Much of the one-day schedule for Clinton’s early August visit was worked out ahead of time in secret contacts between US and DPRK officials. In the end, the North Koreans stuck exactly to the agreed-upon arrangements. During a brief meeting before dinner, Kim gave Clinton an overview of North Korean policy, and Clinton weighed in with his own views of the value of denuclearization to the North. Kim agreed, but the conversation went no further. One of the participants thought Kim was trying to make clear to Clinton that he had tried a path of engaging the United States, but it had been blocked.
At the lavish banquet that followed, Kim might have noticed how closely the small American delegation (which included an American physician) was watching and calibrating his every gesture for evidence of his health. Undoubtedly, he saw how nervous they were. When during the meal Kim offered to take Clinton to a showing of the famous North Korean mass games, with tickets he playfully suggested he had purchased for the occasion, the Americans threw up their shields. Clinton pretended not to hear Kim’s invitation. There was no way he was going to be photographed, like Madeleine Albright was in October 2000, sitting next to Kim at one of those displays. After several attempts by Kim’s aides to convince the Americans that they could not refuse such an offer by their leader, the North Korean leader waved them off. It was all right, he said lightly; he had already “returned” the tickets. The delegation’s plane took off the next morning, with the two journalists aboard.
The Clinton visit might have provided an early opening for a thaw with North Korea, a chance to convince Kim to “unclench” his fist, but Washington was not in a frame of mind to probe. By the time the administration was ready, in late 2009, the situation had already taken another bad turn.
TURNING TO THE SOUTH
On May 23, 2009, a little more than a year after leaving office, former South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun committed suicide. News of his death came in the midst of the run up to the North’s second nuclear test. Even if he had been so inclined, Kim Jong Il could do little more at that moment than offer condolences.
But Kim had another chance to reach out to the South in August when, a few weeks after the Clinton visit, Roh’s predecessor Kim Dae Jung died. The North Korean leader quickly decided (possibly with prodding from pro-dialogue figures in the South) to use the opportunity to send a small delegation to Seoul carrying an important message for the then South Korean president, Lee Myung-bak. The delegation consisted of two high-ranking party figures—Kim Ki Nam, the senior party secretary in charge of ideology, and Kim Yong-gon, director of the Central Committee’s United Front Department, handling engagement with (and intelligence operations against) South Korea.
In typical fashion, President Lee’s conservative advisers, including his unification minister, Hyun In-taek, did what they could to irritate and humiliate the visitors before letting them get to the Blue House. Both North Korean officials had been to Seoul before, but never with the burden of a sick and possibly dying leader on their shoulders, and they knew they had to endure these insults in order to get the message to the South Korean president. They met with Lee early in the morning on August 24. The South Korean press line was that the president had been firm and agreed to nothing. One South Korean newspaper wrote that the North Koreans’ message “conveyed the North Korean leader’s willingness to improve inter-Korean relations, but had nothing on an inter-Korean summit.” But that was hardly true. The essence of Kim’s message was simple and clear: let’s talk.
A former highly successful and well-respected businessman, Lee Myung-bak had been a popular mayor of Seoul (2002–2006) and a one-term member of the National Assembly (1996–1998), in an odd twist of fate having defeated in the 1996 election none other than Roh Moo-hyun, who would later precede him in the Blue House. Lee took over the presidency in February 2008, unwilling to follow the previous two administrations’ line of engagement with North Korea. The new president was not so much a hard-liner as a deeply religious man, not so much a statesman or a politician as a businessman capable of understanding world events in terms of broad trends. Lee’s perspective and insights were impressive to Americans who met him. President Obama and his senior foreign-policy advisers, in particular, found Lee’s grasp of developments in Northeast Asia and his insights into North Korea refreshing.* Translating those views and that broader perspective into an effective policy, however, proved to be another matter—especially given the difficult situation presented by a North Korean regime undergoing a political succession.
In the presidential election of December 2007, the South Korean public, concerned as usual with domestic economic issues but also disillusioned with the pro-engagement policies toward the North the previous two administrations had followed, voted for Lee over the somewhat flamboyant Chung Dong-young by fairly large margins among all age groups. It was different enough from the normal pattern—older voters going for the conservative candidate, younger voters tending toward the progressive one—that it caused many analysts to wonder if there had been a major shift in the fundamental outlook of the Korean electorate. South Korean conservatives, after ten years in the policy wilderness, were straining to get back into power and to undo the damage they thought a decade of pandering to the North had produced. Among those involved in setting the administration’s initial policy course were figures from the nation’s old-line anticommunist wing, a group that held fast to the belief that a sizable minority of the population remained under the sway of North Korea and that the communists continued to have dangerous influence in such areas as labor, the arts, and education. In some respects, Lee’s administration brought South Korean policy toward the North back a quarter century, to the era of Chun Doo Hwan, when there was virtually no contact between the two Koreas and the rhetoric within the South was often harsh and ugly. It might be a new century, but the old battles were not over.
