Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir (34 page)

When I staggered into work the next morning, the sense of pride in the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs was palpable; it was at the center of the action. Kathleen Stephens, who had been running the bureau while I was in Beijing, briefed me on what had gone on in my absence. I wasn’t in much of a mood for high-fives, partly because I didn’t have the energy to raise my arm that high, but mostly because I knew that the work had really only begun. Moreover, as Kathy remarked to me, the opposition efforts were formidable.

The Six Party agreement had a positive, electrifying effect on the mood in Seoul. The dividend was a much-improved view of the United States and a belief that the U.S.–South Korean alliance was back on track. In China, too, there was a positive buzz, especially among those who saw cooperation with the United States in their country’s future.

The bank scandal, however, would bedevil the Six Party Talks for the next eighteen months, during which time there would be almost no negotiation. The next round of talks, which took place in Beijing on November 9, 2005, made no progress amid a deteriorating atmosphere in the Six Parties.

The North Koreans, as if to demonstrate they would not be intimidated (and to show they may also have a sense of irony), fired off a cocktail of short-, medium-, and long-range missiles on July 4, 2006. They launched seven in all, including its longest-range missile, the Taepodong-2. The other six tests included Scud-C and Nodong ballistic missiles, all launched from the new Kittaeryong test site. The United States issued a statement describing the launches as “a provocative act,” pointing out that they violated the voluntary moratorium on longer-range
flight testing, but in the absence of any negotiating process, we could not have really expected such a moratorium to hold.

In July 2006, after the missile launches, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1695, condemning North Korea’s missile launches and calling for a return to the Six Party Talks. The resolution was as strong a resolution ever taken against North Korea. And most importantly, China and Russia supported us, something that probably would not have happened had we failed to engage in the talks. It even included provisions for banning luxury items to North Korea. In October 2006, North Korea exploded an underground nuclear device. It was probably a fizzle, that is, a failure to create the nuclear chain reaction necessary to explode a weapon, but no one doubted that they were planning to try and try again until they succeeded. In the wake of the October underground nuclear test, Secretary Rice thought we needed to get back to the talks and she began an intensive but quiet round of telephone calls with the Chinese foreign minister.

The North Koreans signaled, and later confirmed to us, that they had no intention of engaging in further negotiation unless the actions taken in the Banco Delta Asia case were reversed and the North Korean accounts restored to them. Estimates of the amount of those accounts varied from $22 million to $25 million. Wu and many others in his delegation had worked hard to reach the Joint Statement of September, but he did not see where we could go with the process, now halted over a sum of $25 million.

I told Secretary Rice that it didn’t look like any progress was going to be made. I told her I was all in favor of pressuring the North Koreans, that no one disliked that regime more than I did, but that there is a time to make one’s point and a time to move on, and $25 million was not enough of a haul to scuttle the Six Party process.

Rice and Hadley agreed, but when it came time to reverse the action, it was clear that it was a one-way trip down sanction way.

The problem had to do with the legal designation. Once a bank is designated a primary money-laundering concern, there can be certain
steps undertaken in internal controls and other management issues to undesignate it, but the North Korean accounts had been in the bank at the time, and as part of the basis of suspicion against the bank could not easily be returned to the customer. Moreover, simple solutions like Banco Delta Asia wiring the money to another bank were not easy because that other bank would be reluctant to take tainted money and risk being designated for money laundering, too. Indeed, in the case of receiving North Korean funds and then passing them back to the North Koreans, any bank’s legal department would have good reason to advise against it.

Leverage, I always thought, was something one could use or not, as needed in the circumstances. We threatened Milosevic with air action, we suspended the air action, and we resumed the air action. But Banco Delta Asia had become a kind of sanctions doomsday machine that could not be turned back off, at least not to the satisfaction of the holder of the bank accounts, North Korea.

Once, while Secretary Rice was en route in the back of a SUV to a meeting at the White House Situation Room, she asked Undersecretary Joseph about how to reverse the sanctions. Joseph, quiet and well-mannered, viewed talking to North Koreans about as enthusiastically as talking to the devil.

