No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

11 THE WORLD’S MOST DANGEROUS WEAPONS

NOT EVERY DAY in the White House was taken up with a crisis, although it sometimes seemed that way. By the beginning of 2002 we needed to start to make sense, in a systematic way, of what the events of September 11, 2001, meant to U.S. security. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were no less consequential in our thinking than the attack on Pearl Harbor had been for U.S. policy makers in December 1941. Arguably the effect of the more recent assault on the American psyche was more disorienting because it had been not a powerful state but a well-organized network of stateless actors who’d successfully launched the most devastating attack on the U.S. mainland in modern history: and they’d done it at a cost of only several hundred thousand dollars, using commercial airplanes as a weapon and the territory of the failed state of Afghanistan as a base of operations.

We needed to call attention to the fundamental restructuring of U.S. security priorities necessitated by 9/11: how to defend ourselves in a world in which attacks came with little if any warning and with the possibility that such an attack might involve weapons of mass destruction. But defense in this new era required not just pursuing and defeating terrorists themselves but addressing the failed states that were breeding grounds for terrorism, human trafficking, and the illicit trading of arms and narcotics. In order to help failed states heal, we would come to see the importance of building stable democratic institutions that could provide for their people and prevent the use of their territory for dangerous transnational networks. Finally, those fledgling democratic states would need foreign assistance to achieve stability. The new security concept thus linked defense, democracy, and development—each integral to the success of the strategy.

The first opportunity for the President to set a new direction for our national security policy was the 2002 State of the Union address, the first since the events of September 11. Clearly the President would address the war on terrorism, but what else would he say?

At the time of the address to the nation on September 20, 2001, the NSC had considered the question of linking terrorism and weapons of mass destruction—that is, it had debated whether to raise the specter of a successor attack to 9/11, this one carried out with WMD. Sitting in the Situation Room reviewing the speech on September 19, though, the time simply didn’t seem right to go there. The nation had just been through a devastating event, and the American people did not need to be further unsettled by the specter of a nuclear attack on our soil.

But now the President had to talk about that nexus. The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction had taken on new urgency after September 11. The world had to prevent the most dangerous weapons from ending up in the hands of the most dangerous people, be they terrorists or rogue regimes.

We were veterans of the Cold War and completely conversant with the efforts of responsible powers to prevent biological, chemical, and nuclear war. But North Korea and Iran, opaque and tyrannical regimes with a deep animus toward the United States, appeared to be closing in on the development of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons. Saddam Hussein sat astride the Middle East, increasingly unconstrained in his ability to buy or produce weapons of mass destruction, which he had previously used against his own people and against his neighbors. His link to WMD was not a theoretical one. And once in office, we learned with great alarm that A. Q. Khan, the father of the Pakistani nuclear program, had a business on the side: selling the technology and the know-how to produce nuclear weapons to whoever could afford to buy it.

The world had looked frightening enough on September 10, 2001, but after the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, the threat took on greater urgency. We faced the reality that terrorists had many potential sources from which to buy or develop what we knew they wanted most: a nuclear weapon capable of making the next 9/11 catastrophic on an unthinkable scale. In October 2001 we’d seen credible reporting that terrorists would again attack the United States, perhaps with a radiological or nuclear weapon.

The President sought in the 2002 State of the Union to place all of this into context and to make clear that the United States could defend itself only by taking on the proliferation challenge. In that regard, he uttered one of the most often cited and, frankly, overdramatized phrases of his time in office. After describing the North Korean, Iranian, and Iraqi regimes and their links to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, the President said, “States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger…. We will work closely with our coalition to deny terrorists and their state sponsors the materials, technology and expertise to make and deliver weapons of mass destruction…. America will do what is necessary to ensure our national security.”

The substance of the sentence was unremarkable, but the phrase “axis of evil,” which was, in fact, inserted by a speechwriter, was only meant to vivify the point that certain kinds of regimes with WMD might transfer those weapons to terrorists. I don’t remember a great deal of focus on the phrase during the speechwriting process. Steve and I had talked about whether “evil” sounded too dire but didn’t think at all about “axis” and the fact that it might be over-interpreted to mean an alliance of rogue states. The speech was reviewed in the Pentagon and at the State Department, and no one raised even a yellow flag.

