How Cheney and His Allies Created the North Korea Nuclear Missile Crisis
Thursday, December 28, 2017
By Gareth Porter, Truthout | News Analysis
Vice President Dick Cheney (L) gathers with other senior members of the US
Government during remarks by President George W. Bush about the North Korean
missile launches in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington July 5,
2006. (Photo: Brooks Kraft LLC / Corbis via Getty Images)
The Trump administration has been telling people for months that the crisis
with North Korea is the result of North Korea's relentless pursuit of a
nuclear threat to the US homeland and past North Korean cheating on
diplomatic agreements. However, North Korea reached agreements with both the
Clinton and George W. Bush administrations that could have averted that
threat, had they been completed.
Instead, a group of Bush administration officials led by then-Vice President
Dick Cheney sabotaged both agreements, and Pyongyang went on to make rapid
strides on both nuclear and missile development, leading ultimately to the
successful late November 2017 North Korean intercontinental ballistic
missile (ICBM) test.
The record shows, moreover, that Cheney and his allies derailed diplomatic
efforts to curb North Korean nuclear and missile development, not because
they opposed "arms control" (after all, the agreements that were negotiated
would have limited only North Korean arms), but because those agreements
would have been a political obstacle to fielding the group's main interest:
funding and fielding a national missile defense system as quickly as
possible. The story of Cheney's maneuvering to kill two agreements shows how
a real US national security interest was sacrificed to a massive military
boondoggle that served only the interests of the powerful contractors behind
it.
Curbing North Korean Arms or Missile Defense?
In October 1994, the Bill Clinton administration reached a historic
agreement with North Korea called the "Agreed Framework," under which
Pyongyang agreed to freeze its existing plutonium reactor and related
facilities within a month, with full monitoring by the International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA), and to dismantle them as soon as they could be
replaced with light water reactors. The United States promised to provide
the reactors, as well fuel oil, until the light water reactors were built.
And even more crucially, the US also pledged to take steps to end the enmity
toward North Korea and normalize relations between the two longtime
adversaries.
No sooner had the Clinton administration negotiated the "Agreed Framework,"
however, than the Republicans gained control of both houses of Congress in
the 1994 election. That seismic political shift enabled a powerful lobby of
military contractors pushing for a national missile defense system to
achieve a congressional mandate for rapid development and deployment of such
a system.
It was a fateful convergence, because the missile defense lobby's strategy
was to create a sense of urgency about an alleged imminent threat to the US
homeland from ballistic missiles armed with nuclear weapons mounted by
"rogue states"-- Iraq, Iran and North Korea.
It was not the US, but North Korea that proposed an agreement in 1998 that
would end its development of new missiles as part of a broader peace
agreement with Washington.
And the Clinton administration's agreement with North Korea -- the only
"rogue state" known to have a nuclear weapons program as well as a missile
program -- threatened that missile defense lobby strategy.
When a 1995 CIA intelligence estimate said that none of the three "rogue
states" would have ballistic missiles capable of threatening the United
States for at least 15 years, the missile defense lobby got Congress to pass
legislation creating a "national commission" on the ballistic missile threat
that would contradict the CIA assessment. The commission, led by Republican
hard-liner Donald Rumsfeld, asserted in its final report in July 1998 that
either Iraq or North Korea might acquire long-range ballistic missiles
capable of hitting the United States in as little as five years. In a craven
retreat under political pressure, the CIA then largely adopted the
commission's argument.
North Korea had only carried out two tests of medium or longer-range
missiles in the decade from 1988 to 1998, neither of which had been
successful, so the Clinton administration was not focused on the threat of
an ICBM: It held just two rounds of talks on the ballistic missile program
between 1996 and 1998.
In fact, it was not the United States, but North Korea that proposed an
agreement in 1998 that would end its development of new missiles as part of
a broader peace agreement with Washington.
