Read The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History Online
Authors: Don Oberdorfer,Robert Carlin
North Korea’s shift from self-reliance to engagement began amid very mixed portents. The launching of a long-range DPRK rocket late in 1998 accentuated fears in Japan and redoubled concern in the United States, while charges of nuclear duplicity in clandestine underground activity further marred the atmosphere. At the same time, below the level of most outside awareness, domestic developments in Pyongyang began to set the stage for dramatically different policies that would alter the central relationships on the Korean peninsula.
INTO THE HEAVENS, UNDER THE EARTH
At seven minutes after noon on August 31, 1998, North Korea sent a three-stage rocket roaring into the heavens from a launching site on the
shores of the Sea of Japan, which both North and South Koreans patriotically call “the East Sea.” The first stage fell away from the rocket ninety-five seconds later and landed in the sea 156 miles away, short of Japan. The second stage flew over the northern tip of the main Japanese island of Honshu and landed in the Pacific, 1,022 miles from the launch site. The third stage, a solid-fueled rocket that North Korea had not previously demonstrated or been known to possess, sought to place a small satellite in a global orbit broadcasting the revolutionary hymns “Song of General Kim Il Sung” and “Song of General Kim Jong Il.” So far as US monitors could determine, the effort to launch a satellite failed. But the range of the rocket, especially its third stage, was a most unpleasant discovery for those concerned about North Korea’s potential for launching ballistic missiles with highly lethal and destructive warheads.
The test launch of the rocket, called the Taep’o-dong by Western analysts after the area where a mock-up of the projectile was first spotted, touched off an intense alarm, bordering on panic, in Japan. A man-made projectile from an unfriendly country flying over the Japanese islands was the most tangible physical threat to the country since the end of World War II and a nightmare to many Japanese. The government of Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi sought to contain the furor with uncharacteristically quick responses. A Japanese official had been scheduled to sign an agreement in New York that very day to provide $1 billion toward the light-water reactors promised to North Korea under the 1994 Agreed Framework. After the test, Japan announced it would not sign (though it proceeded with the project under US pressure several weeks later). Japan also announced that it was halting humanitarian food aid to North Korea and suspending its offer to continue talks on establishing diplomatic ties, which would be accompanied by large-scale reparations to Pyongyang. Most significantly, in the long run, the Taep’o-dong test emboldened the previously divided Japanese government to override its traditional pacifism and move into the arena of militarized space, deciding to produce its own satellite reconnaissance system for early warning and to move toward joining the controversial US antiballistic missile project in the Asian region.
In the United States, the test came exactly two weeks after the
New York Times
reported a leak of highly classified intelligence that the United States had detected what appeared to be a secret North Korean underground nuclear weapons complex in violation of the 1994 accord. Taken together, the possibility that North Korea was secretly continuing its quest for nuclear bombs, while rapidly improving its potential ability to deliver them via long-range missiles, sounded alarm bells in Congress, greatly enhancing the credibility of skeptics who had never accepted the idea of negotiating with North Korea to buy off its nuclear threat. In addition, the Taep’o-dong test, coming six weeks after a prestigious commission headed
by former—and future—Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld warned of a sooner-than-expected ballistic missile threat to the United States, was a gift to partisans of the controversial national missile defense plan. A Republican member of Congress gleefully told a White House official after the North Korean test, “That did it—we’ve got the NMD.”
