The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History

by Oberdorfer, Don

  The visit to Pyongyang almost ended in disaster. Moments after the small US Air Force jet carrying Kartman and five other delegation members took off from Sunan International Airport in Pyongyang, the plane’s pressurization gauge stuck. Pressure in the cabin quickly grew to excruciating levels and kept climbing. Several passengers, including a Marine Corps general, writhed in pain as the pilot frantically tried to fix the problem. After he succeeded, the pilot calmly explained to the passengers that he had decided not to deal with the emergency by returning to Pyongyang, which he thought they probably didn’t want.

  The underground nuclear weapons issue was the creation of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, a center of extreme skepticism, if not hostility, toward US rapprochement with Pyongyang. American spy satellites had long been monitoring a variety of North Korean military excavations, which were commonplace in a country under continual fear of air attack. In the case of the dig at Kumchang-ri, into a hard-rock mountain in a heavily militarized area northwest of Pyongyang near the Chinese border, excavation had begun a decade earlier, but had only recently attracted serious attention. Calculating the size of the hole from the mounds of soil and rock being extracted and observing a nearby bridge and dam, the DIA proceeded to produce elaborate theories and assumptions, even creating small-scale models of nuclear reactors and plutonium-reprocessing facilities, which the agency believed could be under construction in the growing cavern beneath the surface of the earth.

  Some other US intelligence officials and competing intelligence agencies were dubious, but the DIA was insistent. The agency was permitted to begin briefings for US allies and congressional committees in June 1998. With the acquiescence of the Central Intelligence Agency, an official intelligence “finding” was promulgated in mid-July that the Kumchang-ri cavern was “probably” a suspect nuclear facility, at which an active nuclear weapons program could be planned or under way. One month later, New York Times correspondent David Sanger was able to confirm rumors of the developments by interviewing former officials at a think-tank meeting outside Washington, DC, and obtaining confirmation of the basic facts from the Clinton administration. Sanger’s August 17 story put the issue on the record in highly visible fashion, making it the subject of political and public debate, just as North Korea was preparing its rocket launch.

  After five rounds and more than six months of negotiations between US and DPRK diplomats, the two sides produced an agreement that an American team could make multiple “visits” to Kumchang-ri. The final price was six hundred thousand tons of food, most of it to be supplied through the United Nations, plus a new potato-production program. Critics howled that the United States had used food to “buy” the agreement. Most observers seemed not to realize that the deal had been crafted in a way to let the North Korean negotiator claim a larger victory than he got. Washington had already decided on a large contribution to the UN food appeal for the year, and that amount was folded into the negotiations. The US negotiator was given an additional amount of US food to use as necessary. To close the remaining gap, the American negotiator assigned an arbitrary (and sufficiently large) production value to the potato project to bring the entire amount close to what the North Koreans had said was their bottom line. In any case, the key was not the food, but that the United States had established the precedent of almost unrestricted multiple visits by well-equipped technical experts to a secret North Korean site.

  The “visit” by fourteen Americans took place over three days in late-May 1999. The inspectors found six miles of crisscrossing tunnels laid out in a grid pattern, plus one chamber near one of the entrances. Neither the tunnels nor the chamber was suitable to do what US intelligence had suggested. North Korean officials who accompanied the team would not describe the purpose of the big dig except to say it was a “sensitive military facility.” Following the on-site inspection, the State Department on June 25 announced that the Kumchang-ri excavation did not, after all, contain a nuclear reactor or reprocessing plant, either completed or under construction, and it had not been designed to do so. No one apologized or was penalized for the intelligence fiasco that had endangered US policy in Korea for most of a year.

  TOWARD AN AID-BASED STATE

  While the eyes of official Washington were riveted on North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, developments of fundamental importance were gaining momentum in Pyongyang. From the vantage point of hindsight, senior officials in both the United States and South Korea identified the final months of 1998 as the time when important shifts began to gather force in the regime north of the thirty-eighth parallel.

  The Supreme People’s Assembly, in theory the highest legislative authority in the country, met on September 5 for the first time since the death of Kim Il Sung four years earlier. As expected, it named his son and heir, Kim Jong Il, as the governmental leader of the country, although not as president—that post was reserved for the dead leader in perpetuity—but as head of the National Defense Commission, which was declared to be “the highest post of the state.” The meeting enacted two other changes that proved to be of major significance. It amended the constitution to introduce some elements of a Chinese-style socialist market economy, and it brought into office a group of the younger, more pragmatic bureaucrats. The government’s cabinet, which was given new powers, was henceforth to be composed of thirty-four officials, of whom twenty-three were new faces, replacing elderly figureheads. There was no doubt that these decisions bore the personal imprimatur of Kim Jong Il.

