The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [175]
Removal of the spent fuel rods began on May 8 without international observation or approval. To the shock of the IAEA, the operations proceeded much more rapidly than expected. North Korean technicians at Yongbyon produced a second homemade defueling machine that nobody had known they had. The two machines worked at top speed in three shifts around the clock.
At the end of May, in a last-ditch effort to preserve the reactor's verifiable operating history, the IAEA sent a high-level team headed by Dimitri Perricos, a twenty-two-year veteran of the agency and director of its East Asia division of safeguards operations. Perricos got nowhere. With about half of the fuel rods still to be removed, the North Koreans refused to slow down discharge operations or to accept the IAEA's method of segregating the rods to verify their history.
Instead, North Korea proposed a discharge method that the IAEA team judged would not guarantee preservation of the necessary data. Even worse, Perricos observed that the actual unloading of the rods by the DPRK reactor operators was "a big mess" that would make it impossible to learn much of anything of the past operations, and he concluded that this disarray was deliberate. On reflection, the struggle over the fuel rods reminded him of a poker game in which Pyongyang's ace was the outside world's uncertainty about how much plutonium it possessed. He believed that a political decision had been made, probably at the very top, that Pyongyang would not give up its high card. At the same time, however, North Korea permitted two IAEA inspectors to remain at Yongbyon to monitor the unloading of the fuel rods and the storage pond into which they were placed. This suggested that for the time being, at least, Pyongyang did not wish to alarm the world about its nuclear intentions.
At IAEA headquarters in Vienna, Director General Blix was indignant at North Korea's refusal to cooperate. Blix was uncomfortable with continuing to bend the agency's global rules and requirements to meet the self-proclaimed "unique status" of North Koreapartly in, partly out of the international nuclear inspection regime. So far as Blix was concerned, the DPRK was fully in the regime until its withdrawal was official and complete, and it should fully comply with IAEA requirements, even though some of the requirements had never been levied on any other state before. Blix feared that tolerating compromises with IAEA directives could damage the agency's shaky authority and credibility with other nations.
Washington officialdom was privately unhappy with the agency's legalistic mind-set. Gallucci, who had become increasingly imbued with the regional and political aspects of the dispute, described the workings of the IAEA in May as "medieval or perhaps Talmudic, depending on what religious metaphor you use." The administration did not know from one day to the next, he said, how Blix would react to North Korea's machinations. Gallucci could not pressure Blix, for fear it would be seen as American interference with nonproliferation objectives that everyone held dear. About the same time, a high-ranking Defense Department official whom I met on a social occasion described Blix as "a fanatic" who was singlemindedly protecting his agency with little thought for the overall consequences. Former ambassador to Korea Donald Gregg described the IAEA inspectors as "a bunch of eager proctologists, making painful inquiries without holding out any benefits to North Korea."
On June 2, when more than 60 percent of the fuel rods had been removed, Blix sent a strong letter to the UN Security Council that was an implicit