The Secretary (29 page)

They wanted more, just like we had in Beirut during the war.

*   *   *

On the flight to Seoul, we ate a light dinner: blackened chicken salad with cut melon
and watermelon for dessert. We chatted to some of the officials in the nook near the
lavatory. Hillary’s daughter, Chelsea, was getting married that summer, as well as
Hillary’s deputy chief of staff, Huma. Huma told stories about dresses and guest lists
for both weddings.

We landed ten hours later, just past seven in the morning, groggy and crumpled. Even
the gray morning light of Seoul was too glaring. We had an eleven-hour day ahead of
us. Clinton’s suitcases, black garment bags and a large red cabin carryall, came down
the steps and were carried down the red carpet to the waiting limousine. Two rows
of South Korean men in wide yellow silk pants, black coats, and red flowing sleeves
stood guard on either side.

Clinton emerged at the top of the stairs a few minutes later. She had changed into
a red jacket and blue trousers just before landing. Beaming behind her sunglasses,
she walked down the steps to be greeted on the tarmac by the South Korean ambassador
to the United States. She was excited about this stop. It was one more building block
in the administration’s policy toward Asia that had been carefully choreographed.

We would have a bit of time at the hotel to freshen up before the one-hour drive to
the Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, the border between South and North Korea. We would
be long gone by the time Lew and his team brought our luggage to the hotel, so the
trick on trips like this was to pack toiletries and a change of clothes before handing
over your luggage for pickup—in this case, pickup had been twenty hours ago.

Outside the hotel our motorcade grew bigger. The U.S. defense secretary Robert Gates
was joining Clinton on her excursion for a display of soft and hard U.S. power. It
was rare for American secretaries of defense and state to travel together, and it
was the first joint visit to the DMZ. America was making its presence felt in Asia
in an unprecedented fashion. The South Korean officials traveled to the border by
helicopter, a much faster ride. But Hillary didn’t like noisy, windy helicopter rides
and avoided them whenever possible. Our press buses, rented by the embassy for the
delegation, had green “Foreign tourists on board” signs on the windshields. An odd
warning, but South Korea was working hard to be friendlier to foreigners, who often
felt discriminated against in one of the most racially homogeneous countries in the
world. Seoul was going to host the G20 summit later in the year, and the Ministries
of Education and Culture had just announced a new initiative to educate students in
global etiquette. The guidebook used in classes instructed students on their “role
as global citizens and on how to interact with foreigners.”
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If the green signs were meant to encourage motorists to let the clueless foreigners
through, they failed. As soon as we departed from the hotel, the back of the long
motorcade was separated from officials at the front by a swarm of cars that jutted
in between our buses. Our bus drivers were not embassy employees, and despite the
police escort, they did not feel empowered to drive through red lights.

The State Department media handlers on our buses were frantically e-mailing their
colleagues in the cars up ahead to inform them that the press was trailing behind.
Without the journalists, there would be no photos of the event. News eventually reached
Fred, in the secretary’s car, and the front of the motorcade slowed down to a snail’s
pace on the highway while the rest of us caught up.

Bernadette Meehan was the line officer with us on her first advance trip. She had
moved back to Washington recently from Dubai. During the long car ride, her mind raced
with the same thoughts that troubled all her colleagues. Did she have the number of
the site officer at the next stop saved in her phone? Did she have a set of earpieces
with her for the secretary for the translation at the press conference later? Did
she remember to tell the secretary that Gates was getting into her car when they reached
the DMZ? Did she check that the toilet was clean and the door unlocked at the Freedom
House building? Did she tell the site officer at the observation post to make sure
they took off the lens caps before handing the binoculars to the two secretaries?
Did she have her briefing paper for the next event? She thought of everything, again
and again, nine hundred times. All night, she had tossed and turned going through
every minute of the day. Every mundane detail mattered. It could be tomorrow’s headline
or front-page picture. The power was in the details, and she was in charge of them

The visit to the border with North Korea had been conceived as a message, a photo
opportunity to project American power in Asia but also to poke North Korea in the
eye. Behind the strutting was some frustration. For more than a year now, the Obama
administration had tried to get Pyongyang to sit down again for talks about giving
up its nuclear program. There had been many rounds of negotiations before 2009, but
the “Dear Leader,” Kim Jong Il, was recalcitrant and wary of giving up leverage. Without
nukes, he was nothing, just another dictator with a famished people on a territory
of no consequence. If he was to give them up, he wanted something big in return, like
eternal American friendship. He demanded attention with erratic behavior like firing
missiles or sinking South Korean ships.