  The greatest questions, though, arose from Kim’s decision to rule the country from a military post and the increasing prominence of military leaders in the assembly, which suggested to outsiders a further militarization of the country’s policies. Although Kim Jong Il, unlike his father, had no military background, since his father’s death he had spent a great deal of time establishing and improving close relations with the armed forces, the only group in the country capable of challenging him. Large numbers of officers had been promoted at his direction. The overwhelming majority of Kim’s publicly reported activities in his first five years of supreme power were visits to military units or had military-related connections. An American visitor to Pyongyang in 1997 noticed what seemed to be some of the extraordinary ways in which Kim was garnering military support. General officers, of whom there were now many, were being driven around the capital by uniformed drivers in new Mercedes and BMW limousines. Despite the famine in the countryside, a special floor of the Koryo Hotel, the capital’s best, had been set aside for the lavish wining and dining of senior military officers. Outside the capital, Russia-style dachas, or recreational residences, were springing up for the use of military leaders. As it turned out, Kim Jong Il’s new post and his policies appear to have cemented his grip on the military, setting the stage for greater diplomatic maneuvers.

  For South Korea and most of the West, the first crack in the depiction of Kim Jong Il as a withdrawn, eccentric, and threatening ogre came in October 1998, a month after the Supreme People’s Assembly meeting, when he met in Pyongyang with Chung Ju Yung, the eighty-two-year-old founder and honorary chairman of the South’s giant Hyundai group. In his first meeting with an outsider since his formal elevation as head of government, Kim was described by his guest as polite, courteous, and deferential to an older man. Photographs of Kim welcoming South Korea’s most illustrious industrialist, and of the two holding hands for the camera, were splashed on the front pages of Seoul’s newspapers. Of more lasting significance were business deals that were sealed or seriously discussed during the Hyundai chairman’s visit.

  Chung Ju Yung, born in 1915, the son of a poor rice farmer in a village just north of the current DMZ, had long been determined to do what he could to improve the lives of the people of his original homeland. In January 1989, he had been the first prominent South Korean industrialist to be welcomed with honors in Pyongyang. In the early 1990s, his attempts to return were blocked for political reasons by the government of P
resident Kim Young Sam. By 1998 Kim Dae Jung’s desire to engage the North and his policy of separating business from politics created an opening for a series of imaginative initiatives by Chung. In June he undertook high-profile “cattle diplomacy” by transporting in big Hyundai trucks 500 head of cattle from his farm through the DMZ as a gift to North Korea and by bringing in 501 more in October, plus twenty Hyundai automobiles, including several luxury models suitable for Kim Jong Il.

  During the October trip, North Korea granted Hyundai the right to bring tourists from South Korea to the famed Diamond Mountain (Mount Kumgang), just north of the DMZ, for payments totaling $942 million over six years. The tours in Hyundai-chartered ships began the following month, when the South Korean firm also began paying $25 million a month into a North Korean account at the Bank of China in Macao. The deal proved to be instrumental in opening the door to more North-South economic engagement, but by June 2000 Hyundai had sustained losses of $206 million on the Diamond Mountain tours, which it could ill afford in a time of economic downturn. In early 2001, it was forced to appeal for an ROK government bailout.

  The supply of so much cash to North Korea without restriction proved to be controversial in South Korea and among Washington policy makers. According to Lim Dong Won, Hyundai’s efforts to push ahead with big deals at a politically sensitive moment in 2000 angered President Kim Dae Jung. Nevertheless, as a general proposition, Kim’s strategists believed the payments were crucial in demonstrating that the South would keep its economic promises toward the North consistently and reliably. “North Korea was suspicious whether the government would allow Hyundai to pay cash,” particularly in periods of tension between the two governments, a senior official told me. When it did so month after month, he said, “they began to trust us.” Looking toward more important things to come, he added, the Hyundai deal was “a bite to catch a fish.”

  Shorn of trade and aid from its original Soviet Union and East European allies, uncertain of China’s stopgap assistance, barred from most commercial loans due to the defaults on its debts in the 1970s, and excluded from international lending agencies due to its closed economic and political systems and the opposition of the United States and other key sponsors, beginning in the 1990s, North Korea attempted to turn virtually all of its diplomacy to extracting assistance, if not cold, hard cash. Pyongyang may well have figured that if Moscow and many Eastern European countries could sell their souls for payoffs from the ROK in the 1980s, it could do so, too, and strike a better bargain. Requests from Pyongyang for payments from South Korea in food, fertilizer, and currency became a constant. In addition, owing to the reports of extreme famine in outlying areas, the international community began supplying large amounts of humanitarian assistance, principally food and medicine, to North Korea in the mid-1990s. Attempts by the North to convince the international community that it would prefer capacity-building assistance instead of outright aid were unsuccessful. The result was that the North’s image was transformed into that of an international beggar, always with its hand out or, at worst, prepared to extort whatever it could.

