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Chapter Three

TEAM AMERICA AND THE HERMIT KINGDOM

Most Americans believe the Korean War ended more than six decades ago, when General William Harrison, representing the United Nations Command, and General Nam Il, representing the North Korean army and Chinese volunteers, signed an agreement to end fighting. The Korean War Armistice Agreement of 1953, however, was merely a ceasefire. Today, more than a million troops face each other across a demilitarized zone (DMZ) less than three miles wide. South Korea has transformed itself into an affluent democracy, while Kim Il Sung, his son Kim Jong Il, and his son Kim Jong Un have turned North Korea into a land of starvation, prison camps, and slave labor. Of all rogue regimes the United States faces, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is the most isolated, most bizarre, and least understood. With its nuclear weapons and long-range missiles, and its refusal to abide by international norms, it is also the most dangerous. That it can now threaten Hawaii, and California may soon be within its strike range, is a testament to more than sixty years of failed American diplomacy.

The Korean armistice was the result of more than five hundred negotiating sessions spanning over two years.¹ The United States did not insist that North Korea recognize the South’s legitimacy. To do so might have derailed sensitive talks.

With the armistice signed, Americans hoped to return home; but South Korea’s president, Syngman Rhee, understood that the armistice was just the beginning of a new phase in the conflict. Three months after its signing, American, Korean, and Chinese officials met again at Panmunjom in the DMZ to discuss peace and withdrawal of foreign forces. These talks were even more hostile than the armistice negotiations. According to Arthur Dean, the American ambassador, “No individual ever spoke personally to anyone on the other side.” North Korean representatives read every statement only after their Chinese allies approved it. “There was never an exchange of greetings or amenities on starting or ending a meeting,” Dean recalled, describing the sessions as “negotiation without contact.”² After four weeks, the Americans and the North Koreans could not even agree on an agenda. The Americans may have wanted to talk, but good intentions mean little in diplomacy. North Korea was a Chinese puppet and Mao Zedong preferred that Korea remain an open wound.³ A follow-up conference in Geneva also ended without progress. Just because an adversary is willing to engage does not mean it is willing to agree.

The presence of American forces along the DMZ made it impossible not to talk. The armistice directed the two sides—American forces under the banner of the United Nations, and North Korea—to form a commission to communicate, settle violations, and handle repatriation of prisoners and displaced civilians. Today, American officers talk with their North Korean counterparts at Panmunjom if only over mundane matters such as the return of the bodies of North Korean villagers or farmers swept downstream during flash floods, or coordinating border crossings for international visitors. In practice, this requires a phone link between American and North Korean officials who occupy offices just a dozen meters away. If the North Koreans refuse to answer, American officers use a handheld bullhorn to shout messages across the divide.

When President Harry S. Truman excluded South Korea from his outline of America’s defensive perimeter, Kim Il Sung assumed he had a pass to attack South Korea. By the end of the 1960s, it appeared that fighting could again erupt on the peninsula. Between 1966 and 1969, there were more than 280 North Korean attacks on Americans or South Koreans around the DMZ.⁴ The North Koreans staged a brazen attack on the presidential mansion in Seoul, aiming to assassinate President Park Chung Hee. Two days later, North Korean forces seized the USS Pueblo, a U.S. Navy ship gathering intelligence in international waters off the North Korean coast, and took all the ship’s personnel hostage.

Only after Lyndon Johnson dispatched the USS Enterprise battle group did the North Koreans even agree to discuss the Pueblo.⁵ Johnson’s approach to the Pueblo crisis presaged Carter’s handling of the Iran hostage crisis years later, and with the same result: When Kim Il Sung concluded that American military force was off the table, talks went nowhere. It was almost a year before the North Koreans released the Pueblo’s crew, and then only after General Gilbert Woodward signed a humiliating “confession” on behalf of the U.S. government.⁶

In hindsight, the decision to negotiate a resolution of the Pueblo crisis was complicated. Engagement saved the lives of the ship’s crew, but their rescue came at a high cost. Allowing North Korea to keep the Pueblo meant the exposure of secret American technology. The ship’s capture remains a propaganda coup for the communist regime. Now a museum, the ship is a reminder to North Korea’s starved population of America’s supposed impotency. The symbolism went deeper, too: South Koreans juxtaposed the willingness of the White House to kowtow to North Korea after the Pueblo’s capture with its inaction after the assault on the South Korean presidential mansion, and said the contrast signaled that the life of the South Korean president was secondary to the return of the American crew. The fact that the North Korean commandos had passed through an area secured by American forces to reach the presidential mansion accentuated the point.⁷

