The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History

by Oberdorfer, Don

  A few days later, the disablement at Yongbyon stopped, though a public announcement would wait until August 26, when the North Korean Foreign Ministry issued a statement accusing Washington of violating the six-party implementation agreements. As a result, the statement said, the North had decided “to immediately suspend the work of neutralizing our nuclear facilities,” a measure that, it revealed, had come into effect on August 14—three days after Washington announced it was not taking the North off the terrorism list, and very possibly the same day as Kim Jong Il’s stroke.* The statement said the North would “consider soon the measure of restoring the Yongbyon nuclear facilities to their original state, per our relevant agencies’ strong demand.”

  In September 2008, the North announced it was “restoring” the facilities at Yongbyon—that is, reversing the disabling measures. Pyongyang told the IAEA to remove its seals and surveillance from the reprocessing plant and informed the inspectors that they would no longer have access to the facility. Although Washington did not sense it at the time, this move signaled a North Korean decision to undertake a major reversal in approach toward the United States, one that would last for the next nine months.

  Events had already started drifting in a negative direction in July, and assuming Kim was healthy on August 12 (when word was flashed to Pyongyang from the North’s UN Mission in New York that the United States was linking the terrorism list to verification), Kim may have quickly decided to counter what would have been seen as Washington’s perfidy. After Kim’s stroke, no one in North Korea, at whatever level, was going to fiddle with that decision. Certainly until Kim recovered, no official would have advocated a course that might be seen as betrayal of a policy formulated when the Supreme Leader was still fully in charge.

  At the beginning of October, Ambassador Christopher Hill drove across the DMZ to Pyongyang to see if it would be possible to put the six-party process back on track. In the weeks since Kim’s stroke, Washington had put together a clearer picture of the North Korean leader’s condition, but the Americans had no idea whether there was anyone in Pyongyang who could reverse the August decision to abandon the disablement measures at Yongbyon. Although Kim was slowly recovering, decision making in Pyongyang was likely still paralyzed.

  Vice Foreign Minister Kim Gye Gwan’s opening statements to Hill were blunt. “Mutual cooperation has collapsed,” he said. The deal they had previously reached was “over.” The die, Kim said, “has been cast.” Pyongyang had been testing US intentions, Kim warned, watching how Washington followed through on the question of removing the North from the terrorism list. Because the US had backed away, it was clear that Washington was not serious and that the only thing left for the North was to “strengthen our deterrent.” By the end of the visit, after several more meetings, Hill thought he had worked the North Koreans out of the corner, but the question of who was leading whom at that point seems open to debate.

  At the time of Hill’s trip, no one in Washington or Pyongyang had to look at a calendar to know that the US elections were only four weeks away and that the Bush administration was running out of time. A month later, Barack Obama was elected president. The change of administrations would make no difference to Pyongyang’s plans, however, which were already in motion. In an early warning of what was to come, one ranking North Korean official told an American in a private conversation soon after the US elections that the situation was already out of the hands of the diplomats. Similar warnings would come from other North Korean officials a few months later—all to the effect that decisions sure to cause serious problems with the United States had been reached at the top levels in Pyongyang, and there was nothing that could be done about it.

  When the Obama administration took office, the six-party talks were as good as dead, though no one in Washington seemed to notice. Kim Jong Il’s stroke and the succession already had a significant influence on decision making in Pyongyang, but again Washington did not seem to notice or to understand how to factor that into its approach. The Obama administration was new and needed to set its image. Through its early actions, the North challenged the new president, and the administration never found its balance after that.

  A TERRIBLE START

  One of President Obama’s signature lines in his January 20,2009, inaugural address was aimed at America’s enemies: “We will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” Soon after the inauguration, it became clear that North Korea was not prepared to take up the offer.

  In February, according to press reports, US intelligence saw unmistakable signs that North Korea was planning a long-range ballistic missile test. Several nonofficial American delegations were in Pyongyang that month, and they all received the same message—nothing would stop Pyongyang from conducting another launch. In fact, one of the delegations was told by a Foreign Ministry official, “You have no idea how bad things are about to get.” Arguments that the North needed to give the new administration some breathing room were rebuffed out of hand. In late February, the North formally announced plans to launch a satellite; in March, as a defensive maneuver, it signed the international Outer Space Treaty and gave the requisite notice to mariners and airmen of the impending launch.*

  Newly appointed US negotiator Stephen Bosworth, who had been in Pyongyang with a private group in February, was sent out to the region in early March, prepared to go to Pyongyang for talks if the North Koreans guaranteed there would be no missile launch around the time of the visit. The North was not interested in even the appearance of compromise, and after hearing all of the threats and blandishments from the United States, the international community, and most of all China, Pyongyang went ahead with the launch on April 5, 2009.

