What to keep in mind with anticipated second summit

As a State Department official, Joel Wit participated in face-to-face talks with North Korea, and in 1999 led the first American nuclear inspection. Now a senior fellow at the Henry L. Stimson Center and director of the 38North project, he shares his opinion:

With a second summit between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un expected in late February … a North Korean pledge to denuclearize will be eyed warily in the West. Verification will require more than just photos snapped by orbiting spy satellites. The United States will need to send inspectors on the ground to ensure Kim’s regime is living up to its word. I know from personal experience that will not be an easy task. Here are some lessons I learned:

1.Mutual distrust runs deep.
2.Assemble the right team – [Back in 1999] a team of 10 inspectors was assembled quickly. It included scientists from American nuclear weapons labs but was dominated by a contingent of intelligence analysts. Because the North Koreans were allergic to anything that smacked of spying, we tried to hide the identities of the intelligence contingent by issuing new diplomatic passports to everyone, standard procedure for State Department employees. However, the North Koreans were not fooled. Once we arrived, one of our escorts — an old Foreign Ministry friend — asked me in private with a wry smile, “Why are all of the team’s diplomatic passports completely new except yours?” Nothing more was said, at least not initially.
3.Set detailed ground rules – Then, the details of what the team could inspect had to be worked out with the North Koreans. Talks almost collapsed over the North’s suspicions that a high-tech laser device we wanted to use to measure tunnels was really meant to secretly gather intelligence.
4.Know what to look for – American intelligence agencies had been watching [the nuclear site] for months so we had a great deal of information on activities at the site. Days before leaving for Asia, analysts from the Defense Intelligence Agency who believed North Korea was cheating briefed our team. They rattled off secret information they thought proved the site was intended to house a secret nuclear facility. That information covered everything from satellite photography to calculations on the volume of dirt piles near the suspected site that helped them reach conclusions about the size of the underground areas. It was impressive but proved wrong.
5.Expect the unexpected (and be prepared to deal with it).
6.Inspections can’t guarantee compliance – Inspections can reduce uncertainty but not eliminate it. The trick for any American president will be to judge whether uncertainty warrants breaking the deal or whether U.S. security is better served by keeping it.
7.Build trust. – The most important lesson is that verifying a denuclearization deal between Washington and Pyongyang will be impossible without trust-building and reconciliation between the two countries. North Korea will not be a defeated country. Its cooperation will be essential. That will only happen if there is a denuclearization deal that also paves the path away from Cold War confrontation toward an improving relationship with the United States.

[Read full NPR article]

US and North Korean spies have held secret talks for the past decade

The Washington Post reports that U.S. intelligence officials have met with North Korean counterparts secretly for a decade, a covert channel that allowed communications during tense times, aided in the release of detainees and helped pave the way for President Trump’s historic summit last year with Kim Jong-un.

The secret channel between the CIA and spies from America’s bitter adversary include two  missions to Pyongyang during the Obama administration by the then deputy CIA Director Michael Morell.

The channel appears to have gone dormant late in the Obama administration. Mike Pompeo re-energized it while CIA director, sending an agency officer to meet with North Korean counterparts in Singapore in August 2017. By early 2018, a whirlwind of secret and public talks were underway.

The U.S. and North Korea have never had diplomatic relations and don’t maintain embassies in each other’s capitals. They have long exchanged messages through the North Korean U.N. mission in New York. In contrast, before the new era of summits, the intelligence channel was a way to communicate directly with regime hard-liners.

North Korea’s key interlocutor was Gen. Kim Yong Chol, former head of Pyongyang’s Reconnaissance General Bureau spy agency. Now the senior North Korean negotiator, he met last Friday with President Trump and Secretary of State Pompeo.

[Washington Post]

Trump’s dual Korean challenges

The White House announced on Friday that President Trump will meet with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, in late February. A White House official said the date and the location of the meeting would be announced later.

The announcement came after a 90-minute meeting in the Oval Office between President Trump and Kim Yong-chol, a former North Korean intelligence chief, who has acted as the top nuclear negotiator for Kim Jong-un.

Meanwhile, President Trump’s demands that South Korea take on far more costs for hosting U.S. troops is straining the alliance and potentially playing into North Korea’s hands ahead of a second summit.

South Korea has about 28,500 U.S. troops on more than 20 sites and paid $855 million last year toward the total $2B cost. But the cost-sharing pact expired at the end of last year after 10 rounds of negotiations that left — in the words of one foreign ministry official in Seoul — a “huge gap” between both sides.

South Korean lawmakers and experts worry that Trump is so obsessed with Seoul paying more that he could take the previously unthinkable step of withdrawing some troops if a deal is not reached. That would be an indirect gift to North Korean leader Kim, undermining one of the most important cards the United States has during negotiations over North Korea’s nuclear program, experts say.

South Korean lawmakers called Trump’s demand unacceptable. Many members of Moon’s administration began their political careers as left-wing pro-democracy student activists, who were inclined to see the U.S. troop presence as more motivated by American strategic interests than South Korea’s views.