In all likelihood, the timing of the test had nothing to do with these US domestic developments, but was keyed to two significant DPRK milestones in early September: the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the North Korean state and the formal elevation of Kim Jong Il to the top post in the North Korean government. Pyongyang had last tested a ballistic missile, the two-stage Nodong, in 1993. In October 1996, North Korea was observed to be making physical preparations for a new launch, but halted them after US warnings that such an action would seriously undermine bilateral relations and the Agreed Framework. In August 1998, however, the Agreed Framework seemed at a dead end, and so this time the launch went ahead, despite US warnings.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the damage to the existing US policy inflicted by the twin blows of August 1998. Members of Congress who had reluctantly gone along with the US commitments under the 1994 Agreed Framework were incensed by the developments and prepared to cut off the funds. “I think we ought to stop talking to [North Koreans], stop appeasing them,” said the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Representative Bob Livingston (R-LA). “I see this as a pretty good excuse just to get out of this [1994 agreement].” A senior Clinton administration official with responsibilities in Asia told me, “The [secret] underground facility pulled the plug on the policy, and the missiles hurt even more.” US policy toward North Korea, he said, “is in deep shit.” Should the United States abandon its commitments under the Agreed Framework, it was clear, North Korea would be free to resume its production of plutonium at Yongbyon, and it was saying it would do so. This activity had brought the two nations to the brink of a military crisis in 1994 and would almost certainly do so again.
Soon after the story broke regarding the secret underground site, the United States demanded to inspect it, in order to determine whether it was indeed a clandestine nuclear facility. In November a US team led by Ambassador Charles Kartman arrived in Pyongyang for the first negotiations the two sides had ever held in the North Korean capital. After initial confusion about the site in question—North Korea thought the United States was concerned about the site depicted on a map in the
New York Times
article, which had indicated the wrong location—Pyongyang’s diplomats were remarkably relaxed, expressing willingness to negotiate a site “visit” (they rejected the word
inspection
) if the Americans would pay for the privilege. Naturally, the initial asking price was ridiculously high,
probably as much a result of bureaucratic dynamics in Pyongyang as any expectation that the price would be met. The pace at which the North Korean negotiator moved to his bottom line in the first round of talks suggested to some on the US delegation that he was instructed to reach a deal, though not right away. At that point, the North Koreans knew something the Americans were uncertain about: that the underground cavern in question, at a place called Kumchang-ri, was not a nuclear facility and was unsuitable for such a purpose. They also increasingly understood it was essential for Washington to obtain access, and therefore Pyongyang could explore what might be gained in return for letting the United States take a look.
The visit to Pyongyang almost ended in disaster. Moments after the small US Air Force jet carrying Kartman and five other delegation members took off from Sunan International Airport in Pyongyang, the plane’s pressurization gauge stuck. Pressure in the cabin quickly grew to excruciating levels and kept climbing. Several passengers, including a Marine Corps general, writhed in pain as the pilot frantically tried to fix the problem. After he succeeded, the pilot calmly explained to the passengers that he had decided not to deal with the emergency by returning to Pyongyang, which he thought they probably didn’t want.
The underground nuclear weapons issue was the creation of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, a center of extreme skepticism, if not hostility, toward US rapprochement with Pyongyang. American spy satellites had long been monitoring a variety of North Korean military excavations, which were commonplace in a country under continual fear of air attack. In the case of the dig at Kumchang-ri, into a hard-rock mountain in a heavily militarized area northwest of Pyongyang near the Chinese border, excavation had begun a decade earlier, but had only recently attracted serious attention. Calculating the size of the hole from the mounds of soil and rock being extracted and observing a nearby bridge and dam, the DIA proceeded to produce elaborate theories and assumptions, even creating small-scale models of nuclear reactors and plutonium-reprocessing facilities, which the agency believed could be under construction in the growing cavern beneath the surface of the earth.
Some other US intelligence officials and competing intelligence agencies were dubious, but the DIA was insistent. The agency was permitted to begin briefings for US allies and congressional committees in June 1998. With the acquiescence of the Central Intelligence Agency, an official intelligence “finding” was promulgated in mid-July that the Kumchang-ri cavern was “probably” a suspect nuclear facility, at which an active nuclear weapons program could be planned or under way. One month later,
New York Times
correspondent David Sanger was able to confirm rumors of the developments by interviewing former officials at a think-tank meeting
outside Washington, DC, and obtaining confirmation of the basic facts from the Clinton administration. Sanger’s August 17 story put the issue on the record in highly visible fashion, making it the subject of political and public debate, just as North Korea was preparing its rocket launch.
