The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (47 page)

Accompanying Ackerman was C. Kenneth Quinones, the Korean-speaking State Department desk officer for North Korea. After lengthy talks with Quinones on outstanding issues, Pyongyang’s Foreign Ministry presented him with a paper proposing a series of trade-offs to settle the issues at stake with the United States. In the paper, written in English in longhand, the North Koreans said they were ready to remain in the NPT and submit to regular IAEA inspections and to discuss the contentious issue of the “special inspections” that the IAEA had demanded, in return for an end to US-ROK Team Spirit military exercises, the lifting of American economic sanctions, and the convening of the long-delayed third round of US-DPRK negotiations to tackle broader issues. The proposal for tradeoffs, in retrospect, was a fundamental shift in the concept of the negotiations, which until that point had been based on making step-by-step progress toward accords rather than one simultaneous and comprehensive deal, later termed “a package solution.” The Foreign Ministry officials said the handwritten proposals had been cleared with the top leadership of their country, meaning Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il.

When Quinones returned to Washington, he found a very skeptical group of US policy makers, who insisted that details of potential accords be hammered out before proceeding further at the political level. In New York, Quinones and Gary Samore, Gallucci’s top aide, engaged in a series
of unannounced meetings with officials of the North Korean UN Mission to try to work out a detailed accord. When this effort ran into trouble, a more senior State Department official, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Hubbard, began making frequent trips to New York to see the North Koreans.

With little progress being made, public as well as official frustration with the stalemate was soaring. On November 1, IAEA director general Hans Blix reported to the UN General Assembly in pessimistic terms on the agency’s standoff with Pyongyang, though he stopped just short of declaring the “continuity of safeguards” to be lost. The General Assembly reacted with a resounding 140-to-1 vote (with China abstaining and only Pyongyang dissenting), urging North Korea “to cooperate immediately” with the IAEA, a demonstration of how isolated Pyongyang had become.

At a press conference in Seoul, the exasperated South Korean defense minister, Kwon Yong Hae, expressed concern about the North Korean nuclear program and mentioned the possibility of using military action to stop it. In a meeting with visiting Secretary of Defense Les Aspin, Kwon agreed to put off any decision about holding the Team Spirit exercise. Aspin said, “The ball is now in North Korea’s court. The world awaits.”

On the way home from Seoul, Aspin gave a background briefing to journalists aboard his plane that inadvertently gave rise to alarmist reports that war was on the verge of breaking out. The news agency Reuters, which filed the most breathless dispatch, quoted a senior US defense official as saying, “We may be entering a kind of danger zone,” because North Korea had massed 70 percent of its military force near South Korea (which in fact was nothing new) and might launch a desperate conventional attack on the South, sparked by hunger and economic frustration in Pyongyang. In a precursor to concerns that later were to be widely discussed, Aspin told the reporters, “These guys are starving” and may feel that “you can either starve or get killed in a war.” The Aspin briefing gave rise to a full-scale journalistic war scare—to the surprise and dismay of most officials who had been following the situation.

On November 5, a passionate column by Charles Krauthammer in the
Washington Post
demanded that Clinton “stop talking to the North Koreans—it is time for an economic blockade—and start talking to the American people” about a military emergency in Asia. The administration was so jarred by Krauthammer’s column that a State Department meeting was convened to discuss it. Two days later, President Clinton threw oil on the fire by warning on NBC’s
Meet the Press
that “North Korea cannot be allowed to develop a nuclear bomb,” implying that the United States would take military action to stop it. Weeks later, after
various US officials speculated that Pyongyang already had at least one bomb, the White House said Clinton had misspoken.

Suddenly, North Korea was at the top of the news in the United States. An NBC/
Wall Street Journal
public opinion poll reported that North Korea’s development of a nuclear weapon was considered the nation’s most serious foreign policy problem by 31 percent of a nationwide sample—a larger proportion than any other single issue they picked.

On November 11, amid the war scare and in the absence of diplomatic movement, the chief DPRK negotiator, Kang Sok Ju, made public the proposed “package solution” in Pyongyang. Without revealing its earlier history, he set out the main elements of the paper that had been given to Quinones a month earlier and discussed inconclusively ever since.

