The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History
Page 46
In a prearranged declaration that had already been presented informally to North Korea, China, Japan, and Russia, Clinton and Kim proposed a four-party conference of the two Koreas, the United States, and China “to initiate a process aimed at achieving a permanent peace agreement” on the Korean peninsula. In a significant difference from the stillborn initiative of the previous year, this was a joint US-ROK proposal rather than an ROK proposal backed by the United States.
Announcing the proposal in a press conference before flying on to Japan, Clinton cautioned against expecting an immediate and positive response from the North: “What is important is to put the offer out there and let it stand and be patient.” Clinton and Kim were heartened when Pyongyang did not immediately reject the proposal. Chinese president Jiang Zemin, in a letter to Kim a few days after the Cheju announcement, expressed Chinese support for the four-power talks.
There were only two problems. Pyongyang seemed confused as to why Washington would put a major new initiative on the table when the US-DPRK Agreed Framework was still finding its footing, and the North Koreans did not want Chinese participation in matters they considered to be none of Beijing’s business. At the same time, Pyongyang could see that Washington had put some weight behind the proposal—President Clinton had personally announced it—and so rejecting it out of hand was impossible.
Furthermore, the country was on the very edge of famine. The food situation in the winter of 1996 had been extremely bad, and it would only get worse in the summer months before the next harvest. In mid-May the UN World Food Program issued a special alert on North Korea, warning that “the food supply situation has deteriorated more seriously than had been anticipated.” The UN agency reported that the DPRK government had reduced rations under its public distribution program to 300 grams (10.5 ounces) of grain per person per day, about 1,000 calories. The UN minimum standard for refugees was 1,900 calories per day.
Diplomatic discussions with the United States, which had revolved around the nuclear issue and political relations in the previous three years, were increasingly dominated in the spring of 1996 by North Korea’s urgent need for food. Calling on Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Hubbard, the State Department’s senior point man on Korea following the reassignment of Robert Gallucci to other duties, North Korea’s external economic chief, Kim Jong U, offered a frank swap of ballistic missiles exports and food. Kim said the North could either sell missiles to Middle Eastern countries to obtain money and food, as it had formerly done to American disapproval, or it could accept food from the United States to forgo those sales. Another high-ranking DPRK caller on Hubbard that spring, Ri Jong Hyok, pushed hard for additional food aid, warning bluntly that “revolutions are made by hungry people.”
Meeting in Jakarta, Indonesia, on July 24, Secretary of State Christopher and his South Korean and Japanese counterparts formally agreed to supply additional food aid and ease some American economic sanctions if North Korea would participate in a joint US-ROK briefing on the four-party peace plan. The same day, the skies over Northeast Asia darkened again, and the heavens opened up with new torrential downpours, three to five times the normal abundant rainfall of that time of year. While the resultant flooding was not as serious as that of the year before, this time it struck more of the country’s principal food-producing areas. Once more the forces of nature, compounding the failure of the juche system, had dealt North Korea a painful blow.
THE SUBMARINE INCURSION
A few minutes after midnight on the morning of September 18, 1996, a taxi driver speeding along a seaside road near Kangnung, on the east coast of South Korea, noticed a group of men crouched near the highway. Suspicious, the cabbie returned to the area after dropping off his passenger and spotted a large object, which he thought at first to be a giant dolphin, in the water near the beach. On second look, it appeared to be a man-made object. Certain that it wasn’t a fishing boat, he reported it to the local police.
Within hours, ROK troops and police identified the object as a thirty-seven-yard-long North Korean submarine of the Shark class that had run aground on the rocky coast and been abandoned. Before dawn that morning, the Defense Ministry was mobilizing forty thousand troops, helicopter gunships, and sniffer dogs in a massive search for an unknown number of intruders from the North.
In midafternoon, on a mountain three miles from the landing site, an army squad reportedly came across a grisly scene: eleven bodies of the North Koreans, all crewmen unequipped for serious infiltration, all executed with bullets to the back of the head. There were no signs of a struggle; one of the dead, an officer on the sub, was armed with a pistol still in its holster. It appeared likely that, in line with standing orders, the eleven had accepted death at the hands of one of their colleagues rather than be captured.
About the same time, local police in a nearby area, acting on a tip from a villager, arrested Lee Kwang Su, a North Korean infiltrator from the sub, in a farmer’s field. Lee, who was the only occupant of the submarine to be taken alive, said the personnel of the submarine belonged to the North Korean military’s Reconnaissance Bureau, charged with the collection of tactical and strategic intelligence on US and ROK forces. The sub’s mission was to test ROK defenses and reconnoiter an ROK air base and radar facility near Kangnung.