After five rounds and more than six months of negotiations between US and DPRK diplomats, the two sides produced an agreement that an American team could make multiple “visits” to Kumchang-ri. The final price was six hundred thousand tons of food, most of it to be supplied through the United Nations, plus a new potato-production program. Critics howled that the United States had used food to “buy” the agreement. Most observers seemed not to realize that the deal had been crafted in a way to let the North Korean negotiator claim a larger victory than he got. Washington had already decided on a large contribution to the UN food appeal for the year, and that amount was folded into the negotiations. The US negotiator was given an additional amount of US food to use as necessary. To close the remaining gap, the American negotiator assigned an arbitrary (and sufficiently large) production value to the potato project to bring the entire amount close to what the North Koreans had said was their bottom line. In any case, the key was not the food, but that the United States had established the precedent of almost unrestricted multiple visits by well-equipped technical experts to a secret North Korean site.
The “visit” by fourteen Americans took place over three days in late-May 1999. The inspectors found six miles of crisscrossing tunnels laid out in a grid pattern, plus one chamber near one of the entrances. Neither the tunnels nor the chamber was suitable to do what US intelligence had suggested. North Korean officials who accompanied the team would not describe the purpose of the big dig except to say it was a “sensitive military facility.” Following the on-site inspection, the State Department on June 25 announced that the Kumchang-ri excavation did not, after all, contain a nuclear reactor or reprocessing plant, either completed or under construction, and it had not been designed to do so. No one apologized or was penalized for the intelligence fiasco that had endangered US policy in Korea for most of a year.
While the eyes of official Washington were riveted on North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, developments of fundamental importance were gaining momentum in Pyongyang. From the vantage point of hindsight, senior officials in both the United States and South Korea identified the final months of 1998 as the time when important shifts began to gather force in the regime north of the thirty-eighth parallel.
The Supreme People’s Assembly, in theory the highest legislative authority in the country, met on September 5 for the first time since the death of Kim Il Sung four years earlier. As expected, it named his son and heir, Kim Jong Il, as the governmental leader of the country, although not as president—that post was reserved for the dead leader in perpetuity—but as head of the National Defense Commission, which was declared to be “the highest post of the state.” The meeting enacted two other changes that proved to be of major significance. It amended the constitution to introduce some elements of a Chinese-style socialist market economy, and it brought into office a group of the younger, more pragmatic bureaucrats. The government’s cabinet, which was given new powers, was henceforth to be composed of thirty-four officials, of whom twenty-three were new faces, replacing elderly figureheads. There was no doubt that these decisions bore the personal imprimatur of Kim Jong Il.
The greatest questions, though, arose from Kim’s decision to rule the country from a military post and the increasing prominence of military leaders in the assembly, which suggested to outsiders a further militarization of the country’s policies. Although Kim Jong Il, unlike his father, had no military background, since his father’s death he had spent a great deal of time establishing and improving close relations with the armed forces, the only group in the country capable of challenging him. Large numbers of officers had been promoted at his direction. The overwhelming majority of Kim’s publicly reported activities in his first five years of supreme power were visits to military units or had military-related connections. An American visitor to Pyongyang in 1997 noticed what seemed to be some of the extraordinary ways in which Kim was garnering military support. General officers, of whom there were now many, were being driven around the capital by uniformed drivers in new Mercedes and BMW limousines. Despite the famine in the countryside, a special floor of the Koryo Hotel, the capital’s best, had been set aside for the lavish wining and dining of senior military officers. Outside the capital, Russia-style
dachas
, or recreational residences, were springing up for the use of military leaders. As it turned out, Kim Jong Il’s new post and his policies appear to have cemented his grip on the military, setting the stage for greater diplomatic maneuvers.