On November 15, after fifteen midlevel meetings in New York and a host of letters back and forth to Pyongyang, the administration finally decided to put its own “package deal” on the table. The essence of the immediate bargain was North Korean resumption of regular IAEA inspections and a renewal of dialogue with the South, in return for cancellation of the 1994 Team Spirit military exercise and the convening of the long-delayed third round of US-DPRK negotiations. Phase two, to be bargained in detail when American and North Korean negotiators finally began their third round, would deal with IAEA inspections of the two disputed Yongbyon waste sites, diplomatic recognition of North Korea, and trade and investment concessions from the United States, South Korea, and Japan.

The new administration proposal immediately leaked to the
Washington Post
’s R. Jeffrey Smith, who was following the maneuvering closely. The publicity was a bombshell in Seoul, which was always extremely sensitive to American concessions to North Korea, and especially to suggestions that South Korea was not the dominant force in policy toward Pyongyang. In addition, the proposal was anathema to President Kim Young Sam for another and highly personal reason: a “package deal” similar in name and concept had been publicly suggested in the spring by his longtime rival in domestic politics, Kim Dae Jung. If
he
was for it, Kim Young Sam was automatically against it.

The South Korean president’s views surfaced dramatically and unexpectedly on November 23, at the start of his first official visit to Washington. Ushered into the Oval Office for what had been planned as a brief meeting to put a pro forma stamp of approval on the US proposal, Kim announced that it looked to him and his people as if the United States were accommodating North Korea without even giving Seoul a role in the decision process. His eyes flashing and his gestures emphatic, Kim insisted that he, not the Americans, would have the final say on whether to cancel the Team Spirit exercise and that he would be the one to announce the
decision when the time came. He also demanded that the long-discussed “exchange of envoys” between North and South actually take place before the third round of US–North Korean negotiations begin.

Clinton was startled and his senior aides mystified by the nature and the vehemence of Kim’s objections, as the various elements of the proposed offer had been discussed for months with officials of Kim’s government. As the “brief” Oval Office meeting stretched on to eighty minutes, with senior American and Korean officials waiting with growing apprehension in another room, the Americans realized that Kim’s objections had as much to do with appearance as with substance. A change in terminology to describe the proposal to North Korea as “thorough and broad” rather than as “comprehensive” or a “package” seemed to ease Kim’s concern substantially. The White House also agreed to permit Kim to announce the final decision on postponement of Team Spirit if it came to that and to make the exchange of North-South “special envoys” a prerequisite for the next round of US-DPRK talks. The latter requirement proved to be an important stumbling block: North Korea bitterly resented being required to give in to the South’s demand in order to deal with the Americans.

By the end of the Kim Young Sam visit, the Americans understood, if they hadn’t before, the complexity and difficulty of negotiating with North Korea. The parties involved were arrayed in a series of overlapping circles: North Korea–International Atomic Energy Agency, North Korea–South Korea, and North Korea–United States. As in a combination lock, all three had to be in alignment simultaneously for the talks to succeed. Now a fourth circle of problems had been added: Washington-Seoul. As the holiday season approached in 1993, negotiations with the DPRK seemed to portend more problems than progress.

THE SEASON OF CRISIS BEGINS

In Pyongyang in early-December 1993, the Workers Party Central Committee made a surprising admission. At a meeting marking the end of the country’s current seven-year economic plan, the party announced publicly that the major targets of the plan had not been met, and it warned that the economic situation was “grave.” Battered by the collapse of its allies and trading partners and by economic stagnation at home, the North was in its fourth consecutive year of economic decline. Its GNP, once on a par with that of the South, was estimated at one-sixteenth the size of the booming ROK economy, and the situation was worsening.

