Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir

by Christopher R. Hill

  As I entered his office for my farewell call, Powell was behind his desk and motioned me in. There was a melancholy look to him as he sat there. I offered an update on Korea and asked how things were going. He told me he had asked the president to allow him to stay longer as secretary of state, but that President Bush had told him that he could not. I thought it was an astonishing thing to tell a visiting ambassador in from the field, but it was typical of Secretary Powell’s casual honesty and directness. I babbled some words about his service to the State Department and the fact that he would always be remembered for his loyalty to people. I asked how he thought things were going in Iraq.

  “We can’t even clear the road from the airport to the embassy,” he responded glumly.

  I left feeling very sorry for Secretary Powell. I always thought a leader should impart a sense of optimism to the troops. Powell had certainly done that for four years, but it was clear that day in December that he was done. His deputy, Rich Armitage, was equally composed, but in contrast to Powell it seemed he couldn’t wait to exit the administration. Armitage offered some criticism of rumored personnel changes.

  “Do you realize they are talking about you for EAP?” referring to the State Department’s Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs. I had long come to an understanding in my line of work that one should not be offended by anything. But then he added: “You would be great for EUR, but not EAP. Besides, you are doing a great job where you are in Seoul.” I felt a little better, as the European Bureau was hardly a dumping ground, and the compliment about Seoul seemed sincere, but I said nothing of my discussion with Rice and Hadley.

  From Armitage’s office I walked down a flight of stairs to the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs (EAP) for my meeting with Assistant Secretary Kelly. East Asia was hardly an abandoned part of the world during the first Bush administration, but as important as it is, it certainly didn’t pass the urgency test. Worse yet, in the wake of 9/11, it had come to be defined as a region whose importance was seen in terms of the role it could play in the Global War on Terror—the GWOT. And while the various challenges there often did touch on the broader issue of Islamic fundamentalism, whether in the southern Philippines or in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim majority state, there was a rhythm that ran through that part of the world. Seeing the region as simply another battlefield in the Global War on Terror was not the best way to reach out to the people there.

  The problem of dealing with the region was even deeper than just preoccupation with international terrorism. There was a body of opinion that the administration, at least in that fraught first term, seemed to want to run East Asia and Pacific policy through three key allies, Japan, Singapore, and Australia, and viewed others in terms of their relationships with those three. Other countries could be important in and of themselves—China, obviously, and Korea as the key player on the peninsula where U.S. troops were stationed—but our enduring, region-wide strategic interests would be routed through three countries. It was by no means a completely fair analysis, but it would stick, so much so that when the Obama administration was to announce a “pivot” to Asia, or, more delicately, a “rebalancing” to Asia, the move was taken as a substantive change of policy from one administration to another. After all, the Bush administration spent great effort to cultivate the South Korean government. But in contrast to the special relationship with Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, and Japan’s critical role in the Indian Ocean with regard to the U.S. investments in the Middle East, South Korean president Roh Moo Hyun was perceived as not being helpful on the North Korean nuclear issue. Key Bush administration officials such as Undersecretary of State John Bolton (a person whose senior position at State was actually in the chain of command under Powell and Armitage) openly criticized the Roh government as soft on the North. Accusations of that kind sent from the safety of Washington, D.C., to people living next door to North Korea did not sit well with any Koreans. The Roh government, which for good measure was also busy downgrading relations with Japan, offered plenty of criticism of its own about the Bush administration’s approach and its supposed lack of willingness to engage in dialogue with the North. The out-of-sync alliance, clearly showing its age at fifty, took its toll in the public mood, where Korean opinion surveys revealed an increasingly negative view about U.S. policy in the region. Impatience with Roh’s administration began to boil over in Washington.

