Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir (39 page)

A month later we were in the U.S. Embassy in Singapore working with Kim Gye Gwan on a declaration that would be complete on plutonium and hold open the door to explore the enrichment riddle. While we would not sweep the uranium issue under the carpet, Condi, in Washington, was working to give us running room. I was trying to keep the process going until we could be assured that we knew all there was to know about the plutonium program. Some in the administration wanted all the negotiations shut down, as if to guarantee that there would never
be another negotiating process. But even the detractors, several of whom had taken to expressing their views through like-minded columnists and editorial writers, had to acknowledge that we were getting an important look at North Korean programs.

As a result of the Singapore meeting, Sung Kim and Paul Haenle were given permission to return to North Korea and cart back through the demilitarized zone on the 38th parallel between North and South Korea some eighteen thousand pages of documents, consisting largely of logs dating back to 1986 on the operation of the facilities at Yongbyon.

When the specialized agencies were able to analyze the documents, they also analyzed what was on the actual paper—and as with the aluminum, traces of enriched uranium were discovered. Could there be a uranium enrichment facility in Yongbyon that we had not yet detected? The possibility was increasingly likely, but to get further we needed to make a tough decision.

It was, as too few people noted, a success at diplomacy. We had succeeded in gaining access to information that no one had obtained before. But the criticism against diplomacy ran far deeper than an analysis of its pros and cons. Negotiation threatened the theory that nothing could be achieved by talking with dictators. Any and all achievements, such as obtaining the operating records of the Yongbyon nuclear plant going back to 1986, not to mention the pixie dust of uranium that covered the reams of paper (and Sung Kim’s Ferragamo loafers), were dismissed as unimportant.

For this degree of North Korean cooperation, we had to make concessions of our own. In addition to providing North Korea with our share of fifty thousand tons of heavy fuel oil, we had agreed at the Berlin meeting to remove the North Koreans from the Trading with the Enemy Act, as well as from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.

Technically, the removal from the list of state sponsors of terrorism was fairly straightforward. The purpose of the statute is to prevent an administration, any administration, from selling military equipment to a
country on the list or supporting positive votes in international financial institutions to provide funds to any listed country. We were obviously not going to sell North Korea weapons, nor, since they are not members of the World Bank, could we support a positive vote even if we wanted to. An interagency team looked at the issue for the purpose of determining whether North Korea had engaged with terrorist groups in the “past six months.” I spoke with Dell Daily, the state department’s counterterrorism coordinator, to stress that any decision to remove North Korea from the list was ultimately President Bush’s to make. We simply wanted to know whether from the point of view of the statute they could be removed. After several weeks, the committee returned a verdict that there was no evidence that North Korea had assisted any terrorist groups and thus, for the purposes of the statute, they were eligible to be removed.

It was not so simple. North Korea had participated in many terrorist acts over the decades, including the infamous bombing and murder of the twenty-one members of the South Korean cabinet accompanying President Chun Doo Hwan on a state visit to Burma in October 9, 1983. Chun, the target, had narrowly missed being killed when his car was delayed at the ceremony. Two of the bombers were captured, and one confessed to being a North Korean assassin.

But the issue that made our concession so difficult was the abduction and kidnapping program the North Koreans had engaged in during the late 1970s and early 1980s against Japanese nationals. The issue had flared up in 2002 when the North Koreans released several abductees, a stunning admission that did more to inflame public opinion than to calm it, especially as the North Koreans had backdated and in effect falsified death certificates of others who had not returned. Deputy Secretary Richard Armitage, who had numerous ties to Japan from his many years holding the East Asian account at the Pentagon and later as a business consultant, declared in a speech in Tokyo in April 2004 that the United States would include the abduction issue in the annual report on global terrorism. Within days, Armitage was accused of having promised that
North Korea would not be removed from the terrorism list unless the abduction issue was resolved. Whether that was a logical inference of his statement or not, the fact remained that he never said it. It would have been beyond his ability to make such a promise.

