Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir (33 page)

Negotiations in the field are often double-tracked with discussions at the foreign minister level, and this one was no exception. Secretary Rice, taking advantage of the short overlap in working days between two parts of the world twelve time zones removed from each other, was frequently on the telephone with her counterparts, especially Korean foreign minister Ban Ki-moon, who helped Song and me keep the U.S.–South Korean position solid. Song and I often took long walks on the Diaoyutai grounds. At one point we looked up and realized that Korean reporters standing just outside the fence, without, we hoped, any lip readers, were filming our whole discussion.

We thought there would be opportunities for some forms of recreation, but just as in Dayton, nobody wanted to run the risk of a press story back home suggesting we were having a great time. So we continued discussions and drafting sessions, and a lot of waiting around, deep into the night.

Efforts to get off the Diaoyutai campus were rare, due mainly to the fact that the Japanese and South Korean journalists were prepared to follow us paparazzi-style, whether we went to a restaurant in the evening or did mundane chores like shopping for toothpaste and shaving cream. On one occasion, Edgar took me to a Chinese indoor market to buy some socks, among other things I needed. He would not let me buy anything at the sticker price and so began bargaining in his fluent Chinese while I nervously looked around to make sure there was no Japanese film crew capturing the event. Finally, with the merchant simply wanting to give away the socks for free, having been already sufficiently compensated by the opportunity to listen to Edgard’s Chinese, we ran out just as a South Korean television crew arrived at the front of the market on the busy city sidewalk, having found us. I nonetheless gave a brief interview:

“Why are you here.”

“I was shopping.”

“What did you buy?”

“Personal items.”

“Will you meet the North Koreans?”

“Not here. Sorry. I have to go. . . .”

• • •

September 19, 2005, came amid expectations that we had finally reached a deal. Washington had agreed to a formulation that skirted but did not slam the door on a light water reactor. We agreed “to discuss the subject of the provision of a light water reactor at an appropriate time.”

I thought it was a judicious turn of phrase, apparently created by Steve Hadley, who, unlike the vice president and some others, was trying to support President Bush in making progress.

But as we got ready for the announcement, Secretary Rice called me to say there was another problem.

I sighed audibly as I took out my pen, the Joint Statement less than an hour from being announced to the world.

“Chris, in the second paragraph of section two, could you take out the reference to North Korea and the United States living in ‘peaceful coexistence.’ Several of us don’t like it. It’s an old Cold War term.”

Dreading the prospect of reopening the text with only minutes to go, I asked what the problem was substantively.

“It’s a Cold War line. The Soviets used to use it all the time in our agreements. We need to take it out.”

“Um, Madam Secretary, that line has been there in the text for weeks now. Uh, I’m standing here looking over at the main room, where television cameras are being set up right now. Do you have any thoughts on what we could put in its place?”

“Doesn’t matter. You just need to take it out.” I suspected someone was pushing her on this and decided not to be my usual pain-in-the-neck self.

“Well,” I said, thinking about the meaning of the phrase—hideous Cold War relic that it may be, “instead of peaceful coexistence, could I change it to ‘exist peacefully together’?”

“Sure.”

“Okay, Got it. Gotta go.” I turned off my phone to make sure I didn’t get any more incoming calls and rushed to get the change in the text, explaining to Wu that it would be clearer English. He started reaching for another pack of cigarettes and it was only 10
A.M.
After all, I said cheerfully, this “peaceful coexistence” line is very Cold War–like. We’re moving on . . .

“You tell me you are trying to change the text at this point?!”

“Really, ‘exist peacefully together’ is much better English. Ambassador Randt, don’t you think so?”

“Absolutely.” (Memo to self: buy that man a beer.)

Wu accepted the change, noting that in his official view it was a translation fix, and we were done.

Minutes later we were in the large conference room with the plastic tulips, and for the first time I was able to look at my closing statement as written for me in Washington. The substance of the statement was fine, although the tone didn’t quite achieve the near-euphoric atmosphere in the room. The statement helpfully included a definition of the “appropriate time” when the North Koreans could expect the parties to “discuss, at an appropriate time,” the subject of the provision of a light water reactor. The definition of appropriate time was based on North Korean action in fulfilling its denuclearization obligations, hardly something the North Koreans could object to. But another line in the statement caught many people’s attention: “. . . the United States will take concrete actions necessary to protect ourselves and our allies (whether they ask for it or not) against any illicit and proliferation activities. . . .”

The effort to attack the North Koreans for illicit activities had been ongoing through the summer months. North Korea had long played by its own rules, most famously using its diplomatic pouch to smuggle cigarettes and other tax-free items to its embassies in several northern European countries for the purpose of financing their operations. As several investigative journalistic pieces had revealed over the years, the North Koreans operated a wide range of bank accounts whose primary function appeared to be the financing of the family fortunes of the Kim dynasty,
as well as the importation of luxury items into North Korea to satisfy the demands of the elites and, more generally, to finance foreign trade.

Even while we were furiously negotiating the Joint Statement in mid-September, the U.S. Treasury announced the designation of Banco Delta Asia as a primary money-laundering concern. Banco Delta Asia was an obscure bank operating in Macao, a former Portuguese colony known for its casinos. I was not surprised about the designation, but the decision to announce in the middle of negotiations seemed to confirm the suspicions of many—including some on my team—that the purpose was not to give me added negotiating leverage (something I would have welcomed), but rather to sidetrack the negotiations entirely.

I had absolutely no doubt that North Korea was engaged in illicit activity, nor did I have any doubt that the sleepy and sleazy gambling mecca of Macao, could well be the hotbed of it. Over the months, teams from the FBI and Secret Service that had found their investigations often running through Macao had briefed me thoroughly on the issues as they related to law enforcement. But I also found these teams of professionals very skeptical and not amused about some of the efforts of media-savvy nonprofessional, political appointees in the Treasury and State Departments to publicize North Korean activities rather than use them, as law enforcement professionals would do, to trace more such activities, work with local authorities in whose jurisdiction the activities taking place, and get them shut down.