The DMZ is a two-mile-wide buffer zone through which runs the Military Demarcation
Line (MDL), one of the last two remaining Cold War–era dividing lines splitting a
country into north and south. The other is the Green Line that divides the island
of Cyprus. There are many other tense borders between countries around the world,
between Lebanon and Israel, or Pakistan and India. At the Wagah crossing, Pakistani
and Indian officers mount an elaborate daily drama, standing eyeball to eyeball, in
colorful costumes, as they shut the border crossing between the two countries at dusk,
to the sound of horns, while villagers and tourists on both sides cheer and clap wildly.

But the MDL had separated one people into two countries for so long that they had
become two people—the north was poor, ravaged by famine. Scientists found that North
Koreans had become a few inches shorter than their cousins to the south. South Korea,
meanwhile, had prospered into the world’s fourteenth-largest economy, its well-fed
people growing taller by a few inches. Seen from the sky at night, North Korea was
a dark spot with one speck of light, Pyongyang. On Google maps, the North was one
large, unknown patch of white while the South was bright and covered in a yellowish-orange
grid of highways and roads.

Like at Wagah, North and South Korean soldiers came face-to-face, in one location
along the 160-mile line splitting their country—the Joint Security Area (JSA) in the
abandoned village of Panmunjom. Also known as the Truce Village, it was a circular
enclave that straddled the demarcation line, and we were heading there with Clinton
and Gates. Despite the lush greenery on both sides, the area felt barren and desolate,
bristling with hostility. Signs warned about land mines. The drizzle added a feeling
of despair.

While we waited below in the “village,” the limousine carrying Clinton and Gates drove
up the hill to Observation Post Ouellette, a small outpost with a watchtower, overlooking
the northern side of the DMZ. In the front seat, Fred’s eyes scanned his surroundings
carefully. The American and South Korean soldiers from the UN mission were on full
alert, but he had ultimate responsibility for his package. North Korean soldiers from
the Korean People’s Army were easily provoked, and the Joint Security Area had been
the scene of several violent incidents over the years, including the gruesome “axe
murder” incident in 1976, when North Korean soldiers seized axes being used by a UN
team to prune a tree and killed two American soldiers. Since then, the demarcation
line was enforced within the JSA, which had been a neutral zone until then; South
and North Koreans now had to stick to their side of the area. There had been no violence
since the 1980s, but the North was unpredictable and on edge following the condemnation
it had faced after the
Cheonan
sinking.

Holding a large black umbrella, Clinton walked up the steps to the observation post,
ringed by low walls covered in camouflage netting. Gates followed, and the two of
them shook hands with the soldiers manning the post. Fred stopped halfway up the stairs,
staying out of the range of the camera lenses. The drizzle stopped briefly, the umbrellas
were put away, the two secretaries were handed binoculars, and perfect pictures were
produced: America’s war and peace envoys, wearing a matching red tie and a red coral
necklace, respectively, standing at the frontier of liberty, peering into the distance,
with the American, UN, and Republic of Korea (ROK) flags fluttering on tall poles
behind them.

In the Truce Village below, a cluster of rectangular blue one-story huts with windows
straddled the demarcation line. ROK soldiers from the Joint Security Area stood guard,
positioned at the southern corners of the buildings, half their bodies hidden by the
stark structures. The stance was meant to give the North a smaller area to target
and allow the soldiers to signal to the South if needed. A modified tae kwon do stance,
known as ROK-ready position, it signaled readiness to fight or to take cover if needed.
The soldiers maintained it as long as there were visitors in the JSA, including inside
the buildings.