When the United States failed to respond to the proposal, however, North
Korea launched a three-stage rocket called the Taepodong on August 31, 1998,
which the missile lobby and news media argued was a major step toward a
North Korean ICBM. The missile lobby used that event to push for legislation
establishing a national policy goal to deploy and "effective National
Missile Defense System" as soon as technologically possible.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il was using the regime's missile development
as a prod to get the Clinton administration to negotiate a deal that would
include concrete steps toward normalization of relations. He even sent a
personal envoy to Washington to present the outline of a new North Korean
offer to give up the regime's quest for an ICBM, as well as its nuclear
weapons capability. In October 2000, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
went to Pyongyang, and the two sides came close to a final agreement that
would have ended North Korean missile development as well as its nuclear
weapons program and led to normalizing relations.
But Clinton didn't go to North Korea to sign the deal in the final months of
his presidency, and the election of George W. Bush in November 2000 was a
major victory for the missile defense lobby. Bush named Rumsfeld, the
primary political champion of a missile defense system, as his Secretary of
Defense. And no less than eight figures with direct or indirect ties to
Lockheed Martin, the leading defense contractor in the missile defense
business, became policymakers in the new administration. The most important
was Dick Cheney, whose wife, Lynn Cheney, had earned more than half a
million dollars serving on the board of directors of Lockheed-Martin from
1994 to 2001.
Cheney set about killing the Agreed Framework and securing the missile
defense system even before Bush entered the White House. Cheney chose Robert
Joseph, a hardline supporter of missile defense and foe of an agreement with
North Korea, as a key member of the transition team that Cheney led. Cheney
then made Joseph senior director on the National Security Council (NSC)
staff with responsibility for both missile defense and "weapons of mass
destruction" proliferation policy.
"Joseph really hated the Agreed Framework," Larry Wilkerson, then in the
State Department's Policy Planning Staff, told journalist Mike Chinoy. "His
objective was first to kill the Agreed Framework and to make sure that
nothing like it could ever get created again."
Joseph's first project was to draft a National Security Presidential
Directive that laid out a "new strategic framework," essentially built
around a ballistic missile defense system, as Joseph later told a National
Defense University researcher.
Joseph drafted a speech that the president gave on May 1, 2001, in which
Bush debuted a new central argument for national missile defense.
"Deterrence can no longer be based solely on the threat of nuclear
retaliation," Bush declared, adding that missile defense system could
"strengthen deterrence by reducing the incentive for proliferation."
Cheney and Bolton Go for the Kill
Colin Powell's State Department posed the main obstacle to the Cheney
group's plans for trashing the Agreed Framework. The Department's East Asian
Bureau got Bush's approval for a formal policy review on North Korea, which
concluded by defining the policy goal of exploring a deal with North Korea
that would involve "an improved relationship."
But Cheney had a bureaucratic strategy to frustrate that endeavor and finish
off the Agreed Framework. The NSC staff initiated a "nuclear posture
review," which was carried out without any participation by Powell's allies.
The final document included North Korea on a new list of countries that
could be targets for US use of nuclear weapons.
No less than eight figures with direct or indirect ties to Lockheed Martin,
the leading defense contractor in the missile defense business, became
policymakers in the new administration. The most important was Dick Cheney.
That designation, which was leaked to the press in March 2002, conflicted
directly with the US pledge in the Agreed Framework to "provide formal
assurances to the DPRK, against the threat or use of nuclear weapons by the
U.S."
Then Bush's State of the Union message in January 2002 introduced the idea
of North Korea as part of an "axis of evil" along with Iran and Iraq. That
was not merely a throwaway line introduced by a speechwriter, but reflected
lobbying by Cheney and Rumsfeld for "toughening sanctions and isolation to
lay the groundwork for regime change in North Korea," according to
Condoleezza Rice's memoir, No Higher Honor.