In addition to being impressed by the obvious professionalism, calmness, and just-the-facts approach of the FBI and Secret Service agents who would gather in my EAP office, all wearing their trademark dark suits and white shirts, I believed that they could be a valuable complement to our negotiations. I had on many occasions told the North Koreans what I had also said publicly, that when a country pursues weapons of mass destruction, has the world’s worst human rights record, and counterfeits foreign currencies, it should not expect these sorts of activities to fly below the radar screen. And as intrigued as I had been by the
efforts of State and Treasury, I became far more interested in professional law enforcement efforts that would make the North Koreans understand where their activities had put them. Most important, by simply following normal law enforcement efforts and not specially set-up structures in the State Department, the North Koreans would start to notice that the noose was tightening. At the same time, they would have little to complain about because there was nothing publicly being said about it.

However, Stuart Levy of the Treasury Department, a highly politicized protégé of John Bolton who had been part of the Florida recount battle in the 2000 presidential election, kept good relations with the media and briefed them frequently, often overselling his product. My predecessor at EAP, Jim Kelly, had hired David Asher, a young, very bright, but ideologically minded political appointee, as if to say “EAP can be crazy, too.” Asher, also an overseller of financial measures, saw to it that many developments came to light with the press.

Thus when the Banco Delta Asia announcement came, it infuriated almost all our Six Party colleagues—especially China, South Korea, and Russia—and was widely seen as a challenge to the entire negotiating process, not to speak of a return to unilateralism. For the Chinese, it was an example of something they had seen during the course of recent centuries: extraterritorialism.

“What are you doing?” Wu asked me.

“It is law enforcement,” I answered wanly.

“That is not how law enforcement officials behave,” he responded without a trace of his usual good cheer.

Wu was right. The designation of the bank as a primary money-laundering concern had been made according to a domestic U.S. law, the PATRIOT Act, which had been passed in the wake of 9/11. But by 2005, the notion that the extraterritorial provisions of the law were necessary to “protect” America did not hold water in places like Beijing. Instead, it was seen as a vehicle for the United States to impose its will in any jurisdiction where it saw fit to do so.

FBI and Secret Service agents would privately complain to me that the Treasury Department’s antiterrorism finance office and the State Department’s Illicit Activities Initiative, in their ongoing talkative relationships with think tanks and journalists, were not helpful to long-standing criminal investigations.

I agreed with them and others that the public treatment of the issues might be undermining professional investigations, and I also believed that the publicizing of our efforts was undermining the negotiation track. And what’s more, they seemed intended to do just that.

Moreover, these efforts were completely oversold within the U.S. government as something that could supplant the negotiations by inducing the North Koreans to declare
no mas
and give up their nuclear ambitions (not likely), or could somehow lead to North Korea’s collapse (even less likely). There was no question that these steps had brought little Banco Delta Asia in far-off Macao to its knees (indeed, much to the glee of U.S. government sanctioneers, depositors big and small were lined up around the block in Macao to withdraw their deposits), but the $22–25 million worth of North Korean accounts frozen by Banco Delta Asia authorities in September 2005 was hardly going to have any macro effect on North Korea’s economy. No serious analyst of North Korea’s behavior believed that their response would be to give in at the Six Party Talks, or to collapse altogether. Indeed, the only effect of the steps against the bank was to derail the prospect of negotiation for some eighteen months and, of course, to make the North Koreans more careful about moving their funds around.

I repeatedly told the North Koreans that this was the world they had chosen, that banks all over the world would be increasingly unlikely to take their funds out of concern that they would face the kind of existential issues currently facing Banco Delta Asia. I explained to Kim that the United States, like any country, had the right to take action to protect itself against illicit activities of the kind that the bank was complicit in. Kim was not entirely convinced that the United States was truly living
in mortal fear over what bad governance at the Macao bank could do to the U.S. economy. Even before the ink was dry on September 19, 2005, I knew this was not going to be easy.

On that day when we reached agreement on the Joint Statement, I settled into my seat on the United Airlines flight for the long journey home. An American flight attendant approached me.

“I have a question,” she said.

“Oh, I am sorry,” I said as I started fumbling in the seat jacket for the menu, to see if I was going to choose the beef or the chicken.

“No, not that,” she said. “I want to know why we can have nuclear weapons and the North Koreans can’t.”

B
y the time I had reached Chicago, North Korea had issued a statement. They would insist on a light water reactor (LWR) in the context of denuclearization. An LWR, relatively more difficult to use to produce bomb-making material than a graphite-moderated reactor, had been envisioned during the Clinton era “Agreed Framework,” but the Bush administration was having none of it. I did not disagree with keeping the LWR off the table, especially for a country that had lied in its previous commitments, but I thought the best way to manage the issue was to put it off. Later on, I thought, if that were the only issue separating us from a blockbuster deal, we should take a look at it. But that kick-the-can-down-the-road approach was not the stuff some in the Bush administration were made of. Why say no when
hell no
seemed the more honest approach?

The statement that day suggested to some that the North Koreans were not going to live up to their obligations to denuclearize unless they received a light water reactor. In fact, the statement was simply an attempt
to define North Korea’s interpretation of the provisions of the agreement that dealt with their assertion of a right to a civil nuclear program. Washington was polarized on the agreement, pitting those who oversold it as peace in our time (Neville Chamberlain at Munich, 1938) against those who saw it as not worth the paper it was printed on. Some argued that the North Koreans had only agreed when they saw the oncoming freight train of sanctions in the Banco Delta Asia case.