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

by Christopher R. Hill

  When the story was leaked to Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post in December 2007, it was fodder for those dedicated to the effort to scuttle the talks. Those talks, of course, in the first place, were what had gained us access to the aluminum, yet the article suggested that the discovery would “force” U.S. negotiators to demand a detailed explanation, as if we would have preferred to sweep the matter under the rug. After all, it came months after the news that North Korea was building a reactor in Syria, the smoking-gun piece of evidence that our proliferation concerns about the North Koreans were real. What the article did not touch on was the obvious fact of how we had made progress on uranium enrichment. The progress was due entirely to an overall negotiating process that gave us access to facilities that we otherwise would have only guessed about from satellites. The problem with the newspaper leak was that it could signal the North Koreans the extent of our technological capabilities and cause them to refuse to give us further such samples.

  Secretary Rice took on the issue in a press conference in Canada. She explained that our goal had been and continued to be to receive a “complete and accurate” declaration from the North Koreans on their nuclear programs. This is what was called for in the October Six Party Talks. We knew that an incomplete and inaccurate declaration was not acceptable, but we did not believe that even a supposedly complete and correct declaration was acceptable. We needed the means to verify the declaration. At the same time, we were also intent on making progress on disabling the plutonium program in Yongbyon and did not want newspaper leaks to scuttle the effort to shut down the plutonium operation where the bomb material was actually coming from. For this reason, we continued to accept more vague formulations about uranium than about plutonium. Our intention was to buy more time while we installed teams of technicians in Yongbyon to disable and, we hoped, eventually dismantle the plutonium program.

  Later in November 2007, I went back to Pyongyang and Yongbyon to view the now-shut-down reactor and meet with our technicians, who were living in a guesthouse next to Yongbyon. It took about two hours to make it out to the site in our convoy of vintage North Korean official Mercedes. After about an hour and a half, we turned off the main two-lane road onto a dirt track through a village that had four-story apartment buildings with plastic sheets in the window frames. It was classic communist architecture, with that “instant aging” feature I remembered so well from living and traveling in Eastern Europe in the 1980s.

  After a mile or two more, the convoy halted. There were agitated voices on the two-way radio sets, followed by an equally agitated meeting of drivers and security agents shouting at each other. We made our way back through the village with the four-story apartment buildings and back onto the main road. Ten minutes later, we made the correct turnoff (in fairness to our handlers, there were no signs to guide us to the nuclear facility) and after another thirty-minute ride through similarly depressed-looking villages, we arrived.

  We met some of the international inspectors and our own “disablers” in their guesthouse, where we had a spartan lunch of rice and something in an unidentifiable room-temperature sauce. On a piece of paper I took down the names of our people with a promise to try to call their families back home in the States. I so admired what these highly skilled technicians were doing for our country. I knew too that they would not have been there were it not for our negotiation efforts, an obvious point that completed eluded many of our hard-line critics in Washington.

  We visited all the sites where our engineers were assisting the North Koreans to disable the facility. We donned white gowns and hoods as we got ready to enter the ramshackle reactor. Our North Korean unit chief Yuri Kim and the bureau’s special assistant Chris Klein both looked at me as if for reassurance this was all going to be okay. I deadpanned, “Milosevic may have been a war criminal, but he never made us do something like this.” The dark corridors, stairways, and work areas in the reactor had the look of an aged manufacturing facility. Nothing had been painted in years. We inspected the disabling measures now under way. Some were more dramatic than others—for example, sawing off ten-foot-long sections of twelve-inch-diameter pipes and leaving them to rust on the ground. None of these measures assured irreversible disablement, but as we looked around at the barren landscape and the humble 1960s-like construction, it was clear that reversing matters would not be easy. I saw that what our disablers had done in the interior structures of the large cooling tower had rendered it useless. What remained was a large conelike structure made of ugly preformed cement, like what a nuclear plant looks like from a distance. I wondered what would be involved in just having the whole thing blown up to make the entire process far more understandable.

  I had arrived in North Korea bearing a letter from President Bush to Kim Jong Il. It was essentially the same one he sent to all the members of the Six Party process, but in this instance I thought there might be an opportunity to deliver it directly.

  In Pyongyang I told our handlers, “My instructions are to convey this letter from our president to your chairman, and if I am unable to do so, I am to bring the letter back with me.” The latter part was not quite in my instructions, but I didn’t believe there was any harm in trying. I was hoping that a letter from President Bush would be of interest. The North Koreans were unimpressed.

  “Our leader is not in Pyongyang today.”

  “No problem. I will wait.”

  “He won’t be in Pyongyang tomorrow, either.”

  “No problem, I will wait longer.”

  “He is visiting other places far away from Pyongyang.”

  “No problem. I can go to where he is.”

  I went nowhere, got nowhere, and with the hours of the visit dwindling, I huddled up with Paul and Sung and decided that we really had to deliver the mail. In an effort to save face, I informed our hosts that I had received “new instructions” and was permitted to deliver the letter to the foreign minister.

