The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (75 page)

The explanations the Chinese advanced may have had some merit, but neither seems convincing as a reason to act so decisively to undercut Kim Jong Il as he was inching down the economic path the Chinese had long hoped he would take. Perhaps just as likely, as rumors had it at the time, the biggest problem was that Kim had gone ahead with plans for the Sinuiju SAR without consulting the Chinese, something for which Beijing has very little tolerance.

The Sinuiju SAR never got off the ground, but the rest of Kim Jong Il’s plans were moving ahead. In late August, Tokyo and Pyongyang announced the DPRK-Japan summit; through the summer and fall, the two Koreas also pushed ahead with plans for a long list of inter-Korean talks and exchanges. In July, in a virtually unnoticed but major breakthrough for the KEDO project, Pyongyang had agreed to a direct air route between North and South Korea, connecting Yangyang International Airport in South Korea with Sondok Airport near the North Korean city of Ham-hung, both on the east coast. By October, when a small KEDO delegation boarded the first flight, the sight of a North Korean airliner at the airport in Yangyang was considered so routine that South Koreans took no notice of an Air Koryo Tupelov sitting on the tarmac. Instead, waiting passengers crowded around the televisions in the lounge, mesmerized by pictures of a North Korean cheering squad—a group of several hundred beautiful young women—seated in the stands at the Asian Games in the South Korean city of Pusan, a city where UN troops had long ago made their final stand against the invading North Korean army.

THE UNQUIET AMERICANS

The story of the mission to Pyongyang by US assistant secretary of state James Kelly in October 2002 and of North Korea’s undisguised and
unrestrained drive for a nuclear arsenal that followed is a cautionary tale of action and reaction between unfriendly nations with intersecting national interests. The developments in the final months of 2002 set the stage and launched a clash over the North’s development of nuclear weapons that in the intervening years has waxed and waned, appeared to approach resolution, and then fell back into confrontation. Some of the interactions between Washington and Pyongyang during this period were and remain highly controversial.

In late-August 2002, when the news broke of the planned Koizumi visit to Pyongyang, Undersecretary of State John Bolton was in Seoul to warn the ROK about the US analysis concerning the North’s HEU program. Like Deputy Secretary Richard Armitage, who was in Tokyo on a similar mission, he could provide no details to the ally to back up the US claim. Bolton also gave a speech while in Seoul, a typically hard-line address about North Korea. As usual, in his negative remarks about the DPRK, he was in front of where policy actually was at the moment, but also as usual he wasn’t wrong about where it was headed.

The North Korean response to Bolton’s speech showed up in a relatively restrained statement from the Foreign Ministry, slamming Bolton personally, but more important ending on a note meant to signal where Pyongyang hoped to lead the upcoming talks with the Americans: “The DPRK has clarified more than once that if the U.S. has a will to drop its hostile policy toward the DPRK it will have dialogue with the U.S. to clear the U.S. of its worries over its security.” In view of what occurred a little over a month later, when James Kelly led a delegation to Pyongyang for talks on October 3–5, the formulation in the North’s statement takes on added significance. It suggests not only what the North had in mind when the Americans finally showed up, but also how thoroughly it was prepared to put the negotiations on a new footing. It also raises important questions as to what Pyongyang might have been expecting the United States to put on the table once those talks began.

In his talks with Kim Jong Il in September 2002, Japanese prime minister Koizumi obliquely raised the enrichment issue. Kim, who was emotional about what he saw as Washington’s pullback from the Agreed Framework and the bilateral engagement that had developed in its wake, did not respond, but it would be hard to suppose the point was missed when North Korean officials pored over the transcripts of the meeting.

