Pompeo Says CIA Previously Had 'Insufficient Focus' on North Korea

CIA director Mike Pompeo said Tuesday that the agency had, until a year ago, not been paying enough attention to North Korea, even as the Hermit Kingdom worked to advance its weapons capability.

“When I came in there was insufficient focus on the problem set,” Pompeo said during an event at the American Enterprise Institute. “It wasn’t the case that it had been ignored, it wasn’t the case that we had missed material things. But clearly it hadn’t received the focus and attention that were going to be needed to deliver for … this administration.”

Still, Pompeo pushed back on reports that the intelligence community had been caught off guard by Pyongyang’s sprint toward a nuclear-tipped missile.

“The intelligence community on this one actually understood the capability and the testing capacity,” he said. “We’ll never get the week or the month right on something that’s this complicated, but we can get the direction of travel and the capacity for rate of change right, and we did.”

Intelligence gaps still exist, he said, due in part to the reclusive nature of the regime. That includes measuring the effect of sanctions, which the Trump administration has pledged to increase on Pyongyang and its enablers as part of a ‘maximum pressure’ strategy.