  The first and second stages of the U’nha-2 rocket performed successfully, but as happened in the 1998 attempt, the third stage malfunctioned and the satellite plunged back into the Pacific. Pyongyang television aired pictures of Kim watching the launch and celebrating with the technicians at the control center not far from Pyongyang; yet unless the large screen at the front of the control center depicting the flight’s progress was preprogrammed to show success, Kim would have known within minutes that the attempt had failed. Nevertheless, he posed for a picture with the control center’s personnel, and North Korean media announced that the satellite had entered orbit. Years later more pictures of the event were released that showed Kim’s son Kim Jong Un had been present as well.

  A few days before the launch, a statement issued in the name of the KPA General Staff warned that if Japanese or US Navy ships in the sea off the launch area “show even the slightest move for interception regarding our peaceful satellite, our revolutionary armed force will unhesitatingly deal a retaliatory strike of justice.” At the time, that seemed like routine North Korean bluster, but when the subject came up later that year, a KPA general told a visiting group of Americans that KPA air force fighters had been standing by with orders to attack enemy vessels if they interfered with the launch.

  The missile launch was followed a week later by a UN Security Council statement of condemnation. The North responded the next day (April 14) with a statement announcing it was withdrawing from the six-party talks and restarting the nuclear facilities at Yongbyon. (This was a step beyond Pyongyang’s September 2008 announcement that it was “restoring” the nuclear center.) Once again, the IAEA inspectors were told to pack their bags, and two days later, on April 16, they were on a plane out of the country.

  In rapid-fire succession, the UN announced details of new sanctions measures, and the North released another statement, warning that if the Security Council did not issue an apology (which Pyongyang knew would never happen), it would take further, even more provocative, action. “Firstly,” it warned,

  the DPRK will be compelled to take additional self-defensive measures in order to defend its supreme interests. The measures will include nuclear tests and test-firings of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

  Secondly, the DPRK will make
a decision to build a light water reactor power plant and start the technological development for ensuring self-production of nuclear fuel as its first process without delay.

  The reference to an “intercontinental ballistic missile” deliberately took the North’s missile program out of the “space launch” box into the military sphere, while the reference to producing fuel for an LWR was a blatant signal about development of a uranium enrichment program.*

  The warning of measures to defend the country’s “supreme interests” was followed by the North’s second nuclear test, on May 25. This explosion, unlike the first, was large enough (estimates ranged from two to six kilotons) to convince skeptics that the North could make a nuclear weapon. The science of estimating yield from afar is not exact, and much depends on knowing where the actual explosion takes place in order to refine the calculations. After reexamining the data, some experts concluded that the yield for the second test was at the upper end of the calculations and might even have exceeded six kilotons. Unlike the first test, no particles from the nuclear explosion vented into the air, making it impossible to determine certain characteristics of the device. That ability to seal the underground test tunnel became of crucial importance after the third test, in February 2013.

  After the North tested a nuclear device early in Obama’s presidency, there was little chance of getting the White House to take seriously the possibility of negotiations with Pyongyang. The Obama administration took the missile and nuclear tests almost as a personal affront, and certainly as confirmation that the most important US goal should be to alter North Korea’s “behavior,” as administration spokesmen constantly repeated, or, in another favorite phrase, to break a cycle of “provocation and reward.” Some members of the administration said they were prepared to pick up where the Bush administration’s North Korea policy had left off if Pyongyang had kept the six-party talks on track. But those talks were already moribund when the Obama administration took office, and there was not much left in terms of policy to pick up.

  Facing a collapsing US financial system, the new president had more than enough to do without chasing what was, in the view of his advisers, an unreliable negotiating partner in pursuit of will-o’-the-wisp outcomes. The “bandwidth” of attention could accommodate only so many issues, and these had to be ones that either the president absolutely could not avoid or he had a fair chance of winning. North Korea did not fall in either category. Those who looked at the experience of the past eight years quickly came to the conclusion that there was no basis for a deal with Pyongyang, and thus no reason to expend high-level time or effort trying to achieve one.

  The irony is that during Obama’s first term, there were more high-level policy meetings (the so-called Deputies Committee and the highly secret “small group” meetings) on North Korea than any other Asian problem, sometimes at critical moments, on a few occasions with heated debate, but often on mundane issues that lower-level officials could just as easily have handled. By late 2009, the administration had adopted a strategy dubbed “strategic patience,” refusing, it said, to become exercised over North Korean actions or to rush back to negotiations after every new “provocation” from Pyongyang. Critics would charge that strategic patience was turning into “strategic passivity,” but as usual it wasn’t the critics who made the difference—it was reality. Once again, events would prove that the stakes in Korea are always too high, and the confrontations too volatile, for Washington to hope that it could simply wait out the North Koreans.