President Bush agonized over the issue for months. He understood the payoff in drilling deeper on North Korea’s nuclear program and disabling the plutonium, but he also understood the Japanese issue. He once commented to Condi and me in the Oval Office that if there were a “bad guy list” (or more colorful words to that effect), it would make more sense for the North Koreans to be on that one.

On June 26, Pyongyang delivered its long-awaited nuclear declaration to the Chinese delegation of the Six Party Talks. It contained important elements, such as the precise amount of plutonium it had used in its nuclear tests. The president, to the enduring dismay of his vice president, who continued to try to run a separate foreign policy in channels both public and private, followed up with the announcement that in response to the declaration the United States would rescind the application of the Trading with the Enemy Act with respect to North Korea, and would provide forty-five days’ notice of intention to remove North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. The declaration was incomplete and incorrect, but we were well on our way to what we considered the far more important phase, the verification protocol.

I asked Sung Kim to deliver a U.S.-drafted protocol that we intended to use as a guide for verifying their declaration of nuclear programs. The key element of our draft was to verify the nonexistence of their uranium program.

“How did it go?” I asked Sung, who had already commenced a rueful shaking of his head. “Never mind,” I told him. “This will probably mean at some point one more trip back there.”

On June 27, the day after the delivery of the nuclear declaration, North Korea fulfilled its part of this phase by blowing up the Yongbyon cooling tower. Television cameras from all over the world, including CNN,
recorded the event. Sung Kim was there, as was Paul Haenle. President Bush watched it from the Oval Office and told aides gathered there, “Now that’s verifiable.” Sung, in a memorable quote (for which he has taken good-natured ribbing from his colleagues ever since) made to Christiane Amanpour on CNN, said, “As you can see, the tower is no longer.”

I watched the collapse while in Kyoto, Japan, at a foreign ministers’ meeting for the G-8 nations. I had hoped to go, but Condi, who was increasingly worried about the hard-right backlash against the Six Party Talks and against me personally, told me to stay behind with her in Kyoto. We watched the event on Japanese television.

I had first raised the idea of blowing up the tower with Kim Gye Gwan, pointing out that the event would be watched around the world and would help us overcome any doubts that our journey—at least on the plutonium production—was real. He was interested, but cautious. In Beijing I told Wu Dawei we needed a gesture that would give meaning to all the sawing of exhaust pipes and other disabling steps. As I spoke I was rolling my notes into the shape of a cylinder and stood them on end. When Wu asked what I had in mind I told him, “We should collapse the cooling tower like this,” slamming the spindled notes with the palm of my hand. Eyeing my crushed notes on the table, he said, “We’ll convince them.”

The cooling tower collapse would prove to be the last accomplishment that year of the Six Party Talks. The entire core group of our team—Sung Kim, Paul Haenle, Yuri Kim, and Chris Klein— agreed that the real endgame was not the North Korean declaration, which we knew would be incomplete. The real issue, we all understood, was to have a workable verification protocol that would give us the needed freedom of movement to find what we already knew existed in some stage or another, namely a uranium enrichment program.

Having turned in an incomplete and inaccurate nuclear declaration, the North Koreans dug in their heels on any further moves, waiting to see if they would be removed from the terrorism list. As the forty-five-day clock ticked down on removal from the list, they did take some steps with
the Japanese to agree on procedures for addressing the abduction issue, but nothing came of it. At the end of the forty-five days President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, a move that upset many Japanese as well as those who were using the abduction issue as a way to block any progress in the talks.

Sung and Paul worked hard to continue the negotiation on a verification protocol. One of the North Koreans, committed to the process, suggested we agree to something, and simply get people on the ground to start the process, expanding out from there. If we had been dealing with a country unlike North Korea, this might have been an acceptable way to start. But with North Korea it was not a proposal I could sell to anyone back in Washington and so I rejected it on the spot.

