The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (77 page)

These were broadly consistent with what Kang had told Kelly and the conditions the Foreign Ministry had included in its October 25 statement. My own belief was that this was their opening bid for negotiations, not necessarily what a negotiation would produce if and when one got under way. Don Gregg several times urged that Kim Jong Il send a message to President Bush in order to calm the situation. On the last day, almost at the last hour, Kang Sok Ju came into the meeting room with a piece of paper. He explained it was an “oral message” from Kim for the president.

The message was simple and, as these things go, relatively positive. It gave nothing away, but did suggest the door was open to finding a way to address US concerns if the Americans would deal with the North’s. Kim noted “the nuclear issue that has emerged recently”—seemingly a careful reference to the enrichment question—and suggested, “If the US were willing to recognize our sovereignty and to offer firm assurances of non-aggression, I believe there would be a way to resolve the nuclear issue in a manner befitting the demands of the new century.” Kim went on to acknowledge “President Bush’s statement that the U.S. has no intention to invade our country,” adding that “the critical issue now is the provision of legally binding assurance of nonaggression by the U.S.” The message ended on a positive note: “If the U.S. takes a resolute decision in this regard, you can be assured that we will respond accordingly.”
*

We left with some hope but also with Kang’s sober warning that the Agreed Framework was “hanging by a thread.” Ambassador Gregg and I brought the message to the White House on our return from the North and discussed it with Deputy National Security Council Adviser Steve Hadley. Hadley’s response was quick, negative, and definitive: “We don’t reward bad behavior.” He asked no questions about our discussions or impressions of Pyongyang.

There may have been something beside concern with “bad behavior” at work in Hadley’s brusque dismissal. Around the same time, through a variety of channels, Washington had received several other messages from Pyongyang about a desire to meet. After considerable internal discussion, the administration had decided to move ahead on one of the channels, but it never got under way. The oral message from Kim Jong Il was apparently put in the same category with the others—distracting and unwelcome
noise designed to pull the United States off base after the Kelly meeting in Pyongyang.

There was no reply to Kim. Few people in Washington even knew the message existed until Don Gregg and I revealed it in a
Washington Post
article in June 2005. Only a few high-ranking officials in the State Department saw what Kim had sent. They decided that although the message held some promise and might be worth pursuing, given the mind-set at the White House, it would be a hopeless quest. The rest of the government’s Asia hands never saw the message. Considering the mood in Washington at the moment, it probably would not have made any difference even if they had.

Given the context of events and the decidedly negative turn matters had taken over the preceding month, the message was as important for the symbolism of the gesture as for the content of the message—and the administration’s rejection of it was equally symbolic. To the North Koreans, for the White House to ignore a message from Kim Jong Il was probably chalked up as an insult, but even more as a sign that Washington was not interested in doing anything to reverse the deteriorating situation. If that was their conclusion, then once again the North Koreans were reading US signals loud and clear.

The South Koreans made one more effort to head the Americans off from the dangerous course their policy was taking. At a meeting of the Trilateral Coordination and Oversight Group, or TCOG, in early November, ROK Deputy Foreign Minister Li Tae-sik, who had been a deputy director of KEDO a few years earlier, tried to dissuade the Americans from immediately cutting off the heavy fuel oil that KEDO was scheduled to deliver, warning it would lead to serious consequences, including the North restarting its nuclear program. A compromise was finally reached, allowing the November shipment, already on a ship headed for a North Korean port, to proceed but halting subsequent shipments.

The view in Seoul was that it was a mistake to cut off the HFO shipments, but there was no way to fight the decision because the Americans were so adamant about it. Soon after, on November 14, and under extreme US pressure, the KEDO Executive Board, composed of the four member countries, agreed to a statement halting HFO shipments, with key wording dictated by the NSC over the phone to the American representative, Ambassador Jack Pritchard. The Japanese and South Korean delegates were ashen faced when they arrived at KEDO headquarters in New York that morning. When the meeting ended, the atmosphere was funereal. Another confrontational session followed upstairs between lower-ranking KEDO staff and members of the US delegation, a meeting intended not to try to change what had already been decided, but simply to vent frustration and to warn of consequences. The Americans shrugged—they
themselves did not agree with the decision, they made clear, but they had been ordered to push the position, and that was what they had done.

