In My Time (77 page)

Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell later testified that he would have presented the key findings differently if he had it
to do over again
. As it was, the NIE clearly gave a false impression. The story of the production of the 2007 Iran NIE is in part a reflection of the continued impact of the bad intelligence we had received about Iraq’s WMD stockpiles. After the charges of politicizing intelligence that filled the air beginning in 2003, policymakers were hesitant to urge edits or suggest that the presentation and structure of the report were misleading. When I was briefed on the report just before its release, I made sure to have two staff members with me, and I said very little. This was the way to avoid being accused of pressuring anyone. But it is not a good way to make policy.

Once it was released, I heard from leaders in the Arab world that they believed the NIE either was prepared at George Bush’s instruction so he would not have to take military action or was put together by a disloyal CIA to ensure that the president did not take military action. Neither was true, but such perceptions hurt us. The NIE itself precluded us from considering as robust a range of options as we might have otherwise.

Secretary Rice had determined that she would not only get a deal with the North Koreans before we left office but would also get an agreement on final-status issues aimed at resolving the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian problem. Although clearly laudable as a goal, neither side nor many experts believed it was possible during our remaining time in office, given the complex set of issues, entrenched hatreds, ongoing violence, and the Hamas-controlled government in Gaza. Moreover, launching a major effort had an impact on other policy priorities. The secretary’s determination to launch a multilateral peace initiative led her to believe she had to get the Syrians to the table to participate. This meant ignoring their efforts to build a covert nuclear reactor. It also meant overlooking the foreign fighters who were crossing the border from Syria into Iraq and killing Americans. It was my view that the Syrians needed to be held accountable, not sent a personal letter from Secretary Rice inviting them to the Annapolis Conference on Middle East peace.

Secretary Rice’s outreach to Syrian dictator Bashar Assad came at a difficult moment for the people of Lebanon. As they tried to form a new democratically elected government, they were under enormous pressure from Syria, which had occupied Lebanon for nearly thirty years. After the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005, popular uprisings had caused Syria to withdraw its troops, but car bombings and assassinations of anti-Syrian politicians and intellectuals in Lebanon continued. Iran, meanwhile, was engaged in efforts to destabilize Lebanon, primarily through its sponsorship of the terrorist group Hezbollah, whose members were demanding an ever-larger role in the government. In July 2006 after Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel and crossed the border, attacking and taking Israeli soldiers hostage, war broke out between Israel and Lebanon. Hezbollah had survived the war, and by the end of 2007 they, along with their ally Syria and their patron Iran, were ascendant in Lebanon. We could have done much more to support the democratic aspirations of the people of Lebanon and thus helped to counter the growing regional prominence of Iran and Syria, had an unrealistic effort to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict not absorbed so much of our attention.

Moreover, as we entered our final year in office, we still had much work to do in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In Afghanistan there was a continued need for diplomatic heavy lifting as we supported Hamid Karzai’s effort to extend the central government’s authority throughout the country and continued to fight the Taliban. We also had much to do in Pakistan, where President Musharraf had provided key support, but had an increasingly weak hold on power over a government whose loyalties were at times divided.

In Iraq, there was good news. The surge of troops and the shift to a counterinsurgency strategy were showing signs of success. Security was returning to large parts of the country, including Baghdad. But as General Petraeus noted, the gains were “fragile and reversible.” We needed to continue the fight and follow through on our efforts to aid the Iraqi people in solidifying their political progress. Our relationship with the Iraqis was evolving, from one where we had been in complete control of the country to one where key treaties would govern the relations between
our two sovereign nations. We were working on a status of forces agreement, or SOFA, that would govern our military relations, as well as a strategic framework agreement that would establish our diplomatic, security, and economic relations. These agreements, which would establish American relations with Iraq for many years to come, deserved the highest levels of diplomatic attention. They would highlight one of the most significant accomplishments of George Bush’s presidency—the liberation of Iraq and the establishment of a true democracy in the Arab world.

ON JANUARY 4, 2008, the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, came into the Oval Office for our regular morning intelligence briefing. He surprised us by bringing three analysts with him, experts on North Korea. A National Security Council meeting on that subject was scheduled for 8:35, and as I later understood, there had been some skirmishing about how much intelligence would be provided in the memo that went to NSC members ahead of time. The State Department had been trying to keep it to a minimum, so McConnell apparently decided to bring the latest thinking on the subject of North Korea directly to the president. President Bush grilled the analysts, homing in on a central question: Were the North Koreans likely to give up their nuclear weapons as a result of the negotiations going on through the six-party talks? The experts were not optimistic.

We walked from the Oval Office to the newly renovated Situation Room, where the National Security Council meeting was being held. The high-tech meeting room was packed. Every seat at the table and against the outer wall was filled. The president ignored the agenda and dove right in. Directing his questions to Chris Hill, who was seated against the wall behind Secretary Rice, the president asked, “What is the status of the talks? Will they lead to the North Koreans giving up their weapons?” Rice said, “I got this,” and stepped in to respond. She emphasized the importance of getting the North Koreans to dismantle the reactor at Pyongyang and of doing whatever we could to make that happen. It was a first step, she said, only a first step.

Then the president called on me. The North Koreans were not living
up to their end of the bargain, I said. They had so far refused to admit to their uranium enrichment activity. They denied proliferating to the Syrians. If the declaration they provide is false, and we accept it, we won’t be accomplishing anything except helping the North Koreans cover up their nuclear activity. I said I realized the State Department was working hard on this, but I was becoming increasingly concerned that the six-party talks were now a convenient way for the North Koreans to hide what they were really doing, and we were not only complicit, but were in fact rewarding them for it by offering benefits and concessions in exchange for missed deadlines and false declarations. I reminded the group that eventually the work the North Koreans were doing in Syria would be public, and then we would have to explain why we had looked the other way.

