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

by Christopher R. Hill

  “We heard there might be some new thinking in Washington about the relationship with us.”

  “Not that I am aware of,” I responded, “but it is funny because we had heard that there might be some new thinking about the nuclear issue in Wellington.” I had in mind a series of telegrams our departing ambassador to New Zealand had sent hinting (against any evidence I was aware of) that New Zealand was rethinking the ban on nuclear ships.

  “Not that I am aware of,” McKinnon answered, as if to mimic my reply to him.

  We talked about New Zealand’s nuclear ban, its durability, how it came to pass in the first place, why it continued to enjoy support from both the Labor and Conservative parties, a kind of “identity issue” for the Kiwis.

  “Well,” I began, worrying that John had come a long way for this short conversation, “perhaps we can talk about how things are going in the Pacific.”

  There are fourteen Pacific Island states, all tiny states with big problems, and all ones that New Zealand was carefully tracking. John explained New Zealand’s efforts to counter human trafficking, build up capacity in police forces around the region, provide humanitarian assistance as well as economic and other technical aid, and support regional integration. The list went on. As he continued, I realized there were many things we should be doing with New Zealand. We should not permit a Cold War–era, frozen disagreement from the 1980s to divide us.

  John concluded by asking if I could visit Wellington whenever my schedule permitted it. With his briefing on New Zealand’s regional activities very much on my mind, I asked if I could meet with some of the people performing these tasks in the ministry. “Frankly, I would like to go and discuss everything under the sun—except the nuclear problem,” I told him.

  I had found the perfect antidote to North Korea and its nuclear ambitions: a country with quite the opposite instincts in every respect. I told Secretary Rice that I thought we could do something more with the New Zealand relationship, especially given their work in the Pacific Island states. I told her we ought to “park” the nuclear disagreement, a kind of relic of the Cold War, and agree to disagree.

  East Asian and Pacific Affairs Bureau Special Assistant Kamala Lakhdhir and I arrived in Wellington in March 2006 on a visit to follow up on some of the discussions McKinnon and I had in Washington. Wellington is a quiet sort of capital. As one Kiwi explained, it would be like Bethesda, Maryland, without Washington, D.C., next to it. As promised, the New Zealanders kept us busy through the two days, meeting parliamentarians, politicians, foreign ministry officials, and Prime Minister Helen Clark, who discussed bilateral issues with me while working through her in-box, an impressive display of multitasking, I thought, as I watched her scrawl notes on the corners of memos while simultaneously asking me questions about North Korea. During the visit we discussed everything, except for the elephant-in-the-room nuclear issue.

  At the concluding press conference, the always feisty New Zealand journalists pressed me to talk about the nuclear issue to see if the U.S. position had changed (big news for them!), or if New Zealand’s position had changed (even bigger news!). I kept my remarks to an expression of appreciation for New Zealand’s Provincial Reconstruction Team in Afghanistan, and for New Zealand’s work on police training in the Pacific Island states. The discussion on the nuclear issue went something like this:

  “Has Washington changed its position on the nuclear issue?”

  “No, our position has not changed.”

  “What is the U.S. position on the nuclear issue.”

  “Our position on the New Zealand nuclear-freeze zone is well-known.”

  “Can you restate it here.”

  “You can look it up on our website.”

  I left Wellington without publicly mentioning the New Zealand nuclear issue, convinced that if we could just move on there was a lot we could cooperate on.

  I returned to Washington and asked Secretary Rice to invite Foreign Minister Winston Peters to Washington to discuss regional issues and what we could do to improve the bilateral relationship, understanding that neither side was going to change its views on the nuclear-free zone.

  Peters arrived in Washington having taken an unusual route through Las Vegas, where he had stopped to see a boxing match. Though not a boxing fan (to my knowledge), Condi was one of the most enthusiastic sports fans I had ever met, so the explanation that the New Zealand foreign minister was on his way to Washington via Las Vegas was a good prelude to the meeting. A few months later, Secretary Rice saw Foreign Minister Peters at an international meeting talking about the North Koreans.

  “He’s really great,” she whispered, as Peters excoriated the North Koreans with the kind of dripping sarcasm that went over many heads in the room, but which Condi and I were getting a kick out of.

  “The New Zealanders are pretty intense on nuclear stuff. They really don’t like nukes,” I deadpanned.

  Nine months later, Prime Minister Clark, who had made no friend of the White House given her strong criticism of President Bush in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, was welcomed by President Bush in March 2007 in a sign that relations between the United States and New Zealand were much improved. (The visit was in part facilitated by Australian prime minister John Howard, who had told President Bush a few months earlier that he and Clark worked well together despite their political differences.) By the time Condi Rice arrived in Auckland in July 2008, she pronounced that differences over the nuclear-free zone would no longer hold the relationship back. “We have moved on,” she said. With Prime Minister Clark standing at her side Secretary Rice described New Zealand as a “friend and ally.”

