HN Reader

It’s possible that Bolton was national security advisor at the time. The timing of this coverage might be to implicate him now.

I was reading about special operations in WWII and these kinds of missions always seem to be on a knife's edge. This mission seems more akin to a WWII operation with the team and their immediate support being entirely on their own.

>But the episode worried some experienced military officials with knowledge of the mission, because the SEALs have an uneven track record that for decades has largely been concealed by secrecy.

This seems to be a trait many special operations groups have. Type A personalities that you want in that job, but that bring with it a willingness for big risk taking and fantastical type missions.

That's not to say their success rate should be super high, these are difficult missions, but some like the failures in Panama were a case of ambition over common sense. Granted this mission they made the right call to leave when they were discovered.

For anyone with direct knowledge, what's up with current military culture regarding secrecy? I knew SF guys from the Vietnam era and they didn't talk with outsiders. In fact, I can't think of any prominent "tell all" books from SOF operators from before the 21st century. Now we have ex-SEALs doing book deals.

When incidents like this happen, it gives credence to North Korean propaganda portraying the US as an imperialist aggressor.

If you can stomach the bravado and unclear factual accuracy, the 2007 book Lone Survivor gives an account of a similar failure, in Afghanistan, where a SEAL team was discovered early in their mission. But, it devolved into a running battle and a disaster for the US special forces where most of the team and many rescuers also died. As a result of those prior events, I can imagine they have different rules of engagement in the event of being detected.

But, what's most crazy to me is that these details are being published in such a short time. My impression is that these clandestine forces used to have much more strict control, and details would not emerge for many decades or even during the lives of the participants?

If anyone is interested, but didn't read it because it looked long-form... it's only ~3,500 words, and is a very accessible writeup about this serious matter.

The bulk of the piece is also a more sympathetic reporting of the story (e.g., the alleged importance of the mission, and allegedly why things happened) than previous reporting I saw. (The end of the piece switches to criticism beyond this story, though.)

It's funny how people are so surprised? This story was already fictionalized in 2004's "Team America - World Police". SEALs, North Korea, it's all there.

Special Forces are secretive, and almost as a law of nature that leads to them being inept.

There is a long list of these special operations in the book "Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs" by Noam Chomsky.

The Japanese bombed civilian boats that happened to be out on the water near pearl harbour before their surprise attack.

Their reasoning was that these boats could have alerted the Americans about the impending attack.

It's interesting to see the US more or less committing the same crime, even if it was just a bug planting mission.

Unfortunately many innocent people do fall victims of covert operations, the whole good versus bad, morals and stuff is cinema content.

The actual ops on the field is very wide gray spectrum, and one of the reasons so many are traumatised upon return to civil life.

I'm always surprised like at this level it still seems some people absolutely want to fire there weapons; whereas I would say the more secret a mission is, the more experience you have, the more training you have and you should have understood that killing people and making noises was not the goal of the mission... It should be more teached it seems, sometimes there is operational value in not killing people.

Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/us/navy-seal-north-korea-...

>you woke up before dawn with your companions to go diving in the freezing cold ocean, in hopes of putting some mussels on your family's table. But suddenly, you die. A man you have never met and whose presence you did not know about has shot you with his rifle. His companions stab your lungs so that your body will sink to the bottom of the sea. Your family will likely never know what happened to you.

Man, fuck these people. Meanwhile hollywood will churn out another hundred films about how Captain America would never let something like this happen because murdering innocents is not a line America would ever cross.

This post has a title that differs from the article it cites?

I feel sorry for us as human beings that something like this isn't treated as a war crime. It should never be ok to kill non-combatant civilians in cold-blood. This thought first came into mind when I read that Israel had killed a whole Iranian family ( https://www.tasnimnews.com/en/news/2025/06/26/3342913/entire... ) to assassinate an Iranian scientist. (Or atleast that is what is claimed - some regimes really are too comfortable with the idea of "collective punishment").

This botched operation shows how representative government has been subverted in America. Power should flow bottom-up, rather than top-down. Would putting this operation to a democratic vote ever result in approval? Highly doubtful. This suggests our current form of democracy is deeply broken and urgently needs fixing. IMO the issue is how we think about power itself. The assumption underneath it all is that once we vote, power becomes fully vested in our elected officials rather than remaining with the people who conditionally granted it to them. The "representative" part of our democratic republic has become the hack that allows crappy politicians to take over and use power for their own benefit. We grant power through voting, but that power should stay accountable to us - not disappear into secret operations that would never survive public scrutiny.