Then I asked what was to me the bottom-line question about our negotiations. “Is it accurate to say that there will be no lifting of our designation of North Korea as a terrorist state and no removal of the Trading with the Enemy Act sanctions unless they present a comprehensive and complete declaration of their programs?” The president said, “Absolutely.” Secretary Rice concurred. I pressed further: “I assume that their failure to admit they’ve been proliferating to the Syrians would be a deal killer.” Secretary Rice agreed, although seeming reluctant. The president emphasized that was his position.

Rice had been working to convince the president that the process she and Chris Hill were working would lead to the North Koreans giving up their nuclear weapons. My view—and the view the president heard in the Oval Office that morning from the intelligence experts—was that there was nothing we could offer them by way of concessions that was worth as much to them as their nuclear weapons. They were convinced the survival of their regime depended upon the weapons. I believed that the only way diplomacy would work was if the Chinese and our other partners in the six-party talks understood we were through playing games and were deadly serious about the threat we all faced.

A few days later, Jay Lefkowitz, the State Department envoy for
human rights issues in North Korea, gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute in which he said, “It is increasingly clear that North Korea will remain in its present nuclear status when the administration leaves office in one year.” North Korea, he said, “is not serious about disarming in a timely manner” and “its conduct does not appear to be that of a government that is willing to come in from the cold.” The next day the State Department issued a statement distancing itself from Lefkowitz’s remarks, saying that he was the envoy for human rights issues and not “somebody who speaks authoritatively about the six-party talks.” He sounded pretty authoritative to me.

At the end of the month, Assistant Secretary Hill gave a speech at Amherst College that made it sound as though we were on our way to ruling out a North Korean uranium program. Yes, he said, North Korea had acquired aluminum tubes “to construct centrifuges,” but “we’ve seen that these tubes are not being used for the centrifuge program”:

We’ve had American diplomats go and look at this aluminum that was used and see what they’re actually using it for. We actually had American diplomats, people like myself, carry this aluminum back in their suitcases to verify that this is the precise aluminum that the North Koreans had actually purchased for this purpose and so what has emerged is the fact that they are not using it for uranium enrichment.

Hill neglected to note that the tubes the North Koreans had turned over to us contained
traces of highly enriched uranium
.

In Senate testimony the next week, Hill acknowledged that the North Koreans had purchased key components for enriching uranium, but again emphasized that they had showed us examples of their using the components for nonnuclear purposes. “More work will be done on that,” he said, “so that we can clearly say at some point in the future that we can rule out that they have any on-going program for uranium enrichment.” Getting to that point would prove to be impossible, however. Months later, when the North Koreans began to deliver documents
to us concerning activities at their plutonium reactor at Yongbyon, the documents themselves contained
traces of highly enriched uranium
.

There was a period in the spring when it looked as though we might be able to get off the path that Rice and Hill had put us on. Hill was in Geneva negotiating what would be in the North Korean declaration, and Steve brought a draft of the proposed language into the Oval Office during our morning meeting on March 14, 2008. The president said he didn’t want to see it. “I’m not going to sign anything until the vice president has signed off on it,” he said. “You go over it with Dick. When he’s happy with it, I’m happy with it.”

Steve came back to my office, and we looked at the document. “Steve,” I said, “this just isn’t going to fly.” It had the United States presenting information about North Korea’s enriching uranium and efforts to build a nuclear reactor in Syria. And it had the North Koreans saying they understood the concerns—not admitting to enriching or proliferating, but saying they understood that the idea they might have troubled us. This was not by any stretch the full and complete declaration the North Koreans were committed to making, which was, I suspected, why Rice and Hill were calling it a “sideletter” and advising that it not be made public.

Concerned that it would damage the six-party talks, Secretary Rice was also still working to keep what we knew about the North Korean–built Syrian nuclear reactor from being made public, long after the period during which the Israelis had expressed concern. She successfully delayed an announcement for several months. Finally, at the end of April, senior intelligence officials conducted a briefing, complete with video, telling the story of al-Kibar.

By late May, Secretary Rice had decided that she ought to go to Pyongyang to meet with North Korean President Kim Jong Il. At one of our small group meetings in Steve Hadley’s office, Steve said the president had asked him to solicit the views of the group about this idea. Condi argued that if we wanted to keep the North Koreans at the table in the six-party talks, we had a choice between lifting the terrorism designation or sending her personally to Pyongyang. Steve asked if anyone
had any response to this suggestion. I signaled that I did, which I’m sure was no surprise to Steve. I said this would be yet one more example of our responding to North Korea’s refusal to keep their commitments by making another preemptive concession. The North Koreans still hadn’t provided a full and complete declaration of their nuclear activities, I pointed out, and now, suddenly we would be sending the secretary of state to Pyongyang? It was a bad idea. A much better option would be to insist they keep their commitments.

Steve called on Secretary of Defense Gates, who didn’t come down one way or the other. Gates called on Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen, who was sitting slouched in his chair, listening to all this with his head in his hand. He didn’t say a word, just pointed at me, signaling that he was signing on with my view. I think a number of us were getting tired of refighting the same battles in meeting after meeting where it seemed we had to argue against yet another misguided approach from the State Department.

Steve brought the meeting to a close and said he and Condi would report the group’s views back to the president. A short while later, I was sitting in my office, when one of the president’s senior advisors came through the door, holding a copy of that week’s
Weekly Standard.
The cover story was titled “In the Driver’s Seat: Condoleezza Rice and the Jettisoning of the Bush Doctrine.” Pointing to the cover, the senior advisor said, “Yet another reason why Condi should not go to North Korea.”