On November 16, the North Korean delegation that had toured South Korea and had then gone on to Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore returned home. The situation had been getting bad when they left Pyongyang. Now, on their return, it was unsalvageable.

Pyongyang waited a week before directly responding to the KEDO statement. On November 21—a day before the oil tanker
Sun River
docked in Nampo with a final 42,886 tons of heavy oil—the North Korean Foreign Ministry raised the stakes, pointing to a passage in the Agreed Framework that linked KEDO’s supply of HFO to the North’s obligation to freeze its reactor and “related facilities.” It did not press this point, however, and—suggesting that the North might be leaving the way open for a reply from Bush to Kim Jong Il’s message—characterized the president in neutral terms. Nevertheless, the essential message was clear: cutting off the HFO would have dire consequences; no HFO, no freeze on operations of the reactor at Yongbyon.

A question about the HFO had come up during a background briefing by two “senior State Department officials” in October at the time of the APEC meeting in Mexico. A reporter had observed that “it seems you can’t cut off the fuel supplies because that would provoke an even deeper crisis.” The answer from one of the officials was revealing: “I think it would be a mistake to suggest . . . X follows and then Y and Z, and A and B follow after that.” In other words, there was no necessary sequence to, or connection between, events. Cutting off the HFO would not inevitably provoke a deeper crisis. As it worked out, however, there were consequences to stopping the HFO, and they were severe. A and B did follow.

Due to problems at the port, the last drops of HFO from the tanker were not unloaded until December 10. Two days later, exactly four weeks after the KEDO statement, and about five weeks after Kim Jong Il’s message to Bush arrived at the White House, the North Koreans pulled the trigger. The pace at which they moved suggested both that they had put together an action plan during the time they had been waiting and that they had decided to pause for brief periods to see how the Americans would react.

Pyongyang’s first step was to restart the facilities at Yongbyon. On December 12, the Foreign Ministry announced the North would “immediately resume operation and construction of facilities [in Yongbyon] to generate electricity.” Even then it signaled the action was not irreversible, asserting that whether the facilities were refrozen depended on the United States. The North also sent two letters to Vienna, on the twelfth and fourteenth, asking the IAEA to remove seals and monitoring equipment from the main nuclear facilities at Yongbyon: the reactor, the spent-fuel pond, the reprocessing plant, and the fuel-fabrication facility. The letters warned that
if the IAEA did not do so “expeditiously,” the North would act unilaterally. After waiting more than a week, on December 22, the North did just that. The two remaining IAEA inspectors were summoned to the nuclear reactor building to witness the cutting of the seals and disabling the surveillance cameras that had guaranteed the reactor would remain shut down. The deed was done with ceremony. About a hundred North Koreans and technicians gathered for the occasion, which was celebrated with patriotic songs and the tossing of flower petals. Consuming beer brought into the reactor building for the occasion, they drank toasts to the country’s nuclear future. Curiously, the North Koreans only covered the surveillance cameras and pointed them toward the wall, almost as if to say that they expected the IAEA to be back eventually.

On the twenty-sixth, the IAEA inspectors reported that the North had started moving fresh fuel to the 5-megawatt reactor, which had sat unfueled since being unloaded in June 1994. Refueling the reactor was a sure sign that the North intended to resume making plutonium. The following day, the North informed the IAEA that because there was no reason for the inspectors to be in North Korea, they should leave. The IAEA asked if their people could have a little extra time to make a more graceful exit. The North Koreans refused. The next plane to Beijing was on December 31, and the inspectors were on it.

