Jo appeared that morning in a conservative dark-blue suit at the State Department to meet Secretary Albright, but changed to his marshal’s uniform, replete with row after row of campaign ribbons and decorations, for his meeting with President Clinton. In the Oval Office, he handed Clinton a letter from Kim Jong Il and then verbally stated his breathtaking objective: to invite Clinton to visit Pyongyang to iron out differences between the two governments in personal conversation with the North Korean leader. Tipped off by Albright, Clinton explained it would be impossible for him to undertake such a visit without thorough preparations and preliminary agreements. He proposed to send Albright first to accomplish these aims, with the hope he would be able to follow before he left office on January 20, only three months away.
While Jo toured the Air and Space Museum and other sights of Washington, Kang Sok Ju provided Ambassador Wendy Sherman and several other officials with advance indications of the extraordinary compromises Kim Jong Il had in mind. Without firmly committing his leader, Kang suggested that North Korea was ready to contemplate steps down a positive path along the lines proposed by Perry in Pyongyang seventeen months earlier: an end to exports of ballistic missiles, technology, and equipment on negotiable terms of compensation, which might be food or other necessities rather than cash; termination of development, testing, production, and deployment of long-range ballistic missiles; potential stationing of US military forces on the Korean peninsula on a long-term basis; and establishment of full diplomatic relations between the United States and the DPRK.
Under pressure of time to follow up, Secretary Albright flew into Pyongyang on October 23, only eleven days after Jo and Kang had left Washington. For the North, the timing of the visit was exquisite. It meant Albright would be in Pyongyang on October 25, the fiftieth anniversary of the entry of the Chinese People’s Volunteers into the Korean War. As a result, the PRC defense minister who was leading a celebratory delegation to the North to mark the anniversary would symbolically have to cool his heels at the gates of Pyongyang while Kim Jong Il entertained the American secretary of state.
Hosting Albright at a small dinner the first night of her visit, Kim Jong Il kept the conversation relaxed. When Albright raised what might have been a difficult subject, he paused for the blink of an eye and then reached for his wineglass to propose a toast, neatly sidestepping the problem. During the dinner, the subject of the Korean War Memorial in Washington, DC, came up. Albright noted that it was not an anti-DPRK memorial but was meant to honor those who sacrificed themselves in the war. Kim replied that he did not think that later generations should be prisoners of the mistakes made by an older generation—a remarkable comment about the Korean War, but one that was never followed up. After dinner Kim sprang a surprise invitation on the Americans to a mass display of choreography and chorus by one hundred thousand people in a Pyongyang sports stadium—a repeat of a spectacle previously staged to celebrate the fifty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Workers Party. With Albright sitting beside him, a potent image signaling to his people that relations with the United States might be changing, Kim pointed to the depiction on a giant screen of the Taep’o-dong launch of August 1998, which had so unnerved Japan and worried the United States. He quipped to the US visitor that this had been the first North Korean satellite launch—and that it would be the last.
Born in Czechoslovakia, the daughter of a diplomat, Madeleine Albright had spent much of her life studying communism and had been in nearly every other communist country. She found Pyongyang “not an unattractive place” given the heroic architecture, but was surprised by the lack of interest shown by the population in her entourage. Her greatest surprise was Kim Jong Il himself, with whom she had lengthy conversations. Despite his reputation as a strange and reclusive person, she found him striving to be an affable, normal leader, even though it was clear that the adulation for him was extreme and that he was in complete control.
In their initial business session, Kim volunteered that he was prepared to give up further production and deployment of his long-range missiles. He also began to define what a ban on missile sales abroad might mean, including contracts not yet fulfilled, and made it clear that North Korea would accept such items as food, clothing, and energy instead of money to compensate for the sales it would lose.
In their next session, Albright presented to Kim, who was accompanied only by Kang and an interpreter, a list of missile-related questions the US team had given to North Korean experts several hours earlier. After she commented that some of the questions were technical and might require study, Kim picked up the list and began immediately to provide answers one by one without advice or further study, in what Albright later called a “quite stunning” feat, which could be performed only by a leader with absolute authority. He agreed to ban future production and deployment of all ballistic missies with a range exceeding 500 kilometers (310 miles), although he did not specify a payload weight limit or what would be done with missiles already produced. Such a range limit would preclude the Taep’o-dong I, which had been test-launched in 1998, as well as its reported intercontinental successor, Taep’o-dong II, which was believed to be capable of reaching the US mainland and was among the principal motivations for the proposed US national missile defense plan. A 500-kilometer limit would also encompass the Nodong missiles, with a range of about 1,300 kilometers (807 miles), which had been a principal threat to Japan for several years. Under questioning by Albright, Kim accepted the need for verification of compliance with the missile agreements, but he also said that he could not accept “intrusive verification” because North Korea was neither an outlaw state nor a defendant on trial. Extensive progress had been made, but many details remained to be negotiated.
