The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (53 page)

Lake then spoke to Carter in Pyongyang, where it was approaching dawn on June 17, and outlined the conditions, which went beyond what North Korea had offered and well beyond the legal restraints of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Carter objected vociferously to upping the ante, noting that these new conditions had not been mentioned before his trip and that he had not presented them to Kim Il Sung or others in Pyongyang. It seemed far from certain, perhaps even unlikely, that the North Koreans would accept them. In fact, however, perhaps because of their own urgent desire to end the dangerous confrontation, the North Koreans quickly accepted. To make certain of agreement on the details, Gallucci subsequently sent the conditions in writing to Kang through the North Korean Mission in New York, and Carter sent a parallel letter to Kim Il Sung. Both received back formal acceptance.

To celebrate the easing of the crisis, Kim Il Sung invited Carter and his party to a celebration on the Taedong River aboard the presidential yacht. This cruise produced another informative decision-making episode, this one involving Kim Il Sung’s wife, Kim Song Ae, who was rarely seen with her husband in public but who participated in the boat ride due to the presence of former first lady Rosalynn Carter. As the yacht sailed by North Korean villages and farmland, the former US president proposed that joint US-DPRK teams discover and return the remains of US servicemen killed during the Korean War as a goodwill gesture to the American people and to forestall the kind of arguments that had long held up improved US relations with postwar Vietnam. Kim was noncommittal, saying this could be discussed in future negotiations, but Carter persisted. At this point, the North Korean first lady spoke up, telling her husband she thought the joint-recovery teams a good idea. “Okay, it’s done, it’s done,” responded the Great Leader.

During the boat ride, the exhausted Carter mistakenly told Kim while CNN cameras were rolling that the American drive for economic and political sanctions at the UN Security Council had been halted due to their
discussions the previous day. This action had not yet been taken. Carter’s comment, which was played on American television, seemed to suggest once more that the White House had lost control of its Korea policies. This gaffe turned out to be the most controversial facet of Carter’s trip in the US press and dominated much of the immediate commentary.

The boat ride was also the occasion for the most important breakthrough of the mission from the South Korean standpoint. Sitting across a small table in the main cabin of the yacht, Carter brought up the unresolved state of North-South relations and the possibility of a North-South summit meeting, which ROK president Kim Young Sam had asked him to propose to his North Korean counterpart. Kim Il Sung recounted for Carter his version of the various attempts at agreement between the two halves of the divided country, and he expressed his frustration that little had been accomplished. In a remarkable statement coming from him, Kim said that the fault for the lack of progress lay on both sides and that responsibility for the mistakes had to be shared. Kim said he had noted his southern counterpart’s statements, in his inaugural address the previous year, about the primacy of national kinship and his offer of a summit meeting “at any time and in any place.” He went on to say that he was ready to meet Kim Young Sam and that their meeting should be held without preconditions or extended preliminary talks. He invited Carter to pass along this message to the South Korean president.

How and why Kim Il Sung decided to proceed to a summit with the South Korean president in the last days of his life is a matter of great speculation, because he had only come that close to a meeting once before, when he had issued the invitation for Roh Tae Woo to attend his eightieth birthday observance in 1992. One theory holds that Kim sensed he did not have long to live and was seeking to arrange a smoother path for his son and successor. Another theory suggests he realized that it was necessary to improve relations with the South in order to improve fundamentally his relations with the United States. Still another theory is that the decision was a spur-of-the-moment response to Carter’s proposal. Whatever lay behind Kim Il Sung’s decision, it is clear that he never backed away from it but proceeded to plan energetically for the summit.

Shortly after Carter left North Korea through Panmunjom, he called on Kim Young Sam at the Blue House. The South Korean president was initially cool to Carter and his mission, believing that once again the fate of the peninsula had been under negotiation at a very high level without his participation. When Carter conveyed Kim Il Sung’s summit offer, however, the South Korean president became visibly excited. Within the hour, Kim Young Sam announced his acceptance of an early and unconditional summit meeting, thereby turning Carter’s mission into a personal initiative to achieve what his predecessors had tried and failed to do. In a
sudden and entirely unexpected reversal of fortune, the immense tension and great danger in the Korean peninsula gave way to the greatest hope in years for a historic rapprochement between the leaders of the North and South.

