In June Blue House national security adviser Yim Sung Joon visited Washington to take soundings on the administration’s thinking. He returned to Seoul with discouraging news that the hard-liners were in the saddle, but apparently with no inkling about the intelligence assessment under way on the issue of North Korea’s highly enriched uranium (HEU) program. Ambassador Jack Pritchard, who had been one of those receiving the briefing on the DPRK’s enrichment efforts, proposed to the North Koreans that a visit by a high-level US envoy be scheduled for July 10—a date that probably suited Pyongyang well enough. Earlier might have been better from Kim Jong Il’s standpoint, as it would have been provided a useful drumroll to his plans to unveil new economic measures on July 1. But July 10 was still tolerably close.
Even with what it saw as accumulating and nearly overwhelming evidence that decisions in Washington were moving in the wrong direction, Pyongyang seemed determined to resume talks with the United States. For its part, Washington did not understand, nor would it have cared even if it had noticed, that Kim Jong Il was in the final stages of a major diplomatic effort to create the peaceful security environment he thought was required for his economic initiative to succeed. That meant securing ties with his great-power neighbors Russia and China, improving relations with the European Community, breaking the logjam with Japan, moving ahead on the inter-Korean front, and, above all else, getting relations with the United States back on track. If there were new possibilities for US diplomacy created by Kim’s economic plans, Washington did not grasp them.
On June 29, barely forty-eight hours before Kim’s new economic policies were to be rolled out, the waters of the West Sea were again the scene of a clash between the two Korean navies. Two North Korean navy ships crossed the Northern Limit Line and opened fire on several smaller South Korean patrol boats, killing and wounding several sailors and sinking an ROK speedboat. In an unprecedentedly quick move, Pyongyang sent a message via the inter-Korean hot line to Seoul, expressing regret over the incident and informing the South that “lower ranks” were responsible for the “unintended clash.” Given that Kim Jong Il’s economic measures were set to go into effect only two days later, it is hard to believe that the naval incident had Kim’s blessing ahead of time. Nevertheless, the clash was a symptom of a festering problem in the West Sea, one that would grow worse and more deadly over time. Eventually, there would be an escalating series of naval incidents accompanied by a military buildup by both sides in the area near the disputed sea border. The situation in the waters off the west coast would become as dangerous as anything that existed along the well-marked and formally accepted military demarcation line on land.
The naval clash gave Washington a perfect excuse to postpone the planned July 10 meeting in Pyongyang. The real reason for the postponement was the new intelligence assessment that suggested the need for a reinterpretation of the North’s enrichment program. The analysis was not based on any direct knowledge of how far the program had actually developed; rather, it was a synthesis of information about material and machinery the North had procured—or sought to procure—over the past several years. The procurement effort suggested to analysts a major effort to move beyond small-scale experimentation and launch a production-scale program, though as the CIA was at pains to make clear, it was impossible to say if all the pieces had already been assembled and were actually operating.
The new assessment, which sent shockwaves through Washington, left the hard-liners feeling vindicated and exuberant. Bolton called the intelligence community analysis “the hammer I had been looking for to shatter the Agreed Framework.” He says in his memoirs that he told representatives of the intelligence community that he intended to use their analysis “to go straight for the Agreed Framework’s jugular.” Even those in favor of negotiations instantly concluded that the North Koreans had been caught “cheating” on the Agreed Framework.
To the Americans, the idea that the North had been “cheating” was almost as important, maybe even more so, than the possibility that the DPRK uranium enrichment program had shifted into high gear. The North’s conduct, real and supposed, was taken collectively as something akin to a moral affront. To the Americans, “cheating” meant that the North Koreans had to be punished. It meant that a US delegation, when it finally got to Pyongyang, would not negotiate, would not host a dinner, and would not engage in any of the normal practices of diplomacy that might begin the process of dealing with the problem. The US delegation would, in effect, give the North Koreans an ultimatum—although no one would have used that word—and then leave.
