Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir (35 page)

I met with her immediately after New Year’s. She had already communicated the possibility to the president, who was prepared to explore it further. After considerable discussion, the decision was made to go ahead with Berlin, a traditional venue for East-West interaction. Condi and the president wanted to limit the publicity and told me to find an excuse for why I was in Berlin. I called Holbrooke, who, long out of government, was, among his other activities, chairman of the American Academy of Berlin. We worked out that I would speak at the Academy. He agreed to be in Berlin, saying so in a tone that convinced me that he would not want to be anywhere else in the world. Holbrooke loved this stuff. It would be like old times, I thought, except he would be my wingman.

We arrived in Berlin on January 15, 2007, for two days of talks with the North Koreans, starting the first session early the next morning in our embassy. We sat across a table in a sparsely decorated U.S. Embassy conference room. Box lunches were brought in and we ate separately in rooms reserved for the two delegations. Following a set of talking points that had been approved by the president, Hadley, and Rice (and not too many other people), I told Kim that we could commit to a process leading to the unfreezing of North Korean assets, but that we had to identify a means to unfreeze the North Korean accounts at Banco Delta Asia, and that wasn’t turning out to be easy.

In addition to offering heavy fuel oil to North Korea, I also proposed to open embassy-like “interest sections” in each other’s capital. The Chinese were very enthused about this idea, since it had been the basis for developing U.S.-China relations in the aftermath of the 1972 Shanghai Accords. Washington was less enthusiastic, as many believed this was too
big a plum for the North Koreans. The issue became moot when Kim Gye Gwan told me his government was not interested in pursuing interest sections at all. I was not entirely surprised. What the North Koreans would get out of such an arrangement would be access in Washington, but they would not appreciate an active U.S. mission in Pyongyang, its officers fanning out to make contact with North Korean society.

It was clear from the discussions that the North Koreans needed fuel oil (how much would need to be negotiated at the next round) and would be prepared to disable their nuclear facilities (with details to be negotiated at the next round of talks).

A major problem remained. The North Koreans were not prepared to discuss our well-founded suspicions about their uranium enrichment program (UEP). We knew that they had made purchases consistent with a UEP, but in the absence of any proven facility, and dogged by the Iraq experience, in which allegations resulting in a war had proven to be inaccurate, we were reluctant to hold up negotiation to eliminate a known site—the Yongbyon plutonium site—for the sake of suspicions but little proof. Our formulation with the North Koreans continued to be that this was an “outstanding question” that needed to be answered to everyone’s satisfaction.

My hope throughout the process, a hope shared by Rice and others, was that the more we could get on the ground in North Korea, the more we could assess the status of the uranium program, whether it was real or something the North Koreans had tried and failed at. Stanford University scholars Siegfried “Sig” Hecker and John Lewis, both of whom had known Secretary Rice for years, made an impassioned case to her for getting on with shutting down the plutonium-producing reactor as the clear and present danger, and keeping the door open to finding out more about the highly enriched uranium (HEU) program. I believed that was good advice, as long as we never dropped the HEU issue.

Berlin marked an important step forward. By logistical happenstance, Rice came through Berlin while returning from a trip to the
Middle East. Taking my entire five-member team with me, I briefed her in her sparsely appointed suite, whose décor was pretty much limited to a reproduction of a large oil portrait of a frightening Frederick the Great. Yuri Kim leaned over to me and said, “Can we cover him up? He’s scaring me.” Condi, oblivious to Frederick’s glare, was intrigued by the idea that we could get some disablement of facilities, put international inspectors on the ground, and share the fuel oil costs with the other partners. A key item on the price tag, however, was to reverse the Banco Delta Asia sanctions, something nobody had yet figured out how to do.

The next morning I spoke before the American Academy in Berlin, at the Adlon, a proud, historic hotel that unfortunately had become known around the world as the place where Michael Jackson dangled his baby outside a fourth-story window for no apparent reason other than to pose before the crowd below. “No, guys,” I told my team. “We are not going to look at where Michael Jackson held the baby.”