In the middle of this crisis over the nuclear question, on December 19, 2002, South Korea held a presidential election. A little-known, politically inexperienced human rights advocate and lawyer, Roh Moo-hyun, won the election, after furious anti-US demonstrations sparked by a tragic accident in which two young South Korean schoolgirls were run over by a US Army armored vehicle. Roh would spend his term in office walking a tightrope, trying to maintain good relations with the United States while building on what seemed to be important gains in inter-Korean relations.

At the end of the Bush administration’s second year, the United States was left with the tattered remains of the Agreed Framework. That agreement had, for eight years, halted the production of fissile material at Yongbyon, created from scratch a multilateral organization (KEDO) that successfully forged working relations with the North Koreans, and provided an opening for the United States to address its concerns about the proliferation of North Korean missiles. Now, this crucial agreement was dead—and there was no way to know what would take its place. On the verge of launching a war against Iraq, the administration knew it could not afford a major confrontation in Korea, but without anything to fill the vacuum created by the destruction of the Agreed Framework, it was ill-prepared to manage the new crisis that was emerging in Northeast Asia. There was no mistaking that things were bad. The real question was, how bad would they get?

__________

*
His superiors apparently did not see this trait as a black mark; Jong later became DPRK ambassador to Indonesia.

*
The president repeated his candid assessment of Kim Jong Il very clearly in his memoirs,
Decision Points
.

*
According to some accounts, Ryu Kwang, who served in the sensitive post of vice minister of the Ministry of State Security, was close to Kim Jong Il. In addition to the talks with Japan, Kim used Ryu for special assignments, most notably in secret contacts between the North and South Korean intelligence services during Lee Myung-bak’s administration. In January 2011, however, there were reports of his execution, attended by senior North Korean cadres.

*
In her memoirs, Condi Rice says she realized that Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly, who would eventually be sent to Pyongyang, and the State Department more generally were on a “short leash.” Apparently, she did nothing at the time to remedy the situation.

*
When I was in Pyongyang weeks later with Ambassador Donald Gregg, Kang told us that the reason for the all-night meeting among the “agencies concerned” was a heated discussion of whether he should say the DPRK was “entitled to have nuclear weapons.” From the vantage point of 2013, that might seem like a minor quibble, but in 2002, with the Agreed Framework still in effect, it would be a major step.

**
Actually, some in Washington thought any dinner would be one too many. In a note to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice while the Kelly delegation was still in Pyongyang, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld observed, “I thought you told the President in my meeting that there weren’t going to be any meals at the North Korean event. I notice they had one or two dinners.” See
http://papers.rumsfeld.com/library/2002-10-04
to Honorable Condoleezza Rice re North Korea.

*
At the time, the British Embassy’s communications facilities were better than what the traveling US delegation had available (e.g., the fax at the hotel), but not by much. The embassy equipment was not rated for classified communications, but something much less, “Limited Official Use.”

*
In 2010 Pak was blamed for the failure of a badly conceived plan for currency revaluation and, according to some accounts, executed.

**
This account of the visit is largely taken from Don Oberdorfer’s earlier writings.

*
Kim’s message was similar to what Kang had told Kelly and what the North Koreans had reiterated several times after that, including to Don Gregg and me. The crucial difference was that Kim was personally taking note of the US president’s statement, while himself carefully using language that left room for negotiations.

18

TROUBLE IN THE US-ROK ALLIANCE

O
NCE THE TWO
K
OREAS
began to develop ties that went beyond rhetoric, differences between Washington and Seoul were inevitable. In the late 1980s, these differences remained relatively minor, but when the North Korean nuclear issue took center stage in the 1990s, and North-South dialogue shifted to a more active phase, the US-ROK policy divide grew. American nonproliferation concerns collided again and again with different priorities in South Korea. From then on, finding the right balance between the goals of the two alliance partners became problematic, no matter who sat in the Blue House. Conservative and liberal ROK leaders each saw Washington as sacrificing South Korean interests in favor of US concerns over the North’s nuclear program.