Despite the near-hysterical reaction in Seoul, there were probably only three real infiltrators, trained and equipped for the mission. Another three were part of the escort party to get the main group ashore. The rest were crew members who were never supposed to have landed in the South. In the ROK manhunt over the next two weeks, eleven North Koreans, only a few of whom were armed, were killed. Two more, from the original highly-trained three-man infiltration squad, held out for forty-eight days before being pinned down and killed in a final firefight near the eastern end of the DMZ. The organizational discipline and fighting skills of the ROK forces had not been impressive, and the Defense Ministry was relieved to end the search and return to normal operations. The deaths of fourteen South Koreans—four civilians, eight military personnel, and two policemen—were attributed to the infiltrators, although several were actually victims of friendly fire.
South Korea, with dense vegetation close to the peninsula-spanning DMZ and fifteen hundred miles of irregular coastline dotted with offshore islands, is highly vulnerable to infiltration. North Korea has penetrated the South’s defenses on many occasions. In the 1970s, as noted in Chapter 4, Kim Il Sung had boasted that his military reconnaissance teams kept American maneuvers in the South under surveillance, and the US Command had concluded that the North could infiltrate and exfiltrate its agents or special warfare units to virtually anywhere in the ROK virtually at will. By the mid-1990s, only modest gains against these operations had been accomplished.
What made the September 1996 incursion different from those of the past was the context. For the first time, Washington found itself positioned between the two Koreas, with important interests on both sides. On the one hand, it was seeking to protect its new relationship with North Korea and especially to keep the freeze of the DPRK nuclear program won through the Agreed Framework. On the other hand, it was still committed to maintaining solidarity with its ally in the South and protecting the security of ROK territory and US troops. The ROK, which had received unqualified US backing in military disputes in the past, was disappointed and angered by the altered American posture, all the more so because policy toward the North—once a taboo subject—had become a central political issue in Seoul.
After alternating for months between taking a hard line against the North, calculated to bring about its early collapse, and backing an accommodation to bring about a “soft landing,” Kim Young Sam shifted powerfully to the hard side. He declared on September 20 that “this is an armed provocation, not a simple repeat of infiltration of agents of the past,” and began almost daily condemnations of the North, eventually declaring that any further provocation against the South—which he said was likely—would br
ing a “real possibility of war.” Announcing that his government was reconsidering its entire northern policy, Kim suspended inter-Korean economic cooperation and halted ROK activities in KEDO, which was charged with providing the light-water reactors under the 1994 Agreed Framework. In an interview with Kevin Sullivan of the Washington Post in early November, Kim said he would not proceed with the four-party peace proposal or provide aid to the DPRK until its leaders apologized for the submarine incursion.
North Korea initially issued a remarkably gauzy statement that “as far as a competent organ of the Ministry of the People’s Armed Forces knows,” the submarine encountered engine trouble and drifted south, leaving its crew “with no other choice but to get to the enemy side’s land, which might cause an armed conflict.” As the clash over the incursion deepened, however, the North’s rhetoric hardened into threats of retaliation “a hundred or a thousand fold” against the killing of its personnel. When the activities of KEDO were halted by ROK objections, Pyongyang publicly threatened to abandon the Agreed Framework and resume its nuclear program at Yongbyon.
In diplomatic meetings, North Korea notified the United States that it was ready to express regret about the submarine incident and to accept a US-ROK briefing on the proposed four-power peace talks, but it insisted on a package of economic benefits in return. A package deal including the briefing arrangement had been extensively discussed in US-DPRK talks in May and June 1996 and virtually agreed to at the end of August, during a visit to the United States by North Korean diplomat Ri Gun, deputy director of American affairs of the DPRK Foreign Ministry. Representative Bill Richardson, who had taken it on himself to become a political-level emissary to North Korea, was heading to Pyongyang on his third trip, ready to conclude the arrangements, when news of the submarine incursion arrived. His trip was canceled.
Immediately after the incursion, South Koreans were angered by an off-the-cuff comment by Secretary of State Christopher that “all parties” should avoid further provocative steps, a statement that seemed to put the United States equidistant from both the antagonists. The State Department made corrective statements, but the damage had been done. A senior ROK official telephoned Daryl Plunk, a Korea expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation, to say that the highest levels of his government found the Clinton administration’s response to the incursion “shameful” and its policies to be “appeasement” of the North.
As hard feelings festered and deepened, American civilian officials in Seoul became alarmed by the gap in thinking between themselves and their allies. In a symbol of the new mood, ROK officers were reluctant to permit a US defense attaché to inspect the North Korean submarine and then, after relenting, subjected him to a body search when leaving the sub. The US Embassy protested. In Washington analysts looked skeptically at Seoul’s reports on its findings.
More ominously, the Korean-language Joong-ang Daily News reported in mid-October that ROK forces had selected twelve strategic targets in the North for air, naval, and ground retaliation in case of further provocations. The report shocked the US Command, which had theoretical “operational control” of the ROK military in wartime but had heard nothing of these attack plans until publication of the newspaper report. Although ROK defense officials denied that the plans represented serious policy making, the Americans were unable to get what they considered satisfactory assurances that ROK forces would not launch retaliatory military action against the North without US consultation and consent. The issue was quietly taken up in numerous senior-level US-ROK discussions—military, diplomatic, and intelligence—all without clear resolution.
