The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History

by Oberdorfer, Don

  The explanation that the Treasury action was necessary to protect the United States was hardly credible to the other countries involved in the six-party talks. The South Koreans were distressed; the Chinese could hardly believe what Washington had done. To them, it was as clear as could be that at a minimum, the US action put at serious risk the progress made only a few days before. In their darkest moments, many even wondered if the Treasury action was a deliberate US attempt to make sure that the September 19 joint statement never got off the ground. In fact, the move made it hard to convince either Beijing or Pyongyang that the United States was serious about the joint statement or that the principles set out in that statement had any meaning. Another six-party meeting was held in Beijing in November, but it could not possibly put Humpty-Dumpty together again. The joint statement, though it continued to exist on paper, had been shattered. The talks were blown completely off track for fifteen months, and inter-Korean relations fell onto a path from which, as of this writing, they have still not recovered.

  As valid as the accusations of North Korean criminal activity that sparked the Treasury action might have been, the central question was whether this action at this time made sense in terms of broader US goals. It clearly did to those in Washington who thought that the exercise of leverage in the international financial system would be an effective way of finally “punishing” the North. There was no serious thinking in the Treasury Department, and little elsewhere in the administration either, about how this move might fit with the overall diplomacy. Worse, no consideration was given to how Washington might turn off the effects of the Treasury action when that became necessary. After the fact, it became obvious that there were no plans to handle the possibility that the North might eventually come back to six-party talks and agree to concrete steps to implement the September 19 joint statement. Clearly, the North would insist the US financial measures be rolled back as part of such a deal, but no one understood how Treasury would do that. Asked about an “exit ramp,” a Treasury official directly involved admitted there wasn’t one.

  In Seoul President Roh received the news of the Treasury action with consternation. In November 2005, several weeks after the measure had been announced, the South Korean leader met President Bush in Kyongju, the capital of one of Korea’s ancient kingdoms, where he pressed Bush over and over on the issue, insinuating numerous times that the “coincidence” of the Banco Delta Asia action and the September 19 joint statement was actually something darker. Each time the president explained his views on the need for this legal action to protect the United States, and each time Roh went back to his barely disguised accusations. It was one of the worst meetings the two ever had.

  To the North Koreans, the Treasury action—coming right on the heels of the September joint statement—may have been reconfirmation that Washington was not really interested in anything but bringing the regime to its knees. Those in the DPRK Foreign Ministry who had been arguing in favor of diplomacy with the United States might at that point have regretted their choice of profession.

  Given the way US officials and others focused for so many years afterward on the September 19 joint statement, it is a fair question as to whether the document represented a moment when the North Korean nuclear problem and all of the attendant issues might have started to move in a positive direction. Unfortunately, there is no way to tell, because if there was such a moment, it disappeared immediately and the path led elsewhere. The statement turned out to be too vague to cope with the lack of trust on all sides. As one keen observer describes it, the statement was “sitting on air,” with no bilateral US-DPRK diplomacy to support it and no political will in Washington, either. The United States had immediately distanced itself from a key formulation of the declaration, while Tokyo quickly ducked its obligations by refusing to take part in the supply of “energy assistance” to North Korea promised by the other five parties. Determined, as they always are, never to allow themselves to be seen as weak or yielding to pressure, the North Koreans seized the opening presented by what became known in shorthand as “BDA” (Banco Delta Asia) to advance their nuclear weapons program to a new and more dangerous phase.

  THE END OF KEDO

  On September 19, 2005, when the United States announced that it supported a decision to disband the organization by the end of the year, KEDO was already on its last legs. In practical terms, the announcement made little difference, apart from the burden it suddenly put on the organization to work out the final extrication of its workers and the settlement of claims by its contractors under less than ideal circumstances.

  On another level, however, both the fate of KEDO and the way it was dispatched reflected Washington’s determined effort to purge itself of the remnants of the Clinton administration’s approach to North Korea. Since its formation in 1995, KEDO had functioned as a multilateral organization able to maintain relations with North Korea, whatever the state of bilateral ties between any of the individual governments and the DPRK. KEDO was not autonomous but under the control of the governments involved; its separate organizational persona was obviously a fiction, yet all sides, including the North Koreans, found it a useful one. Most important, the extended commitment by the United States to KEDO demonstrated to Pyongyang that whatever temporary problems might arise—and there were many—Washington was sticking with the process of engagement. Whether Washington had deluded itself into thinking the North would collapse before the United States had to go through with all of its obligations under the Agreed Framework was, for Pyongyang, beside the point.

  Washington’s commitment to KEDO had also helped convince Seoul and Tokyo that the United States was serious about a long-term diplomatic settlement of the North Korean nuclear problem. However, neither of them fully grasped the extent to which the American contingent in KEDO was separated from the US government, very different from the organization’s South Korean or Japanese employees, most of whom were closely tied to their respective government bureaucracies. In some respects, it turned out KEDO was more effective than the six-party talks in dealing with the North on a multilateral basis. The KEDO office at the LWR construction site was in constant contact with its North Korean counterparts, allowing the two sides to develop working relations that often proved invaluable when problems arose. And in the days before North-South industrial or commercial projects got under way, through its use of numerous South Korean subcontractors, KEDO gave South Korean companies their first experience working in the North.

