The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (70 page)

Many conservatives, who are powerful in the South, were uncomfortable with the sudden warming and rush of developments. After a period of muted criticism, the opposition Grand National Party began finding fault with Kim Dae Jung’s policy, largely on the grounds of its lacking reciprocity for the South’s concessions. Skeptics pointed out that despite symbolic acts, there had been no reduction in DPRK military forces or their potential threat to the South. As the ROK economy and stock market began to sink anew after the Pyongyang summit, disenchantment and impatience with the northern policy mounted, although specific steps of DPRK cooperation continued to be applauded by the majority of the public. Even the awarding of the highly prized Nobel Peace Prize to President Kim in early December for his painstaking efforts at reconciliation with the North and his lifelong struggle for freedom and democracy provided only a temporary boost in Kim’s popularity at home, while plaudits reverberated throughout the rest of the world.

In July, a month after the Pyongyang summit, North Korea joined its first regional security organization, the Asian Regional Forum, sponsored by Southeast Asian nations. A month after that, it renewed its previous application for membership in its first international financial organization, the Asian Development Bank. Meanwhile, Kim Jong Il received Russian president Vladimir Putin and prepared for his second journey in a year to meet Chinese leaders. In September his Foreign Ministry sent letters to the European Union and every European country, proposing the opening of relations. Just prior to the summit, the DPRK established diplomatic relations with Italy and Australia. Between the summit and early 2001, North Korea established diplomatic relations with the Philippines, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, Spain, and Germany and moved toward opening relations with several others. The whirlwind of diplomatic activity on the part of previously reclusive North Korea was startling.

ENGAGING THE UNITED STATES

While the remarkable opening to the South was taking place, North Korea’s engagement with the United States was marking time. From September 1999 to September 2000, US and North Korean diplomats
met in formal bilateral sessions five times in Berlin, Rome, and New York City, with only marginal progress on the issues before them. In an effort to signal to the North where Washington hoped to move relations, at talks in Berlin in January 2000 the US delegation passed a draft of a possible joint communiqué to the North Koreans. Once it became clear, in March, that the action for the moment was in the inter-Korea arena, Washington decided to hang back and not get in the way. Almost as soon as the Pyongyang summit was over, however, signs of movement on the US-DPRK front appeared.

On September 27, 2000, North Korean vice foreign minister Kim Gye Gwan sat down with Ambassador Charles Kartman, the chief US negotiator with Pyongyang, in the twelfth-floor conference room of the US Mission to the United Nations to begin a new round of comprehensive talks on issues between the two governments. Before bargaining could begin, however, Kim announced that Pyongyang at last was ready to send to Washington the special envoy it had long promised to advance the relationship. The North may have signaled weeks earlier that it was planning such a move when midlevel State Department officials had traveled to New York to meet their counterparts in the DPRK UN Mission. The purpose was to follow up a US proposal—conveyed to the North Koreans when a US delegation was in Pyongyang for talks on terrorism—for Secretary of State Albright to meet with Kim Yong Nam in September when he would be in New York, leading the North’s delegation to the annual UN General Assembly meeting.
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The State Department officials were told that, regrettably, such a meeting with Kim could not happen, but that they should not be discouraged, as other possibilities would become apparent.

To the surprise of the Americans, Kim Gye Gwan revealed that the visitor would be Vice Marshal Jo Myong Rok, first vice chairman under Kim Jong Il of the ruling National Defense Commission and by most calculations the second most important person in the country; few in the US delegation had ever heard of Jo, much less understood how important the choice of the NDC first vice chairman as the envoy actually was. Moreover, Pyongyang proposed to send Jo immediately. The dates for his
visit were quickly fixed at October 9–12, less than two weeks away. The selection of such a high-level emissary—and especially a top-level military figure—suggested that Kim Jong Il was prepared to deal with Washington’s central concerns, which were security issues.

After an overnight stopover in Northern California, which was hosted by William Perry and included visits to Silicon Valley high-technology firms, Jo and his party, which included the highly trusted First Vice Foreign Minister Kang Sok Ju, arrived in Washington on October 9. As a young man, Jo had been a minor aide to Kim Il Sung at the end of World War II and had cradled the toddler Kim Jong Il in his arms. A military pilot, he became commander of the DPRK Air Force around 1980. After the death of Kim Il Sung in 1994, he began a meteoric rise from 89th on the 273-man funeral committee to 11th among leaders of the party, the government, and the military in 1996, and second only to Kim Jong Il as first vice chairman of the ruling National Defense Commission in 1998. Although a military professional with a soldier’s bearing who displayed little interest in politics, Jo was also chief of the General Political Department of the Korean People’s Army and was therefore in a position as the senior political commissar of the armed forces to protect the interests of Kim Jong Il.

Jo appeared that morning in a conservative dark-blue suit at the State Department to meet Secretary Albright, but changed to his marshal’s uniform, replete with row after row of campaign ribbons and decorations, for his meeting with President Clinton. In the Oval Office, he handed Clinton a letter from Kim Jong Il and then verbally stated his breathtaking objective: to invite Clinton to visit Pyongyang to iron out differences between the two governments in personal conversation with the North Korean leader. Tipped off by Albright, Clinton explained it would be impossible for him to undertake such a visit without thorough preparations and preliminary agreements. He proposed to send Albright first to accomplish these aims, with the hope he would be able to follow before he left office on January 20, only three months away.

