The UAE’s Phantom Missile Arsenal

Jeffrey Lewis 0:01

We've been sitting on this story for a couple years now. You are listening to the Arms Control Walk podcast, the leading podcast on arms control, nonproliferation, and disarmament. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Walk blog and a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Aaron Stein 0:23

And I'm Aaron Stein, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Refugee Career Center for the Middle East.

Jeffrey 0:30

Hey, Aaron. Let's talk about the United Arab Emirates.

Aaron 0:34

It's my favorite country in the world. I would talk about nothing else than dominating the news cycle.

Jeffrey 0:39

There are two big events that have me focused on the UAE. The first is the hack of the UAE's ambassador to Washington's emails. That's pretty interesting. And then there is this little matter of the ongoing crisis between Saudi Arabia and the UAE on one hand and Qatar on the other.

Aaron 0:57

Yeah, which also involves a reported hack. To place what appears to be false news stories on Qatari websites attributing statements to the Emir, which precipitates the breaking of relations and what I would call the blockade of Qatar by a majority of the Arab states.

Jeffrey 1:18

Yeah, I think what's really interesting about this particular period and the reason that our podcast is due is because for a lot of Americans who don't study the Middle East specifically, I think the Gulf states get treated as a kind of monolithic bloc. And the idea that there are real rivalries and tensions among them and that their ambassadors are engaged in various activities in Washington, D.C. to help advance their interests at the expense of their colleagues is sort of not widely known.

And topping all of that off is the fact that the UAE has made multiple purchases of missiles from North Korea. And that's something that almost never, ever, ever gets talked about until now.

Aaron 2:06

Well, they make great efforts to exert their influence through Washington with their ambassador, as the emails have shown, the small tranche that we've seen. And I don't think that they want people to talk about some of their, well, at least two confirmed missile purchases, perhaps a third.

Jeffrey 2:28

Yeah. So I think that's the place to start for listeners is we're going to talk today about the United Arab Emirates' missile program and specifically the tranches of Scud missiles that they've purchased from North Korea. And that's A topic that we wanted to talk about, first of all, because I think as a factual basis, the existence of those missiles is not well understood.

But also because we've done some open source work where we've identified what we believe is the missile base, and there's construction at that base that I think is consistent with the fact that it's not merely the two purchases we know about, but that there may have been a third purchase.

Aaron 3:09

Yeah, and I think the... The interesting kicker to this story is that, you know, friend of the pod, North Korea, at least the frequent topic of the pod, source of interest from Patreon funders, North Korea, is at the center of this story. And so when you often think about the proliferation of missiles, we've talked about Egypt, we've talked about Iran.

You don't think about the Emiratis going out in the late 1980s and seeking out their own ballistic missile programs themselves.

Jeffrey 3:41

Yeah, so the first purchase that the Emiratis made of Scud missiles from North Korea were Scud-B missiles that they purchased in the late 1980s. And that, you know, it's interesting. There is not a lot of doubt about that happening. I mean, there are... Multiple declassified U.S. documents that record that the UAE purchased probably 18 to 24 Scud B missiles from North Korea.

And in fact, one of those declassified documents even has a map that has the approximate location of the missile base marked on it.

Aaron 4:25

Yeah. It happens to now be co-located with Or at least close to where we are in the UAE, just sort of how this weird network of alliances run through the Middle East. And, you know, the first missile purchase has always stuck out to me because it comes so closely on the heels of the Iran-Iraq War and the War of Cities and really the introduction of the Scud into Middle Eastern conflicts.

Jeffrey 4:55

Yeah, I am actually reaching over to my bookshelf, which I could do because I have a really long microphone. And, you know, one thing I think that people don't really focus on is that Prior to the 1980s, the assumption from most analysts, or the assumption on the part of most analysts, was that ballistic missiles were only for nuclear weapons, that they were so inaccurate that countries wouldn't seek to put conventional warheads on ballistic missiles, but the Iraqis and the Iranians rocketed the hell out of one another.

