by Dick Cheney
Moreover, as we entered our final year in office, we still had much work to do in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In Afghanistan there was a continued need for diplomatic heavy lifting as we supported Hamid Karzai’s effort to extend the central government’s authority throughout the country and continued to fight the Taliban. We also had much to do in Pakistan, where President Musharraf had provided key support, but had an increasingly weak hold on power over a government whose loyalties were at times divided.
In Iraq, there was good news. The surge of troops and the shift to a counterinsurgency strategy were showing signs of success. Security was returning to large parts of the country, including Baghdad. But as General Petraeus noted, the gains were “fragile and reversible.” We needed to continue the fight and follow through on our efforts to aid the Iraqi people in solidifying their political progress. Our relationship with the Iraqis was evolving, from one where we had been in complete control of the country to one where key treaties would govern the relations between our two sovereign nations. We were working on a status of forces agreement, or SOFA, that would govern our military relations, as well as a strategic framework agreement that would establish our diplomatic, security, and economic relations. These agreements, which would establish American relations with Iraq for many years to come, deserved the highest levels of diplomatic attention. They would highlight one of the most significant accomplishments of George Bush’s presidency—the liberation of Iraq and the establishment of a true democracy in the Arab world.
ON JANUARY 4, 2008, the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, came into the Oval Office for our regular morning intelligence briefing. He surprised us by bringing three analysts with him, experts on North Korea. A National Security Council meeting on that subject was scheduled for 8:35, and as I later understood, there had been some skirmishing about how much intelligence would be provided in the memo that went to NSC members ahead of time. The State Department had been trying to keep it to a minimum, so McConnell apparently decided to bring the latest thinking on the subject of North Korea directly to the president. President Bush grilled the analysts, homing in on a central question: Were the North Koreans likely to give up their nuclear weapons as a result of the negotiations going on through the six-party talks? The experts were not optimistic.
We walked from the Oval Office to the newly renovated Situation Room, where the National Security Council meeting was being held. The high-tech meeting room was packed. Every seat at the table and against the outer wall was filled. The president ignored the agenda and dove right in. Directing his questions to Chris Hill, who was seated against the wall behind Secretary Rice, the president asked, “What is the status of the talks? Will they lead to the North Koreans giving up their weapons?” Rice said, “I got this,” and stepped in to respond. She emphasized the importance of getting the North Koreans to dismantle the reactor at Pyongyang and of doing whatever we could to make that happen. It was a first step, she said, only a first step.
Then the president called on me. The North Koreans were not living up to their end of the bargain, I said. They had so far refused to admit to their uranium enrichment activity. They denied proliferating to the Syrians. If the declaration they provide is false, and we accept it, we won’t be accomplishing anything except helping the North Koreans cover up their nuclear activity. I said I realized the State Department was working hard on this, but I was becoming increasingly concerned that the six-party talks were now a convenient way for the North Koreans to hide what they were really doing, and we were not only complicit, but were in fact rewarding them for it by offering benefits and concessions in exchange for missed deadlines and false declarations. I reminded the group that eventually the work the North Koreans were doing in Syria would be public, and then we would have to explain why we had looked the other way.
Then I asked what was to me the bottom-line question about our negotiations. “Is it accurate to say that there will be no lifting of our designation of North Korea as a terrorist state and no removal of the Trading with the Enemy Act sanctions unless they present a comprehensive and complete declaration of their programs?” The president said, “Absolutely.” Secretary Rice concurred. I pressed further: “I assume that their failure to admit they’ve been proliferating to the Syrians would be a deal killer.” Secretary Rice agreed, although seeming reluctant. The president emphasized that was his position.
Rice had been working to convince the president that the process she and Chris Hill were working would lead to the North Koreans giving up their nuclear weapons. My view—and the view the president heard in the Oval Office that morning from the intelligence experts—was that there was nothing we could offer them by way of concessions that was worth as much to them as their nuclear weapons. They were convinced the survival of their regime depended upon the weapons. I believed that the only way diplomacy would work was if the Chinese and our other partners in the six-party talks understood we were through playing games and were deadly serious about the threat we all faced.
A few days later, Jay Lefkowitz, the State Department envoy for human rights issues in North Korea, gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute in which he said, “It is increasingly clear that North Korea will remain in its present nuclear status when the administration leaves office in one year.” North Korea, he said, “is not serious about disarming in a timely manner” and “its conduct does not appear to be that of a government that is willing to come in from the cold.” The next day the State Department issued a statement distancing itself from Lefkowitz’s remarks, saying that he was the envoy for human rights issues and not “somebody who speaks authoritatively about the six-party talks.” He sounded pretty authoritative to me.
