The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (72 page)

Lim’s findings, and warnings from the State Department that it was too early for Kim Dae Jung to show up in Washington, that the ground had not been prepared, and that the atmosphere was still too unsettled, clearly did not faze the South Korean president. Kim had not survived the many challenges in his long career by turning back in the face of adversity. If anything, the negative reports probably spurred him on.

The South Koreans were not the only ones concerned about what was brewing in Washington. The North Koreans were also nervous. Back
in November 2000, an article in the North Korean party daily timed to appear on the day of the US presidential election had laid out in unusually positive terms the North’s position—that the October 2000 joint US-DPRK communiqué was a “historic document,” that Pyongyang was committed to honoring it, and the United States should do so too. In January 2001, as the change of administrations was under way, Pyongyang sent its UN ambassador, Li Hyong Chol, to Washington to ask where things stood and underline to the Americans that Kim Jong Il hoped to continue the process of improving relations. Ambassador Li had long experience working with the United States. He had taken part in the Agreed Framework negotiations in Geneva and had been through the ups and downs of talks in the intervening years. It was Li who led the North Korean delegation to the December 1996 talks in New York over the submarine incident. If anyone knew how to read the Americans and communicate with them effectively, Pyongyang surely thought, it would be him.

Thomas Hubbard, the acting assistant secretary for East Asia, invited the North Korean diplomat to his office in the State Department, where he and Charles Kartman, the four-party negotiator, gave Li a diplomatic answer: things in Washington were not yet clear, there was going to be a policy review, but as this process was under way the two sides should maintain communications. Kartman had been part of the briefings for the incoming administration and had sensed the Bush team’s coolness toward the Clinton-era policies, but neither of the American diplomats had any idea of the drastic change of course in US policy waiting in the wings. For a ranking State Department official to have a diplomat from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in his office to discuss bilateral relations was in itself a reflection of how far things had progressed since 1994. Few could have guessed that after this meeting, no North Korean diplomat would be allowed in Washington for similar discussions for at least the next twelve years.

By the time Kim Dae Jung arrived in Washington in early March, it was clearly no longer possible to say US and ROK policies were moving in tandem. Cracks had become crevices and were widening into canyons. As if things were not bad enough, in talks with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Seoul at the end of February, Kim had agreed to a joint statement that seemed to put the South Korean leader on record as siding with the Russians on the issue of preserving the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. This was read in Washington as implicitly opposing US plans to build a national missile defense system, a centerpiece of the Bush administration’s security policy. Kim’s subordinates scrambled to repair the damage, but the antiballistic-missile issue was an exposed nerve in Washington, and Kim had managed to step on it in the worst way at the worst time.

Kim’s visit to Washington was a disaster, worse even than those fretting about it ahead of time had imagined. US presidents had been through
rough meetings with ROK leaders before, but this was one for the record books. Neither side had been ready for this meeting, though the new Bush administration in Washington—barely six weeks in office—was especially unprepared for a top-level discussion on the North Korea issue.

As the visit began, the
Washington Post
carried a story headlined “Bush to Pick Up Clinton Talks on N. Korean Missiles.” It quoted Secretary of State Colin Powell as saying that the administration would pick up where President Clinton and his administration had left off. In his memoirs, Bush notes that he was not pleased when he saw the
Post
article and immediately reached for the phone to tell his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to fix the problem or he would do it himself. Rice says she had a collegial conversation with Powell about the quote; other sources close to the secretary have said it was not all that friendly and that it marked the beginning of a frosty relationship between the two senior officials.

Friendly or not, Rice’s message was effective. During the Bush-Kim meeting later that day (a meeting Powell attended), the secretary of state came out of the room to issue the sort of retraction to waiting reporters that only a veteran of Washington could muster, masking it as an interim report on the state of the two presidents’ conversation. President Bush, Powell said, had emphasized to Kim that the United States was “undertaking a full review of our relationship with North Korea, coming up with policies that build on the past, coming up with policies unique to the administration, the other things we want to see put on the table.” When the review was finished, “We’ll determine at what pace and when we will engage with the North Koreans.” Any suggestion that “imminent negotiations are about to begin” was “not the case.” In the context of the South Korean leader’s visit, this dance at the very top of the administration was widely—and correctly—interpreted as a sign that the Clinton approach was dead. Some White House officials considered Powell’s remarks to the
Post
a bad misstep, putting him and the State Department further outside the president’s trusted inner policy circle.

On the morning before his mea culpa, Powell had met President Kim for breakfast in Blair House, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. The South Korean leader was at his best, drawing from his deep experience to discuss trends in Asia and US-Korean relations. Powell was impressed and pleased, convinced things might actually be on track. A few hours later, however, at the meeting between the two leaders in the White House, it became clear that things were not on track at all. To the Koreans, Bush was insultingly informal, almost dismissive of Kim. To the Americans, the South Korean leader was stiff and didactic. Afterward, Kim said nothing publicly to indicate his displeasure, but his aides got the word out. South Korean media were filled with expressions of outrage at what
was portrayed as Bush’s disrespectful treatment of their aged leader. Even Koreans who did not otherwise support Kim were dismayed and angered. Among Washington’s Asia hands, there was a sense that the breach would take considerable work to repair, and they set about quickly to do so.