Aaron 5:31

Right.

Jeffrey 5:32

And it's not clear to me that it had any particular battlefield effect, and I think that The analysts who were skeptical of the military utility were not wrong, but those analysts, I think, overlooked the origin of long-range missiles in the German V-2 program and forgot that when countries are at war, just sheer bloody-minded desire to punish the other side and make their civilians suffer is a real part of how leaders think about conflict.

Aaron 6:09

Yeah, and the use of even indiscriminate attack to try and go after population centers to undercut or erode popular support for sustaining a war effort. That should not be so alien, at least to American war planners or at least strategic thinkers in the 1980s. But... The MTCR, the restrictions built around there, are entirely built around the assumption that ballistic missiles are for WMD.

Wouldn't you say?

Jeffrey 6:41

Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. I mean, the whole idea of a 300-kilometer range missile with a 500-kilogram payload is the range at which you would want to safely throw a compact nuclear weapon. And then the size of that compact nuclear weapon. I mean, obviously there are always politics involved in negotiating these things, and so it's not like that number is magical or anything, but I think the underlying logic of the MTCR is absolutely that these systems are for the delivery of weapons of mass destruction and specifically nuclear weapons.

And what we saw in the 1980s was a kind of shift. So there's Iran and Iraq striking each other during the Iran-Iraq war, but then also I think people forget that Libya, after the U.S. conducted an airstrike against Tripoli in order to respond to a terrorist act.

Aaron 7:33

El Dorado Canyon.

Jeffrey 7:35

Yes, yes, yes. After the Libyans, was it LaBelle Discotheque that was frequented by U.S. servicemen that the Libyans targeted? Well, so one of the things the Libyans did in response was take their existing Scud missiles with conventional warheads and fired them at Lampedusa. You know, they couldn't hit anything, but I think Gaddafi got asked about it and said, you know, well, if I had missiles that could reach New York, I would have fired them at New York.

And so, at least for me in the 1980s, we see this kind of transition from the idea that missiles are for weapons of mass destruction to the idea that conventional missiles, even if they aren't tremendously accurate and don't have a huge battlefield effect, are the kind of thing that Middle Eastern governments want. And sort of looking at it, we saw that the North Koreans in particular were Played a very important role in supplying Scud missiles to Egypt and to Libya and to Iran and to Yemen and to the country we're going to talk about today, the United Arab Emirates.

Aaron 8:44

Yeah, I'm just going to pick up there. So you begin to see in now declassified national intelligence estimates, Written in the – I think this one we're talking about is in 1991. There's a section on the United Arab Emirates, and it says, you know, parenthetical ballistic – sorry, sub-ballistic missiles. Dubai purchased 18 to 24 Scud missiles from North Korea in 1988.

And Abu Dhabi, to even add a little more thing, may have had to deal with China for 80 M11 SRBMs.

Jeffrey 9:17

Yeah, you know, that was a really... That's probably another podcast, but one thing that is really interesting about these documents is, at the time, both Saudi Arabia and the UAE are getting in the missile business, and there are lots of rumors that Saudi Arabia and the UAE were interested not just in liquid-fueled missiles from China and Korea, but in China's solid-fueled missiles.

And I've heard nothing more about those reports. It's like they're there, and then they're gone. So that's a... That's an interesting podcast.

Aaron 9:48

Yeah, I mean, but this one we'll talk about. It's the start of the import of 18 to 24 Scud, Scud Bs, into the Emirates, the United Arab Emirates, just outside Dubai. In his early, well, the purchase is 88, and I think we think that the first missiles start showing up in 1989.

Jeffrey 10:11

Right. And the reason I reached over to my shelf was to pull off Joe Bermudez's history of ballistic missile development, the DPRK, because he's got one of the earliest reports that that sale had happened. And what's interesting about that Sale at that time is it makes itself, it makes its way into the press, right? Yeah. But the UAE acts like, you know, this is all just some kind of terrible misunderstanding.

