Read The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History Online
Authors: Don Oberdorfer,Robert Carlin
Kim’s outburst was shocking to officials in Washington, who feared their ally might torpedo the negotiations at the eleventh hour. Gallucci was furious. When he walked into the meeting room that afternoon, his DPRK interlocutor, Kang Sok Ju, offered a few choice words of commiseration. Kang made his point with a charming smile as if to say, “You see, dealing with the South Koreans is never easy.”
Secretary of State Warren Christopher, who was traveling in London, telephoned South Korean foreign minister Han Sung Joo at 2:00
A.M
., London time, after receiving a phone call about Kim’s interview from an unhappy President Clinton. In the Blue House the following afternoon, Ambassador Laney bearded the South Korean president. “We wouldn’t betray you at the DMZ; we wouldn’t do it in Geneva,” Laney declared. Speaking of the alliance’s shared purposes about North Korea, he appealed to Kim to maintain unity when they were finally about to succeed in curbing Pyongyang’s nuclear program. In response, Kim said flatly that he could not approve the Geneva accord because of promises he had made to the Korean people. He vehemently objected to postponing the “special inspections” to clear up North Korea’s murky nuclear past and to the absence of a North-South aspect of the proposed agreement. Laney countered that early “special inspections” could not be negotiated because Pyongyang would immediately lose all its nuclear leverage and that Gallucci was actively seeking a commitment to North-South dialogue as part of the accord. Laney appealed to Kim as a statesman to rise above popular expectations.
President Kim was not convinced. In conversation with his foreign minister, Han Sung Joo, the following morning, Kim initially resolved to denounce the US-DPRK deal. Such a denunciation would have negated the Geneva negotiations, created a crisis between Seoul and Washington, and potentially led to a renewed confrontation with North Korea. In a series of telephone calls, Han persuaded his president that it was in the ROK’s national interest to approve the agreement—but he was able to do so only after harsh words were exchanged. Han told his aide that the intense disagreement would probably cost him his job but that the issue was so important, it was worth the risk. Two months later, Kim dumped Han and named a cautious career diplomat, Gong Ro Myung, in his place.
In view of this situation in Seoul, Gallucci in Geneva was instructed to insist that the US-DPRK agreement include a clause committing North Korea to resume the dormant North-South dialogue. His opposite number, Kang, adamantly refused, on the grounds that North-South relations were inter-Korean business and outside the legitimate concern of the United States. (Inter-Korean matters were also outside the purview of the Foreign Ministry.) North Korean negotiators said flatly that they had instructions to break off the negotiations and return home if the US side insisted on North-South issues as a precondition for the nuclear arrangements. Gallucci insisted that without a North-South commitment, there would be no agreement.
After threats from both sides to leave Geneva in failure, the North Koreans finally agreed to negotiate on the issue. Several days of haggling produced a paragraph declaring, “The DPRK will engage in North-South
dialogue, as this Agreed Framework will help create an atmosphere that promotes such dialogue.” The United States had argued for including the phrase “at the earliest time.” North Korea insisted on the “as” clause, which it later used as an excuse not to perform. Gallucci finally accepted, believing that no language could compel Pyongyang to negotiate with Seoul and that “the exact words were a matter of Talmudic significance to all those who lived on the Korean peninsula.”
Although virtually a treaty in form and substance, with binding obligations on both sides, the accord was styled an Agreed Framework because the Clinton administration worried that it might not win approval if submitted to the Senate as a treaty. The North Koreans were gravely concerned that Congress would balk and that Washington would fail to uphold its end of the accord. The day before the signing, as agreed in Geneva, Clinton sent a letter to “His Excellency Kim Jong Il, Supreme Leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” confirming that he would “use the full powers of his office . . . subject to the approval of the U.S. Congress” to arrange for light-water reactors and provide “interim energy alternatives” during the construction period. The North Koreans complained about the less-than-ironclad language, but the Americans explained that under the US separation of powers, even a president cannot act independently of Congress.
