From: slider@anashram.com

### - this is a good 'brings ya right up to speed' read; IF ya like history/reality heh, so go grab a coffee or summat, and then listen-up...

'coz it looks like they's all talkin' currently in korea innit, talkin'
peace? but really the whole thing's a complete mess that could all blow up
in a moment...

and/'coz: it's STILL only 2-minutes to midnight!

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/30/north-korea-us-nuclear-diplomacy-agreed-framework-1999-pyongyang-mission

good article, albeit had to chop it into two parts coz of server rools on length...)

***

An unprecedented US mission to Pyongyang in 1999 promised to defuse Kim’s nuclear threat. But it all came to nothing – and then the hawks took
power. By Julian Borger

Pyongyang International is one of the world’s quieter airports. The country’s chronic isolation means that there are not many places to fly,
and few foreigners keen on visiting. At least until a new terminal was
built in 2012, many of the flights on the departure boards were just for
show, giving the appearance of connection with the outside world. They
never actually took off.

Against this melancholy backdrop, one day in late May 1999, something
quite extraordinary happened. An official plane bearing the blue-and-white livery of the US government and emblazoned with the stars and stripes
landed and taxied along the runway. The plane was carrying a former
defence secretary, William Perry, who had been brought back from
retirement by President Bill Clinton to try to end the frozen conflict
between the US and North Korea. With a small group of aides, Perry was embarking on a mission that he hoped would avert a return to the armed stand-off that had brought the two countries to the brink of war five
years earlier.

The flightpath followed by Perry’s plane, which had taken off in Japan,
had not been used since the Korean war. As it approached North Korean territory, Perry and his aides cracked dark jokes about whether anyone had remembered to tell the vigilant air-defence missile crews a few thousand
feet below that they had an official invitation.

Perry was arriving at a moment of high tension. The previous year, the
regime in Pyongyang had shown off its proficiency in missile technology
with a series of tests, including the launch of the long-range
Taepodong-1, which sailed over Japan before splashing into the Pacific. Officially, the Taepodong-1 was intended to launch a satellite, but it
relied on the same technology and rocket power as an intercontinental
ballistic missile. And the only way such a missile is of real military use
is when it has a nuclear warhead in its nose cone.

By the time the US delegation arrived in Pyongyang, a 1994 agreement
between Washington and Pyongyang, intended to prevent North Korea from
ever becoming a nuclear weapons state, was fraying. Both sides were
failing to deliver on their earlier promises. As part of the deal, known
as the Agreed Framework, the US had undertaken to supply 500,000 tonnes of
fuel oil a year to the famine-ridden state, but the shipments had begun to arrive late, as the Republican-controlled Congress tried to block every
fuel purchase. Meanwhile, the Americans, Japanese and South Koreans were
behind schedule on their agreement to develop light-water reactors for
civilian energy generation inside North Korea. For their part, the North Koreans appeared to be involved in furtive activities, which – along with
the missile launch – convinced US intelligence agencies that they were seeking to continue making fissile material for a bomb.

Perry was carrying a letter from Bill Clinton to the North Korean
dictator, Kim Jong-il, who had inherited power in 1994 after the death of
his father, Kim Il-sung, the the founder of the nation and the ruling
dynasty. Along with Clinton’s letter to Kim expressing hope for better relations, Perry carried an explicit mandate from Japanese and South
Korean leaders, authorising him to speak on their behalf, and the outline
of a peace plan. In return for a broad renunciation of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles, North Korea would get more than oil and reactors – it would get a ticket back into the international community, including
diplomatic ties and trade with the US.

And potatoes. In the run-up to the Perry mission, North Korean officials
had signalled that Kim Jong-il was convinced that potatoes were the way
out of famine. In return for allowing US weapons inspectors to visit a suspicious underground site shortly before Perry’s visit, Pyongyang had initially demanded $300m, but eventually settled for 100,000 tonnes of potatoes.