Early in 2001, soon after the Kim visit, the administration launched its review of North Korea policy. A few months before the work was finished, one of the State Department’s North Korea experts met a DPRK official traveling in Europe. The Korean expressed serious concern about the tone of statements coming out of Washington and worry that the agreements reached with the Clinton administration were unraveling. Those in Pyongyang who had never favored the Agreed Framework, he said, were starting to suggest it was time to reevaluate the policy. When the American offered his own views of developments, the North Korean stopped him. “We know what you people think,” he said, meaning those with whom the North had negotiated previously. “We need to meet the new people.” Not long afterward, an authoritative article signed “Commentator” appeared in the North Korean party newspaper. It voiced similar concerns, warning that Washington seemed to be changing the basis for US-DPRK engagement and reopening issues, such as reductions in North Korean conventional forces, that both sides had already tacitly agreed to put lower on the bilateral agenda.

Unlike the review headed by former secretary of defense William J. Perry only a few years earlier, the Bush administration’s policy review had a predetermined outcome. Whatever was decided, the conclusions and recommendations had to be different from the Clinton approach. An early indication of the problem was when Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley ordered that the review be divided into two subgroups, with the National Security Council in charge of the functional (i.e., non-proliferation) issues, whereas State would chair on the regional questions. This step essentially gave those opposed to negotiating with North Korea the upper hand in shaping the review. At an early meeting, Tom Hubbard offered a suggestion that he thought would be approved with little comment—that the State Department maintain contacts with the North Korean UN Mission in New York during the review. The idea instantly ran into a buzz saw of opposition, however. Senior administration officials at the meeting made clear that they thought continuing contact meant perpetuating the Clinton policy. The result was that US contacts with the North would be all but cut off during four crucial months.

The review was not actually finished when ROK foreign minister Han Song Soo arrived in the United States in early June 2001. The administration’s plan had been to discuss the review with Han before releasing it in order to give the appearance of bilateral consultations with its South Korean ally. Instead, as so often happens in Washington, there was a leak.
To get out in front of the story, the White House decided it had to release the conclusions before the ROK visitor had a chance to see them.

The conclusions were couched in stock Washington verbiage, and most looked innocuous enough on paper. Those in favor of continuing the negotiating track—primarily at the State Department—took solace from the fact that the review did not explicitly rule out dialogue with the North. A few of the conclusions, however, were flatly inconsistent with what several senior administration officials—including Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Undersecretary of State John Bolton—believed the policy should be. The White House press release on June 6 said that future discussions with North Korea would cover a broad agenda to include “improved implementation of the Agreed Framework relating to North Korea’s nuclear activities,” as well as “verifiable constraints on North Korea’s missile programs and a ban on its missile exports.” In fact, Cheney and the others had no intention of improving the Agreed Framework; they meant to toss it overboard. Furthermore, focused on getting congressional approval for its national missile defense program, the administration had no plans to discuss missiles with North Korea, which it held up as one of the primary reasons for needing missile defense.

Through the spring, the North Koreans waited anxiously for the results of the policy review. When the news came out in June, they reacted negatively, focusing on what seemed to many in Washington a fussy technicality. The North complained that it should have received advance notice of the review’s conclusions rather than learn them from a White House press release. For Pyongyang, not receiving word made the new US policy “unilateral,” something it believed was hardly acceptable after all of the progress and the high-level meetings barely eight months before. Even more, the North Koreans were concerned that Washington was pulling back from the October 2000 joint communiqué—and, implicitly, on Vice Marshal Jo Myong Rok’s visit—on which they placed so much importance. If the joint communiqué that had seemed to open the door to a new relationship between the two countries was no longer part of US policy, they wondered, where were things headed?

The State Department accentuated the positive aspects of the policy review, and Secretary of State Powell adopted the public position, often repeated, that the United States would meet the North “anytime, anyplace.” That was largely an empty offer, since the vice president was determined not to let serious talks with the North get under way. To most people in Washington, though, Powell’s offer demonstrated flexibility that the North simply ignored. As far as the North Koreans were concerned, the formulation was just rhetoric; worse, to them it was an annoying mantra designed to cover up the fact that the United States had retreated from the October
2000 joint communiqué. At one point, a DPRK diplomat told his American interlocutor that the United States should stop repeating the phrase because it was getting under Pyongyang’s skin, and rather than a genuine offer to meet for serious discussions, it was viewed as Washington’s way of needling the North.

The continuing importance, in DPRK eyes, of the October 2000 joint communiqué was highlighted when a small Stanford University delegation arrived in Pyongyang in late June. A midlevel US State Department officer in the delegation was along in an unofficial capacity in order to hear out the North Koreans and transmit their views back to Washington. The North understood this sort of kabuki, but the exercise nearly came unglued when, out of an abundance of concern caused by the ugly state of affairs in Washington, the State Department went out of its way to tell the North Korean UN Mission that its own officer had no “official” standing on the visit. As the delegation alighted from the plane, a Foreign Ministry representative there to meet it expressed surprise and dismay at the US message that had just been received. The ministry had arranged for some important meetings for the delegation, he said, but now, based on the State Department’s communication, they did not see the point.

On further reflection, the North Koreans decided to go ahead with the planned schedule, and the next day the delegation met with the deputy head of the Foreign Ministry’s American Affairs Bureau, Jong Chong Chol, an official sometimes referred to by American negotiators as Mr. No because he was so difficult to deal with.
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Reading from a piece of paper, an indication this was an official position prepared in advance, Jong began his presentation by saying that the North and the United States did not have to be eternal enemies—a key formulation from a Kim Jong Il work of the late 1990s and a signal that Pyongyang obviously wanted transmitted back to Washington. The presentation then went on to note the importance of the October 2000 joint communiqué.