When I briefed the press before the President’s speech, I focused on what we thought was the news in his message: “America will take the side of brave men and women who advocate these [democratic] values around the world, including the Islamic world.” The President was calling for freedom from tyranny in a region in which many of our friends were authoritarians. I even made sure to call Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar so that our friends in Riyadh would not be surprised.

So the next morning, when the media focused almost exclusively on the phrase “axis of evil,” I was stunned and so was the President. Since many people believed that we’d already decided to go to war against Iraq, sinister interpretations suggested that we were preparing to use military force against all three states. We had for all intents and purposes, some believed, declared war on North Korea, Iran, and Iraq.

As luck would have it, I was scheduled to give a speech on proliferation the next day. Working with Steve Hadley and Robert Joseph, the senior director at the NSC who dealt with proliferation policy, I hastily revised the speech to clarify what the President had meant, and I continued to offer clarification in subsequent press interviews. The President was not saying that the three nations were in formal alliance. Rather, they were illustrative of a class of states that share certain characteristics, including the pursuit of WMD, and the axis was between them and their potential terrorist allies. No, we did not believe that military action was the appropriate course in all cases. The President wouldn’t take any options off the table, but he’d said we would work with our friends to deal with the problem; diplomacy was the first line of defense. But, admittedly, the harsh language suggested that negotiation was impossible. How could you negotiate with members of an “axis of evil”? The phrase helped brand the Bush administration as radical and bellicose, given to hot rhetoric and a preference for military force.

That perception was reinforced when the President delivered the 2002 commencement address at West Point. We’d used the usual speechwriting process, which always started with a conversation with the President about what he wanted to say. The President had said that he needed to address the question of how to avoid a surprise attack the next time. That had led to a discussion of whether we, as a nation, had waited too long to act in Afghanistan. Nothing in international history or law suggested that a country had to wait until it was attacked and then respond. Why not argue for the legitimacy of preemption as a strategy, which says that one can act in self-defense in anticipation of an attack, rather than simply trying to deter or contain terrorists and rogues? After a rather academic discussion of preemption, prevention, and deterrence, the President sent us on our way to work on the speech.

The follow-up session took place in my office with Steve Hadley, Mike Gerson, Andy Card, Karen Hughes, and Karl Rove. The group worked well together because we valued one another’s opinions. But when it came to the substance of the speech, people stayed in their lanes. Karl, for instance, struck just the right balance in discussing how a speech would play politically yet never tried to act as the foreign policy expert, though he is extremely well read. I loved working with Karl, who is brilliant and funny and was completely committed to the President’s success. When I said that something wouldn’t work in foreign policy terms, he took it on board. When he said that something wouldn’t work politically, I tried to accommodate his views. I know that Karl had developed a reputation as a “take-no-prisoners” political operative, a “zero-sum game” player. He did not, however, try to insert himself into the substance of foreign policy—a testament to both him and the President. Karl and I had an easy working relationship.

The speech that emerged stated, “Our security will require all Americans to be forward-looking and resolute, to be ready for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives.” But why should that have been controversial? The President was not saying that the United States would always act preemptively. He was simply stating what we thought to be obvious: it might not be possible to deter shadowy networks, and that containment might not be possible when unbalanced dictators can deliver weapons or secretly provide them to terrorists. The language was surrounded by talk of homeland defense, missile defense, and the need for good intelligence. Even reading the speech many years later, it does not seem to me to have a “hair-trigger” feel. Yet that is how it was taken, and again it was linked to Iraq: the United States was declaring the right to attack at a time of its choosing, even if it had not yet been attacked itself.

There would be one more opportunity to lay out a rationale for this policy as well as to broaden the discussion to other key elements of our strategy going forward. The administration was mandated by the National Security Act of 1947, as amended by the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986, to deliver to Congress a national security strategy each year. The document had previously been a largely bottom-up bureaucratic exercise that had produced an unwieldy tome of several hundred pages. I myself had participated in the process when I was on Brent Scowcroft’s NSC. People both inside and outside the administration failed to take it seriously; it was just a task to be finished with as little effort as possible so that one could get on to more important things.

But this time we decided that the national security strategy would be different and consequential. We took as the model the historic NSC-68, Paul Nitze’s seminal statement of U.S. objectives and strategy at the outset of the Cold War.

