Sorry for the light posting as of late…I have been on holiday with limited internet access.

Anyway, I thought I’d follow up on “this post”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1468/ceip-conference-hibbs-conversation in which I discussed, among other topics, Mark Hibbs’ 2002 take on the Norks’ HEU program.

While doing research for “this _ACT_ article”:http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2007_04/NewsAnalysis.asp about the program, I came across this material in my files and thought I’d share it here. It’s all from fall 2002 and discusses the ROK’s take on Pyongyang’s HEU efforts. [I also referenced the _ACT_ piece in “this post.”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1408/north-korean-heu-bad-decisions ]

p=. *N Korea/Khan Network Coop*

All three reports provide various details about what the US and ROK knew and when they knew it. For example, Yonhap reported 25 October 2002 that, at a “parliamentary briefing,” NIS Director Shin Kuhn said that *“the IS began to track” North Korea’s HEU program in “the early part of” 1999 when the ROK learned that “three North Koreans had been dispatched” to KRL.*

Shin also said that South Korean and US intelligence agencies “succeeded in *preventing North Korea from securing certain metallic alloys* needed for building centrifugal separators.”

In the same vein, ROK MoD spokesperson Hwang Eui-Don told reporters that Seoul informed Washington of *“crucial military intelligence in 1999”* regarding the HEU program, AFP reported 21 October 2002. According to Hwang, the ROK “obtained information in 1999 that North Korea was *trying to import production facilities”* for HEU.

Similarly, Yonhap reported three days earlier that, according to an unnamed “diplomatic source,” the *US started investigating the program in 1998.* The report added that Washington “know[s] *the North is receiving assistance from Russia, China, and Pakistan for the uranium-based nuclear program and that a Pakistani Nobel Prize laureate with expertise on nuclear development entered the North.”*

p=. *So What Did Seoul Think About All This?*

Well, according to the same Yonhap report, an unnamed South Korean lawmaker said that Yim Tong-won, special adviser to then-president Kim Dae-Jung, said that, “according to our government’s assessments,” the program *“is at an elementary stage.”* Moreover, he said that *the belief that North Korea admitted “to having such a program” in order to “stimulate negotiations with the United States is gaining more weight.”*

Incidentally, Washington notified Seoul about its intelligence on the HEU program in August 2002, Yim said.

Sorry for the light blogging as of late. Deadlines and all that…

Carol Giacomo “got a great quote”:http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN2246984120070623 from Jack Pritchard that well sums up the recent developments regarding the BDA issue, the IAEA’s upcoming visit, and Hill’s visit to North Korea:

bq. “You’ve got to gauge Hill’s trip by saying *finally U.S. diplomacy is rational.* He should have been doing this long ago,” said Charles Pritchard, former senior U.S. negotiator with North Korea during Bush’s first term.

Pretty much.

See some of you at the Carnegie conference.

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Purchase a bunch of North Korean soju (“you can do that now.)”::http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070504/ap_on_re_as/nkorea_us_liquor_2;_ylt=AmGQ.zkRafTzrq39_0hXob.CscEA Then invite your enemies.

A friend of mine who was stationed in Korea told me that soju has a different effect on everyone, but it is always bad.

I was re-reading a Nelson Report from a few weeks back and noticed a interesting tale related to US intelligence RE: North Korea’s HEU program. Chris gave me permission to print the following paragraphs:

… directly involved players in 2002 have told us that despite the strong public face presented to both N. Korea and the Congress, there was a bitter inter-agency fight over how to interpret the intelligence on all DPRK nuclear activity, but especially over the HEU situation. And we quoted one of these sources as saying he personally witnessed the intervention of then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz to produce a formal assessment on the hard-line extreme of the interpretive spectrum.

Yes, you would be correct to recall a similar phenomenon, and player, in the Iraq WMD fiasco.

Commenting privately today, a concerned observer, then and now, said “the [HEU] evidence was very ambiguous. Wolfowitz took it and ran with it as hard as he could, and the upshot was that we shut down everything we planned to do with the DPRK. It was after that [Jan., 2003] they threw out the IAEA and began [what became] the run-up to the bomb test [last fall].”

This story struck me because I recently “wrote about”:http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2007_04/NewsAnalysis.asp decisions that stemmed from worst-casing the HEU intelligence:

Even as U.S. confidence about the suspected [HEU] program has decreased, policy decisions based on those judgments have continued to reverberate.

*[snip]*

The belief that North Korea may have constructed an enrichment plant also apparently influenced at least some Bush administration policy decisions. A former State Department official said in a March 21 interview that some U.S. officials were “intent on making policy” based on the worst-case assumption that Pyongyang had an enrichment facility. For example, some State Department officials forcefully advocated an extremely intrusive verification scheme that would allow the United States to search for a possible North Korean enrichment facility. Several former U.S. officials have told Arms Control Today that such a plan would have been unacceptable to Pyongyang.

Former State Department Korea director David Straub, however, argued in a March 25 interview that some Bush administration officials were “intent on making policy toward North Korea based on worst-case scenarios about everything,” regardless of the enrichment issue. The entire department supported a “very intrusive inspection system, although some even more so,” he added.

The _ACT_ article also has some relevant information about the HEU program, if anyone’s interested. My last post on the subject can be found “here.”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1368/cia-and-heu-nork-edition

Happy Friday.

McClatchey has a “bunch of them”:http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/17090786.htm for you BDA junkies.

The “article”:http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/17090786.htm also notes something that I don’t recall hearing before….that the US may have cracked down on the bank because it was helping North Korea sell gold.

*Update:*

Jane “has more.”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/1466/show-me-the-money

An unnamed ROK intel official was quoted in a 19 March Yonhap News Service story about the status of North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear reactor.

As of that day, the reactor was “operating normally,” according to “a ranking official at the National Intelligence Service.”

Even if this information is a little outdated, I think it’s worth noting that, according to the NIS official, “a constant stream of steam spotted from its cooling tower” showed that the reactor was still operational.

The official added that

“Whether the Yongbyon reactor is in operation or not can be determined by the existence of the cooling tower steam. Depending on some operational and weather conditions, however, such steam may not be visible”…

“Therefore, North Korea’s suspension of the Yongbyon reactor will be confirmed by the halt of the cooling tower steam or on-the-spot inspection by International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors,” he explained.

I will add that it’s more accurate to say that the IAEA _will_ monitor the shutdown, per the “13 February agreement.”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1353/six-party-joint-statement

The cooling tower signature is, of course, well known. See, for example, “this ISIS brieifng”:http://www.isis-online.org/publications/dprk/dprkplutonium.pdf about North Korea’s plutonium production.