The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (76 page)

What was probably the most fateful meeting the two countries ever had lasted less than an hour. There was no discussion of Kang’s position that as part of any resolution of Washington’s concerns, the United States should recognize the North’s political system, conclude a peace agreement with a nonaggression commitment, and refrain from interfering with the North’s economic development. Kelly asked no questions, probed nothing. The American diplomat knew exactly what his instructions were—deliver the message on enrichment. Period. He had done that. The only thing left for him was to close his notebook and leave. From then on, it was all down hill.

After the meeting, the delegation went to the British Embassy to send a quick initial message on Kang’s remarks back to Washington, using the UK’s secure communications equipment.
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Under considerable time pressure and less than optimal physical conditions in the cramped space, the Korean speakers in the group did what they could to reconstruct a transcript based on what Kang had said in Korean, as opposed to what his interpreter had rendered into English. The North’s interpreters at high-level talks are usually good at either translating directly or capturing in English the proper meaning of what the DPRK negotiator has said. On occasion,
though, the translation is vague. If the point seems important, the best thing is to stop and seek clarification. In this case, the American Korean speakers had to compare notes among themselves as there was no opportunity to go back and ask the North what it meant. There was no second meeting with Kang to clarify what had been unclear.

The delegates’ first message was titled “North Koreans Defiantly Admit HEU Program,” and once it went out there was never any chance that its first impressions—impressions that should have been questioned and carefully analyzed on arrival in Washington—would get judicious treatment. Those six words were in essence all that anyone who looked at the message in Washington remembered, and they sealed the fate of the Agreed Framework. US policy on the North Korean issue went into a free fall from which it never recovered. Almost every senior official who saw the message jumped to the conclusion that the North Koreans had “admitted” to uranium enrichment, even though a closer reading of both the summary and the reconstructed transcript revealed no such thing. In a Principals Committee meeting that followed Kelly’s return to Washington, it was already set in concrete that the North Koreans had admitted to the program and that this “admission” had somehow altered the entire policy landscape.

What difference it should have made whether the North admitted to anything was never really clear, then or later. If the United States thought it had conclusive evidence of a clandestine HEU program, the central question was not whether the North Koreans admitted it, but what to do about it. Yet in the highly charged atmosphere in Washington, the issue of the admission became like high-octane fuel for the hard-liners. There was no question that the meeting with Kang had been negative. The first vice foreign minister had jumped directly into bristling mode, but whether that was because of the US accusation itself or because of the tone of the US presentation—which the North later complained was haughty, rude, and arrogant—wasn’t considered.

From North Korea’s viewpoint, Kelly—however soft-spoken and gentlemanly his actual delivery—had presented a brusque ultimatum and left no opportunity for discussion. In fact, that was the only way to read the core of Kelly’s instructions. In an odd way, for the first time in two years the North Koreans and the Americans were finally on the same page.

THE MORNING AFTER

The US delegation flew to Seoul the next morning. Once there, tired but revved up by what they had convinced themselves they had heard, they briefed the ROK. They did not, however, offer detailed notes of Kang’s remarks, an omission that irked the South Koreans. After the briefing,
ROK officials were shaken and more than a little doubtful. It did not seem, based on their own extensive contacts with Kim Jong Il over the past few years, that the North Koreans would have wanted to see such a crucial meeting with the Americans go so badly.

And there was no need for the Americans to tell them things had gone badly. Only a few hours after the Kelly delegation had departed, the North Korean Foreign Ministry had released a statement complaining that the US envoy had come with a “high handed and arrogant attitude” in claiming that North-South Korean and DPRK-Japanese relations could not move ahead unless the North first met the US “unilateral” demands on “nuclear, missile, and conventional armed forces and human rights issues.” Kelly’s remarks on the North’s initiatives toward Japan and South Korea, as much or maybe even more than the enrichment accusation, had obviously struck home. The North’s statement had also dryly noted, without elaboration, that the DPRK side had “clarified its principled position” to Kelly.

