The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (57 page)

Although passage of power from father to eldest son was traditional in Korean dynasties and Confucian families, it was heretical in a nominal “people’s democracy.” The 1970 edition of the official
Dictionary of Political Terminologies
published in Pyongyang defined hereditary succession as “a reactionary custom of exploitive societies.” This entry was dropped in the early 1970s, after Kim Il Sung decided to make his son his closest aide and successor.

Kim Jong Il graduated from Kim Il Sung University in 1964 and went to work in the Central Committee of the Workers Party, with special responsibility for films, theater, and art, which became his lifelong passion. He is credited with the production of six major films and musicals in the early 1970s. Kim became a secretary of the Central Committee of the Workers Party in September 1973 and a member of its Politburo at a rare secret Central Committee plenum the following year. By then songs
were being sung about him among party cadres, who carried special notebooks to record his instructions.

Despite his prominence in the Workers Party, little was said about him publicly, and nothing at all for foreign audiences, which suggests that his father felt the need to fully prepare the domestic and external public for the first family succession of the communist world. North Korean media referred instead to the “party center,” which was given credit for wise guidance and great deeds. The veil was lifted at the Sixth Workers Party Congress in October 1980, when the younger Kim was simultaneously awarded senior posts in the Politburo, the Military Commission, and the Party Secretariat and was openly proclaimed to be Kim Il Sung’s designated successor.

For many years, the most extensive glimpses of Kim Jong Il in action came from a prominent South Korean actress, Choi Eun Hee, and her former husband, film director Shin Sang Ok, who were kidnapped separately to North Korea from Hong Kong in 1978 on the younger Kim’s orders. Without embarrassment, he baldly told the movie couple in a meeting that they surreptitiously tape-recorded that he had ordered their forcible abduction because “I absolutely needed you” to improve Pyongyang’s unprofessional film industry. The pair made motion pictures for Kim Jong Il for almost three years. He treated them as important artists and members of his social circle until their escape in Vienna in 1986.

The filmmakers reported that Kim spent money lavishly. He housed Choi and eventually Shin in luxurious surroundings. He gave each of them a new Mercedes 280. He built an expensive new motion picture studio for their productions. An aide told Shin that Kim had use of the proceeds from a gold mine, which provided nearly unlimited funds for his gifts, motion picture hobby, and other activities.

In interviews shortly after their escape, Choi and Shin depicted Kim as confident, bright, temperamental, quirky, and very much in charge of governmental as well as theatrical affairs. To his kidnapped “special guests,” he could be privately self-deprecating, as when he said to actress Choi in their first dinner meeting, “What do you think of my physique? Small as a midget’s turd, aren’t I?”

Although kidnapping Choi and Shin is the best documented of the many violent acts associated with the name of the younger Kim, it is not the only one. The terrorist bombing that killed South Korean cabinet members at Rangoon in 1983 was attributed to a clandestine agency reporting to him. Kim Hyon Hui, the female agent in the bombing of Korean Air Lines flight 858, in which 115 people were killed in 1987, was told that her orders came directly from Kim Jong Il in his own handwriting, although she did not see them.

At the same time, even in his early years Kim Jong Il may have been more interested in modernizing the country than most others in the ruling
circles. In a diplomatic dispatch to Berlin in 1982, the East German Embassy remarked on the younger Kim’s “modern” outlook and credited him with a loosening up of popular lifestyles, including the approval of more fashionable women’s clothing; the reintroduction of dice, card, and board games; and the increased consumption of alcoholic beverages, especially beer.

In a tape recording brought out by the filmmakers, Kim Jong Il said in 1984, “After having experienced about thirty years of socialism, I feel we need to expand to the Western world to feed the people. The reality is that we are behind the West.” At the same meeting, however, he said that North Korea could not open up, as even the Chinese were urging. “We have been stuck strategically” because opening up in his militarily embattled country, even for tourism, “would be naturally tantamount to disarmament.” This could only be done after unification, he said. Over the years, Kim vacillated on this point, moving sometimes toward more opening, then retreating.