As partial compensation for the limits on his domestic missile programs, Kim proposed to Albright that other nations launch three or four North Korean scientific satellites per year into outer space, as the DPRK would no longer possess the rockets to do so itself. Such a possibility had been raised in general terms by US negotiator Robert Einhorn in the bilateral missile talks a month after the August 1998 test and also by Perry in his Pyongyang visit the following year. Kim Jong Il had first expressed interest in the idea during the visit of Russian president Vladimir Putin in July 2000, in a remark that Putin was quick to pass on to Clinton and other world leaders and quickly became the subject of public speculation.
The most important compensation, it was clear, would be the visit to North Korea of the president of the United States, which in Pyongyang’s view would end its pariah status and be tangible acceptance of its legitimacy and sovereignty for all the world to see. Even more than economic or other benefits, this had been the central objective of North Korea since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The 1993 Joint Declaration with the United States, including its “assurances against the threat and use of force” and its “mutual respect for each other’s sovereignty, and non-interference in each other’s internal affairs,” had been an important initial step. The Agreed Framework of 1994, which specifically endorsed the earlier declaration, created the first nonhostile relationship between the two countries and was instrumental in ending the nuclear crisis. William Perry’s statements of US acceptance of North Korea had been among the most important aspects of his proposals. Most recently, the US-DPRK joint communiqué issued on the conclusion of Vice Marshal Jo’s visit to Washington declared that “neither government would have hostile intent toward the other” and “reaffirmed that their relations should be based on the principles of respect for each other’s sovereignty and non-interference in each other’s internal affairs.” That language, especially the latter formulation, was largely boilerplate, but coming from the United States was especially important to Pyongyang. From Kim Jong Il’s standpoint, the presence of a US president on its soil would demonstrate not only that the words had meaning but also that the diplomatic-security landscape in Korea had undergone a profound and historic change.
Until the eve
nts of October, virtually no progress had been made in six years of talks about curbing North Korea’s missiles, perhaps not least because Washington never seriously committed itself to those talks, which were held only about once a year. Suddenly, the prospect of nearly limitless agreement had opened up at the eleventh hour of the Clinton administration, with only two weeks to go before the election of a new president and less than three months before Clinton would leave office. Although many concessions and compromises had been outlined by Kim Jong Il, most details remained to be worked out. As Albright knew from watching decades of US-Soviet arms control negotiations, the devil is in the details, especially in such matters as limitations on weapons and the verification thereof. Among the “details” to be ironed out were the terms of compensation by the United States and other nations, precisely which weapons would be covered, what would happen to missiles already produced or deployed, and the whole issue of verification.
It was clear that Clinton could neither sign nor endorse with his presence any vague or loosely worded agreement on such weighty matters; the signing of any agreement in North Korea, particularly in the final days of his presidency, would carry an additional political burden. Time was of the essence if a deal was to be struck. The Americans suggested Kim send missile negotiators to Kuala Lumpur seven days later to discuss the details, with no expectation they would be able to settle the outstanding issues. In the rush of events, Kang Sok Ju was apparently not fully consulted. When told by the Americans at a dinner that night of the plan, he threw up his hands. “I don’t have enough people for that,” he said. In Seoul Kim Dae Jung strongly endorsed the idea of a Clinton trip to Pyongyang, but many experts in Washington told Albright the time was too short and the gamble too great.
It was not to be. Instead of learning the identity of the new president a few hours after the polls closed on November 7, the disputed election dragged on for five weeks in the state of Florida. The president-elect, Governor George W. Bush, indicated to the White House that he was not in favor of further negotiations with North Korea, though he was not similarly negative on Clinton’s continuing efforts on the Mideast, where serious violence had erupted between Israelis and Palestinians. On the final weekend before the New Year of 2001, the State Department notified North Korea that it was now impossible for the outgoing US president to travel to Pyongyang. Clinton telephoned Kim Dae Jung in Seoul to break the news, and the State Department notified all the other countries that had participated in the effort to capitalize on the dramatic opening in North Korea.
North Korean diplomats in New York expressed disappointment at the news and said a great opportunity had been missed. Shortly before turning over her office to a new administration, Wendy Sherman received a New Year’s card postmarked Pyongyang from Kang Sok Ju. It was the first such missive she had ever received from North Korea, and she took it as a positive sign.
On January 20, as Bill Clinton was turning over the US presidency to George W. Bush, Kim Jong Il was ending a six-day visit to China, his second in less than a year, during which he visited the Shanghai stock market and a General Motors joint-venture plant making Buicks in China’s largest city. The bustling Shanghai Kim experienced, with its towering skyscrapers and torrid industrial pace, was a far cry from the city he had seen during his only previous visit there in 1983, near the start of China’s market-oriented reforms. Beijing’s Foreign Ministry spokesman said the North Korean leader praised what had been accomplished by policies of economic reform and opening up. At the dawn of 2001, there was widespread hope that Kim Jong Il would steer his country in the same direction.