  For the first four years of the Obama administration, the center of gravity of Washington’s approach toward North Korea was negative, rather than proactive. In the words of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, the United States was not going to “buy the same horse twice.” That turned out to be more or less the totality of US policy. Unlike the first Bush administration, Obama’s advisers were not opposed to sitting down with the North Koreans, but their deep skepticism that anything useful could be achieved, that there could ever be a “deal,” meant that they were not inclined to look for or to exploit possible openings.

  The question is often asked why the North went ahead with such provocative actions when it had a new US administration offering a better path.* The evidence suggests that Pyongyang’s decisions about backing away from the six-party agreements and conducting the nuclear and missile tests had already been made before the elections and that there was never any hope that the North would back off, no matter who came to office. The six-party process, never favored by the North Koreans anyway, had run its course, and the hothouse atmosphere building around the political succession in Pyongyang ensured that timelines, perspectives, advice, and decisions would all take on a different color in the North Korean leadership than in the past.

  If Washington wanted to see old patterns broken, it would soon get its wish, though not in the way it hoped. Following the North’s second nuclear test, the UN Security Council on June 17, 2009, passed a new resolution (1874)—once again with the Chinese and Russians agreeing to a condemnation of the North Korean missile and nuclear tests. Beijing, however, made sure to include in its own name a proviso:

  The sovereignty, territorial integrity and legitimate security concerns and development interests of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea should be respected. After its return to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, that country would enjoy the right to the peaceful use of nuclear energy as a State party. The Council’s actions, meanwhile, should not adversely impact the country’s development, or humanitarian assistance to it. . . . The issue of inspections was complex and sensitive, and countries must act prudently and under the precondition of reasonable grounds and sufficient evidence, and refrain from any words or deeds that might exacerbate conflict. Under no circumstances should there be the use of force or threat of the use of force.

  This careful language carving out space for continued Chinese economic and political interaction with Pyongyang turned out to be more than rhetoric. Over the next several years, Sino-DPRK trade would grow (from under $3 billion in 2008 to almost $6 billion in 2012), official visitors would travel back and forth in increasing numbers, infrastructure projects in the North funded by the Chinese would rapidly proceed, and overall Chinese economic involvement in North Korea would increase significantly. And all of this support flowed to North Korea from China no matter how irksome Beijing found its neighbor to be.

  CLINTON’S VISIT

  Following the passage of UNSC resolution 1874, North Korea made a classic turn from tough to mellow. In this case, however, it did so with added urgency because of the growing need to establish external and internal conditions that would support the political succession under way in Pyongyang.

  In March 2009, before the missile and nuclear tests, two young American journalists had gone to the North Korean border with China to research a story on defectors. The two women recklessly followed their guide across the ice-covered Tumen River into North Korea, were taken prisoner and roughed up by border guards, and then transferred quickly to Pyongyang, where they were interrogated and scared out of their wits, but not badly mistreated. After an “investigation” lasting a month, in late April the North announced that the two would go to “trial,” an event that took place in early June. The sentence was twelve years of “reform through labor” for both women, “with no chance of appeal.”

  The sentence was shocking, but the chance of the two Americans ever having to serve time was practically nil. It was by now common practice for an American of rather high-level, or at least high-profile, stature to come to Pyongyang to take home US citizens who crossed illegally into the North. Several well-known figures offered to go, but all were rejected by Pyongyang. At last the Obama administration offered up former vice president A1 Gore, whose network the journalists had worked for, but the North Koreans told Washington that it had to be Bill Clinton or the prisoners weren’t going anywhere.

  Several ranking officials in the administration were firmly opp
osed to using Clinton for such a mission, worried that doing so would send the wrong message not only to Pyongyang but also to Seoul and Tokyo. Those arguing against sending Clinton were forceful, and the matter seemed resolved until Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pointed out that the administration faced a public relations nightmare if word got out that the journalists could have been released but weren’t because the White House refused to send the former president.

  Even after the administration resolved to send Bill Clinton to extricate the two Americans, there was considerable nervousness in the White House that the North Koreans might lure him to Pyongyang and then not produce the journalists. That was never actually likely, however, because the North—and especially Kim Jong Il—wanted any visit by Clinton to go well. Kim had hoped to receive Clinton in Pyongyang in the last months of 2000, when US–North Korean relations seemed to be on an upward path. By meeting Clinton now, he could let Washington know that he had still not entirely given up hope of returning to it. Equally, Clinton’s presence in Pyongyang gave Kim the chance to show his son and successor how it was possible to command conciliation and contrition from the United States.

  Before he left, Clinton received a briefing held at his wife’s house in Washington, DC, where he was given strict marching orders—essentially: go, come back with the journalists, and do not under any circumstances smile. Standing around the snack table that evening, the former president asked one of the briefing’s participants, “Do you think I really have to be so careful?” As it turned out, he did.