These kind of "Background" stories are fun to read. But you have to figure the leakers of them have an ax to grind. And this one is told from the "State" side.
U.S. Has a Shifting Script on N. Korea
Administration Split as New Talks Near
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 7, 2003; Page A25
Three times in the past year, Assistant Secretary of State James A. Kelly has led a U.S. delegation to meet with North Korean officials. Each time, under instructions from the National Security Council, he has read -- literally -- from a script that had been tightly scrutinized by senior officials from across the Bush administration . Sometimes, Kelly has been held to an NSC-vetted script even when he met just with Japanese and South Korean officials.
The restraints placed on Kelly -- highly unusual for an official of his experience and stature -- illustrate the administration's delicate, and at times tense, behind-the-scenes struggle with the North Korean crisis. Ever since President Bush outlined a strategy of steadily assembling a multinational coalition to confront North Korea over its nuclear ambitions, his advisers have disagreed profoundly over how tough the coalition's tactics should be, according to more than two dozen interviews with current and former officials in key agencies throughout the U.S. government.
The result, many officials say, has often been a stalemate that has slowed decision making and hobbled the administration's strategy -- even as North Korea has defiantly confirmed a clandestine nuclear program, ousted international inspectors, begun assembling a nuclear weapons stockpile and threatened to test a nuclear weapon.
Now, as the United States and North Korea prepare for another six-nation round of talks, the administration has reached a critical point in the effort to restrain North Korea -- and in its own internal deliberations.
The arguments go beyond the traditional State Department-Pentagon split, frequently leading to intra-agency disputes pitting Asia hands eager for diplomatic engagement of North Korea against nonproliferation experts pressing for containment and isolation. On one side of the debate are those who think that North Korea can be persuaded to abandon its nuclear ambitions in exchange for eventual aid, guarantees of security and other diplomatic incentives. Their opponents profoundly mistrust the North Koreans and want to use political and economic pressure to force the Pyongyang government to capitulate or collapse.
Each side in the administration believes it has the president's blessing. But both are frustrated: Those seeking a diplomatic resolution feel that even when they win a small policy victory, language and tactics become hardened when the policy is implemented. Meanwhile, their opponents seethe at what they see as an attempt to re-create failed policies of the Clinton administration.
Few people interviewed for this article agreed to be quoted by name or even identified by agency because of the sensitivity of the debate. Moreover, some senior administration officials, while acknowledging the divisions, say that focusing on the turf battles obscures the overall success of the White House's deliberate strategy -- and the fact that the onus must remain on North Korea.
In particular, they say, the administration has succeeded in isolating North Korea, enlisting China -- Pyongyang's main patron -- as a U.S. partner and winning the support of other key regional allies for the president's approach. "We have created a unity in a group of five countries who a year ago were all over the map on this," one top official said.
In the coming days, Kelly's script for the upcoming meeting will be drafted, argued and polished, but many issues remain to be settled. Bush has publicly offered North Korea some sort of multilateral security assurances, but the form and timing of such a guarantee have not been decided. Moreover, U.S. officials disagree on what North Korea needs to do to obtain the assurances -- in particular, whether the xenophobic state needs to accede to intrusive inspections.
A review of how the Bush administration has grappled with its North Korea policy shows how the continuous internal debate has never been fully resolved, leading few inside or outside the government to believe much progress will be made in settling the crisis in the coming year.
'Catastrophic Success'
The Clinton administration reached an agreement in 1994 freezing a North Korean plutonium facility and later thought it was so close to a deal limiting North Korean missiles that President Bill Clinton seriously considered making the first presidential visit to Pyongyang in the days before he left office. Only days after the disputed 2000 election was decided, incoming Secretary of State Colin L. Powell invited a group of Clinton State Department officials to his home in McLean to brief him on the status of talks.
Powell did not tip his hand, but "you could sense from his body language that he was more impressed with the progress that had been made than he had thought" he would be, one former official said.
But Bush, deeply skeptical of North Korea and its unpredictable leader, Kim Jong Il, wasn't interested in picking up Clinton's ball. He sided with his more hawkish advisers, who felt the North Koreans did not abide by agreements they had negotiated and needed to be broken of the habit of winning concessions by making outrageous threats. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Bush labeled North Korea part of an "axis of evil" that included Iran and Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq.
A year and a half after Bush took office, the administration still had not arranged its first meeting with the North Koreans. U.S. officials had finally reached consensus that representatives of the two countries should meet when they hit a new roadblock. In July 2002, U.S. intelligence analysts concluded the North Korean government had a clandestine program to enrich uranium, in violation of the 1994 agreement reached with Clinton.
The State Department, acting on its own, arranged for a "coincidental" meeting on July 31, 2002, between Powell and the North Korean foreign minister during an Asian forum in Brunei. Powell, who had indicated he would like such a session, sat down for a cup of coffee with Paek Nam Sun and tried to warn him that North Korea needed to come clean on all its activities. Powell's cryptic comments failed to make an impression on the North Koreans, who still expected a wide-ranging discussion on a new relationship with the United States when Kelly, the assistant secretary of state for East Asia, arrived for talks in October.
But when Kelly got there, he was ordered to stick closely to his NSC-approved script. It was not as harsh as some hard-liners wanted -- a simple declaration that the Clinton deal was dead -- but it did include confronting the North Koreans about the secret uranium-enrichment program.
To make the U.S. displeasure even clearer, the White House ordered the cancellation of a dinner that Kelly had planned to host for the North Koreans. This resulted mostly in confusion, as the North Koreans thought the dinner would still take place but Kelly could not attend.
On the first day of the meeting, Kelly delivered the accusation. The next day, something unexpected happened: The North Koreans confirmed it. Without apology, they said they were developing materials to be used for nuclear bombs.
