About N. Korea and how Bush undid it

May 2004

Washington Monthly

Rolling Blunder

How the Bush administration let North Korea get nukes.

By Fred Kaplan

Thanks to
Mike’s Blog Round Up on crooksandliars.com with links to more information

On Oct. 4, 2002, officials from the U.S. State Department flew to
Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, and confronted Kim Jong-il's
foreign ministry with evidence that Kim had acquired centrifuges for
processing highly enriched uranium, which could be used for building
nuclear weapons. To the Americans' surprise, the North Koreans
conceded. It was an unsettling revelation, coming just as the Bush
administration was gearing up for a confrontation with Iraq. This new
threat wasn't imminent; processing uranium is a tedious task; Kim
Jong-il was almost certainly years away from grinding enough of the
stuff to make an atomic bomb.

But the North Koreans had another route to nuclear weapons--a stash of
radioactive fuel rods, taken a decade earlier from its nuclear power
plant in Yongbyon. These rods could be processed into plutonium--and,
from that, into A-bombs--not in years but in months. Thanks to an
agreement brokered by the Clinton administration, the rods were locked
in a storage facility under the monitoring of international
weapons-inspectors. Common sense dictated that--whatever it did about
the centrifuges--the Bush administration should do everything possible
to keep the fuel rods locked up.

Unfortunately, common sense was in short supply. After a few shrill
diplomatic exchanges over the uranium, Pyongyang upped the ante. The
North Koreans expelled the international inspectors, broke the locks on
the fuel rods, loaded them onto a truck, and drove them to a nearby
reprocessing facility, to be converted into bomb-grade plutonium. The
White House stood by and did nothing. Why did George W. Bush--his
foreign policy avowedly devoted to stopping "rogue regimes" from
acquiring weapons of mass destruction--allow one of the world's most
dangerous regimes to acquire the makings of the deadliest WMDs? Given
the current mayhem and bloodshed in Iraq, it's hard to imagine a
decision more ill-conceived than invading that country unilaterally
without a plan for the "post-war" era. But the Bush administration's
inept diplomacy toward North Korea might well have graver consequences.
President Bush made the case for war in Iraq on the premise that Saddam
Hussein might soon have nuclear weapons--which turned out not to be
true. Kim Jong-il may have nuclear weapons now; he certainly has enough
plutonium to build some, and the reactors to breed more.

Yet Bush has neither threatened war nor pursued diplomacy. He has
recently, and halfheartedly, agreed to hold talks; the next round is
set for June. But any deal that the United States might cut now to
dismantle North Korea's nuclear-weapons program will be harder and
costlier than a deal that Bush could have cut 18 months ago, when he
first had the chance, before Kim Jong-il got his hands on bomb-grade
material and the leverage that goes with it.


The pattern of decision making that led to this debacle--as described
to me in recent interviews with key former administration officials who
participated in the events--will sound familiar to anyone who has
watched Bush and his cabinet in action. It is a pattern of wishful
thinking, blinding moral outrage, willful ignorance of foreign
cultures, a naive faith in American triumphalism, a contempt for the
messy compromises of diplomacy, and a knee-jerk refusal to do anything
the way the Clinton administration did it.


Negotiating with the mad man

Few countries on earth are more difficult to deal with than North
Korea. Since the end of the Korean War 50 years ago, the hermetically
sealed regime--the first and the last of Stalin's idolators--has
brutalized its own people, threatened its neighbors, and stymied
outsiders.

Bill Clinton, a president not known for hawkishness, nearly went to war against North Korea in the spring of 1994. Five
years earlier, during the presidency of George Bush's father, the CIA
had discovered the North Koreans were building a reprocessing facility
near their nuclear reactor at Yongbyon. It was this reactor that, when
finished, would allow them to convert the fuel rods into weapons-grade
plutonium. Now, barely a year into Clinton's
first term in office, they were preparing to remove the fuel rods from
their storage site, expel the international weapons inspectors, and
withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (which North Korea
had signed in 1985).

