Read The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History Online
Authors: Don Oberdorfer,Robert Carlin
Later in the visit, the North Koreans and the “unofficial” US official explored an approach to dealing with the communiqué issue—that is, finding a way to script an encounter in New York at which DPRK and US diplomats could utter the right phrases, enough so the North could satisfy itself that the United States had reaffirmed the document, but not so much as to cause heartburn in Washington. After the Stanford delegation’s visit ended, the idea was brought back to the State Department, where it died. Even a nod in the direction of the October 2000 document was impossible.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, America’s sense of security in the post-Soviet world vanished. As the first of three hijacked jetliners exploded into the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, the Bush administration found itself confronted with what seemed to be an existential challenge, launched from half a world away and symbolic of a new world order in which America and its allies faced off against enemies great and small, seen and unseen, in an ideologically charged battle of proportions not witnessed since the Cold War.
The world expressed horror at the attack and loss of life in New York and Washington, DC, but few at home or abroad understood right away how profoundly events of that late-summer morning had shaken the people of the United States and their government. The attacks transformed US calculations about the type and magnitude of the threats it faced as well as the actions necessary to defend itself in a world now seen as sharply divided between good and evil. A primary concern of Washington became the frightening possibility that terrorists would gain possession of weapons of mass destruction. Of all the places terrorists might obtain such awful tools, North Korea was considered by most to be at the top of the list.
Given the North’s checkered history in carrying out or supporting terrorism, it seemed only prudent to fashion a policy anticipating such a danger and to deal with it proactively. Thus, the North Korean nuclear program became seen as not only a threat to East Asia, but potentially the source of a horrific terrorist attack on the United States as well. There was no evidence that Pyongyang was considering such a course, but there was absolutely no inclination to take the chance. Pyongyang quickly sent two condolence messages to Washington after the 9/11 attack, and sometime later North Korean UN ambassador Li Hyong Chol, clearly shaken personally by what he had seen in New York, expressed his shock to American officials.
If Pyongyang saw 9/11 as an opportunity to signal the United States that the two governments could find common ground on the issue of countering terrorism, Washington clearly did not. The North had previously (in October 2000) issued a joint statement with the United States on terrorism that might have been activated at this crucial moment, but a suggestion along those lines by Ambassador Jack Pritchard, the US negotiator with the North, was ignored. In remarks at the Foreign Press Center on November 19, Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly noted that the North’s response to 9/11 had “not been bad” and acknowledged that the North had sent condolences and even had signed UN antiterrorism conventions. Curiously, he made no mention of the joint statement on terrorism. In any case, by then the question was already moot. NSC Asia director Michael Green called it “flagrantly ridiculous” to think that the
United States might work with the North on counterterrorism after 9/11. Given the tenor of the times, that was undoubtedly true.
The wounds of the 9/11 attacks were still fresh and the general mood in the country still very tough when the president gave his annual State of the Union address to Congress in January 2002. In the address, Bush used the phrase
Axis of Evil
to describe Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. It was a rhetorical flourish, a speechwriter’s meat and potatoes, but it stuck in the public’s mind and for years afterward came to define policy, or at least the general perception of policy, toward Pyongyang. The Asian experts in the State Department saw the phrase as troubling, unnecessarily complicating efforts to reengage Pyongyang, confusing to US allies in the region, and raising concerns in several key capitals about the possibility of US military action against North Korea. (Unsurprisingly, both Seoul and Pyongyang, each for its own reasons, reacted negatively to the phrase.) In the eyes of the hard-liners in Washington, these consequences were of secondary concern. More important was that the questioning of the president’s words by the State Department was a sign of disloyalty.
