No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

by Condoleezza Rice

  In addition, President Bush joined with the leaders of the G8 nations in Kananaskis, Canada, in June 2002 to establish the G8 Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction. Under what became known as the “10+10 over 10” program, the United States committed to providing $10 billion over ten years to support ongoing threat-reduction efforts in Russia and other former Soviet states and requested the other G8 nations to match the United States’ pledge with up to $10 billion collectively to the program. Many other allies would join the partnership at subsequent summits as both recipient and donor nations.

  Our emphasis on missile defense was not without controversy, but abrogating the ABM Treaty so that we could develop missile defenses without limitation made the road considerably easier. On June 13, 2002, despite a last-minute congressional attempt to save the agreement, the United States’ withdrawal from the ABM Treaty officially went into effect. The Russians reacted calmly, issuing a statement of mild protest.

  In January Donald Rumsfeld had restructured the Pentagon bureaucracy to streamline the development and procurement process for missile defense technologies by establishing the Missile Defense Agency. By December the President announced that the United States would begin fielding initial missile defense capabilities that included ground-based and sea-based interceptors as well as detection sensors located on land and sea, in the air, and in space.

  By far the most controversial and difficult issues concerned how to check and control the suspected ambitions of North Korea, Iran, and Iraq to pursue WMD programs. The three states were different both in their levels of development and in the regional implications of their programs.

  As noted before, the President had rejected any return to the Agreed Framework with North Korea because he—and all of us—believed it to be flawed. The North Koreans had taken the benefits, including $4.5 billion to build two light-water reactors, but by late 2002 they were once again threatening to expel all nuclear inspectors and restart plutonium-reprocessing facilities at Yongbyon. That was a familiar pattern with the North Koreans. As President Bush put it, “He [Kim Jong-il] throws his food on the floor, and all the adults run to gather it up and put it back on the table. He waits a little while and throws his food on the floor again.” It was an apt description, but, given the consequences of conflict on the Korean peninsula, there didn’t seem to be many alternatives.

  It was in this context that we set about the contentious process of developing a follow-on strategy to the Agreed Framework. The divisions were deep, with State on one side and Defense and the Office of the Vice President on the other. In fact, State suffered from disunity within its own ranks. John Bolton, the newly appointed under secretary for arms control and international security, oversaw the department’s bureau that developed proliferation policy. John had been Colin’s “neocon hire,” in deference to the President’s desire to have his administration reflect the full range of opinions in the Republican Party. But John was loyal to his ideological soul mates, not to the secretary of state, and was a constant source of trouble for Colin.

  The schism would persist throughout the eight years of the administration. In part this was a structural problem. The secretary of state is the chief diplomat and not surprisingly tries to solve problems diplomatically. Sometimes this involves talking—and taking steps forward—with unsavory regimes, or even enemies, in order to see if there is an overlap of interests. One can hardly negotiate successfully with a regime if one is publicly committed to its destruction. The Vice President and, to a lesser extent, Don Rumsfeld believed that those regimes would never make a deal and that any deal that could be made was not worth having. They made a reasonable case for toughening sanctions and isolation to lay the groundwork for regime change.

  Frankly, the President was squarely on the hawks’ side of the fence. I too was drawn to the side of unrelenting pressure on those regimes, but I could also see two problems with the approach. First, back in 1994 some people in the Clinton administration had reasoned that the North Korean regime might collapse before the United States actually had to deliver the benefits of the Agreed Framework. It didn’t and was as diabolically resilient as ever. If Kim Jong-il had to freeze his people to death in the face of a cutoff of fuel assistance, his view was “So be it.” North Korea had plenty of ways to buy, steal, and smuggle what it needed to ensure the relative comfort of the regime and its military. The malnourished, oppressed, and isolated population was unlikely to rise up against the “Dear Leader.”

  Second, a U.S. policy of complete isolation of North Korea in the service of regime change was not, in the long term, one that others in the region, particularly China and South Korea, would likely abide. In that policy they would see only U.S. intransigence, and pursuing the strategy would create constant tension with those states. Though they might have feared that the United States would use military force, they needn’t have worried: the Pentagon wanted no part of armed conflict on the Korean peninsula. We were without a workable policy.

  By the beginning of 2002, it was already clear that we needed a new approach. In March, after much debate, we notified Congress that North Korea was not in compliance with the terms of the Agreed Framework because it had failed to make a complete and accurate declaration of its nuclear activities and refused to allow inspections of related facilities. The notification meant an end to the $95 million in foreign assistance to keep the program afloat. At the eleventh hour, the President made a decision to stand by the determination but to grant a waiver so that the $95 million in foreign assistance to the North was not affected. That gave us time to develop a new approach without setting off a firestorm of protest among our allies.

  I convened the NSC Principals that April to see where we stood. The North had been blustering ever since the “axis of evil” speech. But unexpectedly, Donald Gregg, a former U.S. ambassador to Seoul under George H. W. Bush, returned from Pyongyang with a message: the North would welcome a U.S. envoy. After raucous debate, Colin won agreement to send Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs James Kelly to Pyongyang. I personally intervened with the President to get his grudging acquiescence. But what would Kelly do once he got there?