  Secretary Rumsfeld, never one to be sentimental toward a fifty-year ally, increasingly challenged South Korean sensitivities with U.S. troop drawdowns about which the South Koreans were barely informed or consulted. Rumsfeld, the “transformational thinker,” understandably had to consider more urgent needs in Iraq and Afghanistan and had been busy making cuts to forces in Europe as well as repositioning forces there for more strategic, “out of area” missions. In Korea he was doing nothing more than that, but given the North Korean threat (in contrast to the depleted threats to Europe), the Pentagon’s moves in Korea angered our detractors and discouraged our friends.

  In 2004, Rumsfeld started letting it be known that forces in Korea should have a strategic role, not just the tired old mission of acting as a “tethered goat” in the unlikely event of (another) North Korean thrust southward. The strategic role came across to the South Koreans as a desire to use their bases as part of war planning against China, and to do so without a South Korean vote.

  14

  CALLING AN AUDIBLE

  The most serious problem festering in the U.S.–South Korean relationship was North Korea’s nuclear aspirations and divergent opinions about how to deal with them.

  The Bush administration’s decision to withdraw from the Clinton administration’s Agreed Framework, in which the U.S. side held direct talks with the North Koreans on a set of agreements whose essence was to provide North Korea with two light water reactors in return for dismantling their existing nuclear program, and the absence of any new mechanism took a heavy toll on our reputation in South Korea. The loose and uncoordinated talk in Washington criticizing any and all arms control negotiations, a neoconservative argument overheard by the rest of the world, alarmed many Koreans, who saw in the new Bush administration a radicalism that was disconnected from reality on the ground. By the time the U.S. administration had agreed with the Chinese on a six-party format for future negotiations, the U.S. reputation had already plummeted among the South Korean public.

  This is not to say the Koreans necessarily had a more effective approach. Paying for summits between the two Koreas, paying for visits by ordinary South Koreans to North Korea, paying for any form of cooperation with the North gave South Korea a reputation as an appeaser.

  That was not an approach that was going to work with the Bush administration, or any administration for that matter. I was convinced that the real problem was that as long as the United States tried to go it alone in negotiating with North Korea, no one else would take any responsibility and would blame the United States for the lack of progress. By 2004, the administration understood that the United States was paying a high price for its efforts with North Korea, while South Korea and China stood on the sidelines. It was time that those two countries took their places at the table.

  South Korean public opinion was turning against the United States, but many were still unhappy with the Roh Moo Hyun administration for not maintaining a good U.S. relationship. As the U.S.–South Korean alliance seemed to be going into free fall, Roh began to look for ways to work with the United States.

  Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon made that possible. As he sensed a renewed interest in the administration to negotiate in the Six Parties, he appointed Song Minsoon, a friend of mine who had been the South Korean ambassador in Warsaw during the time I was U.S. ambassador there, a fact presumably known to Ban. He had also been Mike Sohn’s deputy at the Korean embassy in Singapore years before.

  I took over as negotiator for the North Korea talks in February 2005, a couple of months before I was to leave Se
oul to take up my duties as assistant secretary for East Asia and the Pacific. Minsoon and I began to meet privately in the café on the top floor of Seoul’s Plaza Hotel. It was close enough for each of us to walk from our offices ten minutes north on Sejong-ro Boulevard.

  Minsoon had a reputation as a tough negotiator. That was the good news. The bad news for us was his reputation for toughness came from negotiations with the United States over basing rights and other difficult issues, a reputation that had had a positive effect on Roh’s willingness to go along with Ban’s choice of him as the representative to the Six Party Talks.

  “We need an ‘early harvest’ of ideas that will show that the talks have life to them,” I told him. “As you recall, there were only a couple of sessions last year, both short and neither showing much progress. I’m thinking that if we can take points already agreed on even in Washington, we can put them into a short statement of principles that we can get some agreement on from the North Koreans. The real problems will come later, when we move to implementation.”

  Minsoon didn’t know I was channeling Dick Holbrooke from the Dayton Peace Accords. But he was on board.

  “Let’s work on them, together,” he suggested.

