Nuclear Summit and Missed Opportunity in Pyongyang

By Sunny Lee

Korea Times Correspondent

LONDON ― As world leaders gathered in Washington this week for a first-ever global nuclear summit, with North Korea being a major item on the agenda, a former British diplomat recalled that the U.S. had a chance to put a lid on North Korea's nuclear ambition in 2002, but then sabotaged talks with Pyongyang due to domestic partisan politics.

"It was a missed opportunity." That's how James Hoare, the first British diplomat to open the British Embassy in Pyongyang in 2001, describes a key confrontation that emerged one year after his arrival in the reclusive nation between the U.S. and North Korea, which marked what North Korea watchers called the onset of the "second North Korean nuclear crisis."

The first nuclear crisis in 1994, during which the U.S. was considering a "surgical" strike on the North's main nuclear facilities in Yongbyon, near Pyongyang, which would have trigged a full-scale war on the Korean Peninsula, was averted at the eleventh hour by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter's visit to the North. A pact, called the Agreed Framework, was subsequently signed between North Korea and the U.S.

This, however, was de facto nullified in 2002 and started the second nuclear crisis when James Kelly, then U.S. assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific Affairs, accused the North, immediately after a visit to Pyongyang, of having secret plutonium-based and highly-enriched uranium weapons programs, violating the agreement.

The shocking news, which came amid North Korea's uncommon experiment to reform its economy and improve relations with the world's major powers, followed by bitter confrontation between the two, made the North halt its coming-out drive and dive deeper into bolstering its nuclear devices.

"Now, North Korea has some number of nuclear weapons," Hoare said. On Friday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton estimated that the reclusive state had anywhere from one to six nuclear weapons.

As world leaders gathered for the inaugural summit on global nuclear security, a history lesson of "if things in the past had moved a different way, then the present too, would have been different" rings a bell with Hoare.

In their confrontation in 2002, the U.S. didn't have any evidence, but said that Kang Suk-ju, Kelly's North Korean counterpart, "admitted" operating the clandestine program, something the North denied.

Since then, long blame games have erupted between the two, while what Kelly actually heard in Pyongyang from Kang, a confidant of Kim Jong-il and first deputy minister of the foreign affairs, and used as "evidence," has remained a subject of debate to this day.

According to Yoichi Funabashi, who authored "The Peninsula Question: A Chronicle of the Second Korean Nuclear Crisis," what Kang reportedly told Kelly was the following.

"What is wrong with us having our own uranium enrichment program? We are entitled to possess our own highly enriched uranium, and we are bound to produce more powerful weapons with that."

Kelly's team consisted of eight members, including Jack Pritchard, President George W. Bush's special envoy for negotiations with North Korea; Michael Green, director of East Asian affairs at the National Security Council; and David Straub, director of Korean affairs at the State Department. Three of the delegation spoke Korean.

"The night Kelly and his party came to my [British] Embassy in Pyongyang, there were three interpreters. And they all said they were sure about what they heard [from Kang]. But all three of them subsequently said they weren't sure," Hoare recalled.

According to Hoare, however, at the end of the day what Kang told Kelly didn't really matter because he observed that the mission to Pyongyang was instructed to sabotage the Agreed Framework from the beginning and the highly-enriched uranium matter served as convenient cover.

"In a way, it didn't matter what North Korea said to them. When Kelly came, I felt that his hands were tied by his masters back in Washington," Hoare, now retired from diplomatic duty, spoke in undiplomatically figurative terms.

"Kelly's intention was to destroy the Agreed Framework. And it worked," he said. "He destroyed the Agreed Framework, and as a consequence, North Korea now has nuclear weapons."

Hoare said the framework had a problem. "It was intensely disliked by the U.S. Republican Party because it was Clinton's policy. It was also seen as a U.S. move to compromise on the issue of principle. So the George W. Bush administration during its first year was determined to smash the whole thing. I don't think it was a very sensible policy. Indeed, Bush himself didn't think it was a sensible policy either because he retracted from this hard-line posture in 2005 after winning his second election.

"Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney in particular were determined that they would not have an agreement with North Korea," said Hoare. "Since then, North Korea has conducted two nuclear tests, and it has gone back to testing missiles. I don't think that was a very positive result from Kelly's visit to Pyongyang."

The reason Kelly's delegation visited the British Embassy at that time was because the U.S. didn't have diplomatic relations with the North and the Americans wanted to use the embassy's communication lines to report to Washington.

For Hoare, the behavior of the American diplomats in Pyongyang was unusual from the beginning. "Kelly's team turned up. And they did no socializing with North Korean officials. That was pretty unusual. I think it was done to create confrontation."

The Americans' behavior was also a great contrast to that of the North Koreans who were making efforts to accommodate the visitors' needs. For example, when Kelly's team said they would want to fly directly from Seoul to Pyongyang, officials agreed to this. When the team then said the airplane wasn't big enough for all the delegation members and some of them would have to travel by road, crossing the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), the North Koreans also accepted it.

N. Korea's Coming-out Experiment

For Hoare, the 2002 confrontation was also unfortunate because while he was living inside North Korea at that time he saw the country was showing signs of genuinely opening up to the outside world.

"It was an interesting time to be there. The engagement-based Sunshine Policy by South Korean President Kim Dae-jung seemed to be working. While being suspicious of the intentions of the policy, North Koreans were also eager for outside contracts. They were eager to send students abroad. They were seeing the benefits of engagement," he said.

Hoare got the impression during the period he was there that the thrust of North Korea's approach was to engage in the outside world to learn. They were particularly keen to have training in economics and commercial practices. With financial support from the British government, "two North Korean cadres even attended a human rights training course at a U.K. university," he said.

Having the rare opportunity to live in North Korea during its time of reform and opening-up drive and witnessing the 2002 confrontation between Pyongyang and Washington, which killed the experiment, Hoare feels nostalgic about what might have been if outside conditions were more amenable to the isolated country.

"You can never go back on what has already happened," Hoare said. "But I still think that the highly-enriched uranium issue in 2002 was an unnecessary crisis."