‘You will be better advised,” John Mitchell once famously said, “to watch what we do instead of what we say.” This maxim, uttered by Richard Nixon’s pipe-smoking attorney general, has echoed through the ages, applauded and denounced for its frankness in acknowledging the occasional need for duplicity, or at least the odd sleight of hand, in the practice of government.
Now, with the arrival of North Korea’s declaration of its nuclear programs — long overdue and woefully inadequate in its disclosure of key data — and with the enthusiastic reception afforded the document by the current White House and State Department, the Bush administration seems to have taken Mitchell’s maxim to heart.
The 60-page declaration is a product of the so-called February 13 agreement, the road map for North Korean denuclearization signed in 2007 by all members of the Six-Party talks. The accord, entitled “Initial Actions To Implement Six-Party Joint Statement,” obligated Pyongyang to submit, by the end of 2007 and in exchange for certain benefits it has already received, such as large shipments of heavy fuel oil and infrastructural upgrades, “a complete declaration of all nuclear programs.”
Time and again, the top State Department official on the North Korean account, Assistant Secretary Christopher Hill, insisted the United States and its allies in the Six-Party talks would accept nothing less. “We can’t go with something that’s 80 percent or 90 percent,” Hill told reporters at the Okura Hotel in Tokyo this past January, when the deadline for the declaration’s submission had already passed. “We really need to go with something that’s complete.” “Frankly speaking,” Hill added at the Japanese Foreign Ministry, “a partial declaration is really no declaration at all.” Asked about the lapsed deadline, Hill exalted comprehensiveness over timeliness: “We felt it was better for them to give us a complete one and correct one even if it’s going to be a late one.” The following month, Hill reiterated, in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, that “we cannot accept a declaration that is incomplete or incorrect.”
Half a year later, the declaration we have accepted is by all accounts far from “complete” or “correct.” First, it omits the number of plutonium-based bombs produced at the massive and aging reactor at Yongbyon, which the North Koreans, having tested a nuclear device in October 2006, have now begun to disable. Equally concerning, the declaration also fails to provide any data on two other key issues: the regime’s secret highly enriched uranium (HEU) program, which the U.S. intelligence community judges with “high confidence” to have existed, and with “moderate confidence” to be ongoing; and the North’s proliferation of nuclear technology to other state sponsors of terrorism. This latter issue came to the fore last September, after Israeli fighter jets destroyed a nuclear facility North Korean workers were building in the deserts of northeastern Syria.
These were, we heard repeatedly, the issues of gravest concern to Ambassador Hill. Eight days after the ink dried on the February 13 agreement, he told a Washington think tank audience that the North Koreans had “attempted to purchase some aluminum tubes from Germany” and that there were “indications that they were successful in getting some of these tubes elsewhere.” Six days later, he told the House Foreign Affairs Committee: “We know from the Pakistanis that [the North Koreans] bought these centrifuges. There’s no other purpose for a centrifuge of that kind than to produce highly enriched uranium.” Last November, senior Bush administration officials gathered at the headquarters of the Air Force Technical Applications Center, located on Patrick Air Force Base in Florida, for a special briefing on the traces of HEU discovered on some of the aluminum tubes Pyongyang, inexplicably, provided for our inspection. “It is my professional judgment,” Hill had confidently told a House subcommittee the previous month, “that by the end of this year, we will have a clarity on [the North’s] uranium enrichment such that we can be assured that a highly enriched uranium program is no longer a threat to our country.”
Yet in welcoming the North’s declaration last week, eight months after Hill offered his “professional judgment,” White House National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley admitted the Six-Party allies still need to “get to the bottom of this issue of the uranium enrichment…Our intelligence community has some concerns about their past activities and has some concerns about potentially ongoing activities.” And the proliferation activity? “We want to get to the bottom of that” as well, Hadley said, “to make sure there is not continuing activity going on between North Korea and Syria, or activity with respect to other locations as well.”
So it would appear that, after long delay, the Bush administration has chosen to accept — and to hail as “a good step forward,” in the words of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice — a “partial declaration” of the very sort her point man on the issue, Ambassador Hill, dismissed earlier this year as “no declaration at all.” Indeed, given the nature of the document’s omissions, and the administration’s own stated suspicions about ongoing activities, it is fair to wonder whether the declaration even rises to the level of the “80 percent or 90 percent” Hill also declared unacceptable in January. All the North Koreans were willing to say in their declaration about HEU and Syria, according to Hadley, was that “they’re not engaged in these activities now and won’t [be] in the future.” “They also have acknowledged in writing that we have raised concerns,” Hadley added, as if that were a victory for American diplomacy.
Pressed to explain the administration’s apparent relaxation of standards for accepting the North’s declaration, Hill defended the progress made to date in the Six-Party talks, even as he acknowledged “you’re looking at a partially finished product here and we’ve got to finish the job.” “Obviously, we would like to deal with things in one fell swoop, but sometimes,” Hill told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington on July 1, “you have to kind of do things on an incremental basis… I would draw your attention to the fact that a year ago they were producing plutonium and not only are they not producing plutonium, but they can’t produce plutonium because the thing is disabled.”
To close observers of the Six-Party process, however, the Bush administration’s capitulation on the contents of the declaration came as no surprise. On January 25 of this year, citing foreign diplomats involved in the Six-Party talks and American analysts familiar with the negotiations, Fox News reported that Hill “is now considering accepting a declaration that would be less than complete, carving out the two most contentious issues for later resolution…Hill has floated the idea of allowing the North Koreans to exclude from their declaration both their highly enriched uranium (HEU) program and their nuclear collaboration with Syria, with the understanding that these issues would be revisited later.”
In a series of angry e-mails, all on the record but unpublished until now, Hill vehemently denied the story. “Completely inaccurate,” he wrote. “This idea that we would ignore the most contentious items and take them up later is ridiculous. I don’t believe in ‘carve outs’ and even if I did (which I don’t) how in the world would this work in practical terms? Do you really think we could make concessions on the basis of an incomplete declaration, then somehow we would be able to return to the contentious issues AFTER – AFTER!!!??? — giving away all our leverage? Why? I can tell you this stupidity has never been under consideration by anyone who is part of the process or truly close to the process.
“I suspect,” Hill continued, “that you have sources who are a little out of it, a little frustrated either because they want the process to go forward or are afraid it might, and who are much more interested in manipulating you rather than enlightening you because I can assure you that nobody involved in this process has ever suggested this foolishness or floated such ideas because they don’t make any sense.” Finally, Hill addressed, without invitation or foundation, what he assumed to be the reporter’s political leanings. “And, btw, I am a conservative, meaning I take this messy world as I see it and try to deal with painful reality, stay in channels, respect institutions, observe service discipline and follow instructions. You are not talking to conservatives. Believe me.”
When the reporter politely thanked Hill and promised to distill his rant down to a quotable reaction, suitable for use in reporting, Hill shot back: “Just to be clear. I am calling your piece completely inaccurate. And since you are unable to provide a single named source — not a one, I have to wonder what you have been drinking (or smoking since you are obviously not a conservative).”
The reporter still hasn’t disclosed what he is smoking, but the plumes from John Mitchell’s pipe hang heavy today over the Bush White House and Rice’s State.
– James Rosen is a Fox News Washington correspondent and author of The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate.