BY MID-2003, the level of distrust between Pyongyang and Washington reached heights unseen since the worst days of the Cold War.
The North Koreans convinced themselves that Bush and Cheney had targeted them for the next invasion, which made them desperate to exaggerate their nuclear skills, betting that the Bush administration would not risk a demonstration of what North Korea called its “deterrent.” Cheney and his staff undermined every move toward reopening real diplomacy, using every opportunity at National Security Council meetings to remind the participants that the North Koreans were liars and cheats, as if anyone in the room had any doubts. Every time Powell or his deputy and close friend, Richard Armitage, hinted at the possibility of direct negotiations, or even talks on the sidelines of negotiations with several other nations, they got a lecture about the dangers of playing into Kim's hands the way Clinton did, and perpetuating an evil regime.
Astoundingly, “the decider” never stopped this internal war. The result was paralysis. Every step toward dialogue was undercut. The hardliners inside the administration were frustrated that Bush was halfhearted in his commitment to end tyranny in North Korea. Those who favored negotiations knew that until Bush was willing to dangle clear benefits in front of Kim, there would never be progress. The North Koreans seemed to sense that there was only one way to get Washington's undivided attention: Stage a large explosion.
INTO THIS IDEOLOGICAL stalemate stepped a Polish-born nuclear physicist more interested in North Korean stocks of plutonium than in Washington's stocks of venom. He ended up playing a crucial role in measuring the first and moderating the second.
Siegfried S. Hecker is a legend in the nuclear world: At sixty-four years old, his wiry build, boundless enthusiasm, and shock of white hair reminded many who knew him of the delightfully mad scientist in Back to the Future. But Hecker is anything but mad. He was the former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where America built the first atomic weapons. It was a position first held by J. Robert Oppenheimer, who guided the Manhattan Project before his career was ended by the ugly politics of anticommunism during the Cold War.
Not surprisingly, Hecker knew his way around nuclear weapons and their building blocks. And he knew what it took to lock up the world's most dangerous materials. Over the previous decade he had made more than thirty visits to the former Soviet Union to help them secure their nuclear arsenal. And in late 2003, he was invited by the North Koreans to visit the Yongbyon nuclear facilities as part of the first American delegation to enter the complex since the international inspectors were ousted. The reason for the invitation was simple: North Korea wanted to prove its boast that it had turned its spent fuel into bomb-grade plutonium.
The delegation to Pyongyang had been organized by John W Lewis, a professor at Stanford University who had traveled to North Korea nine times to conduct unofficial talks in hopes of finding the kind of common ground that the two governments clearly could not. In diplomatic lingo, these were called “track two” dialogues because they were unofficial, binding no one—making them a safe place to try out ideas with no commitments.
Hecker knew his role would be to cut through the grandiose North Korean claims. The North Koreans understood the significance of Hecker's visits. If they couldn't convince Hecker they had mastered the art of making a bomb, they couldn't convince anyone. They knew that Hecker would be reporting back to Washington— both in public testimony and in private assessments to the CIA and the national laboratories, the repository of American expertise on nuclear proliferation.
Kim Kye-gwan, North Korea's vice minister of foreign affairs and the delegation's principal host, told the group that he hoped their visit would “contribute to breaking the stalemate and opening up a bright future.”
“We will not play games with you,” he said.1
One official who traveled with Hecker on subsequent visits told me that Hecker was the perfect personality to deal with the North Koreans—nonconfrontational and able to treat the North Korean engineers as equals. “They talked about reprocessing nuclear fuel the way a bunch of baseball fanatics might talk about the strategy for pitching in a tough game,” the official said. “Sig knew how to put the North Korean engineers at ease, and get them to open up— and probably reveal more than they knew they were revealing.”
On January 8, 2004, the North Koreans took Hecker and the rest of the delegation through the major facilities, including the control room of the five-megawatt reactor that had produced North Korea's bomb fuel. They visited the “spent fuel pond” to look at what wasn't there anymore—the rods that would be turned into bomb-grade material. Eventually they settled into a cold conference room, where the North Korean officials lectured anew about their “deterrent.” Hecker challenged them: Where was the evidence?
The North Koreans responded with an offer: “Do you want to see our product?”
“You mean the plutonium?” Hecker replied.
The official nodded.
“Sure,” he said.2
The North Koreans returned with an innocuous-looking metal case and put it on the conference table. Inside, they claimed, was a sample of the plutonium reprocessed from the spent fuel that the international inspectors had guarded. There, sitting in something the size of a breadbox, was a chunk of what this whole argument was all about—the material that the North Koreans believed was the only thing that stopped the United States from pushing the country into the sea.
The North Koreans removed a wooden box containing two glass jars, one that they said contained plutonium oxalate powder and the other plutonium metal. The other members of the American delegation began to back away, suddenly deciding this would be a fabulous moment for a bathroom break, or a brisk stroll around the nuclear plant. Hecker chuckled when he saw them head for the exits, then checked the screw-on metal lids of the containers to be sure they had been taped shut.
“You want them taped,” he said, because even a modest seal protects against most of the harmful radiation.
He had no instruments with him, so Hecker was relying entirely on his experience. He instantly recognized the green color of the oxalate, knowing that was the hue plutonium took on after it was exposed to air. This looked like the real stuff.
But Hecker wanted to be sure. He asked his North Korean hosts to return with the samples and a pair of gloves. He wanted to hold the material in his hands.
What they came back with were a pair of latex gloves, similar to what supermarkets sell for doing dishes. With a gloved hand Hecker picked up the jar of plutonium metal, wanting to get a feel for its density and its ability to shed heat, the two telltale signs that this was the real deal. The container was reasonably heavy and slightly warm. But he could not conclusively identify the contents of either jar without more-rigorous testing.
Later Hecker told Kim Kye-gwan what he had found and that he could not report back, with certainty, that the North Koreans had the material they claimed.
