In My Time - Dick Cheney [257]
A few days later the president and I had our weekly lunch, and as we sat out on his private patio he encouraged me to keep challenging policy that I thought was mistaken. He did not say he agreed with me, but I think he believed the debates would make for a better outcome in terms of his decision making. I hadn’t planned to stop arguing anyway. I feared we were headed for a train wreck.
ON JUNE 26, THE North Koreans provided a declaration to the Chinese that failed to describe either their uranium enrichment program or their proliferation activities. It did not even fully describe their plutonium activities. Despite this, within hours President Bush was in the Rose Garden announcing that he was lifting provisions of the Trading with the Enemy Act and notifying Congress of his intent to take North Korea off the list of state sponsors of terror.
I was disappointed, and not just because I disagreed with the president. It was his call. But the process and the decision that followed had seemed so out of keeping with the clearheaded way I’d seen him make decisions in the past. The president said we would use the next forty-five days—the notice period for Congress before the North Koreans could formally be removed from the terrorism list—to develop a “comprehensive and rigorous” protocol for verifying the North Korean declaration. As I listened to the president’s remarks I wondered how, exactly, we were going to go about verifying what we already knew to be a false declaration.
On June 27, 2008, the North Koreans called in the television cameras and blew up the cooling tower of the nuclear reactor at Yongbyon. It was 1950s technology, a device they could easily afford to give up. By that point they had produced enough plutonium for a store of weapons, and, besides, as President Obama’s director of national intelligence would later confirm, they had a robust ongoing uranium enrichment operation that could also produce material for nuclear weapons.
Two months later, when North Korea decided that we had not taken them off the terrorist list in a timely enough fashion, they announced that they had stopped dismantling the Yongbyon complex. Three weeks after that, Pyongyang announced it was restarting the reprocessing plant and began reattaching equipment that had been removed earlier in the year.
On October 9, 2008, Secretary Rice, Steve Hadley, and I met with the president in the Oval Office to discuss the verification protocol Chris Hill was negotiating. As I listened I realized that despite the president’s insistence on a “comprehensive and rigorous” verification protocol a few months earlier, there was actually no written agreement at all. There was a document the Chinese had proposed, which Rice was calling the verification agreement, but, in fact, the North Koreans had not agreed to the document. There were also some notes Chris Hill had taken of conversations he’d had with his North Korean counterpart, which we were now supposed to regard as part of a formal protocol. At an interagency meeting that week, the State Department handed out a fact sheet explaining that “agreement on verification measures has been codified in a joint document between the United States and North Korea and has been reaffirmed through extensive consultation.” In reality, there was no joint document—just Chris Hill’s notes.
Looking for a way to explain this situation, Rice said, “Mr. President, this is just the way diplomacy works sometimes. You don’t always get a written agreement.” The statement was utterly misleading, totally divorced from what the secretary was doing, which was urging the president, in the absence of an agreement, to pretend to have one—with a nuclear-armed, terrorist-sponsoring