We allowed the bureaucracy at State and Defense to beaver away in the traditional way while quietly drafting a short, clear document within the NSC staff. All of the key staff members were stretched thin, so I asked Philip Zelikow, with whom I’d worked previously and with whom I’d written a well-regarded book on German unification, to take the pen for the first draft. Over lunch with Mike Gerson, Steve Hadley, speechwriter Michael Anton, and several others, I asked Phil to hold nothing back in addressing the United States’ changed circumstances. Controversy was a good thing. I wanted people to debate this document and believe that it mattered. I specifically said that he should address the nexus between terrorism and nuclear weapons and the question of how we would avoid being surprised again as we had been on September 11, 2001. But we wanted to address not just the negative side but also the United States’ view of how the world ought to be. The document should express the country’s confidence in its ability to win this struggle based on its values, just as it had won the Cold War.

Philip’s draft was just like its author, brilliant but baroque. I decided to take the draft and try my hand at a simpler, more direct version. The draft was short and clear—or at least I thought so. When I sent it to President Bush for an early look, he asked me to come down to the Oval. “I thought this document was supposed to be my strategy,” he said. I nodded. “The boys in Midland will never believe it. It doesn’t sound like me.”

I took up my pen again and, after several iterations, produced the document that largely survived an abbreviated interagency process piloted by Steve Biegun, the executive secretary of the NSC, who was also expert in matters of defense and foreign policy. The national security strategy began with a strong commitment on the part of the United States to “create a balance of power that favors human freedom.” It cast our struggle against terrorism in stark ideological terms: much like the great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism, the United States now confronted a world in which “[f]reedom and fear are at war.” In this new age, the document stated, we must never forget “that we are ultimately fighting for our democratic values and way of life.”

The strategy made clear that we would not shy away from using our “unparalleled military strength and great economic and political influence” to achieve those ends. The emphasis we placed on preserving our military dominance sparked some comment, especially when paired with our commitment to defend our interests “by identifying and destroying the threat before it reaches our borders.” Our allies were particularly concerned with the statement that followed: “While the United States will constantly strive to enlist the support of the international community, we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by acting preemptively against such terrorists, to prevent them from doing harm against our people and our country.”

As we noted later in the strategy, the United States has long maintained the option of preemptive action to counter threats to our national security, and international law has for centuries recognized that nations need not suffer an attack before they can take actions against an imminent threat. Contrary to popular view, the only novel aspect of our articulation of the preemption strategy was the way in which we had to adapt the concept of “imminent threat” to contemporary realities. As the strategy states, “The United States will not use force in all cases to preempt emerging threats, nor should nations use preemption as a pretext for aggression. Yet in an age where the enemies of civilization openly and actively seek the world’s most destructive technologies, the United States cannot remain idle while dangers gather.”

We needed to drive home the point that the “enemies of civilization” were of a different character than before. In the past, when the threats had come largely from states, there was some reasonable expectation that military preparations for attack would be visible. But terrorists operated in the shadows and could attack without warning—as they had on September 11. In light of this threat, limiting preemption to the occasions when we are sure an enemy is about to attack makes little sense.

Finally, the strategy committed the United States to “make use of every tool in our arsenal”—not exclusively military force—in countering the threat that terrorists and rogue regimes pose to our nation and our ideals. The strategy emphasized working with our allies to share intelligence and disrupt terrorist finances. It spoke of the importance of opening societies to free commerce and access to markets. Perhaps most innovatively, it recognized the importance of linking development assistance with good-governance reforms and shifts toward democratic governance. For too long, foreign aid had failed to spur economic development in the world’s poorest countries. Success was measured in dollars spent rather than growth rates and the poverty reduction achieved by recipients.

Our strategy recognized that economic development would require greater transparency and respect for the rule of law and basic human rights, and it created various metrics by which we could assess success. All of the measures used came from third parties to make it clear that the United States was going to be objective and transparent itself in conducting the program. Through funding from a new Millennium Challenge Account, we would “reward countries that have demonstrated real policy change and challenge those that have not, to implement reforms.” Ultimately, we would work to protect basic human rights and political and economic freedom so that these countries could “unleash the potential of their people and assure their future prosperity.”

