Future of U.S.-North Korea Ties Centers on the Past

The Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum, a cavernous complex here featuring downed American planes, captured U.S. tanks and piles of bullet-riddled GI helmets, hosted a most unlikely group last week.

The past met the future as North Korean guides escorted eight U.S. Marines through the 80-room museum, which includes a life-size panorama of key events in the 1950-53 Korean War--from the longest battle to the capture of a two-star American general--on the revolving top floor.

“It’s the most impressive war museum I’ve ever seen,” said one Marine.

The eerie encounter reflected the threshold crossed this month as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s North Korean visit launched a detente process that may finally end half a century of hostility--and bring a formal end to the war.

Although the initial breakthrough unfolded at a breathtaking speed, rapprochement will take months, even years, of intense diplomacy that will often dredge up the painful past, U.S. officials now caution.

“It’s a big step, but I think we have to be really careful about what we’re hearing,” said a senior U.S. official who traveled on Albright’s plane. “It’s in a paper bag. We have to figure out really what’s in it. And all of this is to be tested.”

The process is now expected to occur in three phases, each with its own vulnerabilities.

The immediate test will come this week during a second round of U.S.-North Korean talks over “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il’s pledge to Albright that Pyongyang is willing to agree to a long-term deal to scrap both the testing and the export of North Korea’s longer-range ballistic missiles in exchange for assistance in launching its satellites.

The missile issue is at the heart of recent tensions between the world’s most Stalinist state and its most powerful democracy. North Korea’s firing of a missile over Japan in 1998 ignited a regional crisis and intensified U.S. plans for a national missile defense shield that could cost tens of billions of dollars.

A team of U.S. arms experts, led by Robert Einhorn, assistant secretary of State for nonproliferation, will seek to “ensure that we have what we think we have,” said a key member of the Albright team.

The goal will be to lay the groundwork for a visit to Pyongyang by President Clinton, probably next month, and a more formal agreement.

“There will be an element of risk involved” after the Einhorn talks, the key participant said. “There will still be a gap to close.”

The final terms of a deal--particularly what is included and what is not and the means of verifying or monitoring the agreement--will have to be concluded during direct negotiations between Clinton and Kim.

The United States also hopes to be able to announce plans to open a U.S. liaison office in Pyongyang--a forerunner to an embassy and the same kind of facility set up during detente with China in the 1970s--as a result of Clinton’s visit.

The so-called framework agreement of 1994--which obliged the North to freeze its nuclear program in exchange for billions of dollars’ worth of aid from the U.S., Japan and South Korea, including help in building two nuclear power plants--called for an exchange of liaison offices.

Albright’s visit forced Washington to put together what U.S. officials called a “virtual embassy,” complete with Marine security guards and a dozen diplomats who drove fromSeoul across the demilitarized zone. All had full diplomatic immunity.

Barring a breakdown in diplomacy, the main glitch in setting up a liaison office will be the time required to assemble a team of diplomats, give them language training and then find and equip an appropriate facility.

The second, intermediate phase of rapprochement will involve not only the United States. A report by former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry commissioned by the Clinton administration after the 1998 missile episode concluded that the current North Korean government was around to stay--and that it could and should be dealt with diplomatically.

That report set in motion the formation of a coordinated effort by the United States, South Korea and Japan to use their combined leverage to address a wide range of outstanding issues, not all of which are equally important to all three.

Japan, for example, is demanding the hand-over of Japanese citizens abducted from its coastline by North Korea in the 1970s and ‘80s. South Korea’s priority is reunification of the peninsula and of families divided since the war. The United States wants North Korea to stop offering a haven to terrorists and consorting with state sponsors of terrorism that target American interests and allies as far afield as the Middle East.

All three seek a tangible reduction in the military threat posed by the North, but even that desire takes different forms. Japan and the United States are concerned about longer-range ballistic missiles that might reach their shores.

South Korea, however, is more concerned about the conventional military threat from North Korea, reflected by the more than 1 million combined Korean and U.S. troops now deployed along the 2 1/2-mile-deep demilitarized zone, the most heavily fortified border in the world. Longer-range ballistic missiles can’t target a landmass as close as South Korea.

Negotiating three diverse agendas will be “very hard,” said the key U.S. participant in last week’s talks. “It means we have to adopt each other’s goals. It also means that sometimes we’ll make more progress on another’s goals than we will on our own.”

The United States is also not the leader in the process. Detente with North Korea was the initiative of South Korean President Kim Dae Jung’s “sunshine policy,” which led to his groundbreaking visit to Pyongyang in the summer.

“Kim Dae Jung is a remarkable human being who had a vision and who has pursued it in a systematic way and has allowed the rest of us to build on what he has done,” Albright said after the two-day talks here ended. “I stood on the shoulders of a giant in order to be able to have the discussion with Kim Jong Il.”

The third and long-term phase of upcoming negotiations will involve sorting out the past. It will center on converting an open-ended armistice into a formal treaty ending the Korean War. For now, the joint strategy of the South Koreans, Japanese and Americans is to create confidence-building measures, including economic aid to North Korea, as incentives leading to agreement on security issues later, U.S. officials say.

But Pyongyang has already surprised its partners in detente by holding talks between the defense ministers of the two Koreas, a step Washington did not expect for several months, at best. Next will come steps such as a regulated dialogue, establishment of a hot line between Seoul and Pyongyang, the exchange of visits and the observance of military exercises, U.S. officials say.

“We’re still a year or more away from talks about real changes or real pullbacks,” the key member of the Albright team said.

Along the way, the mind-sets of half a century also will have to change. As the Marines left the war museum, several wanted their pictures taken with an elderly military officer bedecked with ribbons. But the North Korean balked.

“I don’t like Americans,” he said, fleeing down the street.