A SECOND NORTH-SOUTH SUMMIT, BUT NOT A THIRD
A high-water mark in inter-Korean relations had been reached under Lee Myung-bak’s predecessor, Roh Moo-hyun, though not without difficulty and certainly not without fiery criticism from the conservatives. Through most of his administration, Roh had pressed the North for a summit, but it was not until the early summer of 2007, Roh’s final full year in office, that the idea gained traction. In August, prodded by Seoul’s warning that the opposition party would soon have its presidential candidate in place and after that happened moving to a summit would be much more difficult, the North had finally indicated it was ready to go ahead. This was much the same problem Washington had experienced in 2000, trying to get Kim Jong Il to agree to a high-level meeting earlier rather than later in a crucial election year in order to avoid problems set in motion by domestic political developments.
The summit was scheduled for late-August 2007, but heavy rains in the North caused a postponement until the autumn. Finally, on the morning of October 2, President Roh Moo-hyun walked across the military demarcation line at Panmunjom and drove the ninety-odd miles to Pyongyang, leading several busloads of officials, journalists, and businessmen. South Korean media scrutinized and commented on every detail of Kim Jong Il’s reception of the ROK president, comparing it unfavorably with the meeting between the North Korean leader and Kim Dae Jung seven years earlier. Kim Jong Il appeared to the media less effusive, not as deferential, and, to some observers, even a little stiff. The photographs suggested his health was not good, and there was considerable speculation that rumors earlier in the year of heart problems might be true.
The summit visit ended on October 4 with the release of a joint statement. Statements emerging from summits are often largely verbiage. This one contained its share of airy phrases, but it also identified a large number of concrete steps that Seoul and Pyongyang agreed to take to improve relations. The list demonstrated, at least on paper, how far the two Koreas might go in cooperation. The steps included:
•convening a meeting between the two side’s defense ministers by November 2007 to discuss building military t
rust, including a plan for “designating a joint fishing area to prevent accidental clashes in the West Sea, the turning of this area into a peace zone, and the issue of military guarantee measures for various cooperation projects”
•establishing a West Sea “special peace and cooperation zone comprised of the Haeju District (in North Korea) and its neighboring areas” and “pushing ahead with the establishment of a joint fishing area and peaceful waters, the construction of a special economic zone, the practical use of Haeju Port, the direct passage of civilian vessels to Haeju, and joint use of the estuary of the Han River”
•completing the first-phase construction of the Kaesong Industrial Complex as early as possible, launching the second-phase development, and starting the railway freight transport between Munsan (in the South) and Pongdong (in the North)
•reconstructing and repairing the railways between Kaesong and Sinuiju (on the Amnok River) and the motorway between Kaesong and Pyongyang for joint use
•constructing a zone for cooperative shipbuilding in Anbyon and Nampo (on North Korea’s east and west coasts) and conducting cooperative undertakings in various fields, including agriculture, health care, and environmental protection
•conducting tours of Mount Paektu and opening a direct flight between Mount Paektu and Seoul
•having the “cheering squads” of the two sides travel to the 2008 Beijing Olympics on the train running on the Seoul-Sinuiju railroad
•holding the first meeting of premier talks to implement this declaration “sometime this November [2007], in Seoul”
This was an enormously ambitious agenda, and virtually none of it would survive beyond Lee Myung-bak’s inauguration in February 2008. Many commentators called the steps completely unrealistic given Roh’s low ratings in the polls and the upcoming presidential elections. The US Embassy in Seoul had been worried that the outcome of the talks would undercut the six-party efforts on denuclearization and had sought reassurances beforehand that Roh would take a strong stance on the nuclear issue. It ended up making no difference whether he pressed the denuclearization issue or soft-pedaled it; the six-party process was about to run into problems that had nothing to do with Roh.
South Korean officials involved in the planning of the meeting say that, from their perspective, one of the main goals of the summit was to create a framework for easing tensions in the West Sea. (The importance of that issue comes through in the emphasis it received in the October 4 joint statement.) They shake their heads ruefully and say they knew the timing for the summit was not good, but that was not by South Korea’s choice. If there is to be another summit, they say, it should come early in a president’s term, to give whatever agreements emerge time to take root and become part of an established strategic landscape before a new administration comes to office.
The provisions on the West Sea in the October summit agreement may have been among the most important; they were certainly the most controversial, in public and within the administration itself. The two Koreas had spent considerable time in military talks in 2006 and 2007 discussing the Northern Limit Line, the de facto boundary separating the two sides in the West Sea. For the South Korean military, the NLL was a core issue for national security. Holding the islands and the waters around them was considered crucial to denying North Korean forces an advance position for attacking the ROK via the west coast near Seoul. For South Korean conservatives, the NLL was not just militarily but also psychologically important. To cede any territory at all to the North would, in their view, signal fatal weakness on the South’s part, weakness that Pyongyang would exploit to the maximum. Whereas some in Roh’s administration saw a potential for turning these dangerous waters into something less volatile, opponents saw the step as naive in the extreme and surrendering to North Korean extortion.