And someone actually tells Joe that the UAE was, you know, very disappointed with the quality of these missiles and that they just went into storage, right? As though, you know, Like, oh, no, it's just a – it's a terrible mistake. We somehow accidentally ordered these missiles.

Aaron 11:05

I am in my office, Wi-Fi – poor Wi-Fi-covered office. And so I don't have my copy of Joe's piece, but I have his summary of his piece. It's on nonproliferation.org with CNS. And he does begin to put it out in 1989. And if you look at his – At the footnote, when he's saying this, is that there's two things he says.

He says, one, he bases this on author-interviewed data, but he says, some sources suggest that the total number of missiles supplied was less than 25, which is similar to what comes out later in the 1991 declassified data. And he says others have speculated that the UAE arms purchases agreement was, in part, a covert intelligence by the United States to acquire a number of the DPRK's latest weapons system.

Jeffrey 11:56

I don't think – go ahead. Sounds great, but yeah, that's – go ahead.

Aaron 12:00

I don't think that – so the reason why I point that out is because when he wrote this was a while ago, and I think subsequent open source work suggests that no, it wasn't.

Jeffrey 12:09

Yeah, I mean, I suspect that that's the Emiratis trying to minimize the situation. Because one of the things, as we said earlier, is that 1991 NIE has a nice map. And it shows that there's a Scud missile base outside of Dubai. And so we started looking around. Not me, by the way.

Aaron 12:25

You and your team.

Jeffrey 12:27

Yes, my team and I started looking around. And we found, near Al Minhad Air Base... A thing that looks to us a heck of a lot like a missile base. You know, it's physically separate from the airbase. It has its own administrative area, what looks like maybe some housing, and its own parking area, its own security fence.

So it's not really, we don't think, part of the airbase. And it's got bunkers that look to me exactly like a missile base. And so one thing we did was we went and got the earliest picture we could commercially available, and so it's an old base. It's before 2000. So it's probably not part of an Al-Minhad expansion.

It's more that it's its own thing. And so we're pretty confident that this is the Scud base. So yeah, if the North Koreans were getting duped and the UAE was just buying these to give the United States... They sure built themselves a hell of a nice missile base to accommodate it.

Aaron 13:34

Right. And then there's the second purchase.

Jeffrey 13:39

Right. So the Emiratis were so displeased that in 1999 they went back and made a second buy.

Aaron 13:46

But not the B this time. So the second – so A9 was the Scud B and then reports say 99 was the Scud C. Right, which has a longer range. Right.

Jeffrey 13:56

Yeah. I mean this is a really interesting story because we don't get the full details until WikiLeaks dumps it all – dumps all the cables.

Aaron 14:04

Right, so another dump, another email dump.

Jeffrey 14:08

Right, thank you. Thank you, Chelsea Manning. I mean, what I find really interesting about this story is it never really hits the press. There is one bit of reporting by Bill Gertz and Roman Scarborough at the Washington Times, but the Clinton administration basically lies to them. Or is vague enough that they get confused. There was a $6.5 billion sale of F-16 fighter aircraft that got held up because the purchase of the Scud C missiles was a violation of the MTCR, and that's the kind of thing that would result in sanctions unless the president issued a waiver.

And so this waiver requirement was delaying the sale, and people were sort of starting to wonder, like, what's taken so long? And Goertz and Scarborough said, oh, well, they needed to get a waiver from the 1988 sale.

Aaron 15:11

Wasn't that sale?

Jeffrey 15:12

Yeah. No, it was a new sale that had happened the year before, but they kept it out of the press. And then I think they eventually got the waiver and made the sale.

Aaron 15:20

Well, they had that 16th.

Jeffrey 15:22

Right. So you don't get the sale actually reported until 2004 when IISS releases a dossier that mentions it in passing as though it's like something that's known. But that's not known. That is, as far as I can tell, the first published claim that, yes, the UAE made a second purchase of Scud Seas in 1999.