I met Holbrooke in the café and walked with him to the ballroom where I would be giving the talk. He was lamenting the lack of notice and what he feared would be too small a crowd. He had clearly forgotten the habits of the East Asian press. Swarms of them, including a couple of Japanese television crews, met us at the elevator and followed us to the ballroom. Trying to get a better shot of me, one hit the back of Holbrooke’s head with a camera. Holbrooke turned to the diminutive journalist and threw him to the floor before he had a chance to apologize. I was so upset by the incident, the wounding of Holbrooke’s pride more so than the bump on his head or his smackdown of the journalist, that I began the remarks with lengthy odes to Dick and his accomplishments. The bump on his bruised head seemed to go away.

At lunch, Dick and John Kornblum took my team and me to a Chinese restaurant on the top floor. Dick asked me if I would mind if he addressed the team, and I said of course not, walking away to have a side conversation with John and let my old boss perform. I knew he missed it
badly. For ten minutes, he told them to relish being part of a team working on negotiations of real consequence. At best, we might bring to bear our collective diplomatic skills to hammer out a deal with the North Koreans. At the very least, we would have learned lessons that can only come through experience. Either way, he told them, they would come out stronger, better diplomats. And one more thing, he concluded: enjoy the moment, because “you may never have another like it.” His tone was impassioned and deeply personal, one generation imparting wisdom to another. Not that any of this team needed a pep talk, but it moved them all deeply. As I spoke with John I could see Yuri, Victor Cha, Tom Gibbons, and Sung Kim sitting there spellbound, listening to every word.

On February 8, 2007, we arrived in Beijing for what we hoped would be real progress after almost eighteen months of virtually none. The talks were tough as the North Koreans pressed for more fuel oil in compensation, and often the discussions ran deep into the night. We knew that to get anything agreed, we would have to reverse the sanctions at Banco Delta Asia, and that no one had yet figured out how to do that. But it was clear that we were going to get some disablement of facilities in return for a supply of heavy fuel oil for the North Koreans, whose cost would be shared among the participants, giving them all a stake in the game.

In one of my telephone updates to Secretary Rice, I told her we had agreement to bring back international inspectors to Yongbyon, and agreement on some disablement steps, but that the North Koreans were holding out for too much fuel oil. I told her I was sure we would get them down to 40,000 tons rather than 50,000.

“Chris, don’t be too hard-line on this. Keep in mind that others are sharing the burden, and really, ten thousand tons of fuel oil is not very much, is it?”

“Okay,” I told her, enjoying the thought that I was the hard-liner here.

On February 13, Wu Dawei announced a new joint statement, the first since September 2005. The key elements were that the North
Koreans had agreed to shut down the plant, take disabling measures, and invite back international inspectors. The statement represented considerable elaboration on the September 2005 one, including the creation of working groups (or, as the Russian interpreter called them: “the groups that work, that is to say, the WGs”) with representatives from all six parties to discuss the creation of a Northeast Asian Peace and Security Mechanism. The “groups that work” began meeting soon after the February Joint Statement, but it was clear the North Koreans were simply not able to gear up on all these fronts and little progress was made.

Meanwhile, back in the trenches of Washington, D.C., renewed fighting broke out over the commitment we had given the North Koreans to restore their Banco Delta Asia accounts. The problem was still that no bank was prepared to take tainted money, for fear that they would become a target. Efforts by Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson to support Secretary Rice earned him a nasty, tendentious story in the
Financial Times,
evidently leaked by subordinates who had no interest in implementing the commitment to reverse the measures.

The impasse continued for months, as Paulson and colleagues from the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank worked out an arrangement with the Russian central bank to transfer the funds out of Banco Delta Asia, in effect laundering the $25 million through these two central banks. In June 2007, Russia announced that it had agreed to take the frozen accounts from Macao and transfer them to the Russian Far Eastern Bank, where North Korea held several accounts. On July 14, after receiving a fuel aid shipment from South Korea, North Korea announced its part of the bargain: it would shut down Yongbyon and upon confirmation of the funds would invite the international inspectors to verify.

