Authors: Dick Cheney
A few days later the president and I had our weekly lunch, and as we sat out on his private patio he encouraged me to keep challenging policy that I thought was mistaken. He did not say he agreed with me, but I think he believed the debates would make for a better outcome in terms of his decision making. I hadn’t planned to stop arguing anyway. I feared we were headed for a train wreck.
ON JUNE 26, THE North Koreans provided a declaration to the Chinese that failed to describe either their uranium enrichment program or their proliferation activities. It did not even fully describe their plutonium
activities. Despite this, within hours President Bush was in the Rose Garden announcing that he was lifting provisions of the Trading with the Enemy Act and notifying Congress of his intent to take North Korea off the list of state sponsors of terror.
I was disappointed, and not just because I disagreed with the president. It was his call. But the process and the decision that followed had seemed so out of keeping with the clearheaded way I’d seen him make decisions in the past. The president said we would use the next forty-five days—the notice period for Congress before the North Koreans could formally be removed from the terrorism list—to develop a “comprehensive and rigorous” protocol for verifying the North Korean declaration. As I listened to the president’s remarks I wondered how, exactly, we were going to go about verifying what we already knew to be a false declaration.
On June 27, 2008, the North Koreans called in the television cameras and blew up the cooling tower of the nuclear reactor at Yongbyon. It was 1950s technology, a device they could easily afford to give up. By that point they had produced enough plutonium for a store of weapons, and, besides, as President Obama’s director of national intelligence would later confirm, they had a robust ongoing uranium enrichment operation that could also produce material for nuclear weapons.
Two months later, when North Korea decided that we had not taken them off the terrorist list in a timely enough fashion, they announced that they had stopped dismantling the Yongbyon complex. Three weeks after that, Pyongyang announced it was restarting the reprocessing plant and began reattaching equipment that had been removed earlier in the year.
On October 9, 2008, Secretary Rice, Steve Hadley, and I met with the president in the Oval Office to discuss the verification protocol Chris Hill was negotiating. As I listened I realized that despite the president’s insistence on a “comprehensive and rigorous” verification protocol a few months earlier, there was actually no written agreement at all. There was a document the Chinese had proposed, which Rice was calling the verification agreement, but, in fact, the North Koreans had
not agreed to the document. There were also some notes Chris Hill had taken of conversations he’d had with his North Korean counterpart, which we were now supposed to regard as part of a formal protocol. At an interagency meeting that week, the State Department handed out a fact sheet explaining that “agreement on verification measures has been codified in a joint document between the United States and North Korea and has been reaffirmed through extensive consultation.” In reality, there was no joint document—just Chris Hill’s notes.
Looking for a way to explain this situation, Rice said, “Mr. President, this is just the way diplomacy works sometimes. You don’t always get a written agreement.” The statement was utterly misleading, totally divorced from what the secretary was doing, which was urging the president, in the absence of an agreement, to pretend to have one—with a nuclear-armed, terrorist-sponsoring state that we knew to be lying about their nuclear program and proliferating nuclear technology to at least one other terrorist-sponsoring state.
“Look, Condi,” he said to her, “I just need more time on this. I need to think about it.” Steve Hadley asked her if she could provide a paper for the president to read as background on the proposal. Was there something he could review? “No,” she said, although she was sitting on the sofa reading from a document describing the purported agreement.
The issue of Japan came up. We had known for some time that the Japanese government was very unhappy that we might lift the terrorism designation. They were concerned in particular about Japanese citizens, many of them children, who had been abducted by the North Koreans decades earlier. I had met with some of their families during my trip to Asia in 2007, and the stories of lost children were heartbreaking. Now, the Japanese perceived we might be contemplating removing North Korea from the terrorism list without a resolution of this issue, and their diplomats had been in repeatedly to see my deputy national security advisor, Samantha Ravich, and others on my national security staff. The Japanese were also troubled by our apparent willingness to take the North Koreans at their word, to trust this rogue regime. Secretary Rice denied there was any objection from the Japanese and told the
president they had simply asked for a delay of twenty-four hours so they could “handle their political situation.” This was inaccurate. Later that day I received a message from our ambassador in Japan, Tom Schieffer, which I would pass on to the president. Schieffer, who had been one of the president’s partners when he owned the Texas Rangers, had grown increasingly concerned about our North Korean policy and was now reporting that the Japanese found the “verification proposal” unacceptable as presented. Schieffer also passed along a warning from the prime minister of Japan: Given North Korea’s history of duplicity, it was essential to get any agreement with them in writing.
