Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir (30 page)

“Tell them the Chinese are not here and ask them if they are going to come or not.”

Edgard gave the answer to his North Korean contact in his fluent but American-accented Chinese, and I’m sure that if China had a version of late-night comedy it would qualify for a pretty good skit.

“They are coming now.”

My thought that no one would ever remember whether the Chinese had been present would, alas, not turn out to be wrong. My “audible” made its way to the press, at first in positive terms, and later as an example of a diplomat “gone rogue,” a theme that would resurface with some senators during my ambassadorial hearings for Iraq, almost four years later. It was the right call. It was really the only call.

Kim Gye Gwan, Li Gun, Choi Son Hui, and a note taker walked through the elevator door, peering left and right as if to make sure there were no Chinese. I reflected on what must have been their instructions, and what would have been the consequences for them of not following them, or of calling an audible, not a concept known in the North Korean foreign ministry.

We sat down at a long, thin table, Kim Gye Gwan directly across from me, his interpreter to his right, and mine to my right. He and his entire team looked as nervous and uncomfortable as anyone I have ever encountered across such a table. I kept repeating to myself the question, the answer to which I already knew: what is the outcome of this meeting that I am trying to produce? It was, of course, to get the talks restarted. Simple. Stay on task and make sure that is indeed the outcome. Nothing else matters.

“Mr. Kim. It is a pleasure to meet.” (Of course it wasn’t anything remotely a pleasure, but I was focused on the hoped for outcome.) “I hope we will have the occasion to meet many times in the coming months. There is much that needs to be done. Our countries are adrift in a sea of mistrust, and we need to do something to overcome that.”

Kim liked the maritime metaphor, and before I knew it he had us all “in the same boat” sailing to an agreement, I guess.

I told him we would need to manage expectations. These talks have either been characterized by pessimistic expectations, or wildly optimistic ones. We need to take out those highs and lows and manage steady progress.

Who knows if he understood what I was talking about, but his note taker seemed to be taking it all down. I found myself more interested in addressing their note taker because those who read those notes would be the decision makers, not Mr. Kim Gye Gwan.

I told him that the United States does not have a hostile policy to North Korea and its people. But we do have a “hostile policy” to many North Korean policies including its nuclear programs. We cannot accept these weapons of mass destruction, and will look for a political and diplomatic solution to achieve the end of these dangerous programs.

Again, not much of a response from Kim, but his note taker was busy. He seemed to appreciate my comment that we do not have a hostile policy toward North Korea, even though it may have seemed to him a distinction without a difference.

• • •

I found Kim, and would always find Kim, hard to read. On the one hand, he was quite willing to engage in conversations, and any expectations I had that he would be dumbly reading talking points to me did not pan out. He was intelligent, and self-confident, and thoughtful in his responses. But he was certainly not about to describe any personal opinions, or step outside his brief for even a second. And not reading talking points could have been because after more than a decade of doing this, he had actually memorized them.

Talks with the North Koreans were all business. Unlike in the Balkans, there was no discussion of raising difficult teenagers, or sports or hobbies. We rarely strayed from the subject at hand and hardly got to know each other.

I
slipped back down the elevator, then through the long corridors to a garage where I got into an embassy black Ford Crown Victoria and headed to the back entrance of the China World Hotel. On the way I learned that Secretary Rice had just arrived with her huge entourage and passed through a gauntlet of well-wishers and fans in the hotel lobby, and was waiting in her suite with her senior staff for me to arrive and give a briefing.

When a secretary of state travels he or she brings along the entire staff: administrative assistants, advisors, spokespeople to deal with the press, regional experts, numerous security personnel, and a support staff that would be busy into the night preparing morning press clips and other papers, as if the operation were back on the seventh floor of the State Department. This one-night stand in Beijing was no exception. I went to the seventeenth floor and was stopped by two marine security guards borrowed from Embassy Beijing, who demanded my ID. As I began to look for my State Department ID, which I had chosen not to wear around
my neck for the meeting with the North Koreans, one of the secretary’s security agents walking down the corridor recognized me and waved me through. I walked down the hall, marveling at all the duct tape used to cover wires for the State Department telephone system that would join all the rooms where her staff was to stay. Two more agents stood in front of her suite.

