U.S. Intelligence Sources on North Korea: “Work Is Ongoing to Deceive Us”

Wow.

Who in the world could have seen this coming?

Oh. Only everybody.

Before we begin, let’s do a flashback to several weeks ago, and the rosy, deeply deluded proclamation of our Tweeter-in-Chief.

Just landed – a long trip, but everybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office. There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea. Meeting with Kim Jong Un was an interesting and very positive experience. North Korea has great potential for the future!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 13, 2018

Since then, President Trump has said that he trusts North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, that he’s smart, he’s a good guy, and even said he would like his people to sit up the way Kim’s people sit up for him.

We’ll put a pause on the “why” involved with how Kim’s people respond to him, except to say, he once had an official killed with a flamethrower for taking what he considered to be a “disrespectful stance” when he entered the room.

Today, U.S. intelligence agencies are saying that North Korea is not only still a nuclear threat, but that they’ve maintained multiple secret sites and are increasing fuel production for nuclear weapons. He’s doing this, despite the theatrics and photo ops of the summit with President Trump earlier this month.

Analysts at the CIA and other intelligence agencies don’t see it that way, according to more than a dozen American officials who are familiar with their assessments and spoke on the condition of anonymity. They see a regime positioning itself to extract every concession it can from the Trump administration — while clinging to nuclear weapons it believes are essential to survival.

How much the Trump administration is willing to give remains to be seen. The problem is, as always, with Trump’s out of control ego. Will he admit that he was duped, or will he insist on carrying on the charade of peace with North Korea and further bend to appease a dictator?

Trump’s loyalists will scoff at the notion, but if Trump’s record of behavior is any indicator, it’s not out of the question.

In recent months, even as the two sides engaged in diplomacy, North Korea was stepping up its production of enriched uranium for nuclear weapons, five U.S. officials say, citing the latest intelligence assessment. North Korea and the U.S. agreed at the summit to “work toward” denuclearization, but there is no specific deal. On Trump’s order, the U.S. military canceled training exercises on the Korean peninsula, a major concession to Kim.

While the North Koreans have stopped missile and nuclear tests, “there’s no evidence that they are decreasing stockpiles, or that they have stopped their production,” said one U.S. official briefed on the latest intelligence. “There is absolutely unequivocal evidence that they are trying to deceive the U.S.”

That belief was echoed by four other officials, all in agreement that North Korea is running a con.

What is being described as common knowledge, based on the advanced intelligence gathering systems in place for the U.S. now, there is at least one undeclared site, other than the main site at Yongbyon.

“There are lots of things that we know that North Korea has tried to hide from us for a long time,” a U.S. intelligence official said.

“When North Korea constructed the enrichment facility at Yongbyon in 2009, the North Koreans did so at a pace that suggested this was not their first rodeo, i.e. not the first time they had assembled large cascades of centrifuges,” said Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program for the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

The latest intelligence suggests that there is also more than one undeclared site, but that it is not likely that Kim Jong Un is going to disclose information about those sites, simply because of Donald Trump’s praises.

The intelligence assessment comes on the heels of a report by 38north.com showing that North Korea was continuing to make improvements at its major disclosed nuclear facility at Yongbyon.

“The observed activity appears inconsistent with a North Korean intent to abandon its nuclear weapons programs,” said Bruce Klingner, a former CIA analyst and North Korea expert at the Heritage Foundation. “There seems little reason to continue expansion plans if the regime intended to dismantle them as would be required under a denuclearization agreement.”

That’s just the thing.

There was no agreement, nothing concrete, and this notion that Trump’s continued pandering to the rogue regime is going to yield positive results is just ridiculous.