  The organization had faced numerous challenges along the way. In 1996 when a North Korean submarine ran aground off the coast of South Korea, and in 1998 when the North launched a rocket that passed over Japan, first Seoul and then Tokyo balked at continuing to fully participate in KEDO, but in both cases the governments worked to overcome the challenges. What could not be overcome was when the United States essentially pulled the plug on its participation in KEDO in 2002, continuing to fund its portion of the administrative expenses but otherwise backing away from the organization’s major purpose, building two light-water reactors in the North. At that point, the organization began to fall apart. For reasons of personal pique and policy exhaustion, the possibilities for utilizing KEDO in the broader diplomacy sphere were not seriously considered by the Bush administration, even though KEDO managed to sustain working relations and access to the North when communications largely broke down between Washington and Pyongyang in late 2002 and 2003. In different political circumstances in Washington, it might have been possible to keep the organization intact, or at least build on it to devise a new diplomatic tool for dealing with North Korea. But no one in the Bush administration had the time or inclination to suggest such a course against what was certain to be bitter opposition.

  Besides, there was the not-so-minor matter of funding. In a nonpartisan way, the US Congress had never been happy providing money for KEDO, and after the uranium enrichment issued surfaced lawmakers would not have given a dime. Even if it had wanted to (which
it clearly did not), the administration could not have certified, as required by Congress as a prerequisite for funding, that the North was in compliance with the Agreed Framework. At that point, had the president used the provision of a waiver to get around the need for certification, it would have provoked a fight with Congress no White House would want.*

  What finally stripped away the last vestiges of the leading American role in the organization turned out to be not serious policy considerations but petty animosities between the State Department and the KEDO front office, leaving the organization leaderless. And without American leadership in the organization, old tensions between Seoul and Tokyo reemerged, eventually showing up in bad blood between individual KEDO employees.

  When on a freezing morning in early-January 2006 the last ship carrying the remaining KEDO workers and officials slipped away from the dock at the LWR construction site and headed out to sea, the folly of the pullout was obvious to everyone who stood on the stern of the MSS Hangyore and watched as nearly a decade of effort and more than a billion dollars spent disappeared from view. Subsequent meetings of the KEDO Executive Board, where the representatives discussed how to divide up the organization’s remaining assets and debts, were bitter and often ugly. It was hard to imagine that either Seoul or Tokyo would again trust an American commitment to a negotiated settlement with North Korea, especially one that called on governments in South Korea or Japan to spend their own taxpayers’ money.

  TRACTION, AT LAST

  With personnel changes in the Bush administration’s second term, and especially after the midterm elections in November 2006 in which the Republicans lost majorities in both the House and the Senate, US policy toward North Korea was refined. The State Department regained some of its footing under Condoleezza Rice, the Department of Defense under Robert Gates ceased to be an obstacle, and the vice president’s office lost much of its ability to influence the policy. Even so, fully half the second term was wasted in trying to recover diplomatic ground squandered in the first four years and in digging out from under the unexpected consequences of the Treasury’s action against the North. What the administration eventually saw as the high-water mark of its policy—agreement and partial implementation by the North of concrete steps toward disabling its nuclear program in 2007—in the end did not lead to sustained progress.

  In late-May 2006, the first signs appeared of possible preparations for a North Korean missile test at the launch site near the coast in South Hamgyong Province. The preparations had to have been the result of careful, long-term planning by Pyongyang. Decisions to conduct missile launches are made months in advance of activity that eventually becomes visible to reconnaissance satellites; in this case, Kim Jong Il may have given approval to proceed with the test sometime in the early winter, in response to Washington’s applying Section 311 and derailing the September 19 joint statement. In fact, if the message the North Koreans passed to Donald Gregg in March 2003 was serious, plans had existed even then for eventually launching a “multistage” rocket.

  Almost immediately after its preparations for a missile test were detected, in a Foreign Ministry spokesman’s statement on June 1 “reclarifying” the North’s position on the six-party talks, Pyongyang “kindly” invited Ambassador Christopher Hill to visit. The purpose, the statement said, was for the United States to explain directly that it had “true political intention” to implement the September 19 joint statement. The invitation, released just after the DPRK foreign minister held talks in Beijing with his Chinese counterpart, was a typical move on the North’s part, possibly as much to appease the Chinese as a genuine offer. Even so, if Hill had been allowed to go, it might well have broken the North’s momentum toward launching a missile. At this point, North Korea was under growing international pressure not to proceed with the test. Having Hill in Pyongyang could have provided a graceful excuse to delay the launch. Washington did not even pause to consider. The same day the North announced its invitation, the White House press spokesman rejected it. A few weeks later, the North finished the preparations, and in the early-morning darkness of July 5 (July 4 in the United States), it launched the first of seven missiles fired off that day.

