Mike Chinoy on Chris Hill

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.

When Rice arrived in Beijing later that night, Hill went to her hotel suite. “The bad news,” he told her, “is that the Chinese didn’t show up. But the good news is that the North Koreans announced they would come back to the talks.” Rice was not amused, although Hill felt that, since getting the talks under way again was one of her goals, her anger would pass.

There are a couple of issues here. One is the characterization of what happened. The second is the political use of the episode by a conservative senator looking for reasons to oppose Hill’s nomination as ambassador to Iraq. As to the episode itself, a bit of context is needed. In the summer of 2005, the US was trying to get North Korea to return to the six-party talks, which Pyongyang had been boycotting since the previous fall. The North had signaled that if its envoy could have a bilateral meeting with Hill, it would return to the talks. The official US position, pulled together in Washington in an atmosphere of constant bureaucratic infighting between so-called “hardliners” and “moderates,” was that Hill could only meet with the North Koreans with the Chinese present. The Chinese, understandably frustrated by what they saw as American obstinacy on a procedural matter that was blocking a resumption of the six-party talks, tried to square the circle by inviting both Hill and the North Koreans to a dinner in Beijing, and then, as I recount in my book “Meltdown”, disappearing. This led Hill to call what he characterized in his testimony as an “audible” – deciding not to walk out of the dinner, which would have almost certainly ensured an angry North Korean reaction that would have destroyed any chance of the six-party talks resuming. Instead, he remained, and at the end of his discussion with the North Koreans, they agreed to return to the talks. When Rice, who had been in the air en route to Beijing while this was happening, arrived in Beijing, Hill told her he had “good news and bad news.” The bad news was that the Chinese had not in the end attended the dinner, so he had met alone with the North Koreans. The good news was that they had agreed to return to the talks. Rice was not pleased, but, as I note in the book, her anger was primarily focused on the Chinese for the way they had arranged this, not on Hill himself. There was indeed a “verbal confrontation” ( Senator Wicker’s term) but it was between Rice and Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing, not, as the Senator suggests, between Hill and Rice. So Hill’s response in his testimony that he did not have a “verbal confrontation” with Rice here is accurate. Indeed, the way I describe his conversation with her in “Meltdown” is that she was “not amused” by his news, but that is very different from suggesting the two had a “confrontation.” Foreign Minister Li’s reaction to Rice’s complaint was to urge that the US focus on the outcome and not fixate on the process. And indeed, barely two months later, there was an important agreement reached at the talks, the “Sept. 19 Declaration,” which laid out a set of principles for the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. This accord, as well as the Feb. 13, 2007 deal that Hill negotiated, the Oct. 3, 2007 deal he reached, and the decision to take Pyongyang off the US terrorism list, were all backed by President Bush and Secretary Rice. In an administration whose North Korea policy was, as I chronicle at great length in “Meltdown,” characterized by frequent flip-flops – and where the President’s own position changed significantly at various points – Hill was clearly a major player. He sought to push positions that he felt advanced the national interest by seeking a negotiated rollback of Pyongyang’s nukes, and was certainly much more than just a messenger boy to the North Koreans. But it is also worth noting that Rice and Bush did not dismiss or seriously reprimand Hill over this particular episode, or replace him with another envoy to handle the six-party talks when they resumed soon afterwards. Indeed, they saw his willingness to take some risks as useful. As a senior State Department official acknowledged to me in an interview (quoted on page 338 of “Meltdown”) Bush and Rice “basically said ‘OK, fine. If Chris Hill thinks he can do it, let him do it. If he succeeds, we get the credit. If he fails, then he takes the blame and we hang him out to dry.'” So this was the game – a function of the politics in Washington – and I would argue that all the major figures- Hill, Rice, Bush – understood exactly how it was being played. So for opponents of Hill’s nomination to Iraq to argue that the decisions Mr. Bush ultimately took in the direction of negotiation and compromise were Hill’s alone and NOT the president’s – and that this somehow means Hill was “soft” on the North Koreans, sabotaging the President’s wishes and is thus someone who cannot be trusted to represent the government and is therefore unqualified to be ambassador to Iraq – is, in my view, a huge, and unjustifiable, stretch.