Suddenly, a diplomatic-military crisis took on new political dimensions, as it was played out in public on live television in full view of Clinton’s friends and foes at home as well as officials around the world. To the consternation of the White House team, the press saw administration officials as bystanders while a private citizen, former president Carter, appeared in control of US policy.
After the officials filed back into the Cabinet Room, National Security Council aide Stanley Roth, a veteran of Asia policy making on Capitol Hill and at the Pentagon, suggested the course of action that was ultimately accepted: that the administration design its own detailed requirements for a freeze on the North Korean nuclear program and send them back to Pyongyang through Carter. In effect, the United States would say, “We agree and accept if you accept our version of the freeze.” As was noted in the meeting, the tactic was similar to a celebrated US ploy at the height of the 1962 US-Soviet Cuban missile crisis, when the Kennedy administration had interpreted communications from Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in its own way to fashion an acceptable settlement.
Gallucci and two other aides left the room and drafted US requirements for a North Korean freeze that was to be in effect while talks continued. In their version, North Korea would have to agree specifically not to place new fuel rods in the 5-megawatt reactor and not to reprocess the irradiated fuel rods that had been removed. By the time it ended, the marathon White House meeting had stretched on for more than five hours.
Lake then spoke to Carter in Pyongyang, where it was approaching dawn on June 17, and outlined the conditions, which went beyond what North Korea had offered and well beyond the legal restraints of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Carter objected vociferously to upping the ante, noting that these new conditions had not been mentioned before his trip and that he had not presented them to Kim Il Sung or others in Pyongyang. It seemed far from certain, perhaps even unlikely, that the North Koreans would accept them. In fact, however, perhaps because of their own urgent desire to end the dangerous confrontation, the North Koreans quickly accepted. To make certain of agreement on the details, Gallucci subsequently sent the conditions in writing to Kang through the North Korean Mission in New York, and Carter sent a parallel letter to Kim Il Sung. Both received back formal acceptance.
To celebrate the easing of the crisis, Kim Il Sung invited Carter and his party to a celebration on the Taedong River aboard the presidential yacht. This cruise produced another informative decision-making episode, this one involving Kim Il Sung’s wife, Kim Song Ae, who was rarely seen with her husband in public but who participated in the boat ride due to the presence of former first lady Rosalynn Carter. As the yacht sailed by North Korean villages and farmland, the former US president proposed that joint US-DPRK teams discover and return the remains of US servicemen killed during the Korean War as a goodwill gesture to the American people and to forestall the kind of arguments that had long held up improved US relations with postwar Vietnam. Kim was noncommittal, saying this could be discussed in future negotiations, but Carter persisted. At this point, the North Korean first lady spoke up, telling her husband she thought the joint-recovery teams a good idea. “Okay, it’s done, it’s done,” responded the Great Leader.
During the boat ride, the exhausted Carter mistakenly told Kim while CNN cameras were rolling that the American drive for economic and political sanctions at the UN Security Council had been halted due to their discussions the previous day. This action had not yet been taken. Carter’s comment, which was played on American television, seemed to suggest once more that the White House had lost control of its Korea policies. This gaffe turned out to be the most controversial facet of Carter’s trip in the US press and dominated much of the immediate commentary.
The boat ride was also the occasion for the most important breakthrough of the mission from the South Korean standpoint. Sitting across a small table in the main cabin of the yacht, Carter brought up the unresolved state of North-South relations and the possibility of a North-South summit meeting, which ROK president Kim Young Sam had asked him to propose to his North Korean counterpart. Kim Il Sung recounted for Carter his version of the various attempts at agreement between the two halves of the divided country, and he expressed his frustration that little had been accomplished. In a remarkable statement coming from him, Kim said that the fault for the lack of progress lay on both sides and that responsibility for the mistakes had to be shared. Kim said he had noted his southern counterpart’s statements, in his inaugural address the previous year, about the primacy of national kinship and his offer of a summit meeting “at any time and in any place.” He went on to say that he was ready to meet Kim Young Sam and that their meeting should be held without preconditions or extended preliminary talks. He invited Carter to pass along this message to the South Korean president.