As the October 9, 2008, meeting was drawing to a close, Steve Hadley tried to restore some orderliness to how we were proceeding. “Condi,” he said, “there are some questions that have to be answered here before we can go ahead.” One option we discussed was sending Chris Hill back to Pyongyang to get written assurances. If this agreement was so important, and if Secretary Rice was so confident in the North Korean assurances, why not get a proper agreement? She did not want to do that. And, it turned out, she didn’t have to.
The next day, October 10, 2008, I got word that the president had agreed to allow Secretary Rice to sign the document removing North Korea from the terrorist list, which she did on October 11. It was a sad moment because it seemed to be a repudiation of the Bush Doctrine and a reversal of so much of what we had accomplished in the area of non-proliferation in the first term. The president had been right when he had denounced the failed approach of the Clinton era. Now we seemed to be embracing it.
By the end of October the North Koreans announced that “verification” would be limited only to the plutonium reactor site at Yongbyon. On November 12, they announced that inspectors could not take soil or nuclear waste samples from the site. On December 11, the North Koreans made clear they did not feel bound by any “oral agreement” Hill thought he had with them, and the negotiations came to a standstill. An article in the
Washington Post
the next morning contained this: “U.S. officials acknowledge now that most of the purported agreements
announced two months ago were simply oral understandings between Hill and
his North Korean counterparts
.” It was not our finest hour.
I could see the North Koreans hitting the rewind button in mid-January 2009, shortly before President Obama was sworn into office, when they demanded that the United States normalize relations with them before they would consider abandoning their nuclear weapons:
• In April 2009 they tested a Taepodong 2 intercontinental ballistic missile.
• In May 2009 they tested a second nuclear weapon.
• In September 2009 they announced they were in the final stages of enriching uranium and weaponizing plutonium.
• In March 2010 a North Korean submarine torpedoed and sank a South Korean vessel, killing forty-six sailors.
• In November 2010 they invited a visiting American delegation to view their uranium enrichment program, unveiling two thousand gas centrifuges operating at the Yongbyon facility, site of the old plutonium reactor on which we had been so focused.
• In November 2010, days after they unveiled their centrifuge operation, North Korea launched a massive artillery barrage at a South Korean island, killing two South Korean marines and two civilians.
• And in February 2011, Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper said in testimony to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that the North Koreans did indeed have a uranium enrichment facility at Yongbyon, a disclosure that “supports the United States’ longstanding assessment that the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] has pursued a uranium-enrichment capability.”
In addition, Clapper said that given the “scale of the facility and the progress the DPRK has made in construction, it is likely North Korea has been pursuing enrichment for an extended period of time. If so,
there is a clear prospect that the DPRK has built other uranium enrichment related facilities in its territory.”
AS I HAVE NOTED before, we accomplished a great deal in our first years in office in slowing the proliferation of nuclear materials and technology. As we dealt with North Korea, particularly throughout 2007 and 2008, the president would sometimes refer to one of those accomplishments—getting the Libyans to turn over their nuclear materials—and say he was looking for the North Koreans to have their “Qaddafi moment.” That is what we all hoped to achieve, and I don’t believe the president himself ever lost sight of that as the objective. But I think Secretary Rice and Assistant Secretary Hill did. For them, the agreement seemed to become the objective, and we ended up with a clear setback in our nonproliferation efforts.