While Jo toured the Air and Space Museum and other sights of Washington, Kang Sok Ju provided Ambassador Wendy Sherman and several other officials with advance indications of the extraordinary compromises Kim Jong Il had in mind. Without firmly committing his leader, Kang suggested that North Korea was ready to contemplate steps down a positive path along the lines proposed by Perry in Pyongyang seventeen months earlier: an end to exports of ballistic missiles, technology, and equipment on negotiable terms of compensation, which might be food or other necessities rather than cash; termination of development, testing, production, and deployment of long-range ballistic missiles; potential stationing of US military forces on the Korean peninsula on a long-term
basis; and establishment of full diplomatic relations between the United States and the DPRK.

Under pressure of time to follow up, Secretary Albright flew into Pyongyang on October 23, only eleven days after Jo and Kang had left Washington. For the North, the timing of the visit was exquisite. It meant Albright would be in Pyongyang on October 25, the fiftieth anniversary of the entry of the Chinese People’s Volunteers into the Korean War. As a result, the PRC defense minister who was leading a celebratory delegation to the North to mark the anniversary would symbolically have to cool his heels at the gates of Pyongyang while Kim Jong Il entertained the American secretary of state.

Hosting Albright at a small dinner the first night of her visit, Kim Jong Il kept the conversation relaxed. When Albright raised what might have been a difficult subject, he paused for the blink of an eye and then reached for his wineglass to propose a toast, neatly sidestepping the problem. During the dinner, the subject of the Korean War Memorial in Washington, DC, came up. Albright noted that it was not an anti-DPRK memorial but was meant to honor those who sacrificed themselves in the war. Kim replied that he did not think that later generations should be prisoners of the mistakes made by an older generation—a remarkable comment about the Korean War, but one that was never followed up. After dinner Kim sprang a surprise invitation on the Americans to a mass display of choreography and chorus by one hundred thousand people in a Pyongyang sports stadium—a repeat of a spectacle previously staged to celebrate the fifty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Workers Party. With Albright sitting beside him, a potent image signaling to his people that relations with the United States might be changing, Kim pointed to the depiction on a giant screen of the Taep’o-dong launch of August 1998, which had so unnerved Japan and worried the United States. He quipped to the US visitor that this had been the first North Korean satellite launch—and that it would be the last.

Born in Czechoslovakia, the daughter of a diplomat, Madeleine Albright had spent much of her life studying communism and had been in nearly every other communist country. She found Pyongyang “not an unattractive place” given the heroic architecture, but was surprised by the lack of interest shown by the population in her entourage. Her greatest surprise was Kim Jong Il himself, with whom she had lengthy conversations. Despite his reputation as a strange and reclusive person, she found him striving to be an affable, normal leader, even though it was clear that the adulation for him was extreme and that he was in complete control.

In their initial business session, Kim volunteered that he was prepared to give up further production and deployment of his long-range missiles. He also began to define what a ban on missile sales abroad might mean,
including contracts not yet fulfilled, and made it clear that North Korea would accept such items as food, clothing, and energy instead of money to compensate for the sales it would lose.

In their next session, Albright presented to Kim, who was accompanied only by Kang and an interpreter, a list of missile-related questions the US team had given to North Korean experts several hours earlier. After she commented that some of the questions were technical and might require study, Kim picked up the list and began immediately to provide answers one by one without advice or further study, in what Albright later called a “quite stunning” feat, which could be performed only by a leader with absolute authority. He agreed to ban future production and deployment of all ballistic missies with a range exceeding 500 kilometers (310 miles), although he did not specify a payload weight limit or what would be done with missiles already produced. Such a range limit would preclude the Taep’o-dong I, which had been test-launched in 1998, as well as its reported intercontinental successor, Taep’o-dong II, which was believed to be capable of reaching the US mainland and was among the principal motivations for the proposed US national missile defense plan. A 500-kilometer limit would also encompass the Nodong missiles, with a range of about 1,300 kilometers (807 miles), which had been a principal threat to Japan for several years. Under questioning by Albright, Kim accepted the need for verification of compliance with the missile agreements, but he also said that he could not accept “intrusive verification” because North Korea was neither an outlaw state nor a defendant on trial. Extensive progress had been made, but many details remained to be negotiated.

As partial compensation for the limits on his domestic missile programs, Kim proposed to Albright that other nations launch three or four North Korean scientific satellites per year into outer space, as the DPRK would no longer possess the rockets to do so itself. Such a possibility had been raised in general terms by US negotiator Robert Einhorn in the bilateral missile talks a month after the August 1998 test and also by Perry in his Pyongyang visit the following year. Kim Jong Il had first expressed interest in the idea during the visit of Russian president Vladimir Putin in July 2000, in a remark that Putin was quick to pass on to Clinton and other world leaders and quickly became the subject of public speculation.

The most important compensation, it was clear, would be the visit to North Korea of the president of the United States, which in Pyongyang’s view would end its pariah status and be tangible acceptance of its legitimacy and sovereignty for all the world to see. Even more than economic or other benefits, this had been the central objective of North Korea since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The 1993 Joint Declaration with the United States, including its “assurances against the threat and use of force” and its “mutual respect for each other’s sovereignty, and non-interference in each
other’s internal affairs,” had been an important initial step. The Agreed Framework of 1994, which specifically endorsed the earlier declaration, created the first nonhostile relationship between the two countries and was instrumental in ending the nuclear crisis. William Perry’s statements of US acceptance of North Korea had been among the most important aspects of his proposals. Most recently, the US-DPRK joint communiqué issued on the conclusion of Vice Marshal Jo’s visit to Washington declared that “neither government would have hostile intent toward the other” and “reaffirmed that their relations should be based on the principles of respect for each other’s sovereignty and non-interference in each other’s internal affairs.” That language, especially the latter formulation, was largely boilerplate, but coming from the United States was especially important to Pyongyang. From Kim Jong Il’s standpoint, the presence of a US president on its soil would demonstrate not only that the words had meaning but also that the diplomatic-security landscape in Korea had undergone a profound and historic change.