American outreach to rogue regimes consistently erodes allies’ confidence, and Seoul had reason to be nervous. It understood Pyongyang’s tendency to couple diplomacy with provocation. On April 15, 1969—Kim Il Sung’s birthday, one day after North Korean officials proposed a meeting in the DMZ—two North Korean MiG-21s shot down an unarmed U.S. surveillance aircraft over the Sea of Japan, dozens of miles from North Korean airspace, killing thirty-one American servicemen.

Nixon contemplated military action but embraced diplomacy instead. Still, he understood that how the Americans talked was consequential. With a greater appreciation for nuance than diplomats today, he considered a number of scenarios: attending the prearranged meeting at Panmunjom and then storming out when the North Korean delegation defended their actions; demanding a special meeting; or boycotting Panmunjom altogether. As Nixon considered the options, Henry Kissinger, his national security advisor, balanced the need to maintain Panmunjom as a channel with the need to avoid transforming it into a stage for North Korean propaganda.⁸ In the end, American officials walked out of the meeting after the North Korean representative condemned the unarmed plane’s flight as a “brigandish aggressive act.”

Nixon’s decision not to retaliate militarily had emboldened the North.⁹ Over the next four months, a period in which there were no talks, North Korean soldiers attacked United Nations Command guard posts and personnel, and North Korean saboteurs attempted to infiltrate South Korea by sea four times. Then, four days after the two sides met so that the Americans could formally issue their litany of complaints, North Korean forces shot down an unarmed American helicopter that had strayed into North Korean airspace while on a training mission along the DMZ. Kim Il Sung calculated that with more than 150,000 American troops embroiled in Vietnam, the chance of American retaliation for his actions was slight.

North Korean authorities demanded that the United States acknowledge its criminality and apologize. For Kim Il Sung, it was irrelevant that helicopters patrolling the border often strayed across mountainous terrain in foggy conditions. He wanted a propaganda victory, not an explanation. Kim counted on the fact that the American public had little patience for Americans being held hostage.¹⁰ Certainly, the West’s lack of strategic patience is a lesson that other rogue leaders leveraged to their benefit, be it the Iranians through several hostage crises, or the Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi, who threatened to execute five Bulgarian nurses on false charges that they had infected Libyan children with HIV.

Even as Kissinger moved to warm up relations with Beijing, America’s relationship with North Korea remained frozen.¹¹ What little dialogue Kim Il Sung engaged in consisted of alternating bellicosity and outreach. For example, after telling the New York Times that he was preparing for war,¹² he sent the U.S. Congress an open letter requesting negotiation,¹³ but then launched a military campaign to seize five South Korean islands off the North Korean coast. Between October and December 1973, North Korean military vessels crossed the maritime boundary around the islands almost every other day; then, in February 1974, they seized one South Korean fishing vessel and sank another.¹⁴ True to form, once Kim Il Sung brought the peninsula to the brink of new conflict, he sent a proposal for talks to the U.S. Congress. No senators took the bait. The North’s proposal to forbid foreign troops in South Korea would have left that country defenseless.¹⁵

That North Korea would make such an outlandish proposal should not be a surprise, given that Kim Il Sung thought he was engaging the United States from a position of strength. After all, the White House had agreed to withdraw from Vietnam, and North Korea’s naval probing demonstrated that the United States was not serious about its commitment to defend South Korea. Kim Il Sung believed he could act without consequence. Over the following year, the North Korean navy grew increasingly aggressive. A conciliatory American approach had encouraged Pyongyang to push harder.

In August 1976, with the Ford administration in its final months, North Korea struck at Americans in the DMZ. A work crew supervised by Captain Arthur Bonifas was trimming a tree that obstructed an American observation post. When North Korean soldiers demanded that they stop, Bonifas refused. Some twenty North Korean soldiers then knocked him and Lieutenant Mark Barrett to the ground and hacked them to death with axes. The murders shocked Washington, but for North Korea they topped off a propaganda campaign that Pyongyang had initiated months before.