Gates, Clinton, and their South Korean counterparts were escorted into one of the
blue huts: the Military Armistice Commission building, where talks take place between
North and South around a green-felt-covered conference table. One door opened onto
the South, the other onto the North.

Inside, a soldier also stood in an ROK-ready position, with his back against the blue
door that opened onto the other side—the “Paradise for People.” Why would any North
Korean want to leave paradise for the South? But if they did, they’d have to walk
over his dead body. The soldier kept his fists clenched and his reflective sunglasses
on, even indoors, no winks or smiles, no humanity. To the North Koreans, he looked
cold and ruthless; he was the enemy incarnate. It was almost comical, except that
people were dying on both sides of the demarcation line, which, in this building,
ran through a table.

Peering through the window, an unusually tall North Korean soldier stood outside,
likely wondering what the commotion was all about. This was a popular tourist destination,
like Checkpoint Charlie at the Berlin Wall. But tourists did not come with bulletproof
cars or a retinue of bodyguards as this group did. North Koreans posted here were
elite soldiers, and this soldier would have been briefed by his superiors when they
picked up indications that a high-profile visit was being prepared. I couldn’t help
wondering whether he recognized Hillary. Had he seen pictures of her? What did he
know about the outside world? What did he wish for?

Fed a steady diet of propaganda about America’s evil designs on his country, the soldier
may have simply wanted to make sure no one crossed into his territory. For a few minutes,
he was unsuccessful. Clinton and Gates had stepped to the North’s side of the blue
room. They were in North Korea. They did not look back at the soldier, though Gates,
a slightly mischievous smile on his face, seemed to have trouble resisting doing just
that.

We drove back into Seoul, for a visit to the twenty-thousand-square-foot War Memorial
of Korea, part war museum, part history lesson, about the many wars that have shaped
Korea over the centuries until the Korean War of the 1950s. The conflict killed hundreds
of thousands: almost 40,000 American soldiers were killed in action or missing, the
South Koreans lost at least 45,000 soldiers, and several thousand from allied countries
died, too. Over 700,000 Chinese and North Koreans died.

The soldiers who had died fighting for South Korea, against the advance of Communism,
were remembered in a way reminiscent of the sober Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in
Washington. In a long outdoor gallery, tall black panels set against stone walls were
engraved with the names of all the soldiers who had died, with a mention of the country
or the American state.

As soon as we arrived, Clinton, Gates, and their entourage took a pause in a room
inside the museum. They were going to pay a choreographically complex homage around
the large memorial, and though they’d received a printed briefing from their teams—in
Hillary’s case, her usual truncated briefing checklist—Bernadette was going to walk
them through it one final time.

Clinton outranked Gates in the cabinet, but the secretary of defense was very easygoing
and followed Clinton’s schedule and preferences without complaint. Hillary could power
through the day and munch on an apple or a sandwich in the car until there was a break
in the schedule for a meal or until she was done for the day: she didn’t need to eat
at a set time. But Gates had one demand: he needed to stop for twenty minutes for
lunch. Two packed lunches had been arranged: a burger and fries for him, a chicken
sandwich for Clinton. Bernadette had gobbled down a packet of trail mix, and now the
two secretaries ate while listening to her instructions about stages, bells ringing,
and rope lines.

Outside, the traveling press corps was also being briefed about the event, the photographer
and cameraman so they knew how the subject of their pictures was going to move and
the rest of us so that we could make sure to stay out of the shot.

Perfect pictures of Clinton and Gates at the DMZ and at the memorial ran on the front
pages of South Korea’s morning papers. The United States had just slapped more sanctions
on North Korea. The nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS
George Washington
was docked in the southern port of Busan. In just a few days, 8,000 American and
South Korean troops would come together for a large military training exercise, Invincible
Spirit, with a U.S. Navy carrier as well as the South Korean air force and submarines.
That was on top of the 28,500 American troops already stationed in South Korea.