Richardson had experience with North Korean diplomacy: as a U.S. congressional representative in 1996, he had successfully secured the release of Evan Hunziker, an American citizen held in North Korean custody; and in early January 2003, when the North Korean situation was falling apart, Pyongyang had sent its own envoys to meet with Richardson in New Mexico, presumably hoping to use him as an intermediary. He had also been sent to Baghdad to secure the release of two U.S. aerospace workers during Bill Clinton’s presidency and had traveled to Bangladesh in 1996 to secure a pardon for an American woman accused of heroin smuggling. So he had a record of mediation successes in problem areas, which often gained significant media coverage.
I agreed to support Richardson’s mission. He also set out to obtain State Department approval, which came in the form of a promise of military air transport, with the caveat that he would not be speaking on behalf of the U.S. government. Shortly thereafter, Richardson sent me a fax: the North Koreans, who had earlier been open to the visit, had changed their minds.
In another curious turn, I was asked by a divisional director of IAEA to see a Swedish banker by the name of Peter Castenfelt who had connections to high-level officials in North Korea. Although I felt quite skeptical, I agreed to the meeting. Castenfelt’s appearance, when he showed up at the IAEA offices in Vienna, did nothing to reassure me: his clothes were mussed, as was his hair. He grinned as he shook my hand, eyeing me through oversized spectacles.
When we sat down, Castenfelt got right to his message. Kim Jong Il, he said, had a dilemma. He wanted to open up the country, to lead North Korea out of its isolated state. Many young North Korean entrepreneurs supported him. The problem was the old army generals of his father’s generation, who opposed Kim Jong Il’s every step toward rapprochement with the international community. Castenfelt said the North Koreans recognized that restoring a relationship with the IAEA was important. In fact, he revealed that the North Koreans had prepared a letter inviting me to visit, but then had decided to postpone sending it because I had made a statement about them they did not like.
Peter Castenfelt was an enigmatic figure. From what I could gather, he had been involved with Russia during Boris Yeltsin’s time, interceding to get loans for Russia from the International Monetary Fund. Germany and Russia later sent him to persuade Slobodan Milošević to stop bombing Kosovo. He seemed to have high-level connections everywhere, including in the United States and Iran. I was never sure what he sought from his role, and he exited the North Korean stage as suddenly as he had entered it.
Abruptly, the clouds broke. The fourth round of six-party talks were deadlocked in August 2005 but then resumed in September, with all parties reaching agreement on a Joint Statement that laid out the principles for addressing the North Korean situation. The statement included North Korea’s agreement to abandon its nuclear weapons program and to return to the NPT and to IAEA safeguards.
What had changed? In my view, the primary difference was Condoleezza Rice, now U.S. secretary of state, who was able to convince Bush (against the opposition of her colleagues, particularly Dick Cheney and his faction) that a shift of course was necessary. Her influence was evident in the appointment of Ambassador Christopher Hill as the head of the U.S. delegation to the six-party talks, and a few months later as assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs. Hill, a pragmatist who believed in step-by-step building of trust through dialogue, broke with precedent and began to engage directly with his counterparts in Pyongyang. I found Hill to be a rare commodity, a high-level Bush administration appointee with a nonideological, commonsense approach to handling geopolitical crises. Hill was remarkably adept at diplomacy with the North Koreans; there were rumors that the Japanese had started privately calling him “Chris Jong-Hill.”
It was evident that Hill had little patience for the hard-liners in Washington; at one point, when we were speaking one-on-one, he told me, “John Bolton’s body may be out, but his hands are still there,” referring to Bolton’s continuing influence in Washington. Hill and I were generally in agreement on issues of common concern: the value of dialogue, the shortsightedness of uncompromising positions, and the importance of a pragmatic, committed, step-by-step approach on North Korea. Unfortunately, from what he eventually shared with me, all sorts of obstacles arose to block his progress on the North Korean nuclear situation. I once mentioned that I found the bench to be very thin at the State Department when it came to arms control expertise. Hill grinned and said that’s why he was getting such bad counsel.
The Joint Statement, unlike the Agreed Framework, did not include a specific timetable or even a complete road map, and some in the United States referred to it derisively as the “son of the Agreed Framework,” implying that three years after trashing the Agreed Framework, the U.S. administration had merely replaced it with an inferior alternative. Still, it was an important step forward. North Korea promised concessions in return for energy assistance. The United States declared it had no intention of invading North Korea, said it would provide a security guarantee to this effect, and pledged to respect North Korea’s sovereignty.
And then, yet again, the negotiations ground to a halt. The United States, citing an ongoing U.S. Treasury Department investigation, froze roughly $25 million in North Korean assets in Banco Delta Asia in Macau, claiming that they were linked to money laundering and counterfeiting. Pyongyang was incensed but offered to resume the six-party talks if the United States released the funds. The United States refused, saying the nuclear and financial issues were unrelated.
With talks once more at an impasse, North Korea announced that it would conduct its first nuclear test. And six days later, on October 9, 2006, Pyongyang kept its word. The detonation was quite small by test standards; there was much doubt in nuclear circles about the effectiveness of the North Korean technology. But there was no denying the most sobering aspect: another country—isolated, impoverished, feeling deeply threatened by the United States but nonetheless defiant—had joined the exclusive club of nuclear weapon possessor states.
If the intent of the North Korean nuclear test was to get attention, it worked. Reactions were swift. The UN Security Council issued a resolution condemning the test, adding sanctions that had little teeth and in some cases repeated what was already in place. Former U.S. secretary of defense William Perry, writing in the Washington Post, declared the test a demonstration of “the total failure of the Bush administration’s policy” toward North Korea.[9] Ex-president Jimmy Carter was more conciliatory, pointing out that it was still possible to return to the 2005 Joint Statement: “What must be avoided,” he wrote, “is to leave a beleaguered nuclear nation convinced that it is permanently excluded from the international community, its existence threatened, its people suffering horrible deprivation, and its hard-liners in total control of military and political policy.”[10]
A sharply opposing perspective, but one that reflected the viewpoint of the U.S. hawks, was offered by David Frum, a Canadian who had previously served as President Bush’s speechwriter and claimed credit for the “axis of evil” concept. Writing in the New York Times one day after the test, he advocated harsh measures: accelerating the deployment of U.S. missile defense systems; ending humanitarian aid to North Korea; bringing a number of Asian countries into NATO. Frum had one more brainstorm: the United States, he wrote, should “encourage Japan to renounce the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and create its own nuclear deterrent.”[11] I breathed a sigh of relief that Frum was no longer in the policy-making loop.