‘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.”
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