Aaron 15:51

Did this square with your open source work? And we talked about this two years ago, you know, because there's a there's a second part to the story that where I managed to get to get all this indirectly confirmed. We can talk about that.

Jeffrey 16:02

Well, you know, one thing that's interesting is we've watched the missile base for changes and there aren't. There aren't a ton of changes there. That we can spot because we only have the satellite image that goes back to 2000. So it's really hard to see if they do a ton of changes sort of in 1999 because we don't have a picture before.

But one thing that struck us, and we'll talk about it a little at the end, is this site is constantly being upgraded. You know, it's not a site that they built once and then sat there for 20 or 30 years. I mean, there are constantly new things being added. And that's one of the reasons that we suspect that maybe there may be a third sale that we'll talk about.

But... You know to a first approximation yeah I mean the site is in really good repair and it in the early 2000s seemed to get some covered parking structures and some other changes that suggest to us that no this was not a capability that was being held in I don't know what you call it a state of suspended animation this was a real military capability

Aaron 17:22

It's maintenance on goes. It's a very well-maintained system.

Jeffrey 17:27

Sorry, I belabored that point. But I mean the real thing – well, go ahead and finish your thought and then I'll jump back in.

Aaron 17:31

No, jump in because I'm going to tell the story about my Istanbul confrontation.

Jeffrey 17:35

Oh, OK. Well, so I mean the place that WikiLeaks is really helpful in this regard is that there are a series of cables from 2004 and 2005. Well, I say series. There are two cables from 2004 and 2005. And what these cables detail is Link Bloomfield. Link Bloomfield, who was the assistant secretary. Shoot, I think he was an assistant secretary of state at the time.

Anyway, Link Bloomfield went to the UAE and basically tried to persuade the UAE to give up the Scud-B and Scud-C missiles that they had bought from North Korea, thinking it would be like a really great proliferation success story in the wake of the stuff that had gone down with Yemen a couple years before. And, you know, the UAE's attitude was basically like, well so now we have you know, like 38 to 44 of these things.

The numbers differ a little bit and that they might be willing to give them up if the U S were willing to sell a TACMs and much more advanced UAVs. And while While there were eventually ATACMs that were sold, the more advanced UAVs were not forthcoming, and there's no evidence that the UAE gave them up.

Aaron 19:01

But, you know, the cables basically are pretty clear that the... Do you know who they got armed UAVs from?

Jeffrey 19:10

Saudis?

Aaron 19:10

China.

Jeffrey 19:12

China. Yeah, why wouldn't the Saudis?

Aaron 19:14

So then, I entered this story in 2015 because... I was invited to – they call them track two. I hate that term because it's usually a bunch of think tankers and former government officials who get together and just talk about what we do on the podcast and usually in less depth. But let's say there was a – Chatham House, but there was a person who was intimately familiar with all aspects of this topic in the Emirates and I pushed him on the two sails and he was very flippant in his response and he was – Yeah, you wouldn't sell us the stuff we wanted.

This was in the context of Iran having ballistic missiles and then constant concern within the Gulf countries that Iran has the capabilities to strike with its ballistic missile force, to which I pointed out that a lot of the other countries in the region have ballistic missiles too. So isn't there a broader proliferation trend? So they're there, at least the two sales.

Jeffrey 20:14

Absolutely. So, and I don't know about you, but I think the... Anecdotal evidence of a third sale that the Bush and or Obama administration hushed up is not bad. I don't know that it's not a clean kill. But I think it's enough to conclude that we probably should be thinking there was a third sale. What do you think?

Aaron 20:48

So I'm going to let you tell the story because this is based upon your open source work. But in your telling, at least privately, before we go public with this, it certainly piqued my interest, but I've never... It's hard to confirm. There's no declassified NIE or cables that you could look back to where you can understand that something definitely did happen.

Jeffrey 21:15

Yeah. So there are, I would say, three pieces of data. The first bit of data actually appears in the WikiLeaks cables, which is in 2008. The U.S. demarched the UAE because a representative from Comid, a guy named Oh Sung Ho, was going to travel to the UAE. Apparently tried to get a visa. Somehow the U.S. found out about it and somehow demarched the UAE.

