, don't give that stuff away, because I'm thinking about that stuff, too.

Jeffrey 10:22

I mean, the drive-throughs, like, are... Those are... They're such a clear signature that, you know, a little machine learning and knowing the signature of this site, they would all pop out. So this was... This was easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy, right, to find this site. Which, you know, is a bad thing. Yeah, yeah, it is a bad thing.

Aaron 10:52

Well, I mean, it's not... Yes, it is a bad thing. It's not the end of the world, but it just shows how easy it is, and...

Jeffrey 11:01

Well, let me say, the North Koreans do a much better job of camouflaging missile sites. That's what I will say. Okay, fair enough. I mean, like, you know, use your natural contours and mix it up a little bit and, you know, don't f***ing park things outside when there are satellites overhead. It's not really that complicated, guys.

Aaron 11:25

Yeah. Well, at least they put in digital trees, right?

Jeffrey 11:30

Yeah, well, and yeah, don't put digital trees over things you don't want people to find because that's like our number one go-to for confirmation. Like if you're looking at something and you're like, oh, I wonder, this could just be a factory. And then you like open up Naver, like, nope. Not a factory. That's right, that's right. And they don't even, by the way, they don't do a good job with the digital trees, so I think you could also machine learn to find the seams where they really ham-handedly drop digital trees.

Aaron 12:05

It's not real artistry. Actually, when you said that, I was like, you could just have the machine just go through the entire brute force of the map and then just pick out where they've put in digital trees.

Jeffrey 12:13

It's true. You could do that, too.

Aaron 12:15

Yeah. They're not thinking about this very carefully.

Jeffrey 12:17

Well, not yet, but they soon will, right? So, you know, there's another thing that comes out of this, right? So other things that are true in that passage. The bunker.

Aaron 12:30

Yes.

Jeffrey 12:30

When a defense minister visited the site and got a briefing from General Lee, who is a real general, they... Did the handshake outside and had him walk into a building. And behind the building, you can see the kind of unusual earthen shape of the bunker. So, you know, because of the way they did the video, you can actually figure out where to look for the underground command post.

And they didn't do all that great of a job disguising it. So you can actually see where the underground bunker is. That's a real bunker that we were able to geolocate because they were lazy.

Aaron 13:11

And then that bunker is where he gets the briefing that sets this thing in motion.

Jeffrey 13:17

Yeah, that's their underground command post for the Army Missile Command.

Aaron 13:22

And the baseball cap is real. That I didn't know. So, like, I knew that we had done this work, but I had forgotten that you knew about the baseball cap.

Jeffrey 13:29

Yeah, General Lee's predecessor did this interview with Admiral Haney, who at the time was the commander of STRATCOM. And there's a picture of them, like, in his office with, like, you know, terrible South Korean pastries or something.

Aaron 13:43

Is it salty pastry country?

Jeffrey 13:45

I don't know. I just... I've never really... I don't know because it seems pretty irregular to me. It's not like there are places where I get like the same things over and over again in South Korea. I'm always surprised. Okay. Which may be people trying to like cater to my weird Western appetite. Oh, he's a fat guy.

We should give him more pastry. Do they give tea too? Yeah.

Aaron 14:16

No, actually, you know, I've always had coffee. Okay. Well, that's good.

Jeffrey 14:20

I think they're used to, right, it's because of the American military connection. It's Americanized in some deeply bizarre ways. And it's not Americanized in other ways, as I discovered when I went drinking with a bunch of Air Force officers. It's a good time. But to go back to that hat... Haney is sitting there with the commander of the ROK missile command and he's got his patch off and it's like oh that's great for security and then I look on the shelf behind him and there's a blue effing baseball cap and actually I at the time I crowdsourced it to make sure that like it wasn't obviously something else yeah like a South Korean like baseball team or something right yeah I went through well I went through all the South Korean baseball teams go Doosan Bears that's my team And I went through local colleges and, you know, like I really, I was pretty careful.

When you look at it closely, it's an A and a C and the bar on the A makes an M. It's an AMC for Army Missile Command. So the hat's real and almost certainly a security violation. And I want one.

Aaron 15:32

So it's actually in like Latin script, right? Yeah.

Jeffrey 15:36

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, so that's actually the South Korean baseball teams all have English or Latin script uniforms. Okay, cool, cool. All right, didn't know that. Okay. Yeah, Doosan Bears, it just says Bears in English.

Aaron 15:50

Okay, cool. All right, all right. That makes it easier.

Jeffrey 15:52

And they got a D on their hat, which I love. Although it's a fauxback. They have this great throwback to the 80s, but it's a fauxback because at the time they were the Oriental Brewing Bears. No, really? Yeah, yeah. So they were the OB Bears, but now they're the Doosan Heavy Industries Bears. So their fauxback is a D instead of an OB.

Aaron 16:12

That's great. That's my team. Back to the hat. So you figure out the hat. So the hat comes back to your book as you play out this sort of two-page scenario.