“It is complicated,” he condescendingly replied, not answering her straightforward question, “very, very difficult and probably cannot be done.” I couldn’t imagine giving an answer like that to my boss, but such were the ideological wars within the Bush administration.

I had been on a trip that took me from Tokyo to Hong Kong to Fiji for a Pacific Island forum, then on to Vanuatu, where I planned a day-and-a-half visit to that tiny country where the U.S. official presence consisted of eighty Peace Corps volunteers.

I arrived at the airport on a late-night flight from Fiji, with a cold and chills. There was a driving rain as I walked down the stairs onto the dark tarmac, to be greeted by an official welcome of Vanuatu “warriors” who met me with a traditional “island greeting,” ceremonially threatening me
with their spears; then, according to the script, upon closer inspection, seeing that I was not hostile, they escorted me to the VIP room of the three-room airport.

Peace Corps country director Kevin George briefed Steve McGann (the EAP office director for the Pacific states) and me on the program in Vanuatu as we drove our way to a spartan hotel with a great view of the ocean. At the check-in desk I was handed a message to call the State Department Operations Center. I marveled how they had tracked me down in Vanuatu, and after about thirty minutes of dialing for an outside line (there was no cell phone service), I reached the Op Center and received word that Secretary Rice wanted to speak with me. I stood by as the operations officer connected me, and when she did, I found I was talking with Philip Zelikow.

Phil was Secretary Rice’s counselor, a senior position for which there is no job description apart from what the secretary wants the counselor to do. Once upon a time Phil had been a Foreign Service officer, a stint on which he relied heavily when dispensing advice from his position as counselor, often starting with “When I was an FSO . . .” He was probably too intellectual to be an FSO, too much the academic. He had a brilliant, integrated mind, and if one could get over the fact that someone from Texas should not have an Oxford accent, he had many useful thoughts to offer. For the most part Phil had moderate and sensible views on issues, even if they were offered in somewhat baroque terms.

Phil (or Philip, as he preferred) was spread rather thin in the State Department, dropping in on what seemed like random issues, then dropping out when the secretary would call him to do something else. I could discern during senior staff meetings, while I was waiting my turn to discuss North Korea, that he was one of the first to understand the Sunni Awakening in Iraq’s Anbar Province, and its significance for overcoming the early de-Baathification mistake which had so harmed our efforts in that country I would later serve in. I was impressed listening in on these discussions. He understood things that many others had not.

But working alongside Phil was not for the faint of heart. Operationally, that is connecting people or pushing an issue forward so that it could be implemented and be of use as part of a foreign policy, he was like a human computer virus who would infect and destroy the simplest of tasks. Why was I being connected to him? I wondered as he came on the phone.

“Chris, can you get to a secure phone there?”

“Uh, not easy, Philip, what with my being here in Vanuatu.”

“Okay, well I’ll just have to talk around it.” What a disappointment, I thought. For the Vanuatu intelligence service this was probably the most interesting telephone call on the island since the invasion of Guadalcanal was launched from there in 1942.

“Um, okay, go ahead, Phil.”

“The secretary has had some in-depth discussions with her counterpart in the biggest Six Party country.” (“Biggest . . .” Oh, I get it. He’s talking about China. Boy, those poor Vanuatan eavesdroppers must be scratching their heads over that one.) “They agreed that you should go there very quietly and meet your little friends. Can you get there by Monday?” “Little friends?” I repeated to myself, the rain still beating on the hotel’s tin roof. I have lots of little friends. Oh, I got it . . .

“She wants me to meet those guys?” I said, referring to the North Koreans. “And with the Chi—, I mean, the biggest country present, I assume.” I didn’t want to go through another such episode.

“She expects the big guys to start the meeting, then you will talk with your little friends bilaterally.”