“I understand,” Kim said. “I would like you to make this report to your government. Don't add anything and don't subtract anything.”3
Within days Hecker was in Washington, and his message was clear: Whatever the Bush administration thought it was doing by ignoring the North Korean threats, it now appeared that the country could, at a minimum, produce bomb fuel. That did not mean they could make a bomb. But they had succeeded at the hardest part of the job. The rest was just a matter of time.
IN THE SUMMER of 2004, with American troops tied up half a world away from the Korean peninsula and the insurgency in Iraq heating up, the White House press office called me one hot August day. After ducking a Times interview for nearly three years, the president had decided one was in his interest, especially in light of his ongoing reelection campaign against Democratic senator John Kerry. I was told to show up on short notice in Farmington, New Mexico, where Bush was traveling the state with Rudy Giuliani, the New York City mayor who was already test-driving a presidential run of his own.
Bush was speaking at a rally in the local sports stadium on the edge of the flat, dried-out town. My colleague Elisabeth Bumiller and I were supposed to meet Bush in an unusual venue for a presidential interview: a cinder-block locker room under the stadium. The only daylight was from a few high-up casement windows. It was the only room the Secret Service thought was truly secure.
The only way to enter the locker room was to wind through the men's room. We made our way down the concrete stairs, and ahead of me I saw a parade of women—Elisabeth, Condoleezza Rice, Karen Hughes—troop past the white urinals to get to the dressing room, where someone had laid out a conference table covered with the kind of blue plastic tablecloth you would use at a summer picnic.
“You know, David,” Rice said to me after walking briskly past the urinals, “I've gone many places with the president before, but I don't think I've been through a men's room.” Bush himself was deeply amused. “I bet The New York Times is accustomed to better surroundings,” he said with a smirk. Clearly he had never visited our newsroom.
The jocularity was a prelude to Bush's extraordinary assertion of confidence about how Iraq would unfold. By this time it was clear that inspectors would never find weapons in Iraq, undermining his argument about why action had been urgent. But Bush would not discuss that topic, and acknowledged only the most minor of mistakes: American forces in Iraq, he said, had won too quickly—allowing Saddam's Republican Guard to melt into Baghdad's neighborhoods and come back as guerrilla fighters. It was, he said, a miscalculation; he was clearly in denial about how much worse the situation could get.
When the subject came to North Korea, Bush wanted to show he was no cowboy, that he had endless patience for negotiation.
I reminded the president that early in 2002 he had declared he would never “tolerate” a nuclear North Korea. Yet wasn't that exactly what was happening? Hadn't Kim Jong-Il correctly calculated that he could amass his weapons fuel without fear of American action? After all, Bush had done nothing to stop him.
“Does ‘tolerate’ mean to you that you won't condone it, or does it mean you'll set some deadlines?” I asked him.
“It means we'll try diplomacy as a first resort,” Bush shot back, seeing where this conversation was headed. I tried again; after all, I noted, when minimal diplomacy had failed with Iraq, he had turned to deadlines and force.
“Well, I don't think you give timelines to dictators and tyrants,” Bush said, glossing over the fact that he had just given exactly that to Saddam—a timeline to disarm or face invasion.
BY THEN, years of covering the White House had led me to understand that this was classic Bush. He knew the principles that mattered to him: an America that looks and acts strong, that presses for individual liberty, a country devoted to seeking and unseating evil around the world. But grand principles are quite different from a grand strategy. And the Bush White House confused the two, time and again. In Afghanistan and in Iraq, the White House proved far more interested in the tactics for knocking over odious regimes than in rebuilding their countries.
It was not until the second term that it began to sink in among Bush's advisers that if you are not going to go to war with all your enemies, and if they are not going to cooperate by imploding, talking to them is one of the few options left. Inside the White House, Bush's top aides, including Rice, knew the biggest obstacle to getting that process going was finding a way to get Bush to suppressor at least temporarily forget—his own strident, moralistic talk.
Rice began the process with historical analogies, making the point that while Stalin wasn't exactly a Boy Scout, Roosevelt and Truman had met with him, even while he was sending people to the gulags.
Many aides around Bush recognized the dangers of the president's inability to separate his emotions about Kim from the practical realities of dealing with a crisis spinning out of control. The question, as one of his top advisers said to me one evening in 2006, is “How do you get the guy to change his mind?” Then he stopped, and answered his own question:
“You do it bit by bit. So slowly that he doesn't have to admit to himself that what he did last year is the polar opposite of what we've got him doing this year.”4
ON THE MORNING of July 4, 2006, as Bush celebrated the nation's independence with Airborne and Special Forces troops at Fort Bragg—a place he could always count on for a warm reception-North Korea was preparing for a fireworks display of its own. In June, intelligence satellite photographs had revealed that the North Koreans were fueling up missiles on their eastern coast. But this was not an ordinary test to demonstrate Kim's pique: the North Koreans appeared to be preparing to fire a Taepodong-2, an intercontinental missile. The Bush administration could not afford to brush this off as mere saber-rattling. It was one thing for Kim Jong-Il to send short-range missiles crashing into the Sea of Japan. It was quite another to demonstrate the ability of a charter member of the Axis of Evil to strike Japan or, eventually, the West Coast of the United States. For an administration that had trumpeted the need for missile defense—and had begun deploying the first interceptors at a base in Alaska—the question of whether the United States could knock the North Korean missiles out of the sky became a test of American credibility.
Inside the Pentagon, there was talk about whether Kim was testing the United States to see just how deeply it was distracted by Iraq. So quietly, without saying anything in public beyond a warning from Rice that a launch would be a “provocative act” that would be treated with the “utmost seriousness,”5 Bush and Rumsfeld ordered the military to blow the North Korean missiles out of the sky—or at least to try.
The man put in charge of the effort was Adm. Timothy J. Keating, at the time commander of U.S. Northern Command. When I went to visit him in May 2008—after he had settled into a vast office overlooking Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, as the new American commander in the Pacific—Keating told me that for six weeks in early summer 2006 the military had prepared to launch ground-based antimissile interceptors from Vandenberg Air Force Base in central California and from Fort Greely, the Army launch site in prime trout-and-salmon fishing territory about 100 miles southeast of Fairbanks, Alaska. The idea was to blow up the Taepodong over the Pacific, demonstrating that America's missile defenses were a real first line of defense against rogue states.
