The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [156]
Before the spy ring announcement, Roh Tae Woo had authorized an ROK deputy prime minister to visit Pyongyang to pursue joint economic development with the North, and he ordered the Economic Planning Board (EPB) to prepare a team to travel to the North on a similar mission. In internal discussions, the intelligence agency opposed the EPB mission, according to Kim Hak Joon, who was chief Blue House spokesman at the time and an expert on unification policy. After the news of the spy ring arrests, which may have been "greatly exaggerated or fabricated," according to the former official, Roh was forced to cancel the missions due to the political and public indignation. "Everything stopped," the former spokesman recalled.
It was in this atmosphere that the IAEA, having received new U.S. satellite photographs indicating dissembling at Yongbyon, stepped up its efforts to force North Korea to reveal the full dimensions of its nuclear activity.
On the eve of a previous IAEA board meeting at which North Korea was to be discussed, Blix had obtained permission for his inspectors to "visit" two sites at Yongbyon that appeared to be nuclearrelated but that had not been declared as such by North Korea. One of the sites was a building that had been constructed as a two-story structure but that had been partly covered by huge mounds of earth and landscaping to appear as a one-story building. American overhead photography had recorded the construction, in the original lower level, of thick-walled vaults made of reinforced concrete-suitable for the storage of nuclear waste. When IAEA inspectors arrived, the lower floor was no longer visible, and the inspectors were told it did not exist. The top floor was filled with heavy weapons, including tanks and missiles on mobile carriages. North Korea subsequently refused to permit formal inspection of the facility on grounds it was a military site and therefore should be exempt from inspection. The IAEA does not accept such an exemption.
On November 12, in a telephone conversation from Vienna with Theis, his chief inspector on the ground at Yongbyon, Blix said the agency now possessed indisputable evidence that a trench had been dug and then covered up between the reprocessing plant and the "one-story building," whose basement was believed to be a nuclear waste storage facility. Blix said there was also clear evidence that the North Koreans had sought to camouflage a nearby outdoor nuclear waste facility. (While he did not say so over the telephone, U.S. satellites had photographed workers hastily covering up the sixteenyear-old waste site with dirt and planting dozens of shrubs and trees to hide it in between IAEA visits to the area.) Blix instructed his inspector to tell the North Koreans that they must declare these sites as nuclear facilities and permit their inspection.
Realizing that North Korean authorities had probably monitored the telephone conversation and that his demands would be difficult for the North Koreans to swallow, Theis immediately summoned two senior nuclear officials of the Yongbyon facility and sought to work with them on amending their initial declaration to the IAEA to include the waste sites with as little admission of error as possible. At first the officials seemed amenable and even grateful. The next day, possibly after receiving instructions from Pyongyang, they reversed course, bitterly accusing Theis of being "an agent of the CIA" and performing inspections "on the basis of instructions from the U.S. State Department." With that, they refused to cooperate, widening and deepening the breach between North Korea and the IAEA.
The two sides sparred inconclusively over the next three months