During the 2024 presidential election campaign, Kamala Harris and other Democrats ridiculed Donald Trump for supposedly having cozied up to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
While Trump did meet with Kim, new disclosures reveal that he also ordered an illegal and deadly SEAL Team 6 covert operation into North Korea that further poisoned U.S.-North Korea relations.
The details of the SEAL Team 6 operation were presented in a front-page New York Times article written by Dave Philipps and Matthew Cole on September 7.
The objective of the operation—in which commandos snuck into North Korea after traveling in mini-submarines—was to plant an electronic device that would let the U.S. intercept the communications of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un amid high-level nuclear talks with President Trump.
Because the operation was considered to be extremely risky, it required President Trump’s approval.
According to Philipps and Cole, Trump gave his approval without notifying key members of Congress who oversee intelligence operations, which appeared to be illegal.
For years, U.S. intelligence agencies had found it nearly impossible to recruit human sources and tap communications in North Korea.[1]
The SEAL unit that carried out the North Korean operation—Red Squadron—was the same unit that allegedly killed Osama bin Laden.
When the SEALs reached what they thought was a deserted shore, wearing black wet suits and night-vision goggles, a North Korean boat appeared in the dark.
Fearing that they had been spotted, the SEALs opened fire, killing everyone on board. The North Korean crew members were all fishermen diving for shellfish. The SEALs punctured their lungs so their bodies would sink.[2]
The SEALs then retreated into the sea without planting the listening device.
Carried out close to American military bases in South Korea, the SEALs’ covert operation “risked setting off a broader conflict with a hostile, nuclear-armed and highly militarized adversary,” according to Philipps and Cole.
After the operation, talks between Trump and Kim collapsed and North Korea’s nuclear program accelerated.
According to Philipps and Cole, the U.S. government estimates that North Korea now has roughly 50 nuclear weapons and missiles that can reach the West Coast, and Mr. Kim has pledged to keep expanding his nuclear program “exponentially” to deter U.S. provocations.
Philipps and Cole have provided us with valuable information based on interviews they conducted with government officials and military insiders.
Predictably, however, given the publication that they write for, their exposé fell short in its larger geopolitical and historical analyses.
North Korea is depicted in the piece as a totalitarian state that is a legitimate adversary of the U.S. and major threat to it.
Left out is the fact that the U.S. artificially and permanently divided the Koreas after World War II and targeted North Korea for destruction because of its adoption of a socialist political-economic model and Juche philosophy in close alliance with Communist China that placed a primacy on self-reliance and industrialization.
That the U.S. destroyed much of North Korea during the Korean War and then transformed South Korea into a defacto U.S. colony with thousands of occupying troops is additionally omitted along with the fact the U.S. imposed crippling economic sanctions in an attempt to destroy North Korea’s economy while repeatedly threatening it militarily.
Stuck in a Time Warp
The Times’s bias with respect to North Korea was apparent in another piece it published the same week, entitled “The Communist Warrior Stranded for Decades in an ‘American Colony.’”
Written by Choe Sang-Hun, a Pulitzer Prize winner, the article profiled a 95-year-old former North Korean soldier named Ahn Hak-sop, who was imprisoned for more than 40 years after being captured by the South during the Korean War.
Now 95, Ahn wants to return to the North to live before he dies. He decided to remain in the South after his release from captivity so he could join with social movements devoted to removing U.S. troops from the Korean Peninsula.
As if stuck in a time warp, Choe Sang-Hun makes a point of ridiculing Ahn’s use of terms like “comrades,” “struggle,” “imperialism” and “colony,” which, he said, showed Ahn’s “devotion to communism.”
Noting that Ahn’s home was filled with papier-mâché figures mocking Uncle Sam and the Statue of Liberty as money-loving, machine-gun-toting, bloodthirsty warmongers, Choe quoted Ahn as stating that “people in South Korea don’t realize that they are slaves in a colony and their leaders can’t do anything without American approval.”[3]
These comments are made out to be political propaganda, though the U.S. is known to possess at least 15 military bases in South Korea and to subsidize South Korea’s military and its leaders are known to display fealty to the U.S.
Sang-Hun further writes off as propaganda a work of papier-mâché art produced by Ahn’s adopted daughter, Jeong Mi-sook, recreating a scene of U.S. troops massacring Korean women and children during the war.
Historians have shown that the massacre of civilians by U.S. troops in the Korean War—including women and children—was, in fact, routine.[4]
Born on Ganghwa, an island west of Seoul in the 1930s, Ahn said that he saw people hit by American napalm bombs who, “when they pulled off their burning clothes, their skins came off too. What I remember to this day is young women covering their private parts with their burning hands even when they were dying.”
After his arrest by South Korean troops, Ahn was held in a solitary, maggot-infested cell, barely larger than a bed, with a hole in one corner that served as a toilet. He was badly tortured with the hope of making him sign a statement renouncing his communist ideology, which he refused.
Losing all his teeth in prison, Ahn was flogged with knotted ropes and waterboarded with water laced with pepper powder until he choked and fainted.
In winter, his tormentors tied him naked to a chair in a room where the floor was covered in ice, and dripped freezing water on the top of his head.
Ahn’s release from prison only occurred in 1995 at the age of 65. Tens of thousands of U.S. troops were still stationed in South Korea at the time, prompting Ahn to join in weekly protests demanding their removal.
Ahn’s misgivings about capitalism were strengthened when he witnessed jobless men bumming cigarettes and standing in line for work during the late 1990s’ Asian financial crisis, when he and his wife were swindled out of their life savings.
Choe Sang-Hun ends his article by asserting that the anti-U.S. military slogans Ahn regularly chants at protests outside the U.S. Embassy in Seoul “sound hopelessly out of place in today’s South Korea, where most citizens want the U.S. troops to stay on their soil to help guard against North Korea and China.”
These latter comments are designed to reassure readers that Ahn’s viewpoint is a relic of the past and that South Korea cannot be considered a colony since the local population wants U.S. troops there.
Evidence presented in the article, however, actually shows Ahn’s viewpoint to be reasonable—particularly in light of the atrocities he and others experienced and continued aggression carried out against North Korea seen in the 2019 SEAL Team 6 raid.
The Times article detailed a 2005 covert operation authorized by George W. Bush in which SEALs used a mini-sub to go ashore in North Korea. ↑
No guns or ammunition were found on the boat. ↑
Ahn’s doormat is the likeness of an American flag bearing the words, “Yankees, move out!” ↑
See Bruce Cumings, The Korean War: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2010); Jeremy Kuzmarov, “The Korean War: Barbarism Unleashed,” Peace History Website. ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Uncontrolled Opposition.” He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of six books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023); and with Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change (Baraka Books, 2025). Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency . He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
