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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: NickSE who wrote (66938)	1/19/2003 12:12:30 PM
From: skinowski	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Great they are, these modern times, with all this wonderful openness… Not like back in the 50’s – 70’s, with all the secretiveness, complicated tradecraft, and so on… If things would be back then the way they are now, John Le Carre wouldn’t have the same material for his great novels: just imagine Smily’s People travel across the Curtain on scheduled airlines, using their real passports… -bg.

To: NickSE who wrote (66938)	1/19/2003 3:11:41 PM
From: FaultLine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Time to collect on his $400k payoff? Check you ascerbic (and tedious) commentary at the door, Ghostrider... --fl

To: NickSE who wrote (66938)	1/20/2003 9:00:23 PM
From: NickSE	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

THE COLD TEST - by SEYMOUR M. HERSH (2003-01-20) newyorker.com [...] In early October, James A. Kelly, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, flew to Pyongyang with a large entourage for a showdown over the uranium-enrichment program. The agenda was, inevitably, shaped by officials' awareness of the President's strong personal views. "There was a huge fight over whether to give the North Koreans an ultimatum or to negotiate," one American expert on Korea told me. "Which is the same fight they're having now." Kelly was authorized to tell the Koreans that the U.S. had learned about the illicit uranium program, but his careful instructions left him no room to negotiate. His scripted message was blunt: North Korea must stop the program before any negotiations could take place. "This is a sad tale of bureaucracy," another American expert said. "The script Kelly had was written in the N.S.C."—the National Security Council—"by hard-liners. I don't think the President wanted a crisis at this time." The C.I.A. report had predicted that North Korea, if confronted with the evidence, would not risk an open break with the 1994 agreement and would do nothing to violate the nonproliferation treaty. "It was dead wrong," an intelligence officer told me. "I hope there are other people in the agency who understand the North Koreans better than the people who wrote this." "The Koreans were stunned," a Japanese diplomat who spoke to some of the participants told me. "They didn't know that the U.S. knew what it knew." After an all-night caucus in Pyongyang, Kang Suk Ju, the First Vice Foreign Minister of North Korea, seemed to confirm the charge when he responded by insisting upon his nation's right to develop nuclear weapons. What he didn't talk about was whether it actually had any. Kang Suk Ju also accused the United States, the Japanese diplomat said, of "threatening North Korea's survival." Kang then produced a list of the United States' alleged failures to meet its own obligations under the 1994 agreement, and offered to shut down the enrichment program in return for an American promise not to attack and a commitment to normalize relations. Kelly, constrained by his instructions, could only re-state his brief: the North Koreans must act first. The impasse was on. [...]