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Episode Info
- Season1
- Episode7
Hosted by Christina Ruffini and Sir Richard Dearlove
Guest
Robert Gallucci
Robert Gallucci attempted to negotiate an agreement with North Korea and was nearly undermined by Robert Gallucci's own colleagues.
Episode Summary
Ever wonder what—exactly—it is like, trying to get North Korea to agree to anything? You need to listen to Robert Gallucci tell it. And how his own people nearly wrecked everything.
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Transcript
INTRODUCTION
Kosinski: Hello, and welcome back to One Decision, where we take you deep behind the scenes of the difficult decisions, at times really messy ones, that shape history, hopefully for the better, though not always. Where we left off last episode, the State Department's lead negotiator for North Korea, Bob Gallucci, found himself in a very bad spot. There was talk as well as planning for potentially actual war with North Korea. Add to that former president Jimmy Carter (this was the 1990s, the Clinton years) had just taken it upon himself to go to North Korea and try to stir up some peace. What he came back with, though, and announced on live television as this big deal was not really a deal at all. At least it did nothing to stop North Korea's plutonium processing for its budding nuclear program, which of course was the problem. Now Bob and the very top of the US administration had to figure out how to fix this without embarrassing everyone, pushing North Korea away from even talking anymore, and without pushing these two countries into a brutal second Korean war. That's all. Bob, your head must have been spinning.
INTERVIEW
Gallucci: Al Gore made his comment now, you you gotta make lemonade. What does lemonade look like? To just go into another room and figure out what we could say that would, one, let us get back to the negotiating table. Two, not just be accepting the Carter deal. Right? And three, be publicly defensible as a strong position by President Clinton. Those are the three qualities. And we sat there and kicked stuff around.
Kosinski: Bob and two other officials decide they would go and tell their North Korean counterparts that the US was actually now requiring them not to refuel their nuclear reactor.
Gallucci: And then we had a slice of baloney thin, thinly, more thinly, when I was doing the press briefing because they said, well, what's the deal? First I had to persuade the press that this was a good deal, but that I wasn't raising the bar, that it's exactly what we were doing was raising the bar. But I'd said, you know, this is a thing that's consistent with what we wanted, limit the plutonium in North Korea. So I I kinda jumbled that up so that it didn't look like we were rejecting the deal that president Carter had made and made a new deal with the North Koreans. And if they didn't accept it, we would have been kicking the North Koreans in the teeth.
Kosinski: You must have been like, how how am I gonna get through this?
Gallucci: You know, we we we have to figure out how to make this work. We don't we don't wanna fight a second Korean war. I mean, you think of of what you think of when you think of wars. And it is all that. So it was, and maybe in diplomatic terms, the most edgy and most difficult, those that period with the North Koreans when it looked like it was all gonna fall apart.
Kosinski: So was it you who then calls the North Koreans? By the way, this isn't quite the deal you might be thinking it is. How how do you convey that to them?
Gallucci: We decided we needed to do this ourselves, not through president Carter. So we have, it's called the New York channel. Through their UN their mission to the UN in New York, that was the method that we used to communicate with the North Koreans. And we told them that they needed to accept these terms in the same channel.
Kosinski: It was a tense, nail biting few days, but that's all it took for the North Koreans to respond. They would accept.
Gallucci: The three of us, I think, thought there was a chance they would accept it if they really thought the alternative was gonna be to go to war with the United States of America. And I think we were getting pretty persuasive that that was gonna be their chance. So I think our military readiness played an important role in having the diplomacy succeed. And plus, this wasn't a, for them it wasn't a highly visible defeat not to refuel. I mean, it's a it's a forgive me, but a pissy five megawatt reactor, five megawatt electric gets rated at, little research reactor essentially, produces enough plutonium for maybe one bomb a year. It seemed like they should accept it if they really wanted to continue the negotiations, but we weren't that sure.
Kosinski: You guys made the right decision.
Gallucci: Yeah. I mean, I I we gotta give this one to the president at the end of the day because he's the one who approved that. And in a sense, Jimmy Carter is showing up in North Korea, a former US president.
Kosinski: That was a big deal for the North Koreans. So even though Bob had to nervously clean up the toxic aftermath of this situation, Carter's involvement likely did give the North Koreans a confidence, the ability to open the door and walk out of the war footing they were facing, which still didn't mean at all that Carter was happy with the decision Bob took.