  Colin advocated a bold approach, as he called it, prescribing engagement through a series of step-by-step moves by each side. His hope was that they’d lead to a different (if somewhat vague) new relationship between the United States and North Korea. Then, as the preparations were under way, a bombshell dropped from the intelligence community. Incomplete but troubling reports linking North Korea to the A. Q. Khan network had emerged. Moreover, Pyongyang had been suspected of seeking the components for uranium enrichment around the globe. Very close to the first anniversary of September 11, John McLaughlin, the deputy director of the CIA, reported the Agency’s assessment that North Korea had built a “production-scale” facility for uranium enrichment. Whatever the status of the Agreed Framework in slowing the plutonium program, the North appeared to be pursuing a second means of obtaining a nuclear weapon.

  There was an unbridgeable disagreement within the administration about how acute the threat was. Everyone agreed that the North had been cheating, seriously cheating, but Colin didn’t want to spark a new crisis on the peninsula by confronting the North. He agreed, though, that Kelly’s trip could not go forward.

  Yet our allies were moving forward with the North. As we were deliberating, Prime Minister Koizumi of Japan visited Pyongyang in an effort to normalize relations between the two adversaries and resolve the crisis over Japan’s abducted citizens. In one of the more bizarre revelations in modern international history, the North admitted that it had in fact kidnapped Japanese citizens in the 1970s and ’80s to steal their identities and use them to train North Korean spies how to speak Japanese. The issue was deeply emotional for the families of the abducted and for the Japanese people as a whole. Kim’s promise to allow the citizens to leave (to this day only partially fulfilled) encouraged Koiz
umi, though of the thirteen who had been abducted only five were still alive. The Japanese foreign minister, Yoriko Kawaguchi, pressed both Colin and me to send a U.S. delegation to North Korea. Koizumi made the same request of the President a couple of days later in a phone call.

  However, with the exception of State, there was little enthusiasm among the NSC Principals for a trip. I felt that we needed to be responsive to the Japanese and South Koreans and that a policy of isolation would go nowhere if it remained unilateral. After Koizumi’s call, I stayed behind and talked to the President. “Why don’t you just authorize Kelly to go?” I asked. I added that he could take a tough message but that it would help our friends. The President said he would think about it and the next morning told me that we could go ahead. But he wanted the North to understand that we had toughened our stance, not softened it. I did not mention my conversation with him to anyone except Steve Hadley. Before putting the issue of Kelly’s trip back onto the table in the NSC, I’d wanted to have a “steer” from the President. I often did this with controversial matters put before the NSC because the likelihood of a good outcome was increased if I knew in advance the limits of the President’s tolerance. In this case it was clear that he wouldn’t tolerate very much.

  After considerable debate, Kelly’s trip was rescheduled for October. When a U.S. diplomat is about to engage in sensitive negotiations, the NSC provides a set of talking points to ensure that the discussions are carried on in accordance with the agreed policy. The instructions that State drafted for Kelly were immediately seen as “soft.” The Bolton part of State reacted angrily, as did the Vice President’s office and the Pentagon. Moreover, the points were considerably more accommodating toward the North than I believed the President would allow.

  Steve Hadley took the pen and, together with Michael Green, the director for Asian affairs on the NSC, drafted a much tougher approach. Usually there is enough trust in an experienced negotiator that the guidance is used more as points of reference than as a script. But in this case, given the fissures, the points were to be read verbatim. There were literally stage directions for Kelly. He was not to engage the North Koreans in any side conversation in any way. That left him actually moving to the corner of the table to avoid Pyongyang’s representatives. Colin was angry about this infringement on his turf and what it said about how the State Department was viewed. We decided, too, that there should be no socializing, and I asked Colin to cancel a scheduled dinner with the North Korean delegation. He did so, unhappily. I’d at least helped get Kelly to Pyongyang, but he and the State Department were on a short leash. I made a mental note that this was no way to treat the secretary of state.

  Jim Kelly’s trip turned out to be extremely consequential but not for the reasons that we’d expected. Jim had laid out his case, including the indictment on uranium enrichment. Until that program was undone, he stressed, it wasn’t possible to move forward. The North Koreans were not prepared for the news that we’d discovered their program and at first denied its existence. But the next day, the first vice foreign minister, Kang Sok-ju, gave a presentation effectively acknowledging our claims.

  Jim contacted Colin, saying that everyone in the delegation had heard the same thing. They’d made sure that the native Korean speakers agreed that, in fact, the North Koreans had admitted to having a covert uranium enrichment program. Because his instructions were so constraining, Jim couldn’t fully explore what might have been an opening to put the program on the table. He sent a cable to Washington describing the events. It soon leaked. It’s clear to me that the hard-liners had leaked the cable to snuff out any hope of further negotiations. They succeeded because the North backpedaled furiously.

