The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [233]
Some other U.S. intelligence officials and competing intelligence agencies were dubious, but the DIA was insistent. The agency was permitted to begin briefings for U.S. allies and congressional committees in June 1998. With the acquiescence of the Central Intelligence Agency, an official intelligence "finding" was promulgated in midJuly that the Kumchang-ni cavern was "probably" a suspect nuclear facility, at which an active nuclear weapons program could be planned or under way. One month later, New York Times correspondent David Sanger was able to confirm rumors of the developments by interviewing former officials at a think-tank meeting outside Washington, D.C., and obtaining confirmation of the basic facts from the Clinton administration. Sanger's August 17 story put the issue on the record in highly visible fashion, making it the subject of political and public debate, just as North Korea was preparing its rocket launch.
It took five rounds and more than six months of negotiations between U.S. and DPRK diplomats, essentially over the extent of access and its price, to produce an agreement that a U.S. team could make multiple inspections at Kumchang-ni. The price was 600,000 tons of food, most of it to be supplied through the United Nations, plus a new potato-production program. Washington insisted officially that the inspections and the food were unrelated, but hardly anyone was fooled.
The inspection, by fourteen Americans, including several technical experts hired for the purpose, took place over three days in late May 1999. Inspectors found six miles of criss-crossing tunnels laid out in a grid pattern, plus one chamber near one of the entrances. Neither the tunnels nor the chamber was suitable to do what U.S. intelligence had suggested. North Korean officials who accompanied the team would not describe the purpose of the big dig except to say it was a "sensitive military facility." Following the on-site inspection, the State Department on June 25 announced that the Kumchang-ni excavation did not, after all, contain a nuclear reactor or reprocessing plant, either completed or under construction, and it had not been designed to do so. No one apologized or was penalized for the intelligence fiasco that had endangered U.S. policy in Korea for most of a year.
TOWARD AN AID-BASED STATE
While the eyes of official Washington were riveted on North Korea's nuclear and missile programs, developments of fundamental importance were gathering momentum in Pyongyang. From the vantage point of hindsight, senior officials in both the United States and South Korea identified the final months of 1998 as the time when important shifts began to gather force in the regime north of the thirty-eighth parallel.
The Supreme People's Assembly, in theory the highest legislative authority in the country, met on September 5 for the first time since the death of Kim Ii Sung four years earlier. As expected, it named his son and heir, Kim Jong 11, as the governmental leader of the country, although not as president-that post was reserved for the dead leader in perpetuity but as head of the National Defense Commission, which was declared to be "the highest post of the state." The meeting enacted two other changes that proved to be of major significance. It amended the constitution to introduce some elements of a Chinesestyle socialist market economy, and it brought into office a group of the younger, more pragmatic bureaucrats. The government's cabinet, which was given new powers, was henceforth to be composed of thirty-four officials, of whom twenty-three were new faces,