While the North Korean regime sought diplomatic advantage, blaming violence on the American presence, the brutality of the axe murders repulsed the international community. North Korea’s traditional allies stayed quiet. If the murders were a gambit to damage America, the net effect was the opposite.

The United States did not offer a humiliating apology for Pyongyang to broadcast repeatedly, nor did it bomb North Korea as Kissinger proposed. Instead, the United States launched Operation Paul Bunyan to cut down the tree with the backing of U.S. Army engineers, combat troops, and South Korean special forces, along with squadrons of jet fighters, B-52 bombers, and the USS Midway strike group on full alert. Military bluster might not be American style, but Washington was playing by Pyongyang rules. It worked. Not only did North Korea stand down, but Kim Il Sung offered regrets.¹⁶

Carter’s New Approach

Jimmy Carter rejected the lessons his predecessors had learned in blood. On January 16, 1975, shortly after declaring his candidacy for president, he announced his intent to withdraw American forces from Korea, although he later amended his pledge to include only ground forces and only on a timeline determined in consultation with Seoul.¹⁷ A devout Christian, Carter was deeply committed to peace. If his proposals were initially ignored, it was because he was considered a longshot candidate. He would not remain so.

Carter clawed his way to the top and won his party’s nomination. The Democratic National Convention adopted his platform calling for the gradual withdrawal of U.S. ground forces and nuclear weapons from South Korea, to be replaced with reliance on tactical air and naval forces.¹⁸ Many diplomats shared Carter’s ambivalence if not antipathy toward Park Chung Hee, South Korea’s president, whose human rights record was appalling.

Carter’s goodwill toward North Korea trumped strategic wisdom. American allies in Seoul, Tokyo, and Taipei saw his plan as dangerous.¹⁹ They knew Kim Il Sung’s mind. An aide to the Japanese prime minister saw Carter’s announcement as a sign that America might abandon Asia, especially since it came so soon after the withdrawal from Vietnam.²⁰ Regional experts noted that Carter’s logic fell flat when translated from theory to reality. “We should consider also the ripple effect of a round, shiny pebble from Washington suddenly tossed into a still Asian pond, causing undulations far beyond the point of impact,” wrote Frank Gibney, an East Asia specialist, in Foreign Affairs.²¹

It was for this reason that Carter’s more worldly advisors tried to rein him in. The secretary of defense, Harold Brown, who had served in senior Pentagon positions during the Johnson administration, advised the president against withdrawal, especially as the intelligence community noted the North’s military buildup.²²

Believing his opponent hopelessly naïve, Kim Il Sung wasted no time in offering diplomacy. Shortly after Carter’s inauguration, Kim sent a letter to the president-elect proposing to replace the 1953 armistice agreement with a peace treaty. The North Korean foreign minister followed suit in a letter to Cyrus Vance, the secretary of state. Carter expressed interest, so long as South Korea might also participate. Kim Il Sung rejected that condition.²³ He was willing to embrace dialogue only if it did not require North Korean compromise.

Kim Il Sung sought to lull Carter into complacency. The DMZ enjoyed the longest pause in provocations since the armistice, and when North Korea downed an American helicopter that had strayed across the border, Kim released the bodies of those killed and the lone survivor within days. But while he wanted a quiet DMZ, Kim remained as belligerent as ever toward South Korea and Japan. Violence escalated in the Sea of Japan, the Yellow Sea, and the Joint Security Area.²⁴ Most abductions of Japanese citizens occurred between 1977 and 1983. These provocations followed Pyongyang’s traditional pattern of matching conciliation toward one country with provocation toward its ally.

Kim’s attempts to drive a wedge between the United States and its Asian allies did not work. When Carter shelved his withdrawal plan, Kim reacted bitterly, accusing the U.S. president of aiming to “deceive the world.”²⁵

Carter never gave up hope that he might broker peace on the Korean Peninsula. He had uncritical trust in his own power of persuasion. If past diplomacy had failed, it had to be the fault of his predecessors, not America’s adversaries. Carter believed that if he was able to bring the two Korean leaders together in a Camp David–like setting, he could achieve peace. Fortunately, his aides and the U.S. ambassador in Seoul talked the president out of a “flaky” proposal to invite both leaders to the DMZ.²⁶

Next, Carter proposed tripartite talks with American diplomats and their North and South Korean counterparts. This too went nowhere. The North Korean regime balked at including the South, and the South worried that Carter’s aim was for the United States to abandon South Korea, much as it had South Vietnam four years earlier.