This tactic suited the hard-liners. Neither the vice president nor Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld believed that negotiations with the North Koreans would ever accomplish anything significant anyway. They were willing to let a senior official go to Pyongyang, but only on a leash so short that it would make a North Korean diplomat look like a free spirit.* The leash on the American negotiator stayed attached well into the multilateral talks that eventually began in 2003.
KIM JONG IL’S PROGRESS
Unaware of the storm in Washington over enrichment, Kim Jong Il went ahead with the rollout of his new economic policies. These were never publicly announced in a single official document, nor were they ever identified as “reforms,” but rather were presented as improvements to “socialist economic management.” Later that summer, the North Korean press was filled with an unusual number of articles praising the party’s economic policies, but there was nothing explicit in the media about what changes were taking place. It did not take long, however, for foreign reporters to get wind of developments. As early as July 11, the Japanese news agency Kyodo published a lengthy and fairly detailed report on the new measures. Sometime later, a busload of KEDO employees traveling on the country’s east coast saw marked improvements in a hotel where they often stopped on the way to or from the reactor construction site. The changes ranged from simple things, like an aquarium in the hotel’s entrance hall no longer filled with lifeless, scummy water, to considerably more important matters, like a bathroom cleaned and renovated so that it that no longer required risking one’s health to use it.
Kim’s new measures were not meant to be applied in a single big bang. Rather, they appear to have been planned in phases, involving gradually widening circles of adjustments. A group of North Koreans traveling to a meeting in Europe, for example, showed a set of slides portraying the various planned phases. At this point, they said, they were looking for practical advice on how to operate markets. They indicated they were under pressure to make the early phases of the new policies show results in order to win over the skeptics in the leadership. The skeptics apparently were making their views known publicly. Signs in North Korean media of an extended debate over how far, and how fast, to move suggested that although Kim Jong Il had made the decision to implement new economic policies, much remained unsettled, open to interpretation, and with enough room left for those opposed to full-scaled reforms to push back.
The intellectual underpinnings for the new policies went back several years, at least to early 2000, not long before Kim Jong Il’s first visit to China in seventeen years. After another visit to China in January 2001, during which Kim toured Shanghai with a large group of military and economic officials, planning apparently continued. In the autumn, Kim gave instructions on key issues that would form the basis of the measures to follow: economic management, profits, results, and expertise.
In the initial phase of the North’s new economic policy, the measures included increasing salaries as well as reducing subsidies for such things as bus and train fares and the cost of housing. The purpose, in part, was to get at the population’s psychology of dependence, to wean people away from feeling the state would provide everything and bring them to a stage where they had to make choices on how to spend their money. Subsequent phases included establishment of large central state-sanctioned markets, permission for selected industries to engage in autonomous economic activity, and ch
anges to the structure of cooperative farms.
Parallel with and apparently intended to work in support of these new measures, Kim approved the establishment of a Special Administrative Region (SAR) in Sinuiju, the gateway city across the Yalu River from the Chinese city of Dandong. The two cities were connected by a relatively narrow bridge consisting of a single rail line and a single vehicular lane, each permitting traffic in only one direction at a time. Built by the Japanese in the 1930s, this bridge and another older one a few yards away had been destroyed by US bombs during the Korean War. The “new” bridge was repaired while the older one was left in its ruined state, eventually to become a popular tourist attraction.
The law governing the Sinuiju SAR was announced on September 12, less than a week before Japanese prime minister Koizumi was to arrive in Pyongyang. It provided for an unprecedented amount of autonomy for the area, similar to the liberties granted to Chinese special economic zones in the 1980s. In addition to a variety of industries, the zone would also, it was rumored, host gambling casinos.
