The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (67 page)

For South Korea and most of the West, the first crack in the depiction of Kim Jong Il as a withdrawn, eccentric, and threatening ogre came in October 1998, a month after the Supreme People’s Assembly meeting, when he met in Pyongyang with Chung Ju Yung, the eighty-two-year-old founder and honorary chairman of the South’s giant Hyundai group. In his first meeting with an outsider since his formal elevation as head of government, Kim was described by his guest as polite, courteous, and deferential to an older man. Photographs of Kim welcoming South Korea’s most illustrious industrialist, and of the two holding hands for the camera,
were splashed on the front pages of Seoul’s newspapers. Of more lasting significance were business deals that were sealed or seriously discussed during the Hyundai chairman’s visit.

Chung Ju Yung, born in 1915, the son of a poor rice farmer in a village just north of the current DMZ, had long been determined to do what he could to improve the lives of the people of his original homeland. In January 1989, he had been the first prominent South Korean industrialist to be welcomed with honors in Pyongyang. In the early 1990s, his attempts to return were blocked for political reasons by the government of President Kim Young Sam. By 1998 Kim Dae Jung’s desire to engage the North and his policy of separating business from politics created an opening for a series of imaginative initiatives by Chung. In June he undertook high-profile “cattle diplomacy” by transporting in big Hyundai trucks 500 head of cattle from his farm through the DMZ as a gift to North Korea and by bringing in 501 more in October, plus twenty Hyundai automobiles, including several luxury models suitable for Kim Jong Il.

During the October trip, North Korea granted Hyundai the right to bring tourists from South Korea to the famed Diamond Mountain (Mount Kumgang), just north of the DMZ, for payments totaling $942 million over six years. The tours in Hyundai-chartered ships began the following month, when the South Korean firm also began paying $25 million a month into a North Korean account at the Bank of China in Macao. The deal proved to be instrumental in opening the door to more North-South economic engagement, but by June 2000 Hyundai had sustained losses of $206 million on the Diamond Mountain tours, which it could ill afford in a time of economic downturn. In early 2001, it was forced to appeal for an ROK government bailout.

The supply of so much cash to North Korea without restriction proved to be controversial in South Korea and among Washington policy makers. According to Lim Dong Won, Hyundai’s efforts to push ahead with big deals at a politically sensitive moment in 2000 angered President Kim Dae Jung. Nevertheless, as a general proposition, Kim’s strategists believed the payments were crucial in demonstrating that the South would keep its economic promises toward the North consistently and reliably. “North Korea was suspicious whether the government would allow Hyundai to pay cash,” particularly in periods of tension between the two governments, a senior official told me. When it did so month after month, he said, “they began to trust us.” Looking toward more important things to come, he added, the Hyundai deal was “a bite to catch a fish.”

Shorn of trade and aid from its original Soviet Union and East European allies, uncertain of China’s stopgap assistance, barred from most commercial loans due to the defaults on its debts in the 1970s, and excluded from international lending agencies due to its closed economic and
political systems and the opposition of the United States and other key sponsors, beginning in the 1990s, North Korea attempted to turn virtually all of its diplomacy to extracting assistance, if not cold, hard cash. Pyongyang may well have figured that if Moscow and many Eastern European countries could sell their souls for payoffs from the ROK in the 1980s, it could do so, too, and strike a better bargain. Requests from Pyongyang for payments from South Korea in food, fertilizer, and currency became a constant. In addition, owing to the reports of extreme famine in outlying areas, the international community began supplying large amounts of humanitarian assistance, principally food and medicine, to North Korea in the mid-1990s. Attempts by the North to convince the international community that it would prefer capacity-building assistance instead of outright aid were unsuccessful. The result was that the North’s image was transformed into that of an international beggar, always with its hand out or, at worst, prepared to extort whatever it could.

The significance of this change has been great in political as well as economic terms, internally as well as externally. Although the regime continued to express fealty to Kim Il Sung’s theory of
juche
, or self-reliance, North Korea by the end of the 1990s had become dependent on others for much of its sustenance. Unlike the assistance from communist countries during the Cold War, most of this flow was not from ideological allies or sponsors, but from those who were not committed to survival of the regime. To keep money flowing and improve his standing abroad, Kim Jong Il was required to take greater account of the world outside than his father had done—or than anyone expected.

PERRY TO THE RESCUE

Having achieved a significant accomplishment with the Agreed Framework in October 1994, the Clinton administration was unable to sustain the level of attention and commitment necessary to keep the process on track. In part that was due to the results of the congressional elections weeks after the Agreed Framework was signed, but it was also due to the all too normal inability of the US government—whatever the political party in power—to devote as much effort to implementing as it does to negotiating agreements. The problem came to a head in the summer of 1998. At that moment of maximum peril to the administration’s North Korea policy, it was widely agreed in the US Congress, the executive branch, and among numerous foreign policy professionals that the best chance for preservation was a high-level review and revision headed by a respected outsider. Nearly everyone’s number-one choice to undertake this job was William J. Perry, the seventy-one-year-old former secretary of defense, who had led the nation’s military establishment during the 1994 nuclear
crisis. Perry was a figure of strength, maturity, and experience. More than almost anyone else, he had looked into the abyss of horrific bloodshed and destruction that had been threatened. Unknown to most outsiders, he had been seared by the experience. Having returned to the comfortable life of a Stanford University professor and board member of high-tech companies, he did not welcome the call from President Clinton asking him to become “North Korea policy coordinator” on an urgent basis. Perry saw it as “a difficult job, with a low probability of success . . . but I also remembered the 1994 crisis, which I thought then and still do was the most dangerous crisis we faced in this period. And I saw us moving toward another crisis as bad as that one.”