It was a huge risk. Tests of the missile defense system had often ended in embarrassing failures, even when highly choreographed. The United States had never launched antiballistic interceptors against an actual hostile target. But to Rumsfeld and other enthusiasts of missile defenses, there might never be another opportunity as good as this one. American satellites knew North Korea's exact launch site. There was only one Taepodong to target—no swarms of missiles that could overwhelm the primitive American system. The North Koreans didn't have the sophistication to spew out chaff and decoys that could fool the antimissile interceptors.
For weeks Keating and others debated whether to demand that the North Koreans declare their intentions. They thought about saying to Kim's government, “‘We know you've got it on the rails, we are assuming you are preparing to shoot, tell us what's in the nose cone,’” Keating said. “We weren't sure. Was it a dummy load, was it another satellite that would broadcast the Great Leader's musings, or was it a weaponized warhead? Didn't know. So we were prepared to assume the worst; hence, we were prepared to launch missiles.”6
On the morning of July 4, Keating was stationed at Northern Command headquarters, chiefly to help monitor the launch of the Discovery space shuttle. Just minutes after the shuttle's takeoff, the North Koreans began firing. A short-range Scud-C missile was launched at 2:33 p.m. Eastern time, followed about a half hour later by another short-range missile. They seemed like the prelude to the main event. Keating was on an open line with Rumsfeld, who did not know he was in his last months as secretary of defense.
Once the Taepodong left its launchpad, Keating and Rumsfeld would have between five and twenty minutes to decide whether to launch interceptors to take it out. The open line was crucial because every second would count. Satellites detected the North Korean launch at 4:01 p.m., but Keating and Rumsfeld never got to test their prized new system. Forty-two seconds into flight, the Taepodong broke up, either because of a launch failure or because the North Koreans aborted the flight.
“It came apart,” Keating recalled with a laugh.
Keating told me he was confident that had the Taepodong headed across the Pacific, the new American system would have knocked it out. But we'll never know: North Korea's own embarrassment short-circuited any demonstration of what Americans bought for all those billions spent on missile defense.
The White House used the incident to make the point that, like Kim in his elevator heels, the North Koreans wanted to appear taller than they were. “The Taepodong was obviously a failure,” Hadley told reporters later that evening. “That tells you something about capabilities.”7
Bush tried to seize the moment, once again, to drive a wedge between North Korea and China. He called Hu Jintao, the Chinese president. As if Hu needed a reminder, he noted that the Chinese had sent a mission to North Korea to urge them not to conduct the test, only to be ignored by the tiny country that relied on China for its survival.
“I told him, ‘Mr. President, this is a terrible day for China,’” Bush recalled in February 2007, in a conversation with a number of reporters. “‘You warned the North Koreans and they ignored you. And I can tell you, Mr. President, I know that you think I'm a great friend of the Japanese, and I am. But if the Koreans go ahead and test a nuclear bomb next, no one may be able to stop them from building their own nuclear arsenal.’”
It was a pretty transparent effort to split the Chinese away, and no doubt Hu was pretty angry at the North Koreans. But as Bush recounted the story, I couldn't help thinking that China has had a lot of truly terrible days—the collapse of dynasties, invasion by the Japanese, the Rape of Nanking, horrific natural disasters. A failed missile launch into the Pacific by a wayward, impoverished, wacky neighbor might not rank among them. The incident demonstrated once again the divergence between Beijing's interests and Washington's. The Chinese feared pushing the North Koreans too hard. The Americans wanted to push them over the brink.
BUSH WAS RIGHT about one thing: North Korea's nuclear test was next.
Everyone saw it coming. Starting in September 2006, two months after the failed missile tests, there was all kinds of activity around a tunnel in North Korea that American spy satellites had monitored for years. It wasn't the first time. In September 2004, Rice told me at the end of an interview on another topic that the United States had seen indications of a possible test, which she thought was being timed in an effort to influence the presidential election, then less than two months away. At the Times, we confirmed the administration's account pretty quickly. (One of the wonders of the modern age is that commercially available satellite photography gives anyone access to images of a quality that only the intelligence agencies had a decade ago.) But the movement of trucks and the running of cables out of the mountainside cave subsided as quickly as they had appeared.
Two years later it seemed the North Koreans were intent on the real thing. On the night of October 9, 2006, just as I was cleaning up from a late dinner in our kitchen, a senior American official called me at home.
“The North Koreans just called the Chinese, and the Chinese called our embassy in Beijing,” the official said. “They said they are going to blow the thing off in half an hour. And that was fifteen minutes ago.”
We quickly cleared out the front page. And sure enough, around 11:36 a.m. Pyongyang time, the U.S. Geological Survey picked up a 4.2-magnitude quake on the Korean peninsula. If the Koreans had not provided their warning to the Chinese, it might have been interpreted as just a mild tremor. But the epicenter matched perfectly with the test site, in North Hamgyong Province. Minutes later North Korean officials made public what everyone suspected: They had “demonstrated” their nuclear deterrent.
But that may have been different from actually detonating a nuclear bomb. To this day there is still an argument over whether what the North Koreans lit off that day was a real weapon. The blast wasn't much more impressive than the Taepodong launch. It was nearly a dud, and many suspect it wasn't a real bomb at all, but just a small, controlled nuclear explosion. The yield was below a kiloton, far less than a tenth of the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. (The North Koreans later reported that they used roughly two kilograms of plutonium, a comparatively small amount.) However, it was enough to allow the North Koreans to claim that they were now the ninth member of the nuclear club—which was all they were hoping to achieve.* They were clearly betting that sooner or later the world would regard them the way everyone seems to regard Pakistan—as a new nuclear weapons state that will never give up all of its atomic treasure.