With time running down on the verification protocol, I made one more trip to Pyongyang in October 2008, accompanied by Sung, Paul, and Yuri. This time the North Koreans made a point that our delegation was not going to be treated to any special privileges. We were not permitted to bring a U.S. military plane, as we had done on the two previous trips, nor were we offered the presidential guesthouse. Instead the North Koreans made reservations for us at a Japanese-run commercial hotel (where, unlike anywhere else in North Korean, we had access to CNN). We had dinner with a very somber Kim Gye Gwan, and I could tell that North Korean interest in the give-and-take of negotiation was coming to an end.

Paul and Sung worked through the day with Ri Gun and his team, while Kim Gye Gwan and I stayed away from the actual negotiation, a practice we had employed in the past by which Kim and I would take up in the evening the issues unresolved from the day. This time, there were too many of those.

We returned from Pyongyang through the demilitarized zone, where, comically, there was a large group of Chinese tourists who asked us to pose for photos, our team having become quite the celebrities in China. We crossed the DMZ by foot, empty-handed, with little to show for our
efforts. A few weeks later, in November, the Six Parties met once more, but it was over. The North Koreans were not serious about the verification protocol, and we could not go forward with what we had in hand from them, a verification protocol that only included the facilities that we were already completely familiar with in the first place. I called Secretary Rice, pulled her off her elliptical machine one last time, and told her we had to break it off. She understood. “Come home,” she said. “That’s a wise decision. You’ve done all you can do.”

I had worked on the North Korean nuclear issue since February 2005, through almost four years and some forty trips to China, South Korea, and Japan. The U.S. reputation in Asia had been transformed due to our willingness to engage as a partner in a process, and the onus of blame was put where it belonged, with the North Koreans. It was step-by-step, “action for action,” meaning that our concessions never got out ahead of what we gained and we never gave up something for nothing. We had also led that process, and in so doing had built on the relationship with China by working cooperatively on something that mattered to both of us. The gaps we had with the South Koreans that were threatening the quality of our alliance had been closed. Indeed, when the South Koreans held a presidential election in 2007, the U.S. relationship was not an issue and no candidate employed anti-Americanism.

President Barack Obama had been elected in the meantime, and his administration was expected to take up the negotiations quickly. But as the months and years rolled by without any resumption, it was clear to everyone that the North Koreans were at fault. Unlike in the past, nobody blamed the United States.

T
he secretary wants to see you at five thirty,” my assistant, Evelyn Polidoro, called into my office at 4
P.M.
One of the many odd things about election transitions is the seamless way the career Foreign Service reacts to the fact that the title of “Secretary” after January 20 now refers to an entirely different person. Evelyn was referring to Secretary Hillary Clinton, who had begun her duties days before. I didn’t think much of the request to see me, assuming as I did that Secretary Clinton wanted to talk with me yet again about North Korea and what it would take to get the denuclearization talks restarted.

Since camping out in a first-floor State Department office with her incoming staff in December, Secretary Clinton had been interested in my views about the talks and whether they could be restarted after collapsing in the fall of 2008 over the North Korean refusal to agree to an adequate verification regime. She was most interested in exploring the idea that the North Koreans had essentially broken off the talks in anticipation of working with a new administration in Washington, which, if true,
suggested a willingness on their part to get them moving again without too much loss of time.

Theories abounded on this point, though I was of the view that the North Korean resistance to go further in the fall of 2008 had more to do with an internal decision that we could surmise had been complicated by Kim Jong Il’s stroke and his incapacitation that summer. I couldn’t rule out, however, that fresh faces in Washington could help the situation. Many North Korean watchers had viewed with dismay, during the 2001 presidential transition, incoming President Bush’s unwillingness to pursue the Clinton administration’s “Agreed Framework” in which the U.S. side held direct talks with the North Koreans on a set of agreements whose essence was to provide North Korea with two light water reactors in return for dismantling their existing nuclear program. The incoming Bush administration officials were especially concerned about mounting evidence that the North Koreans had continued to engage in clandestine purchases of equipment for a uranium program. The result was that the talks went into hiatus while the nuclear program accelerated.