And in the course of that demarch, and there are one, two, three, four, four cables about this. Five cables, I guess, actually. There are five cables. In the course of that, The cables also reveal that a delegation from the UAE had gone to Pyongyang. So we have, I think, pretty good evidence that in the 2008 period, there were relations between the UAE and Comid, which is in the business of selling missiles.

And that relations involved Mr. Oh, and Mr. Oh was very specifically in the missile business. He apparently had been linked to North Korea's missile sales to Iran. So that's one piece of data, right? Now, it doesn't say that there was a sale, but it's enough to indicate that the UAE was at least exploring this possibility or that there was evidence they were exploring this possibility that was enough to alarm the United States.

The second piece of evidence, which jumped out later, came out maybe, I guess, a year ago now. There was another leak to David Kirkpatrick at the New York Times.

Aaron 23:08

I was just Googling around for this story.

Jeffrey 23:11

Yeah. Well, it's mostly about Libya, right? It was leaked Emirati emails could threaten peace talks in Libya. Right. And... One of the details that emerged from the documents he got was he got a copy of the secret U.S. non-paper that was releasable only to the UAE That talked very specifically about an arms purchase that a UAE firm had made from Comid, which were the missile dudes.

Now, this was a conventional arms purchase. I don't mean that it was the missile purchase. It was definitely conventional. But it was $100 million.

Aaron 23:50

Right, and they were going to route it to Libya.

Jeffrey 23:55

So when we started pressing about the Osung Ho visit in 2008 and 2009, or I guess the pressure that the U.S. put to prevent that visit, one of the pushbacks was, well, there's no evidence that UAE connections with Comid extended past that. Like, whatever, maybe they got caught and maybe they stopped. And it's like, well, I mean...

They certainly continued a relationship on the conventional arms side up to $100 million. And so that, at least to me, leads me to think that a couple of demarches about a trip is not going to dissuade the UAE from making a missile purchase if they want to. And then the third thing, which then gets to this base...

Is the UAE has done substantial construction at this base in the past couple of years. So they've constructed two new large bunkers, and they've completely changed the, or completely renovated the security perimeter.

Aaron 25:07

Yeah. I mean, the fence is... And I don't... Go ahead.

Jeffrey 25:09

Yeah. Well, I mean, it's an interesting facility because it's double-fenced. So it's double-fenced, and it's, like, nested. So you've got fenced off areas within fenced off areas. I mean, it really does look like a sensitive missile facility. But then they've added new areas and fences, including a fence that runs through one section that used to be fenced off all by itself, which I don't fully get.

Aaron 25:37

Maybe back up and tell listeners what you think the bunkers are and stuff like that and why you think it's a missile base just from looking at it. Yeah.

Jeffrey 25:44

Well, so we'll put a satellite photograph online, and I'd be interested in other people's views. We shared this with one of my favorite open-source peers, Joseph Dempsey, and he was a little more skeptical than we were, although I think I have satisfied myself that I can answer his concerns. If you look at the base... While it is near Al-Minhad, there's a separate road that drives in.

And actually, I'm totally bummed that Google Earth is getting rid of Panoramio. Because some Russian tourist, and I'm going to put quotes around tourist, took a picture of the signs at the security fence.

Aaron 26:28

I didn't know this story.

Jeffrey 26:30

They clearly flagged that it's a sensitive military facility at which photography is prohibited. He took a picture of the sign saying, no photography. If you drive on that road further, you come to an administrative area, right? Which is, so you've gone in the first round of fences and now you're going to come into a second fence area off to the right.

There's a parking area with it's like now originally it was just a lot and now it's a covered parking area and there's a building that looks like it might be for badging. And then inside there are buildings that look really administrative, right? Sort of a main administration building, other smaller buildings around it, and then some uniform buildings that look like they might be barracks or housing.

