The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [237]
It was clear to Perry from the beginning that he would have to travel to Pyongyang to learn which path the North would choose, if he could get an answer at all. He and his party flew into Pyongyang on May 25, 1999, aboard a US. Air Force special mission plane with "United States of America" emblazoned across its fuselage and the American flag on its tail. Before embarking, Perry and his team had spent an entire day at Stanford going over every word of a seventeenpage script, and over the Korean translation, to be used as the crucial presentation. After a lavish welcome banquet the night of his arrival, Perry made his presentation the following day, primarily to Kang Sok Ju, the First Deputy Foreign Minister who had negotiated the 1994 Agreed Framework and who was the closest diplomatic aide to Kim Jong 11, as he had been to Kim II Sung. Perry was conscious that he was speaking through Kang to Kim Jong 11. Indeed, some members of the party believed he was speaking to Kim directly: an American official noticed that when he dropped a pencil on the conference table, he could hear an electronic echo, presumably from hidden microphones.
Reading from the script inside a file folder, Perry began with references to the difficult history of Korea and its great-power neighbors over the past 100 years, which included the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, in which Japan gained dominance over Korea. In those days, he said, "events [that] occurred and decisions made in capitals in Asia decisively and tragically influenced the course of the 20th century." Perry said he was there not to apologize for things the United States had done but to seek to work together to heal the wounds. He explained his own role in the nuclear crisis of 1994, how important his understanding of that crisis had been to him, and how perilously close the United States and the DPRK had come to a clash of arms.
The United States as a Pacific power would remain intimately bound up with Asia in the future as it had been earlier in the twentieth century, Perry told the North Koreans. Advancing a theme that was to recur in later ROK and U.S. conversations with Kim Jong Il, Perry said that a Korea surrounded by powerful states could benefit from a positive relationship with a power across the Pacific. The United States, he said, would be prepared to consider the legitimate defense concerns of the DPRK, but the DPRK in return must consider the defense concerns of others in the region. He observed that the status quo was not sustainable due to US. concerns about North Korean missile and nuclear programs.
Perry outlined in some detail the actions that North Korea must take to place itself on the positive track he recommended, leading step-by-step to full diplomatic, political, and economic relations with the United States. To obtain these benefits, North Korea must completely halt all missile exports, including related technology and equipment. Even more significantly, North Korea must cease development, production, testing and deployment of all missiles above the limit of the international Missile Technology Control Regime, which North Korea had not joined. This would eliminate the new Taep'odong as well as the Nodong that had been threatening Japan for most of a decade. This was a tall order for a country that was demanding $1 billion in cash yearly to cease its missile exports and had refused even to negotiate on its internal programs.
Should North Korea continue missile tests and other actions perceived to be hostile, in effect taking the second track, Perry said the United States, South Korea, and Japan were prepared to reverse positive steps that they had taken and to protect their security by military actions of their own. He did not specify what actions they would take and felt it was unnecessary for him to speak in detail, since North Koreans knew his history as defense secretary during the 1994 crisis.
Before leaving Pyongyang it was clear to Perry that deep divisions