Cheney set about killing the Agreed Framework and securing the missile defense system even before Bush entered the White House. Cheney chose Robert Joseph, a hardline supporter of missile defense and foe of an agreement with North Korea, as a key member of the transition team that Cheney led. Cheney then made Joseph senior director on the National Security Council (NSC) staff with responsibility for both missile defense and "weapons of mass destruction" proliferation policy.
"Joseph really hated the Agreed Framework," Larry Wilkerson, then in the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, told journalist Mike Chinoy. "His objective was first to kill the Agreed Framework and to make sure that nothing like it could ever get created again."
Joseph's first project was to draft a National Security Presidential Directive that laid out a "new strategic framework," essentially built around a ballistic missile defense system, as Joseph later told a National Defense University researcher.
Joseph drafted a speech that the president gave on May 1, 2001, in which Bush debuted a new central argument for national missile defense. "Deterrence can no longer be based solely on the threat of nuclear retaliation," Bush declared, adding that missile defense system could "strengthen deterrence by reducing the incentive for proliferation."
Cheney and Bolton Go for the Kill
Colin Powell's State Department posed the main obstacle to the Cheney group's plans for trashing the Agreed Framework. The Department's East Asian Bureau got Bush's approval for a formal policy review on North Korea, which concluded by defining the policy goal of exploring a deal with North Korea that would involve "an improved relationship."
But Cheney had a bureaucratic strategy to frustrate that endeavor and finish off the Agreed Framework. The NSC staff initiated a "nuclear posture review," which was carried out without any participation by Powell's allies. The final document included North Korea on a new list of countries that could be targets for US use of nuclear weapons.
That designation, which was leaked to the press in March 2002, conflicted directly with the US pledge in the Agreed Framework to "provide formal assurances to the DPRK, against the threat or use of nuclear weapons by the U.S."
Then Bush's State of the Union message in January 2002 introduced the idea of North Korea as part of an "axis of evil" along with Iran and Iraq. That was not merely a throwaway line introduced by a speechwriter, but reflected lobbying by Cheney and Rumsfeld for "toughening sanctions and isolation to lay the groundwork for regime change in North Korea," according to Condoleezza Rice's memoir, No Higher Honor.
John Bolton, Cheney's proxy in the State Department on proliferation issues, writes in his memoir Surrender is Not an Option that he considered the "axis of evil" speech a signal that he could now begin a bureaucratic offensive aimed at killing the Agreed Framework. Bolton recalls that he pushed the State Department to adopt the position that North Korea was out of compliance with the Agreed Framework for having "failed to make a complete and accurate declaration of its nuclear activities and refused to allow inspection of related facilities."
However, Bolton was misrepresenting the terms of the agreement, which provided that North Korea would come into full compliance with its safeguards agreement, including the accuracy and completeness of its declaration on its nuclear program, "[w]hen a significant portion of the LWR [light water reactor] project is completed, but before delivery of key nuclear components..." Construction on the light water reactor had not even begun in 2002, when the State Department notified Congress that North Korea was out of compliance.
Bolton's plan was frustrated temporarily by resistance from the NSC, over which then-National Security Adviser Rice had some influence. But the decisive blow to the Agreed Framework came in July 2002, when, according to his memoir, Bolton obtained an intelligence assessment stating that North Korea "began seeking centrifuge-related materials in large quantities" in 2001, and that it had "obtained equipment suitable for use in uranium feed and withdrawal systems." Bolton recalls that the new intelligence finding was "the hammer I had been looking for to shatter the Agreed Framework." He argued in interagency meetings that North Korea had pledged to "take steps to implement the North-South Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula," and therefore any North Korean move toward uranium enrichment violated its commitment.
Bolton was creating another false issue. Robert Carlin, a North Korea expert and adviser to the US negotiators, has pointed out that the reference to that document was an "afterthought" and that "no one really believed that the reference to the North-South agreements would constitute one of the core DPRK obligations" in the agreement.
Bush's negotiator with North Korea, Charles L. Pritchard, suggested bringing the uranium enrichment issue into the Agreed Framework, using the North Korean interest in normalization as negotiating leverage, according to Bolton. He also warned that if the United States withdrew from the agreement, North Korea would resume its plutonium program or start a new uranium program.
However, Bolton recalls telling Pritchard that wouldn't make "the slightest difference," because North Korea already had enough plutonium for "several weapons." In fact, it was not at all clear that Pyongyang had already converted plutonium into a single nuclear weapon.
However, Bolton showed no apparent concern about North Korea's long-range missile program, which the Clinton administration and North Korea had agreed would be negotiated in conjunction with moves toward normalization. "I wanted a decisive conclusion that the Agreed Framework was dead," Bolton writes.
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