In response, Clinton pushed the United Nations Security Council to
consider sanctions. North Korea's spokesmen proclaimed that sanctions
would trigger war. Clinton's generals drew up plans to send 50,000
troops to South Korea--bolstering the 37,000 that had been there for
decades--as well as over 400 combat jets, 50 ships, and additional
battalions of Apache helicopters, Bradley fighting vehicles,
multiple-launch rockets, and Patriot air-defense missiles. Beyond mere
plans, Clinton ordered in an advance team of 250 soldiers to set up
logistical headquarters that could manage this massive influx of
firepower. These moves sent a signal to the
North Koreans that the president was willing to go to war to keep the
fuel rods under international control. And, several former officials
insist, he would have. At the very least, they say, he was prepared to
launch an air strike on the Yongbyon reactor, even though he knew that
doing so could provoke war.

Yet at the same time, Clinton set up a diplomatic back-channel to end the crisis peacefully. The
vehicle for this channel was former President Jimmy Carter, who in June
1994 was sent to Pyongyang to talk with Kim Il Sung, then the leader of
North Korea. Carter's trip was widely portrayed at the time as a
private venture, unapproved by President Clinton. However, a new book
about the '94 North Korean crisis, Going Critical, written by three
former officials who played key roles in the events' unfolding, reveals that Clinton recruited Carter to go.

Carter was an ideal choice. As president, he had once announced that he
would withdraw all U.S. troops from South Korea. He retracted the idea
after it met fierce opposition, even from liberal Democrats. But it
endeared him to Kim Il Sung, who, after Carter left office, issued him
a standing invitation to come visit.

Clinton's cabinet was divided over whether to let Carter go. Officials
who had served under Carter--Clinton's secretary of state, Warren
Christopher, and national security adviser, Anthony Lake--opposed the
trip. Carter, they warned, was a loose cannon who would ignore his
orders and free-lance a deal. Vice President Al Gore favored the trip,
seeing no other way out of the crisis. Clinton sided with Gore. As
Clinton saw it, Kim Il Sung had painted himself into a corner and
needed an escape hatch--a clear path to back away from the brink
without losing face, without appearing to buckle under pressure from
the U.S. government. Carter might offer that hatch.

Both sides in this internal debate turned out to be right. Kim agreed
to back down. And Carter went way beyond his instructions, negotiating
the outlines of a treaty and announcing the terms live on CNN,
notifying Clinton only minutes in advance.

Four months later, on Oct. 21, 1994, the United States and North Korea
signed a formal accord based on those outlines, called the Agreed
Framework. Under its terms, North Korea would renew its commitment to
the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, lock up the fuel rods, and let
the IAEA inspectors back in to monitor the facility. In exchange, the
United States, with financial backing from South Korea and Japan, would
provide two light-water nuclear reactors for electricity (explicitly
allowed under the NPT), a huge supply of fuel oil, and a pledge not to
invade North Korea.

The accord also specified that, upon delivery of the first light-water
reactor (the target date was 2003), intrusive inspections of suspected
North Korean nuclear sites would begin. After the second reactor
arrived, North Korea would ship its fuel rods out of the country. It
would essentially give up the ability to build nuclear weapons.

Other sections of the accord--which were less publicized--pledged both
sides to "move toward full normalization of political and economic
relations." Within three months of its signing, the two countries were
to lower trade barriers and install ambassadors in each other's
capitals. The United States was also to "provide full assurances" that
it would never use, or threaten to use, nuclear weapons against North
Korea.

Initially, North Korea kept to its side of the bargain. The same cannot
be said of our side. Since the accord was not a formal treaty, Congress
did not have to ratify the terms, but it did balk on the financial
commitment. So did South Korea. The light-water reactors were never
funded. Steps toward normalization were never taken. In 1996, one of
Pyongyang's spy submarines landed on South Korean shores; in reaction,
Seoul suspended its share of energy assistance; Pyongyang retaliated
with typically inflammatory rhetoric. Somewhere around this time, we
now know, the regime also secretly started to export missile technology
to Pakistan in exchange for Pakistani centrifuges.

By the middle of 2000, relations started to warm somewhat. Kim
Jong-il--who had taken over after his father's death in 1994--invited
Clinton to Pyongyang, promising to sign a treaty banning the production
of long-range missiles and the export of all missiles. Secretary of
State Madeleine Albright made the advance trip in October.


Kim Jong-il is clearly one of the world's battier leaders. Tales are
legion of his egomaniacal extravagance and his weird ambitions. Yet
those who saw him negotiate with Albright say he can behave very
soundly when he wants. Robert Einhorn, who was Clinton's chief North
Korea negotiator (and is now an analyst at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, a conservative think tank in Washington), took
part in the 12 hours of talks with Kim. "He struck me as a very
serious, rational guy who knew his issues pretty well," Einhorn recalls.