At the airport, there were Mercedes saloons on the tarmac and protocol
officers waiting to drive Perry’s delegation to a government guesthouse through grand but deserted boulevards. “There were traffic police, but no traffic,” Perry recalled when we met recently in a hotel close to his
former workplace, the Pentagon. After being driven through the tidy
streets of the capital, Perry, straining to be complimentary, told his
hosts how impressed he was by the modernity of the architecture, only to
be reminded that the US air force had obliterated the original city.

By this stage in his life, Perry could reasonably claim to know the risks
of failure in nuclear diplomacy. As a defence contractor in the 1960s, he
had spent the Cuban missile crisis scrutinising aerial photos and
intelligence reports, thinking each day at work would be his last. He was undersecretary of defence in 1979, when he was woken up by a watch officer whose computer was showing 200 Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles heading for the US. (It turned out to be a false alarm.) From 1994-97, he
was Clinton’s defence secretary, and contingency plans for bombing North Korea had been on his desk at the peak of the 1994 crisis.

One of Perry’s aims in travelling to Pyongyang in 1999 was to see if diplomacy with North Korea was even a possibility. He had begun his career
as a mathematician and engineer, and was testing a hypothesis: that with
the right mix of incentives and dire warnings of the alternatives, a comprehensive bargain could be struck.

Looking back on Perry’s mission today, the question is whether the
experiment failed, or whether it was closed down for political reasons
before it had a chance to succeed. In the eyes of hawks like Donald
Trump’s new national security advisor, John Bolton, the whole exercise was delusional and doomed to failure. (Bolton prides himself on having helped
take a “hammer” to Perry’s experiment.) For Perry, most members of his diplomatic team, and many other observers, the flight to Pyongyang and the exchanges that followed in the next 18 months represent one of the great might-have-beens of diplomatic history, which – had it been allowed to
reach its conclusion – could have set North Korea and the wider region on
a much less dangerous path.

Bolton, the enemy of that peace effort, will now be orchestrating Donald Trump’s summit with North Korea’s current leader Kim Jong-un, which is expected to take place in the next few months. It will be an unprecedented encounter, and will bring with it the chance of a historic breakthrough. However, Bolton has made clear that he thinks Trump should confront Kim
Jong-un with an all-or-nothing choice: give up your nuclear weapons
programme or face military consequences – a single roll of the dice.

Over four days in Pyongyang, Perry’s delegation would not catch a glimpse
of the Dear Leader, but they felt his presence throughout, his image on
scores of billboards, red lapel pins, and behind every word spoken and
every question asked by the officials they were to meet. Accompanying
Perry were two advisors who would later play key roles in the Obama administration: future defence secretary Ash Carter, and Wendy Sherman, a senior state department official who would play a leading role in the
nuclear negotiations with Iran 15 years later. The party also included
Evans Revere, the head of the Korea desk at the state department, a
one-star marine general Wallace “Chip” Gregson, and Philip Yun, a Korean-American junior diplomat.

On the first morning, the visit got off to an inauspicious start. Perry
had asked to see a representative of the North Korean military, suspecting
they might have their own views on peace talks. He was right. One of the regime’s top military officials strode into the first meeting and told the Americans he would rather not be there. “The first thing he said to me
was: ‘This meeting was not my idea. I was directed to talk to you. I don’t think we should even be discussing giving up our nuclear programme’,”
Perry told me.

The general, who was dressed in full uniform, walked around the room
shaking hands briskly with the party. “He was straight out of central casting,” said Revere, a fluent Korean speaker, who was acting as
note-taker for the delegation. The general finally shook hands with Philip
Yun, the sole Korean-American. “He was kind of a scary guy – he was short but really intense, and he held my hand a little bit longer than he held others’, and he looked at me,” Yun told me. “What I got was that I was a traitor to the homeland because I was a Korean American, and therefore
scum.”

The general warned his visitors: “If you bomb our cities, the next day you will find nuclear weapons going off in your cities … not excluding Palo Alto,” a pointed reference to Perry’s hometown. As the talks got going,
the general dismissed efforts by the Korean foreign ministry officials to
get a word in. “You don’t have to listen to those neck-ties. They don’t know anything,” he said. It could have been a show of disagreement, a totalitarian version of “good cop, bad cop”, but to the American
diplomats, the contempt seemed real.