At the end of the month, Assistant Secretary Hill gave a speech at Amherst College that made it sound as though we were on our way to ruling out a North Korean uranium program. Yes, he said, North Korea had acquired aluminum tubes “to construct centrifuges,” but “we’ve seen that these tubes are not being used for the centrifuge program”:
We’ve had American diplomats go and look at this aluminum that was used and see what they’re actually using it for. We actually had American diplomats, people like myself, carry this aluminum back in their suitcases to verify that this is the precise aluminum that the North Koreans had actually purchased for this purpose and so what has emerged is the fact that they are not using it for uranium enrichment.
Hill neglected to note that the tubes the North Koreans had turned over to us contained traces of highly enriched uranium.
In Senate testimony the next week, Hill acknowledged that the North Koreans had purchased key components for enriching uranium, but again emphasized that they had showed us examples of their using the components for nonnuclear purposes. “More work will be done on that,” he said, “so that we can clearly say at some point in the future that we can rule out that they have any on-going program for uranium enrichment.” Getting to that point would prove to be impossible, however. Months later, when the North Koreans began to deliver documents to us concerning activities at their plutonium reactor at Yongbyon, the documents themselves contained traces of highly enriched uranium.
There was a period in the spring when it looked as though we might be able to get off the path that Rice and Hill had put us on. Hill was in Geneva negotiating what would be in the North Korean declaration, and Steve brought a draft of the proposed language into the Oval Office during our morning meeting on March 14, 2008. The president said he didn’t want to see it. “I’m not going to sign anything until the vice president has signed off on it,” he said. “You go over it with Dick. When he’s happy with it, I’m happy with it.”
Steve came back to my office, and we looked at the document. “Steve,” I said, “this just isn’t going to fly.” It had the United States presenting information about North Korea’s enriching uranium and efforts to build a nuclear reactor in Syria. And it had the North Koreans saying they understood the concerns—
not admitting to enriching or proliferating, but saying they understood that the idea they might have troubled us. This was not by any stretch the full and complete declaration the North Koreans were committed to making, which was, I suspected, why Rice and Hill were calling it a “sideletter” and advising that it not be made public.
Concerned that it would damage the six-party talks, Secretary Rice was also still working to keep what we knew about the North Korean–built Syrian nuclear reactor from being made public, long after the period during which the Israelis had expressed concern. She successfully delayed an announcement for several months. Finally, at the end of April, senior intelligence officials conducted a briefing, complete with video, telling the story of al-Kibar.
By late May, Secretary Rice had decided that she ought to go to Pyongyang to meet with North Korean President Kim Jong Il. At one of our small group meetings in Steve Hadley’s office, Steve said the president had asked him to solicit the views of the group about this idea. Condi argued that if we wanted to keep the North Koreans at the table in the six-party talks, we had a choice between lifting the terrorism designation or sending her personally to Pyongyang. Steve asked if anyone had any response to this suggestion. I signaled that I did, which I’m sure was no surprise to Steve. I said this would be yet one more example of our responding to North Korea’s refusal to keep their commitments by making another preemptive concession. The North Koreans still hadn’t provided a full and complete declaration of their nuclear activities, I pointed out, and now, suddenly we would be sending the secretary of state to Pyongyang? It was a bad idea. A much better option would be to insist they keep their commitments.
Steve called on Secretary of Defense Gates, who didn’t come down one way or the other. Gates called on Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen, who was sitting slouched in his chair, listening to all this with his head in his hand. He didn’t say a word, just pointed at me, signaling that he was signing on with my view. I think a number of us were getting tired of refighting the same battles in meeting after meeting where it seemed we had to argue against yet another misguided approach from the State Department.
Steve brought the meeting to a close and said he and Condi would report the group’s views back to the president. A short while later, I was sitting in my office, when one of the president’s senior advisors came through the door, holding a copy of that week’s Weekly Standard. The cover story was titled “In the Driver’s Seat: Condoleezza Rice and the Jettisoning of the Bush Doctrine.” Pointing to the cover, the senior advisor said, “Yet another reason why Condi should not go to North Korea.”
A few days later the president and I had our weekly lunch, and as we sat out on his private patio he encouraged me to keep challenging policy that I thought was mistaken. He did not say he agreed with me, but I think he believed the debates would make for a better outcome in terms of his decision making. I hadn’t planned to stop arguing anyway. I feared we were headed for a train wreck.
ON JUNE 26, THE North Koreans provided a declaration to the Chinese that failed to describe either their uranium enrichment program or their proliferation activities. It did not even fully describe their plutonium activities. Despite this, within hours President Bush was in the Rose Garden announcing that he was lifting provisions of the Trading with the Enemy Act and notifying Congress of his intent to take North Korea off the list of state sponsors of terror.
I was disappointed, and not just because I disagreed with the president. It was his call. But the process and the decision that followed had seemed so out of keeping with the clearheaded way I’d seen him make decisions in the past. The president said we would use the next forty-five days—the notice period for Congress before the North Koreans could formally be removed from the terrorism list—to develop a “comprehensive and rigorous” protocol for verifying the North Korean declaration. As I listened to the president’s remarks I wondered how, exactly, we were going to go about verifying what we already knew to be a false declaration.