Wendy Sherman, who was Albright's North Korean policy coordinator, came
away with the same impression. "There were 14 unresolved issues,"
Sherman says, "and he sat with the secretary, answering all her
questions." Einhorn elaborates: "When Albright presented him with the
qustions, at first he looked a little puzzled, as if he hadn't known
about them. Albright offered to give him time to look them over, but he
said, 'No, no, I can do this.' He went down the list, one by one, and
gave specific explanations. For example, on the question of missile
exports, 'Yes, I mean no exports of missiles of any range.' And 'Yes, I
mean to ban the export of missile technology, not just the missiles.'
On issues where it was clear he didn't want to be drawn out yet, he
skipped over them. He understood where he wanted to be clear and where
he wasn't going to be."

After the Albright-Kim talks, Einhorn and his
staff, working at a frantic pace with North Korean diplomats, hammered
out the beginnings of a deal. But time ran out. Clinton devoted
the final weeks of his second term, futilely as it happened, to a peace
treaty in the Middle East. The unsettled nature of the 2000
presidential election, especially the prolonged Florida recount,
suspended all other diplomatic activity. There were still disagreements
between the two sides over a missile deal.
However, as Clinton left the White House, the stage was set for
diplomatic progress--and, in the meantime, the fuel rods remained under
lock and key.

Sunshine and moral clarity

A few days before Bush took office in January
2001, a half-dozen members of Clinton's national-security team crossed
the Potomac River to the Northern Virginia home of Colin Powell.
President-elect George W. Bush had named the former general as his
secretary of state, a choice widely viewed, and praised, as a signal
that the new president would be following a moderate, internationalist
foreign policy.

The Clinton team briefed Powell for two hours on the status of the
North Korean talks. Halfway into the briefing, Condoleezza Rice, the
new national security adviser, who had just flown in from meeting with
Bush in Texas, showed up. One participant remembers Powell listening to
the briefing with enthusiasm. Rice, however, was clearly skeptical.
"The body language was striking," he says. "Powell
was leaning forward. Rice was very much leaning backward. Powell
thought that what we had been doing formed an interesting basis for
progress. He was disabused very quickly."

In early March, barely a month into Bush's term,
Kim Dae Jung, South Korea's president, made a state visit to
Washington. On the eve of the visit, Powell told reporters that, on
Korean policy, Bush would pick up where Clinton had left off. The
White House instantly rebuked him; Bush made it clear he would do no
such thing. Powell had to eat his words, publicly admitting that he had
leaned "too forward in my skis." It was the first of many instances
when Powell would find himself out of step with the rest of the Bush
team--the lone diplomat in a sea of hardliners.


If Powell was embarrassed by Bush's stance, Kim Dae Jung was
humiliated. KDJ, as some Korea-watchers called him, was a new kind of
South Korean leader, a democratic activist who had spent years in
prison for his political beliefs and had run for president promising a
"sunshine policy" of opening up relations with the North. During
the Clinton years, South Korea's ruling party had been implacably
hostile to North Korea. Efforts to hold serious disarmament talks were
obstructed at least as much by Seoul's sabotage as by Pyongyang's
maneuverings. Now South Korea had a leader who could be a partner in
negotiating strategy--but the United States had a leader who was
uninterested in negotiations.

In Bush's view, to negotiate with an evil regime would be to recognize
that regime, legitimize it, and--if the negotiations led to a treaty or
a trade--prolong it. To Bush, North Korea's dictator was the
personification of evil. He told one reporter, on the record, that he
"loathed" Kim Jong-il. It was no surprise that Bush would distrust
anyone who wanted to accommodate his regime. Bush not only distrusted
Kim Dae Jung but viewed him with startling contempt. Charles "Jack"
Pritchard, who had been director of the National Security Council's
Asia desk under Clinton and was now the State Department's special
North Korean envoy under Bush, recalls, "Bush's attitude toward KDJ
was, 'Who is this naive, old guy?'" Kim Dae Jung had also committed
what Bush regarded as a personal snub. Shortly before his Washington
trip, the South Korean president met Russian president Vladimir Putin,
and issued a joint statement endorsing the preservation of the
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Everyone knew that Bush placed a high priority on scuttling the ABM Treaty.