Adding to the American concern, in early November, was Kim Young Sam’s abrupt ouster of foreign minister Gong, amid reports that he had expressed reservations about the president’s hard line against the North. Gong’s resignation was officially attributed to health reasons, but Korean and American officials close to him believed that the precipitating factor was a dossier of remarks reportedly provided to Kim by the NSP, the ROK intelligence agency. In these remarks, believed to have been gathered through telephone taps, Gong expressed personal differences with the president’s policy in the aftermath of the submarine incursion. (Another former foreign minister told me he had been cautioned by aides when taking his job that he should assume his telephone conversations were tapped.) Gong was replaced as foreign minister by Yoo Chong Ha, Kim’s Blue House assistant for national security, who was considered much more conservative and more independent of US policies than any of his recent predecessors.
In mid-November, with these cross-currents flowing just beneath the surface of the nominally close alliance, New York Times correspondent Nicholas Kristof visited Seoul and summarized the consequences of the submarine incursion as “a surge of tension; fears of further military provocations or even war; stalling of the engagement process; a growing number of hungry North Korean peasants who can count on little international help; and a reminder that it is hard to find a place more dangerous and unpredictable than the Korean peninsula.” ROK officials did not disagree with that analysis, but they were infuriated by Kristof s further observation that due to a newly created rift between the two allies, “some U.S. officials seem to feel that their biggest headache on the peninsula is the government in the South, not the North.” As I learned from conversations in Washington and Seoul, Kristof was on the mark.
North-South relations and US-ROK relations were still tense when President Clinton met President Kim Young Sam on the occasion of the summit of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Manila on November 24. As a result of negotiations before the meeting, the two sides agreed on a three-paragraph statement that avoided the word apology, which Kim Young Sam had been demanding, but that called on the North “to take acceptable steps” to resolve the submarine incident, reduce tension, and avoid provocations in the future. Three days after the meeting, however, in the face of criticism that he had given in to Clinton, Kim reverted to his demand for a full-scale apology.
The most important exchange of the meeting took place in a private conversation between Clinton and Kim in a corner away from most of their aides. Clinton bluntly sought to obtain an ironclad commitment that South Korean forces would not initiate military action against the North without American consent. A senior ROK official who participated in the summit told me he believed Clinton had been reassured by Kim’s remarks, but an American official said Kim’s reaction had still left room for doubt.
Three months later, after Clinton began a new presidential term with a new foreign-policy team, Kim moved preemptively to resolve the issue. During his first meeting with Madeleine Albright in late February, Kim began by volunteering that the new secretary of state could be assured that no South Korean military action would be undertaken without full coordination with the United States. Albright crossed it off her list of issues to discuss. General John Tilelli, the US military commander in South Korea, said later he was completely satisfied there would be no unilateral military action on the part of ROK forces. Nevertheless, the top-level exchanges over the issue demonstrated how strained and mistrustful US relations with South Korea had become.
In the wake of the Manila meeting of Clinton and Kim, the United States renewed its efforts to obtain a settlement of the submarine issue. Mark Minton, the State Department country director for Korea, met North Korea’s director general of American affairs, Lee Hyong Chol, in New York on nine separate days in December to hammer out a multifaceted accord, including US insistence that the North issue an authoritative-level statement of regret and transmit it not once but twice via the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).
On December 29, North Korea issued a statement of “deep regret” for the submarine incursion and a pledge that “such an incident will not recur.” Pyongyang also agreed to attend the long-offered joint US-ROK briefing on the four-power peace talks. As part of a package accord, Washington agreed to resume the supply of heavy fuel oil, and Seoul removed its objections to
continued work on the light-water nuclear reactors promised under the 1994 Agreed Framework. North Korea, in turn, permitted work to resume on preserving the fuel rods that had been unloaded from the Yongbyon reactor. In a last-minute accord arranged by the United States, South Korea agreed to return the remains of the North Korean personnel killed in the submarine incursion. When the transfer took place at Panmunjom, DPRK officials were shocked to find that they received only cremated ashes. US officers believed the bodies were too riddled with bullets to be presentable.
Diplomatic delegations from the United States and the two Koreas met in New York in March 1997 for the “joint briefing” on the four-party proposal, the first such meeting about peace on the peninsula ever held among these three parties. That was followed by several preparatory meetings at Columbia University. North Korean officials—who already knew the answer—asked the Americans why the Chinese were there. Once the preparatory work was out of the way, higher-level diplomats from the four nations met in Geneva in December 1997 to officially begin the four-party peace talks. Altogether, there were six four-party meetings held in Geneva, the last in August 1999. Procedurally awkward, and held at a time when inter-Korean relations were at their nadir, when the North Koreans could barely focus on long-term issues because of the pressing problem of the famine, and when the Chinese were still very tentative in their participation in a multiparty setting that included the two Koreas, the talks accomplished nothing. The Swiss were gracious hosts throughout, but in the end one participant observed that the croissants seemed to get smaller as the meetings bogged down.