In My Time - Dick Cheney [255]
Then the president called on me. The North Koreans were not living up to their end of the bargain, I said. They had so far refused to admit to their uranium enrichment activity. They denied proliferating to the Syrians. If the declaration they provide is false, and we accept it, we won’t be accomplishing anything except helping the North Koreans cover up their nuclear activity. I said I realized the State Department was working hard on this, but I was becoming increasingly concerned that the six-party talks were now a convenient way for the North Koreans to hide what they were really doing, and we were not only complicit, but were in fact rewarding them for it by offering benefits and concessions in exchange for missed deadlines and false declarations. I reminded the group that eventually the work the North Koreans were doing in Syria would be public, and then we would have to explain why we had looked the other way.
Then I asked what was to me the bottom-line question about our negotiations. “Is it accurate to say that there will be no lifting of our designation of North Korea as a terrorist state and no removal of the Trading with the Enemy Act sanctions unless they present a comprehensive and complete declaration of their programs?” The president said, “Absolutely.” Secretary Rice concurred. I pressed further: “I assume that their failure to admit they’ve been proliferating to the Syrians would be a deal killer.” Secretary Rice agreed, although seeming reluctant. The president emphasized that was his position.
Rice had been working to convince the president that the process she and Chris Hill were working would lead to the North Koreans giving up their nuclear weapons. My view—and the view the president heard in the Oval Office that morning from the intelligence experts—was that there was nothing we could offer them by way of concessions that was worth as much to them as their nuclear weapons. They were convinced the survival of their regime depended upon the weapons. I believed that the only way diplomacy would work was if the Chinese and our other partners in the six-party talks understood we were through playing games and were deadly serious about the threat we all faced.
A few days later, Jay Lefkowitz, the State Department envoy for human rights issues in North Korea, gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute in which he said, “It is increasingly clear that North Korea will remain in its present nuclear status when the administration leaves office in one year.” North Korea, he said, “is not serious about disarming in a timely manner” and “its conduct does not appear to be that of a government that is willing to come in from the cold.” The next day the State Department issued a statement distancing itself from Lefkowitz’s remarks, saying that he was the envoy for human rights issues and not “somebody who speaks authoritatively about the six-party talks.” He sounded pretty authoritative to me.
At the end of the month, Assistant Secretary Hill gave a speech at Amherst College that made it sound as though we were on our way to ruling out a North Korean uranium program. Yes, he said, North Korea had acquired aluminum tubes “to construct centrifuges,” but “we’ve seen that these tubes are not being used for the centrifuge program”:
We’ve had American diplomats go and look at this aluminum that was used and see what they’re actually using it for. We actually had American diplomats, people like myself, carry this aluminum back in their suitcases to verify that this is the precise aluminum that the North Koreans had actually purchased for this purpose and so what has emerged is the fact that they are not using it for uranium enrichment.
Hill neglected to note