So when Kim Dae Jung arrived in Washington, Bush publicly criticized
him and his sunshine policy. Bush and his advisers--especially Vice
President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld--decided
not only to isolate North Korea, in the hopes that its regime would
crumble, but also to ignore South Korea, in hopes that its next
election would restore a conservative.

Bush was the nieve one, it turned out. Kim
Jong-il survived U.S. pressures. And Kim Dae Jung was replaced by Roh
Moo Hyun, a populist who ran on a campaign that was not only
pro-sunshine but also anti-American. Relations were soured further by
Bush's 2002 State of the Union Address, in which he tagged North Korea,
Iran, and Iraq as an "axis of evil." A month later, in February, Bush
made his first trip to Seoul. James Kelly, his assistant secretary of
state for Asian affairs, went in advance to set up the meeting.
Pritchard, who accompanied Kelly, recalls, "The
conversation in the streets of Seoul was, 'Is there going to be a war?
What will these crazy Americans do?' Roh said to us, 'I wake up in a
sweat every morning, wondering if Bush has done something unilaterally
to affect the [Korean] peninsula."

By this time, Clinton's Agreed Framework was unraveling.
The light-water reactors, it was clear, were never going to be built.
Normalization of relations was another non-starter. The CIA got wind
that North Korea may have been acquiring centrifuges for enriching
uranium since the late 1990s, most likely from Pakistan. By September
2002, the conclusion was inescapable. It was debatable whether this
literally violated the Agreed Framework, which dealt with the
manufacturing of plutonium, but it was a sneaky end run and a violation
of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

On Oct. 4, Kelly flew to Pyongyang to confront North Korean officials
with the evidence. The North Koreans admitted it was true. For almost
two weeks, the Bush administration kept this meeting a secret. The U.S.
Senate was debating a resolution to give President Bush the authority
to go to war in Iraq. The public rationale for war was that Saddam
Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. If it was known that
North Korea was also making WMDs--and nuclear weapons, at that--it
would have muddied the debate over Iraq. Some would have wondered
whether Iraq was the more compelling danger--or asked why Bush saw a
need for war against Iraq but not against North Korea. The Senate
passed the Iraqi war resolution on Oct. 11. The Bush administration
publicly revealed what it had known for weeks about North Korea's
enriched-uranium program on Oct. 17.

On Oct. 20, Bush announced that it was formally withdrawing from the 1994 Agreed Framework.
It halted oil supplies to North Korea and urged other countries to cut
off all economic relations with Pyongyang. The North Koreans, perhaps
realizing that they had once again boxed themselves into a diplomatic
corner, decided to replay the crisis of 1994: In late December, they
expelled the international weapons inspectors, restarted the nuclear
reactor at Yongbyon, and unlocked the container holding the fuel rods.

On Jan. 10, 2003, they withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
However, they also said they would reverse their actions and retract
their declarations if the United States resumed its obligations under
the Agreed Framework and signed a non-aggression pledge.

Another sign that Pyongyang was looking for a diplomatic way out came
on that same day, when delegates from North Korea's U.N. mission paid a
visit to Bill Richardson, the governor of New Mexico and a former U.N.
ambassador in the Clinton administration. Richardson had bargained with
North Korea before. As a congressman, he once traveled to Pyongyang to
retrieve the body of a constituent whose Army helicopter had been shot
down after drifting across the DMZ. He later negotiated the return of
an American hiker who was arrested as a spy after inadvertently
crossing the North Korean border.

Since President Clinton had used Jimmy Carter as an "unofficial"
intermediary to jump-start nuclear talks in '94, North Korean officials
may have inferred that this was the Americans' way of "saving face" in
dealing with out-of-favor regimes--to have middlemen do behind the
scenes what presidents could not do publicly.

Richardson seemed willing to serve as an intermediary. During the two
days of talks in Santa Fe, he stayed closely in touch with the State
Department. Richardson was no showboat, had no partisan animus,
and--unlike Carter in Clinton's day--probably could have played
middleman to Bush without going beyond his instructions. But nothing
came of the Richardson gambit. As Pritchard recalls it, "The North
Koreans were grasping for straws, looking for any friendly face. But
they forgot to do the math. Richardson was a
Democrat, a Clinton guy. No way would Bush have anything to do with
him." Einhorn agrees. In the Bush administration, as he delicately puts
it, "The default mode was skepticism about anything involving Clinton."

Read the rest Washington Monthly and mikes-blog-round-up By: John Amato