  In the apparent absence of a working elevator, we were directed to trudge six floors up a narrow unheated stairway (indeed the entire building was unheated), until we arrived at the foreign minister’s outer office. It was a lot warmer than the rest of the building, with space heaters doing their best to deal with the cold. The warmish office was some consolation for our vertical trip. I went into the foreign minister’s modest office. I always enjoy having a quick look at the bric-a-brac. In this case it consisted of gifts from various human-rights-challenged dictatorships primarily from Africa. The foreign minister, clearly pleased with himself, took the envelope with both hands to indicate some respect for the sender, if not the deliverer.

  Two hours later, as the wheels of our plane lifted off the runway, our entire six-person team broke into spontaneous applause at the thought of soon being in that flower garden of relative freedom—Beijing.

  On March 13–14, 2008, my team and I met with Kim Gye Gwan and his team in Geneva for talks on the elusive North Korean declaration that had been due on December 31. I was intent that the leaked report of enriched uranium traces not scuttle the progress we made in shutting down the Yongbyon facility, but I did make use of the leak to remind Kim that the issue could not be ignored in any declaration.

  We looked for ways to move forward on the declaration, while Kim only acknowledged our concerns on uranium enrichment, never admitting to an actual program. I was struck by how he never said he didn’t know, simply that it had never existed and was a figment of our imaginations. “Is it possible,” I asked, “that there was a program, but that it was discontinued?” I thought that might be the reason he had been categorical in denying its existence. He stuck with his story. In contrast, his deputy, Ri Gun, had remarked that the issue “is complicated.” If it never existed, it could never be complicated. I had enough negotiating experience in the Balkans to know that sometimes people just flat out lie, and in this case I suspected that Kim, and perhaps not Ri, was doing just that. I had always remembered Milosevic telling me, in his singular English-languag
e syntax, “I will never lie you.” He just did it again, I thought at the time.

  A month later we were in the U.S. Embassy in Singapore working with Kim Gye Gwan on a declaration that would be complete on plutonium and hold open the door to explore the enrichment riddle. While we would not sweep the uranium issue under the carpet, Condi, in Washington, was working to give us running room. I was trying to keep the process going until we could be assured that we knew all there was to know about the plutonium program. Some in the administration wanted all the negotiations shut down, as if to guarantee that there would never be another negotiating process. But even the detractors, several of whom had taken to expressing their views through like-minded columnists and editorial writers, had to acknowledge that we were getting an important look at North Korean programs.

  As a result of the Singapore meeting, Sung Kim and Paul Haenle were given permission to return to North Korea and cart back through the demilitarized zone on the 38th parallel between North and South Korea some eighteen thousand pages of documents, consisting largely of logs dating back to 1986 on the operation of the facilities at Yongbyon.

  When the specialized agencies were able to analyze the documents, they also analyzed what was on the actual paper—and as with the aluminum, traces of enriched uranium were discovered. Could there be a uranium enrichment facility in Yongbyon that we had not yet detected? The possibility was increasingly likely, but to get further we needed to make a tough decision.

  It was, as too few people noted, a success at diplomacy. We had succeeded in gaining access to information that no one had obtained before. But the criticism against diplomacy ran far deeper than an analysis of its pros and cons. Negotiation threatened the theory that nothing could be achieved by talking with dictators. Any and all achievements, such as obtaining the operating records of the Yongbyon nuclear plant going back to 1986, not to mention the pixie dust of uranium that covered the reams of paper (and Sung Kim’s Ferragamo loafers), were dismissed as unimportant.

  For this degree of North Korean cooperation, we had to make concessions of our own. In addition to providing North Korea with our share of fifty thousand tons of heavy fuel oil, we had agreed at the Berlin meeting to remove the North Koreans from the Trading with the Enemy Act, as well as from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.

  Technically, the removal from the list of state sponsors of terrorism was fairly straightforward. The purpose of the statute is to prevent an administration, any administration, from selling military equipment to a country on the list or supporting positive votes in international financial institutions to provide funds to any listed country. We were obviously not going to sell North Korea weapons, nor, since they are not members of the World Bank, could we support a positive vote even if we wanted to. An interagency team looked at the issue for the purpose of determining whether North Korea had engaged with terrorist groups in the “past six months.” I spoke with Dell Daily, the state department’s counterterrorism coordinator, to stress that any decision to remove North Korea from the list was ultimately President Bush’s to make. We simply wanted to know whether from the point of view of the statute they could be removed. After several weeks, the committee returned a verdict that there was no evidence that North Korea had assisted any terrorist groups and thus, for the purposes of the statute, they were eligible to be removed.

  It was not so simple. North Korea had participated in many terrorist acts over the decades, including the infamous bombing and murder of the twenty-one members of the South Korean cabinet accompanying President Chun Doo Hwan on a state visit to Burma in October 9, 1983. Chun, the target, had narrowly missed being killed when his car was delayed at the ceremony. Two of the bombers were captured, and one confessed to being a North Korean assassin.

