The whole process had encountered a number of ups and downs, with diplomatic breakthroughs in 2005 followed by North Korean missile and nuclear tests in 2006. There was a surge of progress throughout much of 2007, followed by Pyongyang’s backsliding toward the end of the year, when the North failed to meet a year-end deadline for providing its nuclear declaration and disabling fully three of its Yongbyon nuclear facilities.
By 2008, though, the diplomacy had also produced some results. Even though Pyongyang had not completely disabled its known capability, the North had taken significant initial steps toward this goal, sealing and breaking down much of the infrastructure associated with Yongbyon. It had also readmitted weapons inspectors, including experts from the United States, who’d begun to “crawl all over” the nuclear site and verify its disablement. Rendering inoperable the North Koreans’ plutonium production capacity was a significant achievement, as we were worried that they might transfer the material to others.
We were focused at the beginning of the year on getting the North to submit its declaration. We expected Pyongyang to provide a full disclosure of all of its plutonium-related activities. Since the program’s existence was well known, the North Koreans seemed prepared to do this to a fairly acceptable level; we also had other sources of information in any case that could fill in any gaps.
But despite our successes on the plutonium side, serious concerns remained regarding our suspicions that the North Koreans had developed a second route to a nuclear weapon through uranium enrichment. It had been a problem since the earliest days of the administration, when we had received intelligence that the North had been pursuing a highly enriched uranium capability. The discovery had caused the postponement of Assistant Secretary Jim Kelly’s visit to Pyongyang in 2002. When the visit took place, the North Koreans seemed to admit that they had a program and then denied its existence. Confronted with the accusations, they responded by expelling weapons inspectors from the country in 2002 and withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty the following year. We now needed the North Koreans to acknowledge their uranium enrichment capability in their declaration so that facilities and research associated with it would be covered by the inspection regime that we’d employ as a part of the agreement. This was no small matter; it was, in fact, the crux of the issue.
Chris Hill and his North Korean counterpart, Kim Kye Gwan, worked on the declaration for months. I knew that everyone in the government was nervous about what was transpiring. Steve Hadley scheduled interagency meetings for Chris to apprise his colleagues about the course of diplomacy. Unfortunately, Chris often acted as if they were an intrusion into the considerable flexibility that I’d won for him with the President. By all accounts, he answered questions somewhat petulantly, only reinforcing concerns in the Pentagon, the Vice President’s office, and even the National Security Council staff.
There was a tendency, too, in the Washington press corps to attribute every breakthrough exclusively to Chris’s negotiating skill, which would only reinforce the misguided notion that State was somehow winning a bureaucratic battle against other agencies that opposed the course we were on. A few too many such stories appeared throughout the spring, and it was a problem for me and for Chris. We agreed after a while that he wouldn’t talk to the press about the negotiations. I’d take any questions so that I could deflect criticism of him from the right, on Capitol Hill, and within the administration. Chris also stepped back from the day-to-day negotiations with the North, handing that responsibility to an excellent Korean-speaking Foreign Service officer, Sung Kim, with Paul Haenle representing the NSC. This created something of a firewall since Paul could represent Steve and the White House directly and help keep the interagency process better informed. I can honestly say that Chris never operated outside his guidance, but the overhyping press coverage made it seem as if he was freelancing—successfully freelancing was the impression, but that didn’t earn him any slack. In any case, the personality dynamics made the already difficult issue even harder to manage.
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THE NORTH KOREANS finally presented their formal declaration of their nuclear program on June 24, 2008. A few days later, they blew up a water-cooling tower at the nuclear facility in Yongbyon. Although the demolition was covered on CNN with great fanfare, this spectacle could not make up for serious deficiencies in North Korea’s declaration report. There was a fairly comprehensive accounting of their plutonium program, but the report revealed nothing about North Korea’s suspected uranium capability. And there was an accounting of the amount of plutonium the North had produced, but the declaration did not cover the issue of how many “devices” the North might have made with the plutonium it had harvested. Nonetheless, knowing how much material they had made allowed us to estimate how many devices there might be.
By prior arrangement, the delivery of the declaration was meant to trigger the removal of restrictions on North Korea from the Trading with the Enemy Act and also the lifting of the country’s designation as a state sponsor of terrorism. The latter was subject to a forty-five-day waiting period once the President notified Congress of his intention to do so.
The inadequacy of the North Korean declaration had been evident for some time, prompting a debate within the administration about whether to go ahead and remove the North from the United States’ state sponsor of terrorism list, which singled out countries that supply a terrorist organization with training, logistics, or material or financial support. Technically, the North Koreans should have already been removed from this list much earlier; there had not been, at the time, any known terrorist incident involving Pyongyang for two decades. But the signal that removing them from the list would send was important, all the more so since North Korea valued the step as legitimating its regime in the eyes of the international community.
The Japanese were lobbying hard against lifting the designation, though. They worried, as before, that there would not be enough pressure on the North to resolve the abduction issue. We’d tried to help, and indeed, Pyongyang had agreed to some small steps, including a plan to reopen investigations into the abductions issue and answer questions about the fate of the victims.