In early 2001 the president had it exactly right when he decided to set a new course for dealing with North Korea and made other countries, most importantly China, a part of the negotiations. When our diplomats began meeting bilaterally with the North Koreans again, sometimes in contravention of their instructions, China was essentially sidelined, as were our allies the Japanese and the South Koreans. We missed a number of important opportunities to use our leverage to get them to play a more constructive role. There is no question but that the challenge of North Korea’s nuclear program was one of the toughest we faced during our time in office. As we worked to meet this challenge, I wish the president had been better served by his State Department team.
THE STORY OF OUR diplomacy with North Korea, particularly in the second term of the Bush presidency, carries with it important lessons for American leaders and diplomats of the future. First is the importance of not losing sight of the objective. In this case, the president had made clear that our goal was getting the North Koreans to give up their nuclear weapons program. However, as negotiations proceeded, the State Department came to regard getting the North Koreans to
agree to something, indeed anything, as the ultimate objective. That mistake led our diplomats to respond to Pyongyang’s intransigence and dishonesty with ever greater concessions, thereby encouraging duplicity and double-dealing. And in the end it led them to recommend we accept an agreement that didn’t accomplish the president’s goal and even set it back. A good model for future leaders is Ronald Reagan’s approach at the Reykjavik Summit with Gorbachev in 1986. He wasn’t so desperate for an agreement that he would take whatever he could get. He would not concede America’s right to missile defense, and when the Soviets refused to grant that point, he ended the talks.
This leads to the second and related lesson. The most effective diplomacy happens when America negotiates from a position of strength. If we remember that our ultimate goal is the substantive one of denuclearization and we are willing to walk away rather than accept a partial, untrue, or damaging agreement, we are in a much stronger position. At the same time, if our adversaries understand we will not compromise on fundamental principles and that we will use military force if necessary, they are much more likely to do business at the negotiating table. That is why I argued that we should have taken action ourselves to destroy the North Korean–built nuclear reactor in the Syrian desert. It would have sent an unmistakable message to the Syrians, the Iranians, and the North Koreans that our words meant something, that we would not tolerate the proliferation of nuclear technology. Such a message might well have encouraged those nations to take advantage of the opportunity to reach a diplomatic agreement rather than risk military action. The effect of U.S. military action was seen clearly, for example, when Muammar Qaddafi watched the United States liberate Iraq and then called to say he’d like to give up his nuclear weapons program.
The third lesson is that red lines must mean something. In the aftermath of 9/11, President Bush put in place an effective nonproliferation policy that yielded results. We dedicated ourselves to preventing terrorists and terror-sponsoring states from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. When the North Koreans tested a nuclear weapon in October 2006, President Bush warned that we would hold them fully accountable
for the consequences of any proliferation, especially to states like Syria and Iran. Six months later, when we discovered they were proliferating to Syria, we should have held them accountable and did not. The lesson for other rogue nations might unfortunately be that they need not worry about threats from America. When our actions don’t match our rhetoric, diplomacy becomes much more difficult, and ultimately it becomes more likely that terror-sponsoring states will feel they can defy the will of the United States with impunity.
Fourth, effective diplomacy requires that we think strategically. The president did just this when he insisted in 2001 that we get the Chinese engaged in our efforts to convince the North Koreans to give up their nuclear program. We also brought in the Russians, the Japanese, and the South Koreans. The president saw that North Korea was already so isolated and under such extensive sanctions that the United States alone had little ability to bring significant pressure to bear. However, a multilateral approach that included China might well have the ability to pressure Pyongyang. We lost opportunities to encourage the Chinese to play a more constructive role. In the immediate aftermath of North Korea’s nuclear test in October 2006, for example, the Chinese were upset, particularly because Pyongyang gave them only an hour’s notice of the test. We should have used that moment of leverage to bring our partners in the six-party talks together—with the Chinese in the lead—to put true pressure on the North Koreans. Another moment of maximum leverage was when we discovered the existence of the nuclear reactor that the North Koreans were building in Syria. Again, we should have immediately taken the information to the Chinese and worked together with them to develop a strategic plan to accomplish our objective. Instead, with Assistant Secretary Chris Hill determined to have bilateral discussions with the North, we sidelined the Chinese, ensuring that they would not be as effective a partner for us as they could have been.