How and why Kim Il Sung decided to proceed to a summit with the South Korean president in the last days of his life is a matter of great speculation, because he had only come that close to a meeting once before, when he had issued the invitation for Roh Tae Woo to attend his eightieth birthday observance in 1992. One theory holds that Kim sensed he did not have long to live and was seeking to arrange a smoother path for his son and successor. Another theory suggests he realized that it was necessary to improve relations with the South in order to improve fundamentally his relations with the United States. Still another theory is that the decision was a spur-of-the-moment response to Carter’s proposal. Whatever lay behind Kim Il Sung’s decision, it is clear that he never backed away from it but proceeded to plan energetically for the summit.
Shortly after Carter left North Korea through Panmunjom, he called on Kim Young Sam at the Blue House. The South Korean president was initially cool to Carter and his mission, believing that once again the fate of the peninsula had been under negotiation at a very high level without his participation. When Carter conveyed Kim Il Sung’s summit offer, however, the South Korean president became visibly excited. Within the hour, Kim Young Sam announced his acceptance of an early and unconditional summit meeting, thereby turning Carter’s mission into a personal initiative to achieve what his predecessors had tried and failed to do. In a sudden and entirely unexpected reversal of fortune, the immense tension and great danger in the Korean peninsula gave way to the greatest hope in years for a historic rapprochement between the leaders of the North and South.
Although delighted at the prospect of a summit meeting, the South Korean president privately rejected Carter’s account of his counterpart’s state of health, which Carter described as “vigorous” and “alert.” The South Korean president’s own father, whom he spoke to by telephone every morning, was just a year or two older than Kim Il Sung. From television pictures recorded by his intelligence agency, Kim Young Sam believed that his counterpart in the North wasn’t all that well. “Carter is a smart man,” Kim Young Sam told aides as the former US president left his office, “but he doesn’t know much about old people.”
Carter called it “a miracle” that his meetings with Kim Il Sung had transformed a confrontation at the brink of war into new and promising sets of US-DPRK and North-South negotiations. “I personally believe the crisis is over,” he announced after briefing officials at the White House, and within a few days it was clear that this was so. The sanctions activity and plans for extensive reinforcement of US troops were dropped. After obtaining written confirmation from Pyongyang of its acceptance of the US-devised freeze on its nuclear program, Washington announced readiness to proceed to the third round of US-DPRK negotiations, which were scheduled to begin on July 8 in Geneva.
Despite the positive results of his unorthodox initiative, Carter initially was the object of more criticism than praise. American politicians, public figures, and the press, emphasizing the contradictions between Carter’s efforts and Clinton administration policies, were critical of his intervention. The former president was startled to be privately informed, as he came back across the DMZ, that t
he White House did not want him to return home through Washington or to even make a telephone report to Clinton. Later the administration relented, and Carter paid a visit to the White House en route to Atlanta, although Clinton remained at Camp David during the meeting with his Democratic predecessor and spoke to him only by telephone.
It will be years, perhaps many years, before it will be possible to know with certainty how close the Korean peninsula came to a devastating new outbreak of war in the spring of 1994. It is instructive that those in the US and ROK governments who were closest to the decisions are among those who, in retrospect, rate the chances for hostilities to have been the highest. The United States responded to what it saw as North Korea’s nuclear challenge at the time with a combination of force and diplomacy that, although often improvised and lacking coherence, was equal to the seriousness of the issue. How effective the US response was in influencing Pyongyang’s decisions, however, is a judgment that it is still too soon to make.