On October 10, the South’s National Security Council met and, with an eye to the looming storm clouds, laid out steps it hoped would keep the situation from worsening. Noting that abrogation of the Agreed Framework would be dangerous (a position very much at odds with the Bush administration’s viewpoint at this juncture), the group decided that, in addition to keeping in touch with allies on the enrichment issue, the South should attempt to arrange a visit by First Vice Foreign Minister Kang Sok Ju to Washington. The latter idea was an indication of how out of touch America and its South Korean ally had become on the North Korea question; such a visit might have seemed to make good sense in a policy paper in Seoul, but it would have been laughed out of the room in Washington.

The South’s ongoing contacts with Pyongyang provided a channel for Seoul to air its concerns with the North Koreans at the highest level. ROK unification minister Chung Se-hyon was to be in Pyongyang for previously scheduled talks on October 19–23. President Kim Dae Jung instructed him to deliver to Kim Jong Il a message with the following points: the North should send Kang Sok Ju to Washington to keep the dialogue going, it should not take any steps that would hasten the demise of the Agreed Framework, and it should make its position clear prior to a US-ROK-Japan summit in Mexico scheduled to take place on the margins of an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting.

To reinforce his message to the North Koreans, and also to make things clear to Washington, on October 23 President Kim publicly warned against scrapping the Agreed Framework. “Military action can result in great tragedy,” Kim’s spokesman quoted the president as saying. “Nobody wants that.” Economic sanctions, he added, would give North Korea “the freedom for nuclear responses.”

Kim Jong Il was paying attention. On October 25, his Foreign Ministry released a statement repeating the complaints about the Kelly delegation’s high-handed attitude and reiterating the points Kang had made to Kelly about what the United States should do to resolve the problem, but ending on a conciliatory note about the need for negotiations to continue. It made a special point of referring to Kim Jong Il’s recent economic measures, noting, “The DPRK has taken a series of new steps in economic management and adopted one measure after another to reenergize the economy, including the establishment of a special economic region, in conformity with the changed situation and specific conditions of the country.”

If the statement was meant to turn the tide, it didn’t. What the South Koreans, and probably the North Koreans as well, didn’t fully realize was that in Washington, the Agreed Framework, a crucial underpinning for Seoul’s Sunshine Policy, was doomed. In the initial shock of Kelly’s report on his meeting, the Bush administration was as close to having a unified view as it would ever achieve on the North Korean issue. The hard-liners considered this the final nail in the Agreed Framework’s coffin, and even those who had backed negotiations reluctantly agreed.

The more fundamental problem at this point was the same one facing the dog who chases the bus and one day catches it: what next? Given the administration’s planning for an attack on Iraq—a Senate measure on the use of force in Iraq was up for a vote that very week—the administration did not want or need a distracting bombshell about North Korea, although it quickly offered classified briefings on the Kelly trip to select members of Congress. (Not all took up the offer—and then those who didn’t complained later that they had not been briefed.) Besides the tactical question of what to do with the news of the Pyongyang meeting, there was a larger strategic one: if the Agreed Framework was dead, “shredded” in the words of some officials, what would take its place to keep the North’s plutonium production frozen? According to John Bolton, there was “no need to replace it [the Agreed Framework] with anything.” Astonishingly, nothing was decided on the overall approach until December 2002, two months after the Kelly visit and just as the situation was starting its rapid slide over the cliff.

Information about the Kang “admission” leaked before the White House had decided how to handle the news. The administration needed to put out its own account and did so through a restrained statement by the State Department’s press spokesman on October 16, noting that because the North Koreans had “acknowledged” to Kelly that they had an enrichment program, the United States was “unable” to pursue the president’s bold approach to improving relations with the North. A KEDO delegation was in previously scheduled talks in Pyongyang exactly at that time, and one of the delegation members, unsure of how the North Koreans
would react to what was liable to be a very negative story once it became public, had asked acquaintances in Washington to give him a heads-up if the news broke while he was in North Korea. “Just call me and say the weather in Washington has turned bad.” In the early hours of October 17 (late on the sixteenth in Washington), the phone rang and the weather report came through. It was bad.