Much of Perry’s short stay in Pyongyang was spent with the regime’s top “neck-tie”, Kang Sok-ju, a tough, often prickly diplomat, who was known as a confidant of Kim Jong-il. In a series of meetings, which were punctuated
by speeches about US perfidy and the virtues of the Kim family leadership,
Kang would listen to the Americans’ proposals and come back the next day
with questions. Perry assumed that after each encounter Kang was
consulting with Kim Jong-il and then relaying the leader’s queries.

Perry’s team had a precise plan of how to roll out the US proposal in
stages. One part of the US proposal was to establish an “interests
section” in Pyongyang, a small diplomatic mission that could evolve into a full embassy. “They were very interested in that, and had all sorts of questions about how to do that. The recognition, the international
respect, loomed very large in their minds,” Perry said. “We were really trying to get more than an agreement on the technical issues of missiles
or nuclear weapons. We were working to try to set up a situation in which
North Korea could become a normal country.”

Putting that prospect at the centre of the US offer, Perry said, was “the main distinction between our negotiations and all the ones prior to that.
For this regime, and its eccentric leader, respect and standing were the
most important things, which is why previous US attempts to intimidate
North Korea through military and economic pressure alone had failed. To
give ground under such circumstances would mean loss of face.

“They go to great lengths never to show weakness,” said Suzanne DiMaggio,
a senior fellow at the New America thinktank, who has played a leading
role in back-channel talks with the North Koreans and Iranians. “It is disconcerting at times. You have to be prepared for it. Sometimes it comes across as confidence, other times as intransigence.”

Perry’s delegation was wined and dined, taken to see the country’s top acrobats perform, and given a tour of Pyongyang. They visited the Juche
Tower, a stone edifice erected in honour of the state ideology of self-reliance. And they toured a collective farm to see a rice-planting
device said to have been invented by the leader, moved by the plight of
his famished people.

Everywhere they went, there were demonstrations of popular enthusiasm. At
the collective farm, a 15-piece folk band popped up on a dike by the side
of a field. At the Juche Tower, a bus stopped outside, seemingly by
chance, and its passengers disembarked and went into a dance routine in
the middle of the otherwise empty streets, like a Hollywood musical. “Everything was supposed to be ‘spontaneous’,” said Wendy Sherman, the state department official. “And there was a cameraman following everything
we did with a 1950s hand-cranked camera. It was all rather surreal.”

Throughout the trip, Perry’s group assumed their conversations were being monitored. “When we wanted to talk, we walked outside, even knowing there might be bugs in the trees,” Sherman said. “When we wanted to get a
message across and were not sure who we should be talking to, we would sit
in a waiting room and speak, knowing we were being listened to.”

Amid all the mutual suspicion, a moment of genuine human connection materialised early in the trip when the group delivered a consignment of medical supplies to a children’s hospital. The director appeared genuinely grateful, and on the point of tears. The hospital had no antibiotics for
its patients. A young girl was found and coaxed into shaking hands with
the Americans, but first had to be convinced by the staff that they had
not come to kill her, as the regime had always said they would.

On the plane back to Japan, Perry’s team argued over whether the visit had been a success. Over the four days in Pyongyang, Kang and the other North Koreans had listened and asked questions, but made no counter-offer. The Americans were politely thanked for the visit and were told to expect a response. There was no immediate sense of breakthrough.

Ash Carter was the lead spokesman for the pessimistic view. The demeanour
and constant hectoring of the North Koreans left no doubt the mission had
been a complete failure, he argued – it was a sign the time had come for tougher measures. Revere, the Korean speaker who had more a feel for the nuances of culture and language, led the opposing argument. “The point I
made is that what we had heard was a North Korean version of ‘I’ll think about it’,” he said. “That’s not a negative message. They didn’t say no,
and by North Korean terms that’s almost a ringing endorsement, and we
should not slam the door.”

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)

From: slider@anashram.com

(cont.)

