The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (44 page)

For North Korea, the cancellation of the 1992 Team Spirit exercise had been the most tangible evidence of its improved relationship with the United States and the US concession of greatest immediate benefit to the North Korean military establishment. Although Americans tended to scoff at Pyongyang’s fears that the annual field exercise was a threat to its national security, the landing of large numbers of additional American troops in South Korea by sea and air, the profusion of flights near the DMZ by American nuclear-capable warplanes, and the movement of heavily armed ROK and US ground troops made a powerful impression on the North—as Team Spirit’s planners had hoped from the start, nearly two decades earlier. Moreover, Team Spirit was personally important to Kim Il Sung, who had been complaining bitterly about it publicly and privately for many years.

In a public statement, North Korea described the threat to resume the maneuvers as “a criminal act” designed to “put the brakes on North-South relations and drive the North-South dialogue to a crisis.” Within weeks, Pyongyang, citing the Team Spirit issue as the reason, abruptly canceled all North-South contacts in every forum except for those in the Joint Nuclear Control Commission. A short time later, those talks also collapsed. For
the first time, North Korea warned that it might refuse to continue the IAEA inspections, declaring that the decision to revive the Team Spirit exercise is “an act of provocation breaking the U.S. promise not to make nuclear threats.”

The day before the US-ROK Team Spirit announcement, the Agency for National Security Planning, Seoul’s renamed domestic and foreign intelligence agency, trumpeted the arrest of sixty-two people in what it charged was the largest North Korean espionage ring in the history of the republic. More than three hundred others were implicated, the agency claimed, including a female member of the North Korean Workers Party hierarchy who had lived in the South under false identities several times in earlier decades. While there is no doubt that North Korea had long had spies in the South, the timing of the NSP’s roundup and its revelations raised eyebrows within other elements of the South Korean government, especially because NSP officials—as well as the presidential campaign managers for ruling-party candidate Kim Young Sam—were unhappy with the rapid improvement of relations with the North.

Before the spy-ring announcement, Roh Tae Woo had authorized an ROK deputy prime minister to visit Pyongyang to pursue joint economic development with the North and ordered the Economic Planning Board to prepare a team to travel to the North on a similar mission. In internal discussions, the intelligence agency opposed the Economic Planning Board mission, according to Kim Hak Joon, who was chief Blue House spokesman at the time and an expert on unification policy. After the news of the spy-ring arrests, which may have been “greatly exaggerated or fabricated,” according to the former official, Roh was forced to cancel the missions due to the political and public indignation. “Everything stopped,” the former spokesman recalled.

It was in this atmosphere that the IAEA, having received new US satellite photographs indicating dissembling at Yongbyon, stepped up its efforts to force North Korea to reveal the full dimensions of its nuclear activity.

On the eve of a previous IAEA board meeting, Blix had obtained permission for his inspectors to “visit” two sites at Yongbyon that appeared to be nuclear related but that had not been declared by North Korea. One of the sites was a two-story structure camouflaged to appear as a one-story building. American overhead photography had recorded the construction, in the original lower level, of thick-walled vaults made of reinforced concrete—suitable for the storage of nuclear waste. When IAEA inspectors arrived, the lower floor was no longer visible, and the inspectors were told it did not exist. The top floor was filled with heavy weapons, including tanks. North Korea subsequently refused to permit formal inspection of the facility on the grounds that it was a military site and therefore exempt from inspection, not an exemption the IAEA allowed.

On November 12, in a telephone conversation from Vienna with Theis, his chief inspector at Yongbyon, Blix said the agency now possessed indisputable evidence that a trench had been dug and then covered up between the reprocessing plant and the “one-story building.” Blix said there was also clear evidence that the North Koreans had sought to camouflage a nearby outdoor nuclear waste facility. Blix instructed his inspector to tell the North Koreans that they must declare these sites as nuclear facilities and permit their inspection.