  We raised our beer glasses.

  “I’ll get you a draft”—I was hoping he wouldn’t get the unintended pun—“tomorrow.”

  I was thinking about how the United States and the Republic of Korea could really begin to fix the damage being done to the relationship, if we could only work in this way on North Korea. In fact, South Korean and American diplomats had done many things together over the years, but neither the Korean people, not to speak of the U.S. public, understood how close the relationship had become. Sometimes we had taken each other for granted. With my ambassador to South Korea hat still firmly on my head, I thought that nobody believed that in the current state of relations we could really work closely on an issue of such fundamental importance as the North Korean nuclear crisis. I thought, maybe we could. I set about to meet the rest of the Six Party representatives, starting with the Chinese.

  Wu Dawei, the Chinese vice minister who headed China’s delegation to the talks, walked into the conference room on the eighth floor of Embassy Seoul. I had welcomed him at the elevator, pausing to show him some of the artwork on the eighth floor, including the pictures of all the past U.S. ambassadors to Korea. The collection of mug shots of U.S. ambassadors, typical in any U.S. embassy, had an added twist. At that time, all the former ambassadors whose pictures were in black-and-white were deceased. Those in color: still kicking. The ambassadors had all died in the order that they were ambassador, and while it was not true (as I had joked to many visitors) that the photos would fade to black-and-white on the news of a death, it did not take much of a sense of philosophy to recognize that our time in office is short.

  A retinue of aides and note takers accompanied Wu as he sat across from me, his interpreter seated next to him. While Wu did not speak much English, one could tell that his staff certainly did as they dove into their notebooks before the interpreter had even started. The Chinese staff seemed bright and buttoned down, a credit to China’s successor generation. Many had gone to U.S. universities, and I thought that if we could manage things with China during turbulent times, we could surely have a great future together.

  I heard that Wu was a heavy smoker, and I thought briefly of suspending the smoking ban in the embassy, a move that could, in one way at least, improve the atmosphere, but looking at the smoke detectors above, patiently waiting to do their duty at the whiff of a cigarette, I decided not to.

  From reading Wu’s biography I knew I was sitting across from someone who had seen a lot over the years in China. He looked to be bracing for an unpleasant meeting and I was going to try to disappoint him on that score. As with the South Koreans, I knew that the purpose of the Six Party Talks was not just to deal with North Korea, but also to find common platforms with other countries and develop “patterns of cooperation” (Condi’s phrase from two months before).

  I had noticed something else in Wu’s bio. He had a reputation for earning the loyalty and the affection of his staff, something I could also see on their faces. They liked their boss. He was quirky, engaged in shifting subjects, and I did my part to keep him off balance as well. Our official talking points tended to talk past each other. He called for more patience from the Americans toward North Korea, and I called for less patience from the Chinese. At times we both laughed at the impossibility of harmonizing our two approaches, but we agreed on where we should end up: with a denuclearized North Korea.

  “I hope you don’t mind if I sometimes recall something from Chinese history,” he said.

  “I would be disappointed if nothing from your four-thousand-year history ever came to mind. After all, this is a historic problem we are dealing with.”

  Kenichiro Sasae was the Japanese representative. Like Wu, he had long experience dealing with Asian neighbors and working with the United States. He was a problem solver, a pragmatist. He understood Japan’s difficulties in the region: the internal Japanese politics churned over the thirty-year-old issue of the North Korean abductions of Japanese citizens, the competition with China, the problems dealing with Roh Moo Hyun’s administration.

  He came to my home for breakfast and promptly endeared himself by congratulating me on the Boston Red Sox winning the World Series. I recognized the good staff work that had gone into that comment and wished I had something as irrelevant and personal for him as well. We talked about how the negotiations might unfold. I told him we were interested in some kind of early harvest that would show the world that the process had some possibilities. He agreed and methodically went through Japan’s negotiating history with the North Koreans, especially on the issue of the abductions. I assured him that the United States would remain engaged on the question, but that I was concerned whether the other participants shared that view. He understood but was pleased with my assurances.