Suddenly, the talks were over; Kelly had a second-day script that would have hinted at how the U.S.-North Korean relationship might move forward. But there was no guidance on how to respond to this revelation -- and he was not free to try anything on his own.
"We had no plan for catastrophic success," said a senior administration official who had pushed for an end to the 1994 agreement.
'Talks Will Not Last'
Bush, officials say, quickly decided that the United States would not be drawn into one-to-one negotiations with North Korea unless other countries from the region were also at the table. "If we are channeled into this bilateral approach, it is going to fail again," said one official, explaining the reasoning behind Bush's decision.
But almost immediately, administration officials resumed their fight over how to achieve the goal of disarming North Korea.
The Asia specialists in the State Department wanted to press for diplomatic talks, this time with other nations included. The hard-liners who hoped to force the government to collapse were bolstered by tantalizing CIA reports, based on a single defector, that Kim's hold on power was shaky.
In the end, a middle ground called "tailored containment" was chosen, but it quickly faded once the name leaked and regional allies complained. "It was leaked and died from exposure to the sun," an official said. "It had so many meanings that no one could agree on what, ultimately, it was." Meanwhile, the CIA unexpectedly retracted its tantalizing intelligence, saying it had no confidence in the source's information.
Robert Joseph, the NSC senior director for nonproliferation and a proponent of the confrontational approach, assumed increasing influence over North Korea policy. He worked closely with John R. Bolton, the undersecretary of state for arms control. Bolton nominally reports to Powell but often agrees with the Defense Department and Vice President Cheney's office.
Guided by these officials, the United States put pressure on North Korea -- notably, cutting off deliveries of critical fuel oil as winter approached. In response, North Korea kicked out international inspectors and restarted the nuclear facility that had been shuttered by Clinton's 1994 deal. On the diplomatic front, North Korea demanded bilateral talks even as the administration struggled to enlist regional allies, especially China.
In April, China agreed to host three-nation talks. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who takes a tough stance on North Korea, had just days before sent a memo to Bush's senior advisers saying enough diplomacy had taken place and it was time to press for substantial changes in the Pyongyang government.
Now, Rumsfeld warned in another memo that the Chinese-arranged session might be a trap to lure the administration into bilateral discussions. When the talks were scheduled anyway, he sent a third memo urging that Kelly be removed as head of delegation and replaced by Bolton or Joseph.
Kelly went, but with a script that took a very tough line and allowed no direct meetings with the North Koreans. Asia specialists at the State Department were deeply frustrated: "These talks will not last the scheduled three days," senior North Korea specialist Charles L. Pritchard e-mailed his colleagues. "The North will walk out."
The U.S. delegation arrived in Beijing on April 23 to discover that the Chinese -- either on their own or because of the private hints of some U.S. officials hoping to create the conditions for a deal -- had lured the North Koreans to the talks by promising they would have a separate meeting with the Americans. After an opening session with all three parties, the North Koreans refused to attend any more meetings until they were granted a private audience. Kelly again requested permission for a bilateral meeting -- and the Chinese ambassador made a personal appeal to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice -- but Washington adamantly rejected it.
In a brief encounter with Kelly, however, a North Korea official managed to deliver the intended message: North Korea already had a nuclear weapon and might test it.
There was no script for this. Kelly didn't respond.
'The Main Problem'
The collapse of the April talks left the diplomatic approach floundering and the administration still divided. In an effort to bridge the divisions, senior officials in May approved a plan to push forward on two fronts -- pursue more talks that would now include Japan, South Korea and Russia, while simultaneously taking steps to isolate North Korea. In essence, it became a race to see which approach paid off first.
On the isolation front, Bush announced a crackdown on "proliferation trade," an effort directly aimed at cutting off North Korea's lucrative trade in missiles and other illicit goods.
Meanwhile, the diplomatic approach was being aided considerably by China, which had become deeply worried about the impasse. To some extent, as one official put it, the administration has subcontracted its policy out to China, which some within the administration find troubling because China does not share the Bush administration's broad agenda. China's goal is stability on the Korean peninsula -- not North Korea's collapse or Korean reunification.
In July, with the Defense Department preoccupied with Iraq, Powell seized an opportunity. Flying to Africa with Bush, he and Rice had a lengthy discussion with the president about North Korea. Accounts differ on the importance of the meeting, but in the aftermath officials on both sides of the administration debate have perceived a shift toward permitting direct talks with the North Koreans.
During Bush's August vacation in Crawford, Tex., the president further tacked toward Powell's position. U.S. negotiators were sent to the talks, which began Aug. 27, with instructions that offered the prospect of more diplomatic engagement.
Indeed, under a script informally blessed by Washington, when the first day's session ended, Kelly, along with DOD official Richard Lawless, NSC official Michael Green and a translator, stood at one side of the room and waited for the North Koreans. The North Koreans finally had their long-awaited private session. They used most of it to rant and to repeat threats to test a weapon. They asked four questions about Kelly's presentation. Each time they got the same answer: Go back and carefully review my statement.
With representatives of the NSC and DOD looking over his shoulder, Kelly was not about to say anything more.
During the meeting, one benefit of the six-nation format became apparent: North Korea could see a lineup of nations united against its nuclear program. But Kelly's script was also disappointing to the U.S. allies at the table. Kelly floated the idea of a paper signed by all the parties at the table that would reassure the North Koreans they are not the target of an attack, and he indicated a package of incentives would accompany an irreversible and verifiable end to North Korea's nuclear programs. But the other nations felt Kelly offered mostly generalities, and Chinese Vice Minister Wang Yi later told reporters "the main problem we are facing" was not North Korea, but U.S. policy.
Now, all parties are waiting to see what's in Kelly's script for the next meeting.
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