The agreement was signed in ceremonies in Geneva on October 21 by Gallucci and Kang for the United States and the DPRK, respectively. According to its main provisions:
The United States would organize an international consortium to provide two light-water reactors by a “target date” of 2003. Until the reactors were operational, the U.S. would arrange to supply 500,000 tons of heavy fuel oil annually to make up for the energy forgone by the North. In return for the HFO, North Korea would freeze all activity on its existing nuclear reactors and related facilities, and permit them to be continuously monitored by IAEA inspectors. The eight thousand fuel rods unloaded from the 5-megawatt reactor would be securely stored and eventually shipped out of the country.
North Korea would come into full compliance with the IAEA—which meant accepting “special inspections”—before the delivery of key components for the reactors. The DPRK’s existing nuclear facilities would be completely dismantled by the time the LWR project was completed.
The two governments would reduce existing barriers to trade and investment and open diplomatic liaison offices in each other’s capitals as initial steps toward eventual full normalization of relations.
The United States would provide formal assurances against the threat or use of nuclear weapons against North Korea.
FALLOUT FROM THE AGREED FRAMEWORK
North Korea greeted the accord as a triumph, which was neither surprising nor unjustified in view of the vastly unequal weight of the two countries. DPRK negotiator Kang Sok Ju was greeted with ceremonial honor at the airport in Pyongyang on his return from Geneva. He and his team were feted at a banquet given in the name of (but not in the presence of) Kim Jong Il. The Workers Party newspaper,
Rodong Sinmun
, hailed the agreement as “the biggest diplomatic victory” and boasted, “We held the talks independently with the United States on an independent footing, not relying on someone else’s sympathy or advice.”
In Seoul public opinion and the views of influential elite groups were extremely negative, even though the ROK government officially endorsed the agreement and pledged to cooperate to make it work. Arriving on one of my periodic visits a month after the signing of the accord, I was startled to run into so many objections expressed in such passionate terms, even by normally pro-American and pragmatic Koreans.
The objections ran the gamut from the failure to consult Seoul adequately to the belief that the US negotiators could have obtained a better deal through tougher bargaining. Moreover, many South Koreans agreed with the sentiments expressed by President Kim Young Sam to the
New York Times
during the last days of the Geneva bargaining: any American deal would help shore up a Pyongyang regime on the verge of collapsing, thus postponing reunification.
However, the most important objection to the Agreed Framework was less specific but much more serious: South Koreans were in anguish that the United States, their great ally and closest friend, would establish any relationship with North Korea, about which nearly everyone had complex feelings and which many regarded as a bitter enemy. All the more infuriating was the fact that the US-DPRK deal had been consummated without the direct involvement of the ROK. Suddenly, Washington was dealing with “the evil twin,” as one Seoulite put it to me. The consequences of this shift in relationships with North and South, which were little understood in Washington, made the ROK government and its people immensely more difficult to deal with.
The agreement was greeted coolly by the American public, which had not been prepared for such a broad accord with a pariah nation. The
New York Times
headline was “Clinton Approves a Plan to Give Aid to North Korea.” The
Washington Post
announced, “North Korea Pact Contains U.S.
Concessions; Agreement Would Allow Presence of Key Plutonium-Making Facilities for Years.”
Seventeen days after the Agreed Framework was signed, its problems in Congress became more serious when Republicans in the 1994 elections unexpectedly won control of both houses for the first time in decades. Foreign policy had been only a minor issue in the political campaigns, but the new Republican Congress was much more conservative and more skeptical of any dealings with North Korea than the outgoing Democratic Congress had been.
On December 17, less than two months after the signing of the Agreed Framework, the new relationship between Washington and Pyongyang was tested in an unexpected way. That morning two US Army warrant officers in an unarmed helicopter lost their way in snow-covered terrain and flew across the DMZ five miles into North Korean airspace before being shot down. Chief Warrant Officer David Hileman was killed, but the copilot, Chief Warrant Officer Bobby Hall, survived. He was immediately surrounded and captured by North Korean troops.
