The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History

by Oberdorfer, Don

  The result was that concerns about US intentions and misperceptions on both sides about the future of US-ROK security relations became the basis of deep and persistent problems throughout the Roh years. During this stormy period, the habits of alliance and personal ties between Americans and Koreans built up over the decades proved crucial in keeping matters from getting worse than they did. That Roh himself did not fundamentally oppose the alliance but, in fact, saw it as crucial to ROK security may have been the biggest—if largely invisible—source of overall stability. On taking office, Roh told his advisers, and always seemed to believe, that his first priority had to be maintaining close relations with the United States. Although often accused of causing strains in the relationship, given the circumstances he faced he did a better job keeping ties intact than his critics were willing to acknowledge. The list of accomplishments in support of US-ROK relations in his years as president is reasonably long, even though the lasting impression of problems is stronger still.

  Blunt and sometimes seemingly undisciplined, Roh in his public remarks often fed the fires of doubt about the future of the alliance with his own words. On a visit to Turkey in April 2005, he created controversy at home when he spoke out against “working-level” South Korean officials who, he said, did not grasp the “big picture” about the “gradually changing” ROK-US alliance. Unclear about the trends of the times, these people, Roh said, made “sullen” or “outlandish” remarks. That would have been enough to set off a firestorm in Seoul, but Roh, in typical fashion, proceeded to make things worse: “What I am most concerned about are the ROK people. Some considerably highly educated ROK people appear to have a more pro-American way of thinking than Americans themselves. . . .The ROK people should think and make judgments the way most ROK people do. What is important in guiding the ROK-US alliance is to effectively coordinate the American people’s perception of Asian order and the ROK people’s perception of Asian order and make a good judgment.”

  The criticism of Koreans who seemed “more pro-American” than the Americans themselves naturally sparked outrage in South Korean media. The Blue House presidential secretary for public information did not help matters when, faced with criticism of Roh’s remarks, she responded, “It has been [the] ROK presidential offices’ mission to keep the alliance with the U.S. while preserving national interest.” That just further inflamed the situation, not only reinforcing the image that the government saw the two—the alliance with the United States and the “national interest”—as separate things, but worse, seeming to accuse those who were “more pro-American” than the Americans of favoring US over ROK interests.

  Only a few months later, US-ROK relations faced what might have become a truly major storm. At a reception in the upscale Silla Hotel in Seoul just before the annual Security Consultative Meeting between top defense officials of the two countries, the ROK Foreign Ministry representative, Kim Sook, under instructions from Blue House National Security Council deputy Lee Jong-seok, informed the Americans that Seoul did not want to include a reference to the US “nuclear umbrella” in the traditional SCM statement. (The NSC had previously discussed the question and decided that dropping the term would help provide a positive environment for diplomatic efforts on the North Korean nuclear issue.) The US officials were dumbfounded. SCM statements had for decades contained a reference to the “nuclear umbrella.” Dropping it suddenly would be a major, inexplicable change and could mislead the North Koreans into thinking the United States had reduced its commitment to South Korea. After long, difficult discussion in the hotel’s bar, the Americans told Kim in so many words, “No reference to the nuclear umbrella, no communiqué.” Kim called that information in to Lee Jong-seok, who was attending a dinner with his NSC colleagues. Lee expressed surprise that the United States was so firm on the issue, even though he had been forewarned by the Foreign Ministry that dropping the reference would cause big problems. He told Kim to wait while he did some checking. A few minutes later, he called back: the reference to the nuclear umbrella could stay.

  This sort of internal discord within the establishment in the South, added to the differences between Seoul and Washington, became corrosive, continuous drops of acid on the alliance. From the standpoint of some in Washington, Roh’s closest Blue House advisers—especially Lee Jong-seok—did not understand the nuances of military-security issues. When the ROK military complained to its US counterparts that it was being shut out of the Blue House decision-making process, Washington’s suspicions fed on themselves. American NSC staffers did their best to form good personal relations with their Blue House counterparts, and in their view succeeded in building bridges. The problem was that the gulf in perceptions had become too wide and personal impressions in some quarters on both sides had hardened.

  The ROK military was particularly unhappy with policy and had been since the days of Kim Dae Jung. The army viewed many of the steps the Kim administration had taken to advance inter-Korean relations, such as opening transportation corridors through the DMZ, as having undermined South Korean security and set bad precedents. To those charged with protecting the country’s security, holes poked through the DMZ were not knitting the two Koreas together, but rather opening dangerous routes for a North Korean armored attack. These concerns would grow throughout the Roh administration.

  As intense as this criticism became, however, it never got beyond grumbling. The idea of a military coup against the civilian government, even when fears about the country’s security were involved, now seemed unthinkable. Military officials, instead, looked ahead to the possibility that the next ROK government would be a conservative one, and thus present an opportunity to reverse what many of them believed were terrible mistakes. In effect, members of the once politically decisive ROK army found themselves using guerrilla tactics against their own government, ceding bureaucratic space for time.

