The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [161]
The U.S. official chosen to negotiate with North Korea was Robert L. Gallucci, the breezy, Brooklyn-born assistant secretary of state for politico-military affairs. A man of abundant self-confidence and a good sense of humor, he was an expert on nuclear issues and a veteran of the postwar UN effort to dismantle Iraq's nuclear and chemical weapons programs. As Gallucci said later, he was "blissfully ignorant of profound regional contact," having previously spent only five days in South Korea and none in the North. Gallucci was picked largely because the negotiations were conceived as being narrowly focused on the proliferation question, and Washington did not wish to name a more politically oriented official whose outlook and responsibilities might alarm Seoul. Once he began the negotiations, however, Gallucci's perspective widened rapidly.
On the North Korean side, the negotiator was Kang Sok Ju, the deputy foreign minister whom I had met several times in New York and Pyongyang. Kang had attended the International Relations College in Pyongyang and had served in the international department of the Workers Party, the North Korean Mission in Paris, and as a deputy foreign minister for European affairs. A self-assured and evidently well-connected man (his older brother is head of the Workers Party History Research Institute), I had found him more direct and willing to engage than other senior North Korean diplomats, and less openly ideological. He had more experience in the west than most North Korean diplomats, and he told American negotiators at one point that one of his favorite books was Gone with the Wind. To their amazement, he quoted from it to prove the point.
After three lower-level exchanges to set it up, the first meeting between Gallucci and Kang took place at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations on Wednesday, June 2, only ten days before North Korea's withdrawal from the NPT was to become effective. Except for one or two career officials who had been present at the one-day Kanter-Kim Yong Sun meeting the previous year, the American negotiators had never even met a North Korean before, and Kang and his team had never had a serious conversation with an American official. Each side was nervous and uncertain about what to expect from the other.
Speaking for the record as it would be read at home, Kang opened with a lengthy speech about the glories of Kim Il Sung and the juche system, which depressed the Americans but is obligatory for most North Korean presentations. The exchanges that followed did not get far, with North Koreans adamantly refusing to stay in the NPT and the Americans demanding that they do so. As the talks seemed to be getting nowhere, the U.S. team returned to Washington at the weekend and told the North Koreans essentially, if you want to meet again, call us and tell us what you have in mind.
On Monday morning, responding to a North Korean call, Quinones returned to New York and met three Pyongyang officials in a Forty-second Street coffee shop. There for the next three days, the American diplomat carried on a Socratic dialogue with the DPRK diplomats, drinking orange juice and coffee for hours at a time at a table by the front window of the coffee shop, where nobody paid any attention to them except (Quinones learned later) the FBI, which photographed the rendezvous. Quinones patiently explained to the uninformed