Although delighted at the prospect of a summit meeting, the South Korean president privately rejected Carter’s account of his counterpart’s state of health, which Carter described as “vigorous” and “alert.” The South Korean president’s own father, whom he spoke to by telephone every morning, was just a year or two older than Kim Il Sung. From television pictures recorded by his intelligence agency, Kim Young Sam believed that his counterpart in the North wasn’t all that well. “Carter is a smart man,” Kim Young Sam told aides as the former US president left his office, “but he doesn’t know much about old people.”

Carter called it “a miracle” that his meetings with Kim Il Sung had transformed a confrontation at the brink of war into new and promising sets of US-DPRK and North-South negotiations. “I personally believe the crisis is over,” he announced after briefing officials at the White House, and within a few days it was clear that this was so. The sanctions activity and plans for extensive reinforcement of US troops were dropped. After obtaining written confirmation from Pyongyang of its acceptance of the US-devised freeze on its nuclear program, Washington announced readiness to proceed to the third round of US-DPRK negotiations, which were scheduled to begin on July 8 in Geneva.

Despite the positive results of his unorthodox initiative, Carter initially was the object of more criticism than praise. American politicians, public figures, and the press, emphasizing the contradictions between Carter’s efforts and Clinton administration policies, were critical of his intervention. The former president was startled to be privately informed, as he came back across the DMZ, that the White House did not want him to return home through Washington or to even make a telephone report to Clinton. Later the administration relented, and Carter paid a visit to the White House en route to Atlanta, although Clinton remained at Camp David during the meeting with his Democratic predecessor and spoke to him only by telephone.

It will be years, perhaps many years, before it will be possible to know with certainty how close the Korean peninsula came to a devastating new outbreak of war in the spring of 1994. It is instructive that those in the US and ROK governments who were closest to the decisions are among those who, in retrospect, rate the chances for hostilities to have been the highest. The United States responded to what it saw as North Korea’s nuclear challenge at the time with a combination of force and diplomacy that, although often improvised and lacking coherence, was equal to the seriousness of the issue. How effective the US response was in influencing
Pyongyang’s decisions, however, is a judgment that it is still too soon to make.

Whether by blunder or design, North Korea discovered by early 1993 that its nuclear program, with its potential to destabilize Northeast Asia and affect the prospects for nuclear proliferation in other parts of the world, was its most valuable asset in transactions with the outside world, especially after the loss of its Soviet ally and the devaluing of its relations with China. Pyongyang played its card brilliantly, forcing one of the world’s richest and most powerful nations to undertake direct negotiations and to make concessions to one of the world’s least-successful nations. The nuclear threat proved, up to a point, to be Pyongyang’s great equalizer.

In the spring of 1994, however, the growing power of the forces arrayed against it strongly suggested that the situation was getting out of hand, and not necessarily to North Korea’s advantage. By the time Carter arrived, Kim Il Sung was seeking a way to end the crisis without losing face or surrendering his bargaining card, and the former president provided the means. By cooperating with Carter, accepting a US-designed nuclear freeze, and agreeing to a North-South summit meeting, the Great Leader defused the explosive confrontation while leaving the future open for further negotiations, which he planned to direct in the months to come.

Justifying his action on the need for national unity to confront the North in talks, South Korean president Park Chung Hee declares martial law in October 1972 to crush all domestic opposition.
PHOTO BY KIM IN KON/JOONG-ANG PHOTO

Presidents Park Chung Hee and Jimmy Carter review troops during Carter’s 1979 visit to Seoul. While cordial in public, the two presidents quarreled bitterly in private over the US troop withdrawal policy.
JIMMY CARTER LIBRARY

Citizens of Kwangju parade through the streets in a popular uprising in May 1980 after brutal ROK special forces units temporarily withdraw. Many Koreans hold the United States partly to blame.
PHOTO BY LEE CHANG SUNG /JOONG-ANG PHOTO

President Ronald Reagan, Vice President George Bush, and their wives welcome President Chun Doo Hwan and his wife to the White House in 1981, despite previous US opposition to Chun’s assumption of power by a “coup in all but name.”
RONALD REAGAN LIBRARY