The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (45 page)

__________

*
The tussle over a meal was eventually resolved in favor of those who thought eating with the enemy would do no harm, and Kanter broke bread with the visitor at the now defunct Pen and Pencil Restaurant just off Fifth Avenue. The issue of meals and toasts would come up again a decade later.

12

WITHDRAWAL AND ENGAGEMENT

T
HE FIRST NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION
crisis of the post–Cold War era came as an unwelcome surprise to the newly installed governments of Kim Young Sam in Seoul and Bill Clinton in Washington, which were both barely organized to deal with routine business, let alone a complex and dangerous confrontation with North Korea.

The South Korean government was in its fifteenth day in office on March 12, 1993, when the new foreign minister, Han Sung Joo, received word of North Korea’s announcement that it intended to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty. A former professor of international relations with a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, Han was an expert on regional and global issues but a neophyte in governmental service. After trying in vain to reach the new South Korean president, who was attending a naval graduation ceremony outside Seoul, Han sat down to assess the potential consequences of North Korea’s precipitating act.

The major concerns, as Han saw them, lined up in this order: first, the possibility that North Korea would actually produce nuclear weapons, thereby changing the strategic situation on the divided peninsula; second, the possibility that the United States and other nations would react so strongly that war would break out in Korea; and third, the expectable demand inside South Korea to match the North Korean bomb program, touching off an arms race that could spur Japan as well as South Korea to become nuclear weapons powers and destroy the international non-proliferation regime that had retarded the spread of nuclear weapons for two decades. These possibilities would engage the two Koreas, the United States, and the international community over many months to come.

Two weeks after the announcement, Han traveled to Washington with the sketchy outlines of what he called a “stick and carrot” approach to persuading Pyongyang to change its mind during the ninety-day waiting period before its withdrawal would become effective. As Han saw it, the
stick would be supplied by potential UN Security Council sanctions. Under chapter 7 of the UN Charter, which had been invoked after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, these sanctions could range from downgrading or severance of diplomatic relations to economic embargoes or military action. The carrots could include cancellation of the Team Spirit military exercise, security guarantees, trade, and other inducements to cooperate with the international community. “Pressure alone will not work,” Han declared.

Han’s approach was in line with the thinking of most officials in the State Department, whose business and tradition is to negotiate, but it was controversial among the more hawkish elements in Seoul and many sectors of the US government. “The [US] Joint Chiefs of Staff said, ‘Under no circumstances should you engage [the North Koreans] in negotiations. You should not reward them. You should punish them,’” recalled a State Department official. But the official added, “As soon as you said, ‘How do you mean, punish them?’ of course the JCS would back away from any military options.”

The absence of acceptable military options was also evident in Seoul. A few weeks after the North Korean announcement, when US defense secretary Les Aspin made his first official visit to the ROK capital, Defense Minister Kwon Yong Hae warned that even a “surgical strike” against the Yongbyon reactor would lead to a major escalation of hostilities on the peninsula. The result, Kwon said, could be a general war that would wreak death and destruction on South Korea and immediately involve US military forces. Such an attack, even if completely successful, would probably not destroy any plutonium that might already be hidden away in North Korea.

Negotiations quickly emerged as the consensus solution in Washington, not because they appeared to be promising but because nobody could come up with another feasible plan to head off a crisis in Northeast Asia. However, talks with the North Koreans were highly controversial. With no strong signals coming from Clinton, the administration seemed unable to make a clear-cut decision to offer negotiations.

China, which was widely recognized as a crucial participant in the international maneuvering, was urging direct negotiations between the United States and North Korea, which were ardently desired by Pyongyang. South Korean foreign minister Han, in a meeting with Chinese foreign minister Qian Qichen in Bangkok on April 22, said Seoul would drop its long-standing opposition to Washington-Pyongyang talks if China, in return, would agree not to veto a UN Security Council resolution calling on the North to comply with international nuclear inspections rather than withdraw from the NPT. Qian did not immediately accept the deal, but in fact China did not veto the resolution.