Gallucci: When he found out that, the message we sent back to the North Koreans was not, yep, we'll see you in Geneva. It was, if you give us through diplomatic channels, not through Jimmy Carter, through diplomatic channels, that you will agree you're not gonna produce any more plutonium in that reactor as long as we're negotiating. There was more to it, but we'll go back to the negotiating table with When he found out we had, that the phrase we were trying to avoid using with the press was that we had raised the bar, he was pissed. I mean, that would be the technical diplomatic word. Carter was furious that he had done this and he was getting no credit. You know, I understood why he felt this way. I understood why President Clinton's people were trying to protect him politically. I understood all this. It was too bad. He had a bad taste in his mouth, but I don't think we could have gotten a deal and gotten back to the negotiating table without him going to North Korea. So I was I was pleased. I was sorry, you know, it worked that way. What would you say the outcome outcome of your decision was? To create the opportunity for diplomacy to work. In other words, I could go back to Geneva, which I did, I think the following week. And we were in right away, if you remember that period, Kim Il Sung dies. There's another kerfuffle over that. But we are in our negotiating mode again.
Kosinski: Yeah. And like all decisions or agreements with North Korea, you know, it was not to come to any big fruition, unfortunately.
Gallucci: Well, we thought what you just said was wrong, but what you just said turned out to be right. So, I mean, at the time we said, geez, we shut down a plutonium program. I mean, just a moment here, take a step back. Little five megawatt reactor wasn't much, but they had two other reactors under construction. Right? The CIA said that will produce all three together about 200 kilograms of plutonium a year. That's a lot of nuclear weapons, right? That's about 40 nuclear weapons worth each year. The CIA predicted that by the year 2000, this is 1994, six years on when those reactors are finished and functioning, by the year 2000, when the next president comes in, he will find North Korea with a 100 nuclear weapons. When the next president came in, how many nuclear weapons did North Korea have? Zero. Right? So we think this deal shut them down. Okay? And then of course, the deal falls apart. Early in the Bush administration, the North goes off, starts up the reactor again, starts producing plutonium, tests the nuclear device in 2006, and they're now in nuclear weapons state. And now they probably have 50 nuclear weapons. But for that, for a period of maybe eight, nine years after the agreed framework post 1994, the program was shut down.
Kosinski: And that is a big deal, preventing several years' worth of plutonium production and an estimated 100 nuclear bombs. Still, some Republicans thought the agreement was a major sellout that the US didn't get nearly enough. The late senator John McCain called Bob a traitor for his negotiations on this.
Gallucci: We we were, you know, the wusses of the West here. I mean, it always drove me kinda nutty to have, I mean, Murkowski, I don't mean the current Senator Murkowski, but her father would always yell, Why are you taking this? What are you doing for North Koreans? And I said, Well, we would like not to go to war. And he'd say, I would just tell them what they have to do. We're the United States of America. They're a little pissant country. Said senator, that's not exactly how they see it. That's not the way diplomacy works, even with small countries. You know, diplomacy requires compromise.
Kosinski: What Bob and his team did was seriously delay North Korea's nuclear program for nearly a decade.
Gallucci: Yeah. I'm glad you think it's significant. We thought it was significant, but not everybody thinks it's significant. And another way of putting this is our policy preventing a North Korean nuclear weapons program was a failure. Because overall this period, at the end of the day, we're now looking at a nuclear weapon state with tens of nuclear weapons, however exactly many they have, both plutonium and highly enriched uranium cores may be a thermonuclear weapon, which has a yield at 20 times greater than the Nagasaki bomb, and missiles of extended range possibly to reach your hometown. So we can't look back and say what a great success was American policy. Did we have a shining moment? Maybe. During the Bush administration, when things fell apart and during the Obama administration, not close to nothing happened. This was the era of strategic patience, remember? Yeah, good old strategic patience. This takes two perfectly good words and makes a really crappy phrase. You know, they're much more sophisticated now, it's been thirty years. They've been around the block with a lot of US negotiators. They've been talking with the South. We have a leader in North Korea, the chairman, who's had the experience of meeting an American president, sitting American president, quite unusual. So, it's a different it's a different, atmosphere now. I think this administration will eventually get negotiations going with the North. I'm not sure exactly when, but I'm anticipating they will.
Kosinski: What do you think about the current state of the relationship, but also the prospects for anything changing in North Korea in terms of its threat to the rest of us? Conventional wisdom is emerging that North Korea will never give up its nuclear weapons.
Gallucci: I do not share that view. I'm of the view that I don't know whether North Korea will give up its nuclear weapons. But I certainly would give it a run. I said this to the North Korean who I had known years before, and he said, why would we ever trust you to and give up our nuclear weapons? And we took so long, and it's been so hard to get them. And I said, because you'd be safer. You don't have you know, with nuclear weapons, you are always gonna be a target. You're on a target list now for our nuclear weapons because you have nuclear weapons. You keep saying you want these weapons because you're afraid of that America will launch a regime change and flip your regime. He said, that's what you do. And he started giving me back Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya, and all that. Said, Just, you know, slow down here. Do you think South Korea worries about us changing their regime? What's preventing good relations between our two countries? You would very much like to have a friend like South Korea does that is not China and next door, right? You'd like to have a superpower, even if it's across the Pacific Ocean, that's the best place for your superpower friend to be, you know, 6,000 miles away, 7,000 miles away. So what's preventing this? And I said, it is one, nuclear weapons and two, it's the way you treat your own people. It's a human rights issue. So he said, there you go, wanting to change our regime again. I said, no, that's not what regime change means.
