The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [171]
The negotiations had been difficult enough without additional complications. Throughout the fall and winter, the main venue of U.S.-DPRK communications had been a dingy basement room at United Nations headquarters in New York, where Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Tom Hubbard had been meeting North Korean ambassador Ho Jong, with one or two aides on each side. Each time the Americans felt they had reached an agreement with the North Koreans on resumption of IAEA inspections and North-South negotiations, it collapsed, sometimes because the IAEA or South Korea refused to compromise its position, sometimes because Pyongyang pulled back from a seemingly agreed position.
After a new round of abortive negotiations, the IAEA established a February 21 deadline for continuing its inspections of the Yongbyon nuclear facilities. Unless an agreement could be reached by then, the international agency said, it would turn the stalemate over to the UN Security Council for action. In advance of the deadline, U.S. diplomats began informal discussions with the four other permanent members of the Security Council about economic and political sanctions to be levied against North Korea, and the Pentagon began preparations to order more than a thousand additional troops to South Korea for the Team Spirit exercise.
At this point in mid-February, the U.S. ambassador to South Korea, James Laney, came to Washington deeply concerned and angry that nobody seemed to be in charge of administration strategy as the situation veered toward conflict with North Korea. Laney, former president of Emory University and, in earlier days, an Army enlisted man and later a theology teacher in Korea, made the rounds of senior officials at the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon, and reported that Seoul was calm but that the ROK government was worried-more about overheated rhetoric and brinksmanship in Washington than about a potential nuclear threat from North Korea. Laney expressed worry about the potential for "accidental war" on the peninsula as the United States unnecessarily "ratcheted up" the IAEA. inspection issues and seemed to be pushing North Korea to violent action rather than relying primarily on deterrence as in the past. General Luck, he reported, agreed with his view. Above all, he insisted, the matter demanded far greater priority and coordination in Washington. Referring to U.S. military and civilian casualties in a new Korean war, Laney warned the White House, "You could have 50,000 body bags coming home."
The ambassador's pleas were sobering for Vice President Al Gore and others in Washington. Partly as a result, Gallucci eventually was named as overall coordinator of U.S. policy toward North Korea, with the rank of ambassador and a charter to coordinate or at least rationalize the disparate views of the White House, State Department, Defense Department, CIA, and. various officials and offices within them. Nonetheless, disagreements continued within the executive branch and also in Congress and in the press.
On February 15, North Korea accepted minimum conditions for resumption of IAEA inspections but then, characteristically, refused to issue visas to the inspectors until a number of preconditions were met. Finally, in a renewed set of Hubbard-Ho Jong talks in New York-the twenty-second in a series that had begun the previous September-the two sides agreed on a broad set of measures to take effect simultaneously. On March 1, which American negotiators dubbed Super Tuesday, everything was to be settled at once: international inspectors were to return to Yongbyon for inspections to ensure "continuity of safeguards"; the United States and South Korea were to announce cancellation of the 1994 Team Spirit exercise; working-level North-South contacts were to be launched at Panmunjom in prepara tion for the exchange of "special envoys"; and the United States and North Korea were to announce that they would convene their longawaited third round of high-level negotiations on March 21.
By this time, however, the U.S. government