Sung Kim Through the Retrospectoscope

The announcement that Sung Kim will be our new U.S. Ambassador to South Korea suggests continuity if a comparison of his background to Kathleen Stephens’s tells us anything. Like Stephens, Kim is a protege of Chris Hill* and comes from the State Department’s Korea Desk, which has long favored appeasement, agreed frameworks, and a peace treaty with North Korea, and had previously been caught trying to water down language in the State Department’s annual human rights report.

My own fears about Stephens — who had been a strong advocate of a peace treaty with the North during the Roh years — went largely unrealized because of North Korea’s recent aggressive behavior, and because of the profound influence South Korean elections have on U.S. policy toward North Korea. Like Stephens, you can expect Sung Kim to represent the State Department’s desire for Agreed Framework III, and you can expect that desire to remain latent absent a major change in North Korea’s behavior or South Korea’s government.

It is disturbing, nonetheless, that Sung Kim’s entire rise to policy prominence arises from the flawed and failed Agreed Framework II, and that Kim increasingly became the public face of the agreement as it collapsed. As of June 2005, Sung Kim was a virtual unknown in Korea policy circles in Washington, and the brevity of his official bio reflects this. The Dong Ilbo reports that his Korean name is Kim Sung-Yong, is a graduate of Loyola Law, attended the London School of Economics, and served briefly as a prosecutor in Pennsylvania before joining the State Department as a career foreign service officer. (In Washington, you’ll sometimes hear talk that the Ambassador to Korea should be a political appointee, as is the case with most higher-profile diplomatic posts.)

Here, in brief, is a chronology of Sung Kim’s role in Agreed Framework II. As you read this, ask yourself if this is merely the work of a civil servant doing the work assigned to him or whether this represents something more like the obsessive pursuit of a fantasy.

February 2007:  Agreed Framework 2.0 signed.  The deal is criticized for its failure to mention the North’s suspected uranium enrichment program,

March 2007:  Applying my powers of paranormal clairovyance, I foretell how and when the deal will fall apart.

April 2007:  North Korea misses its first set of disablement deadlines and refuses to budge until U.S. Treasury lifts sanctions on a Macau bank the North had used to launder drug and counterfeiting proceeds.  The U.S. Federal Reserve later returns the tainted funds to Pyongyang.  The next several months consist of stalling and re-negotiations of the hopelessly vague agreement.

September 2007:  Israel bombs the Al-Kibar reactor in Syria.  Media reports, though initially in conflict on the details, claim that the North Koreans were somehow involved in helping Syria build a nuclear capability there, and that some North Korean engineers are killed in the attack.

October 2007:  The North Koreans attempt to hand Chris Hill an incomplete, incorrect nuclear declaration.  Chris Hill tells a little white lie, denying it.

November 3, 2007:  Seven months behind schedule, North Korea finally begins “disabling” its 5-megawatt reactor at Yongbyon.  The first U.S. monitors arrive at Yongbyon, and Sung Kim is there beforehand.  The dilapidated reactor is stripped of its useful machinery, which is moved to nearby warehouses instead of being removed from North Korea.  The agreement largely fails to deal with the North’s then-controversial uranium enrichment program, which represents a far greater proliferation threat than the plutonium program.

December 4, 2007:  Chris Hill returns from another visit to Pyongyang and Yongbyon.  Still no progress on the declaration, which Hill still says “should be complete and full and should include all of its nuclear programmes, nuclear materials and nuclear facilities.”

December 21, 2007:  While Sung Kim is in Pyongyang, the Washington Post reports that U.S. analysts found traces of enriched uranium in samples of smelted-down aluminum tubing the North Koreans provided the Americans … to prove that they hadn’t enriched uranium.

December 31, 2007:  North Korea misses an agreed deadline to declare all of its nuclear programs, including its suspected uranium enrichment and proliferation activities.

January 2008:  Chris Hill furiously denies rumors that the U.S. would lift sanctions before the North verifiably declares and   disarms.

January 28, 2008:  Sung Kim packs his bags for Pyongyang in an attempt to get the North Korean declaration.

February 2, 2008 (Groundhog Day):  Kim comes home with no declaration.

March 14, 2008:  Sung Kim takes over for Chris Hill in negotiating bilaterally with the North Koreans in Geneva.  The apparent objective, again, is to extract a nuclear declaration from the North Koreans.

April 18, 2008:  Secretary of State Rice publicly suggests for the first time that the U.S. would lift sanctions on the North before verifiable disarmament.

April 22, 2008:  With the diplomacy still stalled over North Korea’s refusal to give a complete nuclear disclosure, Sung Kim goes back to Pyongyang.

April 24, 2008:  After months of foot-dragging, the State Department and the CIA finally notify a furious Congress about North Korea’s involvement in the al-Kibar reactor in Syria.

May 11, 2008:  This time, Kim comes home with seven boxes containing 18,000 pages of photocopied documents — ostensibly, partial verification for a declaration the North has yet to hand over.  The documents consist mainly of technical logs of operations at the 5-megawatt reactor between the 1980’s and 2005.  In an apparent effort to create a media spectacle, Kim and his team carry the boxes of documents through Panmunjom as the cameras roll.

