Читать онлайн "The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States" - Lewis Jeffrey - RuLit

For instance, Hillary Clinton has often told a story—which she repeated for the benefit of this commission—about being patched through to a visiting ambassador during her tenure as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013. Only later would she learn that, at the time she had asked to be put in touch with him, the ambassador did not have his cell phone, his staff knew he was out to dinner but not where, and the hotel concierge did not know which of three restaurants he had recommended the ambassador had chosen, if any. The Ops Center called all three, texted a picture of the ambassador to each manager, and found him. The Ops Center tracked down the ambassador so quickly that Clinton wasn’t even aware there had been a problem. Similarly, at one point during her own service as secretary of state from 1997 to 2001, Madeleine Albright needed to reach a diplomat who was out of contact at a football game. The Ops Center arranged to have the scoreboard flash a message for him to find a pay phone.

Compared to these challenges, Sullivan’s order that the watch officer find Ja Song Nam, the North Korean ambassador, was a snap. Ja was asleep in bed. He had not been told about the emerging crisis. North Korea did not have an Ops Center.

Sullivan knew the State Department had used the New York channel before. He had watched it being used in 2017 to negotiate the release of Otto Warmbier, an American student whom North Korea had detained in North Korea on trumped-up charges. Warmbier had been terribly mistreated in North Korea: when North Korea returned him to the United States, he was in a coma and would die a few weeks later. (The Warmbier family subsequently emerged as favorites of Haley, who felt that the family’s grief and ongoing lawsuit helped illustrate the fundamentally evil nature of the North Korean regime.)

Sullivan’s intended use of the New York channel was less humanitarian than pragmatic. He saw the moment not simply as an opportunity to punish North Korea for killing innocent civilians, many of them children, but more importantly as a chance to further isolate the Kim regime. He was not the only senior State Department official with this hardheaded sensibility: during Tillerson’s tenure, one of his aides, Brian Hook, had written a memo suggesting that human rights were useful largely as a means to “pressure, compete with, and outmaneuver” US adversaries. While many of Tillerson’s aides had departed with Tillerson, Hook had stayed on, even traveling with Pompeo to Pyongyang. Now, in consultation with Hook, Sullivan came to see the shootdown of BX 411 less as a crime to be avenged than as an opportunity to pressure, compete with, and outmaneuver Kim Jong Un.

The loss of life was tragic, Sullivan reasoned, but North Korea had backed itself into a corner. He calculated that the resulting pressure on North Korea would offer him his best chance at negotiating an end to North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs. “John thought he would offer North Korea a way out,” according to Hook, “but he wanted that way out to be a loss for Kim and a victory for us.”

Connected by the Ops Center to the North Korean ambassador, Sullivan explained that Sydney Seiler, the newly appointed US special representative for North Korea policy, would be on the 3:15 AM Amtrak out of Washington, arriving in Penn Station at 6:40 AM. Would the North Koreans take a meeting with him?

Ja agreed to meet with Seiler. After a brief discussion, the North Korean diplomat also agreed to ask the Chinese to host the meeting, although Sullivan secured his assurance that it would be a bilateral affair between the two representatives. “The Chinese just bring the donuts,” explained Hook later. No one notified Haley or Lerner.

THE CHURCH LADY

President Trump chafed under the order imposed by Francis. Indeed, the president called his chief of staff the “Church Lady”—an insult that he had initially used against Kelly, but which he applied to Francis with even more regularity. In truth, however, Francis was less severe than this nickname implies. He knew he could not change the president. He simply had to try to steer Trump as best he could.

Among his many measures to impose order on the White House, one thing Francis did not try to do was to prevent the president from using Twitter or other social media—even though Twitter remained a constant source of information that Francis and Kellogg believed was often misleading or false and too often tempted the president to make ill-considered remarks that would disrupt days or sometimes weeks of his staff’s careful preparations.

Francis and Kellogg had worked hard to persuade other governments not to take the president’s tweets too seriously. Francis’s predecessor Kelly had once told reporters, “Believe it or not, I do not follow the tweets,” and Francis made a point of repeating that statement as often as possible. This was part of a strategy to downplay the importance of these often inflammatory, but technically official presidential statements.

In fact, Francis did attempt to impose some order on what the president tweeted. He asked for the same thing Kelly had asked for—to be informed of what Trump planned to tweet before he did so—and tried to discourage the president from using Twitter to make major policy announcements. Even so, Francis told colleagues, he knew there would always be late-night or early-morning tweets that he did not see. His overall goal was simply “pushing the tweets in the right direction.”

But even such mild attempts to direct the president’s Twitter habit had proven difficult, especially when it came to Trump’s remarks about foreign leaders. In particular, his social-media bullying of Kim Jong Un had reached a new nadir following the collapse of the diplomatic thaw with North Korea in 2018. Of all the people President Trump blamed for the failure of negotiations with the Kim regime—and Pompeo, Kelly, and Bolton received their share of his animus—the person Trump held most responsible was Kim himself.

Of course, Trump could not fire the leader of North Korea with a tweet. But he could express his disappointment that their negotiations had come to naught. Thus, the collapse of the 2018 diplomatic effort was followed by a string of aggressive, baiting tweets that were impressively personal in nature.