In July 1994, Korea experts speculated about how quickly Kim Jong Il would assume his father’s titles of general secretary of the Workers Party and president of the DPRK. Ignorant of how thorough the preparations had been for the succession or how firmly Kim already held the reins of power when his father died, many observers including the South Korean president predicted Kim would quickly be overthrown. The lengthy (three-year) mourning period that followed, and his failure to assume the top posts right away, stirred speculation—completely mistaken—that Kim Jong Il faced important opposition within the hierarchy.

THE FRAMEWORK NEGOTIATIONS

The long-awaited third round of US-DPRK nuclear negotiations, interrupted by Kim Il Sung’s death, resumed in Geneva on August 5. American negotiators were relieved to discover that the death of the Great Leader had not altered the existing DPRK negotiating positions or diminished the desire of its leadership to make a deal. From the outset of the August talks, the North Koreans were impressively businesslike and determined to move ahead.

In a single week of talks ending with a postmidnight press conference on August 12, the two delegations were able to agree on the rough outlines of a settlement of the central issues. Additional progress emerged from tougher bargaining when the negotiations resumed in September after a six-week recess.

As a result of the Carter mission, North Korea had already agreed to freeze its nuclear program while negotiations proceeded. In Geneva the two sides now pursued a permanent solution along the lines they had pre
viously discussed: that Pyongyang would abandon all of its proliferation-prone gas-graphite nuclear facilities in return for modern light-water-reactor nuclear power plants.

Beyond this basic provision, a comprehensive agreement had to take into account a number of lesser items of concern to one side or the other. DPRK negotiator Kang, in a private conversation with Gallucci, referred to several key items as “our chips”: the eight thousand irradiated fuel rods that had been unloaded earlier in the year from the 5-megawatt nuclear reactor, the reprocessing facility that could extract from those fuel rods enough plutonium for four or five nuclear weapons, and the mandatory IAEA “special inspections” of the disputed nuclear waste sites, which might cast light on whether North Korea already possessed hidden plutonium. The United States also had some important bargaining chips, especially the possible establishment of political and economic ties that could create a new environment for North Korea and substitute, in some degree, for the loss of the Soviet Union and the shifts in the policies of China.

Early on, the North Koreans asked to be compensated for the energy they would be giving up by shutting down their working reactor and stopping work on the two larger ones long before the promised light-water reactors were on the scene, a period roughly estimated to take at least ten years. They made it clear that they needed something concrete to take home at the end of the negotiations. The Americans explored supplying various energy sources, including surplus Defense Department generators, coal-fired plants, and others. US negotiators were delighted when the North Koreans asked for heavy oil, a little-used sludge-like commodity that is left over from the refining of petroleum. It had previously powered a large electricity plant near the northern border, supplied decades earlier by the East Germans and, unknown to the Americans, had been high on Kim Il Sung’s wish list in connection with additional power plants.

How to structure the terms of what was emerging as a comprehensive deal consumed much of the bargaining. North Koreans feared they would be made to give up everything at the beginning and then the Americans would renege in the long run. Americans feared a sweeping agreement in principle that would not be fulfilled by the North Koreans. Gallucci observed that “there wasn’t sufficient trust for one to take a very large step assuming the other would take the compensatory counter step. There had to be a series of smaller steps linked with constant checking on compliance.” Thus, the core of the agreement was a detailed timetable of reciprocal actions, some of which were spelled out in a “confidential minute” that was not made public due to North Korean sensibilities. In the final stages of the talks, a certain rhythm developed: whenever the two sides became stuck over wording on a sensitive implementation issue, one side
or the other would simply say, “Put it in the confidential minute,” and the discussions could move on.