Kosinski: We lecture everybody and you know, we have more people incarcerated in the United States than any other advanced country in the world, but we still lecture everybody about their human rights policy. That's what we do. He says one of the most painful things about the time of his decision was that he had to know the technical issues inside and out even better than his boss or his boss's boss, which is both isolating and frustrating because so few other humans truly understand the significance or insignificance of any part of a deal. For example, the reason the IAEA wanted to do special inspections in North Korea was so that they could take samples at a possible radioactive waste site to analyze whether North Korea was telling the truth about the amount of plutonium they claimed to have. The way this came out in the press is that there was a secret plutonium storage place that the North Koreans had that we knew about and they wouldn't let us go there. That was an easier story
Gallucci: than, well, let me explain to you about isotopes of plutonium and how long they're in a reactor for burn up and how radioactive decay called transmutation takes place. Nobody's interested in that. But not only not the press, not my boss, right? Too much, you know? It's just too much.
Kosinski: It's frustrating because nuance, big things hinge on nuance all the time.
Gallucci: They do. And I was once briefing at the National Press Club. And I actually, I had good news. I kept getting these, forgive me, shit eating questions. Look, you guys, I said, for you, good news is bad news. Right? Bad news is good news. Complicated news is no news at all. And simple bad news is the best news in the world. Because the the goal of the American press is to sell ads. You're just trying to get eyeballs. And the way to get eyeballs is to have a big old clown show. The president could have gone in front of that press corps, you know, you know what that looks like in that briefing room, and said, well, Jimmy Carter made a deal, and, and the inspectors who are still there can stay there. And now we're gonna go back to the negotiating table, notwithstanding the fact that they destroyed history. He couldn't have done that, right? And if you raise the bar too high, well, we told them they had to give up their separated plutonium, whatever they've got, they would have said no. We knew what the criteria for a successful solution would be. It had to be politically successful domestically in the United States. It had to be negotiable with the with the North Koreans they had to accept it. And it had to be defensible from the national security perspective, so that the president could stand up and stand behind it. So that we're trying to square that circle, we felt we'd, you know, we've done as good as we're gonna be able to do with that. It's like you made this this decision that was right for the time, and it was like a decision that so few people understood. I'd love to tell you that I didn't care what the critiques were, but I did. And that some of the critiques came from the press. A lot of them came from Republicans who were really offended by the effort at this which had gone on by that time for a full year to negotiate with North Korea. So I would love for everybody to be more sophisticated and for politics to stop at the water's edge. But as you know, politics does not stop at the water's edge.
Kosinski: How do you feel about your decision today? You feel good about it? You feel I mean, you you one could say that you were doing God's work and you did it.
Gallucci: I feel good about a case of where diplomacy worked, and it did, as I said, for a while. I think you captured it with a phrase a little a little bit ago. It was not a permanent solution, but it worked for a while.
Kosinski: And I think it can work again. And I think it's worth the effort. And in a nutshell, what did you learn from the experience? What did it how did it sort of shape you after that? Because it was a pretty harrowing time. I would say the biggest thing is don't give up. Great advice. Bob, it's so nice to talk to you again. Thanks for delving into it. Same to you. Let's bring Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6, back to hash all of this out, a decision that was both difficult and controversial, as well as both successful and unsuccessful, it doesn't get much more tricky and with actual war looming on the horizon.
ANALYSIS WITH SIR RICHARD DEARLOVE
Dearlove: I think it's someone with that face right up to the problem, You know and I love the cultural juxtaposition between this wonderful American Italian and these really bizarre North Koreans. And I mean I've met and talked to the North Koreans and they are so strange. They don't behave, they have a sort of scripted behaviour which they have to follow. And it's very disconcerting.
Kosinski: Yeah, and if this had erupted, this could have been beyond ugly.
Dearlove: I mean a war on the North Korean Peninsula would be horrendous. I mean I've been up to the DMZ and stood on the, you know, right on the line where you've got the two groups of special forces, you know, guards facing each other. I mean it's the last Cold War armistice line still in existence and it's pretty terrifying. And then you've got, if you look across the DMZ into North Korea, you've got the biggest flagpole in the world flying the North Korean flag.
Kosinski: How would you rate this decision? Do you think the US should have pushed for much more?
Dearlove: I I mean, I think it's quite surprising they achieved anything. A lot has happened since then.
Kosinski: Do you see any hope in the personage of Kim Jong Un that he might have some inclination to change things, to, you know, bring his country into the modern age finally? Any any glimmer of hope there? Not really.