Secretary Rice was in one of the sitting rooms, beyond where the elliptical machine, installed for her visit—and every one of her visits, wherever she went around the world—stood. She was sitting on a couch with a few members of her staff, enjoying a glass of wine after a long flight.

“I’ve got good news and bad news,” I announced. “I met with the North Koreans, went through our approach. They have agreed to come to the next round of Six Party Talks, which we tentatively agreed would take place later this month.”

“And the bad news?” she asked.

“The Chinese didn’t show. I thought about canceling the whole meeting but decided to go through with it, hoping the Chinese would appear. They never did.”

“I’ll have to take that up with [Foreign Minister] Li tomorrow,” she responded. “They knew they were supposed to be there. I talked to him. You talked to Wu. Sandy [Ambassador Randt, who was sitting with her] talked with his contacts. They should have been there. Take a seat and have a glass of wine. It has been a long day.” She had that right.

The next (long) day, I accompanied Rice to her meeting with Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing at the Foreign Ministry. Minister Li was a friendly sort of person, with a hobby of writing poetry whose quality and depth was not always apparent to those who heard it through an interpreter. The meeting was held in a large conference room on the ground floor. As we took our places in the brightly upholstered chairs arrayed in a semicircle, Secretary Rice and Foreign Minister Li in the center two chairs, a small table with flowers between them, we could hear the considerable preparations going on outside in the large hall for what would be an enormous
press conference with banks of television cameras. The North Korean announcement that they would come to the Six Party Talks had reached around the world and the excitement was palpable. After opening pleasantries, Condi got right to the point.

“Why weren’t you there?”

“The North Koreans didn’t want us there. But it was a good outcome. You have succeeded in bringing the North Koreans back to the table. This is a great success. Congratulations!” He was very pleased and cheerful and was trying to get Condi to be the same.

“But you were supposed to be there,” she snapped, not quite in the mood that the minister (and I) were hoping for. I started getting worried that she was overplaying this. At that moment Ambassador Randt turned slightly to me and gestured lightly with his right hand that all was going to be okay. Perhaps, I thought, this was all an act that she had rehearsed in front of Sandy. But whatever it was, I appreciated his concern for how I was taking all this, as I was getting more sick to my stomach by the moment.

Li continued in a very pleasant tone, “You should focus on the outcome, and not just the process.”

“The outcome was good,” Condi, in her petulant best, shot back, “but the process was bad.” Oh, give it a rest, I thought. Not everything can be put into categories of good and bad. I started riffing in my mind. Okay, got it. Lots of politics back in Washington, but, really, time to move on. I emerged from my inner dialogue in time to hear her finally drop the issue and focus on when the Six Party Talks would take place, and how we should try to make progress.

At the conclusion of the meeting, the foreign minister and the secretary of state went out to meet the press. There were at least a hundred journalists from the United States, China, Japan, and other countries. Banks of cameras were set up in the back, and while there would be the required questions about Taiwan, the main issue was North Korea, and
especially the news that the North Koreans would rejoin the talks after so many months.

I stood over to the side of the atrium along with some of Rice’s aides.

• • •

Condi was very good in press conferences—gracious, smart, detailed, articulate, one of the best I had ever seen—so I didn’t worry too much about any “bad process” comments (although the Chinese looked a little anxious). She made the obligatory and accurate comment that the resumption of the talks was “only a start,” and that the goal of those talks would be to make progress on denuclearization. She spoke of the need for North Korea to “make a strategic choice” to give up its weapons.

I agreed, although my own view was that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il was unlikely to fall out of bed one morning having made a “strategic choice.” More likely, a strategic choice would only follow a series of less-than-strategic choices to join in talks, agree to some give-and-take, and finally, when the direction was clear, agree to move forward to the ultimate goal. But I knew that day was many months, perhaps years away. On that bright Sunday morning in Beijing, I had no idea how fraught the future would turn out to be, nor did I understand how difficult it would be to achieve even consensus within the Bush administration. All I knew then was that the secretary of state and the president wanted what I was doing to succeed and were going to back me up.

