On a dark, cold winter night in 2019, a team of eight Navy SEALs from the elite SEAL Team 6, Red Squadron, the same unit that killed Osama Bin Laden in 2011 in Pakistan, crept out of the water in North Korea’s territorial waters onto DPRK soil. The objective of this highly secretive mission was to plant a high-tech electronic listening device to allow our intelligence agencies to intercept and listen to communications between North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, and other world leaders such as China’s Xi Jinping or Russia’s Vladimir Putin. This operation was personally ordered and greenlit by President Donald J Trump. The SEALs, fully aware of the high stakes and the potential impact of their mission, rehearsed for months to ensure that every detail would go according to plan. The mission was scheduled to take place three weeks before the historic summit between U.S. President Donald J. Trump and North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un to discuss North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. This device, if planted according to plan on North Korean soil, would allow the U.S. to receive valuable intelligence on North Korea but also enable the U.S. to have more valuable leverage points during talks between the two leaders behind closed doors. However, the New York Times journalists uncovered the newly leaked information about the secretive operation. Although the White House declined to comment or confirm the mission’s occurrence, the New York Times reported — through interviews with former first-term Trump administration officials, members of U.S intelligence agencies and the U.S. military — that several of those people were talking about the mission details because they were worried that the failures of Special Operations are often obscured by the government’s secrecy. If the public and policymakers become aware only of high-profile successes, such as the raid that killed bin Laden in Pakistan, they may underestimate the extreme risks that American forces undertake,” the Times reported. 

The newly revealed details about the operation show that it didn’t go exactly as planned. Once the SEALs disembarked from their underwater delivery vehicles and swam to shore, they encountered what they suspected to be possible North Korean border guards, which led to the SEAL team opening fire upon the vessel, killing all possible hostiles on board. Once the SEAL team had neutralized the suspected DPRK soldiers, members of the SEAL team swam over to the boat, where they discovered that what they thought to be DPRK soldiers were actually local North Korean fishermen. This prompted the SEALs to stab all deceased North Korean fishermen in the lungs to ensure they would sink to the bottom of the bay. Once they killed all members aboard the fishing trawler, the SEALs promptly exited North Korean soil and waters to ensure their already compromised mission would not further affect U.S. geopolitical policies in the region and the upcoming summit between the two nations. The operation prompted an investigation by the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) and U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) into whether the killing by the SEALs met the Rules of Engagement (ROE) of the operation. The investigation concluded that the Special operators acted within the boundaries of their ROE to protect operational secrecy and safety while also ensuring the safety of American service members. Although this operation didn’t lead to further escalation in regional tensions, it still reveals a stark reality of U.S. foreign policy and the measures the government will take to gather information on its adversaries.