In October 2002, Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly went to Pyongyang with explicit orders, which Rice attributes to those who were undermining diplomacy, to accuse Pyongyang of cheating on the agreement by having a uranium enrichment program. North Korea's First Vice Foreign Minister Kang Sok Ju did not deny the government's interest in uranium enrichment, but said it was a response to the clear indications from the Bush administration that it had no intention to improve relations with his government. He also said North Korea was prepared to negotiate on all enrichment, including uranium, if the United States changed its hostile policy.
However, at an NSC meeting a week later, no one disagreed with the assertion that the Agreed Framework was dead, according to Bolton. In December 2002, the Bush administration strong-armed its Japanese and South Korean allies to end their supply of oil to the North Korea, officially terminating the Agreed Framework.
Cheney and his allies were clearing the political path to full funding for the national missile defense system they wanted to rush to deployment as quickly as possible. Rumsfeld had created a new Missile Defense Agency in the Pentagon in early 2002, which had unprecedented freedom from congressional or Department of Defense oversight.
They were also opening the floodgates for North Korean nuclear and missile development.
Cheney Kills Rice's North Korea Agreement
For the next three years, the Bush administration refused direct negotiations with North Korea. But Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice got Bush to agree in September 2005 to a joint statement of principles with North Korea in the context of Six-Party Talks.
In October 2007, Washington and Pyongyang negotiated an agreement under which Pyongyang would first seal and then disable its plutonium-based facilities for shipment of heavy fuel and provide a full accounting of its entire nuclear program, including uranium. For its part, the US pledged to remove North Korea from its list of state sponsors of terrorism and lift other trade restrictions. In a later phase, the two sides would agree on a verification system and on steps leading to normalization of relations.
Then Cheney sabotaged the new agreement. In April 2007, Israel claimed Syria had built a nuclear reactor in the desert in eastern Syria with North Korean assistance. Bush's advisers all accepted the Israeli claim as true, but nearly a decade later, the IAEA's expert on North Korean reactors at the time revealed detailed technical evidence that had led him to conclude with certainty that the Syrian site could not possibly have been a North Korean-designed reactor.
Cheney seized on the alleged Syrian reactor to wrest control over North Korea policy from Rice. In a January 4, 2008 White House meeting, he recalls in his memoirs In My Time how he successfully prodded Bush and Rice to agree with his assumption that a "failure to admit they've been proliferating to the Syrians would be a deal killer." Two months later, Bush gave Cheney power to approve any joint US-North Korean text negotiated by the State Department.
Under pressure from Cheney, Rice adopted a new diplomatic strategy. In addition to their obligations in the first two phases of the October 2007 agreement, she writes in No Higher Honor, "[T]he North Koreans would also have to agree to a verification protocol to govern the on-site inspection of all aspects of their nuclear program."
That verification protocol -- not the actions pledged by Pyongyang in the October 2007 agreement -- would now be the basis for deciding whether the administration would take North Korea off the terrorist list and stop the application of the Trading with the Enemy Act.
Rice was changing the rules after the fact. After had North Korea delivered its declaration on its plutonium enrichment program in late June 2008, US negotiators sought North Korean agreement for inspectors to go into any site, whether declared or not, including sensitive military sites. Pyongyang conveyed its strong private objections to that, as well as to environmental sampling by inspectors. The 45-day period during which the United States was supposed to have taken its two small steps toward normalization came and went.
North Korea immediately accused the United States of violating the October agreement and suspended the disabling of its nuclear facilities. The US negotiator, Chris Hill, got what he regarded as North Korean verbal agreement to an amended version of the verification protocol, but North Korea would not sign it. On the basis of that unwritten understanding, Bush agreed to take North Korea off the US list of terrorist sponsors, and the physical disabling of the North Korea's plutonium complex was completed.
But Bush insisted that North Korea sign the verification protocol, and in December, after Barack Obama's election, Pyongyang rejected the Bush administration's unilateral rewriting of the agreement, issuing a statement that it would only agree to intrusive inspections when US "hostile policy and nuclear threat to the North are fundamentally terminated." US-North Korean diplomacy on the October 2007 nuclear deal came to a halt.
Cheney and his allies had prevented the successful completion of two agreements that could have averted the present crisis with North Korea. When Bush took office in 2001, North Korea was believed to possess less than an atomic bomb's worth of plutonium. By the end of his second term, North Korea was already a nuclear power, with several nuclear weapons.
Even more significant, however, the Bush administration never even attempted to negotiate limits on North Korea's long-range missile program. That failure was very costly to the interests of the American people -- but it was a gift to the national missile defense program that has kept on giving.
Original published in Truthout(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
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