In My Time

by Dick Cheney

At another session later that month with most of the National Security Council present, I again made the case for U.S. military action against the reactor. Not only would it make the region and the world safer, but it would also demonstrate our seriousness with respect to non-proliferation. It would enhance our credibility in that part of the world, taking us back to where we were in 2003, after we had taken down the Taliban, taken down Saddam’s regime, and gotten Qaddafi to turn over his nuclear program. But I was a lone voice. After I finished, the president asked, “Does anyone here agree with the vice president?” Not a single hand went up around the room. I had done all I could, and I’m not sure the president’s mind would have been changed if the others had agreed with me. He had decided to recommend to the Israelis that we take the diplomatic path. How, he asked, were the Israelis likely to respond to that decision? Secretary Rice told him she believed that the Israelis would accept the offer of diplomacy. She thought Prime Minister Olmert would go along with the idea of taking the information to the United Nations and working for multilateral action to shut down the facility.

  I told the president that the Israelis would destroy the reactor at al-Kibar if we did not. Ehud Olmert, whom I had known for years, meant what he said about taking action. I also remembered 1981, when the Israelis had ignored world opinion and launched an air strike to destroy a nuclear reactor Saddam Hussein was building at Osirak in Iraq.

  In mid-July the president placed a call to Prime Minister Olmert to tell him we wanted to go the diplomatic route. Olmert, disappointed, said that wouldn’t work for Israel. He could not place the fate of Israel in the hands of the UN or the IAEA. And time was growing short. The reactor had to be destroyed before it “went hot,” before the nuclear fuel was loaded, or there would be the potential for significant radioactive contamination.

  Under cover of darkness on September 6, 2007, Israeli F-15s crossed into Syrian airspace and within minutes were over the target at al-Kibar. Satellite photos afterward showed that the Israeli pilots hit their target perfectly. There was not a single crater except where the nuclear reactor once stood.

  In the days that followed the strike, the Israeli government asked that we not reveal what we knew about the target they’d struck in the desert. They believed that widespread public discussion about the nuclear plant or the fact that the Israelis had launched the strike might force Syrian President Bashar Assad to respond, launching a wider conflict. For the Syrians and the North Koreans, though, the private message was clear—Israel would not tolerate this threat. We agreed to maintain secrecy in the near term about the plant and the operation to take it out.

  Assad decided to keep quiet as well. A North Korean delegation showed up in Syria shortly after the attack, probably to advise on the way forward, and the Syrians subsequently demolished the reactor building, covered the site with soil, and erected a metal structure over it.

  What had happened in the desert might, for a short time, remain a secret. But all of us on the National Security Council knew the truth: that the North Koreans had proliferated nuclear technology to Syria, one of the world’s worst state sponsors of terror. The North Koreans and the Syrians were clearly violating the red line drawn by President Bush on October 9, 2006, in the wake of North Korea’s first nuclear test.

  BY THE TIME WE came into office, the North Koreans had an established pattern of behavior. They would make an agreement about their nuclear sites, pocket the benefits of the agreement, and then continue on with their weapons programs. They were masters of brinksmanship—creating problems, threatening their neighbors, and expecting to be bribed back into cooperation. It had usually worked for them. In 1994, with Bill Clinton in the White House, they agreed to freeze their plutonium production program in exchange for 500,000 metric tons of fuel oil a year and two reactors of a type that cannot easily be used to produce weapons material. But they secretly pursued a second route. In 2002, with the North Koreans having received millions of tons of fuel oil and with the al-Kibar reactor construction under way, an American delegation confronted them with evidence of their deception, and they admitted they had been developing a second way to produce nuclear weapons—by enriching uranium.

  It was with the intention of breaking this pattern of deceit and deception that President Bush in 2003 established the six-party talks made up of the United States, South Korea, North Korea, Japan, China, and Russia. The idea was to move away from the bilateral, or one-on-one, negotiations that had failed in the past and to bring into the diplomatic process other nations that had an interest in preventing North Korea from developing nuclear weapons. China was particularly important, because as North Korea’s economic lifeline, China had considerable influence over the isolated and insular North Korean government. We knew that the Chinese were concerned about the regional instability that could arise from a nuclear-armed North Korea, particularly given the likelihood that nations like Japan and others would feel the need to follow suit.

  By 2006, however, we were clearly slipping back into the old pattern. An early indication came at the end of October, just three weeks after North Korea tested a nuclear weapon. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, who was leading our delegation to the six-party talks, decided to participate in an hours-long, private meeting with North Korean envoy Kim Gye Gwan in Beijing. As Hill well knew, President Bush’s policy was to take a regional approach to North Korea’s nuclear programs, thus bringing the combined pressure of several nations to bear, but the North Koreans had been demanding that the United States meet with them one-on-one, in the way that had proved so fruitful for them in the past. Hill, against instructions from Secretary Rice, obliged, cutting our six-party allies, the Japanese and South Koreans, out of the negotiations and providing the North Koreans what can only have looked to them like a reward for bad behavior. Two and a half months later, with Secretary Rice’s approval, Assistant Secretary Hill and the American delegation held a bilateral meeting with the North Korean delegation in Berlin. On the evening of January 16, 2007, the Americans provided a lavish meal, supplied large amounts of liquor, and proposed friendly toasts. Said one member of the delegation, “We pulled out all the stops because we wanted to demonstrate that we were serious and sincere.” The North Koreans had crossed one of the brightest of bright lines—they had tested a nuclear weapon—and we were hosting them at a banquet.