The Chinese, who might have been expected to support this development in the North’s economy, did just the opposite. Virtually as soon as the North Koreans announced the SAR, media reports appeared citing Beijing’s opposition to it. The Chinese crushed the SAR as quickly as they could, charging that the area’s newly appointed “governor”—a shadowy Dutch Chinese figure named Yang Bin whom Kim had somehow been persuaded to pick—was a big-time crook who owed millions in taxes and that a fleshpot and magnet for money laundering on their border was more than they could tolerate. Yang was arrested in short order and sentenced to eighteen years in jail.
The explanations the Chinese advanced may have had some merit, but neither seems convincing as a reason to act so decisively to undercut Kim Jong Il as he was inching down the economic path the Chinese had long hoped he would take. Perhaps just as likely, as rumors had it at the time, the biggest problem was that Kim had gone ahead with plans for the Sinuiju SAR without consulting the Chinese, something for which Beijing has very little tolerance.
The Sinuiju SAR never got off the ground, but the rest of Kim Jong Il’s plans were moving ahead. In late August, Tokyo and Pyongyang announced the DPRK-Japan summit; through the summer and fall, the two Koreas also pushed ahead with plans for a long list of inter-Korean talks and exchanges. In July, in a virtually unnoticed but major breakthrough for the KEDO project, Pyongyang had agreed to a direct air route between North and South Korea, connecting Yangyang International Airport in South Korea with Sondok Airport near the North Korean city of Ham-hung, both on the east coast. By October, when a small KEDO delegation boarded the first flight, the sight of a North Korean airliner at the airport in Yangyang was considered so routine that South Koreans took no notice of an Air Koryo Tupelov sitting on the tarmac. Instead, waiting passengers crowded around the televisions in the lounge, mesmerized by pictures of a North Korean cheering squad—a group of several hundred beautiful young women—seated in the stands at the Asian Games in the South Korean city of Pusan, a city where UN troops had long ago made their final stand against the invading North Korean army.
THE UNQUIET AMERICANS
The story of the mission to Pyongyang by US assistant secretary of state James Kelly in October 2002 and of North Korea’s undisguised and unrestrained drive for a nuclear arsenal that followed is a cautionary tale of action and reaction between unfriendly nations with intersecting national interests. The developments in the final months of 2002 set the stage and launched a clash over the North’s development of nuclear weapons that in the intervening years has waxed and waned, appeared to approach resolution, and then fell back into confrontation. Some of the interactions between Washington and Pyongyang during this period were and remain highly controversial.
In late-August 2002, when the news broke of the planned Koizumi visit to Pyongyang, Undersecretary of State John Bolton was in Seoul to warn the ROK about the US analysis concerning the North’s HEU program. Like Deputy Secretary Richard Armitage, who was in Tokyo on a similar mission, he could provide no details to the ally to back up the US claim. Bolton also gave a speech while in Seoul, a typically hard-line address about North Korea. As usual, in his negative remarks about the DPRK, he was in front of where policy actually was at the moment, but also as usual he wasn’t wrong about where it was headed.
The North Korean response to Bolton’s speech showed up in a relatively restrained statement from the Foreign Ministry, slamming Bolton personally, but more important ending on a note meant to signal where Pyongyang hoped to lead the upcoming talks with the Americans: “The DPRK has clarified more than once that if the U.S. has a will to drop its hostile policy toward the DPRK it will have dialogue with the U.S. to clear the U.S. of its worries over its security.” In view of what occurred a little over a month later, when James Kelly led a delegation to Pyongyang for talks on October 3–5, the formulation in the North’s statement takes on added significance. It suggests not only what the North had in mind when the Americans finally showed up, but also how thoroughly it was prepared to put the negotiations on a new footing. It also raises important questions as to what Pyongyang might have been expecting the United States to put on the table once those talks began.
In his talks with Kim Jong Il in September 2002, Japanese prime minister Koizumi obliquely raised the enrichment issue. Kim, who was emotional about what he saw as Washington’s pullback from the Agreed Framework and the bilateral engagement that had developed in its wake, did not respond, but it would be hard to suppose the point was missed when North Korean officials pored over the transcripts of the meeting.
