Author: David E. Sanger
Publication: The New York Times
Date: November 24, 2002
Last July, American intelligence
agencies tracked a Pakistani cargo aircraft as it landed at a North Korean
airfield and took on a secret payload: ballistic missile parts, the chief
export of North Korea's military.
The shipment was brazen enough,
in full view of American spy satellites. But intelligence officials who
described the incident say even the mode of transport seemed a subtle slap
at Washington: the Pakistani plane was an American-built C-130.
It was part of the military force
that President Pervez Musharraf had told President Bush last year would
be devoted to hunting down the terrorists of Al Qaeda, one reason the administration
was hailing its new cooperation with a country that only a year before
it had labeled a rogue state.
But several times since that new
alliance was cemented, American intelligence agencies watched silently
as Pakistan's air fleet conducted a deadly barter with North Korea. In
transactions intelligence agencies are still unraveling, the North provided
General Musharraf with missile parts he needs to build a nuclear arsenal
capable of reaching every strategic site in India.
In a perfect marriage of interests,
Pakistan provided the North with many of the designs for gas centrifuges
and much of the machinery it needs to make highly enriched uranium for
the country's latest nuclear weapons project, one intended to put at risk
South Korea, Japan and 100,000 American troops in Northeast Asia.
The Central Intelligence Agency
told members of Congress this week that North Korea's uranium enrichment
program, which it discovered only this summer, will produce enough material
to produce weapons in two to three years. Previously it has estimated that
North Korea probably extracted enough plutonium from a nuclear reactor
to build one or two weapons, until that program was halted in 1994 in a
confrontation with the United States.
Yet the C.I.A. report - at least
the unclassified version - made no mention of how one of the world's poorest
and most isolated nations put together its new, complex uranium project.
In interviews over the past three
weeks, officials and experts in Washington, Pakistan and here in the capital
of South Korea described a relationship between North Korea and Pakistan
that now appears much deeper and more dangerous than the United States
and its Asian allies first suspected.
The accounts raise disturbing questions
about the nature of the uneasy American alliance with General Musharraf's
government. The officials and experts described how, even after Mr. Musharraf
sided with the United States in ousting the Taliban and hunting down Qaeda
leaders, Pakistan's secretive A. Q. Khan Nuclear Research Laboratories
continued its murky relationship with the North Korean military. It was
a partnership linking an insecure Islamic nation and a failing Communist
one, each in need of the other's expertise.
Pakistan was desperate to counter
India's superior military force, but encountered years of American-imposed
sanctions, so it turned to North Korea. For its part, North Korea, increasingly
cut off from Russia and China, tried to replicate Pakistan's success in
developing nuclear weapons based on uranium, one of the few commodities
that North Korea has in plentiful supply.
Yet while the United States has
put tremendous diplomatic pressure on North Korea in the past two months
to abandon the project, and has cut off oil supplies to the country, it
has never publicly discussed the role of Pakistan or other nations in supplying
that effort.
American and South Korean officials,
when speaking anonymously, say the reason is obvious: the Bush administration
has determined that Pakistan's cooperation in the search for Al Qaeda is
so critical - especially with new evidence suggesting that Osama bin Laden
is still alive, perhaps on Pakistani soil.
So far, the White House has ignored
federal statutes that require President Bush to impose stiff economic penalties
on any country involved in nuclear proliferation or, alternatively, to
issue a public waiver of those penalties in the interest of national security.
Mr. Bush last year removed penalties that were imposed on Pakistan after
it set off a series of nuclear tests in 1998.
White House officials would not
comment on the record for this article, saying that discussing Pakistan's
role could compromise classified intelligence. Instead, they noted that
General Musharraf, after first denying Pakistani involvement in North Korea's
nuclear effort, has assured Secretary of State Colin L. Powell that no
such trade will occur in the future.
"He said, `Four hundred percent
assurance that there is no such interchange taking place now,' " Secretary
Powell said in a briefing late last month. Pressed about Pakistan's contributions
to the nuclear program that North Korea admitted to last month, Secretary
Powell smiled tightly and said, "We didn't talk about the past."
A State Department spokesman, Philip
Reeker, said, "We are aware of the allegations" about Pakistan, though
he would not comment on the substance. "This adminsitration will abide
by the law," he said.
Intelligence officials say they
have seen no evidence of exchanges since Washington protested the July
missile shipment. Even in that incident, they cannot determine if the C-130
that picked up missile parts in North Korea brought nuclear- related goods
to North Korea.
But American and Asian officials
are far from certain that Pakistan has cut off the relationship, or even
whether General Musharraf is in control of the transactions.
