In My Time - Dick Cheney [251]
Worse was to follow as Hill and Rice made concession after concession to the North Koreans and turned a blind eye to their misdeeds. As I watched the course the State Department was taking, I concluded that our diplomats had become so seized with cutting a deal, any deal, with the North Koreans that they had lost sight of the real objective, which was forcing the North to give up its weapons. I do not believe that the president ever lost sight of the ultimate goal, however. I heard him repeatedly ask both Rice and Hill if we were truly on a path to denuclearization. Unfortunately, the reassurances he received did not reflect reality.
MANY OF OUR DIPLOMATIC failures would be played out against an action plan that participants in the six-party talks agreed to in February 2007. It provided for the North Koreans to halt operations at Yongbyon and to admit UN inspectors within sixty days in exchange for 50,000 tons of fuel oil. North Korea would then provide a complete declaration of all of its nuclear programs, disable all its existing facilities, and in return receive another 950,000 tons of fuel oil. The United States would also begin the process of removing North Korea from the list of states that sponsor terrorism and lift the economic sanctions of the Trading with the Enemy Act.
At the next convening of the six-party talks, in March 2007, the North Koreans played the game they had played so often and effectively before. They walked out of the talks and refused to participate further unless $25 million in North Korean funds frozen in a Macau-based bank were returned to them. The funds had been frozen in September 2005, when the U.S. Treasury Department designated Banco Delta Asia as a “primary money laundering concern,” charging that the bank had circulated U.S. currency counterfeited in North Korea and laundered money for a variety of North Korean criminal activities, including drug trafficking. The designation essentially prevented the bank from conducting international transactions in U.S. currency. Now the North Koreans were demanding the money before they would participate in nuclear negotiations.
The State Department urged that we agree to the demand and began looking for ways to get the funds returned to the North Koreans. Their efforts were complicated when international banks refused to transfer the money, fearing being caught up in a transaction that involved illicit funds. Finally, a Russian bank agreed to participate, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York wired the money into a North Korean account at the Russian bank. By June 2007, as a result of our pressuring the banks involved, the North Koreans had gotten $25 million in illicit funds unfrozen and wired to them. With the money in hand, they said they would shutter the Yongbyon plant—which they were supposed to have done two months previously.
By mid-August 2007, we had known for four months that the North Koreans were proliferating nuclear technology to the Syrians. Although I was sure the Israelis would take out the plant, nothing had happened as yet, and we had not come up with an effective strategy to leverage the knowledge we had of the reactor at al-Kibar. Secretary Rice’s approach was to downplay the existence of the reactor out of concern for the six-party talks. Although the reactor made a mockery of the talks up until then, further talks, she reasoned, might be disrupted if the Syrian plant became public. The president would soon be traveling to Australia for the