Dearlove: Not yet. In fact, you know, there's less dialogue, I think, with them. There's greater emphasis by North Korea on military buildup. They clearly refined their rocketry and missile technology, and they probably have a fissile material stockpile that takes them above 50 warheads. But I mean I still believe that the primary importance of this build up is really just to blackmail the West, to make sure a) the regime survives, to make sure that the population doesn't starve, and maybe that they then bargain a bit and bargain something away, you know, to get the rice or whatever it is they lack. But I think the country that could always make a bigger difference to North Korea is China. China doesn't really have much incentive to help the United States sort the Korean problem. And I think any solution, mean, any significant progress would be a US Chinese initiative.
Kosinski: It would have to be joint. When Bob Gallucci was listening to Jimmy Carter announce this big deal with North Korea, which of course, was not such a big deal. Did he really have a choice, though? He could have either let that ride and North Korea would keep on enriching, or he could take that risk and go back to the North Koreans and seem like he was reneging on what they had just agreed to. Was it even a viable choice not to go back to them? And I mean, it's a nightmare scenario. It was you know, Former does a deal behind your back and tells you he's done it, you know, waves the flag on CNN and says this is just a great deal. I I think if anyone, if I'd been in Gallucci's shoes, would have known exactly what he did,
Dearlove: which is just to sit there, put his crash helmet on. And I've been in exactly that situation. And they say, oh, because you know the head of MI6 can go and do things because in a way he's a deniable diplomat. You know you're not a diplomat and you're deniable, the meeting never took place, so you're sent off to sort out some ghastly problem which the politicians do not want to touch with a barge pole. It's quite amusing. It's a classic position, you're in. I love how he said he was chosen to be the lead negotiator as an insult to the other side.
Kosinski: I've also been I've also been the insult on various occasions. What other memories of dealing with North Korea stay with you or wake you up as nightmares?
Dearlove: Just dealing with them was was they always had its sort of well, I thought it had its humorous side. They were intrigued. They were intrigued by the fact that British lawns were so beautiful and they said, well, know, just can't, you know, lawns in North Korea just don't look like that and you must have some secret blend of grasses. They asked me whether I could obtain samples of English grass seed.
Dearlove: So I did, I got them a whole lots of different samples, which obviously went off to some biological institute. And the other thing which was interesting was they always used to take me to the most expensive restaurants in Geneva.
Kosinski: So they wanted to show you that they were sort of these suave characters. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like Bob Gallucci also had some rather interesting times with them.
Dearlove: Well, I I think it's a real tribute to Bob Gallucci that, in a way he got as far as he did.
Kosinski: I agree, and I think about it sometimes that there are so many people like this, especially around Washington. They had very senior roles but all behind the scenes, like in the State Department, and they have done so much for their country, but most other people have no idea. So you could be sitting next to this person in a restaurant somewhere, and you have no clue that this is the person who wrangled a deal with North Korea years ago and stopped their freaking nuclear program. Be honest, did you think that Donald Trump was going to make any headway in his overtures to Kim Jong Un?
Dearlove: Not really. But on the other hand, it was quite a good idea to go and talk to him. You think so? Well of course Kim Jong Un is desperate for recognition on the world state and that was a huge prize for North Korea. But on the other hand, I believe fundamentally in talking to your enemies if you can. And you never know what might have come out of it, but I mean I think there was a certain naivety in Trump feeling that he could fix something. What did happen is that the North Koreans accelerated their nuclear weapons and their missile programme. So I think in the last four or five years my guess is it's advanced at a significant speed. Whereas in the past we were not dealing with what I would describe as flight tested weapon systems. I'll tell you one last anecdote. A very good friend of mine went to North Korea on an inter parliamentary union visit and he's a Dutch Roman Catholic and he said to the North Koreans as the weekend approached, he said I see from your constitution that you have freedom of religion. I would like to go to Catholic Mass on Sunday please. You know, silence on the part of his, you know, guides and interpreters. Anyway, what happened was Sunday came and lo and behold he was picked up and taken to a sort of Catholic chapel. And after about five minutes, he realized that the congregation, the priests, were all actors and that they had been rehearsing for forty eight hours.
Kosinski: Oh god. Like boom, instant Catholic mass.
Dearlove: They were determined to show him that, oh yes, of course, we do have freedom of religion in North Korea. But he said he was absolutely convinced that it was a show that had been put on for him personally.
Kosinski: That's how weird it is. We'll leave it on that lovely note. Well, it's great talking to you, Michelle, and I look forward to us chatting. Thanks, Richard. And thank you for joining us on this episode of One Decision. I'm Michelle Kosinski. Subscribe to us wherever you find your podcast to delve into the minds of those playing for high stakes and whose decisions can shape our world and our lives in it.
