The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [166]
Action on the North-South front, the other prerequisite for convening the third round of U.S.-North Korean negotiations, was even less productive. In May, South Korea proposed meetings between the two sides to work on the nuclear issues, and North Korea counterpro- posed an exchange of "special envoys" to deal with unification issues and prepare a North-South summit. Despite a series of exchanges over the summer and fall, the two sides could not even agree to convene working-level meetings at Panmunjom to prepare for more important meetings. Working-level contacts were finally convened for three days in October but without results.
In early October 1993, with no progress being made on any front, Representative Gary Ackerman, the ebullient and earthy Democratic lawmaker from New York City, traveled to Pyongyang on a get-acquainted mission. Earlier in the year Ackerman had succeeded Stephen Solarz as chairman of the Asia-Pacific subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and thus he carried considerable weight in Congress. He bore a message from the administration, which he delivered in person to Kim Il Sung, that the United States wished to resolve its issues with the DPRK through dialogue and negotiations and wished to resume the bilateral engagement at the political level.
Accompanying Ackerman was C. Kenneth Quinones, the Korean-speaking State Department desk officer for North Korea who had helped get the talks started. After lengthy talks with Quinones on outstanding issues, Pyongyang's Foreign Ministry presented him with a paper proposing a series of trade-offs to settle the issues at stake with the United States. In the paper, written in English in longhand, the North Koreans said they were ready to remain in the NPT and submit to regular IAEA inspections and to discuss the contentious issue of the "special inspections" that the IAEA had demanded, in return for an end to U.S.-ROK Team Spirit military exercises, the lifting of American economic sanctions, and the convening of the long-delayed third round of U.S.-DPRK negotiations to tackle broader issues. The proposal for trade-offs, in retrospect, was a fundamental shift in the concept of the negotiations, which until that point had been based on making step-by-step progress toward accords rather than one simultaneous and comprehensive deal, later termed "a package solution." The Foreign Ministry officials said the handwritten proposals had been cleared with the top leadership of their country, meaning Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il.
When Quinones returned to Washington, he found a very skeptical group of U.S. policy makers, who insisted that details of potential accords be hammered out before proceeding further at the political level. In New York, Quinones and Gary Samore, Gallucci's top aide, engaged in a series of unannounced meetings with officials of the North Korean UN Mission to try to work out a detailed accord. When this effort ran into trouble, a more senior State Department official, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Hubbard, began making frequent trips to New York to see the North Koreans.
With little progress being made, public as well as official frustration with the stalemate was soaring. On November 1, IAEA director general Hans Blix reported to the UN General Assembly in pessimistic terms on the agency's standoff with Pyongyang, though he stopped just short of declaring the "continuity of safeguards" to be lost. The General Assembly reacted with a resounding 140-to-1 vote (with China abstaining and only Pyongyang dissenting) urging North Korea "to cooperate immediately" with the IAEA, a demonstration of how isolated Pyongyang had become.
At a press conference in Seoul, the exasperated South Korean defense minister, Kwon Yong Hae, expressed