THE DAY THE WHITE HOUSE announced it would resume talks with “axis of evil” charter member North Korea, the president’s administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development told an audience of policymakers and journalists in Washington just how evil that regime really is. Even as Andrew Natsios, the author of a new book on the North Korean famine, was explaining how the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea had systematically starved hundreds of thousands of its citizens between 1995 and 1999, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer issued the following statement: “The Permanent Mission of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) to the United Nations has informed the State Department that the DPRK is prepared to begin talks with the United States. The United States will work to determine the timing and other details in the coming days.” Natsios, who was careful to stipulate that he was not speaking for the administration, recounted how in the face of the famine the Hermit Kingdom denied food to the entire northeast region of the country, to workers in unproductive mines and factories, and to any North Korean who moved from the place their ration card had been issued. “They killed those people not because they did not like them, but because they were irrelevant,” Natsios told a gathering at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. As he recounts in “The Great North Korean Famine” (United States Institute of Peace), allotments of corn were halved for farmers in 1996, creating a breakdown in the country’s food distribution network. The North Korean farmers he interviewed told Natsios, “Once they did that, it was very clear, we had to steal all the food in the collective or we ourselves would starve.” Eventually the government had to dispatch soldiers to guard the cornfields, and later soldiers to guard those guards, Natsios said, to keep the army from succumbing to bribes from farmers. In the weeks ahead, the Bush administration will send Charles Pritchard, the U.S. special envoy to North Korea, to begin talks on missile sales, nuclear weapons inspections, and the estimated 700,000 troops Pyongyang has massed near the border with its southern neighbor. This week Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Richard Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage are scheduled to hash out what tack Pritchard should take with his interlocutors in Pyongyang. Like most of the internal foreign policy debates over the axis of evil, this one divides the administration’s neoconservatives from its Clintonistas. In the latter camp, the National Security Council’s Asia directorate and the State Department’s Korea desk favor giving Pritchard flexibility to pare down the president’s comprehensive policy agenda for the Hermit Kingdom and concentrate on a single issue. Administration officials call this “sequencing”–negotiating separately on the several aims the president has set out. These aims are to shrink North Korea’s conventional military forces; give the International Atomic Energy Agency the unfettered access it needs to inspect North Korean nuclear power sites; end North Korean sales of missiles and related technology; and accelerate peace talks between the north and south. On the other side of the debate, the Office of the Vice President and the Pentagon want negotiations to focus on what one administration official calls “issues central to the nature of the regime.” This would mean pressing the North Koreans to lift the secrecy that shrouds their unconventional military programs and asking for transparency in the distribution of international food aid to hungry people. This faction also seeks to avoid succumbing to diplomatic blackmail. “The hard-line approach is that you don’t reward North Korea for not engaging in behavior they should not have done in the first place,” the official said. This means, first, refraining from any up-front concessions in response to North Korea’s ending its robust trade in missile technology with Iran, Libya, Syria, and Egypt. The CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency estimate Kim Jong Il’s regime pockets $1billion annually from selling missiles abroad, and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research puts the figure slightly lower. Compare that with the $520 million the country earns annually from the export of minerals, metallurgical products, conventional armaments, and agricultural and fishery products. While President Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, never proposed reimbursing the North Koreans for forgone missile exports, she did offer them a tantalizing carrot. In an interview last week, Ambassador Wendy Sherman, the State Department’s counselor who spent hours in negotiations with Kim Jong Il during an October 2000 visit to Pyongyang with Albright, described the outlines of the deal that nearly materialized back then: If the North Koreans stopped developing, deploying, and exporting missiles, we would help them obtain a satellite–as she put it, “We would discuss the possibility of helping coordinate the launching of non-strategic, non-military satellites on non-DPRK boosters under appropriate transfer-of-technology controls.” The missiles-for-satellites deal is exactly the kind of thing the president’s hawks want to avoid–especially at a time when the U.S. government has information to suggest that North Korea is developing a clandestine nuclear weapons program notwithstanding the agreement it signed in 1994 with the United States pledging to forgo this activity. The CIA’s latest unclassified report on the acquisition of technology for weapons of mass destruction says, “We assess that North Korea has produced enough plutonium for at least one, and possibly two, nuclear weapons.” In a speech at the Heritage Foundation on May 6, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton said that the North Koreans are also developing chemical and biological weapons. “Despite the fact that its citizens are starving, the leadership in Pyongyang has spent large sums of money to acquire the resources, including a biotechnology infrastructure, capable of producing infectious agents, toxins, and other crude biological weapons,” he said. Whether Charles Pritchard will be authorized to allow North Korea to parlay these programs into diplomatic and financial benefits from Washington depends on the outcome of the Bush administration’s internal deliberations this week. Lest the special envoy lose sight of the true nature of the regime he is going to encounter, a copy of Andrew Natsios’s book might be just the thing to read on the plane to Pyongyang. Eli J. Lake covers the State Department for United Press International.
