CIA director Mike Pompeo said Tuesday that the agency had, until a year ago, not been paying enough attention to North Korea, even as the Hermit Kingdom worked to advance its weapons capability.
“When I came in there was insufficient focus on the problem set,” Pompeo said during an event at the American Enterprise Institute. “It wasn’t the case that it had been ignored, it wasn’t the case that we had missed material things. But clearly it hadn’t received the focus and attention that were going to be needed to deliver for … this administration.”
Still, Pompeo pushed back on reports that the intelligence community had been caught off guard by Pyongyang’s sprint toward a nuclear-tipped missile.
“The intelligence community on this one actually understood the capability and the testing capacity,” he said. “We’ll never get the week or the month right on something that’s this complicated, but we can get the direction of travel and the capacity for rate of change right, and we did.”
Intelligence gaps still exist, he said, due in part to the reclusive nature of the regime. That includes measuring the effect of sanctions, which the Trump administration has pledged to increase on Pyongyang and its enablers as part of a ‘maximum pressure’ strategy.
Pompeo said that the agency views Kim Jong-un as a rational actor and believes he will not stop at a “single successful test.” The goal of Kim’s nuclear and conventional weapons development, he added, extends beyond regime preservation to securing a North Korean-ruled, unified peninsula.
“The logical next step would be to develop an arsenal of weapons,” Pompeo said. “That is, not one, not a showpiece, not something to drive on a parade route on February 8, but rather the capacity to deliver from multiple firings of these missiles simultaneously.”
(Pompeo’s citation of February 8 is a reference to its “Army Building Day”—2018 marks the 70th anniversary of the North Korean army.)
Pompeo reiterated that the CIA is working to ensure that never occurs.
He conceded that the agency is presenting the president with options in case the diplomatic effort underway is not successful. Still, he stressed that the administration is committed to a diplomatic solution first.
“It is the focus. It has been uniformly that for now 365 days. It remains so today,” he said.