As these events were taking place, Representative Bill Richardson, a New Mexico Democrat, was on his way to Pyongyang via Beijing. When he arrived in the North Korean capital, he tried unsuccessfully to arrange the release of Airman Hall. Foreign Ministry officials told him that the case was in the hands of the less sympathetic Korean People’s Army command. When Richardson left on December 22, he took with him the body of Airman Hileman but, despite pleas about the coming of Christmas, only a promise of best efforts to arrange the release of Hall “very soon.”
On Christmas Day, Hall, still in captivity, wrote a “confession,” accurately setting out the facts of his flight and asking forgiveness for his “grave infringement upon the sovereignty of the DPRK.” In line with standard North Korean practice, Hall’s confession meant that the way was clear for negotiations over his release to begin. The following day, the North Korean Foreign Ministry asked the State Department to send a senior official to Pyongyang, saying that the release of Hall probably could not be arranged through the military channels at the DMZ that were being used to deal with the issue.
Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Hubbard, who had participated in the framework negotiations and other exchanges, crossed the DMZ into North Korea on December 28. Immediately, the Foreign Ministry began probing to see what the United States might give up in return for Hall’s release. In two days of talks, Hubbard refused to grant the North
Koreans any of the political concessions they sought, such as agreement to begin negotiating a US-DPRK peace treaty, but he did agree to a statement of “sincere regret” for the “legally unjustified intrusion into DPRK air space.”
To Hubbard, an illuminating aspect of the negotiations was the difference between the Foreign Ministry, which was eager to protect the just-signed framework accord with the United States, and the military, which was primarily concerned with the defense of borders. Foreign Ministry officials spoke openly of their frictions with military officers; at the DMZ, KPA officers spoke disparagingly to their American military counterparts of the “neckties,” as they called the DPRK diplomats.
Such differences, in a less personal vein, had emerged during the course of the Agreed Framework negotiation. To some extent, referring to conflicts with the harder-edged military was a useful bargaining ploy on the part of the North’s diplomats, but Gallucci, Hubbard, and other American negotiators became convinced that on another level, the differences were real. In Geneva the diplomats intimated they ultimately won most of the confrontations because, they said, their instructions had been personally signed by the new Supreme Leader, Kim Jong Il. At the climax of the Hall case, the Foreign Ministry’s position again won the day, probably because it fitted Kim’s own view that advancing relations with the United States was a paramount goal.
On the evening of December 29, Hubbard received final approval from Washington for the public statement of US regret that he proposed to make to accomplish Hall’s release. At that point, North Korean deputy foreign minister Kang excused himself from an official dinner, taking a copy of the statement and saying he would submit it to “the Supreme Leader.” At 2:00
A.M
., another Foreign Ministry official called on Hubbard at the State Guest House to announce that the statement and the release of Hall had been “approved by Kim Jong Il.” Hall was released the following morning at Panmunjom, where KPA officers made little effort to hide their displeasure.
Within minutes of Hall’s return to South Korea, Clinton telephoned ROK president Kim Young Sam to reassure him that Hubbard’s negotiations had not opened a new US channel or line of policy toward North Korea. The telephone call was deemed necessary because South Korean news media and some officials were highly critical of the negotiations, worried that Hubbard had made new deals in the North and finding proof of that in the brief statement Hubbard had made on Washington’s authority. “Something strange is going on up there,” Kim told Clinton, still trying to keep the United States in check. “We should not move too fast.”
In mid-January 1995, I was able to take a weeklong look at North Korea in the Kim Jong Il era as part of a four-member academic delegation sponsored by George Washington University’s Sigur Center for East Asian Studies. As in my 1991 visit, the small Russian-built airliner that brought us from Beijing was the only one to land in the entire country that day, in stark contrast to Seoul’s busy Kimpo International Airport where forty thousand passengers a day were arriving or departing from overseas on an incessant stream of jumbo jets.