Ex-CIA Analyst Expects North Korea to Attack South Korea Before Tensions End
Unless North Korea wants to be annihilated, its leadership has to find a way to climb down from its current wave of provocative rhetoric. But one of the CIA’s former top Pyongyang analysts thinks dictator Kim Jong-un will order a limited strike on South Korea — as a way to actually tamp down hostilities.
“North Korea will launch an attack,” predicts Sue Mi Terry, a Columbia University professor who served as a senior analyst on North Korea at the CIA from 2001 to 2008. The attack won’t be nuclear, she thinks, nor will it be a barrage from the massive amounts of artillery Pyongyang has aimed south.
Instead, Terry believes, “it will be something sneaky and creative and hard to definitively trace back to North Korea to avoid international condemnation and immediate retaliation from Washington or Seoul.” This, she thinks, is what counts as de-escalation in 2013 from the new regime in Pyongyang: a relatively small attack that won’t leave many people dead.
North Korea’s bluster waxes and wanes so often that it’s hard to know what to take seriously. But in recent years, North Korea has shown a willingness to follow its rhetoric with actual violence. In March 2010, it sunk the South Korean corvette Cheonan, killing 46 sailors. That November, Pyongyang attacked the island of Yeonpyeongdo during a U.S.-South Korea military exercise. Today, it moved an intermediate-range missile to its east coast, seemingly a feint at Japan.
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