Instead of adopting a new seven-year plan with the usual emphasis on heavy industry, the party decreed a three-year period of transition, with top priority to agriculture, light industry, and foreign trade. The meaning of the shift was clear: the North’s leaders had lowered their sights and
were aiming at mere survival. They were failing to feed their people and to provide enough clothing and other consumer goods to avoid privation, hence the new emphasis on agriculture and light industry. In an attempt to ease the situation without making basic changes in its autarkic command economy, North Korea was looking to exports for salvation—but it had little to sell that the world wanted.

Kim Il Sung endorsed the economic shift in his annual New Year’s address to the nation. Gone was the traditional goal, repeated incessantly by Kim for decades, that North Koreans would soon be able to “eat rice and meat soup, wear silk clothes and live in a tile roofed house.” Kim conceded that during the seven-year plan, “we came up against considerable difficulty and obstacles in the economic construction owing to the unexpected international events and the acute situation created in the country.” He described the situation at home and abroad as “complicated and strained.”

This departure from Kim Il Sung’s eternal official optimism was like God announcing that things weren’t what they should be in heaven. Adding to the impact of Kim’s change in direction and tone was evidence that in his eighties, he was emerging from semiretirement to reassert himself in day-to-day administration. Some American experts interpreted this as a sign of dissatisfaction with the work of his eldest son, Kim Jong Il, who had been openly designated as his chosen successor in 1980.

How much Kim Il Sung knew—or wanted to know—about the details of his country’s problems in his latter years is a debatable point. According to a variety of North Korean and foreign sources, the younger Kim had increasingly assumed the management of governmental and party affairs. On the eve of his eightieth birthday in 1992, Kim Il Sung had told the
Washington Times
that he continued to carry out “some external work,” but that “as far as the internal affairs of our country are concerned, everything is dealt with by [Kim Jong Il].”

Nonetheless, according to a North Korean defector, Kang Myong Do, a son-in-law of North Korean prime minister Kang Song San, the turning point in Kim Il Sung’s reengagement in the economy had taken place by the time of the interview. In late 1991 or early 1992, the defector said, his father-in-law, who had been prime minister during two earlier periods and was the son of one of Kim Il Sung’s guerrilla comrades, gave the Great Leader an unvarnished account of the desperate economic conditions in the strategic province along the Chinese and Russian borders where he was currently serving as provincial governor. Beginning in March 1992, startled by the contrast with rosier reports that he had been receiving through official channels, Kim Il Sung convened a series of extended Workers Party meetings on the economic situation. By the end of the year, the incumbent prime minister had been fired and Kang had been brought
back for his third term in the job. In early 1993, Kim presided over an extended Politburo conference on the economic troubles, which led eventually to the new economic policies that he announced in December.

Toward the end of January, Kim Il Sung received an illustrious visitor. America’s most famous evangelist, the Reverend Billy Graham, had often carried his crusades to communist and totalitarian countries, but he had a special interest in North Korea because his wife, Ruth, had spent part of her youth attending the American School in Pyongyang while her parents were missionaries in China. In 1992 the evangelist had visited the North and brought a conciliatory message from President Bush. With tension growing again between Washington and Pyongyang, Graham had requested and received a message from Clinton in connection with his current trip. This message, however, was very blunt, only a few sentences long, with no salutations or good wishes. It said, in essence, cooperate on the nuclear issue; only then can relations improve.

The evangelist and his aides, especially Stephen Linton, a missionary’s son who knows the culture and the language from years living in the South, sought to surround the Clinton message with grace notes and explanatory phrases that might make it more polite, less stark, and more acceptable to the eighty-one-year-old Korean leader. Nevertheless, when Graham conveyed the heart of the American president’s message with its emphasis on North Korea’s nuclear program, Kim became visibly angry, speaking loudly and shaking his fist. He harked back to the foreign-policy pronouncements of his New Year’s address, when he charged that the United States had raised “the nonexistent nuclear issue” and was itself to blame for bringing nuclear weapons into the Korean peninsula to threaten the DPRK. “Pressure and threat cannot work on us,” Kim had said in his address and repeated to Graham. The two countries needed to communicate with each other, Kim said, not confront each other—but if the United States used the language of threats, he declared, it would drive the situation to catastrophe.