Jeffrey 16:24

Yeah, I mean, you know, I just wanted to convey the fact that this place exists. Because, you know, people don't really focus on South Korea's missile program at all. I mean, we have in our podcast because we care. But if you were to just read the press generally, you would be under the impression that North Korea was bristling with missiles and that the South Koreans were sitting there with nothing.

Aaron 16:46

Right.

Jeffrey 16:47

But in fact, they aren't sitting there with nothing. They have a whole... They got a whole thing.

Aaron 16:52

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and so like, I guess maybe the big takeaway, you know, is that a lot of what informed your book, at least the scenario, is stuff that we talk about on the pod a lot, you know, is how geolocation interlinks with maybe, I mean, I guess assumptions would be the right word, or like informed analysis, and like how you can then draw out scenarios or I guess, pictures of how this would actually work in a crisis.

Jeffrey 17:29

Yeah. I mean, from my perspective, we do all this work and it gives us this weird... We get all this weird view. Oh, gosh, this is interesting. Something I have to tell you about in a second. But, you know, those facilities are there. And, and so you know, as we're, as I'm crafting this narrative, I can't help but have it shaped by my narrative.

Okay. I have to tell you something that's really cool. Okay. Someone in South Korean is kind of nitpicking the novel in generally a constructive way.

Aaron 18:12

Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey 18:15

But he is convinced that this base that we identified on the island is not a base.

Aaron 18:20

But I got to say, I can see the launchers.

Jeffrey 18:25

Maybe we misidentified one of the launchers.

Aaron 18:28

He's doing this in real time now? I mean, is this like a breaking news on the pod? Uh-huh. Is it on Twitter, or is you guys going back and forth in email?

Jeffrey 18:34

No, no, I'm not. I'm just watching him. I'm just watching him. I'm just watching him. They're not bad nitpicks at all. You know, like, he's like, they're pretty small nitpicks.

Aaron 18:47

Okay.

Jeffrey 18:48

They're not. They're not. I'm not offended at all. We could be wrong about that island, but it's built to the same spec, and it's... They could be missile defense units that maybe we mismeasured. But yeah, he actually confirmed the other base and the headquarters. So there you go.

Aaron 19:06

There you go. Well, I guess real life smacks into your scenario, and I guess that's a plug to go out and buy it, or at least read it if you haven't already. Maybe get a copy at your local library. Well, I'm all about constructive nitpicks. Yeah, that's good. That's part of the reasons why open source, in some sense, is...

Is aided by crowdsourcing. I mean, sometimes that can be bad, but sometimes crowdsourcing gives you... Oh, yeah, it's great.

Jeffrey 19:33

No, no, it's great, because, I mean, you know, we've been just going through picking out the bases, and we haven't been really peer-reviewing them too much, because we just haven't decided how we want to handle the actual specific locations, but... You're going to come up with a list and not all of them will be exactly right. But I am happy that the HQ and he agrees with Wanzhou.

We'll go back and look at that based on that island. I don't know, man.

Aaron 19:57

You wanted to talk about brute force before we wrap up.

Jeffrey 20:01

Or not. No, the brute force thing was machine learning is how you... Avoid the brute force problem is, you know, you could go through and pick out the drive-thrus.

Aaron 20:11

Yeah. I mean, that's my dream in order to get there and to become more proficient about that. You know, I've been talking to a lot of people about how to learn that because it's, it's something, a skill I need to, I need to pick up, but there's so many, I mean, just to keep in the open source seems there's so many opportunities with that.

There's so many opportunities with that. And that's my son. Cause my, my, my, my wife is in Boston. So I am on, I'm on solo dad duty today.

Jeffrey 20:36

Well, I think that's a good pod, Aaron. What do you think?

Aaron 20:40

Yeah, I think that's good. We don't have Scott with us, so he can't tell us how great things are on Slack. Talk about your book on the Slack channel. I can tell you that much.

Jeffrey 20:48

Yeah, I have been so socked in with interviews, I kind of dip in and dip out, but just generally my life is crazy at the moment.

Aaron 20:55

Yeah, I can imagine. So, I mean, I think with that, we'll wrap up. If you would like to join the conversation about Jeffrey's book and about a lot of other Non-proliferation things, including some geolocation challenges I threw out there. I tweeted... I sent a picture, sorry, into the Slack channel about where I was on my way home waiting for the bus, and somebody in the Slack channel was able to geolocate me within 28 minutes.

I thought that was pretty impressive. You can head... I knew it wouldn't take very long, but, like, I'm always, like... I'm always... I'm always impressed about how quickly these geolocation wizards can go. Because I can do it. Oh, yeah. It's brutal, right? I'm slow. And they're so fast. But anyways, if you want to jump in on this conversation, just head over to patreon.com slash acwpodcast.

And if you have a .edu address and are a student, you can join the conversation for as little as $3 a month. Sorry. No, it's okay. You can join for as little as $3 a month. And for the rest of us with a .com, it's $5 a month. And with that, I have a son to tend to.

So Jeffrey, it's been great. It's been a pleasure, Aaron. Bye. Bye-bye.