  But the issue that made our concession so difficult was the abduction and kidnapping program the North Koreans had engaged in during the late 1970s and early 1980s against Japanese nationals. The issue had flared up in 2002 when the North Koreans released several abductees, a stunning admission that did more to inflame public opinion than to calm it, especially as the North Koreans had backdated and in effect falsified death certificates of others who had not returned. Deputy Secretary Richard Armitage, who had numerous ties to Japan from his many years holding the East Asian account at the Pentagon and later as a business consultant, declared in a speech in Tokyo in April 2004 that the United States would include the abduction issue in the annual report on global terrorism. Within days, Armitage was accused of having promised that North Korea would not be removed from the terrorism list unless the abduction issue was resolved. Whether that was a logical inference of his statement or not, the fact remained that he never said it. It would have been beyond his ability to make such a promise.

  President Bush agonized over the issue for months. He understood the payoff in drilling deeper on North Korea’s nuclear program and disabling the plutonium, but he also understood the Japanese issue. He once commented to Condi and me in the Oval Office that if there were a “bad guy list” (or more colorful words to that effect), it would make more sense for the North Koreans to be on that one.

  On June 26, Pyongyang delivered its long-awaited nuclear declaration to the Chinese delegation of the Six Party Talks. It contained important elements, such as the precise amount of plutonium it had used in its nuclear tests. The president, to the enduring dismay of his vice president, who continued to try to run a separate foreign policy in channels both public and private, followed up with the announcement that in response to the declaration the United States would rescind the application of the Trading with the Enemy Act with respect to North Korea, and would provide forty-five days’ notice of intention to remove North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. The declaration was incomplete and incorrect, but we were well on our way to what we considered the far more important phase, the verification protocol.

  I asked Sung Kim to deliver a U.S.-drafted protocol that we intended to use as a guide for verifying their declaration of nuclear programs. The key element of our draft was to verify the nonexistence of their uranium program.

  “How did it go?” I asked Sung, who had already commenced a rueful shaking of his head. “Never mind,” I told him. “This will probably mean at some point one more trip back there.”

  On June 27, the day after the delivery of the nuclear declaration, North Korea fulfilled its part of this phase by blowing up the Yongbyon cooling tower. Television cameras from all over the world, including CNN, recorded the event. Sung Kim was there, as was Paul Haenle. President Bush watched it from the Oval Office and told aides gathered there, “Now that’s verifiable.” Sung, in a memorable quote (for which he has taken good-natured ribbing from his colleagues ever since) made to Christiane Amanpour on CNN, said, “As you can see, the tower is no longer.”

  I watched the collapse while in Kyoto, Japan, at a foreign ministers’ meeting for the G-8 nations. I had hoped to go, but Condi, who was increasingly worried about the hard-right backlash against the Six Party Talks and against me personally, told me to stay behind with her in Kyoto. We watched the event on Japanese television.

  I had first raised the idea of blowing up the tower with Kim Gye Gwan, pointing out that the event would be watched around the world and would help us overcome any doubts that our journey—at least on the plutonium production—was real. He was interested, but cautious. In Beijing I told Wu Dawei we needed a gesture that would give meaning to all the sawing of exhaust pipes and other disabling steps. As I spoke I was rolling my notes into the shape of a cylinder and stood them on end. When Wu asked what I had in mind I told him, “We should collapse the cooling tower like this,” slamming the spindled notes with the palm of my hand. Eyeing my crushed notes on the table, he said, “We’ll convince them.”

  The cooling tower collapse would prove to be the last accomplishment that year of the Six Party Talks. The entire core group of our team—Sung Kim, Paul Haenle, Yuri Kim, and Chris Klein— agreed
that the real endgame was not the North Korean declaration, which we knew would be incomplete. The real issue, we all understood, was to have a workable verification protocol that would give us the needed freedom of movement to find what we already knew existed in some stage or another, namely a uranium enrichment program.

  Having turned in an incomplete and inaccurate nuclear declaration, the North Koreans dug in their heels on any further moves, waiting to see if they would be removed from the terrorism list. As the forty-five-day clock ticked down on removal from the list, they did take some steps with the Japanese to agree on procedures for addressing the abduction issue, but nothing came of it. At the end of the forty-five days President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, a move that upset many Japanese as well as those who were using the abduction issue as a way to block any progress in the talks.

  Sung and Paul worked hard to continue the negotiation on a verification protocol. One of the North Koreans, committed to the process, suggested we agree to something, and simply get people on the ground to start the process, expanding out from there. If we had been dealing with a country unlike North Korea, this might have been an acceptable way to start. But with North Korea it was not a proposal I could sell to anyone back in Washington and so I rejected it on the spot.

  With time running down on the verification protocol, I made one more trip to Pyongyang in October 2008, accompanied by Sung, Paul, and Yuri. This time the North Koreans made a point that our delegation was not going to be treated to any special privileges. We were not permitted to bring a U.S. military plane, as we had done on the two previous trips, nor were we offered the presidential guesthouse. Instead the North Koreans made reservations for us at a Japanese-run commercial hotel (where, unlike anywhere else in North Korean, we had access to CNN). We had dinner with a very somber Kim Gye Gwan, and I could tell that North Korean interest in the give-and-take of negotiation was coming to an end.