The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History

by Oberdorfer, Don

  After a break, Vice Minister Kim parried Kelly’s accusation in standard North Korean fashion—he said the charge was false and represented an effort by those opposed to improving US-DPRK relations, a response that left open the possibility that there were others in the United States not so opposed and thus with whom the North could do business. Having dispatched the issue, the North Korean negotiator moved on to his prepared presentation, which was no doubt precisely where Kim Jong Il wanted the discussion to be in the first place. The vice foreign minister’s presentation, totally ignored after the fact in Washington, included initiatives on the timing of special IAEA inspections (a point John Bolton had been pressing for months), missile exports (a serious US proliferation concern, though the administration hadn’t made an effort to discuss it with the North since coming to office), conventional power plants versus light-water reactors (at that point KEDO had just poured “first concrete,” the symbolic start of construction), and the status of US troops in South Korea (for more than a decade the North had been hinting, signaling, and explicitly explaining that it was not opposed to the presence of US troops on the peninsula as long as they weren’t a “threat”). The North Koreans were almost certainly expecting Kelly to pick up on one or all of those ideas. Instead, he stuck to his instructions—no negotiating.

  At dinner that night, Vice Minister Kim made an effort—disguised as a joke—to see if there was any way to get Kelly off to the side where the two might go beyond their talking points and engage in a more constructive discussion. Kelly’s instructions wouldn’t allow it, nor would those in his delegation who were determined to see that he didn’t slip his leash.

  The next morning, the two delegations met again for another sterile exchange of accusations and counteraccusations. The real fireworks started that afternoon when the Americans met with Kang Sok Ju. Anyone who had dealt with Kang—and almost no one on the Kelly delegation had much experience in negotiations with him before that session—knew that the first vice foreign minister could get prickly, bombastic, and sarcastic, especially when he was tired. In the 1994 Geneva talks, in fact, there had been an unspoken agreement between the lower-ranking members of the delegations to avoid afternoon meetings as much as possible because any progress made in the morning between Kang and his American counterpart tended to get frayed, if not actually undone, as the day wore on.

  Kang told Kelly he had been up all night in important meetings, discussing the US position with very senior officials.* Even if Kang had had a good night’s sleep, what followed probably would have been, as in fact it turned out to be, an unmitigated diplomatic disaster, one that was inevitable given the circumstances, the background preparations, and especially Kelly’s rigid instructions not to negotiate or even engage in normal diplomatic courtesies. Prior to the delegation’s arrival in Seoul on its way to Pyongyang, the US Embassy had been told to stand by for important, high-level last-minute instructions to pass on to Kelly. The instructions, it turned out, were that the US negotiator was not to toast the North Koreans and not to host a dinner for them. It was hard to see how the leash could have been any shorter.**

  In many respects, the Kang-Kelly meeting was similar to what happened in January 1992, when Undersecretary of State Arnold Kanter met with North Korean party secretary Kim Yong Sun in New York: the same concern on the US side with something so trivial as whether to host a meal, the same insistence that the US delegation was not there to negotiate, and the same take-it-or-leave-it approach the US negotiator was instructed to bring to the table. There was a crucial difference this time, however. This time the North Koreans had considerably more leverage—eight thousand spent fuel rods sitting in cans in the cooling pond at Yongbyon, fuel rods that when reprocessed would yield around twenty-five kilograms of plutonium, enough for at least three or four nuclear weapons.

  These were extremely high stakes, but they were not what the Americans at the table had been told to consider. Their sole purpose was to let the North Koreans know that they had been caught “cheating” and that until this problem was fixed, there would be no further discussions. Consequently, when Kang Sok Ju began to talk about the nuclear issue, they could hardly believe their ears. In fact, that stunned reaction turned out to be the problem. Sitting at the table in the Foreign Ministry conference room, the delegation members each interpreted what they heard as an admission by Kang that the North had an enrichment program. After the meeting, they reinforced each other’s impressions, filling in the blanks of each other’s uncertainties. Looking back years later, several of the delegation members saw what had gone wrong in their first reaction. When Kang referred to Kelly’s charges, they took that as an implicit admission of enrichment. When Kang said the North had a “right” to nuclear weapons, they took that as an implicit admission of enrichment. When Kang said the North had something “even more powerful than nuclear weapons,” they took that as a threat of biological, or chemical, or who knows what kind of weapons.

  What was probably the most fateful meeting the two countries ever had lasted less than an hour. There was no discussion of Kang’s position that as part of any resolution of Washington’s concerns, the United States should recognize the North’s political system, conclude a peace agreement with a nonaggression commitment, and refrain from interfering with the North’s economic development. Kelly asked no questions, probed nothing. The American diplomat knew exactly what his instructions were—deliver the message on enrichment. Period. He had done that. The only thing left for him was to close his notebook and leave. From then on, it was all down hill.