The reaction was just as the President, Steve Hadley, and I had hoped. The Financial Times, the Washington Post, and the New York Times all printed full-page articles debating the strategy. John Lewis Gaddis, the eminent Yale historian, called it the most important foreign policy document since NSC-68 of Harry Truman’s administration. I have to admit that the academic in me was absolutely thrilled to have produced within the confines of government something viewed as so consequential. The principles in the national security strategy would be reinforced in the 2003 National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, drafted in part by William McRaven, a U.S. Navy officer who worked for me at the NSC and would later lead the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command. The world had been waiting to hear how the United States would react to the devastating events of 9/11. The President’s speeches and the national security strategy left no doubt: we would be aggressive in confronting threats and assertive in pursuing the United States’ national goals and values. This stance was meant to unsettle our foes. Apparently, it succeeded in unsettling many of our friends as well.

THOUGH THE national security strategy addressed a broad range of issues, it was the issue of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction that attracted most of the attention of the international press and ours as well. We approached the problem on three fronts. First, we needed a way to stop and, where possible, roll back the weapons programs of rogue states. Second, we needed to secure existing weapons as well as nuclear materials in places as diverse as Pakistan and Russia so they would not fall into the hands of terrorists or rogue states. Finally, we needed to defend the United States and our allies should the unthinkable happen.

The effort to secure existing stockpiles was largely without controversy. President Bush was committed to funding the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) Program, which had worked for the last two decades to safeguard and dismantle the large stockpiles of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons in former Soviet states. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Russia inherited a vast number of weapons stored in facilities that were insecure at best, with some sites protected with little more than a chain-link fence.

Recognizing the threat that those weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists or other hostile actors, Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar led the effort in Congress to establish a program in 1991 that would help successor Soviet states dismantle their stockpiles, develop secure processes for the storage and transfer of the materials, and reduce the threat of proliferation not only of the weapons themselves but also of the scientific knowledge necessary to develop them. President Bush invested heavily in the non-proliferation aspects of Nunn-Lugar, requesting more than $3.2 billion in funding for the CTR Program and other initiatives such as enhanced export and border control programs, recovery of radiological materials, and construction of secure chemical weapons destruction facilities. The administration also oversaw the first expansion of the CTR Program beyond the former Soviet Union by providing assistance to Albania to eliminate its chemical weapons. The United States assisted Pakistan to secure its nuclear arsenal by providing assistance in the early days after 9/11 and by helping share best practices in securing nuclear material.

In addition, President Bush joined with the leaders of the G8 nations in Kananaskis, Canada, in June 2002 to establish the G8 Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction. Under what became known as the “10+10 over 10” program, the United States committed to providing $10 billion over ten years to support ongoing threat-reduction efforts in Russia and other former Soviet states and requested the other G8 nations to match the United States’ pledge with up to $10 billion collectively to the program. Many other allies would join the partnership at subsequent summits as both recipient and donor nations.

Our emphasis on missile defense was not without controversy, but abrogating the ABM Treaty so that we could develop missile defenses without limitation made the road considerably easier. On June 13, 2002, despite a last-minute congressional attempt to save the agreement, the United States’ withdrawal from the ABM Treaty officially went into effect. The Russians reacted calmly, issuing a statement of mild protest.

In January Donald Rumsfeld had restructured the Pentagon bureaucracy to streamline the development and procurement process for missile defense technologies by establishing the Missile Defense Agency. By December the President announced that the United States would begin fielding initial missile defense capabilities that included ground-based and sea-based interceptors as well as detection sensors located on land and sea, in the air, and in space.

By far the most controversial and difficult issues concerned how to check and control the suspected ambitions of North Korea, Iran, and Iraq to pursue WMD programs. The three states were different both in their levels of development and in the regional implications of their programs.

As noted before, the President had rejected any return to the Agreed Framework with North Korea because he—and all of us—believed it to be flawed. The North Koreans had taken the benefits, including $4.5 billion to build two light-water reactors, but by late 2002 they were once again threatening to expel all nuclear inspectors and restart plutonium-reprocessing facilities at Yongbyon. That was a familiar pattern with the North Koreans. As President Bush put it, “He [Kim Jong-il] throws his food on the floor, and all the adults run to gather it up and put it back on the table. He waits a little while and throws his food on the floor again.” It was an apt description, but, given the consequences of conflict on the Korean peninsula, there didn’t seem to be many alternatives.

