Reminder: Condi Rice’s North Korea Fiasco

A week ago, I really didn’t care who Romney chose as his a running mate — then came the rumor that Condoleezza Rice was the leading candidate. Having now established the limits of my apathy, I wonder what explains the excitement among certain Republicans about the idea that Rice would be the perfect Vice-Presidential candidate (for anything other than spending the next 100 days re-litigating Bush’s foreign policy).  One answer may be the dullness of the other alternatives, but another must be Rice’s compelling personal history.  In the end, her “mildly pro-choice” views on abortion will probably disqualify her, and John Fund thinks he has the inside track on her actual odds of being selected:  “zero.”

But even if that part of this discussion is moot, I still can’t stand hearing it said that Rice’s diplomatic legacy recommends her for higher office. Leave aside the broader question of Rice’s tenure as a whole, which speaks well enough for itself, or her executive skill, which also draws unfavorable reviews.  Just look at the mess she made of our North Korea policy, where President Bush gave her a relatively free hand during his second term.  Rice made Chris Hill her instrument for that policy, and thereafter, she was either inexcusably uninformed about what Hill was doing, or allowed him to willfully deceive Congress and the American people, continuing to trade valuable aid and concessions for North Korean obstructionism, false declarations, uranium-smeared “verification” samples, and blatant nuclear proliferation to Syria. By the time this charade unfolded, China held Rice in such contempt that it brushed off her protests as North Korean cargo planes loaded with missile parts refueled on Chinese runways for the long trip to Tehran.

I wrote the criticism that follows in reaction to Hill’s nomination as Ambassador to Iraq, a position he filled for about a year before he quietly retired to an academic job.  All of this applies with equal force to Rice.

By now, we know how the story of Agreed Framework ended. North Korea never provided a full disclosure of its nuclear programs; never dismantled or handed over a single nuclear weapon; never handed over any fissile material; never completely dismantled or disabled any of its several reactors in various states of completion; and never came clean about the September 2007 revelation that it was secretly building another reactor in Syria even as it negotiated with us. [….] Meanwhile, North Korea steadily reneged on every last one of its commitments in Agreed Framework II.

Even before the failure of Agreed Framework II had played out, Congress had some questions, and Hill went to the House Foreign Affairs Committee to answer them just days after the deal was signed. Hill made more promises than Bernie Madoff at an AARP convention, and he broke them just as promiscuously.

Hill insisted in his opening statement that North Korea must disclose “all” of its nuclear programs, and that “[a]ll means all, and this means the highly enriched uranium program as well.” Despite North Korea’s denial that it had a uranium enrichment program in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Hill pushed to give North Korea the million tons of heavy fuel oil, lift Trading With the Enemy sanctions, and remove North Korea from the list of state sponsors. North Korea still denies having had a uranium enrichment program to this day.

Democratic Chairman Gary Ackerman wondered about verification. Hill responded, “I can assure you what we will not end up with is an agreement where they pretend to disarm and we pretend to believe them. We will have an agreement where we know.” But after President Bush granted the North Koreans key concessions at Hill’s urging, the North Koreans balked at verification. Hill tried to paper this over with a vague, almost meaningless verification protocol.

Rep. Chris Smith asked about North Korea’s oppression of its own people, including the diversion of international food aid to favored subjects. Hill answered: “I can assure you that any agreement … will be done entirely consistent with our laws and obligations [to condition non-humanitarian aid on human rights improvements, and to distribute aid according to internationally accepted humanitarian standards]. I can promise you that, Mr. Congressman…. As I have made crystal clear in all my discussions with the North Koreans, the United States and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea can never have a fully normal relationship absent progress on these important fronts.” A year later, in an interview with the L.A. Times, Hill had changed his answer: “Obviously we have continued differences with [North Korea], but we can do that in the context of two states that have diplomatic relations.” On another occasion, when Hill was asked about the atrocities in the North, Hill was quoted as saying, “Each country, including our own, needs to improve its human rights record.” Contrary to the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004, Hill continued to exclude human rights from the talks’ agenda, and pushed President Bush to give more concessions after the North Koreans frustrated U.S. efforts to monitor the distribution of its food aid.

Rep. Ed Royce asked about North Korea’s counterfeiting of U.S. currency, which the agreement never addressed. Hill said, “I want to assure you that I have repeatedly raised with the North Korean side that it is completely unacceptable to be engaged in this type of activity…. We have no intention of trading nuclear deals for counterfeiting our currency.” Hill’s answer flirted with perjury. By then, he was probably already engineering the return of $25 million in counterfeiting-tainted funds to North Korea and the lifting of U.S. sanctions relating to counterfeiting and money laundering. The funds transfer may have been been a technical violation of 18 U.S.C. sec. 1957, which prohibits knowingly engaging in any transaction in criminally derived property. If Hill ever raised the issue with the North Koreans again, there’s no evidence of it. As of April 2008, Treasury believed that North Korea was still counterfeiting U.S. currency.

This was just the beginning of what would become a pattern for Hill. After months of North Korean stalling on the full disclosure of its nuclear programs, Hill finally secured a North Korean promise to deliver its disclosure by the end of 2007. Hill went to Pyongyang in November to find out whether the disclosure would be delivered on time. The North Koreans handed Hill a declaration so patently incomplete that Hill knew it would be a deal-breaker to accept it. Later, asked by reporters if he’d had “a chance to see” a draft of the North Korean declaration, Hill said “no.”  [….]

Hill tried to conceal what he could not explain, most embarrassingly the September 2007 revelation that North Korea had been building the Syrian nuclear reactor destroyed by Israeli warplanes. For months, the Bush Administration kept key congressional committees in the dark about the reactor and North Korea’s involvement in it. The ranking Republicans on the House Intelligence and Foreign Affairs Committee later co-wrote a blistering Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal to demand a briefing. When that briefing finally took place in April of 2008, it drew furious reactions in Congress, but did not kill Agreed Framework II.

More broadly, Hill continued to sell the President, the Secretary of State, and the American people a diplomatic initiative ostensibly aimed at denuclearizing North Korea long after North Korea had forcefully repudiated any such intention. No one knows when the North Koreans first started insisting that they were going to keep their nukes, agreement or not, but it took the visit of former U.S. diplomat Jack Pritchard to Pyongyang in the spring of 2008 for us to learn about it. In May of 2008, Pritchard told a Washington Post reporter what the North Koreans had told him, and what the North Koreans had almost certainly been telling Hill for months: “that the United States should get used to a nuclear-armed North Korea.” Not long afterward, the North Koreans cornered Condoleezza Rice face-to-face and demanded “to be recognized as a nuclear state.” Since then, the North Koreans have repeatedly and publicly insisted that they will never give up their nuclear weapons. Yet Hill continued to press his bosses for more concessions and fewer conditions until the end of the Bush Administration.

In the end, Agreed Framework II accomplished absolutely nothing except to give Kim Jong Il more aid, more diplomatic concessions, and more time to expand their capacity to produce nuclear weapons.  If anything good came of Rice’s gullible outreach to Kim Jong Il, it was to prove conclusively that policies like hers have no prospect of disarming North Korea, or moderating its domestic or trans-national ruthlessness.