Then you drive on a road a little bit further and there's another security perimeter. And then you get really interesting things because there's what looks like an entrance to an underground facility to your right.

Aaron 27:29

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's hard to see, too.

Jeffrey 27:32

Oh, it's very hard to see. There's another road that leads to a series of partially buried buildings that are kind of arrayed in a semicircle that look like other missile sites we've seen. And then right smack there are two brand new bunkers that they've built in the past couple of years. And it's those new bunkers that really caused us to sort of say, oh, wow, well, you know, I mean, usually when you see changes at a missile base, that means that there are, like, changes in missiles.

Aaron 28:00

Explain the bunkers. I mean, again, what do you put in the bunkers, just for people following along?

Jeffrey 28:04

My guess is probably the vehicles. Maybe the airframes. Maybe they are going to put the airframes on the vehicles and have them all sitting together. It's a little hard to tell. These are much larger bunkers because beyond the two new bunkers, there are many smaller bunkers.

Aaron 28:21

You can measure them, right? So that's one of the tools you can use on open source is that you can measure the bunkers to draw inferences. They just aren't things sitting in the sand.

Jeffrey 28:28

And we – so I think – so there are different accounts of how many missiles they had purchased previously, Scud Bs and Scud Cs. I think one cable said 38. I think the UAE later said it was less than 30. I have seen slightly higher numbers. This is the Scud C. Well, Scud Bs plus Scud Cs. Right.

So the number of other bunkers in the site was sort of consistent with that. You know, it's sort of about the right number. Again, not exactly knowing what the number is. And then beyond that, in a separate fenced off area, there were these big buildings that looked like they were... You know, either air-conditioned or connected to fuel tanks underground.

They had some weird piping on the outside. I mean, I know it's the desert, right? So it gets really, really hot. And so it's really hard to tell if that's climate control or if those are buildings for fuel. But just the point is, it was this really unusual base that had lots of bunkers and lots of buildings.

And the buildings were, you know, clearly pretty interesting looking. So... To me, it looks like a missile base. It's in the right spot, given where the map is. It's old enough. It doesn't have any other obvious purpose.

Aaron 29:44

And the 10-year increments, I think, is important, too. That's always stuck out to me.

Jeffrey 29:48

Yeah, and the 10-year increments, it's sort of, you know, late 80s, late 90s, late 2000s. It's about the right time for them to be making a purchase. And then, of course, the North Koreans had something new to sell. Which is, you know, over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s, we saw that the North Koreans moved past the Scud B and the Scud C to something that's sometimes called the Scud D. Or, I mean, I think the thing that the UAE probably would have bought would be the extended range Scud.

Aaron 30:23

Yeah, we talked about the ER Scud on the podcast. Scud ER, ER Scud, whichever one you want to use. Right.

Jeffrey 30:29

And I think sometimes that nomenclature of Scud B, Scud C, Scud D gets a little bit confusing because there are different things you can do to extend range. You can sometimes make a missile bigger, but you can also reduce the payload. But we know that the North Koreans have an extended range Scud that is capable of traveling to about 1,000 kilometers.

And that would be a big and useful upgrade for the UAE. Because if you imagine that their goal is to have the ability to respond to conventional missile attacks from Iran, you know, just looking at where the UAE and where Dubai is, and, you know, looking at where Iran is, like, 500 kilometers hits some interesting things in Iran.

But, you know, Tehran is like 1,200 kilometers away. So, you know, starting to get up into that 1,000 kilometer range really, I think, is an important step.

Aaron 31:39

Who knew, right? You know, this is, it's one of the most, we've done a lot of Middle East missiles. We've done Yemen, we've done Egypt, we've done the Saudi story. We have the Israel-Taiwan connection. This one just flies under the radar in ways that I don't understand. Well, I mean, I do understand why it flies under the radar, but that's no excuse.

There is what appears to be – now, 2009 is not an open-shut case, but at least on two instances from a phantom scud force in the Middle East and basically an airbase that the U.S. shares.

