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By Root 1901 0

did not take long for North Korea to test the "modest initiative" by asking for a bilateral meeting with U.S. diplomats in Beijing. While Washington did not consider this a truly "neutral setting," it approved the meeting between a North Korean diplomat and the political counselor of the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, Raymond Burkhardt, to take place at the Chinese Foreign Ministry's International Club. There in a small second-floor room, which Americans assumed was bugged by the Chinese, the U.S.-North Korean talks began on December 5, 1988. Burkhardt, who had never dealt with North Koreans before, was surprised that their representatives turned out to be serious and businesslike diplomats who wasted no time with bluster or the usual obligatory praise of Kim 11 Sung and juche. The discussions were centered squarely on the main issues of the day as seen in the two capitals.

Thus in late 1988 for the first time, North Korea achieved the mutually authorized, direct channel for diplomatic business with the United States that it had long been seeking. This, however, was fundamentally the result of Seoul's policy reversal rather than a reflection of new thinking in Washington. U.S. diplomats made it clear from the beginning that the Beijing talks were for communications but not for negotiations. The United States continued to insist that any dealmaking regarding the divided peninsula would have to involve Seoul.

As it turned out, the meeting between American and North Korean diplomats in the International Club in Beijing was the first in a series of thirty-four such sessions, in which messages were passed but little progress was made, between December 1988 and September 1993.

9

MOSCOW SWITCHES SIDES

month after the successful conclusion of the Seoul Olympics, the Soviet Union's ruling Politburo took up for the first time the question of its relations with South Korea. This unheralded Politburo meeting of November 10, 1988, whose decisions as usual were taken in secret, marked the start of a historic Soviet drive toward friendly accommodation with a long-standing antagonist on the Korean peninsula. As was often the case in major power deliberations regarding Korea, the Politburo decisions that day were based almost entirely on considerations of Russian national interest, with their impact in the peninsula given secondary consideration. Nonetheless, the reversal that was set in motion reverberated powerfully on both sides of the thirty-eighth parallel. Prodded and induced by the ROK, the Soviet Union was transformed over the next two years from godfather, superpower guarantor, and economic benefactor of North Korea to partner and, in some respects, client of South Korea. This was of monumental importance.

By the time of the Politburo meeting, the cold war ice was breaking up between the Soviet Union and the United States, and Mikhail Gorbachev was at the height of his powers. The previous month Gorbachev had ousted from the Politburo Yegor Ligachev, the most influential critic of the shift away from the traditional Soviet foreign policy support for "class struggle" and ideological allies, and he had placed foreign affairs under the supervision of Alexander Yakovlev, a leading exponent of a foreign policy based on "new thinking" and accord with the West. Gorbachev had been to Washington to sign a nuclear-weapons reduction treaty with the United States, and Ronald Reagan had been to Moscow to celebrate their new relationship and walk in Red Square with Gorbachev. Just two days earlier, on November 8, Vice President George Bush had been elected U.S. president to succeed Reagan, prompting Gorbachev to plan a December visit to New York to meet the president-elect and proclaim from the rostrum of the United Nations a new Soviet foreign policy based on "universal human values." In describing his new foreign policy, Gorbachev declared at the UN, "Today, the preservation of any kind of `closed' society is hardly possible"-words that must have chilled Pyongyang. To confirm the seriousness of his policy, he took the occasion