The next day, the North Koreans carried on with the KEDO talks as if nothing had happened, though one member of their delegation flashed a particularly sour look across the room. At dinner, after the talks, the same North Korean vented. Washington had released a story that the North had acknowledged an enrichment program to the Kelly delegation, he said. The North Korean, who had been at the Kelly meetings, insisted Kang had done no such thing. The real problem, he said, was that the DPRK side had been astonished and offended at the US delegation’s demeanor. “They were diplomats, but they wouldn’t even discuss things,” he complained. “They just repeated the same thing over and over.”

The first shock of the report from the Kelly delegation that the North had “admitted” to an enrichment program had brought the warring camps in Washington into a temporary consensus, but like a soap bubble it vanished in short order. The hard-liners wanted to jettison the Agreed Framework immediately. Others didn’t want to go quite so far, but were not sure of the way ahead. At an APEC meeting in Mexico, October 21–27, open, no-holds-barred warfare broke out within the US government. The
New York Times
and the
Washington Post
were wheeled into position for the opposing camps to fire broadsides at each other. The Agreed Framework was “dead,” one unidentified US senior official was quoted as saying. A few days later, Secretary of State Colin Powell responded, saying no such decision had been made and that if the North Koreans called, “We’ll listen, and I hope vice versa.” The next day, the unidentified senior official was quoted as making the eye-popping statement that Powell’s remarks might represent the State Department position, but it didn’t represent the administration view.

In the middle of that open debate, on October 26, President George Bush, Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, and South Korean president Kim Dae Jung issued a joint statement asserting that North Korea’s uranium enrichment program violated the country’s nuclear agreements. The statement called upon Pyongyang to “dismantle” the program “in a prompt and verifiable manner and to come into full compliance with all its international commitments.” Stressing the three countries’ desire for a peaceful resolution to the nuclear issue, the declaration made clear that both Japan and South Korea intended to continue their bilateral engagement efforts with Pyongyang. At this point, Seoul and to a lesser degree Tokyo were seeking to control and contain Washington, thinking the joint
statement preserved their room for maneuver. It is not at all clear they understood how little control they would have over events to come.

The North Koreans had been watching, probably in consternation, the way the story was developing. As reflected in their statements from the moment Kelly left Pyongyang, they were especially concerned about US interference with inter-Korean relations. (DPRK-Japan relations had by then already hit a major obstacle in terms of negative Japanese public opinion sparked by Pyongyang’s assertion that several of the Japanese abductees had died while in the North.) Both the message from the ROK leader and his public comments may have given them reason to hope something could yet be salvaged. If not, they would try to make clear, certainly to the South Koreans, that it was the Americans who had failed to make the extra effort.

On October 27, the day after the tripartite statement in Mexico, an eighteen-member North Korean delegation flew into the South for a nine-day tour of South Korean industry, part of the inter-Korean exchanges that had been launched by the June 2000 summit. The nominal leader of the group was Pak Nam-ki, head of the Workers Party Finance and Planning Department.
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The real leader was Kim Jong Il’s brother-in-law, Chang Song Taek. South Koreans who accompanied the group on the tour found Chang intelligent, attentive, and, though he wasn’t an economist, interested in ways to enhance inter-Korean economic cooperation.

On November 2, former ambassador Donald Gregg and I, along with Korea Society vice president Fred Carriere, arrived in Pyongyang.
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We had hoped to drive to the North Korean capital, transiting the DMZ, but US military officials in Korea blocked the move, requiring us to fly via Beijing. We saw the same people US assistant secretary James Kelly and his party had seen. The Foreign Ministry officials were obviously perturbed at the course of events, a little defensive, and more than a little apprehensive. Although as in Kelly’s case there was no clear or explicit admission, there was also not a word of denial that they were actively pursuing a highly enriched uranium program. We told them flatly that their enrichment program was an extremely serious breach of the relationship between the United States and North Korea and that any future agreement would require the most rigorous verification because of this violation of nuclear accords. They said that they would “clear the concerns” of the United States in return for three things: first, recognition of their sovereignty, in a statement that would imply their acceptance as a legitimate state that is not to be attacked or overthrown; second, no interference with their economic development—that is, no economic sanctions or embargoes against
them, a request that was not accompanied by any solicitations of economic assistance; and third, negotiation of a nonaggression treaty by which the United States would legally assure North Korea that it would not attack with nuclear weapons or other means.