  Concerns about the breaches in the DMZ were not confined to the US or ROK side, either. The DPRK army apparently had its own problems with the idea of opening up corridors that would permit high-speed access to the North by American and ROK troops. During one meeting with Kim Jong Il, South Korean officials saw what they interpreted as the supreme North Korean leader working to rope his own military into approving the construction. Rather than simply order his generals, Kim co-opted them, pushing them to take an active part in planning and building the transportation corridors—a rail line and two roads, one in the eastern part of the country and one in the west.

  One of the most vexing problems that arose in the US-ROK bilateral security area had to do with OPCON, the proposed transfer of wartime operational control of ROK forces from US to South Korean hands. That would be a big step psychologically, reflecting Korea’s sense that it had entered the ranks of the middle powers and was no longer a dependent of the United States. But OPCON transfer would also involve changes to key aspects of long-established bilateral security structures. Theoretically, it could weaken deterrence by suggesting to Pyongyang that there were now gaps in the alliance, most specifically in the ability to coordinate a ROK-US military response to a North Korean attack. South Korean conservatives, prepared to battle Roh on every front they could find, charged that OPCON transfer was part of the president’s effort to weaken the alliance. Retired ROK army generals considered it a terrible idea, and they opposed it in droves.

  Over the decades, the issue of wartime operational control had been raised several times by ROK leaders, who felt the United States used it to tie the South’s hands in dealing with North Korea during crisis situations. This time, however, was different. This time it was the Americans who proposed the OPCON transfer. Washington’s hope was to deal preemptively with what appeared to be signs that the Roh administration would eventually try to recast the alliance in ways that could weaken it. By jumping out in front on the issue, the Americans gambled they could shape the enormously complex process of the transfer of wartime operational command and keep the alliance effective. Once the S
outh Korean military recovered from the shock that it was actually the Americans who were proposing such a big step, the two sides spent several years bouncing proposals back and forth over when the transfer should occur. The ROK military offered a date of 2012, which would be partway through the next South Korean administration. The Americans proposed the transfer take place much earlier—2009—setting off an uproar in Seoul and reigniting fears in some quarters that US secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld was punishing South Korea for its perceived anti-American tendencies.

  Although Rumsfeld was certainly not happy with some of what he saw in ROK policies, there were broader problems he was trying to deal with in terms of US forces worldwide. As early as July 2001, in a brief note to his special assistant, Larry Di Rita, he had raised the problem of getting the “allies to do more—transfer responsibility i.e., Japan, Korea.” Rumsfeld also thought it was past time to reduce the US military “footprint” in Korea and move its forces’ Yongsan headquarters, which sat in the middle of the South Korean capital, farther south.

  Reconfiguring the US-ROK alliance, making it more flexible and less expensive, required changes that ROK conservatives found difficult to comprehend or accept. It wasn’t until early 2007, after Rumsfeld had left office, that the allies announced that they had finally settled on April 2012 for OPCON transfer. When the new ROK administration of Lee Myung-bak took office in 2009, it wanted that date put off, and so in June 2010, citing recent examples of North Korean aggression, the allies selected a new date—December 2015.

  TENSIONS RISE

  At the same time it was reevaluating the military arrangements on the Korean peninsula and gathering its forces to attack Iraq in early 2003, the United States found itself faced with a growing nuclear problem. North Korea was rapidly restarting its nuclear program and beginning to reprocess those eight thousand irradiated fuel rods that contained approximately twenty-five kilograms of plutonium ideally suited to the production of nuclear weapons. For Washington, the need to concentrate on the final diplomatic and military preparations for Iraq was all consuming, meaning it could not afford to have the situation on the Korean peninsula boil over. Moreover, despite the official position that the United States could fight two wars at the same time, military planners knew they could not do much more than “hold” the North if fighting broke out on the peninsula while the US military was involved halfway around the world in Iraq.

  Notwithstanding rumors that the Pentagon was working on plans for military action against the North, or public bluster from hard-liners seeming to support that option, a military solution in Korea was not widely seen in the administration as a viable course. The president himself was firmly convinced it was not the path he wanted to follow. The administration’s immediate concern was that the North might take advantage of US military involvement in the Middle East, provoking a military confrontation to test the American commitment to South Korea. To forestall such a contingency, Washington relied on an escalating series of high-level public warnings backed up by well-publicized movement of potent military equipment, primarily aircraft, to the Pacific. If deterrence failed, the Pentagon hoped at least to have additional forces in position to use against a DPRK foray.

  Although the Americans had no plans to take military action in Korea, the North Koreans may not have been so sure. Taking note of US statements and reinforcements, Pyongyang responded in an unusual, and to the US military completely unexpected, fashion. On the morning of March 2, 2003, in an audacious gambit, four North Korean Air Force MiG fighters intercepted a US RC-135S reconnaissance aircraft over the Sea of Japan. North Korean pilots usually stayed close to land; for a formation of fighters to fly some 150 miles over the ocean was extraordinary. This surprise move could not have been the result of a sudden scrambling of aircraft in response to that particular US reconnaissance flight on that particular day, either. Rather, it had to have come about after planning and preparation. Aircraft had to be transferred from airbases elsewhere in the country to be in position to launch the operation. Though the preparations went undetected, there had been indications in the preceding weeks that something might be coming. Beginning in late February, North Korean public complaints about US military activity in the Pacific and around Korea began singling out RC-135S flights.