  After the meeting, the delegation went to the British Embassy to send a quick initial message on Kang’s remarks back to Washington, using the UK’s secure communications equipment.* Under considerable time pressure and less than optimal physical conditions in the cramped space, the Korean speakers in the group did what they could to reconstruct a transcript based on what Kang had said in Korean, as opposed to what his interpreter had rendered into English. The North’s interpreters at high-level talks are usually good at either translating directly or capturing in English the proper meaning of what the DPRK negotiator has said. On occasion, though, the translation is vague. If the point seems important, the best thing is to stop and seek clarification. In this case, the American Korean speakers had to compare notes among themselves as there was no opportunity to go back and ask the North what it meant. There was no second meeting with Kang to clarify what had been unclear.

  The delegates’ first message was titled “North Koreans Defiantly Admit HEU Program,” and once it went out there was never any chance that its first impressions—impressions that should have been questioned and carefully analyzed on arrival in Washington—would get judicious treatment. Those six words were in essence all that anyone who looked at the message in Washington remembered, and they sealed the fate of the Agreed Framework. US policy on the North Korean issue went into a free fall from which it never recovered. Almost every senior official who saw the message jumped to the conclusion that the North Koreans had “admitted” to uranium enrichment, even though a closer reading of both the summary and the reconstructed transcript revealed no such thing. In a Principals Committee meeting that followed Kelly’s return to Washington, it was already set in concrete that the North Koreans had admitted to the program and that this “admission” had somehow altered the entire policy landscape.

  What difference it should have made whether the North admitted to anything was never really clear, then or later. If the United States thought it had conclusive evidence of a clandestine HEU program, the central question was not whether the North Koreans admitted it, but what to do about it. Yet in the highly charged atmosphere in Washington, the issue of the admission became like high-octane fuel for the hard-liners. There was no question that the meeting with Kang had been negative. The first vice foreign minister had jumped directly into bristling mode, but whether that was because of the US accusation itself or because of the tone of the US presentati
on—which the North later complained was haughty, rude, and arrogant—wasn’t considered.

  From North Korea’s viewpoint, Kelly—however soft-spoken and gentlemanly his actual delivery—had presented a brusque ultimatum and left no opportunity for discussion. In fact, that was the only way to read the core of Kelly’s instructions. In an odd way, for the first time in two years the North Koreans and the Americans were finally on the same page.

  THE MORNING AFTER

  The US delegation flew to Seoul the next morning. Once there, tired but revved up by what they had convinced themselves they had heard, they briefed the ROK. They did not, however, offer detailed notes of Kang’s remarks, an omission that irked the South Koreans. After the briefing, ROK officials were shaken and more than a little doubtful. It did not seem, based on their own extensive contacts with Kim Jong Il over the past few years, that the North Koreans would have wanted to see such a crucial meeting with the Americans go so badly.

  And there was no need for the Americans to tell them things had gone badly. Only a few hours after the Kelly delegation had departed, the North Korean Foreign Ministry had released a statement complaining that the US envoy had come with a “high handed and arrogant attitude” in claiming that North-South Korean and DPRK-Japanese relations could not move ahead unless the North first met the US “unilateral” demands on “nuclear, missile, and conventional armed forces and human rights issues.” Kelly’s remarks on the North’s initiatives toward Japan and South Korea, as much or maybe even more than the enrichment accusation, had obviously struck home. The North’s statement had also dryly noted, without elaboration, that the DPRK side had “clarified its principled position” to Kelly.

  On October 10, the South’s National Security Council met and, with an eye to the looming storm clouds, laid out steps it hoped would keep the situation from worsening. Noting that abrogation of the Agreed Framework would be dangerous (a position very much at odds with the Bush administration’s viewpoint at this juncture), the group decided that, in addition to keeping in touch with allies on the enrichment issue, the South should attempt to arrange a visit by First Vice Foreign Minister Kang Sok Ju to Washington. The latter idea was an indication of how out of touch America and its South Korean ally had become on the North Korea question; such a visit might have seemed to make good sense in a policy paper in Seoul, but it would have been laughed out of the room in Washington.

  The South’s ongoing contacts with Pyongyang provided a channel for Seoul to air its concerns with the North Koreans at the highest level. ROK unification minister Chung Se-hyon was to be in Pyongyang for previously scheduled talks on October 19–23. President Kim Dae Jung instructed him to deliver to Kim Jong Il a message with the following points: the North should send Kang Sok Ju to Washington to keep the dialogue going, it should not take any steps that would hasten the demise of the Agreed Framework, and it should make its position clear prior to a US-ROK-Japan summit in Mexico scheduled to take place on the margins of an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting.

  To reinforce his message to the North Koreans, and also to make things clear to Washington, on October 23 President Kim publicly warned against scrapping the Agreed Framework. “Military action can result in great tragedy,” Kim’s spokesman quoted the president as saying. “Nobody wants that.” Economic sanctions, he added, would give North Korea “the freedom for nuclear responses.”