May 13, 2008:  Sung Kim parades the documents before the press before analyzing or translating them, an act of diplomatic theater the apparent intention of refuting rising skepticism about North Korea’s intentions and winning support in Congress.  Like all North Korean “declarations” before or since, the documents say nothing about North Korea’s suspected proliferation or uranium enrichment … except for the traces of enriched uranium U.S. analysts later find on the documents.  Despite those key gaps in the documents and North Korea’s suspiciously low estimate of reprocessed plutonium, Kim reassures the reporters that the North Koreans are ready to cooperate on verifying their nuclear declaration.

May 29, 2008:  The North Koreans tell the visiting ex-diplomat Jack Pritchard that they will never give up their existing nuclear weapons and fissile material:  “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.'”  The State Department lashes out at Pritchard and questions his integrity.

June 8, 2008:  Sung Kim prepares to return to Pyongyang to discuss the full normalization of diplomatic relations with the world’s most repressive regime.

June 26, 2008:  President Bush announces his intention to lift some sanctions against North Korea and notifies Congress that he intends to de-list the North as a state sponsor of terrorism in 45 days.  Both John McCain and Barack Obama issue skeptical statements suggesting that they would oppose such a move absent a strong verification mechanism.

June 27, 2008:  Sung Kim goes to Yongbyon and plays anchorman before an unskeptical press as North Korea blows up the cooling tower for its used-up 5-megawatt Yongbyon reactor.  (Still no progress on dismantling the much larger 50 and 200-megawatt reactors nearby, however.)   Kim offers this oddly wistful observation:

“I detected “¦ a sense of sadness when the tower came down,” said Sung Kim, who traveled to Yongbyon, about 60 miles north of the capital of Pyongyang to watch the demolition of the 60-foot-tall cylindrical structure. “There is a significant degree of emotional attachment to the Yongbyon facilities ….” [….]

“(You could tell) just looking at the expression of the Yongbyon engineers who were on the site when this happened,” said Kim, who shook hands with Ri after the smoke cleared and the cooling tower had vanished from the landscape.  [AP]

June 28, 2008:  In Seoul, Kim gives an ebullient news conference before journalists who mostly ask him shallow questions like, “Who actually [blew up the tower?],” “Where were you standing?,” and “Why don’t they take down that enormous pyramid in the middle of Pyongyang?”  Some observers later note the the destruction of the cooling tower is a symbolic gesture, and that the North Koreans could operate the reactor with no tower using water from a nearby river, or rebuild it without much difficulty:

The tower is a technically insignificant structure, relatively easy to rebuild. North Korea also has been disabling — though not destroying — more sensitive parts of the nuclear complex, such as the 5-megawatt reactor, a plant that makes its fuel and a laboratory that extracts plutonium from its spent  fuel. “It’s symbolic. But in real terms, whether demolishing or not a cooling tower that has already been disabled doesn’t make much difference,” said Lee Ji Sue, a North Korea expert at Myongji University in  Seoul.  [IHT, Choe Sang-Hun]

July 24, 2008:  The Chosun Ilbo reports that at a session of the six-party talks that week, North Korea’s Foreign Minister demanded of Secretary Rice that the North be recognized as a nuclear power.

July 29, 2008:  Sung Kim is promoted to special envoy responsible for the six-party talks; however, the promotion won’t become official without Senate confirmation.

August 14, 2008:  Sung Kim flies to Beijing for the second time in two weeks to try to meet his North Korean counterpart and break a deadlock over North Korean refusals to allow international verification of its declaration.  Two days later, Kim flies home after being stood up by the North Koreans.

August 26, 2008:   North Korea announces that it has halted the disablement of the 5-megawatt Yongbyon reactor in retaliation for the President Bush’s failure to remove the North from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.  The U.S. continues to insist that North Korea agree to a verification protocol before North Korea is de-listed; actual verification, however, is not a prerequisite.  Meanwhile, Sung Kim is back in Pyongyang to talk about verification.  Kim calls his discussions with the North Koreans “very detailed and substantive,” but they get nowhere.

August 27, 2008:  The North Koreans bitterly denounce the U.S. insistence on verification of North Korea’s partial declaration.  Consensus shifts to the view that the North Koreans are now waiting Bush out.

September 2008:  With the deal quickly collapsing, Bush’s days numbered, and North Korea’s nuclear capabilities and arsenal all still intact, the North Koreans bulldoze away the rubble from the old cooling tower, take the salvaged machinery from the 5-megawatt reactor out of storage, and announce that they’re rebuilding the reactor.

October 11, 2008: North Korea’s removal from the list of state sponsors of terrorism becomes official.

December 2008: Agreed Framework II finally collapses for good. The rest is history: a new U.S. president comes into office ready to continue a policy of accommodation; those plans are foiled by a North Korean missile test, a nuclear test, a series of hostage incidents, and two major armed attacks on South Korea.

* P.S. I would really, really love to know why it was that Hill only spent about a year as Ambassador to Iraq after such a contentious nomination. I’ll keep your information confidential on request.