Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir

by Christopher R. Hill

  The first issue was to gain more time for the actual negotiations. One of the main reasons that the previous three sessions had made so little progress was the fact that their preset duration was so short. Delegates would arrive on a Tuesday, talk on Wednesday, and allow the Chinese hosts to issue a nonbinding statement on Thursday as everyone made their way through Beijing traffic out to the airport. I had raised the issue with Wu during a trip to Beijing in April, explaining that I thought we should leave the time frame open until we had an achievement in the form of something that everyone agreed to. Wu paused for a moment, perhaps contemplating potential food budget problems at the Foreign Ministry’s negotiating facility in the event the stay were left unlimited, but he agreed.

  The next issue was the need to come up with a joint statement that would strongly suggest progress in the negotiations, albeit not a final document, and not just a Chinese statement. Everybody at the talks needed to agree, hence joint. Recalling the Dayton Peace Accords, which were preceded by the two documents known as “Agreed Principles” and “Further Agreed Principles,” I thought it was a good way to jump-start a moribund process and gradually bring the North Koreans into some kind of envelope of negotiation.

  Several of the parties, including the Russians, were in favor of a statement of principles because they understood the difficulty of getting agreement on anything, let alone a full page of negotiation-guiding principles. The Russians also had vast experience in international negotiation and had a realistic sense of what was possible and what was not. That said, the Russians rarely took the lead in any phase of the upcoming negotiations except to support a process of dialogue. Their diplomats were talented and experienced, but they were unable to hide their cynicism and even disgust about the process. Aleksandr Alekseyev was typical of their stable of skilled but jaded diplomats. His body language conveyed someone who given enough time might have thought of a worse place to be than the Six Party Talks, but in the meantime he acted like he was in a living hell.

  In our meetings at the Seoul Plaza Hotel and in long sessions on the telephone, Song Minsoon and I had put together several ideas that could serve as a basis for a joint statement. The basis, we agreed, would be North Korea’s willingness to do away with its nuclear programs, but we understood that if that goal were achieved it would be worth something to get.

  Song wanted to take a tough stand against Japan’s efforts to include the issue of abductions in the document, and had gone public with his concerns about the Japanese, an opinion that certainly didn’t lose him points in the Blue House but caused problems for the Japanese. I pushed back with Minsoon, arguing that Japanese negotiators had a serious public opinion problem back home and could hardly be expected to ignore what was really the issue for the Japanese: the abduction of several of its citizens by the North Koreans in the late 1970s and early ’80s to use these hapless people as language teachers and other cross-cultural lessons for North Korean spies. Originally there were thirteen people confirmed to have been abducted. But that number grew to be seventeen, which drove Japan’s diplomacy further into isolation. Song’s retort was telling: “Do you have any idea how many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of our citizens have been abducted by the North Koreans?”

  Ultimately, what became known as the Japanese abduction issue became the rallying cry for those who opposed the Six Party negotiations, or really any negotiations with the North Koreans in the first place. Japanese groups including families of abductees, but often just supporters of one kind or another, descended upon Washington to spread the word about North Korean perfidy. The groups from Japan, often carrying pictures of abductees, targeted congressional offices, think tanks, National Security Council staff, and offices in the State Department to press their case that nothing should be done on North Korea’s nuclear arsenal until the abduction issue was to be solved—often in the form of gaining release of people murdered years ago by the North Koreans.

  Japanese prime minister Koizumi had taken up the abductee issue in his meetings with Kim Jong Il in 2002, a meeting that resulted in the jaw-dropping admission followed by the equally jaw-dropping oral apology that they had indeed abducted thirteen Japanese during the period of 1977–83, just as the abductee groups had claimed. Five of the thirteen were released a month later, but of the remaining eight, Kim claimed that all had died (the North Koreans provided death certificates at the time, but later admitted that these were not originals and had been drawn up to respond to Japanese demands to see the documented causes of death). One of the eight was the youngest of the abductees, a then thirteen-year-old girl named Megumi, who, the North Koreans told Koizumi’s delegation, had tragically committed suicide back in 1994. In late 2004, the North Koreans provided what they described as Megumi’s ashes. But when the Japanese tested the ashes (in a controversial process that critics claimed was amateurishly conducted and politically tainted), they were found not to be those of Megumi, a finding that was to further exacerbate the issue. Since 2004, the North Koreans had refused to engage again on the issue.

  One day I was asked to come to the office of Florida congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and brief her on North Korea. Representative Ros-Lehtinen was a strong-minded Cuban-American and a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Maintaining the Cuba embargo, combating human trafficking, and tormenting the State Department were her priorities, and not necessarily in that order.

  I found her standing in front of her desk, smiling as always, with about fifteen Japanese gathered in the room, of whom many were photographers. She held out a list of abductees and ceremonially handed it to me as the cameras clicked away. I had met with the abductee supporters on many occasions in my own office, and I even knew several of the Washington-based Japanese photographers, so there was nothing unpleasant or embarrassing for me in meeting these Japanese again. What was, of course, unusual to say the least was that an American member of Congress would try to set up an American diplomat for the apparent purpose of embarrassing him in front of foreigners.

