The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [203]
As these events were taking place, Representative Bill Richardson, a New Mexico Democrat, was on his way to Pyongyang via Beijing. When he arrived in the North Korean capital on the evening of the seventeenth, he tried strenuously but unsuccessfully to arrange the release of Airman Hall. He was told by Foreign Ministry officials that the case was in the hands of the less sympathetic Korean People's Army command. When Richardson left on December 22, he took with him the body of Airman Hileman but, despite pleas about the coming of Christmas, only a promise of best efforts to arrange the release of Hall "very soon."
On Christmas Day, Hall, still in captivity, wrote a "confession" accurately setting out the facts of his flight and asking forgiveness for his "grave infringement upon the sovereignty of the DPRK." The following day, the North Korean Foreign Ministry asked the State Department to send a senior official to Pyongyang, saying that the release of Hall probably could not be arranged through the military channels at the DMZ that were being used to deal with the issue.
Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Hubbard, who had participated in the framework negotiations and other exchanges, crossed the DMZ into North Korea on December 28. It was immediately clear that the Foreign Ministry was under orders to see what concessions could be gained in return for Hall's release. In two days of talks, Hubbard refused to grant the North Koreans any of the political concessions they sought, such as agreement to begin negotiating a U.S.-DPRK peace treaty, but he did agree to a statement of "sincere regret" for the "legally unjustified intrusion into DPRK air space."
An illuminating aspect of the negotiations were conspicuous differences between the Foreign Ministry, which was eager to protect and advance the framework accord with the United States, and the military, which was primarily concerned with the defense of borders. Foreign Ministry officials spoke openly of their frictions with military officers; at the DMZ, KPA officers spoke disparagingly to their American military counterparts of the "neckties," as they called the DPRK diplomats.
Such differences, in a less personal vein, had emerged during the course of the U.S.-DPRK negotiations in Geneva. To some extent conflicts with the harder-edged military were a useful bargaining ploy on the part of the diplomats, but Gallucci, Hubbard, and other American negotiators had become convinced that the differences were real. In Geneva the diplomats ultimately won most of the confrontations because they said their instructions had been personally signed by the new supreme leader, Kim Jong Il. At the climax of the Hall case, the military was also overruled, evidently by Kim Jong 11. While this appeared to show that Kim Jong Il retained ultimate authority even in policy disputes involving the powerful military, the openness with which differences were acknowledged suggested that the glue binding together disparate interest groups had become much thinner since the demise of the Great Leader.
On the evening of December 29, Hubbard received final approval from Washington for the public statement of U.S. regret that he proposed to make to accomplish Hall's release. At that point, Deputy Foreign Minister Kang excused himself from an official dinner, taking a copy of the statement and saying he would submit it to "the supreme leader." At two A.M. another Foreign Ministry official called on Hubbard at the State Guest House to announce that the statement and the release of Hall had been "approved by Kim Jong Il." Hall was released the following morning at Panmunjom, where KPA officers made little effort to hide their displeasure. "I became convinced there was a supreme being there, and that probably it is Kim Jong Il," Hubbard told me later. However, neither he nor other foreign diplomats were able to meet the new North Korean leader in person.
Within minutes of Hall's return to South Korea,