Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir (38 page)

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.

A
s 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.

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-language syntax, “I will never lie you.” He just did it again, I thought at the time.