Whether by blunder or design, North Korea discovered by early 1993 that its nuclear program, with its potential to destabilize Northeast Asia and affect the prospects for nuclear proliferation in other parts of the world, was its most valuable asset in transactions with the outside world, especially after the loss of its Soviet ally and the devaluing of its relations with China. Pyongyang played its card brilliantly, forcing one of the world’s richest and most powerful nations to undertake direct negotiations and to make concessions to one of the world’s least-successful nations. The nuclear threat proved, up to a point, to be Pyongyang’s great equalizer.
In the spring of 1994, however, the growing power of the forces arrayed against it strongly suggested that the situation was getting out of hand, and not necessarily to North Korea’s advantage. By the time Carter arrived, Kim Il Sung was seeking a way to end the crisis without losing face or surrendering his bargaining card, and the former president provided the means. By cooperating with Carter, accepting a US-designed nuclear freeze, and agreeing to a North-South summit meeting, the Great Leader defused the explosive confrontation while leaving the future open for further negotiations, which he planned to direct in the months to come.
Justifying his action on the need for national unity to confront the North in talks, South Korean president Park Chung Hee declares martial law in October 1972 to crush all domestic opposition. PHOTO BY KIM IN KON/JOONG-ANG PHOTO
Presidents Park Chung Hee and Jimmy Carter review troops during Carter’s 1979 visit to Seoul. While cordial in public, the two presidents quarreled bitterly in private over the US troop withdrawal policy. JIMMY CARTER LIBRARY
Citizens of Kwangju parade through the streets in a popular uprising in May 1980 after brutal ROK special forces units temporarily withdraw. Many Koreans hold the United States partly to blame. PHOTO BY LEE CHANG SUNG /JOONG-ANG PHOTO
President Ronald Reagan, Vice President George Bush, and their wives welcome President Chun Doo Hwan and his wife to the White House in 1981, despite previous US opposition to Chun’s assumption of power by a “coup in all but name.” RONALD REAGAN LIBRARY
President Kim Il Sung (center) meets Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko (on Kim’s right) and other leaders in his 1984 visit to Moscow. Politiburo member Mikhail Gorbachev, later to be the Soviet leader, is third from right.
Kim is on outwardly cordial terms with Gorbachev in his 1986 visit to Moscow. Privately, however, they distrust each other.
In the mid-1980s thaw, two brothers of a divided family say goodbye after an emotional reunion in Seoul. PHOTO BY KIM JOO MAN /JOONG-ANG PHOTO
Bold protesters battle riot police in 1987 demonstrations demanding direct presidential elections in the South. Faced with widespread protests, the government gave in. PHOTO BY KIM HYUNG SOO /JOONG-ANG PHOTO
Chinese Foreign Minister Qian Qichen and party (foreground) are welcomed in 1991 to Pyongyang by DPRK Foreign Minister Kim Young Nam. Only eight commercial flights a week entered the country of 21 million people. PHOTO BY AUTHOR
Fourth graders in a sword drill in Pyongyang display childhood vigor and regimentation in 1991. In the background, the Pyongyang skyline and the Arch of Triumph, larger than the one in Paris, a tribute to Kim Il Sung. PHOTO BY AUTHOR
The United States feared that North Korea’s indigenous 5-megawatt reactor, photographed surreptitiously by a Western visitor, would be the first element of a massive nuclear weapons program.
President Clinton, alarmed by the North Korean nuclear program and the confrontation of armies, visits the DMZ in 1993 and calls it “the scariest place on earth.” AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Former president Carter meets President Kim Il Sung in June 1994 to head off a military crisis over nuclear issues on the peninsula. THE CARTER CENTER
As Carter appears on live CNN television from Pyongyang at the height of White House policymaking on Korea, Vice President Gore and other top US officials are reduced to being amused but powerless onlookers. THE WHITE HOUSE
Kim Jong Il, who inherited power after his father’s death, waves to his people but remains mysteriously silent on public occasions.
