Did Christopher Hill, Barack Obama’s nominee to serve as Ambassador to Iraq, lie under oath during his confirmation hearing on Wednesday? One exchange he had with Senator Roger Wicker, a Republican from Mississippi, deserves considerable scrutiny. Wicker read Hill a passage from the piece I wrote about Hill for this week’s TWS. That article focused on two incidents in which Hill disregarded George W. Bush’s policy of refusing to conduct bilateral negotiations with North Korea. Wicker first read this paragraph: “Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had given Hill permission to meet face-to-face with the North Koreans but only on the condition that diplomats from China were also in the room. Although the Chinese participated in the early moments of the discussions, they soon left. Hill did not leave with them.” And then he read this passage, a direct quote from Meltdown, an exhaustively reported book on the North Korean nuclear crisis written by CNN reporter Mike Chinoy. “Although Rice remained supportive of reviving the diplomatic process, Hill had held the bilateral discussion with North Korean negotiator Kim Gye Gwan in defiance of her instructions.” Hill’s response is incredible — literally:
So which is it? Did Rice agree to “a bilateral meeting” with the North Koreans or did she want the Chinese to be there? They are mutually exclusive. Did Rice tell Hill he could simply disregard Bush administration policy? Unlikely. Chinoy, who interviewed Hill for his book and offers a sympathetic account of Hill’s diplomatic work, explains it this way on page 239 of his book. “The North Koreans made clear that, while they were open to returning to the talks, they wanted a bilateral meeting with Hill before making any announcement. Hill’s problem was that Rice and other senior officials, while willing to sanction a meeting, insisted that it be trilateral, with China participating as well.” [Emphasis added] They “insisted” that China participate as well. If that’s right — and it’s consistent with my reporting, administration policy and at least part of Hill’s answer — then Rice did not “agreed to a bilateral meeting” with North Korea in the summer of 2005. Hill continued his response to Wicker at the hearing:
That is, do I adhere to the stated policy of the president or do I freelance? Hill decided to freelance. And, as Chinoy points out, he did not have to call an audible at all. “He could have called Rice on her plane to ask for guidance. Instead, displaying the willingness to take risks and to stretch — if not ignore — his instructions that would characterize his modus operandi in the coming months, Hill decided to go ahead on his own and present her with a fait accompli.” More Hill, from the hearing:
This presents a question. If Secretary Rice had “agreed” to “have a bilateral meeting” with the North Koreans, as Hill testified under oath, why would she have been “quite angry” that the Chinese did not attend the meeting? On its face, Hill’s testimony makes no sense. Wicker concluded by asking HIll whether he and Rice had a confrontation about the “audible” Hill called. “Never,” Hill responded. If Hill “remembers this quite clearly,” he seemed to remember it a different way shortly after the incident took place. Again to Chinoy:
There are two possibilities: HIll told the truth in his testimony and Chinoy’s account is wrong. Or Hill lied under oath. If I had to bet, I’d bet on the latter. Why? Chinoy quotes Hill directly from his conversation with Rice and goes on to describe how Hill “felt” about their confrontation — two facts that strongly suggest Hill was Chinoy’s source. And on pp. 368-369, Chinoy lists the people he interviewed for his book. Rice is not among them. Hill’s rogue diplomacy was not a one-time thing. He did the same thing in the fall of 2006. Three weeks after President Bush declared at a press conference that the U.S. would not meet bilaterally with the North Koreans, Hill sat down with Kim Gye Gwan, his North Korean counterpart. In doing so, Hill overruled the president to engage a rogue state, included on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terror. And he did so, we now know, at a time when North Korea was proliferating nuclear technology to Syria, another state sponsor of terror, in a facility that was financed, at least in part, by Iran, another state sponsor of terror. And for this he is rewarded with the country’s most important diplomatic post? It seems clear that Hill twice disregarded presidential policy and ignored instructions that expressly forbade him from a bilateral meeting with North Korea. Did he lie about it, too?