Bush did not want to give Kim the pleasure of seeing the United States overreact. But he couldn't ignore the event, either. So he went downstairs in the White House, stood in front of a painting of George Washington, and finally issued a specific warning to the North Koreans—a warning that Bob Joseph and others had urged him to issue years before. Looking grim, with Rice standing just off to the side, he declared that “the transfer of nuclear weapons or material by North Korea to states or non-state entities would be considered a grave threat to the United States, and we would hold North Korea fully accountable for the consequences of such action.” Naturally, no one wanted to say what “fully accountable” meant.
In Bush's statement lies the kernel of a new American nuclear strategy, one that would threaten, ambiguously, retaliation against any state that is the source of nuclear material used in an attack by terrorists or another country. But that opens a host of complications that Bush did not want to deal with at the time—including the question of whether the United States could use nuclear weapons against a country that, knowingly or unknowingly, provided nuclear material or know-how to someone else.8
Naturally, the test touched off another titanic battle within the administration. The hardliners saw it as the moment to unify the world to choke off the North Koreans, who had clearly overplayed their hand. This time, the Chinese were truly angry. They condemned the North's nuclear claims as a “flagrant” violation of international norms and suddenly cut off trade across the North Korean border—not for long, as it turned out, but long enough to get Kim's attention. Rice and Joseph traveled to Asia, reassuring the Japanese that America's nuclear umbrella covered them. Rice talked tough, saying that the North would be confronted with sanctions “unlike anything that they had faced before.”9 Five days later the UN Security Council passed a resolution imposing the toughest international sanctions on North Korea since the Korean War by barring the transfer of materials that could be used to make weapons of mass destruction—transfers that were already largely controlled— and, more important, by authorizing all countries to inspect cargo coming into and going out of the socialist state. (There is no evidence anyone has done so.)
The resolution only passed, however, after the Security Council explicitly withdrew references to the possible use of force, a sticking point for Russia and China.10 It was another legacy of Iraq, preventing Bush from using truly coercive diplomacy.
While Bush won the diplomatic wrangling, history would record that North Korea proved its nuclear capability and built the bulk of its arsenal on his watch. It is hardly a milestone he is eager to acknowledge; to this day the United States does not officially describe North Korea as a nuclear weapons state. “Nobody accepts that they're a nuclear power,” Rice insisted a few weeks after the tests, as China announced the urgent resumption of talks. The North Koreans, she said, “can say it all they wish.”11
Understandably, Bush and Rice did not want to give the Koreans the status they desperately sought. But the genie was out of the bottle. If the North Koreans had not exploded an actual weapon, they had proven they have the material and the knowledge for the basics of what it takes.
“The administration will continue saying that a nuclear weapon in North Korea is unacceptable, but in fact they are beginning to accept it,” Scott D. Sagan, co-director of Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation, told me shortly after the test. “The administration is switching from a nonproliferation policy to a deterrence and defense policy. It is a form of containment rather than a form of nonproliferation.”12
The fact that North Korea had gotten away with it was obvious to other powers, starting with Iran. Kim had endured sanctions, yes, but nothing that threatened North Korea's existence.
“Think about the consequences of having declared something ‘intolerable’ and, last week, ‘unacceptable,’ and then having North Korea defy the world's sole superpower and the Chinese and the Japanese,” Graham Allison of Harvard said to me shortly thereafter. “What does that communicate to Iran, and then the rest of the world? Is it possible to communicate to Kim credibly that if he sells a bomb to Osama bin Laden, that's it?”13
AFTER THE NUCLEAR TEST, something truly curious happened in Washington. The Cheney forces—those arguing for deeper isolation of North Korea in hopes of triggering the end of the regime-were vanquished. The administration had been shocked out of its complacency that the North Korean problem would somehow take care of itself while Bush focused on Iraq. Suddenly, talking to Kim Jong-Il sounded like a pretty bright idea.
In the first Bush term, it is likely that Bush would have responded to the test with crushing sanctions, and perhaps activated a long-dormant Pentagon plan that would have put a naval blockade around the country, reminiscent of the one Kennedy threw around Cuba at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. But with Iraq in crisis—Bush had already secretly concluded that the United States was at risk of losing against the insurgency—a confrontation in the Pacific did not seem viable. So Rice argued that the administration should capitalize on the international reaction and open real diplomacy with the North Koreans. As one participant in the National Security Council meeting where this was first discussed recalled later, “Cheney looked like he was going to be ill.”
In the summer of 2008, Rice recalled that at that meeting, “we had to make a choice once the nuclear test had taken place. Were we just going to use the Security Council resolutions to tighten the screws and try and force some kind of North Korean behavior, or were we going to give them a chance and try to reopen the diplomatic track?”14
Rice said she argued for diplomacy and got a lot of push-back from the administration's hardliners. (When I asked her who took the opposing side of the argument, she said, “I'll just let you guess.”) Her argument was not an easy sell. Every public statement made over the past six years pointed to a strategy of isolating the North.
“We could have taken maximum pressure against them,” Rice recalled. “It wasn't a crazy argument. …They've done this, they've ticked off the whole world, they've shown that they're dangerous, just squeeze them.”
Publicly, Bush insisted he would only talk to the North Koreans with all of its neighbors present at the table—the “Six Party Talks” that involved all of North Korea's immediate neighbors in Asia and the United States. He would not reward them, he insisted, with one-on-one talks that would allow the North to play the different countries against one another.
“Now all of a sudden people are saying the Bush administration ought to be going alone with North Korea,” Bush said at the time.
“But it didn't work in the past is my point. The strategy didn't work. I learned a lesson from that and decided that the best way to convince Kim Jong-Il to change his mind on a nuclear weapons program is to have others send the same message.”
But by January 2007, an enterprising diplomat who had made his name negotiating with Serbian killers was meeting one-on-one with the North Koreans. Among the critics of the Bush administration's handling of North Korea in its first term, none had been more vociferous than the American ambassador to Poland, Christopher R. Hill.
He had no problem with the decision to present the North Koreans with evidence they were cheating on their nuclear freeze. But it was a terrible idea, Hill thought, to issue ultimatums without thinking through the next steps of the chess game. It was typical, he said, of an administration that viewed all negotiations as essentially unwise, because sooner or later Washington would get taken to the cleaners by foreigners.