Secretary of State Albright meets with Kim Jong Il’s envoy, DPRK National Defense Commission First Vice Chairman Jo Myong Rok in Washington, October 2000. PHOTO BY MANNY CENETA, AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi meets with Kim Jong Il during his second visit to Pyongyang in May 2004. AFP/GETTY IMAGES
President Roh Moo-hyun and Kim Jong Il converse at the October 2007 summit. The results of the summit were overturned only a few months later when a new ROK president took office. BLUE HOUSE PRESS CORPS
WPK party secretaries Kim Ki Nam and Kim Yong Gon pay their respects in Seoul in August 2009 during the funeral of former ROK president Kim Dae Jung. The two envoys were sent by Kim Jong Il to explore the possibility of resuming high-level inter-Korean dialogue. AFP/GETTY IMAGES
A few of the over 50,000 North Korean workers at a South Korean factory in the Kaesong Industrial Zone. BLUE HOUSE PRESS CORPS
President Park Geun-hye, daughter of Park Choong Hee and South Korea’s first woman president, waves to the people at her February 2013 inauguration. HANKOOK ILBO PHOTO
Members of the North Korean military band resting in the heat in Pyongyang before the sixty-fifth anniversary of the end of the Korean War. PHOTO BY ED JONES, AFP/GETTY IMAGES
14
DEATH AND ACCORD
ON THE MORNING OF July 6, 1994, less than three weeks after he said good-bye to Jimmy Carter, Kim Il Sung sat behind the desk in his office and instructed senior officials on the economic goals for the year ahead. From all outward signs, the eighty-two-year-old Great Leader was in good form, wearing a light-blue Western-style suit and wagging his finger vigorously at two dozen officials arrayed before him.
“Agriculture first. Light industry first. Foreign trade first,” declared Kim, repeating the priorities he had announced in his New Year’s address after conceding that the economy was in trouble. In a rich, husky rumble, which had been the voice of command in North Korea for nearly a half century, he set forth specific targets for the year: 850,000 tons of fertilizer, 12 million tons of cement, completion of one hundred ships, and special priorities for railways and metal industries. In remarks that would take on important meaning later, Kim gave top priority to the urgent need for more electric power. Saying that the much-discussed light-water nuclear reactors would take too long to ease the shortage of energy, he laid down an immediate requirement for additional power plants burning heavy fuel oil (HFO).
The meeting with the economic aides was among the last activities of an aged head of state who had reengaged dramatically in the affairs of his country, as if somehow he sensed that his time was short. In the month of June, Kim had taken part in seventeen events and activities, including on-the-spot inspections at two collective farms and meetings with a variety of visitors from overseas, far more than in previous months.
Following the meeting with Carter, Kim’s preoccup
ation was to prepare for the unprecedented summit meeting with his South Korean counterpart, Kim Young Sam, which had emerged from the talks with the former US president and was scheduled to begin in Pyongyang on July 25. After decades of haggling and disagreeing about such a meeting, the North and South this time had smoothly agreed on the overall plan and many of the details. Kim Il Sung personally intervened to facilitate agreement on some of the planning issues.
In Seoul Kim Young Sam was spending days meeting with his ministers, staff, and experts on North Korea in preparation for the momentous conference. The two sides had agreed that the South Korean president would lead a hundred-member delegation to Pyongyang, accompanied by an eighty-member press corps equipped for live television broadcasts to the public back home. The actual meetings, which were to take place over two or three days, would be one-on-one discussions, with only two or three aides and a note taker accompanying each president.
On the crucial subject of national reunification, Kim Young Sam was preparing to contest his counterpart’s confederation plan calling for one country with two systems, which South Koreans found biased and unworkable, and to propose instead gradual steps to reconciliation such as the exchange of visits by separated families, exchange of correspondence, and mutual access to television and radio programs of the other side. Kim believed it would take more than one meeting to iron out the historic trouble between the two Korean governments; he therefore planned to propose that this be the first of a series of summits. To ease the way, he was preparing to surprise North Korea by offering to supply 500,000 tons of rice to help feed its people, an amount more than double the 100,000 to 200,000 tons North Korea had been unofficially requesting through ROK businessmen.
The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History Page 40