With the precedent of the carefully limited 1992 New York meeting of Arnold Kanter and Kim Yong Sun before them, American officials were moving toward a decision to undertake direct negotiations with the North without the participation of the South, which was a reversal of often-declared US policy. The Washington-Pyongyang talks were “the South Koreans’ idea. . . . [T]hey actually came to us and suggested it,” according to Raymond Burkhardt, who was acting US ambassador in Seoul at the time. Burkhardt added, however, that it was initially understood on both sides that the talks would be limited to nuclear issues, which were peculiarly the province of the United States as a nuclear power.

With Washington still unable to decide what approach to take, Pyongyang forced the issue. In early May, with about a month to go before the June 12 deadline, a diplomat at North Korea’s UN Mission in New York telephoned C. Kenneth Quinones, the DPRK country officer in the State Department, to ask if the Americans wanted to meet and, if so, the sooner the better. Some of Quinones’s colleagues were amazed that he had spoken on the telephone to North Koreans, but he pointed out that the North Koreans had placed the call. On further consideration, the State Department took North Korea’s initiative as a hopeful sign of eagerness to avoid a confrontation over the nuclear issue. The administration decided to move ahead to talks.

The US official chosen to negotiate with North Korea was Robert L. Gallucci, the breezy, Brooklyn-born assistant secretary of state for politico-military affairs. A man of abundant self-confidence and a good sense of humor, he was an expert on nuclear issues and a veteran of the postwar UN effort to dismantle Iraq’s nuclear and chemical weapons programs. As Gallucci said later, he was “blissfully ignorant of profound regional contact,” having previously spent only five days in South Korea and none in the North. Gallucci was picked largely because the negotiations were conceived as being narrowly focused on the proliferation question, and Washington did not wish to name a more politically oriented official whose outlook and responsibilities might alarm Seoul. Once he began the negotiations, however, Gallucci’s perspective widened rapidly.

On the North Korean side, the negotiator was Kang Sok Ju, the deputy foreign minister whom I had met several times in New York and Pyongyang. Kang had attended the International Relations College in Pyongyang and had served in the international department of the Workers Party, the North Korean Mission in Paris, and as a deputy foreign minister for European affairs. A self-assured and evidently well-connected man (his older brother was head of the Workers Party History Research Institute), he was more direct and willing to engage than other senior North Korean diplomats I had met and less openly ideological. Kang was a personal rival to
Kim Yong Sun, and his Foreign Ministry colleagues would later gently inquire why the Americans had signaled a preference for meeting with Kim in the January 1992 talks instead of, in their view, the more capable Kang. He had more experience in the West than most North Korean diplomats, and he told American negotiators at one point that one of his favorite books was
Gone with the Wind
. To their amazement, he quoted from it to prove the point—though not the passage (“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn”) that many had expected.

After three lower-level exchanges to set it up, the first meeting between Gallucci and Kang took place at the US Mission to the United Nations on Wednesday, June 2, only ten days before North Korea’s withdrawal from the NPT was to become effective. Except for one or two career officials who had been present at the one-day Kanter-Kim meeting the previous year, the American negotiators had never even met a North Korean before, and Kang and most of his team had never had a serious conversation with a ranking American official. Each side was nervous and uncertain about what to expect from the other. The members of the Korean delegation wanted to know, “Who is this Gallucci?” and were somewhat distressed that the Americans did not seem to understand how important Kang Sok Ju was. If nothing else, in protocol terms, the first vice minister far outranked a US assistant secretary. Besides, they noted, Kang spoke directly to Kim Jong Il. Did Gallucci see the US president?