“These assholes don't know how to negotiate,” Hill told a small group of friends and colleagues in 2007. “Everything is Appomattox. It's just ‘Come out with your hands up.’ It's not even really Appomattox, because at the end of Appomattox they let the Confederates keep their horses.”
Hill's interest in Korea dated back to his days as a young foreign service officer, when he served in the fortresslike American embassy in downtown Seoul. He got a kick out of dealing with the South Koreans, with all their bluster and insecurity, born of 2,000 years of being used as pawns in power struggles between the Chinese and the Japanese. But once he broke their code, he found them fairly easy to handle on the other side of the negotiating table. Yet every morning when he picked up the papers, he told friends, he was astounded by how the Bush administration had botched its dealings with the South Koreans, a critical treaty ally. There had to be a better strategy concerning how to deal with what Hill, in wry moments, liked to call “a diddly-shit little country like North Korea.”
Eventually he couldn't take it anymore. He shot off a cable to Powell and his deputy, Armitage, offering to help. “I said to Powell, ‘If you can find a way to get a guy from Poland to Korea, I think I can help you there.’” Soon Hill found himself back in Seoul, this time as the American ambassador, with the job of trying to smooth things over between Bush and a South Korean government that wanted to buy off the North Koreans, not confront them.
Hill was born into diplomacy. Though he was raised in Little Compton, Rhode Island, some of his earliest memories are from Belgrade, where he was a five-year-old running around the embassy where his father worked as an American diplomat. These were the days of Tito's Yugoslavia, a place of harsh authoritarianism, but one of the few corners of Eastern Europe where things worked. His early years gave Hill a love of the Balkans that would test his talents as a negotiator long after Tito was gone.
Hill went on to Bowdoin College and then the Peace Corps, which sent him to Cameroon. It was perfect training for Hill: a country of 250 different tribes, with ethnic and cultural differences as confounding as the unpaved roads. His first tasks were modest. “I conducted audits,” he remembered in late 2007, “running around the country on my Suzuki 125.”
One day he drove the Suzuki to the port city of Douala, where he took the foreign service exam in an American consulate so small that it was staffed by only two diplomats. By the fall of 1977, he was following his father's footsteps into the foreign service—and he found himself right back in Belgrade.
He quickly became one of the State Department's rising Eastern European experts, serving in Poland from 1983 to 1985. Then he moved to South Korea for three years as an economic officer, just as the country was moving toward democracy. He returned to the States and worked for Stephen Solarz, the New York congressman famous for his travels around the world—including North Korea. Upon his return to the State Department, Hill worked on the Poland desk, just as Poland erupted in the first big Eastern European uprising against the Soviet behemoth. Then the Berlin Wall fell. “I thought that history was over,” Hill recalled.
It was just beginning to get interesting. Hill went on to Albania to open an American embassy there. Then it was back to Washington with a new administration under Bill Clinton. Hill found himself working for the brilliant, egotistical Richard Holbrooke, who was assistant secretary of state for Europe. Holbrooke took him on his nonstop adventures trying to patch together the Balkans, an effort that ended up in the Dayton Accords, negotiated on an air base in Ohio.
It was there that the thin, intense Hill demonstrated what he's best at—driving a bargain, giving a little to get a little. His saving grace was that his intensity was masked by a sardonic humor that made him completely capable of commenting, as if he were an outsider, on the absurdity of his mission.
In the Balkans talks, there were moments when he would watch Slobodan Milosevic, the brutal Serbian leader, growl and argue during the big negotiating sessions at Dayton. Later, if he could get him alone, Hill would demand, “What the hell was that about?” and frequently he got an actual answer. Gradually he channeled Milosevic, one of the world's most detested tyrants, toward a messy deal that ultimately saved lives.
There were two big lessons in the Milosevic experience that shaped Hill's negotiating style—and ultimately put him at war with the neoconservatives who thought he was selling America out to the North Koreans. “The first was that this knee-jerk view that you can't negotiate with dictators is garbage,” Hill told me as we sipped coffee one warm spring day in Washington. “My view is that you can—especially if the dictator is surrounded by more powerful nations.” The second lesson was that having twenty people around the table doesn't work. You get things done one on one, when there is less chance of a loss of face.
When Holbrooke took him to Macedonia during the negotiating process, the country's president, Kiro Gligorov, an aging, white-haired veteran of the wars against the Fascists, had one request: that he leave Hill in town as the ambassador. And so a midlevel career foreign service officer got his break; he was able to jump the queue for ambassadorships. But until Bush came to Poland, Hill's next ambassadorship, Hill had barely met the Republican president. They hit it off, not least because Hill is almost as passionate about baseball as Bush is.
Hill, however, is part of the State Department's deep bench of Red Sox fans. That cadre of diplomats raised Bush's hackles. He didn't mind the team; it was simply that the Red Sox fans around him, particularly at the White House, reminded him of the stereotypical elitist New England eggheads whom he rejected so virulently as he moved from Andover to Yale to Harvard Business School. Nicholas Burns, who became undersecretary of state, recalled nearly blowing a job interview with Bush by describing his enthusiasm for Boston's heroes. Hill got into such an argument with Bush over the 2007 World Series that Rice feared he was about to get the president off track on North Korea.
“You would see him roll his eyes when the subject of the Red Sox came up,” one witness to these encounters said. “It was this look of ‘not another one.’”
It was after Bush's trip to Poland that the deal was sealed to send Hill to Seoul. But he quickly learned that there was only so much the United States ambassador could do to patch up the fractured relationship. Seoul and Washington were on entirely different paths: Every time Washington tried to turn up the pressure on Kim Jong-Il, the South Koreans sent food, cash, or new investments that nullified the effort. In Bush's mind, the South's strategy was simply one of appeasement: It was building railroad lines across the DMZ and putting together joint ventures inside North Korean territory, essentially under North Korea's control. There were offers to provide the North with huge amounts of electricity and, of course, food aid. To the South Koreans it was an investment in the future: Because they did not feel truly threatened by North Korea, they wanted to manage the problem—and reduce the cost of eventual unification.