Once in office in late-February 2008, Lee Myung-bak made clear that his administration would almost entirely dismiss the Kim-Roh summit agreement. The argument often heard from his supporters was that the previous two presidencies—of Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo-hyun—had resulted in a “lost decade” in terms of inter-Korean relations and that Seoul had given away too much while asking too little of the North Koreans. Lee was not opposed to dealing with the North, and his advisers as a whole were not blindly ideological. They had convinced themselves, however, that the long-term trends within North Korea were working in their favor and that the best way to encourage those trends was to turn off the aid and cash spigot and deal with Kim Jong Il from a position of strength. By the end of Lee’s term, however, the general sentiment in South Korea was that this approach, though it had offered a correction to the Sunshine Policies of the earlier decade, had not in the end left the situation in better shape.
In July 2008, Lee was at the National Assembly, scheduled to give what his aides say was meant to be his most positive speech to date on inter-Korean relations, when terrible news came in. A South Korean tourist at the Hyundai-run Mount Kumgang resort in North Korea had been shot and killed by a North Korean soldier during a predawn stroll into an off-limits area. The circumstances were not clear, but the public response to the killing of the tourist—a middle-aged housewife and mother—was one of outrage. This public anger, whipped up further by inflammatory media coverage, caused a quick decision by the administration to close down the tours to Mount Kumgang even before all the facts could be determined. The North apologized immediately but blamed the South for the incident; for its part, Seoul said the North rejected its demands for an investigation.
In August, when there was still no resolution of the incident in sight, Pyongyang released an unusual “special statement” in the name of “a spokesman for the unit of the Korean People’s Army stationed in the area of Mt. Kumgang.” It noted that the North had already “expressed regrets” for the “unpleasant incident,” but it pushed the blame for the incident onto the victim, whom it argued had not paid attention to the regulations in the area. The statement went on to declare that, because Seoul was making such an issue of the incident, the North would expel “unnecessary personnel from the tourist area,” tighten control of passage of vehicles across the military demarcation line to enter Mount Kumgang, and “take strong military counteractions against even the slightest hostile actions in the tourist resort in the area of Mt. Kumgang and the area under the military control from now on.”
Under other circumstances, Seoul might have found a way to accept the North’s expression of regret, but the conservatives in the government were determined not to let the tours—which they considered to be a money pot for Pyongyang—reopen. Over the next few years, they came up with a variety of reasons that the enterprise had to remain closed. Eventually, the North argued that South Korea could not forbid the North to use its own territory to earn tourist dollars. Even after the chairwoman of Hyundai Group, Hyon Jong Un, met with Kim Jong Il on August 16, 2009, and received his assurances for security for the tours, Seoul would not relent. Among the North Korean officials at the meeting with Hyon was Kim Yang-gon, who a week later would be in Seoul carrying the message from Kim Jong Il.
After Lee Myung-bak heard the North Korean supreme leader’s proposal to meet, and over the grumbling of some of his advisers, he instructed Labor Minister Im Tae-hee, formerly his chief of staff, to arrange for secret talks with Kim Yang-gon. Seoul did not convey its answer to the North right away, however, and after waiting a few weeks, Pyongyang inquired why there was no word. Finally, Lee sent a response, telling Kim Jong Il that he basically agreed with the idea of improving relations. At this point, it was barely two months after the UN Security Council resolution calling for increased international sanctions on the North. To have Seoul peel away from the solid phalanx supposedly confronting Pyongyang would not be helpful to Washington’s strategy. Aware of the talks but largely in the dark about the details, the White House watched somewhat nervously, but held out hope that the initiative would, in the end, go nowhere. It turned out to be a good bet.
SECRET TALKS
, PUBLIC CLASHES
Throughout 2008 and into 2009, as inter-Korean relations deteriorated, the threats from the North became more strident. A particular area of concern was the West Sea, where several smaller naval clashes between the two sides had already taken place. Increasingly, it looked possible that a major incident could occur at any time. Within a year, there would be such serious developments, but with Kim Jong Il’s push in the summer of 2009 for improved ties with the United States and South Korea, the path detoured first to Singapore, where representatives of the two Koreas met in October 2009 to discuss the possibility of a third inter-Korean summit.*
From sources who were very well placed to observe the events directly, there are significantly different versions of what happened in the talks. In later accounts, the South Korean delegate, Im Tae-hee, has publicly claimed that over their two days of discussions, he and his interlocutor, Kim Yang-gon, came extremely close to agreeing on the basic framework for a summit, including a venue in the North, taking into account Kim Jong Il’s health. A contrary account holds that Im exceeded his instructions from President Lee and that the two sides were not really close when the Singapore meeting ended.
Im says the North was amenable to talking about the return of abducted South Koreans and ROK prisoners of war held in the North since 1953; in return, the North was looking for compensation—primarily food. According to Im, this sort of exchange was in line with the West German policy of “Frei Kauf,” in which the Bonn government had supplied money to the communist government in Berlin in return for the ability of East Germans to move west. Even South Korean unification minister Hyun In-taek, hardly a pushover when it came to dealing with North Korea, acknowledged that the government was considering a similar but noncash approach. According to an account of the meeting that appeared in public a few months before the 2012 presidential elections (and was probably an inspired leak meant as ammunition against the progressive candidate, Moon Jae-in), the deal foundered because the North Koreans asked for too much compensation. Im Tae-hee firmly denies this.
The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History Page 66