  Worse was to follow as Hill and Rice made concession after concession to the North Koreans and turned a blind eye to their misdeeds. As I watched the course the State Department was taking, I concluded that our diplomats had become so seized with cutting a deal, any deal, with the North Koreans that they had lost sight of the real objective, which was forcing the North to give up its weapons. I do not believe that the president ever lost sight of the ultimate goal, however. I heard him repeatedly ask both Rice and Hill if we were truly on a path to denuclearization. Unfortunately, the reassurances he received did not reflect reality.

  MANY OF OUR DIPLOMATIC failures would be played out against an action plan that participants in the six-party talks agreed to in February 2007. It provided for the North Koreans to halt operations at Yongbyon and to admit UN inspectors within sixty days in exchange for 50,000 tons of fuel oil. North Korea would then provide a complete declaration of all of its nuclear programs, disable all its existing facilities, and in return receive another 950,000 tons of fuel oil. The United States would also begin the process of removing North Korea from the list of states that sponsor terrorism and lift the economic sanctions of the Trading with the Enemy Act.

  At the next convening of the six-party talks, in March 2007, the North Koreans played the game they had played so often and effectively before. They walked out of the talks and refused to participate further unless $25 million in North Korean funds frozen in a Macau-based bank were returned to them. The funds had been frozen in September 2005, when the U.S. Treasury Department designated Banco Delta Asia as a “primary money laundering concern,” charging that the bank had circulated U.
S. currency counterfeited in North Korea and laundered money for a variety of North Korean criminal activities, including drug trafficking. The designation essentially prevented the bank from conducting international transactions in U.S. currency. Now the North Koreans were demanding the money before they would participate in nuclear negotiations.

  The State Department urged that we agree to the demand and began looking for ways to get the funds returned to the North Koreans. Their efforts were complicated when international banks refused to transfer the money, fearing being caught up in a transaction that involved illicit funds. Finally, a Russian bank agreed to participate, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York wired the money into a North Korean account at the Russian bank. By June 2007, as a result of our pressuring the banks involved, the North Koreans had gotten $25 million in illicit funds unfrozen and wired to them. With the money in hand, they said they would shutter the Yongbyon plant—which they were supposed to have done two months previously.

  By mid-August 2007, we had known for four months that the North Koreans were proliferating nuclear technology to the Syrians. Although I was sure the Israelis would take out the plant, nothing had happened as yet, and we had not come up with an effective strategy to leverage the knowledge we had of the reactor at al-Kibar. Secretary Rice’s approach was to downplay the existence of the reactor out of concern for the six-party talks. Although the reactor made a mockery of the talks up until then, further talks, she reasoned, might be disrupted if the Syrian plant became public. The president would soon be traveling to Australia for the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meetings, where he would be seeing Chinese President Hu Jintao, and I urged him to take a presentation on the North Korean–Syrian reactor and have a heart-to-heart with Hu. The Chinese could exert far more pressure than they had so far, and showing them the results of failing to stop the North Korean nuclear program might motivate them. But the president was not persuaded.

  The North Koreans were supposed to provide a complete declaration of all their nuclear activities by the end of 2007, but they did not, and as we discussed their missing another deadline, Secretary Rice argued that North Korea’s final declaration need not include any mention of uranium enrichment. Although they had once admitted to such a program and although we knew they had one, she urged that we not require them to declare it.

  I failed to see how accepting a false declaration from North Korea advanced the objective of complete, verifiable, irreversible destruction of the North Korean nuclear program, which had long been the Bush administration’s stated goal. To the contrary, by letting them avoid admitting their enrichment program in what was supposed to be a complete declaration, we were helping them hide what they were doing. And to make matters worse, we were promising rewards for their duplicity.

  But Secretary Rice urged that we view a North Korean declaration that was solely about their plutonium program as a “first step.” She said there was no need to be concerned about their uranium enrichment program because in a side conversation between Chris Hill and his North Korean counterpart, the counterpart had admitted to the uranium program. There was no official record of this conversation, but the very fact that it had occurred, said the secretary, meant that it wasn’t necessary for the North Koreans to include the uranium enrichment program in their final declaration.

  This was an approach to arms control I had never seen before. Not only were we going to accept a false declaration, but we were supposed to be reassured because the other side had whispered an admission of the declaration’s falsehood in Chris Hill’s ear. The secretary repeatedly assured the president that he shouldn’t worry. Everything was fine. But clearly it wasn’t.

  BY DECEMBER 2007 I was not just concerned about where we stood on North Korea. We faced a number of critical foreign policy challenges at the very same time that the power of the president and the administration to solve them was waning. It is a natural phenomenon that most administrations face as they get down to the end of their time in office: The president’s ability to do big things diminishes on an almost weekly basis in the final year of his presidency.