Diplomats and military leaders alike “were horrified by the peremptory and damaging way the issue was pursued by the Carter White House,” noted Don Oberdorfer, who covered Asian affairs for the Washington Post for a quarter century.²⁷ Carter’s intentions may have been noble, but his single-minded rush to diplomacy was costly. Ultimately, time ran out. An assassin’s bullet felled the South Korean leader and ushered in years of political upheaval, while the Iran hostage crisis consumed Carter’s attention through his last year in office.

Reagan and Korea

Ronald Reagan inherited a more dangerous Korea largely because Carter’s desire for diplomacy had emboldened Kim Il Sung. Reagan turned Carter’s approach on its head. Carter wanted to evacuate troops from the Korean Peninsula; Reagan increased their numbers. Diplomacy took a back seat. Halfway through Reagan’s first term, a Soviet fighter jet downed a South Korean airliner that had strayed over Soviet territory, killing 269 people, almost a quarter of them Americans. Tension skyrocketed not only between the superpowers, but also between Seoul and Pyongyang.

It was against this backdrop that China again became central to the Korean conflict. A decade after Nixon visited China, Beijing was finding its stride. On October 8, 1983, Chinese diplomats passed the American embassy in Beijing a North Korean message expressing Pyongyang’s willingness to participate in tripartite talks. In the face of Reagan’s military buildup, the North Korean leadership had decided to cast aside its objection to South Korean participation, the basis for its rejection of Carter’s offer.

Kim Il Sung’s about-face might be seen as validation of the idea that engagement with rogues can work if it is conducted from a position of strength. Events the next day challenged that assumption, however. As South Korean cabinet members and presidential advisors awaited President Chun Doo-hwan’s arrival at a wreath-laying ceremony in Rangoon, three North Korean army officers detonated a bomb they had hidden in the roof of the mausoleum, killing twenty-one, including the foreign minister and the deputy prime minister. It was no rogue operation. At the time, Pyongyang’s foreign operations service was under the command of Kim Il Sung’s eldest son and future successor, Kim Jong Il.²⁸

If Western diplomats believe that transforming rogues into responsible regimes boils down to incentives, the Rangoon massacre should disabuse them of the notion. Rogues are proactive rather than reactive. They simply do not accept international norms. Limiting strategy to the tools of normal diplomacy will fail.

After the bombing, Reagan’s attitude toward North Korea diplomacy cooled. In January 1984, the Chinese premier, Zhao Ziyang, passed a North Korean message to Reagan again endorsing three-way talks between the Koreas and the United States. The offer fit a pattern in which Pyongyang proposed engagement only to deflect consequences for its behavior. Many rogues understood that dangling the prospect of diplomacy can lead the West to put aside its disgust at earlier actions.²⁹ Diplomats look forward, and they are often willing to put atrocities behind in exchange for the promise of a better future. Seldom do olive branches offered by rogue regimes suggest a desire for peace, however.

There had been no softening of Kim Il Sung’s complete refusal to accept South Korea’s legitimacy. When the International Olympic Committee selected Seoul to host the 1988 Olympics, some South Korean officials hoped they might leverage the games for reconciliation.³⁰ The Dear Leader, for his part, saw any acceptance of Seoul as a blow to his claim to be Korea’s only legitimate leader.³¹ North Korean threats had forced the relocation of the 1970 Asian Games away from Seoul, but in the run-up to the 1986 games in Seoul, Kim Il Sung’s complaints fell on deaf ears. Six days before the opening ceremony of the Asian Games, North Korean terrorists detonated a bomb at South Korea’s main airport, killing five. The world might know that North Korea was guilty, but if other states hesitated to deal with the South, then Kim Il Sung could claim victory. For rogue regimes, terrorism is a fully legitimate tool in the diplomatic kitbag.

To drive home the point, North Korean agents placed a bomb on board a Korean Air flight from Baghdad to Seoul in November 1987, killing 115. One North Korean agent committed suicide, but police captured his accomplice, who confessed that Pyongyang had ordered the bombing to suggest that South Korea was unsuitable to host the Olympics.³² The international community did not back down, and the games proceeded without a hitch. As for North Korea, it won a spot on the State Department’s State Sponsors of Terrorism list.³³

After the Olympics ended, South Korea’s president, Roh Tae-woo, announced that the South would no longer seek to isolate the North. “The basic policy in the past was to try to change the North Korean position by isolating them,” Roh explained. “We have changed this. We think that by encouraging them to be more open, we can have peace in this part of the world.”³⁴ Later that week, Roh unveiled a program to promote trade, exchanges, and humanitarian contacts with the North.