It was in this context that we set about the contentious process of developing a follow-on strategy to the Agreed Framework. The divisions were deep, with State on one side and Defense and the Office of the Vice President on the other. In fact, State suffered from disunity within its own ranks. John Bolton, the newly appointed under secretary for arms control and international security, oversaw the department’s bureau that developed proliferation policy. John had been Colin’s “neocon hire,” in deference to the President’s desire to have his administration reflect the full range of opinions in the Republican Party. But John was loyal to his ideological soul mates, not to the secretary of state, and was a constant source of trouble for Colin.

The schism would persist throughout the eight years of the administration. In part this was a structural problem. The secretary of state is the chief diplomat and not surprisingly tries to solve problems diplomatically. Sometimes this involves talking—and taking steps forward—with unsavory regimes, or even enemies, in order to see if there is an overlap of interests. One can hardly negotiate successfully with a regime if one is publicly committed to its destruction. The Vice President and, to a lesser extent, Don Rumsfeld believed that those regimes would never make a deal and that any deal that could be made was not worth having. They made a reasonable case for toughening sanctions and isolation to lay the groundwork for regime change.

Frankly, the President was squarely on the hawks’ side of the fence. I too was drawn to the side of unrelenting pressure on those regimes, but I could also see two problems with the approach. First, back in 1994 some people in the Clinton administration had reasoned that the North Korean regime might collapse before the United States actually had to deliver the benefits of the Agreed Framework. It didn’t and was as diabolically resilient as ever. If Kim Jong-il had to freeze his people to death in the face of a cutoff of fuel assistance, his view was “So be it.” North Korea had plenty of ways to buy, steal, and smuggle what it needed to ensure the relative comfort of the regime and its military. The malnourished, oppressed, and isolated population was unlikely to rise up against the “Dear Leader.”

Second, a U.S. policy of complete isolation of North Korea in the service of regime change was not, in the long term, one that others in the region, particularly China and South Korea, would likely abide. In that policy they would see only U.S. intransigence, and pursuing the strategy would create constant tension with those states. Though they might have feared that the United States would use military force, they needn’t have worried: the Pentagon wanted no part of armed conflict on the Korean peninsula. We were without a workable policy.

By the beginning of 2002, it was already clear that we needed a new approach. In March, after much debate, we notified Congress that North Korea was not in compliance with the terms of the Agreed Framework because it had failed to make a complete and accurate declaration of its nuclear activities and refused to allow inspections of related facilities. The notification meant an end to the $95 million in foreign assistance to keep the program afloat. At the eleventh hour, the President made a decision to stand by the determination but to grant a waiver so that the $95 million in foreign assistance to the North was not affected. That gave us time to develop a new approach without setting off a firestorm of protest among our allies.

I convened the NSC Principals that April to see where we stood. The North had been blustering ever since the “axis of evil” speech. But unexpectedly, Donald Gregg, a former U.S. ambassador to Seoul under George H. W. Bush, returned from Pyongyang with a message: the North would welcome a U.S. envoy. After raucous debate, Colin won agreement to send Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs James Kelly to Pyongyang. I personally intervened with the President to get his grudging acquiescence. But what would Kelly do once he got there?

Colin advocated a bold approach, as he called it, prescribing engagement through a series of step-by-step moves by each side. His hope was that they’d lead to a different (if somewhat vague) new relationship between the United States and North Korea. Then, as the preparations were under way, a bombshell dropped from the intelligence community. Incomplete but troubling reports linking North Korea to the A. Q. Khan network had emerged. Moreover, Pyongyang had been suspected of seeking the components for uranium enrichment around the globe. Very close to the first anniversary of September 11, John McLaughlin, the deputy director of the CIA, reported the Agency’s assessment that North Korea had built a “production-scale” facility for uranium enrichment. Whatever the status of the Agreed Framework in slowing the plutonium program, the North appeared to be pursuing a second means of obtaining a nuclear weapon.

There was an unbridgeable disagreement within the administration about how acute the threat was. Everyone agreed that the North had been cheating, seriously cheating, but Colin didn’t want to spark a new crisis on the peninsula by confronting the North. He agreed, though, that Kelly’s trip could not go forward.