Washington's most successful effort at getting Kim's attention came when it choked off a tiny bank in Macao, where the North Korean leadership both laundered its money and kept the leadership's personal accounts. “I knew we were finally getting their attention,” Bush told me once, “when President Roh came and complained that we had to stop. That was the first time I thought we were really getting to the North Koreans.”15 The battle over the bank also cemented animosity between Bush and Roh, whose approach to North Korea was partly repudiated when he left office in 2008, and was replaced by a much harder-line South Korean government that was more on Washington's wavelength.
Hill recognized that if the South Koreans didn't have a negotiating strategy, neither did Bush. The Six Party Talks were a sound innovation, because they put the burden on the Chinese and others to solve the problem. But as a practical matter, they often amounted to diplomatic farce: Each of the six countries had about thirty diplomats in the room, meaning that all the participants were reduced to posturing, knowing that every word uttered was heard by roughly 180 people. The scene was made worse by the seemingly endless pauses for translations. A series of giant “tulips” ran down the length of the negotiating table, and they would light up when every translator was done. Hill used the downtime to read box scores from the latest Red Sox games. As he said to friends, “I'm supposed to negotiate a nuclear deal with a bunch of white plastic tulips?”
The first instructions he had been given as a negotiator told him not to smile at the North Koreans, not to shake hands, and not to join in any toasts. “They showed,” said Hill, “a complete lack of understanding about how the world works.”
Over time, though, he managed to break every one of the rules. Though Bush had banned any direct bilateral talks with the North Koreans during the first term—after all, the place was run by a dictator—Hill pursued exactly that kind of contact. He lobbied ceaselessly to visit Pyongyang, usually to Rice's exasperation. Hill knew that with the North Koreans, you not only had to talk face to face— you had to be in their face. Though Bush insisted during the first term that the North Koreans would have to abandon their weapons before he would negotiate, soon Hill was giving a little to get a little.
“There's nothing we're doing,” he told me at the end of the summer of 2007, “that anyone who has haggled for some vegetables in a Korean market won't recognize.” Of course, vegetable-market diplomacy was exactly what Bush had rejected during the first term. Hill had to make up for lost time.
TO DO SO, Hill and Rice mapped out a strategy in late 2006 to circumvent Cheney. When a chance to reopen negotiations with North Korea cropped up in early 2007, Rice cut the deal directly with Bush; Cheney learned of it later. But the next steps would be harder: forcing North Korea to make good on its pledge to declare all of its nuclear facilities, equipment, and stockpiles and then permanently disable the Yongbyon plant. The last step would be the most difficult—getting the North Koreans to turn over their existing fuel and bombs, their only leverage with the world.
By the summer of 2007, Hill had succeeded in getting Yongbyon shut down. In fits and starts, after receiving plenty of oil and promises, the North Koreans started taking pieces apart. It was the most progress anyone had made in years.
In the fall, after the Yongbyon facility had been shuttered, Hill went to the White House for a lunch with Bush. They met in the Oval Office, then moved to the adjacent private dining room. Bush's mind was already on the next step, persuading the North Koreans to surrender the bomb fuel they had made on his father's watch, and on his own.
“What's it going to take to get them to give this up?” he asked Hill. Hill said he didn't know yet what the price would be, or even if it would prove possible. But it won't be cheap, he told the president. He said Bush might soon have to consider taking the North off the list of state sponsors of terrorism, a huge symbolic gesture toward reaching an accord with a regime Bush hated. And if the North complied with the rest of its commitments, the United States would also have to get around the Trading with the Enemy Act, a World War I-era federal law that had been used since the 1950s to try to choke off dealings with the North.
Cheney sat in on part of the meeting, brooding but saying nothing. What Hill was describing were steps Cheney had fought, behind the scenes, for years. During the first term, he had repeatedly stepped into the Oval Office at key moments to undercut the negotiators, or at least tie their hands with specific instructions that were likely to blow up negotiations. But he had lost Rumsfeld as an ally and no longer had his acolytes in key departments. Rice had outmaneuvered him, using her direct lines to Bush to argue, at the beginning of 2007, that he had no other choice than to talk to the repulsive dictatorship and offer specific rewards in return for each step of compliance. It was, in short, the opposite of the strategy she had laid out for me so confidently in her office in March 2001, when she said, simply, “We ought to look for ways to weaken the regime,” making it clear that North Korea would not be rewarded until it gave up everything.
If Cheney was fuming, he was too smart to show it or to interfere; he almost never directly engaged with Hill. (Nor did he ever engage with Nick Burns, the Iran negotiator.) But with many of his back-channel approaches cut off, he was reduced to insisting that the North Koreans be forced to come clean on issues that they were almost certain to lie about—how much plutonium they had made, where it was, what had happened to the highly enriched uranium project they bought from A. Q. Khan, and, above all, what they'd built for countries like Syria.
Hill doubted that the North Koreans would be willing to talk about their Syrian adventure, he told Bush, but he assured him that the United States would insist that it be part of the declaration.
“Good job,” Bush said at the end of the session—his favorite form of faint praise. (He often directed this compliment to foreign leaders at the end of press conferences; while he may have intended it to be folksy, one fumed to me later that Bush's comment was “the most patronizing line I ever received in public life.”)
Everyone in the room, especially Hill, knew that this was the easy part. In the end, Bush and his team would be judged by a single standard: whether North Korea possessed fewer nuclear weapons and fuel than it had when Bush came to office, and whether the country was less capable of selling its nuclear products around the world.
Bush's own former aides knew it was a test Bush would fail. One of the president's former North Korea hands told me he feared that “when the administration is over, the North could have more weapons and find itself under fewer sanctions than ever.” That, in the end, would describe Bush's Korea legacy.