The rapid progress toward a far-reaching accord in the first week, as well as continued progress when the negotiations resumed in September after a six-week recess, was surprising to many American officials. US negotiators surmised that, especially after Kim Il Sung’s death, the new leadership was under pressure to produce a deal that would enhance Kim Jong Il’s stature. Gallucci believed that the tangible threat of UN sanctions in the spring and American willingness to face down North Korea with a major infusion of additional ships, planes, and troops, as worrisome as it had been to all parties, was a crucial reason for his success. He called the events of June “a very good combination of political-military activity” that drove Pyongyang back to the bargaining table with a strong desire to reach a settlement. That view probably underestimated the extent to which the North wanted a settlement in order to get progress on its overarching strategic goal—improving relations with the United States.

One of the thorniest issues was the IAEA’s demand, which Washington and the UN Security Council had endorsed, for “special inspections” of the two suspected nuclear waste sites at Yongbyon, which North Korea claimed were military facilities exempt from inspection. Pyongyang maintained that this dispute had caused its startling announcement eighteen months earlier that it was withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In the meantime, private declarations of its chief negotiator, Kang Sok Ju, as well as public statements from Pyongyang, warned that North Korea would “never” submit to what it described as a violation of its national sovereignty. Gallucci, on the other hand, came with firm instructions that North Korean acceptance of the “special inspections” must be part of the final agreement. This was clearly a deal breaker—until both sides began showing flexibility.

The State Department’s senior North Korea watcher, Robert Carlin, who had spent more than twenty years listening for nuances in North Korean statements, noticed that beginning September 23, Kang had stopped saying “never” about the special inspections. Carlin thought the omission significant. The Pyongyang watcher was even more certain that something was up when, on September 27, Pyongyang radio broadcast a puzzling press statement by “a spokesman for DPRK Ministry of the People’s Armed Forces.” In blustery language, the statement seemed to attack the ongoing Geneva talks being conducted by the Foreign Ministry, declaring that the army had never expected anything, did not recognize “talks accompanied by pressure,” and could “never allow any attempt to open up military facilities through special inspections.” CIA experts in Washington, whom I happened to meet that afternoon at a conference on Korea policy, interpreted the statement as presaging even fiercer North
Korean opposition to special inspections and a deadlock in the negotiations. Carlin, however, was convinced that the opposite was true—that the strange military pronouncement had arisen from an outbreak of extremely unusual open bureaucratic warfare between the army and the Foreign Ministry in Pyongyang over making a key concession in Geneva.

Carlin was soon proven right. At the negotiating table on October 6, Kang proposed coolly that North Korea not be required to accept special inspections (he used a euphemism to avoid these words) until 70 to 80 percent of the components of the promised light-water reactors had been shipped. Suddenly, “never” had been transformed into a discussion of the price. Carlin wrote an e-mail to his immediate superior at the State Department: “At 11:50 this morning we won the war. I can pinpoint the time because when Kang said what he said, I knew the game was over, and I looked at my watch.” At that point, it was left to Gallucci to nail down the terms and persuade Washington to permit special inspections to be postponed until the delivery of key nuclear components of the promised light-water reactors—at least five years or more away. The postponement became one of the agreement’s most controversial features. Gallucci and the US administration defended it as the best they could do.

South Korea had agreed to play the central role and pick up the lion’s share of the costs of providing the light-water reactors, but Seoul was absent from the bargaining table at Geneva. Although its diplomats were briefed daily, its absence from direct participation in the US-DPRK negotiations and resulting accords was a bitter pill for South Koreans, who saw themselves as relegated to a marginal role while their sponsor sat down with their peninsular foe. Conversely, a direct, normal relationship with Washington had been the most important objectives for Pyongyang ever since the fall of the USSR.

The anxiety in Seoul emerged dramatically in mid-October, when President Kim Young Sam, in an interview with the
New York Times
, objected to the agreement nearing completion in Geneva on the grounds that “North Korea faces the danger of imminent political and economic collapse” and that “any compromise [at this point] with North Korea will only help prolong its survival.” He also declared that the United States, with far less experience than Seoul in negotiations with Pyongyang, was being deceived in Geneva. These comments contradicted the public positions of support for the negotiations that had been taken by Kim’s government.