Realizing that North Korean authorities had probably monitored the conversation and that his demands would be difficult for the North Koreans to swallow, Theis immediately summoned two senior nuclear officials of the Yongbyon facility and sought to work with them on amending their initial declaration to the IAEA with as little admission of error as possible. At first the officials seemed amenable and even grateful. The next day, no doubt after receiving instructions, they reversed course, bitterly accusing Theis of being “an agent of the CIA.” They refused to cooperate, widening the breach between North Korea and the IAEA.

The two sides sparred inconclusively over the next three months as the IAEA presented the North Koreans with new data on the chemical “inconsistencies” and referred vaguely to “information” on the true purposes of the two suspect sites. By this point, under Kim Jong Il’s instructions, the North was already laying plans to withdraw from the NPT and apparently simply stalling for time. Pyongyang’s officials made various explanations and denials, none of them credible to the IAEA. In early January, the agency’s experts identified two possible explanations for the chemical inconsistencies: undeclared and undetected diversions from the very small Soviet-supplied research reactor at Yongbyon or diversion from the 5-megawatt indigenous reactor.

In the latter case, US intelligence agencies calculated, it was at least theoretically possible that enough plutonium could have been obtained from a full load of irradiated fuel rods to produce one or two nuclear weapons (although very substantial additional efforts, of which North Korea was not then believed to be capable, would be required to weaponize the plutonium). This, and later discredited CIA calculations on the 5-megawatt reactor’s operating history, was the basis for worst-case US intelligence estimates and public statements during the coming nuclear crisis.

Eventually, the focus of contention became the two suspect sites that the IAEA had identified as unacknowledged nuclear waste sites. In late-December 1992, Blix requested “visits” to clarify the nature of the sites and make tests. In January Pyongyang responded that “a visit by officials could not be turned into an inspection” and said that inspections of nonnuclear military facilities “might jeopardize the supreme interests” of the DPRK. This was a clear—and very calculated—reference to the
Non-Proliferation Treaty’s escape clause, which permits a nation to withdraw from the treaty to avoid jeopardizing its “supreme national interests,” and which DPRK Foreign Ministry officials had already pointed out to Kim Jong Il as a “legal” route to getting out of the NPT.

In response, Blix, meeting a North Korean representative in Vienna, spoke explicitly for the first time of the possible requirement of a “special inspection.” Except for the case of Iraq, the agency had never made such a demand inspection before. The UN Security Council, meanwhile, declared itself able to take punitive action if IAEA inspection requests were ignored. Thus, North Korea was set to become the first test of the more vigorous international consensus against nuclear proliferation.

In preparation for the IAEA board meeting in February, Blix asked the United States to approve the display of the satellite photographs at the heart of the agency’s demand for inspection of the two suspect sites. The remarkable high-resolution pictures had been shown to Blix and his staff, but the CIA bureaucracy was much less willing to display them to a board that included officials of countries such as Libya, Syria, and Algeria and in the presence of North Korean representatives. However, in response to urgent requests from the State Department, outgoing CIA director Robert Gates overruled his staff. Gates knew that sensitive intelligence photos had been displayed for the Security Council on the Chad issue in the early 1980s, on the Iran-Iraq War later in the 1980s, and on Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1991–1992. “For me,” Gates recalled, “the notion of sharing imagery with an international agency was not as new or as radical a step as it may have been to the bureaucracy.”

Close to a dozen satellite photographs of North Korean installations and attempts at deception at Yongbyon were presented to a closed session of the IAEA board on February 22. The impact was electric. The initially skeptical board was deeply impressed. At the end of its meeting, on February 25, the board demanded that North Korea permit the special inspection of the two disputed sites “without delay.” As a concession to Chinese requests, it provided a one-month grace period for North Korean compliance, making clear that if Pyongyang did not act, it would take the issue to the Security Council for international sanctions or other actions.