AT YONGBYON, Hill discovered the dirty little secret about why the North Koreans had been so willing to close and then dismantle their giant nuclear facilities: They were a rusting, radioactive junkyard. “Kind of like a Cuban ‘56 Chevy,” Hill said. “It could run forever. But if it ever stopped running, good luck to anyone who wanted to get it started again.”
Out of money, the North Koreans had stopped maintaining the facility soon after the inspectors were thrown out in 2003—even though they were actively building a sister plant in Syria, half a world away. The deterioration was so great that the five Americans charged with supervising the dismantling included a doctor who was constantly checking for leaking radiation. The North Korean workers did not even have basic safety equipment; the United States had to insist that the North Koreans slow down on unloading fuel from the shut reactor to avoid an environmental disaster.
When it came time to cut the giant cooling loops of the reactor—a major step in making sure that it could not be turned on again without significant work—the North Koreans simply let the giant metal parts fall to the ground, where they now sit, rusting. Critics of the deal noted that to put the reactor back together, the North Koreans would simply have to lift the parts in place with a forklift and weld them back in place.
“The good news,” Hill cracked one day, “is that they don't have any forklifts.”
Certainly the mood was improving. The North Koreans had invited the New York Philharmonic to Pyongyang, and Hill helped make the visit happen. Rice was in South Korea the day before the first concert, and Bill Perry, the former defense secretary, went to her hotel room and urged her to travel to the North and attend the concert—she was, after all, a masterful pianist. “It's not the right time, Bill,” Rice told him, eager to avoid replicating Albright's embarrassing trip to Pyongyang at the end of the Clinton administration.16
Dismantling Yongbyon, it turned out, was a lot easier for the North Koreans than owning up to the past. They missed their deadline for submitting a declaration of what they produced, and they refused to explain what happened to all that uranium enrichment equipment that A. Q. Khan told his interrogators he had sold to the North Koreans. One day, though, the chief North Korean negotiator, Kim Kye-gwan, offered to show Hill and his team the tons of aluminum tubes they had bought from Russia, a purchase that was one of the tip-offs that the North Koreans were trying to build centrifuges for enrichment.
“THEY ARE NOT” being used for uranium enrichment,” Kim insisted. Soon Hill's aides were in a military factory two hours from Pyongyang examining the tubes, spread out on a large table. The North Koreans insisted the tubes were for a conventional weapon, a rocket launcher. One of Hill's senior aides brought the tubes back home—stuffing them into the luggage on a commercial airliner. It did not take long for government laboratories to report that they had detected traces of highly enriched uranium on the outside of the tubes. Whether that meant they were used for nuclear work, or just near some equipment used for nuclear purposes, was unclear.
As Hill squeezed the North Koreans for more, they eventually turned over 18,000 pages of operating records of the Yongbyon facility, intended to back up their declaration of how much plutonium the country had produced. It took teams of translators and experts months to sort through all the records, and even then there were the usual suspicions that the North Koreans might not have reported everything truthfully. Then it turned out that the operating records, like the Russian tubes, were tainted with trace amounts of uranium— “pixie dust,” Hill insisted, half in jest—which North Korea could not easily explain. That fed suspicions that there was a secret uranium-enrichment program under way that the North Koreans might also be forgetting to mention.
But when it came to answering questions about Syria, the North Koreans simply shut down. They refused to talk about it. They told Hill that they were not currently helping any foreign countries build nuclear facilities, and would not in the future. Beyond that, Las Vegas rules applied: Whatever happens in Syria stays in Syria.
In the end, George Bush, the man who demanded that the North Koreans would have to tell all, accepted a meaningless statement in which the North Koreans acknowledged the American concern about proliferation activities—and admitted to nothing. But Bush badly needed a political win, and in late June he announced that he was starting the process to take the North off the list of state sponsors of terrorism. “The United States has no illusions about the regime in Pyongyang,” Bush said, insisting his actions would have “little impact on North Korea's financial and diplomatic isolation.” It almost seemed as if he were apologizing to the Cheney forces, or at least trying to placate them. He never mentioned Chris Hill's name.
“This is action for action,” Bush insisted. “This is ‘we will trust you only to the extent that you fulfill your promises.’” It was much more. As Bob Joseph noted, “the North Koreans actually got more than they did under Clinton,” and Bush had control of neither the plutonium nor the weapons.
Bush did get something. The next day, June 28, 2008, the North blew up the cooling tower at Yongbyon. CNN was invited to record the event. Back in the United States, the image created a public impression that the North Korean nuclear crisis was somehow over. Of course, it was not: By late August, Bush had postponed taking the North off the terrorism list until Kim agreed to a series of intrusive inspections. With its usual mix of paranoia and bravado, the North declared that “the U.S. is gravely mistaken if it thinks it can make a house search in our country as it pleases, just as it did in Iraq.”
With their classic flare for brinksmanship, the North Koreans tore the seals off their reprocessing facility and announced they would resume making bomb fuel. (Getting the reactor started would be a much more complex task—if they could manage it at all.) In short, they threatened to wreck the one diplomatic accomplishment Bush could claim at the end of his second term. As temper tantrums go, this one was pretty effective. Hill was sent back to Yongbyon and came up with a compromise that he sold—just barely—back in Washington. With Bush's approval, Rice signed the document that deleted North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terror. In return, the North Koreans agreed, vaguely, to allow some inspections outside of the Yongbyon nuclear complex. But it was unclear where, and the text of the agreement was not specific. For example, there was no permission to visit the site of the 2006 nuclear test or any of the many military facilities that intelligence agencies believe are involved in the nuclear program. All future access beyond Yongbyon would have to be negotiated by the next administration. Rice spent time on the telephone with her Chinese counterparts, extracting their agreement to press the North Koreans to make good on the pledges.