Yet our allies were moving forward with the North. As we were deliberating, Prime Minister Koizumi of Japan visited Pyongyang in an effort to normalize relations between the two adversaries and resolve the crisis over Japan’s abducted citizens. In one of the more bizarre revelations in modern international history, the North admitted that it had in fact kidnapped Japanese citizens in the 1970s and ’80s to steal their identities and use them to train North Korean spies how to speak Japanese. The issue was deeply emotional for the families of the abducted and for the Japanese people as a whole. Kim’s promise to allow the citizens to leave (to this day only partially fulfilled) encouraged Koizumi, though of the thirteen who had been abducted only five were still alive. The Japanese foreign minister, Yoriko Kawaguchi, pressed both Colin and me to send a U.S. delegation to North Korea. Koizumi made the same request of the President a couple of days later in a phone call.

However, with the exception of State, there was little enthusiasm among the NSC Principals for a trip. I felt that we needed to be responsive to the Japanese and South Koreans and that a policy of isolation would go nowhere if it remained unilateral. After Koizumi’s call, I stayed behind and talked to the President. “Why don’t you just authorize Kelly to go?” I asked. I added that he could take a tough message but that it would help our friends. The President said he would think about it and the next morning told me that we could go ahead. But he wanted the North to understand that we had toughened our stance, not softened it. I did not mention my conversation with him to anyone except Steve Hadley. Before putting the issue of Kelly’s trip back onto the table in the NSC, I’d wanted to have a “steer” from the President. I often did this with controversial matters put before the NSC because the likelihood of a good outcome was increased if I knew in advance the limits of the President’s tolerance. In this case it was clear that he wouldn’t tolerate very much.

After considerable debate, Kelly’s trip was rescheduled for October. When a U.S. diplomat is about to engage in sensitive negotiations, the NSC provides a set of talking points to ensure that the discussions are carried on in accordance with the agreed policy. The instructions that State drafted for Kelly were immediately seen as “soft.” The Bolton part of State reacted angrily, as did the Vice President’s office and the Pentagon. Moreover, the points were considerably more accommodating toward the North than I believed the President would allow.

Steve Hadley took the pen and, together with Michael Green, the director for Asian affairs on the NSC, drafted a much tougher approach. Usually there is enough trust in an experienced negotiator that the guidance is used more as points of reference than as a script. But in this case, given the fissures, the points were to be read verbatim. There were literally stage directions for Kelly. He was not to engage the North Koreans in any side conversation in any way. That left him actually moving to the corner of the table to avoid Pyongyang’s representatives. Colin was angry about this infringement on his turf and what it said about how the State Department was viewed. We decided, too, that there should be no socializing, and I asked Colin to cancel a scheduled dinner with the North Korean delegation. He did so, unhappily. I’d at least helped get Kelly to Pyongyang, but he and the State Department were on a short leash. I made a mental note that this was no way to treat the secretary of state.

Jim Kelly’s trip turned out to be extremely consequential but not for the reasons that we’d expected. Jim had laid out his case, including the indictment on uranium enrichment. Until that program was undone, he stressed, it wasn’t possible to move forward. The North Koreans were not prepared for the news that we’d discovered their program and at first denied its existence. But the next day, the first vice foreign minister, Kang Sok-ju, gave a presentation effectively acknowledging our claims.

Jim contacted Colin, saying that everyone in the delegation had heard the same thing. They’d made sure that the native Korean speakers agreed that, in fact, the North Koreans had admitted to having a covert uranium enrichment program. Because his instructions were so constraining, Jim couldn’t fully explore what might have been an opening to put the program on the table. He sent a cable to Washington describing the events. It soon leaked. It’s clear to me that the hard-liners had leaked the cable to snuff out any hope of further negotiations. They succeeded because the North backpedaled furiously.

In the absence of any movement, the United States had to respond forcefully. We briefed our allies on what we knew and made clear that we would halt further U.S. funding for the fuel shipments promised under the Agreed Framework. Good work by the State Department secured the agreement of our principal partners, South Korea, Japan, and the European Union. On November 18 the last load of fuel to be delivered as part of the Agreed Framework docked at the port of Nampo in North Korea. Three days later, the North Koreans issued a statement blaming the United States for the collapse of the Agreed Framework. The last shred of the framework for dealing with the North Korean problem had been dismantled.

As the end of the year approached, we again returned to the question of a strategy for North Korea. This time Steve Hadley commissioned papers from within the White House staff. Mike Green wrote a paper suggesting that we had to internationalize the conflict and pursue policies principally aimed at bringing allies on board in a common approach. Samantha Ravich, from the Office of the Vice President, proposed that we explicitly announce that regime change was our goal and lay out a set of steps to get there. That was an interesting idea, but it would have had no support internationally and would have scared our already nervous allies even more. Finally, Bob Joseph proposed “tailored containment,” aimed at changing the regime’s behavior through pressure. At an NSC meeting on November 13, the President, at my urging, supported the third approach.

