U.S. efforts to penetrate reclusive North Korea have been so confounding for so long that the military likely doesn't have enough accurate intelligence to take out its nuclear and missile facilities even if President Donald Trump ordered it.

Trump on Thursday declared anew that "military action would certainly be an option," one that would be "a very sad day for North Korea."


"Is it inevitable? Nothing's inevitable," he said at a White House news conference, adding that he "would prefer not going the route of the military, but it's something certainly that could happen. Our military has never been stronger.”

But because the so called Hermit Kingdom has long been one of the most impenetrable intelligence targets — the top U.S. spy earlier this year called it “one of the hardest, if not the hardest" — there is low confidence airstrikes or other means of attack would successfully thwart its nuclear and missile ambitions without leaving significant elements of its arsenal for Pyongyang to retaliate with.

"You don't want to stir the hornet's nest and the hornets are still there when you're done," said Douglas Paal, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former National Security Council staffer for former President George H.W. Bush. "If you're giving options to the president ... one of the very first things we have to say is we can strike what we can see, but we don't know what we can't see.

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"Generally speaking, I don't think it's overstating to say we're still groping in the dark," he added.

The difficulty collecting and interpreting intelligence on North Korea is one reason why different spy agencies often reach different conclusions about North Korea's capabilities — and have been caught off guard repeatedly, including reportedly by the test earlier this week of a thermonuclear bomb.

In 2013, for example, the Defense Intelligence Agency said it had "moderate confidence" that North Korea had developed a nuclear warhead that could be launched atop a ballistic missile. Shortly after, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper walked that back and said that the finding was not the consensus of the whole intelligence community.

But this summer, a military intelligence analysis of North Korea's nuclear and missile programs had to be revised, concluding Pyongyang could place an atomic bomb atop an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the United States by the end of 2018 — two years sooner than previous estimates.

Weeks later, other U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that North Korea has begun building missile-ready warheads.

And on Sunday, North Korea's underground detonation of a nuclear weapon in the remote northeast of the country literally shook the region with what experts now say was a 140 kiloton blast — more powerful than its previous five tests combined.

The U.S. collects intelligence on foreign nations and terrorist groups primarily using human spies, electronic eavesdropping, cyber espionage and spy satellites. And each is especially difficult in North Korea for various reasons, say those with direct experience.

One is the lack of diplomatic or commercial relationships, said Bruce Klingner, who spent 20 years at the CIA and DIA before joining the Heritage Foundation.

“We obviously don’t blend well into North Korea, and even South Korea has difficulty running agents, because of differences in dialect and pronunciation,” Klingner said. “Any strangers stand out, so in a country where people will report on their families and neighbors, certainly any stranger will get reported.”

That means any human intelligence comes from North Korean defectors. There have been some but not many, and more often than not they have been individuals lacking direct knowledge of the regime's most sensitive inner workings.



Paal said defectors also will typically embellish the information they share to get better treatment and are often not reliable.

And even the limited opportunities there are for human intelligence collection — considered crucial to gauging intent — are often unsatisfying.

“North Korea is probably the most restrictive human environment in the world. It’s far more restrictive certainly than pre-war Syria or Iran, more restrictive than China or Burma,” said Andrew Peek, a former Army intelligence officer and fellow at the Clements Center for National Security, a nonpartisan research center at the University of Texas at Austin. "I think we have less granularity on North Korea than we do on Syria or Iran. There’s very little osmosis in or out.”

Gathering intelligence through electronic means — in military parlance, signals intelligence — is also restricted because of the limited technology, internet access and cellphone use inside North Korea. And those who do use computer networks in North Korea, including government officials, use strong encryption.

"Their broadband is extremely limited," Dan Coats, director of national intelligence, told a Senate panel in May. "So using that as an access to collection is — we get very limited results."

The same goes for other intelligence gathering tools, he said. "We get very limited results. We do not have constant, consistent [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] capabilities and so there are gaps, and the North Koreans know about these," Coats told the Armed Services Committee. "So it is — it becomes a difficult challenge relative to a society as closed and as isolated as North Korea is ..."

Using satellites to take photos is the most successful intelligence collection tactic in North Korea, experts say. But even that has limits.

While imagery can help track military movements or analyze activity or test preparations at nuclear or missile sites, it provides an incomplete picture, Klingner said.

Surveillance images are also difficult to collect because many North Korean military and storage facilities are located underground, both for security reasons and because the mountainous country lacks large open spaces.

Such terrain can also make it difficult to get multiple images of a facility from different vantage points, he said.

A reminder of the difficulty tracking North Korea's secret military activities was the recent underground test of what North Korea claimed was a hydrogen bomb, which caught many observers by surprise.

“The hardest part is confirming what they have done on the nuclear test side,” said Jon Wolfsthal, who served as the senior director for arms control and nonproliferation on the National Security Council until January. “Are they bluffing or not? That is because we don’t have great links inside their nuclear test program, and they have gotten good at ensuring nothing leaks from their test site.”

Others agreed that the fact so many of North Korea's missile and nuclear assets are underground in caves or tunnels shuts off many options that might otherwise be available to military planners.

"I think the X factor to me is how much they have developed these underground complexes, and I would suspect deeply. We just have no sense of that," said Peek.

It all adds up to a relative blind spot for American and allied intelligence agencies.

"If you look at the satellite picture of the lights at night from the satellite," Coats said in May, "there's one dark area with no lights on, and that's North Korea."

Bryan Bender contributed to this report.