At the time of the president’s speech, tensions between the United States and North Korea had already ticked upward. Shortly before the State of the Union, the Department of Defense released an unclassified executive summary of the Nuclear Posture Review; classified excerpts were leaked and appeared in the
New York Times
and the
Los Angeles Times
in March. The NPR was a congressionally mandated review meant to provide guidance on a number of very broad, strategically important questions concerning the numbers, disposition, and targeting of US nuclear weapons. For Pyongyang, these broader issues in US policy were not germane. What were germane were the references to North Korea. According to the leaked portions, North Korea and Iraq were described as “particular problems,” and, in addition to Russia, the North was on a list with six other countries as potential nuclear targets: North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and China.
The targeting list itself may not have been new, and in the context of the entire document the references to North Korea were minor. Fundamentally, it was hardly news to the North Koreans that they were an object of US military contingency planning, but the press reports about the NPR presented two problems. First, they excited a long-standing North Korean aversion to public, overt expressions of US military pressure. As one North Korean official had put it during offline discussions in Geneva in the autumn of 1994 in response to a US naval demonstration and remarks by a US admiral, “We know you have aircraft carriers, we know they are off our coast, but why do you have to talk about it?”
The second problem had to do with this public statement of intent. Given Washington’s commitments to the North in various agreements
during the Clinton years not to threaten the DPRK with nuclear weapons, the North took the reports about the NPR as yet another sign of serious US backsliding. It is not clear that everyone in Washington understood how mentioning the North in the NPR contradicted previous policy. When a North Korean diplomat complained about it in a meeting in New York in the spring, one US official taking part scratched his head and asked what the complaint was all about.
The South Koreans, for their part, were alarmed by what they perceived as US policy going in the wrong direction and creating a drag on their own efforts to engage Pyongyang. They fretted constantly about President Bush’s negative public statements about the North and considered his colorful rhetoric about Kim Jong Il particularly neuralgic. Washington might have thought the president’s candid remarks were leavened by frequent official protestations that he favored diplomacy and that the United States had no intention of using military force against the North. Seoul did not see it that way.
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Given the evolving plans for the invasion of Iraq, ensuring that the Korean issue did not boil over was crucial to the president. In a trip to South Korea in early-February 2002, soon after his “Axis of Evil” remarks, Bush demonstrated that he understood the need to repair the damage with the South, and especially to restore personal ties between the two leaders. This time his meeting with President Kim Dae Jung went well, in stark contrast to the March 2001 conversations. The centerpiece of the February trip was a joint visit by the two leaders to the final train station on the South Korean side of the demilitarized zone, restored in anticipation of concrete progress on an inter-Korean agreement to reconnect the long-severed railroad lines. The symbolism was clear—the United States supported Kim in his efforts to restore the railroad as part of the South Korean leader’s larger effort to knit the two Koreas together.
Yet even here, the administration had problems pulling in one direction. The Defense Department was strongly against the sort of breach in the DMZ that reconnecting the railway would create. The US military in South Korea had been dragging its feet, and in some cases actively opposing, the South’s efforts to open transportation corridors through the DMZ to the North. Where the US Embassy was doing its best to keep US-ROK ties intact, the US military in Korea, through its own channels, was portraying Blue House policy as anathema to the alliance. According to one observer on the scene, as soon as the Bush administration had come into office, the US military in Korea felt free to begin more open criticism of the ROK approach.
Things almost came unglued when Bush arrived in Seoul. The president’s statement at Dorasan Station would be watched closely as a signal of the state of the US-ROK alliance. On landing, Secretary of State Rice had a copy of the president’s proposed remarks and flashed it in front of Tom Hubbard, who by this time had become US ambassador to Seoul, and his deputy. Looking quickly at the text, the two diplomats saw it contained a reference to the Axis of Evil. “It stays in,” said Rice curtly. She did not specify what she meant, but both men understood perfectly. When the Blue House somehow obtained a copy of the remarks, it created problems the next day. Rice was furious that the South Koreans had seen a copy of the remarks—which surprisingly were not supposed to be passed to the host government—and blamed the US Embassy. The South Koreans, in turn, were furious that the president planned to include “Axis of Evil” on such an occasion and in a location picked to represent Kim Dae Jung’s policy of engagement and reconciliation. The discussions between the two sides were heated, but over the course of a long meeting, Kim and Bush found a basis for understanding. When the president made his remarks at the train station, the phrase had disappeared.