By this time, the credibility and international standing of both the IAEA and North Korea were at risk, with the stakes very high for both sides. If the IAEA could not secure international backing for inspections when there was evidence of cheating, its newly asserted authority could be defied with impunity, and the post-Iraq drive against nuclear weapons proliferation would be set back decisively. For Pyongyang, the danger was that this would be only the first of increasingly intrusive inspections it regarded as masterminded by hostile US intelligence.

Entwined around the legal questions was the sensitive issue of respect, what Koreans call
ch’emyon
and Westerners call “face,” a matter of tremendous, almost overwhelming, importance to the reclusive North Korean regime. “For us, saving face is as important as life itself,” a senior North Korean told Representative Gary Ackerman (D-NY) during his 1993 visit to Pyongyang, and experts on North Korea say that may not be much of an exaggeration. Although the “special inspections” were unlikely to clear up the inconsistencies in Pyongyang’s program, they would almost certainly provide overwhelming evidence that North Korea had not told the IAEA the whole truth about its nuclear facilities. In the court of international opinion, North Korea would face demeaning condemnation. As the tension increased, the country’s minister of atomic energy, Choi Hak Gun, told IAEA inspectors, “Even if we had done it [cheated], we would never admit it.”

As the conflict was coming to a head in November 1992, Governor Bill Clinton won the American presidential election over incumbent George Bush. The outgoing administration was unwilling to contemplate long-range policies for dealing with North Korea and the issues posed by its nuclear noncompliance, and in the early months after its January 20 inauguration, the incoming administration was not organized well enough to do so either. Similarly in Seoul, Kim Young Sam, assisted by last-minute red-baiting against Kim Dae Jung, won the presidential election in mid-December and took office on February 25, far from well equipped to deal with immediate crisis.

The IAEA, however, did not wait for the new governments in Washington and Seoul to get settled before pressing its ultimatum. On February 26, the day after the IAEA Board of Governors formally endorsed the demand for inspection of the suspect sites, Blix sent a telex to the North Korean Foreign Ministry, requesting that IAEA inspectors be permitted to travel to Yongbyon on March 16 to examine the two disputed places. It was a tense time in North Korea. March 9 was the kickoff of the new Team Spirit exercise, downsized but still an impressive seventy thousand South Korean troops and fifty thousand American troops, including the landing of nineteen thousand Americans from outside the country and the deployment of the aircraft carrier USS
Independence
offshore.

The day before the exercise, North Korea announced that Kim Jong Il, who had been supreme military commander for a little over a year, had ordered the entire nation and armed forces to assume a “state of readiness for war,” ostensibly in response to the Team Spirit “nuclear war test aimed at a surprise, preemptive strike at the northern half of the country.” Senior military officials, told that an attack might be imminent, were ordered to evacuate to underground fortifications. All military leaves were
canceled, the heads of all soldiers were shaved, steel helmets were worn, and troops were issued rifle ammunition. In Pyongyang armored cars were drawn up in rows near security headquarters, and armed police checked military passes, while in the countryside the civilian population was mobilized to dig trenches near their homes as protection against air attack. In fact, these preparations were part of the plan for the announcement on March 12 of the North’s withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, citing the treaty’s escape clause on “defending supreme national interests.” As cover for its NPT withdrawal, Pyongyang gave two reasons: Team Spirit, which it charged had violated the spirit of the NPT and of the North-South denuclearization accord, and the IAEA demand for special inspection of two suspect sites, which it described as “an undisguised strong arm act designed to disarm the DPRK and strangle our socialist system.” Pyongyang recognized that under the treaty, its withdrawal would not take effect until after a three-month waiting period. In the meantime, Kim Jong Il was in the field with his troops, expecting a military response from the outside.

Although there had been abundant hints that North Korea might withdraw from the NPT, many officials who had not been monitoring the North Korean nuclear situation were unaware of them. Most governments and publics were blindsided. The announcement of the withdrawal was treated as an incomprehensible act of defiance and an ominous sign that North Korea was hell-bent on the production of nuclear weapons. As the world reacted with shock and dismay, North Korea’s nuclear program suddenly leaped to the top of the international agenda.