John Bolton, Cheney's proxy in the State Department on proliferation issues,
writes in his memoir Surrender is Not an Option that he considered the "axis
of evil" speech a signal that he could now begin a bureaucratic offensive
aimed at killing the Agreed Framework. Bolton recalls that he pushed the
State Department to adopt the position that North Korea was out of
compliance with the Agreed Framework for having "failed to make a complete
and accurate declaration of its nuclear activities and refused to allow
inspection of related facilities."
However, Bolton was misrepresenting the terms of the agreement, which
provided that North Korea would come into full compliance with its
safeguards agreement, including the accuracy and completeness of its
declaration on its nuclear program, "[w]hen a significant portion of the LWR
[light water reactor] project is completed, but before delivery of key
nuclear components." Construction on the light water reactor had not even
begun in 2002, when the State Department notified Congress that North Korea
was out of compliance.
Bolton's plan was frustrated temporarily by resistance from the NSC, over
which then-National Security Adviser Rice had some influence. But the
decisive blow to the Agreed Framework came in July 2002, when, according to
his memoir, Bolton obtained an intelligence assessment stating that North
Korea "began seeking centrifuge-related materials in large quantities" in
2001, and that it had "obtained equipment suitable for use in uranium feed
and withdrawal systems." Bolton recalls that the new intelligence finding
was "the hammer I had been looking for to shatter the Agreed Framework." He
argued in interagency meetings that North Korea had pledged to "take steps
to implement the North-South Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of
the Korean Peninsula," and therefore any North Korean move toward uranium
enrichment violated its commitment.
Bolton was creating another false issue. Robert Carlin, a North Korea expert
and adviser to the US negotiators, has pointed out that the reference to
that document was an "afterthought" and that "no one really believed that
the reference to the North-South agreements would constitute one of the core
DPRK obligations" in the agreement.
Bush's negotiator with North Korea, Charles L. Pritchard, suggested bringing
the uranium enrichment issue into the Agreed Framework, using the North
Korean interest in normalization as negotiating leverage, according to
Bolton. He also warned that if the United States withdrew from the
agreement, North Korea would resume its plutonium program or start a new
uranium program.
However, Bolton recalls telling Pritchard that wouldn't make "the slightest
difference," because North Korea already had enough plutonium for "several
weapons." In fact, it was not at all clear that Pyongyang had already
converted plutonium into a single nuclear weapon.
Cheney set about killing the Agreed Framework and securing the missile
defense system even before Bush entered the White House.
However, Bolton showed no apparent concern about North Korea's long-range
missile program, which the Clinton administration and North Korea had agreed
would be negotiated in conjunction with moves toward normalization. "I
wanted a decisive conclusion that the Agreed Framework was dead," Bolton
writes.
In October 2002, Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly went to Pyongyang
with explicit orders, which Rice attributes to those who were undermining
diplomacy, to accuse Pyongyang of cheating on the agreement by having a
uranium enrichment program. North Korea's First Vice Foreign Minister Kang
Sok Ju did not deny the government's interest in uranium enrichment, but
said it was a response to the clear indications from the Bush administration
that it had no intention to improve relations with his government. He also
said North Korea was prepared to negotiate on all enrichment, including
uranium, if the United States changed its hostile policy.
However, at an NSC meeting a week later, no one disagreed with the assertion
that the Agreed Framework was dead, according to Bolton. In December 2002,
the Bush administration strong-armed its Japanese and South Korean allies to
end their supply of oil to the North Korea, officially terminating the
Agreed Framework.
Cheney and his allies were clearing the political path to full funding for
the national missile defense system they wanted to rush to deployment as
quickly as possible. Rumsfeld had created a new Missile Defense Agency in
the Pentagon in early 2002, which had unprecedented freedom from
congressional or Department of Defense oversight.
They were also opening the floodgates for North Korean nuclear and missile
development.