“Okay, I’ll be in Sydney thirty-six hours from now. If I could get some more details of how to handle these talks sent through our consulate there, I’ll figure out how to get to Beijing and what the logistics are.”

The next morning I met the president and the prime minister of Vanuatu, then spent the rest of the day visiting Peace Corps volunteers in their villages. In one place, the chief and two volunteers working on public health turned out the entire village for my visit. I wondered whom the
villagers thought they were meeting, since assistant secretary is not a title that necessarily means a lot to a Vanuatan villager.

One of the volunteers explained: “We told them you were important and had once been a volunteer like us.”

“Perfect,” I replied, wishing I were back in Cameroon on my Suzuki 125 dirt bike.

I gave a short speech about how the Pacific Ocean, which was lapping up against the edge of the village, joins my country to this village, and that the same waters flow between us. As someone afflicted with a fever and chills I was relieved I had come up with lines like that on the spur of the moment. I was channeling my Peace Corps days. (Once I had told an audience near Tiko, Cameroon, “Ask not what your credit union can do for you; ask what you can do for your credit union.”)

The chief of the Vanuatan village told an inspiring story about the fact that during “the war” American soldiers (marines) had left a large pile of no-longer-needed equipment in the village, and how honored everyone was that the Americans chose their village for that.

I shook hands with a long line of people, and when after about forty-five minutes I could feel my hand beginning to throb, I realized that people were shaking my hand and then getting back in line to do it again. I asked the Peace Corps volunteer about it, and he answered: “Happens here a lot with visitors. There otherwise isn’t much going on here.”

• • •

I arrived in Beijing Monday night, slipped down the stairs from the plane to a waiting embassy car, and headed off to the apartment belonging to Deputy Chief of Mission David Sedney, where I spent the night. The next morning I began discussions with the North Koreans out at the Diaoyutai, and this time the Chinese showed up.

What the Chinese had delivered was a willingness of the North Koreans to attend the next session of the Six Party Talks. What they had not delivered was any flexibility on the part of the North Koreans to engage
in actual negotiations. Essentially, the Chinese delivered North Koreans who would attend but not engage.

I explained to Kim Gye Gwan what I had explained to him the previous November: that there was nothing I could do about the sanctions situation, and that the matter was in the banking world. Wu didn’t try to suggest otherwise, perhaps already knowing that the fix was in and the North Koreans were prepared to return to the talks, even if just to sit there.

In December 2006 we had the next session, three days and out by the twenty-second, just in time to get us all back to our families by Christmas. I presented a phased denuclearization plan, but the North Koreans would not comment, though they did agree to take it back for study.

The Chinese issued a “Chairman’s Statement,” a weaker formulation than a Joint Statement like the one issued in September 2005. The statement fecklessly reaffirmed that the parties all continued to be committed to the September 2005 Joint Statement, noted the fact that candid discussions were conducted in bilateral channels, and declared the Fifth Round to be in recess pending consultations in capitals. In short, the talks had not moved an inch since September 2005. During the December round, there were side discussions between the Treasury Department representatives and the North Koreans on the subject of the sanctions against Banco Delta Asia. These too got nowhere, although I was glad to let the Treasury representatives, led by a very reasonable and knowledgable deputy assistant secretary, Danny Glaser, have the pleasure of dealing with the North Koreans on this issue.

On the evening of December 22, Victor Cha, the NSC director for Northeast Asia, accompanied by Korea office director Sung Kim, visited the North Korean embassy and discussed next steps with Li Gun and Choi Sun Ai, the North Korean deputy (Victor’s counterpart) and the “interpreter” (who at times behaved like the head of the North Korean delegation).

To Victor’s and Sung’s surprise, Li and Choi suggested a quiet
meeting somewhere in Europe where we might be able to make progress on the denuclearization issues, with the proviso that the Banco Delta Asia sanctions eventually be reversed before anything could be actually agreed and implemented. I immediately informed Secretary Rice, who was intrigued by the possibility but suggested I get home and that we take up the matter after Christmas.