Yet in the words of one American
official who has reviewed the intelligence, North Korea's drive in the
past year to begin full-scale enrichment of uranium uses technology that
"has `Made in Pakistan' stamped all over it." They doubt that North Korea
will end its effort even if Pakistan cuts off its supplies.
"In Kim Jong Il's view, what's the
difference between North Korea and Iraq?" asked one senior American official
with long experience dealing with North Korea. "Saddam doesn't have one,
and look what's happening to him."
A Meeting of Minds in 1993
Pakistan's military ties to North
Korea go back to the 1970's. But they took a
decisive turn in 1993, just as
the United States was forcing the North to open up its huge nuclear reactor
facilities at Yongbyon. Yongbyon was clearly a factory for producing bomb-grade
plutonium from spent nuclear fuel.
When North Korea refused to allow
in inspectors headed by Hans Blix, the man now leading the inspections
in Iraq, President Bill Clinton went to the United Nations to press penalties
and the Pentagon drew up contingency plans for a strike against the plant
in case North Korea removed the fuel rods to begin making bomb-grade plutonium.
In the midst of that face-off, Benazir
Bhutto, then the prime minister of Pakistan, arrived in Pyongyang, the
North Korean capital. It was the end of December, freezing cold, and yet
the North Korean government arranged for tens of thousands of the city's
well-trained citizens to greet her on the streets. At a state dinner, Ms.
Bhutto complained about the American penalties imposed on her country and
North Korea.
"Pakistan is committed to nuclear
nonproliferation," she said, according to a transcript issued at the time.
However, she added, states still have "their right to acquire and develop
nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, geared to their economic and
social developments."
Ms. Bhutto's delegation left with
plans for North Korea's Nodong missile, according to former and current
Pakistani officials.
The Pakistani military had long
coveted the plans, and by April 1998, it successfully tested a version
of the Nodong, renamed the Ghauri. Its flight range of about 1,000 miles
put much of India within reach of Pakistan's nuclear warheads.
A former senior Pakistani official
recalled in an interview that the Bhutto government planned to pay North
Korea "from the invisible account" for covert programs. But events intervened.
Months after Ms. Bhutto's visit,
the Clinton administration and North Korea reached a deal that froze all
nuclear activity at Yongbyon, where international inspectors still live
year-round.
In return, the United States and
its allies promised North Korea a steady flow of fuel oil and the eventual
delivery of two proliferation-resistant nuclear reactors to produce electric
power. That was important in a country so lacking in power that, from satellite
images taken at night, it appears like a black hole compared to the blazing
lights of South Korea.
But within three years, Kim Jong
Il grew disenchanted with the accord and feared that the nuclear power
plants would never be delivered. He never allowed the International Atomic
Energy Agency to begin the wide-ranging inspections required before the
critical parts of the plants could be delivered.
By 1997 or 1998, American intelligence
has now concluded, he was searching for an alternative way to build a bomb,
without detection. He found part of the answer in Pakistan, which along
with Iran, Libya, Yemen, Syria and Egypt was now a regular customer for
North Korean missile parts, American military officials said.
A. Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan's
nuclear bomb, who had years ago stolen the engineering plans for gas centrifuges
from the Netherlands, visited North Korea several times. The visits were
always cloaked in secrecy.
But several things are now clear.
Pakistan was running out of hard currency to pay the North Koreans, who
were in worse shape. North Korea feared that without a nuclear weapon it
would eventually be absorbed by the economic might of the South, or squeezed
by the military might of the United States.
In 1997 or 1998, Kim Jong Il and
his generals decided to begin a development project for a bomb based on
highly enriched uranium, a slow and difficult process, but relatively easy
to hide.
Talking, but Not Changing
They did so even while sporadically
pursuing a better relationship with Washington. In the last days of the
Clinton administration, the North negotiated with Secretary of State Madeleine
K. Albright for a deal to restrict North Korean missile exports in return
for a removal of economic penalties, a de- listing from the State Department's
account of countries that sponsor terrorism and talks about diplomatic
recognition. The deal was never reached.
President Clinton even considered
an end-of-term trip to North Korea, but was talked out of it by aides who
feared that the North was not ready to make real concessions. The nuclear
revelations of the past few weeks suggest those aides saved Mr. Clinton
from embarrassment.
"Lamentably, North Korea never really
changed," said one senior Western official here with long experience in
the topic. "They came to the conclusion that the nuclear card was their
one ace in the hole, and they couldn't give it up."
American intelligence agencies,
meanwhile, suspected that North Korea was restarting a secret program.
In 1998, satellites were focused on a huge underground site where the C.I.A.
believed Kim Jong Il was trying to build a second plutonium-reprocessing
center. But they were looking in the wrong place: after American officials
negotiated access to the suspect site, they found only a series of man-made
caves with no nuclear-related equipment, and no apparent purpose. "World's
largest underground parking lot," one American intelligence official joked
at the time.