Cheney Kills Rice's North Korea Agreement
For the next three years, the Bush administration refused direct
negotiations with North Korea. But Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice got
Bush to agree in September 2005 to a joint statement of principles with
North Korea in the context of Six-Party Talks.
In October 2007, Washington and Pyongyang negotiated an agreement under
which Pyongyang would first seal and then disable its plutonium-based
facilities for shipment of heavy fuel and provide a full accounting of its
entire nuclear program, including uranium. For its part, the US pledged to
remove North Korea from its list of state sponsors of terrorism and lift
other trade restrictions. In a later phase, the two sides would agree on a
verification system and on steps leading to normalization of relations.
Then Cheney sabotaged the new agreement. In April 2007, Israel claimed Syria
had built a nuclear reactor in the desert in eastern Syria with North Korean
assistance. Bush's advisers all accepted the Israeli claim as true, but
nearly a decade later, the IAEA's expert on North Korean reactors at the
time revealed detailed technical evidence that had led him to conclude with
certainty that the Syrian site could not possibly have been a North
Korean-designed reactor.
Cheney seized on the alleged Syrian reactor to wrest control over North
Korea policy from Rice. In a January 4, 2008 White House meeting, he recalls
in his memoirs In My Time how he successfully prodded Bush and Rice to agree
with his assumption that a "failure to admit they've been proliferating to
the Syrians would be a deal killer." Two months later, Bush gave Cheney
power to approve any joint US-North Korean text negotiated by the State
Department.
Under pressure from Cheney, Rice adopted a new diplomatic strategy. In
addition to their obligations in the first two phases of the October 2007
agreement, she writes in No Higher Honor, "[t]he North Koreans would also
have to agree to a verification protocol to govern the on-site inspection of
all aspects of their nuclear program."
That verification protocol -- not the actions pledged by Pyongyang in the
October 2007 agreement -- would now be the basis for deciding whether the
administration would take North Korea off the terrorist list and stop the
application of the Trading with the Enemy Act.
Cheney and his allies were clearing the political path to full funding for
the national missile defense system they wanted to rush to deployment as
quickly as possible.
Rice was changing the rules after the fact. After had North Korea delivered
its declaration on its plutonium enrichment program in late June 2008, US
negotiators sought North Korean agreement for inspectors to go into any
site, whether declared or not, including sensitive military sites. Pyongyang
conveyed its strong private objections to that, as well as to environmental
sampling by inspectors. The 45-day period during which the United States was
supposed to have taken its two small steps toward normalization came and
went.
North Korea immediately accused the United States of violating the October
agreement and suspended the disabling of its nuclear facilities. The US
negotiator, Chris Hill, got what he regarded as North Korean verbal
agreement to an amended version of the verification protocol, but North
Korea would not sign it. On the basis of that unwritten understanding, Bush
agreed to take North Korea off the US list of terrorist sponsors, and the
physical disabling of the North Korea's plutonium complex was completed.
But Bush insisted that North Korea sign the verification protocol, and in
December, after Barack Obama's election, Pyongyang rejected the Bush
administration's unilateral rewriting of the agreement, issuing a statement
that it would only agree to intrusive inspections when US "hostile policy
and nuclear threat to the North are fundamentally terminated." US-North
Korean diplomacy on the October 2007 nuclear deal came to a halt.
Cheney and his allies had prevented the successful completion of two
agreements that could have averted the present crisis with North Korea. When
Bush took office in 2001, North Korea was believed to possess less than an
atomic bomb's worth of plutonium. By the end of his second term, North Korea
was already a nuclear power, with several nuclear weapons.
Even more significant, however, the Bush administration never even attempted
to negotiate limits on North Korea's long-range missile program. That
failure was very costly to the interests of the American people -- but it
was a gift to the national missile defense program that has kept on giving.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
Gareth Porter
Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and historian
writing on US national security policy. His latest book, Manufactured
Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, was published in
February of 2014. Follow him on Twitter: @GarethPorter.
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