North Korea May have Stolen Secrets

These stories with North Korea just keep coming.  This time, a few news outlets have reported that North Korea may have stolen some war plans describing different options, including assassination of the Great Leader.  The theft may have happened, but I am skeptical of the whole claim and even more skeptical that it happened electronically as it is described.  The alternative may be worse, depending upon how you look at the North.

War plans are not something easy to come by.  They are very highly classified and require access control beyond the normal stuff a military usually has.  If they were in a computer, they were not in a computer that would have been attached to the Internet.  Not everyone has access to them even if they have the clearances for this kind of material.  Most people do not.  So, only a small number of people had access to these plans and none of them were in North Korea.

If the North really did get these, it did not likely steal them.  Somebody gave them the documents and that someone was either a spy for North Korea, Russia or China.  None of these countries would want anyone to know they had a spy in the location he was in, so they would try to pretend they stole the documents from a computer.  But the stealing was more likely the Chelsea Manning kind of theft, by an authorized person who had access to the documents.  There is more an more of that kind of theft being engineered by Russia and China.  They get people with clearances into places they want to steal from, then take the information they are given and publish it, or use it to make trouble between allies.  That is exactly what they think they can do here.

There is more sympathy for the North if we think the world is ganging up on them and may kill off the leadership, but I have never seen a war plan that didn't think about doing away with some leaders - not many - and write down that thought.  Those are plans, i.e. potential actions that give leadership a range of possibilities.  It does not mean any person will actually do any of the things described.  In my previous post, I talked about the two dozen plans drawn up after the North shot down a US surveillance plane in international waters, in 1969.  They are options and nothing more.  They would have to be negligent not to consider having this leader removed - permanently, so there is no reason for there to not be a plan for that.   How they got that plan, if they did, would be of more interest.