The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [151]
Starting in the fall of 1991, while exploring the range of incentives and disincentives that the United States could wield with the North, Washington officials had begun to discuss the possibility of a high-level meeting. The idea was highly contentious within the administration, but its advocates won approval to discuss it with the South Koreans, who approved it on the explicit condition that it would be only a one-time session that would not lead to further talks. Kim Chong Whi, Roh's national security adviser, as well as State Department experts, suggested that the meeting be with Kim Yong Sun, the relatively freewheeling Workers Party secretary for international affairs, who was close to Dear Leader Kim Jong Il, instead of the highly programmed and less voluble North Korean foreign minister.
In December, American officials informed the North Koreans, through the U.S.-DPRK political counsel channel in Beijing-which was limited to passing messages and little else-that a high-level meeting might be held if Pyongyang agreed to meet its nuclear inspection obligations. In the opinion of several U.S. officials, the promise that such a meeting represented had been an important factor in the North's decision to conclude the nuclear accord with the South and in its preparations to sign a nuclear safeguards agreement with the IA-EA.
Shortly after ten A.M. on January 21, 1992, Kim Yong Sun and several aides arrived at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in an ostentatious stretch limousine, to meet an American delegation headed by Arnold Kanter, the undersecretary of state for political affairs (and the third-ranking official in the State Department). Due to the intense antagonism to North Korea as an abhorrent society and a military threat and the unprecedented nature of the meeting, there had been fierce debates within the administration not only about whether to have the meeting but also about what Kanter could say. The bureaucratic compromise, according to Kanter, was "that the meeting would happen, but I would take a tough line."
Kanter's "talking points"-normally stripped-down notes of the main lines of presentation-were reviewed and approved in advance by an interagency committee and then by the South Korean and Japanese governments. They became virtually a script he had to read, though he did so in the most conciliatory and inoffensive way possible. While urging North Korea to permit IAEA inspections and to give up the nuclear weapons option, Kanter was forbidden to spell out what North Korea could expect in return. He was specifically not permitted even to mention the word normalization of American-North Korean relations. Although he referred vaguely to future meetings between the two countries as the principal incentive for Pyongyang, Kanter was required by the arrangement with Seoul to rule out follow-up meetings of this group, making clear that the session itself was not the start of a negotiating process.
The well-tailored Kim Yong Sun, who was wearing a more expensive suit than any of the Americans, impressed Kanter as shrewd and worldly, although he had never been in the United States before. While North Korea might be a hermit kingdom, Kanter concluded, his interlocuter was no hermit. Referring repeatedly to his intimacy with the Dear Leader, Kim Yong Sun said Kim Jong Il was now in charge of North Korea's foreign relations as well as the military. In the meeting and in a lengthy private talk with Kanter, Kim Yong Sun pushed hard for an agreement in principle to another meeting, or at least a joint statement at the conclusion of this one. When both were refused, he seemed disappointed but not angry. Later in the year, as tension mounted between Pyongyang and Washington, Kim sent a personal message to Kanter through the Beijing diplomatic channel appealing for another meeting to work things out-but this was rejected by the administration.
On January 30, eight days after the Kanter-Kim