  18

  BREAKFAST WITH CHENEY

  In July 2007, Secretary Rice asked me to join her in the Oval Office to brief the president and vice president on the North Korean process. The president was energized by the fact that the Six Party Talks, the multilateral framework that he and then Chinese president Jiang Zemin had worked through at the president’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, some from years before, was finally making some progress. I did all I could to lower expectations, explaining that we had taken a long time to get to this point of shutting down the plutonium plant. It would probably take another long period of time before we could expect the North Koreans to turn over plutonium already produced.

  As I explained the state of affairs to the president, who was seated to the right of the fireplace while the vice president sat in the wing chair to the left, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that the vice president, quiet throughout, had fallen asleep. As I enumerated my first two points with my right hand, starting with my thumb, I turned slightly to the left to the sleeping veep for the last two, “Thirdly, we are going to need to work closely with the South Koreans . . . and fourthly . . .” He remained sound asleep.

  As Condi and I walked to the black SUV, waiting on West Executive Drive outside the West Wing side entrance, she commented, “I think you noticed the vice president. That happens a lot these days.” She didn’t elaborate on what “that” was and I didn’t ask her to since it was pretty clear. A day later, it was reported that the vice president had entered George Washington University Hospital to have a procedure to replace the pacemaker on his heart. I felt some guilt at having made fun of someone with a bad heart. I also reflected on a vice president who, having been laughably (not to speak of tragically) wrong about rose-petal-covered streets in Baghdad, seemed to continue to conduct his own foreign policy, regardless of the president’s views, and seemed, especially in the second term, so out of sync with his boss. Of course, it wasn’t just the president’s views he ignored. Cheney didn’t seem to care what anyone thought.

  In a Situation Room discussion presided over by the president and attended by several cabinet-level members, Cheney began a lengthy, but completely faulty, retelling of a report he had obviously not read particularly carefully that morning, concerning North Korean cooperation with Iran. It fell to Condi, as the president looked on, to spea
k up and say, “Mr. Vice President, with all respect I read that report and that is not what it said.” I watched anxiously from my backbench position behind Condi to see what Cheney would say. There was no rejoinder from the vice president.

  I was in Sydney, Australia, in early September 2007 with President Bush when he learned that the Israelis had attacked a Syrian nuclear facility under construction by what we understood to be North Korean crews, and had completely destroyed it. (Interestingly, the Syrians finished the job by plowing the rubble under the desert sand, as if to say it had never existed in the first place.) The president shook his head at the thought that the same people we were trying to engage in a dialogue were engaged in building a nuclear reactor in one of the most troubled regions on earth. Bush asked what impact it would have on the negotiations with North Korea, and I responded that these events really helped me explain to the North Koreans that as long as they engaged in this type of behavior, either we or someone else would come after them. They would never have a day of rest. The president liked that. Some two weeks later the CIA allowed me to show certain photos to the North Korean nuclear delegation of their countrymen visiting with Syrian nuclear experts.

  “Mr. Kim [Gye Gwan], can you help me understand these photos? It looks to me that your countrymen have been in Syria helping the Syrians build a reactor. Look, Mr. Kim, isn’t that the head of operations at Yongbyon? Do you know him?”

  Kim tried pathetically to talk about Photoshopping, an explanation I brushed off. As for the head of the Yongbyon complex he was never seen again.

  The neoconservatives, aided by a vice president’s office with deep suspicions of the Foreign Service, seem to believe that the State Department negotiated with the North Koreans because we enjoyed it. Our effort to explain to these critics that this process was for the time being the best way to make progress fell on deaf ears. Nor was there the slightest acknowledgment that these same individuals who worked behind the president’s back to thwart his interest in cooperating with the Chinese and others on North Korea—Vice President Cheney, John Bolton, Bob Joseph, Eric Edelman (the list is long)—were completely wrong about Iraq’s having had weapons of mass destruction, did not have the good manners or common decency to admit their mistake, and preferred to blame the intelligence agencies whose information they had shamelessly cherry-picked, and in Cheney’s case with his trips up to CIA headquarters, tried to shape. But with Iraq in the midst of a completely predictable catastrophic civil war, these undaunted neocons continued to roam the waterfront looking for other outlets for their aggressiveness.

  At a meeting in the White House Situation Room in early 2008, a former colleague of mine, a Foreign Service officer who had worked extensively for Vice President Cheney and was now in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, informed us that the U.S. Navy had been following a suspicious-looking North Korean ship en route to Burma.

  The navy wanted to board the vessel to see what was on it, but the FSO was concerned that such an action could “hurt Chris’s negotiation.” His comments, dripping with ill will, implied that I would really want us to look the other way while North Koreans shipped missiles or other weapons to customers such as the Burmese junta. I told the meeting, “Please go ahead. As far as I’m concerned the navy should sink it. From the negotiation point of view, it reinforces the point I try to make to them every single time I meet with them: their proliferation and nuclear policies have put them in a world of hurt.” The navy never got near the ship. It was just a hoped-for opportunity to make the State Department appear as the appeaser.

  In October 2007, the president invited Condi and me to a breakfast with the vice president, who seemed more chipper with his newly installed pacemaker. National Security Advisor Steve Hadley and White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten were also invited.

