N. Korea to Jack Pritchard: We Won’t Disarm

The U.S. State Department on Friday bashed its former envoy to North Korea, who a day before said Pyongyang is not going to meet Washington’s requirements on denuclearization despite laborious negotiations underway.  [Yonhap]

No one should be surprised by anything about  this revelation except the name of the prophet.  This has started a delicious  red-on-red, Mick-on-Keith slap fight  between Pritchard and  the State Department.  Pritchard, of course, was a Clinton holdover, an early defector from the Bush Administration, and a defender of the first Agreed Framework who thought that  his former colleagues weren’t  willing to bend enough to get a deal with Kim Jong Il. 

Jack Pritchard, who coordinated North Korea policy under both the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, said Thursday that Pyongyang’s officials told him they would only give up key nuclear facilities by destroying them, but not the weapons and plutonium already manufactured. 

The North Koreans also told him that they expect to be provided with a set of light-water reactors in return for dismantling their nuclear installations, Pritchard said. The former envoy, now president of the Korea Economic Institute in Washington, had traveled to Pyongyang late last month and met with the foreign and vice foreign ministers and lead  members of North Korea’s nuclear negotiation team.  [Yonhap]

Why is it that our diplomats so seldom bring out the North Koreans’ conciliatory side?  And what is it with the Bush Administration?  They  seem unusually  sensitive  about this sort of thing this week:

Tom Casey, a State Department spokesman, called Pritchard a “former official with an axe to grind.”

“With all due respect to Jack Pritchard and the foreign government-funded organization he works for, you know, I am glad that he’s gainfully employed, and I am glad he’s having lots of conversations out there,” he told reporters when asked to comment on Prichard’s remarks.

“But for my money, I will bank on the president, the secretary of state, and Chris Hill rather than what Jack thinks he is getting from whoever the heck it is he is talking to today,” the spokesman said.  [….]

“There are way too many people that make a living professing to know what’s really going on inside these and other negotiations,” Casey said, “and it’s kind of amazing how usually they are wrong.”  [Yonhap, emphasis mine]

It’s even more amazing how those of us who don’t make a living doing this have  forecast these negotiations’ outcome  with more accurately than those who do. 

“If I had a dime for every time some former official with an axe to grind had put forward their own version of what our negotiations were, I would be a very wealthy man,” he said.  [Yonhap]

Or, he could write a book of his own and actually become one.  You know what would be too ironic  for this world?  If the Administration were to claim that Pritchard misquoted the North Koreans because of a translation error (see WaPo quote here).  Pritchard adds his own views about Agreed Framework 2.0, and he’s no fan:

[Pritchard] he said in an interview yesterday that as a result of his discussions in Pyongyang April 22 to 26, he thinks the Bush administration reached a poor agreement.

“It is a weak handoff that will cause the next administration more problems than it solves,” Pritchard said.  [Washington Post, Glenn Kessler]

Specifically, Pritchard pointed out that some of the North Koreans’ most significant technical facilities  haven’t been  touched by this agreement, including its plutonium metal fabrication or weaponization facilities, or its  completed nuclear weapons.  To this, I would again bring up  two additional reactors this agreement  has not touched — a nearly complete 50-MW reactor right next to the  worn-out, used-up  5-MW model that has been partially dismantled, and a half-finished 200-MW reactor (satellite images here).  Chris Hill has never leveled with us about any of this.  That’s one of his charms.  And when sanctions against North Korea are lifted, North Korea will lose any incentive to give up those things.

More generally, the North Koreans simply aren’t interested in disarming:

Pritchard said North Korea made a “strategic decision” two years ago that it had harvested enough plutonium from the Yongbyon reactor and would shut it down. The reactor and related facilities since then have been partly disabled. North Korea told Pritchard that the next phase, dismantling the facilities, will take three years. During that period, they said, they expect the United States to complete a light-water reactor promised under a Clinton-era accord that was later nullified.

