During September and late October, with tensions rising, the IAEA held a number of meetings at its headquarters in Vienna with the North Korean minister of atomic energy, Choe Hak Gun, and the North Korean delegation. Each time the IAEA gave North Korea numbers that reflected the Agency’s analysis, the North Koreans would adjust their declaration accordingly. However, they still did not come up with what we considered a complete and correct declaration.
Finally, Blix decided to send me on a mission to Pyongyang, to lay out the discrepancies, press the North Koreans to be fully transparent, and urge them to bring a new, accurate declaration of their nuclear program to the IAEA, including the nuclear material and facilities we believed they had not yet revealed. In short, we were asking them to uphold their obligations under their safeguards agreement with the Agency; otherwise, we would have to call for a “special inspection,” the Agency’s tool of last resort to get access to suspect sites.
Thus the December 1992 visit was not exactly a friendly call; we had our work cut out for us. By that time, I had moved into the position of the IAEA’s director of external relations. I was accompanied by Sven Thorstensen, the Norwegian safeguards director responsible for North Korea, and Olli Heinonen, a Finn who worked for Sven at the time and who had been heavily involved in the initial inspections.
The discussions were torturous. The North Koreans proved to be formidable negotiators. There was a good cop/bad cop division of labor among the members of their delegation. Some accused us of being U.S. agents, and when I reacted sharply to this, they mumbled an apology. Others took a softer approach, and when that didn’t work, they yielded once again to their harsher colleagues. This routine was repeated on various topics. In the meantime, the North Korean media began attacking Blix and me, and the Agency as a whole, accusing us of being stooges for the Americans.
This continued for three grueling days. Each night, I called Blix from the hotel phone to tell him we were not making progress; and he answered that we needed to request a special inspection. We were certain that our hosts were eavesdropping on our conversations, so we discussed a special inspection as a way to put pressure on them.
By the final evening, it was clear that our visit had failed to achieve a breakthrough. We were invited to dinner with Deputy Foreign Minister Kang Sok Ju, where the North Koreans served us each a hamburger topped with a fried egg.
At the outset of the conversation, I asked the deputy foreign minister a question that was meant to be more conversational than provocative: “Why is it that your country has so much resentment toward the United States?”
The response was anything but casual. It turned into a forty-five-minute harangue, an extended history of North Korean relations with the United States dating back to the arrival of the USS General Sherman on the Korean Peninsula in the mid-1800s. The ship had steamed up the Taedong River to the outskirts of Pyongyang. In what was viewed as a heroic victory against foreign invaders, the locals burned the ship and killed all its crew. The great-grandfather of North Korea’s Great Leader Kim Il Sung had reportedly participated in that attack.
And so it went: while our food sat before us, untouched, the deputy foreign minister recounted every U.S.–North Korean interaction since that time. When he finally paused, I asked him, out of courtesy, a simple follow-up question. He continued for another fifteen minutes. The obsession was clear: North Korea was deeply entangled in a long-running struggle with the United States, certain that the Americans were bent on trying to change the regime.
At the end of this exchange, I looked down. Our fried eggs had turned a questionable shade of gray. But diplomacy offered little choice. We began to eat.
Back in Vienna, after further consultation, Blix made the decision to request a special inspection. This was an extremely rare move on the part of the Agency. It had been done only once before, in Romania, shortly after the fall of Nicolae Ceauşescu, when the new Romanian regime had itself requested a special inspection in an effort to further discredit the former Communist president.[1] In the case of North Korea, calling for a special inspection of the disputed waste facility would send a clear signal that the IAEA was upping the ante.
As expected, the North Koreans refused. They insisted they would not provide the Agency with the requested access.
The IAEA Board of Governors called for a special session. The event was memorable, a closed-door session with restricted attendance. The Agency’s concerns about North Korea’s nuclear program were presented in three parts: first, the technical background, in terms of the discrepancies as observed and analyzed; second, the arguments justifying additional access; and third, the evidence of concealment.
The concealment portion involved the presentation of satellite imagery supplied by U.S. intelligence. Until this point, the satellite imagery of North Korea’s facilities had been made available to us only during briefings at the U.S. Mission, with a security officer, an elderly chap, stationed at the door of the briefing room—presumably to ensure that the IAEA inspectors would not run off with the images. The United States had altered the resolution of the images somewhat, in order to disguise their actual surveillance capability. Still, the windows of the buildings could clearly be discerned.
This was the first time in the history of the IAEA that the Secretariat had shared information supplied by Member State intelligence in a Board setting. Member States had historically been very uneasy about the Agency’s use of any information obtained through national intelligence agencies. The case of Iraq was an exception, but the Iraq inspections had been conducted under the extraordinary mandate of Security Council Resolution 687. This Board meeting on North Korea thus served as a quiet milestone: in subsequent years, referring to the use of intelligence would become much more routine.
Five weeks later, a Board resolution was proposed to refer the North Korean noncompliance to the UN Security Council. The response from Pyongyang was swift and decisive. Kim Il Sung’s regime issued terse edicts that restricted the Agency’s inspections, making it nearly impossible to investigate further the history of their nuclear program. However, North Korea remained in the NPT, and the Agency maintained its ability at least to verify North Korea’s declared nuclear material.
Possibly this opening remained because the Security Council did not take forceful action. China, with its emphasis on dialogue and restraint, refused to endorse certain steps, such as the imposition of sanctions or the adoption of a resolution demanding that North Korea agree not to make nuclear weapons and not to withdraw from the NPT. Because of China’s opposition, the resolution that was finally adopted “called on” but did not “require” North Korea to permit additional IAEA inspections. Resolution 825 was approved in May 1993, with China and Pakistan abstaining.
A stalemate now set in and continued through most of 1993. IAEA inspectors had to negotiate every inspection, even when merely servicing the Agency’s monitoring cameras and checking the film. Finally, in the spring of 1994, the situation came to a head. North Korea announced that they would begin removing the entire core of the reactor at Yongbyon—a total of eight thousand rods of spent fuel—for storage and potential reprocessing. This was a critical moment. By taking a specific array of samples at this stage, Agency inspectors would be able to verify the history of the reactor’s operation. The key question was whether this was still the original reactor core or whether an earlier core had at some point been removed and replaced but not reported to the IAEA. Since reactor operation produces plutonium, an unreported core of spent reactor fuel could already have been reprocessed in secret to separate the plutonium. By analyzing the material in these samples, the IAEA would be able to determine the amount of spent fuel (and by extension, the amount of plutonium) available to North Korea for possible diversion to weapons.
1
Following Ceauşescu’s ouster, the new government requested a special inspection to show that, under Ceauşescu’s rule, Romania had reprocessed one hundred milligrams of plutonium without informing the IAEA.