Koizumi’s reference would have fit with other evidence that Pyongyang had no doubt been collecting about Washington’s concerns with the enrichment program. The North Korean Foreign Ministry has a good clipping service, allowing it to track closely important American statements on the Korean issue. Just how closely had been demonstrated in November 1998, at the talks in Pyongyang on the issue of the underground cavern at
Kumchang-ri. When the head of the US delegation, Ambassador Charles Kartman, pointed out on a large map unfolded on the conference room table where the Americans believed the secret facility was, the North Koreans were flummoxed. They had thought the United States would point to a site that had previously been pinpointed in a graphic on the front page of the
New York Times
, as part of the story that had initially put the issue into the public realm. The North Korean negotiator looked at where his US counterpart was pointing and said, “Are you sure?”

With such close attention to US media, it is unlikely Pyongyang would have missed two high-profile American references earlier in 2002 to the issue of a “covert” North Korean nuclear weapons program. In early May, John Bolton made the charge in a speech at the Heritage Foundation. A month later, the same charge was gingerly picked up and discussed at some length by former US negotiator Robert Gallucci in a presentation to the Council on Foreign Relations. As if that weren’t enough, in July, at a meeting with the North Korean foreign minister during an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation session in Brunei, Secretary of State Powell warned his North Korean counterpart that when Kelly made his scheduled visit to Pyongyang in early October, he would raise some tough issues.

At a meeting in mid-August with North Korean UN diplomats in New York, Leon Sigal of the Social Science Research Council, who often met with the North Koreans, raised Bolton’s charges. The diplomats didn’t push back. Later, when the
Los Angeles Times
carried an op-ed by Sigal that specifically cited Bolton’s accusation, Pyongyang took note of that article in its party daily,
Rodong Sinmun
. In other words, there was at some level in the North Korean apparatus knowledge of the American accusation of a “covert” nuclear program. Given that the plutonium program at Yongbyon was fully monitored by the IAEA, a “covert program” could refer to only one thing—enrichment. Exactly how much detail officials in the Foreign Ministry knew about the program is an open question, but they certainly knew that the Americans had it high on their list of issues.

Despite evidence that North Korea anticipated that the subject of the HEU program would come up, the impression of those on the Kelly delegation on the first afternoon of the talks was that the North Koreans were caught off balance by the US accusation and that the head of the North Korean delegation, Vice Foreign Minister Kim Gye Gwan, was unprepared with an answer until he checked with someone higher up during a break in the discussions. There is another scenario to consider, however, and that is what Kim was unprepared for was not the accusation itself. Rather, he may have been caught off balance by what he perceived—and in fact what Kelly’s presentation as written by the hard-liners meant to impart—was the imperious tone of the US presentation, especially the nonnegotiable position that dialogue was impossible until the North’s
enrichment program was halted. After the fact, some in the US delegation have said they thought that the main point of Kelly’s presentation was to make clear that if the enrichment program was stopped, the United States would pursue the “bold approach.” That, however, does not appear to be the central message the North Koreans heard.

Putting diplomacy with the United States back on track at this point was absolutely essential for Kim Jong Il’s new economic policies. For the United States to come in with an ultimatum that no talks were possible until the enrichment program was addressed was exactly what the North Korean diplomats had told Sigal was the fundamental problem—that the Americans were not leaving room for discussion. In Pyongyang’s view, the United States wanted the North to disarm first, before talks, whereas the North thought it had signaled (certainly in its response to John Bolton’s speech in Seoul) that US security concerns could be addressed during, but not before resuming, dialogue. Moreover, in a comment that obviously needled the North Koreans terribly because it was pointed directly at Kim Jong Il’s personal initiatives toward Tokyo and Seoul, Kelly’s presentation warned that if the enrichment program were left untouched, that would negatively affect Pyongyang’s initiatives toward Japan and South Korea.

