Just kidding. That was the sum and substance of a North Korean artillery barrage three days ago, according to the younger sister of North Korea’s leader. The Korean People’s Army “did not fire even a single shell into the relevant waters,” says Kim Yo-jong, who often issues fiery statements that her big brother Kim Jong-un would rather not put out in his own name.

North Korean soldiers, Ms. Kim intimated, were giving new meaning to the term “war games” for military exercises. “We conducted a deceptive operation in order to assess the real detecting ability of” South Korea’s “military gangsters,” Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency quoted her as saying.  “They misjudged the blasting sound as the sound of gunfire and conjectured it as a provocation.”

The North Koreans, judging from Ms. Kim’s remarks, must have had a good laugh, having “watched the reaction” of the South Korean “military gangsters while detonating blasting powder simulating the sound of 130 mm coastal artillery 60 times.”

Yet whom did Ms. Kim think she was kidding? And did she really think the South Koreans, with hyper-sophisticated electronic devices on the ground and on the  spy satellites of their American ally, would fall for her claims?

Rather, the North Koreans were “surprised by our military’s detection capabilities,” South Korea’s Yonhap News quoted a military official as saying. “North Korea’s artillery firing (on Saturday) was also detected by our military’s detection assets.”

The official had some choice words of his own to characterize Ms. Kim’s remarks.

Her statement amounted to “merely a low attempt at psychological warfare about our military’s detection capabilities,” NK News, a website that monitors North Korea, quoted the official as saying.

NK News noted, however, that the South Korean command “was vague about the North’s launch locations in its descriptions of North Korean artillery fire on Saturday and Sunday after being precise about locations on Friday.”

Ms. Kim resorted to heavy sarcasm with the apparent dual purpose of undermining the confidence of South Koreans in their own  armed forces and embellishing her role as her brother’s alter ego. The fact that KCNA carried her remarks in English indicated they were also intended as a warning to South Korea’s American ally. 

Little sister has a degree of freedom to speak out that shows she remains a powerful figure. “The ridiculous behavior of these puppets in military uniform is nothing new today,” KCNA quoted her as saying. “When a bird flock appeared in the sky above the West Sea before, they mistook it for our plane and made a sortie of a fighter.”

Added Ms. Kim: “They also insisted that a latrine door on a hill was a ‘north drone that made a southward invasion.’”