Kang’s remarks opened with a lengthy paean to the glories of Kim Il Sung and the
juche
system, which depressed the Americans, but they soon learned this was obligatory for most North Korean presentations, at least until the two sides got down to serious business. The exchanges that followed did not get far, with North Koreans adamantly refusing to stay in the NPT and the Americans demanding that they do so. As the talks seemed to be getting nowhere, the US team returned to Washington at the weekend and told the North Koreans essentially, “If you want to meet again, call us and tell us what you have in mind.” What the Americans did not yet understand was that after observing international reaction in March to the North’s withdrawal announcement, the Foreign Ministry had persuaded Kim Jong Il that the announcement had opened an unexpected opportunity, that the world wanted the North come back to the NPT and that the North could use this response to advance its goals, most of all improving ties with the United States. Kang had come to begin that process, and the first session had been largely shadow boxing.

On Monday morning, responding to a North Korean call, Quinones returned to New York and met three Pyongyang officials in a Forty-Second Street coffee shop. There for the next three days, the American diplomat carried on a Socratic dialogue with the DPRK diplomats, drinking orange juice and coffee for hours at a time at a table by the front window of the
coffee shop, where nobody paid any attention to them except (Quinones learned later) the FBI, which photographed the rendezvous. Quinones explained to the visitors how the US government and State Department were organized, what was or was not possible in the American system, and what types of security assurances might be provided to them in return for a decision to remain in the NPT.

After another round of seemingly sterile talks between the full delegations, the Americans had a gloomy dinner, not sure what would salvage the situation. Somebody recalled that a
Rodong Sinmun
editorial had contained language suggesting there were circumstances in which a solution was possible. It was decided to replay the words back to the North Koreans at the session the next morning. Gallucci recited the passage, with his interpreter reading directly—and ostentatiously—from a copy of the newspaper. The reaction was immediate and electric on the part of the North Korean delegation. After that, Kang no longer spoke of withdrawal and the mood became more positive.

During an afternoon break, several members of the US delegation crafted prospective assurances against “the threat and use of force, including nuclear weapons,” and against “interference in each other’s internal affairs.” To defend themselves against potential intra-administration criticism that they had given in to Pyongyang, they took the phrases directly from the UN Charter and previous official US statements in other circumstances.

Meeting in lengthy sessions on June 10 and 11—the very eve of the June 12 withdrawal date—Gallucci and Kang hammered out a six-paragraph joint statement. The key points were the American security assurances, an agreement by the two sides to continue their official dialogue, and, in return, a North Korean decision to “suspend” its withdrawal from the NPT for “as long as it considered necessary.”

The joint statement removed the immediate threat of North Korean withdrawal from the Non-Proliferation Treaty and defused the sense of crisis, though it did not actually resolve the central issues. The Americans who had participated in the negotiations were elated, especially because Pyongyang’s negotiators proved to be open to argument and logic rather than the extraterrestrials some had expected. “I would make a point to Kang and he would make a point,” said Gallucci, which would have been unremarkable in most negotiations but had by no means seemed ensured in the case of North Koreans. After the opening lecture, Gallucci found Kang more open to reason than the Iraqis he had dealt with. Above all, Kang handled the nuclear questions in ways that suggested agreements could be made on many issues, if the two sides could agree on the price.

For the North Koreans, a joint statement with the United States was an achievement of immense importance. A year earlier, at the end of the
Kanter–Kim Yong Sun talk, the Bush administration had refused to issue such a document. That Kang came back with a joint statement where Kim could not must have seemed especially delicious to the Foreign Ministry.

More important, the joint statement was of great symbolic value to the Foreign Ministry and to others in Pyongyang arguing for a serious effort to bargain with the Americans on the nuclear program. Even if it had only described the weather in New York, the statement would have been tangible evidence that the United States had recognized the legitimacy of North Korea and was willing to negotiate. By raising the stakes with its nuclear program, North Korea suddenly had become important to the United States. For the same reasons that Pyongyang was satisfied, the joint statement raised hackles in conservative circles in Seoul, where American relations with North Korea were anathema. This zero-sum pattern was to persist throughout the nuclear crisis.