  The significance of this change has been great in political as well as economic terms, internally as well as externally. Although the regime continued to express fealty to Kim Il Sung’s theory of juche, or self-reliance, North Korea by the end of the 1990s had become dependent on others for much of its sustenance. Unlike the assistance from communist countries during the Cold War, most of this flow was not from ideological allies or sponsors, but from those who were not committed to survival of the regime. To keep money flowing and improve his standing abroad, Kim Jong Il was required to take greater account of the world outside than his father had done—or than anyone expected.

  PERRY TO THE RESCUE

  Having achieved a significant accomplishment with the Agreed Framework in October 1994, the Clinton administration was unable to sustain the level of attention and commitment necessary to keep the process on track. In part that was due to the results of the congressional elections weeks after the Agreed Framework was signed, but it was also due to the all too normal inability of the US government—whatever the political party in power—to devote as much effort to implementing as it does to negotiating agreements. The problem came to a head in the summer of 1998. At that moment of maximum peril to the administration’s North Korea policy, it was widely agreed in the US Congress, the executive branch, and among numerous foreign policy professionals that the best chance for preservation was a high-level review and revision headed by a respected outsider. Nearly everyone’s number-one choice to undertake this job was William J. Perry, the seventy-one-year-old former secretary of defense, who had led the nation’s military establishment during the 1994 nuclear crisis. Perry was a figure of strength, maturity, and experience. More than almost anyone else, he had looked into the abyss of horrific bloodshed and destruction that had been threatened. Unknown to most outsiders, he had been seared by the experience. Having returned to the comfortable life of a Stanford University professor and board member of high-tech companies, he did not welcome the call from President Clinton asking him to become “North Korea policy coordinator” on an urgent basis. Perry saw it as “a difficult job, with a low probability of success . . . but I also remembered the 1994 crisis, which I thought then and still do was the most dangerous crisis we faced in this period. And I saw us moving toward another crisis as bad as that one.”

  Perry recruited Harvard University professor Ashton Carter, who had been one of his assistants in the Pentagon, and assembled a small team of US government officials headed by Ambassador Wendy Sherman, counselor of the State Department and a close confidant of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Perry concluded early that it was essential to present North Korea with an unshakably close alliance of the United States, South Korea, and Japan, rather than risk the possibility that Pyongyang would play one nation off against another as it had done with the Soviet Union and China during most of the Cold War. To cement the alliance, Perry created a three-way Trilateral Coordination and Oversight Group (TCOG) of the United States, the ROK, and Japan to consider North Korean issues. Second, he concluded that US policy could not be at odds with that of the South Korean president, who had made engagement with the North the major thrust of his newly installed administration.

  The essence of Perry’s plan was to offer North Korea’s leaders a proposal with two alternative tracks. Track one was to end their long-range missile programs and reconfirm the stand-down of their nuclear weapons program, in return for full diplomatic relations with the United States, a peace treaty ending the Korean War, and improved relations with South Korea and Japan. Track two was to continue down the road of missile tests and nuclear uncertainty, in which case the United States and its allies would take actions to enhance their own security and containment of the North, increasing the likelihood of confrontations.

  It was not simple for Perry to persuade the US administration to accept both the positive and the negative elements of his plan. The positive road would accord a greater degree of legitimacy and acceptance to the North Korean regime than had been the case before. Perry argued that even though North Korea was undergoing extreme economic hardships, it was not likely to collapse, and “therefore we must deal with the DPRK regime as it is, not as we might wish it to be.” In successive cabinet-level meetings at the White House, Perry argued convincingly that the status quo was unsustainable and spoke in graphic detail from his 1994 experience of the awesome dangers of the downward track. Madeleine Albright, normally a strong opponent of antidemocratic regimes, was persuaded by Perry’s views and a private briefing by General John Tilelli, the US military commander in South Korea, that the downward road was exceedingly dangerous and thus a serious effort to put North Korea on the upper path was essential. Albright, and she believes Clinton as well, was deeply affected by the views of Kim Dae Jung, in whom they had great trust and confidence.

  It was clear to Perry from the beginning that he would have
to travel to Pyongyang to learn which path the North would choose, if he could get an answer at all. He and his party flew into Pyongyang on May 25, 1999—right after the Kumchang-ri inspection ended—aboard a US Air Force special-mission plane, aircraft that were becoming a common sight at the North Korean airport as more official US delegations showed up. Before embarking, Perry and his team had spent an entire day at Stanford University going over every word of a carefully prepared seventeen-page script, and over the Korean translation, to be used as the crucial presentation. The idea of the script was to layer the message Perry would deliver, giving Kim Jong Il—who would be following the discussions via frequent reports from his aides—a chance every step of the way to absorb the US presentation.