The argument continued all the way back to Tokyo and then to South Korea,
where there was a debate in a secure meeting room at the HQ of US Forces
Korea Command, attended by the ambassadors to Seoul and Tokyo. The
ambassadors backed Revere and ultimately helped win over Perry to the
optimist camp. When Perry made the call to Washington, he assured the administration that the door to an agreement had at least opened a crack,
and asked for patience.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/30/north-korea-us-nuclear-diplomacy-agreed-framework-1999-pyongyang-mission

That hunch proved right, eventually. But the North Korean response was a
long time coming. It was more than a year before the North Koreans
signalled they were ready to resume the talks with a return visit. “We
were hoping and prodding them to give us the return visit, and we waited
and we waited and we waited. We couldn’t figure out what the problem was,” said Robert Carlin, a former CIA specialist on North Korea seconded by the state department to work with Perry.

Kim Jong-il, as it turned out, had more pressing priorities.

In June 2000, just over a year after Perry’s trip and almost exactly 50
years after the outbreak of the Korean war, the leaders of North and South Korea met for the first time. South Korean president Kim Dae-jung had
survived kidnapping, an assassination attempt and a death sentence under
the US-backed South Korean dictatorship in the 70s and 80s. His rise to
the presidency in 1998 marked a decisive break with the country’s past, including its policy of hard-edged containment of the North.

Kim Dae-jung argued for a “sunshine policy” of detente with Pyongyang. In an exceptional political gamble, he flew to the North Korean capital, not knowing what kind of reception awaited him. But when the aircraft door
opened, there was the diminutive figure of Kim Jong-il, pot-bellied in his trademark khaki boilersuit and outsized late-period Elvis Presley
sunglasses. Thousands of people had been bussed to the airport to wave red paper flowers and chant the names of the two Kims.

At the end of the trip, the leaders declared their commitment to the reunification of the peninsula “through the joint efforts of the Korean people”. This heady language created a sense of optimism that peace might
now be possible. Kim Dae-jung was awarded the Nobel peace prize a few
months later for his efforts.

Now that relations had been restored with Seoul, the North Korean leader
was finally ready to pursue the negotiations with the US that Perry had
begun the previous year. “That apparently was the block,” Carlin said. Preparing the meeting with Kim Dae-jung had taken “a lot of their energy
and attention. But the talks went very well. There was a sense we would be
able to move.”

It was not until September 2000 that the Pyongyang government signalled it
was ready for the next major round of talks. And by this time, the Clinton administration had less than four months left to run. “It had taken over a year before the North Koreans said yes to the Perry process. It showed
their inexperience and naivety that they left it to an election year,”
said Philip Yun, the former state department official.

In October 2000, Kim dispatched one of his top military officers, the 72-year-old war veteran Vice Marshal Jo Myong-rok, to Washington. Along
the way, Jo stopped in California, where Perry held a dinner for him at Stanford University and took him on a tour of tech companies around San Francisco Bay, a personal request of Kim Jong-il’s. The tour included
Lucent labs, a leader in optic fibre technology that was run by a Korean American, Jeong Kim. The Lucent visit had the twin benefits of
demonstrating the technological benefits of cooperation with the west and
the achievements of Korean Americans in the tech sector.

It happened to be Fleet Week during the visit, and the Bay was full of battleships. As Perry and Jo were being driven over the Bay Bridge, jets
from the Blue Angels, the US navy’s flight demonstration squadron, flew
over in tight formation. “He must have thought it was all done for his benefit,” said Perry, who said nothing to disabuse him of that impression.

The San Francisco stop-off was intended, like the visit to the children’s hospital in Pyonyang, to humanise diplomatic relations between two
countries that were entirely unfamiliar to each other. In Philip Yun’s
eyes at least, it went some way to succeeding. Growing up in the US, Yun’s favourite aunt and frequent babysitter would warn him that if he did not behave, North Korean soldiers would come for him. It was the stuff of his childhood nightmares, but here he was spending hours in the back of an
official car, chatting with one of the regime’s top generals. “My mom’s
from the North, and he sounded like my grandfather to me,” Yun recalls. “He just seemed tired.”