  Because this would be the maiden launch of the missile that was the focus of so much attention—an intermediate-range Taep’o-dong II—no one (including the North Koreans) knew how far it could fly. Some estimates were that it could hit Alaska or Hawaii, and US officials at first braced themselves for the possibility that they would have to use the country’s still developing antimissile defenses. In his memoirs, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld describes the missile interceptors as being on “high alert” and preparations for him to give the order to launch them if it was determined the Taep’o-dong was heading toward the United States. As it turned out, the North Korean missile failed less than a minute into flight, allowing Rumsfeld to enjoy the rest of the July 4 weekend and NORTHCOM—in charge of missile defense for the United States—to use the opportunity for a real-life dry run of its operational readiness. It seems unlikely that the North meant for the missile to go anywhere near the continental United States. Most probably, the plans were for this first attempt to end up in the mid-Pacific.

  Even so, it appears the North wanted this Taep’o-dong launch to be seen as menacing. Unlike a previous missile launch in August 1998, and subsequent ones (once in 2009, twice in 2012), the North did not claim the July launch as part of its space program. In fact, a statement released after the tests portrayed the activity as “missile launches by the Korean People’s Army.” The six other missiles—a combination of short- and medium-range missiles—had more success, splashing down in the Sea of Japan off the Russian coast.

  In response to the missile launches, Washington and Tokyo pushed for a tough UN Security Council sanctions resolution that included reference to Chapter Seven, authorizing the use of force. China and Russia, not surprisingly, balked. The final Security Council resolution (1695) called for member states to prevent “missile and missile-related items, materials, goods and technology” from being transferred to or from the DPRK. The resolution also demanded that the North “re-establish its pre-existing commitment to a moratorium on missile launching.”

  In Pyongyang the idea that the international community thought that the 1999 launch moratorium had any validity in the current circumstances, or that the UN had any standing to tell the DPRK when it should or should not implement its own unilaterally declared moratorium, must have seemed astounding. In a Foreign Ministry statement on July 6, the North went to considerable lengths to make the point that its launch moratorium had been conditional, that the relevant conditions no longer existed, and that, in fact, Pyongyang had already announced in March 2005 that the 1999 moratorium was no longer valid.

  At the time, no one realized that perhaps the most important result of the UN resolution was to lock Washington into an escalating series of responses. Each time the North launched another ballistic missile, which it proceeded to do three more times over the next seven years, the United States felt obliged to ratchet up the pressure in the form of new sanctions resolutions, which in turn sparked new North Korean countermoves. Whether there was anything to Pyongyang’s persistent claims that what it was really after was establishing its right to the peaceful use of outer space—comparable to that of South Korea and Japan—no one could tell because no one probed. It was not even possible to determine if there was any negotiated basis at all for dealing with the North Korean missile issue because the only arrow in the international community’s quiver was sanctions.

  Immediately after the July missile launches, Ambassador Hill was sent to Asia to discuss a coordinated response to the North’s move. Before Hill’s departure, President Bush told him, “You tell the Chinese I can’t solve this—they need to solve this.” By this time, Kim Jong Il’s October 2000 offer to negotiate with the United States on the missile issue had been long forgotten by Washington; the North Koreans apparently did not think it worth ra
ising again, either. As Washington would soon discover, Pyongyang had already decided to follow up its missile salvo with action on the nuclear front, crossing the nuclear threshold in a way that would complicate US efforts to achieve the denuclearization of North Korea and would rattle capitals around the region.

  RUMBLE IN PUNGGYE

  The first signs that the North would test a nuclear device appeared in August, only a month after the missile barrage. The evidence of preparations set off increasingly shrill—and to some extent bombastic—warnings in the press from officials in the various concerned capitals, making the remainder of the summer and the early fall a repeat, in many respects, of what had occurred prior to the July missile launches. At times it was hard be sure which were stronger, the pressures on the North not to test or those on Washington to talk to Pyongyang. Washington was at its worst, blustering about what would happen to the North if it went through with the test. The North Koreans either did not believe the threats or did not care.

  On October 3, the DPRK Foreign Ministry ended the uncertainty with a statement announcing that Pyongyang had decided it had no choice but to conduct a test. Six days later, on the morning of October 9, it did exactly that. The North Koreans informed the Chinese a few hours ahead of the time, location, and expected yield—around four kilotons. Such prenotification of a first nuclear test was an unusual move—no other country is known to have done so. Presumably, the North Koreans wanted to be able counter what they knew would be complaints from Beijing by saying they had given advance warning. In terms of actual yield, this first test was judged by outside experts to be only partially successful and not very impressive, in the neighborhood of one kiloton. When a small group of Americans—including former US negotiator Jack Pritchard, Sig Hecker, John Lewis, and Robert Carlin were in Pyongyang at the end of October, they asked a North Korean military official, Colonel General Ri Chan Bok, about the reports of the small yield.* General Ri did not miss a beat. “You should know,” he said, “that it is easier to test a larger device than a smaller one.” After discussions with officials from the Foreign Ministry and the Yongbyon nuclear center, the Americans came away with the strong impression that the test had marked a turning point, that the North Koreans were heartened by what they had accomplished, whether it was fully successfully or not, and that Pyongyang would be less likely than ever before to give up its nuclear weapons program.