When Pritchard asked when North Korea would give up its nuclear weapons, he said he was told: “The United States should get used to us as a nuclear weapons state.” North Korean officials asserted that they would consider talking about giving up atomic weapons only after “full and final normalization” of relations.  [Washington Post, Glenn Kessler]

All of this comes just as the State Department increasingly resorts to theatrical stunts to create the  illusion of progress  toward disarming North Korea.  First, there was  Sung Kim’s  display of 18,000 pages of untranslated photocopies that could well be shopping lists for the Dear Larder.  Next, the North Koreans will symbolically blow up the Yongbyon cooling tower, which proliferation expert Henry Sokoloski calls  “nuclear theater.”   It’s reminiscent of a well-worn tactic known as the “northern wind” in South  Korea,  in which politicians —  in apparent cohoots with the North Koreans, and no doubt in exchange for some undisclosed favor —  negotiatie some kind of pre-election  summit or reduction of tensions to  exhibit their diplomatic finesse to the voters.

Against this backdrop, the unverified rumor I’ve heard is that the State Department will wait until the end of June to notify Congress that it intends to remove North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.  Because Congress will then have 45 days to oppose the move, State’s idea would be to take advantage of the August recess in an election year.

One  interesting point that Casey raises is that Pritchard  heads the Korea Econonic Institute (KEI),  an influential klatsch in this town that’s also  funded by the South Korean government (KEI is registered as a foreign agent).  I lean toward believing that Pritchard comes by his views more-or-less honestly, perhaps  influenced by  a desire to help the Democrats maneuver themselves into looking stronger than the Republicans by opposing a weak  deal that’s failing anyway — and maybe, maneuvering himself into Hill’s job in an Obama Administration.   From outside of DC, the  degree of South Korean influence in this city isn’t apparent, but here, it is.  And I’ve  recently  wondered how Lee Myung Bak’s  election  would affect the ideological direction of influential  groups like KEI, the Korea Foundation, and the Korea Society, all of which have functionally lobbied for the U.S. to show more “flexibility” in the face of North Korea’s various  demands, indiscretions, and atrocities.  Lee  may be  too smart to oppose this deal openly, but it doesn’t seem fanciful that he isn’t entirely happy with the United States adopting a  Chung Dong Young policy toward the North.  It would be in equal parts  gratifying and distressing if the Korea lobby ended up killing Agreed Framework 2.0 after seeing America fail to stand up for their own interests.

Japan, however, is signaling its  open opposition:

Japanese Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura, in the Japanese Diet, recently said that not including those elements would make North Korea’s declaration unacceptable to Japan, one of the six nations participating in the nuclear talks.

The Post also suggests that AF 2.0 will be orphaned in the U.S. presidential campaign:

Both Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, and Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic front-runner, have raised questions about the agreement in recent weeks, with both calling for “tougher diplomacy.” [Washington Post, Glenn Kessler]

I don’t think even Kessler would make this up, but  I have not seen  where Obama criticized this deal.  In any event, it’s getting pretty damn unanimous that this agreement  stopped being  about disarmament or counterproliferation long ago, making any defense of it  on the latter basis  seem  bizarre to the point of being  disingenuous.

Pritchard is a smart man who happens to be right this time, but agreeing  with  him gives me  a sensation of uncomfortable confluence I haven’t felt since a time some years ago  when I shared a Greyhound bus with a flamboyant transvestite and his/her companion.  I don’t discount, of course,  that Pritchard probably  wishes he were the one making this deal instead of Chris Hill.  Indeed, I am inclined to believe the criticisms of both Pritchard and Casey, but Casey isn’t saying anything that’s vital to our national security.

Related:   Never, ever have I seen such a one-sided,  fawning, biased  journalistic tongue bath as Glenn Kessler’s profile of Chris Hill.   I don’t doubt that after writing this, Kessler could have  identified each spice, condiment, and side dish  in Hill’s last three meals based on taste alone.  He does let Victor Cha slip in a comment about Hill’s promiscuous media exhibitionism.  If you read Kessler’s  op-ed the way a Russian would have read Pravda in the 30’s, you can see that Hill’s object is  a deal — any deal.  And if you want a deal badly enough, a bad deal is exactly what you’ll get.

A well-connected reader adds:   “Not so foggy but nasty, nasty from Foggy Bottom.  And to think Jack Pritchard used to be one of the chief doves on North Korea policy! (and he is now saying the Norks told him they have no real intention of giving up any bombs)…at least we now know why our negotiators are suddenly shedding crocodile tears for the Japanese abductees…if Prichtard is right and the Norks are going to renew their demand for light water reactors, Washington wants to send that bill to Tokyo, as we did in the Agreed Framework (with gasoline at four dollars a gallon, no one wants to ask the U.S. taxpayer to foot this bill for NK energy).    So the abductees become key to milking the Japanese cash cow…”