White House Worries Carter May Imperil N. Korea Talks

Former President Jimmy Carter is planning another personal diplomatic mission to the Korean peninsula, and Clinton Administration officials are worried that the irrepressible but controversial crisis mediator could upset delicate negotiations over North Korea’s nuclear program.

Some Administration officials are so concerned that they are considering urging President Clinton to ask Carter not to make the trip until after the current round of nuclear talks in Geneva has been concluded. The talks are expected to resume this week.

“Carter is a two-edged sword for the Administration,” one senior official said. “He played a constructive role in dealing with North Korea in his earlier visit and could well play a constructive role in promoting a North-South dialogue. But another trip would become more delicate if he becomes a factor in the talks on nuclear weapons.”

U.S. negotiators in Geneva are struggling to resolve a dangerous impasse that developed during the past year when North Korea balked at allowing international inspectors to determine whether it had been diverting plutonium for nuclear weapons production.

Carter has set no date for his new mission. But both North and South Korea have invited him to visit the region, and he has made it clear to associates that he plans to act soon.

His stated goal is to urge the leaders of both countries to begin a dialogue aimed at eventual reunification--an issue that is only indirectly linked to the nuclear problem.

Administration officials, however, fear that the strong-willed Carter might stray beyond the broad question of North-South relations and involve himself in the nuclear issue.

They recall that he has proven to be a highly independent emissary, most recently in Haiti and in an earlier visit to North Korea.

For example, in assessing North Korean leader Kim Il Sung, who was seen by U.S. analysts as an exceptionally ruthless dictator before his death in July, Carter offered a relatively benign view in a recent report.

“He is very friendly toward Christianity, having been saved from a Japanese prison in China by Christian pastors,” Carter wrote. “Also, he is an avid hunter (killed two bears and 200 boars this past year) and quite interested in fishing.”

Secretary of State Warren Christopher, discussing Carter’s role during an interview, stopped short of saying he would recommend a delay in Carter’s trip. But he left little doubt that the Administration does not want the former President involved in the nuclear issue, which he said “needs to be worked on carefully and with as much precision and discipline as we can.”

Two other senior officials, who asked not to be identified, suggested that Carter should be asked to delay a Korean trip at least until the nuclear talks have ended.

With the new trip to the Korean peninsula looming, State Department officials have tried to work out an arrangement with the former President that will permit him to participate but will carefully circumscribe his role.

Christopher, who served as deputy secretary of state in the Carter Administration, said he believes that he and Carter have ironed out their differences over the proper role for the former President to play in Administration policy.

“One thing for certain,” Christopher said, is that “there’ll be better coordination in the future” between Carter and the State Department.

Carter, after reading news accounts of his differences with the State Department shortly after returning from his recent trip to Haiti, telephoned Christopher and set up a Sept. 24 meeting in Plains, Ga.

They met for 2 1/2 hours at Carter’s house. Carter has not commented on the substance of the meeting, although during an appearance Saturday in Washington to receive a J. William Fulbright Prize for fostering international understanding, he praised his “good friend Warren Christopher” and told a State Department gathering in jest: “Our next task is to work for more domestic understanding.”

In the interview, Christopher said that during the meeting they agreed that the former President’s role in foreign policy poses “a complicated situation that has to be reviewed on a case-by-case basis” when it involves Carter traveling to meet with foreign leaders.

“We’ve been through a lot of things together,” said Christopher, who served as Carter’s chief negotiator for the Iranian hostage crisis. “It was a friendly, instructive session. We went through the background of various events, and coming out of it he recognizes the responsibility that I have as secretary of state.”

Christopher said Carter “has three roles: as world citizen, as possible mediator invited by parties of a dispute and as a representative or envoy of the President. And each of the roles must be thoroughly thought out or it might invite confusion, especially on the part of others.”

James R. Lilley, the U.S. ambassador to South Korea during the Ronald Reagan Administration, delivered a blunter assessment of Carter’s potential to help or hinder:

“Jimmy Carter may have a role to play, but it’s a very directed role. . . . And the role is North-South talks. Keep him away from nuclear weapons. Keep him away from sanctions. Keep him away from all of that. . . .

“But if you say to him very simply: ‘You have got a peacemaking crusade, President Carter. Bring the North Koreans into the South Korean talks and we will give you 10 Nobel Prizes and you will be the hero of the century,’ ” then Carter could be very helpful, Lilley suggested.

Carter met with Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang in June. Some Administration officials had opposed that meeting as well, but Clinton approved it after having turned down two earlier requests by Carter to visit the Communist state. At the time of the Carter trip, North Korea faced the prospect of U.N. sanctions for threatening to expel international nuclear inspectors.

The Carter mission was later credited with easing tensions between North and South Korea and creating a possible opening for resolving the nuclear problem.

Yet the former President angered Administration officials by telling Pyongyang that the United States was ready to drop its sanctions plan. Washington had no such intentions, but Carter’s comments effectively derailed the sanctions proposal and embarrassed the Administration.

Similarly, when Carter negotiated the agreement for Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras and Haiti’s other military leaders to relinquish power without a U.S. invasion, he did not insist that they leave the country--a proviso that Clinton had favored. The White House also had to insist on an Oct. 15 deadline for Cedras to step down; Carter’s original version of the agreement did not include a firm date.

As one foreign policy official said: “You pay a price when you get Carter. You diminish your own guy. And people will want him in negotiations because they think they’ll get a better deal.”

Some Administration officials also have accused Carter of undermining both Clinton and Christopher by publicly criticizing Administration foreign policy and by insisting on playing an increasingly active role in it.

In an interview with The Times just after returning from Port-au-Prince, Carter said he told Cedras he was “ashamed” of the U.S. embargo of Haiti, which he said deprived children of food and medicine and caused many deaths.

State Department officials said they were well aware that Carter is in a special category and can play a vital role in assisting the Administration. “But he has to fit in with the goals and objectives of the President and secretary of state,” a senior Administration official said. “He can’t be off on his own if he is an envoy for the President.”

In fact, after Carter traveled to North and South Korea in June, he wrote a report of his visits in which he said he had emphasized to the North and South Korean leaders that he was speaking as a private citizen representing the Carter Center, the Atlanta institution that houses his presidential library and is involved in public policy initiatives in many countries.

But in the report, copies of which were sent to supporters of the Carter Center, the former President also said his mission had an official blessing. He told of calling Clinton and of the President ordering the State Department to give him a definitive briefing on the building tensions between North and South Korea.

Carter telephoned Vice President Al Gore and told him that he was strongly inclined to accept Kim Il Sung’s longstanding invitation to visit the country. The following day Gore called and said Clinton approved.

U.S. officials have long described the regime created by Kim Il Sung as one of brutal, oppressive dictatorship. But the former President found his hosts “open, friendly and remarkably reticent about making abusive or critical comments about the South Koreans.”

He wrote that it was obvious that the threat of sanctions “had no effect on them whatsoever, except as a pending insult, branding North Korea as an outlaw nation and their revered leader as a liar and criminal. This was something they could not accept. Economic sanctions had no meaning for them, since their basic philosophy--almost a religion--is juche , meaning self-reliance.”

Times staff writer Jim Mann contributed to this report.