In Washington, however, the old general had a surprise in store. Just
before going to the White House, Jo went to his hotel to change from his business suit into full dress uniform, complete with rows of medals. The subsequent photographs of this martial embodiment of the Kim regime being greeted by Clinton in the Oval Office represented US acceptance of the
Kims’ regime, exactly 50 years after Kim Il-sung launched a surprise
attack across the 38th parallel into South Korea, and were a bigger prize
for the North Korean regime, who paid attention to matters of protocol,
than any number of fuel and grain deliveries.

Jo opened a brown leather folder he had been clutching and handed Clinton
a letter from Kim Jong-il, signalling his willingness to cease the
production, sale and use of long-range ballistic missiles. Furthermore, Jo
told Clinton, if the US president were to come to Pyongyang, “Kim Jong-il will guarantee that he will satisfy all your security concerns”.

At the end of Jo’s trip, the two governments issued a joint statement,
which was a more optimistic view of the relationship than anything before
or since. “Recognising the changed circumstances on the Korean Peninsula created by the historic inter-Korean summit, the US and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea have decided to take steps to fundamentally improve their bilateral relations,” it stated, adding that talks would
begin to “formally end the Korean war by replacing the 1953 armistice agreement with permanent peace arrangements”.

But time was running out. The battle for the presidency between Al Gore
and George W Bush was in full swing, and Clinton had only weeks to secure
the legacy as a peacemaker that had eluded him that summer in Camp David,
when the Israelis and Palestinians had come close to a historic deal and
then balked.

Within nine days of the Jo visit, the US secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, was in Pyongyang to finalise the deal and lay the groundwork for
a presidential visit from Bill Clinton. North Korean officials bent over backwards to make sure her visit was a success.

“It was clear that orders had come from the top that virtually anything
the Americans wanted, they were to get,” said Robert Carlin, the former
CIA officer who was in the advance team sent ahead to prepare for
Albright’s arrival. “For example, the US security people brought a bomb-sniffing dog. The South Koreans had objected when we brought a bomb-sniffing dog on a visit, because this was an insult, but the North
Koreans said: ‘Go ahead – sniff away.’”

Kim Jong-il stage-managed Albright’s visit as an elaborate spectacle, with each scene designed to reveal him as an object of worship. He gave two extravagant banquets – the first time any US official had had the chance
to study this mercurial leader close up. At one point, during a meal, Kim
rose to propose a toast and down a large glass of wine in single extended
gulp. “Spontaneously, all the North Koreans in the room get up and start clapping,” Philip Yun said. “There was a guy next to me, who was trying to get me drunk, and all the time you could tell he was looking at Kim
Jong-il. The moment Kim took that drink, he got up in a second,
mid-sentence, to applaud.”

Meals were accompanied by entertainment. Groups of singers and dancers
would suddenly appear to sing Korean and American classics, in shows choreographed like a Broadway musical. Wendy Sherman, who sat next to Kim during one of these performances, told him: “I feel like in another life
you were a great director.” He replied by pointing out he owned every Oscar-winning film ever made. “He was the great puppet-master. It was all very disturbing,” Sherman said.

Kim’s greatest surprise came at the end of the first day of talks. He told Albright, Sherman and the rest of the US party that the night’s programme
of entertainment had been changed, and they were going to see something special. “We had no idea where we were being taken,” Sherman said.

They were loaded into vehicles and driven through deserted Pyongyang
streets to the city’s May Day Stadium. The car park outside was empty, and the stadium itself was dark, but when Kim led Albright into the arena, it erupted with more than 200,000 people shouting his name. All the Americans could do was stand at his side, to witness the adulation. “He was cheered
for 10 minutes,” Sherman said. “It was more than awkward. It was very uncomfortable.”

Kim Jong-il had ordered a rerun of the 50th anniversary celebration of the Communist Workers Party rally from the previous year. Kim and his guests watched animated pictures created by tens of thousands of flashcards being
held up and switched with split-second timing by suited party members.
Albright later said in a radio interview that the experience of being
alongside the leader at the focal point of hysterical worship as “like
being in some very strange movie”.