THREADS COME TOGETHER: JAPAN–NORTH KOREA TALKS
In January 2001, at about the same time Kim Jong Il was visiting China, DPRK first vice foreign minister Kang Sok Ju had flown to Singapore for a secret meeting with Hidenao Nakagawa, a former top aide to then Japanese prime minister Yoshiro Mori. At that point, Kim Jong Il was probably still proceeding on the assumption that the progress with the United States achieved in late 2000 was secure and would help him promote relations with Japan as part of a broader strategy to improve the North’s external security environment. Perhaps more important, a breakthrough in relations with Japan would feed into Kim’s evolving ideas for major domestic economic policy initiatives. These plans for significant changes in the North’s economy—normally, they would be called “reforms,” but the North Koreans did not like the word—required money, money the North Korean treasury did not have. Normalizing relations with Tokyo would open the door for Japanese reparations for its occupation of Korea earlier in the century, similar to the 1965 Japan-ROK settlement—though, with the passage of a quarter century, this sum could potentially be considerably larger than the $800 million in grants and loans Japan had paid to Seoul. But reparation could not be discussed unless Tokyo and Pyongyang reached some sort of understanding about how to deal with the question of Japanese abducted by the North Koreans over the past thirty years.
The January meeting in Singapore got nowhere, but on coming into office in April 2001, the new Japanese prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, decided to continue the contacts. In a series of secret meetings that stretched from the summer of 2001 until August 2002, sometimes in Kuala Lumpur, sometimes in northern China, Japan and the DPRK maneuvered, probed, parried, and tested each other’s intentions at both the personal and the official levels. In September 2001, Kim Jong Il replaced his representative in the talks with a mysterious figure whose identity was never revealed to the Japanese but who may have been a ranking official in the Ministry of State Security named Ryu Kwang.
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In response, in November, Koizumi replaced his own representative with Hitoshi Tanaka, director general of the Foreign Ministry’s Asia Bureau. In March 2002, the Japanese said they wanted Kang Sok Ju to attend, and at the next meeting, in April in Kuala Lumpur, Kang appeared. Rather than explore broader questions of Japan–North Korea relations, Kang wasted much of the time talking about a Japanese payment to the DPRK, something Tanaka had already clearly indicated in previous meetings that he could not touch.
To keep the threads aligned, in early April, and after urging from South Korean intelligence chief Lim Dong Won during a meeting with Kim Jong Il, Pyongyang tendered an invitation for a US delegation to visit the North. Unexpectedly, Washington held back because it was now moving into another policy review sparked by George Bush’s “gut instinct” that the United States should not get bogged down in a long series of messy negotiations with the North. What was needed, the White House decided, was something clean, clear, and, as it came to be called, “bold.” According to the US negotiator with North Korea, Ambassador Jack Pritchard, there wasn’t much guidance from the White House on what “bold” meant, nor was there much time to flesh out the idea. The basic idea was that the United States would provide assistance to the North, if and when Pyongyang addressed US concerns in the area of weapons of mass destruction—nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and missiles—terrorism, and human rights.
All the while, Kim Jong Il was working on his own bold approach, an elaborate choreography involving a number of players and moves. As far as the North Koreans were concerned (and they were the only ones who knew about all of the moving pieces), by late spring the DPRK’s agenda for the remainder of 2002 apparently looked like this: promulgation of
new economic measures, a visit by a high-level US official to put talks back on track, a summit meeting with Japan, a spurt of forward movement in inter-Korean relations (including North Korean participation in the Asian Games in Pusan), and, always concerned to have his back covered, a visit by Kim Jong Il to Russia, for his third meeting with Putin in as many years.