The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [246]
While Jo toured the Air and Space Museum and other sights of Washington, Kang Sok Ju provided Wendy Sherman and several other officials with advance indications of the extraordinary compromises Kim Jong Il had in mind. Without firmly committing his leader, Kang suggested that North Korea was ready to contemplate steps down a positive path along the lines proposed by Perry in Pyongyang seventeen months earlier: an end to exports of ballistic missiles, technology, and equipment on negotiable terms of compensation, which might be food or other necessities rather than cash; termination of development, testing, production, and deployment of long-range ballistic missiles; potential stationing of U.S. military forces on the Korean peninsula on a long-term basis; and establishment of full diplomatic relations between the United States and the DPRK.
Under pressure of time to follow up, Secretary Albright flew into Pyongyang on October 23, only eleven days after Jo and Kang had left Washington. Hosting Albright the first night of her visit at a mass display of choreography and chorus by 100,000 people in a Pyongyang sports stadium-a repeat of a spectacle previously staged to celebrate the fifty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Workers Party-Kim pointed to the depiction on a giant screen of the Taep'o-dong launch of August 1998, which had so unnerved Japan and worried the United States. He quipped to the U.S. visitor that this had been the first North Korean satellite launch-and that it would be the last.
Born in Czechoslovakia, the daughter of a diplomat, Madeleine Albright had spent much of her life studying communism and had been in nearly every other communist country. She found Pyongyang "not an unattractive place" given the heroic architecture, but was surprised by the lack of interest shown by the population in her entourage. Her greatest surprise was Kim Jong Il himself, with whom she had lengthy conversations. Despite his reputation as a strange and reclusive person she found him striving to be an affable, normal leader, even though it was clear that the adulation for him was extreme and that he was in complete control.
In their initial business session, Kim volunteered that he was prepared to give up further production and deployment of his long-range missiles. He also began to define what a ban on missile sales abroad might mean, including contracts not yet fulfilled, and made it clear that North Korea would accept such items as food, clothing, and energy instead of money to compensate for the sales it would lose.
In their next session, Albright presented to Kim, who was accompanied only by Kang and an interpreter, a list of missile-related questions the US. team had given to North Korean experts several hours earlier. After she commented that some of the questions were technical and might require study, Kim picked up the list and began immediately to provide answers one by one without advice or further study, in what Albright later called a "quite stunning" feat, which could only be performed by a leader with absolute authority. He agreed to ban future production and deployment of all ballistic missles with a range exceeding 500 kilometers (310 miles), although he did not specify a payload weight limit or what would be done with missiles already produced. Such a range limit would preclude the Taep'o-dong I, which had been test-launched in 1998, as well as its reported intercontinental successor, Taep'o-dong II, which was believed