  The Iranians were continuing their nuclear efforts, and although we had been working to find a diplomatic solution, the president made it very clear that all options were on the table and that we could not accept a nuclear-armed Iran. Within the last few months, however, our commander in the Middle East, Admiral Fox Fallon, had been interviewed on the record criticizing what he called “bellicose” comments from Washington as “unhelpful” and suggesting that no planning for any military option was under way. A foreign diplomat posted in Washington said to me a few days later, “If you guys are going to take the military option off the table, couldn’t you at least have your secretary of state do it?” People expected the top diplomat to make such statements, he said, “but when the CENTCOM commander does it, they take notice.” After making similar comments again in early 2008, Fallon would resign.

  A few months earlier, while Secretary Gates and Secretary Rice were on a visit to Saudi Arabia, I had received a panicked phone call from a member of their traveling party. Secretary Gates had apparently just informed the king that the president would be impeached if he took military action against Iran. The president had not decided what the next steps were on Iran, and it was inappropriate for key officials to suggest either publicly or with important allies that his options were limited. We had to tell the Saudis that Secretary Gates was speaking for himself and not reflecting U.S. policy. Statements like those by Gates and Fallon removed a key element of our leverage and convinced allies and enemies we were less than serious about addressing the threat. This, in turn, made a diplomatic solution more difficult.

  On December 3, 2007, the director of national intelligence declassified key findings from a new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran. The first key judgment in the report asserted: “We judge with high confidence that in the fall of 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.” Only if you went to a footnote did you understand that by “nuclear weapons program,” the intelligence community meant “Iran’s nuclear weapon design and weaponization work and covert uranium conversion-related and uranium enrichment-related work” (emphasis added). The community chose not to consider Iran’s very significant declared enrichment efforts in its dramatic opening statement.

  As the NIE indicated, there are three parts to making a nuclear weapon: weapons design, weaponization of the nuclear material, and production of the nuclear material—whether plutonium or enriched uranium. The NIE judged that Iran had halted the first two activities, which are easily resumed, and had made “significant progress” in the third area, involving “declared centrifuge enrichment activities.” But it took careful reading to get to this understanding, and there were few careful readers, especially in the media. The report was read as providing assurance that we need no longer worry about Iran’s nuclear program.

  Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell later testified that he would have presented the key findings differently if he had it to do over again. As it was, the NIE clearly gave a false impression. The story of the production of the 2007 Iran NIE is in part a reflection of the continued impact of the bad intelligence we had received about Iraq’s WMD stockpiles. After the charges of politicizing intelligence that filled the air beginning in 2003, policymakers were hesitant to urge edits or suggest that the presentation and structure of the report were misleading. When I was briefed on the report just before its release, I made sure to have two staff members with me, and I said very little. This was the way to avoid being accused of pressuring anyone. But it is not a good way to make policy.

  Once it was released, I heard from leaders in the Arab world that they believed the NIE either was prepared at George Bush’s instruction so he would not have to take military action or was put together by a disloyal CIA to ensure that the president did not take military action. Neither was true, but such perceptions hurt us. The NIE itself precluded us from considering as r
obust a range of options as we might have otherwise.

  Secretary Rice had determined that she would not only get a deal with the North Koreans before we left office but would also get an agreement on final-status issues aimed at resolving the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian problem. Although clearly laudable as a goal, neither side nor many experts believed it was possible during our remaining time in office, given the complex set of issues, entrenched hatreds, ongoing violence, and the Hamas-controlled government in Gaza. Moreover, launching a major effort had an impact on other policy priorities. The secretary’s determination to launch a multilateral peace initiative led her to believe she had to get the Syrians to the table to participate. This meant ignoring their efforts to build a covert nuclear reactor. It also meant overlooking the foreign fighters who were crossing the border from Syria into Iraq and killing Americans. It was my view that the Syrians needed to be held accountable, not sent a personal letter from Secretary Rice inviting them to the Annapolis Conference on Middle East peace.

  Secretary Rice’s outreach to Syrian dictator Bashar Assad came at a difficult moment for the people of Lebanon. As they tried to form a new democratically elected government, they were under enormous pressure from Syria, which had occupied Lebanon for nearly thirty years. After the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005, popular uprisings had caused Syria to withdraw its troops, but car bombings and assassinations of anti-Syrian politicians and intellectuals in Lebanon continued. Iran, meanwhile, was engaged in efforts to destabilize Lebanon, primarily through its sponsorship of the terrorist group Hezbollah, whose members were demanding an ever-larger role in the government. In July 2006 after Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel and crossed the border, attacking and taking Israeli soldiers hostage, war broke out between Israel and Lebanon. Hezbollah had survived the war, and by the end of 2007 they, along with their ally Syria and their patron Iran, were ascendant in Lebanon. We could have done much more to support the democratic aspirations of the people of Lebanon and thus helped to counter the growing regional prominence of Iran and Syria, had an unrealistic effort to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict not absorbed so much of our attention.