What evidence exists that the supposed mission occurred?

No mention of this in the article, but less than two years after this happened, the Pentagon announced a change in policy with regard to supporting CIA missions.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/10/politics/pentagon-cia-counter...

Is there any way all those involved in the killings can be prosecuted for murder?

Anyone willing to speculate what the target and electronic device could’ve been?

If later the murdered fishermen are identified and their stories known, is it possible for their families to seek compensation from USG?

It would have been nicer to kidnap the fishermen.

> The plan called for the Navy to sneak a nuclear-powered submarine, nearly two football fields long, into the waters... then deploy a small team of SEALs in two mini-subs, each about the size of a killer whales..

What? What is with these measurements?

The US and its usual spreading of freedom to innocent civilians overseas I see.

Terrible murder aside, what kind of signals was that device going to intercept and why did it need to be on shore?

Sounds like a Jack Reacher novel!

"A North Korean boat appeared out of the dark. Flashlights from the bow swept over the water. Fearing that they had been spotted, the SEALs opened fire. Within seconds, everyone on the North Korean boat was dead."

Seeing as how this was right where this entire mission turned into a lethal clusterfuck, you'd think rigorously trained, carefully coordinated and disciplined SEALs would just try the incredibly sophisticated tactic of.... just, you know, holding their fire a few minutes to first see if the boat knew about them or had anything to do with their mission. They must have known that random people can appear for reasons of their own, without necessarily being a sign of discovery, and then just wait and see if they can resume ops soon after the intruder leaves.

Even your average career burglar knows better than to panic at the first sight of an unforeseen individual arriving at some scene they're working for a theft.

Not as bad as Bay of Pigs, but despicable nonetheless. Kudos to the journalists who surfaced this.

We are fed a steady diet of media that propagandizes empire. We rewrite history (eg downplaying the USSR's role in WW2). We push a narrative of honorable soldiers, a competent military and elite commandoes.

But the reality is nothing like any of those things. This particularly mission was almost comically bad and would just be funny if a bunch of completely innocent fishermen didn't get deleted in service of this fiction that North Korea is some great evil.

But I take comfort in that. Because as much as hired killers and assassinations might appear in fiction, it basically doesn't exist in the real world. And when people do try, it basically always goes comically wrong (eg the Adelsons in Florida). Hired killers? Just not a thing.

Murder is an interesting crime because the perpetrator and the victim almost always know each other. And the recidivism rate is almost zero. Serial killers are a statistical outlier. Most murder is personal.

But there is "professional" murder, again to a very limited degree. Organized crime, gangs and (of course) state actors, most notably military units. Osama bin Laden was killed this way but even that was comically bad. It took years to find this massive compound that stuck out like a sore thumb in Abbotabad and even then, they managed to crash a Blackhawk.

This gives me a lot of confidence that, for example, Jeffrey Epstein wasn't killed.

The other aspect of this worth examining is the widesprread assumption that of course this was justified. Why? This was technically an act of war between nuclear powers. This was a huge provocation. Haven't we done enough to North Korea? I am, of course, referring to the intentional starving ("economic sanctions") of the citizenry.

.... as opposed to what? What do you think they should have done, sat around waiting to be captured so the could be featured in a NoKo TikTok video?

> The plan called for the Navy to sneak a nuclear-powered submarine, nearly two football fields long, into the waters off North Korea and then deploy a small team of SEALs in two mini-subs, each about the size of a killer whale

The lengths some people willing to go just not to use the metric system

>They found no guns or uniforms. Evidence suggested that the crew, which people briefed on the mission said numbered two or three people, had been civilians diving for shellfish. All were dead, including the man in the water. Officials familiar with the mission said the SEALs pulled the bodies into the water to hide them from the North Korean authorities. One added that the SEALs punctured the boat crew’s lungs with knives to make sure their bodies would sink.

Nothing to see here but a bunch of psychopaths killing innocent people as they screw up their own mission

Upstream reporting: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/us/navy-seal-north-korea-...

Yesterday's HN post on the story, with some discussion, but was flagged:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45143759

    [flagged] US special forces killed North Korean civilians in botched 2019 mission (reuters.com)
    68 points by hnlurker22 1 day ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 28 comments

[deleting this -- now that the source for the article has been changed, my comment is not as relevant]

“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf”

— Originally attributed to George Orwell in one form or another

[dupe] Earlier, source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45137040