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* The sanctions were finally lifted in June 2000 after the North-South summit meeting and after DPRK diplomats furnished their American counterparts at a bilateral meeting in Rome with a restatement of the missile-test moratorium that was used to gain the acquiescence of Senate leaders. The Italian Foreign Ministry made available the sixteenth-century Villa Madama for the talks, a gracious setting for negotiations normally held in more straitened circumstances.
* As it happened, Kim Yong Nam’s visit to New York was interrupted in Germany when, while changing planes, he was ordered by airport authorities to undergo a security search. He protested and, when that made no difference, turned around and went home. The United States quickly delivered a message of apology to the DPRK UN Mission in New York, which obviously mollified the North. The incident caused bemused satisfaction to officials in the Foreign Ministry’s American section. They had advised that Kim travel to New York via a well-worn route through Beijing on United Airlines, which was familiar with the drill of screening officials from the DPRK. However, the ministry’s International Bureau (which had the lead because Kim was going to a UN meeting) insisted it knew better and that the routing, though unusual, should go through Germany to connect with the US “flag carrier,” American Airlines.
17
THE END OF THE AGREED FRAMEWORK
WHEN THE ADMINISTRATION OF George W. Bush came to office in January 2001, it inherited a better situation than any US administration in the past fifty years in regard both to Washington’s sometimes troublesome ally in the South of Korea and to its long-term adversary in the North. By 2000 Seoul felt that the United States, even while it moved ahead in relations with Pyongyang, had wisely given the overall lead to the South—a sentiment that seemed to guarantee an increasingly harmonious partnership. There were no more issues with the Republic of Korea on human rights, and any problems about the status of US troops were on a low simmer. Above the thirty-eighth parallel, the North’s nuclear center at Yongbyon was frozen and under continuous monitoring by inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency. An initial proposal for limiting North Korea’s ballistic-missile program was on the table. North-South tensions were low, interchange between the two sides was growing, and prospects for the future looked promising. The Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization was functioning well as a multilateral organization and making progress at the construction site for the light-water reactors on North Korea’s east coast. The Kim-Albright exchange combined with the October 2000 joint communiqué had provided a plateau from which Washington and Pyongyang could negotiate new, more stable arrangements. If the Agreed Framework, now almost seven years old, needed updating and improving, the way seemed open for doing so.
As Bill Clinton left office, the one cloud on the horizon as far as Washington was concerned was hardly minor, but neither was it seen as unmanageable. The US government was fairly sure that the North was working on uranium enrichment, probably with help from A. Q. Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist whose network was clandestinely supplying nuclear know-how and material to a number of countries. Midlevel officials in the State Department were already devising a strategy to address that problem with the North once the intelligence community gave the okay to raise the issue in the diplomatic arena. That assumed US policy would stay on course, slowly improving relations with Pyongyang as North Korea addressed issues of priority concern to Washington and Seoul.
Things began to veer off track, however, as soon as the new president took office. Intense, poisonous disagreement within the administration hobbled policy discussions about Korea at every turn. Several top-level officials came to office thoroughly opposed to the Agreed Framework, determined to do away with it. Even those prepared to live with the agreement thought it failed to get at the nuclear problem decisively enough and avoided forcing the North Koreans to make a strategic choice to give up the program soon enough, leaving Pyongyang with a dangerous nuclear capability while supplying the regime with aid that prolonged its life.
This idea of forcing the North to make a “strategic choice” was pervasive in the administration and one of the few points of agreement between the warring parties in Washington. Without pressure on the North Koreans, the thinking went, they would never be forced to choose between nuclear weapons or regime collapse, and if they were not forced to choose, then they would neve
r give up their nuclear program. In a sense, pressure was the easy choice, negotiations the more difficult one. The latter required understanding Pyongyang’s perspective. The South Koreans wrestled with that challenge constantly, but it was not the sort of contemplation the Americans, who tended to think of North Korea as a “black box,” did very well or, indeed, cared to do at all. Moreover, many of the US government’s officials with the longest experience dealing with the North fled to posts overseas to escape the fetid atmosphere in Washington or left the government altogether. Whether intentional or not, beginning in 2001, a climate of intimidation descended over the policy process that closed off the possibilities for calm discussion or dispassionate consideration of options. Anyone connected with the Clinton administration was suspect by the new administration’s appointees; anyone attempting to discuss policy options toward North Korea that resembled those of the Clinton years was told in no uncertain terms that this was “not the president’s view.” The suspicions and ill feelings were reciprocated, with the result that the administration was soon, and virtually for its entire term in office, at war with itself over North Korea policy.
In October 2002, less than two years after they took office, those who thought the Agreed Framework had been a bad idea could congratulate themselves for having swept it away. Only a few more months passed before it became obvious that there was no serious plan for what to do next. Moreover, the ad hoc steps that Washington did take—over the strenuous objections of Seoul and Tokyo—ended up, in short order, precipitating exactly what the United States said it did not want to see, that is, the restart of the North’s plutonium production facilities at Yongbyon. From that point, the progress from 1994 to 2000 on limiting the nuclear program unraveled at a breathtaking pace.
The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History Page 52