After a break, Vice Minister Kim parried Kelly’s accusation in standard North Korean fashion—he said the charge was false and represented an effort by those opposed to improving US-DPRK relations, a response that left open the possibility that there were others in the United States not so opposed and thus with whom the North could do business. Having dispatched the issue, the North Korean negotiator moved on to his prepared presentation, which was no doubt precisely where Kim Jong Il wanted the discussion to be in the first place. The vice foreign minister’s presentation, totally ignored after the fact in Washington, included initiatives on the timing of special IAEA inspections (a point John Bolton had been pressing for months), missile exports (a serious US proliferation concern, though the administration hadn’t made an effort to discuss it with the North since coming to office), conventional power plants versus light-water reactors (at that point KEDO had just poured “first concrete,” the symbolic start of construction), and the status of US troops in South Korea (for more than a decade the North had been hinting, signaling, and explicitly explaining that it was not opposed to the presence of US troops on the peninsula as long as they weren’t a “threat”). The North Koreans were almost certainly expecting Kelly to pick up on one or all of those ideas. Instead, he stuck to his instructions—no negotiating.

At dinner that night, Vice Minister Kim made an effort—disguised as a joke—to see if there was any way to get Kelly off to the side where the two might go beyond their talking points and engage in a more constructive
discussion. Kelly’s instructions wouldn’t allow it, nor would those in his delegation who were determined to see that he didn’t slip his leash.

The next morning, the two delegations met again for another sterile exchange of accusations and counteraccusations. The real fireworks started that afternoon when the Americans met with Kang Sok Ju. Anyone who had dealt with Kang—and almost no one on the Kelly delegation had much experience in negotiations with him before that session—knew that the first vice foreign minister could get prickly, bombastic, and sarcastic, especially when he was tired. In the 1994 Geneva talks, in fact, there had been an unspoken agreement between the lower-ranking members of the delegations to avoid afternoon meetings as much as possible because any progress made in the morning between Kang and his American counterpart tended to get frayed, if not actually undone, as the day wore on.

Kang told Kelly he had been up all night in important meetings, discussing the US position with very senior officials.
*
Even if Kang had had a good night’s sleep, what followed probably would have been, as in fact it turned out to be, an unmitigated diplomatic disaster, one that was inevitable given the circumstances, the background preparations, and especially Kelly’s rigid instructions not to negotiate or even engage in normal diplomatic courtesies. Prior to the delegation’s arrival in Seoul on its way to Pyongyang, the US Embassy had been told to stand by for important, high-level last-minute instructions to pass on to Kelly. The instructions, it turned out, were that the US negotiator was not to toast the North Koreans and not to host a dinner for them. It was hard to see how the leash could have been any shorter.
**

In many respects, the Kang-Kelly meeting was similar to what happened in January 1992, when Undersecretary of State Arnold Kanter met with North Korean party secretary Kim Yong Sun in New York: the same concern on the US side with something so trivial as whether to host a meal, the same insistence that the US delegation was not there to negotiate, and the same take-it-or-leave-it approach the US negotiator was instructed to bring to the table. There was a crucial difference this time, however. This time the North Koreans had considerably more leverage—eight thousand spent fuel rods sitting in cans in the cooling pond at Yongbyon, fuel rods
that when reprocessed would yield around twenty-five kilograms of plutonium, enough for at least three or four nuclear weapons.

These were extremely high stakes, but they were not what the Americans at the table had been told to consider. Their sole purpose was to let the North Koreans know that they had been caught “cheating” and that until this problem was fixed, there would be no further discussions. Consequently, when Kang Sok Ju began to talk about the nuclear issue, they could hardly believe their ears. In fact, that stunned reaction turned out to be the problem. Sitting at the table in the Foreign Ministry conference room, the delegation members each interpreted what they heard as an admission by Kang that the North had an enrichment program. After the meeting, they reinforced each other’s impressions, filling in the blanks of each other’s uncertainties. Looking back years later, several of the delegation members saw what had gone wrong in their first reaction. When Kang referred to Kelly’s charges, they took that as an implicit admission of enrichment. When Kang said the North had a “right” to nuclear weapons, they took that as an implicit admission of enrichment. When Kang said the North had something “even more powerful than nuclear weapons,” they took that as a threat of biological, or chemical, or who knows what kind of weapons.