  In the absence of any movement, the United States had to respond forcefully. We briefed our allies on what we knew and made clear that we would halt further U.S. funding for the fuel shipments promised under the Agreed Framework. Good work by the State Department secured the agreement of our principal partners, South Korea, Japan, and the European Union. On November 18 the last load of fuel to be delivered as part of the Agreed Framework docked at the port of Nampo in North Korea. Three days later, the North Koreans issued a statement blaming the United States for the collapse of the Agreed Framework. The last shred of the framework for dealing with the North Korean problem had been dismantled.

  As the end of the year approached, we again returned to the question of a strategy for North Korea. This time Steve Hadley commissioned papers from within the White House staff. Mike Green wrote a paper suggesting that we had to internationalize the conflict and pursue policies principally aimed at bringing allies on board in a common approach. Samantha Ravich, from the Office of the Vice President, proposed that we explicitly announce that regime change was our goal and lay out a set of steps to get there. That was an interesting idea, but it would have had no support internationally and would have scared our already nervous allies even more. Finally, Bob Joseph proposed “tailored containment,” aimed at changing the regime’s behavior through pressure. At an NSC meeting on November 13, the President, at my urging, supported the third approach.

  Before we went down to the Situation Room, however, he told me that he had come to the conclusion that nothing would work without getting China on board. That was clearly right, but at the time, we didn’t have a way to enlist the Chinese, and the point just hung in the air. By the end of 2002 the North had blown up any chance for negotiation by announcing in a letter to the IAEA that it was restarting its reactor. The North further declared that its nuclear facilities were not subject to any agreement with the IAEA and were instead a matter between North Korea and the United States. Kim Jong-il had just thrown a big wad of food on the floor. For the time being, we made no effort to pick it up.

  The Iranian Challenge

  IRAN PRESENTED a different kind of challenge than North Korea. Pyongyang was certainly a threat to our regional interests and more directly to South Korea, but the United States also enjoyed a preponderance of force on the Korean peninsula with which to deter the North. There were certainly dangerous flashes of aggression from Pyongyang. Still, I always believed that Kim Jong-il was crazy but not suicidal. The more likely problem would be the transfer of North Korean nuclear materials and know-how to other rogue states or even terrorists, not an invasion across the 38th parallel. After all, North Korea would sell anything.

  On the other hand, Tehran was the poster child for state sponsorship of terrorism in the Middle East and made persistent attempts to shift the balance of power in the region. The regime maintained a network of terrorist groups, including the ever-dangerous Hezbollah, which had the capability to commit terrorist acts anywhere in the world. Based in Lebanon, Hezbollah had made its reach felt as far away as Latin America with attacks in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the 1990s. George Tenet had referred to the organization as terrorism’s “A Team,” contrasting it to al Qaeda, which was deadly but not as sophisticated as Hezbollah, literally translated as the “Party of God.”

  Because the Iranian regime was also Shia, many of our Sunni allies in the Middle East feared Iran’s penetration into the region. The Iranians had been known to stir up trouble among the Shia populations in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain, to name just a few countries. Iran, they believed, wanted to establish a “Shia crescent,” uniting those populations across national borders and destroying the integrity of the Sunni-governed states. The “Persian” challenge, as our Sunni friends called it, had to be counterbalanced since it could not be destroyed. Iraq historically served as this buffer, which explains why the United States had backed Saddam in the Iran-Iraq War in a conflict that Baghdad’s dictator had actually started.

  Furthermore, the United States was for the Iranians the “great Satan,” a view reciprocated by Washington since the searing events of the 444-day hostage crisis of 1979–1981. But most of the world, including Europe and Japan, did not share this political antipathy toward Iran. Unlike the isolated North Koreans, every major power
maintained embassies in Tehran, and trade between Iran and the rest of the world was robust. Iran’s two largest trading partners in 2002, Germany and Japan, were U.S. allies.

  Internationally, then, there were fewer alarmist interpretations regarding Iran’s nuclear program, and consequently a considerable distance existed between the United States and other countries on what to do about it. The policy line was set quickly and clearly in the Bush administration: any nuclear program in Iran was unacceptable. We spent considerable time and energy trying to convince Moscow to abandon the construction of the Bushehr nuclear power plant. The Russians countered that the Iranians, as signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, had a “right” to civil nuclear power. In response to our concerns, they made the plant “proliferation-resistant” by insisting that all of the nuclear fuel would be made in Moscow and shipped to Tehran to run the plant. The spent fuel would then be returned to Russia.

  In continuing to insist that there be no nuclear program in Iran, the United States pointed out the obvious: Iran was sitting on huge oil and gas reserves. Why not focus on enhancing its refining capabilities to make use of those holdings? Why instead seek nuclear power? Furthermore, the August 2002 discovery of undisclosed nuclear plants at Natanz and Arak only seemed to strengthen the U.S. case. If they were ostensibly pursuing nuclear technologies for peaceful purposes, why would they have anything to hide?

  As troubling as the Iranian program was in 2002, it seemed to be at a relatively early stage of development. It was not that Iran was completely trusted by the international community, but there was so much normal economic and political interaction between Tehran and the rest of the world that, for most of our friends, there was little urgency to intervene. We were pretty lonely in calling out the growing dangers of the Iranian nuclear threat, which did not yet occupy center stage.