  I escorted Sasae to the front of the house, waving as he got into his car and waiting for the wheels to turn, the Asian custom for the precise moment when a visit ends. I had met the South Korean, Chinese, and now the Japanese representatives and was looking forward to meeting Aleksandr Alekseyev from the Russian Federation, about whom I had heard good things from other U.S. diplomats, including those in U.S. Embassy Moscow who had worked with him. I wondered, how hard could this be? All .300-plus hitters and with great personalities as well.

  I hadn’t met the North Koreans.

  It was Wednesday, June 29, 2005, and I was at RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C., watching the Nationals play the Pittsburgh Pirates. It was the fifth inning, a tie score, and the Nats were about to come up. I had a great seat on the third-base side, but instead of enjoying the action of a close game I was anxiously looking at my cell phone. Finally, it rang.

  “Chris, it’s Joe DeTrani. I think we have a deal.”

  “Okay, Joe. Tell me exactly what they have agreed to.”

  Joe DeTrani, whom I inherited as my deputy in the Six Party process negotiations, was up in New York and had been meeting with the North Koreans at a nongovernmental meeting, a so-called Track 2 conference sponsored by the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, to which several North Korean negotiators were invited. He had just had a conversation with his opposite number in the North Korean delegation, Ri Gun. Ri had told him that if the U.S. side were to meet the head of the North Korean delegation, he was sure the North Koreans would be willing to go back to the Six Party Talks.

  “Joe, it sounds encouraging, but, nonetheless, Ri being ‘sure’ is different from actually agreeing to return to the talks.”

  Joe understood that if I was to sell the idea to Secretary Rice, I needed to say that if we met them, they would announce their return to the talks. Being “sure” was not enough.

  “I understand, but I think we are good. Do you want to speak with him?”

  I went up the stairs of the stands to ge
t away from the noise. But the Nationals were in first place at the time, and the stadium was pretty full that night despite a rain delay. I told him to put Ri on as I blocked one ear with the palm of my hand and pressed the cell phone against the other to try to hear him.

  “Mr. Ri,” I said—not quite sure how to address him. “Good to talk with you. I want to make sure we have an understanding that if I meet Mr. Kim [Gye Gwan] in Beijing, your government will announce that you are returning to the Six Party Talks.”

  “Yes. That is our understanding.”

  I thought of parsing the word understanding, but his answer was good enough for me, or at least good enough to try out on Secretary Rice. I knew that she would share my skepticism but would want to try. Iraq and Afghanistan were not getting any easier.

  The next morning, I explained the proposed deal to the secretary. She listened carefully, and didn’t seem concerned that Ri might be getting ahead of himself, except to comment that officials in communist/totalitarian societies usually have developed a survivalist sense of not getting out ahead of their talking points. She told me she’d get back to me later in the day.

  When we met again, she told me I could proceed, but that the meeting had to be in a Chinese government facility, with the Chinese present. I responded that I understood the instructions, but that it might not work. The whole point of the North Korean boycott of the talks was that we don’t meet with them the way we meet with all the other parties.

  “Do the best you can. Those are the instructions,” she responded. I tried to get more details on what she meant by a “Chinese government facility.” A military base? Conference center? Their foreign ministry? A government-owned hotel? And what does it mean to have the Chinese present? Should it become a three-way talk? At what level do the Chinese have to be present?

  “Do the best you can,” she repeated.

  I returned to the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs and went to the office of Kathleen Stephens, the principal deputy assistant secretary. I had known Kathy since my first tour in Korea and was delighted when she agreed to take the deputy position. Kathy and I started a facetious list of what could constitute a Chinese government facility in China. “There are a lot of them,” she observed in mock understatement. I then walked over to my own office and asked my assistant Stasia Miller to get the Korea team up to my office.