  Kim Jong Il was paying attention. On October 25, his Foreign Ministry released a statement repeating the complaints about the Kelly delegation’s high-handed attitude and reiterating the points Kang had made to Kelly about what the United States should do to resolve the problem, but ending on a conciliatory note about the need for negotiations to continue. It made a special point of referring to Kim Jong Il’s recent economic measures, noting, “The DPRK has taken a series of new steps in economic management and adopted one measure after another to reenergize the economy, including the establishment of a special economic region, in conformity with the changed situation and specific conditions of the country.”

  If the statement was meant to turn the tide, it didn’t. What the South Koreans, and probably the North Koreans as well, didn’t fully realize was that in Washington, the Agreed Framework, a crucial underpinning for Seoul’s Sunshine Policy, was doomed. In the initial shock of Kelly’s report on his meeting, the Bush administration was as close to having a unified view as it would ever achieve on the North Korean issue. The hard-liners considered this the final nail in the Agreed Framework’s coffin, and even those who had backed negotiations reluctantly agreed.

  The more fundamental problem at this point was the same one facing the dog who chases the bus and one day catches it: what next? Given the administration’s planning for an attack on Iraq—a Senate measure on the use of force in Iraq was up for a vote that very week—the administration did not want or need a distracting bombshell about North Korea, although it quickly offered classified briefings on the Kelly trip to select members of Congress. (Not all took up the offer—and then those who didn’t complained later that they had not been briefed.) Besides the tactical question of what to do with the news of the Pyongyang meeting, there was a larger strategic one: if the Agreed Framework was dead, “shredded” in the words of some officials, what would take its place to keep the North’s plutonium production frozen? According to John Bolton, there was “no need to replace it [the Agreed Framework] with anything.” Astonishingly, nothing was decided on the overall approach until December 2002, two months after the Kelly visit and just as the situation was starting its rapid slide over the cliff.

  Information about the Kang “admission” leaked before the White House had decided how to handle the news. The administration needed to put out its own account and did so through a restrained statement by the State Department’s press spokesman on October 16, noting that because the North Koreans had “acknowledged” to Kelly that they had an enrichment program, the United States was “unable” to pursue the president’s bold approach to improving relations with the North. A KEDO delegation was in previously scheduled talks in Pyongyang exactly at that time, and one of the delegation members, unsure of how the North Koreans would react to what was liable to be a very negative story once it became public, had asked acquaintances in Washington to give him a heads-up if the news broke while he was in North Korea. “Just call me and say the weather in Washington has turned bad.” In the early hours of October 17 (late on the sixteenth in Washington), the phone rang and the weather report came through. It was bad.

  The next day, the North Koreans carried on with the KEDO talks as if nothing had happened, though one member of their delegation flashed a particularly sour look across the room. At dinner, after the talks, the same North Korean vented. Washington had released a story that the North had acknowledged an enrichment program to the Kelly delegation, he said. The North Korean, who had been at the Kelly meetings, insisted Kang had done no such thing. The real problem, he said, was that the DPRK side had been astonished and offended at the US delegation’s demeanor. “They were diplomats, but they wouldn’t even discuss things,” he complained. “They just repeated the same thing over and over.”

  The first shock of the report from the Kelly delegation that the North had “admitted” to an enrichment program had brought the warring camps in Washington into a temporary consensus, but like a soap bubble it vanished in short order. The hard-liners wanted to jettison the Agreed Framework immediately. Others didn’t want to go quite so far, but were not sure of the way ahead. At an APEC meeting in Mexico, October 21–27, open, no-holds-barred warfare broke out within the US government. The New York Times and the Washington Post were wheeled into position for the opposing camps to fire broadsides at each other. The Agreed Framework was “dead,” one unidentified US senior official was quoted as saying. A few days later, Secretary of State Colin Powell responded, saying no such decision had been made and that if the North Koreans called, “We’ll listen, and I hope vice versa.” Th
e next day, the unidentified senior official was quoted as making the eye-popping statement that Powell’s remarks might represent the State Department position, but it didn’t represent the administration view.

  In the middle of that open debate, on October 26, President George Bush, Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, and South Korean president Kim Dae Jung issued a joint statement asserting that North Korea’s uranium enrichment program violated the country’s nuclear agreements. The statement called upon Pyongyang to “dismantle” the program “in a prompt and verifiable manner and to come into full compliance with all its international commitments.” Stressing the three countries’ desire for a peaceful resolution to the nuclear issue, the declaration made clear that both Japan and South Korea intended to continue their bilateral engagement efforts with Pyongyang. At this point, Seoul and to a lesser degree Tokyo were seeking to control and contain Washington, thinking the joint statement preserved their room for maneuver. It is not at all clear they understood how little control they would have over events to come.

  The North Koreans had been watching, probably in consternation, the way the story was developing. As reflected in their statements from the moment Kelly left Pyongyang, they were especially concerned about US interference with inter-Korean relations. (DPRK-Japan relations had by then already hit a major obstacle in terms of negative Japanese public opinion sparked by Pyongyang’s assertion that several of the Japanese abductees had died while in the North.) Both the message from the ROK leader and his public comments may have given them reason to hope something could yet be salvaged. If not, they would try to make clear, certainly to the South Koreans, that it was the Americans who had failed to make the extra effort.