On June 27, 2008, the North Koreans called in the television cameras and blew up the cooling tower of the nuclear reactor at Yongbyon. It was 1950s technology, a device they could easily afford to give up. By that point they had produced enough plutonium for a store of weapons, and, besides, as President Obama’s director of national intelligence would later confirm, they had a robust ongoing uranium enrichment operation that could also produce material for nuclear weapons.
Two months later, when North Korea decided that we had not taken them off the terrorist list in a timely enough fashion, they announced that they had stopped dismantling the Yongbyon complex. Three weeks after that, Pyongyang announced it was restarting the reprocessing plant and began reattaching equipment that had been removed earlier in the year.
On October 9, 2008, Secretary Rice, Steve Hadley, and I met with the president in the Oval Office to discuss the verification protocol Chris Hill was negotiating. As I listened I realized that despite the president’s insistence on a “comprehensive and rigorous” verification protocol a few months earlier, there was actually no written agreement at all. There was a document the Chinese had proposed, which Rice was calling the verification agreement, but, in fact, the North Koreans had not agreed to the document. There were also some notes Chris Hill had taken of conversations he’d had with his North Korean counterpart, which we were now supposed to regard as part of a formal protocol. At an interagency meeting that week, the State Department handed out a fact sheet explaining that “agreement on verification measures has been codified in a joint document between the United States and North Korea and has been reaffirmed through extensive consultation.” In reality, there was no joint document—just Chris Hill’s notes.
Looking for a way to explain this situation, Rice said, “Mr. President, this is just the way diplomacy works sometimes. You don’t always get a written agreement.” The statement was utterly misleading, totally divorced from what the secretary was doing, which was urging the president, in the absence of an agreement, to pretend to have one—with a nuclear-armed, terrorist-sponsoring state that we knew to be lying about their nuclear program and proliferating nuclear technology to at least one other terrorist-sponsoring state.
“Look, Condi,” he said to her, “I just need more time on this. I need to think about it.” Steve Hadley asked her if she could provide a paper for the president to read as background on the proposal. Was there something he could review? “No,” she said, although she was sitting on the sofa reading from a document describing the purported agreement.
The issue of Japan came up. We had known for some time that the Japanese government was very unhappy that we might lift the terrorism designation. They were concerned in particular about Japanese citizens, many of them children, who had been abducted by the North Koreans decades earlier. I had met with some of their families during my trip to Asia in 2007, and the stories of lost children were heartbreaking. Now, the Japanese perceived we might be contemplating removing North Korea from the terrorism list without a resolution of this issue, and their diplomats had been in repeatedly to see my deputy national security advisor, Samantha Ravich, and others on my national security staff. The Japanese were also troubled by our apparent willingness to take the North Koreans at their word, to trust this rogue regime. Secretary Rice denied there was any objection from the Japanese and told the president they had simply asked for a delay of twenty-four hours so they could “handle their political situation.” This was inaccurate. Later that day I received a message from our ambassador in Japan, Tom Schieffer, which I would pass on to the president. Schieffer, who had been one of the president’s partners when he owned the Texas Rangers, had grown increasingly concerned about our North Korean policy and was now reporting that the Japanese found the “verification proposal” unacceptable as presented. Schieffer also passed along a warning from the prime minister of Japan: Given North Korea’s history of duplicity, it was essential to get any agreement with them in writing.
As the October 9, 2008, meeting was drawing to a close, Steve Hadley tried to restore some orderliness to how we were proceeding. “Condi,” he said, “there are some questions that have to be answered here before we can go ahead.” One option we discussed was sending Chris Hill back to Pyongyang to get written assurances. If this agreement was so important, and if Secretary Rice was so confident in the North Korean assurances, why not get a proper agreement? She did not want to do that. And, it turned out, she didn’t have to.
The next day, October 10, 2008, I got word that the president had agreed to allow Secretary Rice to sign the document removing North Korea from the terrorist list, which she did on October 11. It was a sad moment because it seemed to be a repudiation of the Bush Doctrine and a reversal of so much of what we had accomplished in the area of non-proliferation in the first term. The president had been right when he had denounced the failed approach of the Clinton era. Now we seemed to be embracing it.
By the end of October the North Koreans announced that “verification” would be limited only to the plutonium reactor site at Yongbyon. On November 12, they announced that inspectors could not take soil or nuclear waste samples from the site. On December 11, the North Koreans made clear they did not feel bound by any “oral agreement” Hill thought he had with them, and the negotiations came to a standstill. An article in the Washington Post the next morning contained this: “U.S. officials acknowledge now that most of the purported agreements announced two months ago were simply oral understandings between Hill and his North Korean counterparts.” It was not our finest hour.