Before we went down to the Situation Room, however, he told me that he had come to the conclusion that nothing would work without getting China on board. That was clearly right, but at the time, we didn’t have a way to enlist the Chinese, and the point just hung in the air. By the end of 2002 the North had blown up any chance for negotiation by announcing in a letter to the IAEA that it was restarting its reactor. The North further declared that its nuclear facilities were not subject to any agreement with the IAEA and were instead a matter between North Korea and the United States. Kim Jong-il had just thrown a big wad of food on the floor. For the time being, we made no effort to pick it up.

IRAN PRESENTED a different kind of challenge than North Korea. Pyongyang was certainly a threat to our regional interests and more directly to South Korea, but the United States also enjoyed a preponderance of force on the Korean peninsula with which to deter the North. There were certainly dangerous flashes of aggression from Pyongyang. Still, I always believed that Kim Jong-il was crazy but not suicidal. The more likely problem would be the transfer of North Korean nuclear materials and know-how to other rogue states or even terrorists, not an invasion across the 38th parallel. After all, North Korea would sell anything.

On the other hand, Tehran was the poster child for state sponsorship of terrorism in the Middle East and made persistent attempts to shift the balance of power in the region. The regime maintained a network of terrorist groups, including the ever-dangerous Hezbollah, which had the capability to commit terrorist acts anywhere in the world. Based in Lebanon, Hezbollah had made its reach felt as far away as Latin America with attacks in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the 1990s. George Tenet had referred to the organization as terrorism’s “A Team,” contrasting it to al Qaeda, which was deadly but not as sophisticated as Hezbollah, literally translated as the “Party of God.”

Because the Iranian regime was also Shia, many of our Sunni allies in the Middle East feared Iran’s penetration into the region. The Iranians had been known to stir up trouble among the Shia populations in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain, to name just a few countries. Iran, they believed, wanted to establish a “Shia crescent,” uniting those populations across national borders and destroying the integrity of the Sunni-governed states. The “Persian” challenge, as our Sunni friends called it, had to be counterbalanced since it could not be destroyed. Iraq historically served as this buffer, which explains why the United States had backed Saddam in the Iran-Iraq War in a conflict that Baghdad’s dictator had actually started.

Furthermore, the United States was for the Iranians the “great Satan,” a view reciprocated by Washington since the searing events of the 444-day hostage crisis of 1979–1981. But most of the world, including Europe and Japan, did not share this political antipathy toward Iran. Unlike the isolated North Koreans, every major power maintained embassies in Tehran, and trade between Iran and the rest of the world was robust. Iran’s two largest trading partners in 2002, Germany and Japan, were U.S. allies.

Internationally, then, there were fewer alarmist interpretations regarding Iran’s nuclear program, and consequently a considerable distance existed between the United States and other countries on what to do about it. The policy line was set quickly and clearly in the Bush administration: any nuclear program in Iran was unacceptable. We spent considerable time and energy trying to convince Moscow to abandon the construction of the Bushehr nuclear power plant. The Russians countered that the Iranians, as signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, had a “right” to civil nuclear power. In response to our concerns, they made the plant “proliferation-resistant” by insisting that all of the nuclear fuel would be made in Moscow and shipped to Tehran to run the plant. The spent fuel would then be returned to Russia.

In continuing to insist that there be no nuclear program in Iran, the United States pointed out the obvious: Iran was sitting on huge oil and gas reserves. Why not focus on enhancing its refining capabilities to make use of those holdings? Why instead seek nuclear power? Furthermore, the August 2002 discovery of undisclosed nuclear plants at Natanz and Arak only seemed to strengthen the U.S. case. If they were ostensibly pursuing nuclear technologies for peaceful purposes, why would they have anything to hide?

As troubling as the Iranian program was in 2002, it seemed to be at a relatively early stage of development. It was not that Iran was completely trusted by the international community, but there was so much normal economic and political interaction between Tehran and the rest of the world that, for most of our friends, there was little urgency to intervene. We were pretty lonely in calling out the growing dangers of the Iranian nuclear threat, which did not yet occupy center stage.