The announcement had been long hoped for, but by June I was beginning to think it would never happen. I was on three-day trip to Mongolia to visit our embassy and call on senior officials in that windswept, sparsely populated country. I went on a weekend trip north from Ulan Bator to get a sense of the vast Mongolian steppe and, as I always tried to do in
visits to countries throughout the region, to meet Peace Corps volunteers. Being a Peace Corps volunteer, as I always told them, was the best foreign service assignment I ever had.

We spent the night in a tourist hotel in the middle of nowhere that offered as a side treat the opportunity to sleep in a Mongolian yurt, or
ger,
a traditional round hut with a wood-burning stove in the center. The weather was freezing at night and there was a hard driving rain, a rarity, I was told. Some seven Japanese journalists, who, having been taken by surprise in the “Berlin shock,” were under strict orders by their editors to shadow my every move since January, followed me to the remote hotel.

One of the journalists informed me that the North Koreans had actually announced the shutdown of the plant and had called for international inspectors. Tom Gibbons, the East Asian and Pacific Affairs Bureau’s special assistant, managed to find a telephone that worked to try to confirm the news. I said very little to the press except that we had a long way to go in the process. Getting inspectors on-site was just the beginning.

I retired to my room in the hotel, my Mongolian
ger
having been flooded out by the pounding rain. I pondered how long it had taken to get this far, and if I really had the stomach to stay with this much longer. It was not just the physical toll, but also the beating I was taking within the administration at the hands of its neoconservatives, who continued to regard any negotiation with North Korea as an exercise in appeasement, for which anyone directly engaged needed to be punished. Anytime there was progress, it was attributed to such measures as the freeze on the Banco Delta Asia accounts. I felt I was far too visible a spokesperson on the issue, and that any approbation I earned for our country in East Asia was more than offset by the berating I was getting.

There was no question that the secretary and the president were supporting me, but there seemed to be little effort to rein in those inside the administration who were trying to scuttle the talks. Condi responded to my every word about such people by telling me to ignore them and understand that the president fully supported me, which I deeply
appreciated. Having the support of the president should have been the gold standard, but Washington had become a sort of free-fire zone and it was not at all clear to me that the president could protect an expendable Foreign Service officer.

At one point, the Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Nick Burns called and told me that the new United Nations secretary-general, the former Korean foreign minister and a close acquaintance of mine, Ban Ki-moon, had asked Rice if I could join him in the UN. Before I could even weigh what I thought was an offer, Nick explained that she had told Ban that she needed me where I was, and that Ban had agreed. Nick said he just wanted me to know, and concluded cheerfully that it is always good to be wanted. Wanted, I thought, was a pretty accurate description of my predicament with some of these critics.

As I headed to the airport in Ulan Bator, I received word from our embassy in Beijing that Kim Gye Gwan had asked me to make an urgent trip to Pyongyang. We were still a couple of weeks ahead of the actual shutdown, and I had no intention of visiting the Yongbyon nuclear facility to watch them process material for weapons of mass destruction. But in talking it over with Rice, we agreed there might be some value in making the trip to Pyongyang to ensure that all was on track.

For reasons I never fully understood, there had been persistent reports in the press, attributed to unnamed sources, that for months I had sought to go to North Korea but had been blocked by Vice President Cheney. I had never made any such request, because I never saw the value in going. A trip to North Korea needs to pay off to overcome the added hostility back in Washington. Years after Secretary of State Albright had visited and met with Kim Jong Il, she was still being subjected to criticism, as if she hadn’t known how to handle an encounter with a dictator.

In one meeting in the White House Situation Room, Rumsfeld raised the possibility of sending someone on a visit to Pyongyang, especially as no official American had been there since Albright’s visit in October 2000. Back in the fall of 2005, Rumsfeld, who often raised
“out-of-the-box” ideas—and in so doing, demonstrated why the box was there in the first place—elaborated on his suggestion, saying, as I sat three feet away from him, “if we do send someone we need to send someone with a higher status than Hill.” Vice President Cheney, not particularly known for empathy, looked over at me and motioned that I shouldn’t take it personally.