It was exactly the kind of agreement Cheney had spent the first half of the administration killing off. John McCain, in the midst of a presidential campaign that was going badly, expressed enormous skepticism. The Japanese—America's greatest ally—denounced it as a sellout, because it did not force the North Koreans to account for the Japanese nationals they had kidnapped and taken to the North years ago. (The outrage was fueled by a statement by the North Koreans that in the years since their kidnappings, the Japanese hostages had all died.) For the Bush administration, which had come to office declaring that it would never sign any agreement that was not “complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization,” it was a bitter pill—an accord that was incomplete, partly verifiable, and probably reversible. Michael Green, Bush's former Asia aide, told the Washington Post, “There is a real danger that Pyongyang will pull a bait-and-switch now that the sanctions have been lifted.”
For the next administration, the problem could be compounded by a power struggle to succeed the country's leader, Kim Jong-Il. In August, 2008, just before the last act in the nuclear negotiations with the Bush administration, Kim reportedly suffered a stroke. China flew in doctors to perform emergency surgery. By the time Hill arrived back in Pyongyang, rumors abounded about Kim's condition. The Chinese were saying little; the North Koreans were saying less. Hill feared that if Kim's illness proved long, it would freeze talks: after all, no one got fired—or shot—in North Korea for taking the hardest possible line.
In the long run, Hill told friends, North Korea was clearly a doomed, failed state by every measure. In the short term it had cards to play, from a hand they greatly strengthened during Bush's presidency. In Bush's time, North Korea produced so much nuclear bomb fuel that the chances of disarming the country diminished greatly, while the potential costs of disarmament rose exponentially. We didn't just lose our leverage with the North Koreans. We handed them our lever.
THERE ARE MANY lessons to take away from Bush's disastrous encounter with the North Koreans. First among them is that once countries believe that Washington has locked them in its gunsights— particularly bankrupt, corrupt little dictatorships—no one should be surprised if they race to get a nuclear weapon. This is the post-Cold War curse. Perhaps nothing could have deterred Kim Jong-Il from finishing the project that his father started. Certainly nothing could have stopped him from planting the seeds of nuclear ambiguity—keeping the world guessing about whether he had one or two weapons.
But after Saddam Hussein fell, Kim understood that he needed something more. He needed an arsenal big enough to convince the Americans that invading his country would be a lot riskier than invading Iraq. He needed an arsenal large enough to leave open the possibility that he might sell a few weapons on the black market. In short, he needed real nuclear deterrence.
Condoleezza Rice has argued that Kim Jong-Il didn't pass that threshold on Bush's watch, suggesting to me that they would need twenty or more weapons to have a convincing arsenal. I suspect they have plenty now to do the job, which is why they were willing to begin auctioning off their nuclear plant, piece by piece.
While the Bush administration liked to talk about North Korea, Iran, and other nuclear threats in the same breath—just a bunch of like-minded nuclear crazies—in fact they were very different cases. Unlike Iran, North Korea has neither the power to send the price of oil skyrocketing nor the ability to inflame the Middle East. North Korea wants to survive. Cash is the key to that survival—that's why they sold their know-how to the Syrians, and it is why they extracted commitments for oil out of American negotiators. The good news is that the North Koreans can be bought.
Eventually, Bush came to recognize that negotiations were his best bet. There is no other explanation for his willingness, late in the second term, to drop all the talk about running North Korea over a cliff. Bush, to use Hill's analogy, eventually discovered he was in a Korean vegetable market. By the time he stopped swaggering and began haggling, it was too late. North Korea had already produced its weapons, and the price tag for buying back that arsenal could be astronomical.
Yet Obama probably will not have a choice. If he fails to strike a deal to buy back the plutonium or the weapons, he will be dealing with a country that could, at any time, sell its wares. If he buys them back, he will be accused, chiefly by the hawks, of giving in to nuclear blackmail. And he will never know if he bought all of them—or if North Korea kept a few in reserve.
There is another lesson in the Korean fiasco—a lesson about the limits of American power. After Iraq, even the new American president will have a far harder time issuing a credible threat that he may resort to military force if diplomacy fails. Yet even the world's sole superpower does not control enough economic levers by itself to squeeze a tiny, destitute dictatorship. If we did, the odious regimes in Zimbabwe and Sudan would have disappeared long ago.
AS BUSH'S TERM came to an end, a group of top experts on Asia-some inside the government, some from the intelligence agencies, some outside experts and government officials—got together at the National Defense University to play a mind game: What would happen if everyone's wish came true, and North Korea collapsed? Where would its weapons and nuclear fuel end up?
The answer was pretty sobering: No one could be sure where the weapons were, and many believed they could find their way into the hands of renegade elements of the North Korean military. Others thought they would be sold on the black market by entrepreneurs seeking to capitalize on the chaos. “Biggest goddamn mess you ever saw,” one of the participants said. “The Chinese, the Americans, the South Koreans—they are all trying to find the nukes. No one knew where to start looking, much less what to do.”
The truth is that even though we have been watching North Korea since the earliest days of the Cold War, we're as much in the dark about the country's leadership today as we were at the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. But we have more leverage than ever before—all of Asia wants this problem to go away. Bush capitalized on that by bringing all the neighboring countries into the talks with the North. And that alone may be the best argument for engaging with the North Koreans, with an energy the Bush administration could not muster.
The first Bush term was a demonstration of the dangers of thinking the United States alone has the power to bring a regime, even a weak one, to its knees with economic pressure. Unless the rest of the world is willing to help, that strategy is bound to fail. Cheney, of all people, should have known that. In his days as a CEO he made a compelling case about why unilateral economic sanctions do not work.
The lesson of the second term is that sometimes even the best diplomatic efforts can't turn back the clock. Had Bush tried old-school horse-trading early on, had he entered negotiations with North Korea with confidence, and had he focused on the countries that really had nuclear capability, it's possible—even likely—that Kim never would have amassed a small but potent arsenal.
Bush's aides all dispute that conclusion; Kim, they say, was unstoppable. We'll never know. But the Bush legacy is that he took a messy, dangerous problem and made it worse.
* The other eight include the five existing nuclear powers at the time of the signing of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the United States, Russia, China, Britain, and France. Israel, Pakistan, and India have never signed the treaty, and all have substantial arsenals, though Israel continues the charade of never formally confirming the weapons that it has now possessed for more than three decades.