Koizumi’s reference would have fit with other evidence that Pyongyang had no doubt been collecting about Washington’s concerns with the enrichment program. The North Korean Foreign Ministry has a good clipping service, allowing it to track closely important American statements on the Korean issue. Just how closely had been demonstrated in November 1998, at the talks in Pyongyang on the issue of the underground cavern at Kumchang-ri. When the head of the US delegation, Ambassador Charles Kartman, pointed out on a large map unfolded on the conference room table where the Americans believed the secret facility was, the North Koreans were flummoxed. They had thought the United States would point to a site that had previously been pinpointed in a graphic on the front page of the New York Times, as part of the story that had initially put the issue into the public realm. The North Korean negotiator looked at where his US counterpart was pointing and said, “Are you sure?”
With such close attention to US media, it is unlikely Pyongyang would have missed two high-profile American references earlier in 2002 to the issue of a “covert” North Korean nuclear weapons program. In early May, John Bolton made the charge in a speech at the Heritage Foundation. A month later, the same charge was gingerly picked up and discussed at some length by former US negotiator Robert Gallucci in a presentation to the Council on Foreign Relations. As if that weren’t enough, in July, at a meeting with the North Korean foreign minister during an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation session in Brunei, Secretary of State Powell warned his North Korean counterpart that when Kelly made his scheduled visit to Pyongyang in early October, he would raise some tough issues.
At a meeting in mid-August with North Korean UN diplomats in New York, Leon Sigal of the Social Science Research Council, who often met with the North Koreans, raised Bolton’s charges. The diplomats didn’t push back. Later, when the Los Angeles Times carried an op-ed by Sigal that specifically cited Bolton’s accusation, Pyongyang took note of that article in its party daily, Rodong Sinmun. In other words, there was at some level in the North Korean apparatus knowledge of the American accusation of a “covert” nuclear program. Given that the plutonium program at Yongbyon was fully monitored by the IAEA, a “covert program” could refer to only one thing—enrichment. Exactly how much detail officials in the Foreign Ministry knew about the program is an open question, but they certainly knew that the Americans
had it high on their list of issues.
Despite evidence that North Korea anticipated that the subject of the HEU program would come up, the impression of those on the Kelly delegation on the first afternoon of the talks was that the North Koreans were caught off balance by the US accusation and that the head of the North Korean delegation, Vice Foreign Minister Kim Gye Gwan, was unprepared with an answer until he checked with someone higher up during a break in the discussions. There is another scenario to consider, however, and that is what Kim was unprepared for was not the accusation itself. Rather, he may have been caught off balance by what he perceived—and in fact what Kelly’s presentation as written by the hard-liners meant to impart—was the imperious tone of the US presentation, especially the nonnegotiable position that dialogue was impossible until the North’s enrichment program was halted. After the fact, some in the US delegation have said they thought that the main point of Kelly’s presentation was to make clear that if the enrichment program was stopped, the United States would pursue the “bold approach.” That, however, does not appear to be the central message the North Koreans heard.
Putting diplomacy with the United States back on track at this point was absolutely essential for Kim Jong Il’s new economic policies. For the United States to come in with an ultimatum that no talks were possible until the enrichment program was addressed was exactly what the North Korean diplomats had told Sigal was the fundamental problem—that the Americans were not leaving room for discussion. In Pyongyang’s view, the United States wanted the North to disarm first, before talks, whereas the North thought it had signaled (certainly in its response to John Bolton’s speech in Seoul) that US security concerns could be addressed during, but not before resuming, dialogue. Moreover, in a comment that obviously needled the North Koreans terribly because it was pointed directly at Kim Jong Il’s personal initiatives toward Tokyo and Seoul, Kelly’s presentation warned that if the enrichment program were left untouched, that would negatively affect Pyongyang’s initiatives toward Japan and South Korea.
The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History Page 55