In My Time - Dick Cheney [250]
In the days that followed the strike, the Israeli government asked that we not reveal what we knew about the target they’d struck in the desert. They believed that widespread public discussion about the nuclear plant or the fact that the Israelis had launched the strike might force Syrian President Bashar Assad to respond, launching a wider conflict. For the Syrians and the North Koreans, though, the private message was clear—Israel would not tolerate this threat. We agreed to maintain secrecy in the near term about the plant and the operation to take it out.
Assad decided to keep quiet as well. A North Korean delegation showed up in Syria shortly after the attack, probably to advise on the way forward, and the Syrians subsequently demolished the reactor building, covered the site with soil, and erected a metal structure over it.
What had happened in the desert might, for a short time, remain a secret. But all of us on the National Security Council knew the truth: that the North Koreans had proliferated nuclear technology to Syria, one of the world’s worst state sponsors of terror. The North Koreans and the Syrians were clearly violating the red line drawn by President Bush on October 9, 2006, in the wake of North Korea’s first nuclear test.
BY THE TIME WE came into office, the North Koreans had an established pattern of behavior. They would make an agreement about their nuclear sites, pocket the benefits of the agreement, and then continue on with their weapons programs. They were masters of brinksmanship—creating problems, threatening their neighbors, and expecting to be bribed back into cooperation. It had usually worked for them. In 1994, with Bill Clinton in the White House, they agreed to freeze their plutonium production program in exchange for 500,000 metric tons of fuel oil a year and two reactors of a type that cannot easily be used to produce weapons material. But they secretly pursued a second route. In 2002, with the North Koreans having received millions of tons of fuel oil and with the al-Kibar reactor construction under way, an American delegation confronted them with evidence of their deception, and they admitted they had been developing a second way to produce nuclear weapons—by enriching uranium.
It was with the intention of breaking this pattern of deceit and deception that President Bush in 2003 established the six-party talks made up of the United States, South Korea, North Korea, Japan, China, and Russia. The idea was to move away from the bilateral, or one-on-one, negotiations that had failed in the past and to bring into the diplomatic process other nations that had an interest in preventing North Korea from developing nuclear weapons. China was particularly important, because as North Korea’s economic lifeline, China had considerable influence over the isolated and insular North Korean government. We knew that the Chinese were concerned about the regional instability that could arise from a nuclear-armed North Korea, particularly given the likelihood that nations like Japan and others would feel the need to follow suit.
By 2006, however, we were clearly slipping back into the old pattern. An early indication came at the end of October, just three weeks after North Korea tested a nuclear weapon. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, who was leading our delegation to the six-party talks, decided to participate in an hours-long, private meeting with North Korean envoy Kim Gye Gwan in Beijing. As Hill well knew, President Bush’s policy was to take a regional approach to North Korea’s nuclear programs, thus bringing the combined pressure of several nations to bear, but the North Koreans had been demanding that the United States meet with them one-on-one, in the way that had proved so fruitful for them in the past. Hill, against instructions from Secretary Rice, obliged, cutting our six-party allies, the Japanese and South Koreans, out of the negotiations and providing the North Koreans what can only have looked to them like a reward for bad behavior. Two