  The North Korean fighters flew close to the unarmed US reconnaissance plane, but did nothing reckless. Reportedly, one of the pilots asked for permission from his central authorities to fire, but whether this was bravado or a serious step, permission was denied. After twenty hair-raising minutes, the US aircraft turned back to its base on Okinawa. For the North Koreans, simply putting its fighters up and out to meet the American plane was enough of a gesture, a warning to Washington to keep back. Although the military leadership was doubtless pleased to declare the mission a success to Kim Jong Il, Pyongyang did not publicly crow over the episode. No mention of it appeared in North Korean media for more than a week, and then it was buried in a longer article in the party daily arguing that the “incident” would “never have taken place” if the Americans had not ratcheted up tensions in the area.

  The episode at the beginning of March with the MiGs occurred as developments at Yongbyon were moving into a critical phase. On January 10, the North had announced that its final withdrawal from the Non-Proliferation Treaty would be effective the following day, on the grounds that there had been only twenty-four hours left on the clock when its initial thirty-day withdrawal notification had been “suspended” in June 1993.* At the end of January, American media reported that US satellites spotted trucks apparently moving the thousands of spent fuel rods from the cooling pond, where they had been stored and monitored since 1994 by the IAEA, across the river to the reprocessing plant a few kilometers away. There was some debate in the US intelligence community about whether those trucks were actually moving the fuel rods or, indeed, whether the rods had been moved at all. Only later did it become clear that the rods had, in fact, been transported to the reprocessing plant, probably sometime in January. The North Koreans subsequently told a visiting American delegation that they had reprocessed all of the spent fuel in one continuous campaign, starting in January and finishing by the end of June 2003.

  Early in 2003, a North Korean official quietly told a foreign contact that the people who had all along wanted the country to develop nuclear weapons had moved into a position of influence on the policy, and they would not stop until they had succeeded. On March 12, the North Korean UN Mission passed a message to former US ambassador Donald Gregg, who had remained in contact with the North over the years. The message was that in the face of what Pyongyang saw as a growing, almost imminent, threat from the United States, if Washington failed to do something very soon to start a direct bilateral dialogue, the North would take a number of steps, including launching a multistage missile and accelerating the pace of reprocessing—which, according to the North Korean message, “had already started.”

  Coming in the middle of concerted efforts to restart their nuclear program, it seems unlikely that Pyongyang was offering to step back. The North may have calculated, however, that the message would encourage the United States to explore the possibility of resuming talks, to reduce a potential threat in Korea in order to concentrate on Iraq. If so, Pyongyang totally misjudged the Bush administration’s single-minded opposition to bilateral talks, or even, at that point, to pursuing serious diplomacy with the North at all.

  THE SIX-PARTY MIRAGE

  The multilateral diplomacy that was to be the focus of so much attention over the next several years, and would ultimately prove to be a dead end, began in March 2003. At that point, the Chinese became increasingly worried by what they saw and heard from Washington, namely, warnings that if Beijing did not rein in the North Koreans, the United States would form of “coalition of the willing” to do so—a phrase implying that the United States might solicit similar international support for action against the DPRK as it had for its unfolding invasion of Iraq. Former
secretary of state Condoleezza Rice says in her memoirs that this was deliberate theater on the part of the White House to scare the Chinese into action. If so, it only partly succeeded. The US warnings did not push the Chinese into applying pressure on Pyongyang, but they did help feed a debate in Beijing about the dangers of the North’s nuclear program—not in terms of the physical threat but rather the action-reaction cycle it could set off, leading to instability in the region and threatening the core Chinese interest in its own economic development.

  In an effort to keep the situation within bounds, the Chinese eventually chose a backdoor solution. After highly contentious talks between Kim Jong Il and senior Chinese diplomat Qian Qichen (the same PRC official who had tried to soothe the North’s anger after Beijing’s decision to recognize the ROK in 1992), the Chinese squeezed out of Pyongyang an agreement to trilateral—US-China-DPRK—talks. They intended for these to evolve quickly into a US-DPRK bilateral meeting, the only outcome with which they could convince the North Koreans to attend talks at that point. Washington, however, refused to play along. The Americans said they would attend only one such meeting, and on this they held firm; the single three-way meeting, convened in Beijing on April 24–25, accomplished nothing.

  The meeting did give the chief North Korean delegate, Ri Gun, a chance to make ambiguous and ominous remarks in a side conversation to Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly. Kelly and Ri had sat next to each other during dinner, conversing in English. As dinner ended, Ri called his interpreter over and began a presentation to Kelly in Korean. The North had warned the United States that it had nuclear weapons in 1994, Ri claimed, and asked rhetorically, why hadn’t Washington taken it seriously?* Ri went on to warn that the North might have to “demonstrate” its capability and might “transfer” nuclear material, though to whom Ri did not specify.