  We met in the small dining room off the Oval Office. I walked in with Condi from the hall entrance. The others soon joined us as President Bush entered from the door off the Oval Office.

  The breakfast was one of the president’s opportunities to hear directly from someone in the field, and so I expected he would turn to Condi and me for a briefing. He sat on the end of the table set for six. The vice president was on his left and Condi on his right. I sat to Condi’s right, across from Bolten, and Hadley sat on the other end of the table from the president. There was a fruit cocktail pre-positioned at each place setting with some yogurt and orange juice. Food was the last thing on my mind as I got ready for the stress-inducing briefing of the president of the United States. A White House steward took orders for more, but all waved him off, satisfied with the fruit cup, juice, and coffee. Everybody, that is, except the vice president, who ordered fried eggs and bacon.

  The president started with some baseball trash talk with me, knowing I was a Red Sox fan and saying that he didn’t think the Sox could get past the Angels and their ace pitcher John Lackey in the first round of the playoffs. I told him he had to be kidding (as Condi looked worriedly in my direction), because the Red Sox had never had a problem with Lackey, etc. We continued on for almost a minute discussing the superior Red Sox starting pitching.

  Back on the North Korean nuclear issue, Condi took the lead, providing for the president a thoughtful, detailed, structured, and, most important for me, sober account of where we could expect to go from here. She was riveting, and I marveled at her capacity to integrate every aspect of the Six Party Talks, from the precise plutonium amounts already produced to our efforts to create a Northeast Asia security mechanism. The president interrupted frequently with specific questions that conveyed that he was well informed on the issues, and occasionally I chimed in with further explanations. The president was very hopeful that we might be able to put the plutonium already produced under some kind of international supervision or monitoring, before eventually getting it out of the country. I could not be optimistic that we were at that point, but said it was a goal we should strive for in the current phase of the process. Hadley and Bolten listened attentively, while the vice president seemed more attentive to wolfing down his remaining eggs and starting in on his heavily buttered toast.

  The president turned to the vice president and said, “Dick, do you have any questions for Condi and Chris?”

  Cheney looked up from his breakfast and responded, “Well, I’m not as enthusiastic about this as some people.”

  Condi didn’t seem to want to take that one on, so I did. “Mr. Vice President, I’m not enthusiastic, either. I’m doing the job I have been asked to do and trying to get home at night.”

  The president seemed to sense the tension in my voice. “It’s okay, Chris,” he said. “The vice president was simply expressing some concern about what the verification regime will look like.”

  Condi gestured to me that she would take it from there. She explained, very presciently (because the lack of an adequate verification regime ultimately was the issue that ended the process), that if we are unable to arrive at a satisfactory verification regime, we would obviously not continue. Cheney grunted and returned to his breakfast.

  19

  “THAT’S VERIFIABLE”

  As we looked ahead to what would transpire in the next few months, reaching agreement with the North Koreans on a verification protocol that would give us the necessary latitude to inspect and verify their declaration of nuclear programs was fast becoming the main issue. Those of us close to the process knew it could be the ultimate deal breaker.

  By the fall of 2007, international inspectors were working in Yongbyon monitoring the closed nuclear plant. After a five-day meeting of the Six Parties that ended on October 3, we agreed on a Joint Statement that called on North Korea to provide a “complete and correct declaration of all its nuclear programs—including clarification regarding the uranium issue.” Pyongyang also agreed to disable its facilities and, repeating a previous pledge, not to transfer nuclear material, technology, or know-how.

  Experts worked through the October talks to agree on eleven
steps that would disable the plant. Some of the measures were easier to reverse than others, but the totality of the disablement was aimed at taking Yongbyon off-line permanently, or at least ensuring that the repair bill would be exorbitant. These steps had never been accomplished in previous negotiations with the North Koreans. We worried about the unexplained indications of a uranium program, but the plutonium reactor was there for all concerned and the world to see, and had already produced enough for some six nuclear weapons.

  In November, at a bilateral meeting in the North Korean embassy in Beijing, Kim Gye Gwan informed me that the specialized aluminum we believed had been purchased in connection with an enrichment program had actually been purchased for a shipboard gun system. I took that explanation back to our technical agencies in Washington, and the answer came back: “Highly doubtful.” When I next met with Kim, I told him that we wanted to see the facility where these so-called rustproof guns were produced. He took the proposal back, and soon Sung Kim and NSC staff representative Paul Haenle, who had replaced Victor Cha on the team, were on their way to visit the factory where the weapons were allegedly being produced. I asked Sung to make sure he was able to bring back samples of the aluminum, and to our mutual surprise, he was allowed to carry out a couple of small pieces in his briefcase.

  Sung turned over the aluminum to a specialized U.S. government agency, and to our astonishment, the results came back that the aluminum contained traces of highly enriched uranium. The tests were inconclusive, especially on the issue of how uranium could have been on the aluminum chunks, but its presence suggested that our insistence on clarification of the uranium issue was justified.