In “Fear,” Bob Woodward’s account of the Trump White House, the U.S. president is described as being obsessed with the cost of the U.S. troop presence, angrily threatening to pull them out on more than one occasion. At various times, he was talked down by a host of insiders, including former defense secretary Jim Mattis, former secretary of state Rex Tillerson and Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Victor Cha, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said, “There’ll be nothing to filter what Trump wants to do, nothing to filter a very uniformed view on how he wants things done.”

[From a Washington Post analysis]

North Korea envoy headed to U.S. to meet Pompeo, possibly Trump

Kim Yong Chol, Pyongyang’s lead negotiator in denuclearization talks with the United States, was headed for Washington on Thursday for expected talks with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and a possible encounter with President Donald Trump to lay the groundwork for a second U.S.-North Korea summit, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The North Korean visit could yield an announcement of plans for another summit between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The Washington Post quoted people familiar with recent diplomatic activity as saying that if announced soon, a second summit would probably take place in March or April, with Danang, Vietnam, the most likely venue.

There has been no indication, however, of any narrowing of differences over U.S. demands that North Korea abandon a nuclear weapons program that threatens the United States or over Pyongyang’s demand for a lifting of punishing sanctions.

On Wednesday, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence acknowledged that efforts to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear arsenal had not made headway. “While the president is promising dialogue with Chairman Kim, we still await concrete steps by North Korea to dismantle the nuclear weapons that threaten our people and our allies in the region,” Pence said in an address to U.S. ambassadors and other senior American diplomats at the State Department.

[Reuters]

What is North Korea’s definition of denuclearization?

One of the central questions in the negotiations over North Korea’s nuclear program: What does Kim Jong Un want in return for giving up his weapons?

The United States is demanding the “complete, verifiable and irreversible” denuclearization” of North Korea. But when Kim met Trump in Singapore last June, he promised only to “work toward the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”

Specifically, the issue is what Kim means by his insistence on the “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” — and whether that includes a demand for U.S. troops to leave South Korea and pull nuclear-armed American bombers and submarines out of the surrounding region. (South Korean President Moon Jae-in raised a separate issue: whether making a “political” declaration that the 1950-53 Korean War was over would affect the status of U.S. forces in South Korea.)

Moon’s own unification minister, Cho Myoung-gyon, told a parliamentary hearing on Jan. 9 that Seoul does not share Pyongyang’s definition of denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

The ambiguity over such a central question could be a negotiating tactic, leaving some tough questions for later in the peace process when mutual trust is higher. 

Many experts see all this as a problem, a sign that Trump and Moon are dodging some of the big issues in their desire to declare the talks a success. Read more

Could a Trump-Kim deal leave Japan in the lurch?

As a second summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un looms, and as the American president grapples with an all-consuming Russia probe, fears are growing that Trump’s next move could put Tokyo in a bind.

“I think there’s a very a high chance — maybe more than 50 percent — that, if Trump meets Kim again, there will be a deal that sells out allies,” said Van Jackson, a former Pentagon official and North Korea expert who teaches at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.

Trump has touted his dealings with Kim as his administration’s signature foreign policy achievement, frequently pointing to the lack of nuclear tests by the North and the absence of missiles being shot over Japan — part of an informal moratorium by Pyongyang on atomic or longer-range missile tests. Now, with the White House mired in what is expected to be a punishing year for the president as the probe into alleged Russia interference in the 2016 election gains steam, Trump could look to North Korea for a much-needed victory.

“Anything that can deflect attention from serious questions about Trump’s integrity and fitness for office will be seen by this White House as worth trying,” said Andrew O’Neil, an expert on North Korea and a professor at Griffith University in Australia.

For Trump, such a victory could involve the U.S. signing off on the easing of crippling sanctions on the North in exchange for Pyongyang capping or curbing intercontinental ballistic missiles believed capable of striking much of the United States, while permitting it to keep some level short- and midrange missiles that could hit Japan, including the estimated 200 to 300 medium-range Nodong missiles it possesses. Those missiles can fly about 1,300 km (800 miles). Such a move, while adhering to Trump’s “America First” mantra, would almost assuredly have devastating implications for the U.S. alliance with Japan.

[The Japan Times]

Negotiating a location for second US-North Korea summit

President Trump said Sunday that the US is “negotiating a location” for a second summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, whom Trump says he has spoken to “indirectly.”

Trump also said Sunday that the US has a “very good dialogue” going with North Korea, despite signs that talks between the two countries appear to have reached a stalemate.

Trump noted that sanctions against North Korea will remain “in full force and effect” in the meantime, and warned that if anyone else had been elected US president, “you’d be at war right now.”

“You would right now be in a nice, big fat war in Asia with North Korea if I wasn’t elected president,” Trump said.

Last week, Trump said he had received a “great” letter from Kim and held it aloft in the Cabinet Room for reporters to see.

Trump’s remarks last week came one day after Kim’s New Year’s address, in which the North Korean leader warned the US about sanctions. “I’ll endeavor towards a result that will be welcomed by the international community,” Kim said of the potential second meeting between the two leaders. North Korea, however, would have “no choice but to defend our country’s sovereignty and supreme interest, and find a new way to settle peace on our peninsula” if the US “misinterprets our people’s patience, and makes one-sided demands and continues down the path of sanctions and pressure on our republic,” Kim said.

[CNN]