Jeffrey 32:25

Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting. You know, I think one question is whether or not... I mean, I always have questions about how the United States knew that Mr. O was going to travel to the UAE. Because, you know, I think it's okay to talk about this now because it's been a while. But do you remember when Al Jazeera got all those South African documents?

Aaron 32:52

Yeah.

Jeffrey 32:53

So one of those documents was about a North Korean representative from Comid who was going to be transiting South Africa, presumably en route to sell missiles elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa. And they were going to make a pitch to him at the airport. It's a terrible document to leak because... The guy's almost certainly dead because of it. I mean, I would think this is...

I mean, unless he was literally sent out there as bait, it's a good way to get somebody killed in North Korea. Well, like, the geniuses at Al Jazeera didn't effectively redact his name.

Aaron 33:31

Yeah, I remember, because they tried to turn him, right?

Jeffrey 33:34

Yeah, I mean, like, first of all, just by releasing the document, you're putting the guy in danger, because honestly, how many people from Comid... Did the North Koreans send through South Africa transiting to sub-Saharan Africa to sell missiles? You know, there's another instance where the date on the document is not redacted. So you can tell when the transit happened.

So the North Koreans probably could figure out who it was. But then on top of it, right, he had a single letter last name. So yeah, they redacted the one letter. That's right. But like, screw you guys. Yeah. You're like going to get this poor guy killed. And then on top of it, they didn't put the redaction over the damn letter.

They left it off a little bit, so if you blew it up and you looked at it, you could see very well that his name wasn't redacted.

Aaron 34:32

Yeah, a lot of websites are getting problems recently for blowing their sources.

Jeffrey 34:36

Yeah, so, you know, and I mean, like, I think at the time we didn't want to, like, be too explicit about it. In the hopes that this guy would get to travel again before the North Koreans figured it out, but it's been a couple of years now, so they've had enough time. I mean, they have certainly figured out who it is.

I think it's Mr. O, or at the very least, I will say this. When WikiLeaks came out, we demarched the UAE for... Letting Mr. O travel there, and we said he was linked to the Iranian missile program, right?

Aaron 35:21

Yeah, and that's still a possibility. I mean, Dubai is a transit point.

Jeffrey 35:27

How come we've never sanctioned Mr. O?

Aaron 35:29

I mean, that's a good question. I don't know.

Jeffrey 35:33

Why? Because we want him to be able to travel, because we were going to pitch him.

Aaron 35:39

I mean, just before we wrap up here, the... I mean, I've always wondered, and this is what gives me hesitance about the 2009 case. And this also involves Emirati sort of, you know, while they go insane about the threat from Iran, Dubai is the major transshipment point for Iran. People going to Iran, at least Iranian smuggling to bypass sanctions, and was the home of one of the hubs for AQ Khan.

Remember that one? I do. It wouldn't be beyond the realm of possibility that maybe 2009 wasn't directly linked to their own thing, but... But it fits with what you were saying earlier with the open source about the expansion of the base, or at least the building in what looks like bigger bunkers.

Jeffrey 36:38

Right. So, you know, I mean, I think one of the things I just find fascinating about this whole process is North Korea has an active program to sell missiles around the world. And we don't always hear about those sales. And in particular, I'm kind of fascinated at how successful the UAE has been in suppressing information about those sales.

Aaron 37:08

They're effective in Washington.

Jeffrey 37:11

Yeah. And it's really interesting that you almost never hear anyone referring to UAE missile sales. And then, you know, when you get a declassified document, you go look at like, oh, crap, that's I mean, that looks like a missile base. And like, wow, that looks like a missile base in which there's still construction. Right. And then you get like a tranche of documents that.

You know, for cables. They're like, oh, look, the U.S. is trying to get them to give up the second purchase that's never been confirmed. And oh, look, the U.S. is demarshing them in order to stop a third purchase. Like, I think it's this really interesting difference because on the one hand, you have this kind of You know, official Washington discourse about how important it is to stop North Korean proliferation, right?