Perry recruited Harvard University professor Ashton Carter, who had been one of his assistants in the Pentagon, and assembled a small team of US government officials headed by Ambassador Wendy Sherman, counselor of the State Department and a close confidant of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Perry concluded early that it was essential to present North Korea with an unshakably close alliance of the United States, South Korea, and Japan, rather than risk the possibility that Pyongyang would play one nation off against another as it had done with the Soviet Union and China during most of the Cold War. To cement the alliance, Perry created a three-way Trilateral Coordination and Oversight Group (TCOG) of the United States, the ROK, and Japan to consider North Korean issues. Second, he concluded that US policy could not be at odds with that of the South Korean president, who had made engagement with the North the major thrust of his newly installed administration.

The essence of Perry’s plan was to offer North Korea’s leaders a proposal with two alternative tracks. Track one was to end their long-range missile programs and reconfirm the stand-down of their nuclear weapons program, in return for full diplomatic relations with the United States, a peace treaty ending the Korean War, and improved relations with South Korea and Japan. Track two was to continue down the road of missile tests and nuclear uncertainty, in which case the United States and its allies would take actions to enhance their own security and containment of the North, increasing the likelihood of confrontations.

It was not simple for Perry to persuade the US administration to accept both the positive and the negative elements of his plan. The positive road would accord a greater degree of legitimacy and acceptance to the North Korean regime than had been the case before. Perry argued that even though North Korea was undergoing extreme economic hardships, it was not likely to collapse, and “therefore we must deal with the DPRK regime as it is, not as we might wish it to be.” In successive cabinet-level meetings at the White House, Perry argued convincingly that the status quo was unsustainable and spoke in graphic detail from his 1994 experience
of the awesome dangers of the downward track. Madeleine Albright, normally a strong opponent of antidemocratic regimes, was persuaded by Perry’s views and a private briefing by General John Tilelli, the US military commander in South Korea, that the downward road was exceedingly dangerous and thus a serious effort to put North Korea on the upper path was essential. Albright, and she believes Clinton as well, was deeply affected by the views of Kim Dae Jung, in whom they had great trust and confidence.

It was clear to Perry from the beginning that he would have to travel to Pyongyang to learn which path the North would choose, if he could get an answer at all. He and his party flew into Pyongyang on May 25, 1999—right after the Kumchang-ri inspection ended—aboard a US Air Force special-mission plane, aircraft that were becoming a common sight at the North Korean airport as more official US delegations showed up. Before embarking, Perry and his team had spent an entire day at Stanford University going over every word of a carefully prepared seventeen-page script, and over the Korean translation, to be used as the crucial presentation. The idea of the script was to layer the message Perry would deliver, giving Kim Jong Il—who would be following the discussions via frequent reports from his aides—a chance every step of the way to absorb the US presentation.

After a lavish welcome banquet the night of his arrival, Perry made his presentation the following day, primarily to Kang Sok Ju, the first deputy foreign minister who had negotiated the 1994 Agreed Framework and was the closest diplomatic aide to Kim Jong Il.

Reading from the script inside a file folder, Perry began with references to the difficult history of Korea and its great-power neighbors over the past one hundred years, which included the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, in which Japan gained dominance over Korea. In those days, he said, “events [that] occurred and decisions made in capitals in Asia decisively and tragically influenced the course of the 20th century.” Perry said he was there not to apologize for things the United States had done but to seek to work together to heal the wounds. He explained his own role in the nuclear crisis of 1994, how important his understanding of that crisis had been to him, and how perilously close the United States and the DPRK had come to a clash of arms.

The United States as a Pacific power would remain intimately bound up with Asia in the future as it had been earlier in the twentieth century, Perry told the North Koreans. Advancing a theme that was to recur in later ROK and US conversations with Kim Jong Il, Perry said that a Korea surrounded by powerful states could benefit from a positive relationship with a power across the Pacific. The United States, he said, would be prepared to consider the legitimate defense concerns of the DPRK, but
the DPRK in return must consider the defense concerns of others in the region. He observed that the status quo was not sustainable due to US concerns about North Korean missile and nuclear programs.

Perry outlined in some detail the actions that North Korea must take to place itself on the positive track he recommended, leading step-by-step to full diplomatic, political, and economic relations with the United States. To obtain these benefits, North Korea must completely halt all missile exports, including related technology and equipment. Even more significantly, North Korea must cease development, production, testing, and deployment of all missiles above the limit of the international Missile Technology Control Regime, which North Korea had not joined. This would eliminate the new Taep’o-dong as well as the Nodong that had been threatening Japan for most of a decade.

Should North Korea continue missile tests and other actions perceived to be hostile, in effect taking the second track, Perry said the United States, South Korea, and Japan were prepared to reverse positive steps that they had taken and to protect their security by military actions of their own. He did not specify what actions they would take and felt it was unnecessary for him to speak in detail, as North Koreans knew his history as defense secretary during the 1994 crisis.

Before leaving Pyongyang, it was clear to Perry that deep divisions existed within the regime, or at least that North Korea wanted the United States to believe there were, about accepting his ideas. At US requests for a meeting with a senior military figure, General Lee Yong Chol, a high-ranking member of Kim Jong Il’s entourage, met the Perry team. “We don’t normally meet with our enemies,” he began bluntly, and proceeded to say he believed it was a bad idea even to discuss giving up North Korean missiles. Referring to the intensive US bombing of Yugoslavia then taking place, he said this was because the Serbs were unable to fire back at the United States and that North Korea was determined never to be in that position. Moreover, Lee referred to the Foreign Ministry officials as wimpish and said the military would pay little heed to what they thought.