A series of stadium-sized agricultural scenes were followed abruptly by a totally different image: a Taepodong missile launching amid clouds of
smokes and flames, and appearing to travel across the arena. Kim turned to Albright, smiling, and said the virtual missile had been “the first
satellite launch, and it would be the last”. Then he turned to Sherman and told her the same thing.

Getting North Korea to agree to strict missile curbs was the key objective
of the Albright visit, and she made it clear to Kim that she could not recommend a visit by Clinton until Kim could allay US concerns. The US had prepared a list of questions about Pyongyang’s understanding of the
proposed restrictions, and had expected it to be answered by the country’s missile experts. But Kim demanded to see the questionnaire himself at the
start of his second meeting with Albright, the day after the extravaganza
at the Mayday Stadium.

“And what he did was systematically start answering the questions, without asking the advisers sitting next to him,” Albright recalled. “So I think that he is informed on the subject, technically, and very much wanted to
show that he was in charge.”

Albright returned from Pyongyang convinced that Kim Jong-il was a
pragmatist, and that a visit would put the seal on a historic deal. “President Clinton told me he would do whatever was needed to get the
treaty signed, and he would have prevailed on the issue,” Perry said.

However, on 7 November 2000, 10 days after Albright returned from
Pyongyang, Americans went to vote in what turned out to be the most finely balanced presidential election in the nation’s history. If Vice President
Al Gore had won, Clinton would probably have used his final weeks in
office to make the trip to visit Pyongyang, but any such plans were put on
hold through the torment of the vote tally in Florida that would decide
the result.
Advertisement

In the end, George W Bush’s lead in Florida was so slim that the result of the presidential election came down to a fierce legal battle between
Democrat and Republican about whether or not there would be a manual
recount of the votes, which Gore believed would grant him victory. To get
the manual recount stopped, the Republican party flooded Florida with
lawyers – one of the most aggressive of whom was a man with sandy hair, wire-rimmed glasses and a bristling moustache, named John Bolton.

After the supreme court halted the recount, confirming Bush as president, Bolton was one of several Republican lawyers rewarded for their efforts in Florida. “People ask what [job] John should get,” said vice
president-elect Dick Cheney at the time. “My answer is: anything he
wants.” Bolton was made undersecretary of state for arms control, although
he was a splenetic opponent of almost all arms-control agreements,
especially with North Korea. In his memoir, Surrender Is Not an Option,
Bolton derides the “high-minded Clintonites” and “careerists” who believed
peace was possible with North Korea.

Even after Bush’s victory, the diplomats who had been pursuing a peace
deal with Pyongyang thought all was not lost. Colin Powell, the former
general appointed as Bush’s secretary of state, was enthusiastic about a potential agreement. According to Perry, “Colin assured me and assured Clinton that he liked this agreement and was going to go through with it.
And he intended to do that.” As late as 6 March 2001, Powell stated
publicly that the new administration planned “to engage with North Korea,
to pick up where President Clinton left off.”

He was wrong. Cheney and the new defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld,
shared Bolton’s antipathy to talks, and won the day with Bush. The view of the Bush hawks was that the Clinton administration’s contact with
Pyongyang represented a reward for the regime’s human-rights atrocities
and violations of arms agreements. “September 11 pushed North Korea to the side, but by year’s end I was able to move on to the offensive toward dismantling the failed Agreed Framework and its various manifestations,” Bolton wrote in his memoir. In Bush’s state of the union speech in January 2002, he named North Korea alongside Iran and Iraq as a member of the
“axis of evil”.

Robert Carlin stayed on at his post running the north-east Asia division
at the bureau of intelligence and research, trying to change minds, but to
no avail. He left in May 2002. “I went through the descent and crash landing,” he told me. “We kept writing memos to Powell trying to get him
to understand what we had accomplished and what was still possible. I
think he got it, based on the comments that he put on some of the papers.
But he was already hogtied.”

Now 90, Perry spends his time travelling the world, accompanied by his daughter, Robin, warning of the dangers of a nuclear conflict, trying to

[continued in next message]

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