The “Fourth Round” of talks was scheduled for July 26, 2005. There had been three other rounds, in 2003 and 2004, but none had led to the slightest signs of progress even though the U.S. negotiators, led by former assistant secretary Jim Kelly, had worked hard (and fought hard within a divided administration) to come up with new proposals more in line with an effort to achieve a give-and-take negotiation. These internal battles were fought along several fronts. The East Asian directorate in the NSC, in the very capable hands of security scholar and Japan expert Michael Green, battled the Counterproliferation Directorate under the
well-mannered but strongly opinionated Bob Joseph, who never saw a problem in the world he did not want to use some form of coercion to solve. Mike prevailed with the president (and with Condi) and so the U.S. position going into the talks was quite a reasonable hand to try to play. My job, in the summer of 2005, was to get some credit for the United States for taking such a position, demonstrate to the parties that we were committed not only to a process of dialogue but also to success, and especially to arrest the slide in U.S.–South Korean relations that our differences over North Korea had caused. We were not just going to give this the junior college try, as Bob Frasure used to say. We were going to emerge with something.

The first issue was to gain more time for the actual negotiations. One of the main reasons that the previous three sessions had made so little progress was the fact that their preset duration was so short. Delegates would arrive on a Tuesday, talk on Wednesday, and allow the Chinese hosts to issue a nonbinding statement on Thursday as everyone made their way through Beijing traffic out to the airport. I had raised the issue with Wu during a trip to Beijing in April, explaining that I thought we should leave the time frame open until we had an achievement in the form of something that everyone agreed to. Wu paused for a moment, perhaps contemplating potential food budget problems at the Foreign Ministry’s negotiating facility in the event the stay were left unlimited, but he agreed.

The next issue was the need to come up with a joint statement that would strongly suggest progress in the negotiations, albeit not a final document, and not just a Chinese statement. Everybody at the talks needed to agree, hence joint. Recalling the Dayton Peace Accords, which were preceded by the two documents known as “Agreed Principles” and “Further Agreed Principles,” I thought it was a good way to jump-start a moribund process and gradually bring the North Koreans into some kind of envelope of negotiation.

Several of the parties, including the Russians, were in favor of a
statement of principles because they understood the difficulty of getting agreement on anything, let alone a full page of negotiation-guiding principles. The Russians also had vast experience in international negotiation and had a realistic sense of what was possible and what was not. That said, the Russians rarely took the lead in any phase of the upcoming negotiations except to support a process of dialogue. Their diplomats were talented and experienced, but they were unable to hide their cynicism and even disgust about the process. Aleksandr Alekseyev was typical of their stable of skilled but jaded diplomats. His body language conveyed someone who given enough time might have thought of a worse place to be than the Six Party Talks, but in the meantime he acted like he was in a living hell.

In our meetings at the Seoul Plaza Hotel and in long sessions on the telephone, Song Minsoon and I had put together several ideas that could serve as a basis for a joint statement. The basis, we agreed, would be North Korea’s willingness to do away with its nuclear programs, but we understood that if that goal were achieved it would be worth something to get.

Song wanted to take a tough stand against Japan’s efforts to include the issue of abductions in the document, and had gone public with his concerns about the Japanese, an opinion that certainly didn’t lose him points in the Blue House but caused problems for the Japanese. I pushed back with Minsoon, arguing that Japanese negotiators had a serious public opinion problem back home and could hardly be expected to ignore what was really the issue for the Japanese: the abduction of several of its citizens by the North Koreans in the late 1970s and early ’80s to use these hapless people as language teachers and other cross-cultural lessons for North Korean spies. Originally there were thirteen people confirmed to have been abducted. But that number grew to be seventeen, which drove Japan’s diplomacy further into isolation. Song’s retort was telling: “Do you have any idea how many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of our citizens have been abducted by the North Koreans?”