And on the other hand, like, just behind the thinnest of curtains, there is this real effort, right, to stop a specific instance, well, two specific instances of proliferation to a U.S. ally. And the people who are openly talking about stopping North Korean proliferation know this, right, because they're involved in this. And, you know, yet it stays offstage.

And I guess there are reasons to classify it, but not really. I mean, this is really about doing an ally a solid and not calling them out for aiding North Korea's missile program.

Aaron 38:41

I think that's at the government level and then sort of down one step below in the sort of think tank land. I mean, you're not going to have a lot of analysts who are going to push real hard on this.

Jeffrey 38:53

Now, I have to be clear, we've been sitting on this story for a couple years now.

Aaron 38:57

Our email chain about this I was checking was in 2015.

Jeffrey 39:00

Yeah, and it's partly because we were trying to find, really, a smoking gun. Yeah, and, you know, I... I am wary that while this thing looks like a missile base and has no other obvious purpose, you know, maybe it does, you know, and I'm just not thinking of it. And I'm aware that while it's very common for an analyst to see construction in a missile base and say, well, that is usually indicative of a new missile system, that, you know, we don't really know that, right?

That it's just indicative. And so... You know, you can put all this circumstantial evidence together, but I really was and still am, I think, to some degree, incredibly reluctant to just go out and say straight up, oh, I think the North Koreans sold another round of ER scuds to the UAE because we don't really know that. But it's increasingly hard to talk about this because I think that that's probably more likely than not now.

And so like, how do you how do you responsibly raise this issue? And honestly, we had a series of conversations. I talked to several journalists about it to see if they could get some reporting on it. I definitely talked to some some people who are otherwise involved in this issue. And every answer I got from everybody was freaking weird.

You know, I never got like a straight denial, but I never got a straight confirmation either. And it's like, what do you do with this?

Aaron 40:43

What's interesting, as I'm just looking back at the Declassified 91 NIE, and it says Qatar was negotiating with Egypt to acquire Scuds in mid-1990, but since the Gulf War, it's shifted to an effort to obtain Patriot. Just to really bring it full circle, it was not abnormal in the early 1990s, late 1980s for countries in the region to seek out ballistic missiles from the tentacles of the DPRK.

Jeffrey 41:24

Right. Well, I mean, after I mean, I think the Iran Iraq war was a fantastic advertising campaign. And, you know, we definitely in the wake of that saw Saudi Arabia purchase intermediate range ballistic missiles from China. And, you know, we've seen really rapid. I mean, I think it's kind of amazing if you if you step back. So in addition to the Saudis, then the North Koreans were able to, as we said, make sales to Libya and had an ongoing relationship with Egypt, which is where all this nonsense started.

Sales to Yemen, an ongoing relationship with Syria, an ongoing relationship with Iran, and also the UAE. So, you know, poor Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Oman, I think, are the only ones who got left out of all the fun. So far as we know.

Aaron 42:17

So far as we know. We'll find out in the NIE in the next 10 years, or we'll keep an eye out in the press, despite efforts to suppress.

Jeffrey 42:25

Yeah. But I mean, it's interesting, right? Countries love missiles. Dictators, well, dictators, maybe that's too strong, but autocrats, autocrats love missiles.

Aaron 42:36

Yeah, I think that's another part.

Jeffrey 42:38

Yeah. Well, this ought to be fun over on the Slack channel.

Aaron 42:44

Yeah, I'd love for the... I guess peer review is not the right word, but for people to crowdsource, what the hell is going on over there?

Jeffrey 42:53

Red team.

Aaron 42:54

Red team. Red team. That's it. It's a red team. And who knows? Maybe we'll do a follow-up.

Jeffrey 43:02

So, Scott, how are things going over on the Patreon-funded Slack channel? We have a very active community over there. And like you said earlier in the episode, it looks like we may be doing some red team, blue team sort of analysis on this episode's findings. So come on over. That ought to be fun. Hey, Aaron. Thanks for joining me.

My pleasure. And thank you for listening.