  Ros-Lehtinen, as she always was with me in public and in private, was very affable as the Japanese filed out of the room, and even chatted for a few minutes before rushing off to her next appointment. Briefing a member of Congress is a matter taken seriously by the State Department. Indeed, Senate confirmation is always provisional on the basis of the nominee’s willingness to brief the Congress, an obligation I thought I was fulfilling that day.

  The encounter with Ros-Lehtinen highlighted a fact that was to be increasingly clear over the months and years of dealing with the North Koreans: nobody liked the idea of talking with them, but nobody had a better idea, either. Since Bosnia I had long since come to the realization that policy can have different, even contradictory elements. During the run-up to Dayton, the British representative, Pauline Neville-Jones, had said in a meeting, “We can bomb and talk at the same time.”

  But bombing and talking are elements of a strategy that can be controlled. One can talk, or not talk, depending on the situation. One can bomb or not bomb. In the case of some of the sanctions envisioned, these became doomsday machines that once imposed could not, at least not in any timely way, be unimposed. They also became weapons in the hands of those who did not want to see the negotiations continue.

  The fact was that North Korea was the most heavily sanctioned country in the world, and it was unclear that any additional imposition of sanctions would yield a different result.

  Managing the Japan relationship proved to be a complex process. As competent and pragmatic as Kenichiro Sasae was, I found, especially after Koizumi retired in 2006, that the Japanese had lost their way in dealing with others and, as the Six Party meetings unfolded, were often the delegation least in line with the others. What we anticipated to be a five-on-one frequently became far more muddled as South Koreans openly complained about Japanese behavior, especially in subsequent sessions when all parties—except the Japanese—were working on their domestic political authorities to provide hea
vy fuel oil to induce the North Koreans to shut down their plutonium plant and accept international inspectors in their facilities.

  By that time I had made numerous visits to Tokyo and had a great deal of sympathy for what Sasae was dealing with. It was not unlike what I had to wade through in Washington, with attitudes toward government at an all-time low. Sasae invited me to dinner and drinks with senior Japanese politicians, perhaps in an effort to show them what he had to work with in me, but I like to think it was also to show me what kind of difficult people he had back in Tokyo. In these sessions over sushi and whiskey, I told the politicians how hard Sasae had beaten me up over inclusion of abductee issues in the talks. All true, except that some of them would have been disappointed to hear how pragmatic and reasonable Sasae was in dealing with it.

  One of the expectations of the East Asian security club in Washington, of which NSC Asia director Mike Green was a charter member, along with many other think tankers and academics, was that in anticipation of Six Party sessions I should take part in three-party meetings with the Japanese and South Koreans. But rather than formulate common positions, I found these sessions represented more opportunities to have me hone the mediating skills I had forged in the Bosnian crucible. As reasonable as Song and Sasae were individually, their reasonableness did not project in these larger meetings. As I told Secretary Rice after one session: “I never knew Asians could be so sarcastic with one another.” Frequently, after one got finished eviscerating the other’s point, he would look over at me as if for approval. I tried every icebreaker conversation I knew—convincing teenagers to take useful courses in college, complaining about former diplomatic assignments, and baseball, a subject that united the three countries certainly more than positions at the Six Party Talks.

  In Bosnia, the equivalent problem was our creation of the Bosnian-Croat Federation, a shotgun marriage consummated during the worst years of the war. Those sessions usually went horribly, but at least the United States had some real clout in dealing with the other two. Japan and Korea were not to be confused with constituent parties of a fledgling Balkan state. The last straw was a lunch in Beijing in which Song Minsoon had refused to emerge to go in front of the cameras with Sasae and me. It was left to me to explain that Minsoon had been called away from the lunch urgently. Actually, he was hiding out in the restaurant waiting for the Korean and Japanese journalists to leave. I told Secretary Rice I couldn’t take it anymore. Give me the Bosnian Serbs any day! Each trilateral session left us worse off than we were before, and I would rather meet the Japanese and South Korean separately. She agreed.

  But back in Washington, D.C., a town known not so much for second chances as for second-guessing, I was criticized for not being dedicated enough in taking advantage of this opportunity for trilateral cooperation.

  As we filed into the grand hall at the Diaoyutai conference facility, I was struck by the extraordinary preparations the Chinese had made for the occasion. I thought of all the books I had read about multilateral conferences, the grandeur of the European venues, the more plain functionalism of the American sites. The Chinese erred on the side of grandeur more than functionality, but what the facility conveyed was that China was giving these negotiations its best shot, while imparting a sense of its power. If this all failed, it would not be because China did not make an adequate effort.