North Korea initially brushed off the initiative, but the White House embraced it. The State Department effused, calling it “a major—indeed historic—reversal of traditional” South Korean policy.³⁵ Not everyone was happy with how diplomacy had become intertwined with incentives. Benjamin Gilman, a Republican and chairman of the House Committee on International Relations, observed, “We are paying for bad behavior by rewarding North Korean brinkmanship with benefits.” He further noted, “North Korea is now the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid in East Asia, and in response to recent North Korean provocations, the Administration proposes only to increase the level of our assistance.”³⁶

Skeptics abounded, but it was hard to argue when America’s Korean allies wanted to talk. After Roh informed the Americans that he would seek a summit with Kim Il Sung, the State Department let Pyongyang know that Washington would also like to improve relations should North Korea cease its belligerence and terrorism.³⁷ The North Koreans agreed, and so began a series of nearly three dozen bilateral meetings spread over five years. Direct talks eased communication—no longer did the two sides have to use China as an intermediary—but the talks did little to address the chief U.S. concerns: North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs.³⁸

North Korea’s Nuclear Program

In 1980, a spy satellite spotted construction of a nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, about sixty miles north of Pyongyang. Four years later, satellites detected craters suggesting that North Korea was experimenting with detonators used in nuclear bombs.³⁹ That North Korea had signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1985 should not have assuaged diplomats; the Soviet Union had promised North Korea four nuclear plants if it accepted the treaty.⁴⁰ Its signature allowed Pyongyang to import dual-use equipment. While the NPT requires states to sign a safeguards agreement with the IAEA within eighteen months, Pyongyang refused.⁴¹

The Pentagon monitored Yongbyon from afar as the complex grew. By February 1987, it was clear that North Korea intended to produce plutonium. The next year, satellites detected a new facility, two football fields long and six stories high, and more evidence that North Korea was experimenting with the explosions needed to set off a nuclear warhead.⁴²

Whereas Reagan had kept concerns about Yongbyon secret in order to maintain the option of a surprise attack, George H. W. Bush put diplomacy front and center. Bush trusted that the world would see the North Korea threat just as he did. Secretary of State James Baker explained, “Our diplomatic strategy was designed to build international pressure against North Korea to force them to live up to their agreements.”⁴³ In a national security review, the White House also embraced a carrots-and-sticks policy.⁴⁴ Bush’s approach to Korea essentially paralleled Carter’s strategy toward Iran. After cultivating international opinion, he sought to entangle Pyongyang in dialogue and nonproliferation obligations.⁴⁵ There was one big difference between Carter on Iran and Bush on North Korea: Bush understood the importance of deterrence.

Undermining Bush policy, however, was a lack of consensus about its goals. One camp, giving priority to arms control, viewed compliance with the NPT and IAEA inspections as the top goal. They argued that demands to end reprocessing violated rights recognized in the NPT and might lead North Korea to abandon the treaty altogether. Another camp, emphasizing security, argued that the threat North Korea would pose with weapons-grade material should override the universality of the treaty’s privileges.⁴⁶

Any pretense of secrecy ended when South Korean diplomats leaked word of North Korea’s activities after being briefed by American diplomats.⁴⁷ International headlines soon broadcast predictions that North Korea might be nuclear-weapons capable by the mid-1990s.

North Korea responded with bluster. Pyongyang accused the West of hypocrisy, a card to which American diplomats are sensitive, as Iran and other rogues well understand. The North Koreans said they would not accede to inspections of Yongbyon so long as the American military maintained a nuclear arsenal in South Korea.⁴⁸ Whereas rogue regimes as a rule do not accept Western arguments, Bush yielded to the North Korean argument.⁴⁹ Those who elevated arms control over national security won the day.⁵⁰

Bush hoped that removing nuclear missiles from South Korea would set the circumstances for successful negotiations. Rather than shape the move as a concession to Pyongyang, Bush’s team depicted it as outreach to Moscow.⁵¹