Rumors of a secret enriched-uranium
project persisted, however. The C.I.A. and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory
in Tennessee evaluated the evidence but reached no firm conclusion.
But there were hints. One Western
diplomat who visited North Korea in May 1998, just as world attention focused
on Pakistan, which had responded to India's underground nuclear tests by
setting off six of its own, recalled witnessing an odd celebration. "I
was in the Foreign Ministry," the official recalled last week. "About 10
minutes into our meeting, the North Korean diplomat we were seeing broke
into a big smile and pointed with pride to these tests. They were all elated.
"Here was a model of a poor state
getting away with developing a nuclear weapon."
When the Clinton administration
raised the rumors of a Pakistan-North Korea link with Prime Minister Nawaz
Sharif, who succeeded Ms. Bhutto, he denied them. It was only after General
Musharraf overthrew Mr. Sharif's government, and after Mr. Bush took office,
that South Korean intelligence agencies picked up strong evidence that
North Korea was buying components for an enriched-uranium program.
The agencies passed the evidence
along to Washington, according to South Korean and American officials.
It looked suspiciously similar to the gas centrifuge technology used in
Pakistan. "My guess is that Pakistan was the only available partner," said
Lee Hong Koo, a former South Korean prime minister and unification minister.
A. H. Nayya, a physics professor
at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, who has no role in the country's
nuclear program, agreed: "The clearest possibility is that the Pakistanis
gave them the blueprint. `Here it is. You make it on your own.' "
Under American pressure, Dr. Khan
was removed from the operational side of the Pakistani nuclear program.
He was made an "adviser to the president" on nuclear technology.
Here in Seoul, nuclear experts working
for the government of President Kim Dae Jung say they were subtly discouraged
from publicly writing or speculating about the North's secret programs
because the Korean government feared that it would derail President Kim's
legacy: the "sunshine policy" of engagement with North Korea and encouraging
investment there.
By this summer, however, the C.I.A.
concluded that the North had moved from research to production. The intelligence
agency took the evidence to Condoleezza Rice, the president's national
security adviser, who asked for a review by all American intelligence agencies.
Such a request is usually a prescription
for conflicting interpretations. Instead, the agencies came back with a
unanimous opinion: the North Korean program was well under way, and had
to be stopped.
Telling the North, 'You're Busted'
After sending senior officials to
Japan and South Korea in August to present the new evidence, Mr. Bush decided
to confront the North Koreans. On Oct. 4, James A. Kelly, the assistant
secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, was in North Korea
and told his counterparts that the United States had detailed information
about the enriched-uranium program.
"We wanted to make it clear to them
that they were busted," a senior administration official said.
The North Koreans initially denied
the accusation, but the next day, after what they told the American visitors
was an all-night discussion, they admitted that they were pursuing the
secret weapons program, several officials said. "We need nuclear weapons,"
Kang Sok Joo, the North Korean senior foreign policy official, said, arguing
that the program was a result of the Bush administration's hostility.
Mr. Kelly responded that the program
began at least four years ago, when Mr. Bush was governor of Texas. The
Americans left after one North Korean official declared that dialogue on
the subject was worthless and said, "We will meet sword with sword."
Since then, the North Koreans have
been more circumspect. They have talked publicly about having the right
to a nuclear weapon, even though they have signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation
Treaty and an agreement with South Korea to keep the Korean Peninsula free
of nuclear weapons.
The Bush administration has been
uncharacteristically restrained. President Bush led the push for an oil
cutoff, but also issued a statement on Nov. 15 saying that the United States
had no intention of invading North Korea. His aides hoped that the statement
would give Kim Jong Il the kind of security guarantee he had long demanded
- and a face-saving way to end the nuclear program.
Mr. Bush's aides say the way to
deal with North Korea, in contrast to their approach to Iraq, is to exploit
its economic vulnerabilities and offer carrots, essentially the strategy
the Clinton administration used. Many here in Seoul believe it may work
this time.
"The North Koreans are a lot more
dependent on us, and on the West, than they were in the 1994 nuclear crisis,"
said Han Sung Joo, who served as South Korea's foreign minister then.
But the reality, officials acknowledged,
is that Mr. Bush has little choice but to pursue a diplomatic solution
with North Korea.
Kim Jong Il has 11,000 artillery
tubes dug in around the demilitarized zone, all aimed at Seoul. In the
opening hours of a war, tens of thousands of people could die, military
officials here say.
"Here's the strategy," one American
official said. "Tell the North Koreans, quite publicly, that they can't
get away with it. And say the same thing to Pakistan, but privately, quietly."
