In My Time - Dick Cheney [258]
“Look, Condi,” he said to her, “I just need more time on this. I need to think about it.” Steve Hadley asked her if she could provide a paper for the president to read as background on the proposal. Was there something he could review? “No,” she said, although she was sitting on the sofa reading from a document describing the purported agreement.
The issue of Japan came up. We had known for some time that the Japanese government was very unhappy that we might lift the terrorism designation. They were concerned in particular about Japanese citizens, many of them children, who had been abducted by the North Koreans decades earlier. I had met with some of their families during my trip to Asia in 2007, and the stories of lost children were heartbreaking. Now, the Japanese perceived we might be contemplating removing North Korea from the terrorism list without a resolution of this issue, and their diplomats had been in repeatedly to see my deputy national security advisor, Samantha Ravich, and others on my national security staff. The Japanese were also troubled by our apparent willingness to take the North Koreans at their word, to trust this rogue regime. Secretary Rice denied there was any objection from the Japanese and told the president they had simply asked for a delay of twenty-four hours so they could “handle their political situation.” This was inaccurate. Later that day I received a message from our ambassador in Japan, Tom Schieffer, which I would pass on to the president. Schieffer, who had been one of the president’s partners when he owned the Texas Rangers, had grown increasingly concerned about our North Korean policy and was now reporting that the Japanese found the “verification proposal” unacceptable as presented. Schieffer also passed along a warning from the prime minister of Japan: Given North Korea’s history of duplicity, it was essential to get any agreement with them in writing.
As the October 9, 2008, meeting was drawing to a close, Steve Hadley tried to restore some orderliness to how we were proceeding. “Condi,” he said, “there are some questions that have to be answered here before we can go ahead.” One option we discussed was sending Chris Hill back to Pyongyang to get written assurances. If this agreement was so important, and if Secretary Rice was so confident in the North Korean assurances, why not get a proper agreement? She did not want to do that. And, it turned out, she didn’t have to.
The next day, October 10, 2008, I got word that the president had agreed to allow Secretary Rice to sign the document removing North Korea from the terrorist list, which she did on October 11. It was a sad moment because it seemed to be a repudiation of the Bush Doctrine and a reversal of so much of what we had accomplished in the area of non-proliferation in the first term. The president had been right when he had denounced the failed approach of the Clinton era. Now we seemed to be embracing it.
By the end of October the North Koreans announced that “verification” would be limited only to the plutonium reactor site at Yongbyon. On November 12, they announced that inspectors could not take soil or nuclear waste samples from the site. On December 11, the North Koreans made clear they did not feel bound by any “oral agreement” Hill thought he had with them, and the negotiations came to a standstill. An article in the Washington Post the next morning contained this: “U.S. officials acknowledge now that most of the purported agreements announced two months ago were simply oral understandings between Hill and his North Korean counterparts.” It was not our finest hour.
I could see the North Koreans hitting the rewind button in mid-January 2009, shortly before President Obama was sworn into office, when they demanded that the United States normalize relations with them before they would consider abandoning their nuclear weapons:
• In April 2009 they tested a Taepodong