  I took my seat at the U.S. side of the enormous hexagon table structure, with each of the six table sides (the tables themselves were only some three feet wide) containing five seats, the center one reserved for the head of the delegation. Behind each green felt-covered table side were some twenty to twenty-five chairs reserved for additional members of the delegation. The diameter of the circle of tables was some sixty feet, with a large floral arrangement in the center, access to which would have been possible only by crawling under one of the sides of the table.

  The floral arrangements contained five large plastic tulips, which I soon discovered had a mundane but very functional purpose: each of the five represented one of the languages in the conference (Korean, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, and English) and was being used as part of the consecutive interpretation system. Thus when Wu Dawei spoke, each tulip would dutifully light up and remain lit until each interpreter was done interpreting his statement in the other languages, at which point the speaker, surveying all the extinguished tulips, could move to the next paragraph. Some interpreters were faster than others. The English tulip, for example, lit up along with the others, but went dark again somewhat more quickly than the Japanese tulip, which was often the last to be extinguished because the interpreter was trying to get it exactly right. How would one know which tulip represented which language? Easy. The tulip representing the language being spoken did not light up. Thus, when I spoke the English tulip stayed unlit.

  As the above suggests, this venue, impressive as it was, was no place to get any real work done. Wu would convene the day’s meeting. Each of the other delegation heads would have an opportunity to say something, usually not very positive, at which point Wu would thank us all and adjourn the so-called plenary. Then the work would begin.

  Typically, I would start with bilateral meetings with the Japanese, South Koreans, and Wu’s Chinese delegation, and then my delegation would sit down for a session with the North Koreans. Generally, attendance would be limited to the principal plus six or seven. In that summer of 2005, I would make sure that Victor Cha, representing the national security staff, was present, plus Jim Foster, our Korea desk director, and Joe DeTrani, my overall deputy for the talks. I would try to rotate in as many technical staff as possible. Staff who did not get into a meeting would spend their time in the corridor using their cell phones to call back to their offices in Washington, often to complain that they were left out of meetings.

  Sessions with the North Koreans would be fairly stiff affairs, although I was struck again by the fact that Kim Gye Gwan did not seem to need to refer to notes or talking points, despite the North Koreans’ reputation as robotlike negotiators.

  In talking with Kim I made sure that his own note takers were getting it all down, since I assumed what was important was what people back in Pyongyang were hearing about the talks. I noticed that he, as many diplomats are prone to do, would occasionally posture for his note takers by going into a diatribe about our supposed hostile policy to his country. I would respond in kind, pointing out that “hostile policy” is something for which the North Koreans have no equal. But mainly I tried to keep them on task by going through the elements of the draft joint statement that the Chinese had put together—largely on the basis of the draft that Minsoon and I had worked out months before.

  After meeting with the North Koreans, I would immediately brief the South Koreans and Japanese (separately, of course), and would touch base with Condi Rice back in Washington often very early morning or late at night, when she seemed always, no matter when I called, to be getting on or getting off her elliptical machine. I needed to speak with her because in the meantime she would have been receiving phone calls from members of “my team” complaining that I was violating instructions by talking to the North Koreans. It was perfectly within my guidance to be speaking directly with the North Koreans, but many people found that anathema, besides which they had a literalist view of what constitutes a multilateral conference.

  After one week of the conference I took score of how many bilateral meetings I had had with the five other parties, so as to set the meetings with the North Koreans in the context of the organization of the talks. Of course, I had more issues to talk about with the North Koreans than I did with our allies, the Japanese and South Koreans, with whom we were also having evening social events (separately), but I did not want a situation to develop in which I was meeting more with the North Korean delegation than the delegations of our allies, so in order to make the numbers look good I would add more meetings with the others. This prompted Minsoon at one point to be one of the first South Korean diplomats to turn down
a bilateral with the Americans:

  “But Chris, I just saw you an hour ago. We had breakfast this morning and we are on for dinner tonight. Why do we have to meet this afternoon again?”

  “Never mind that, Minsoon. I just have to see you.”

  Whether it is in their manual of negotiation or not, the North Koreans would have an annoying habit of agreeing to something, then coming back and not agreeing to what they had just agreed. This was a habit that simply needed to be broken.

  On one occasion, Kim Gye Gwan returned to talks after an hour break (I always suspected he was using these numerous breaks for taking a nap) to inform me that he had “new instructions from Pyongyang,” that his position had changed. I called my own break, left the room, and did not deal with him for another three days, until Wu Dawei patched up the difference. I told Wu that meeting directly was a tactic, not a policy (a line I borrowed from Secretary Rice), and that if meeting with them was not going to yield any results I was happy not to meet with them and confine my contacts to the plenary (and the tulips). That sufficiently upset Wu that he said he would immediately work on it. I told him I was willing to be the good cop (a concept that Chinese cops-and-robbers movies had long since mastered) but that he needed to be the bad cop, and that the next time I saw him I wanted to “see some blood on the floor.” Wu gave me a concerned look, as if to assure himself I was speaking metaphorically, and again told me he would address the problem with Kim.