The Vice President was dead set against removing the North Koreans from the terrorism list, saying that it would reward bad behavior since the North hadn’t lived up to its obligations in filing the declaration. At one of the several NSC meetings held on the subject, one participant said, “We have to get the North Koreans to tell the truth.” I sometimes wondered if that was a quixotic fantasy. The North Koreans say that their country is paradise and South Korea is a prison camp, I thought to myself. They aren’t acquainted with the truth. But the point was well taken; we had to find some way to get a handle on the uranium enrichment issue.
We decided to go at the problem from another angle. The North Koreans would also have to agree to a verification protocol to govern the on-site inspection of all aspects of their nuclear program. That protocol, if properly structured, would give us access to sites both declared and undeclared, meaning that we’d have the right to inspect a building or facility even if the North hadn’t put it on the declaration. We could then trigger inspections of sites that were suspected of being associated with uranium enrichment.
We were also seeking an acknowledgment of North Korea’s alleged proliferation of nuclear technology and know-how to other entities. This issue was meant to deal with a very troubling problem: strong suspicions and evidence of North Korean assistance to Syria in the building of an undeclared nuclear reactor that had been discovered the year before.
The covert facility had been destroyed in an Israeli air strike, after President Bush had refused an Israeli request that we carry out the operation ourselves. We met as a national security team on this issue for the better part of two months. The Vice President favored U.S. action, while Bob Gates and I stood against it. When Mike Hayden, the CIA director, told us that he couldn’t certify with anything other than low confidence that
the reactor was part of a nuclear weapons program, the President decided against a strike and suggested a diplomatic course to the Israeli prime minister. Ehud Olmert thanked us for our input but rejected our advice, and the Israelis then expertly did the job themselves.
As can be imagined, though, this complicated even more the question of what to do about North Korea. In April 2008 the Central Intelligence Agency released images of the Syrian reactor, elements of which were strikingly similar to some of the construction and engineering components at North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear facilities. “How can we deal with a country that lies on its declaration, is still pursuing nuclear weapons and is suspected of helping Syria build a reactor for its own program?” That was a very good and penetrating question asked by the opponents of continued diplomacy with the North. But I felt strongly that we had to go the last mile to see if we could stop Pyongyang’s further development of nuclear weapons. And I thought that if we could just get people on the ground—good, well-trained U.S. inspectors—we might really learn what was going on inside this isolated, dangerous country.
The forty-five-day waiting period on the “state sponsor of terrorism” designation came and went as we worked feverishly to get the North to improve the tenets of a proposed verification protocol before we would consider removing Pyongyang from the list. There is little doubt in my mind that the Chinese were helping put pressure on the regime this time. Of all nations, China has the most influence on North Korea. But the Chinese cannot dictate to the North, and sometimes it was wearisome to watch Beijing’s own frustration with Kim Jong-il.
I’ll never forget one such incident. At a meeting of ASEAN in Malaysia, I asked our hosts to convene a meeting of interested foreign ministers to talk about nuclear proliferation. The Six-Party Talks had stalled again, and I thought we might bring some international pressure on the Chinese and the North to move forward. My counterpart, Li Zhaoxing, had agreed to attend, but when the meeting started he was not present. We forged ahead, but there was a lot of mumbling that he’d stiffed the other participants—most especially me. About halfway through the meeting, Li appeared, visibly shaken. He said nothing. But when the session ended, he came up to me and apologized. “I’ve never been talked to that way!” he said, referring to his discussions with the North Koreans. He was quite furious and physically agitated. I later learned that he’d tried to bring the North Koreans to the meeting, only to be chewed out by the political commissar who was accompanying the hapless North Korean foreign minister. Sometimes even China couldn’t make Pyongyang budge.
Finally, in late August, the North Koreans began to push hard for a resolution to the terrorism list issue. They could count, and they knew we were several days past the forty-five days that had followed our notice to Congress. North Korea announced that it would be suspending its disablement of its nuclear facility in Yongbyon because the United States had not kept its end of the bargain. We decided that Chris should go to Pyongyang in search of a breakthrough, and he seemed to get one in early October. The parties agreed to verification measures that would give inspectors access to all declared sites related to the plutonium production program and, based on “mutual consent,” access to undeclared sites as well. As Chris noted at the time, we’d have to have consent anyway since we weren’t going to shoot our way into the facilities. The inspectors would also be able to carry out “scientific procedures” such as sampling and forensic activities—which were key to understanding what materials and chemicals were being used and thus the nature of the activities at any given site. Perhaps more important, the North Korean negotiator, Kim Kye Gwan, committed verbally to creating a separate document that would address outstanding issues—namely, North Korea’s suspected uranium enrichment program and allegations of proliferation.
The verification measures were far from perfect, and for eight days we debated whether to complete the process and remove the North from the state sponsors of terrorism list. Again the President faced contradictory advice, with the Vice President saying no and me arguing that we needed to take this one last step. The six parties would now work to put in writing what the North had committed to Chris verbally. The resulting verification protocol would have to be clear about what we were allowed to do because I wasn’t asking anyone to trust Pyongyang. But, I argued, we had no other way to get on the ground where we knew troubling activities were taking place. We’d obtained information about North Korea’s nuclear activities that had come from the approximately eighteen thousand pages of documentation that the North had handed over earlier that spring. These papers included operating records that dated back to 1986. The quid pro quo was worth a try, and anyway, removing the North from the terrorism list would have little if any effect on the sanctions we imposed on the regime. These measures had been codified in acts of Congress, executive orders, and UN Security Council resolutions that would remain intact. The United States wouldn’t make any additional concessions to the North without a satisfactory verification protocol. And if the North didn’t give us one, we would suspend the energy assistance that each of the six parties was scheduled to deliver as part of our previous agreements.
I thought I’d made a compelling argument. On the evening of October 9, I was at a State Department retreat just outside Washington, D.C. The President and I had talked numerous times about the decision he faced. At one point, he asked whether there was something else the North might accept. I asked Chris Hill the question. “They would accept a visit by you,” he answered.
I relayed the option to the President. “No! That would really legitimize him,” he responded, recalling the star-crossed trip to Pyongyang of Madeleine Albright, who had been made to endure a cultural event in which the citizens of North Korea carried out elaborate card displays.
That night, he called me several times, clearly struggling with the decision. I talked to Steve Hadley, who was also struggling, but he had decided he agreed with me on the decision. The President did too. I asked if the President wanted me to come back to Washington immediately. He did. I made my apologies to the State Department management and leadership and returned home. Knowing that the President had made the decision, I called several members of Congress. Most were fine, but some, such as Senators Jon Kyl and John Ensign as well as Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, were deeply troubled. Those were people whom I’d come to trust and respect, and it bothered me that they were so concerned.
I thought that the argument was solid for trying—one last time—to get the North Koreans to deal. That’s the way diplomacy works. But I knew that I’d asked the President to walk out on a limb and that if the North Koreans didn’t deliver he’d be subject to fierce criticism. That is, unfortunately, precisely what has come to pass.
Despite our best efforts, the North balked and would not write down the understandings we had agreed to orally. The final Six-Party Talks broke down on our watch on December 11. On December 12 we announced that we wouldn’t go forward on energy assistance absent progress on verification. We thought the Chinese and Russians had agreed, but they indicated that they would complete their share of energy assistance. South Korea, on the other hand, would not.
A month later, the North Koreans made a statement saying they wouldn’t allow nuclear inspections unless the United States’ “hostile policy and nuclear threat to the North are fundamentally terminated.” That was an old canard that Pyongyang employed when it didn’t intend to cooperate. The Six-Party Talks had come to an end.
Much later, in 2010, nuclear physicist Siegfried Hecker, a former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, would be invited to North Korea and shown an industrial-scale facility capable of producing enriched uranium. According to Hecker, the state of the facility demonstrated “without a doubt” that Pyongyang had pursued uranium enrichment for many years. We’d been right about uranium enrichment but unable to use diplomacy to confirm our suspicions or do anything about it.
The fact is there are constraints in dealing with North
Korea that limit the options available. In debates with the Vice President, I would often make that point and ask what option he was proposing. He could never come up with one that was actually feasible. Those discussions always demonstrated that there was no perfect solution to the problem.
The military option against Pyongyang was not a good one; it was fraught with unintended consequences and the near-certainty of significant damage to Seoul. Kim Jong-il maintains missile batteries whose projectiles can reach South Korea’s capital city in a very short period of time. Though august figures such as former Defense Secretary William Perry suggested we threaten to launch air strikes against the North’s ballistic missile site before their July 2006 test, President Bush and his advisors did not seriously consider military action. The Pentagon maintains military plans for war against North Korea. The day may come when a President has to use them, but everyone wants to avoid that outcome if at all possible.
A second option would have been to adopt a sanctions-only approach, trying to squeeze the regime until it either collapsed or changed its policy. The first outcome seemed unlikely. The Kim dynasty had survived for more than half a century despite isolation from the United States and the international community.
The possibility of simply squeezing the regime into submission was tempting but likely to fail. The North Koreans were already heavily sanctioned and still they had detonated a nuclear device and proliferated nuclear knowledge to Syria. There was no evidence that sanctions alone were changing their behavior or slowing their path to even more sophisticated nuclear technology.
The punitive measures that were put in place undoubtedly helped spur the North toward sporadic cooperation. Still, the imposition of sanctions in the absence of a willingness to negotiate seriously serves only to isolate the United States from its allies. Maintaining a coalition against Kim Jong-il required us to keep the onus for recalcitrance on the North. And in truth, without concerted actions from others, American unilateral penalties were unlikely to bring an end to North Korea’s ambitions. In the final analysis, Beijing was willing to go only so far in pressuring the North. While a nuclear North Korea was unwelcome, the collapse of Kim’s regime was thought to be worse given that the resulting instability could spill over into bordering Chinese territories. That concern, which heightened after Kim’s stroke in 2008, was a serious constraint.
No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington Page 84