Calling In the Formers

North Korea’s top nuclear negotiator will sit down with a team of former American diplomats in an undisclosed venue in Singapore this weekend to discuss one of the world’s most complex and dangerous problems: what to do about Pyongyang’s ever-expanding nuclear weapons program.

Like James Franco and Seth Rogen in this winter’s farcical comedy The Interview, these Americans do not represent the U.S. government, nor do they speak on behalf of the Obama administration. Nevertheless, they are on a mission to glean as much as possible from the reclusive Hermit Kingdom at a time when North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is ruthlessly consolidating power inside his government and threatening a “second Korean War” over this week’s U.S. military exercise with South Korea.

The U.S. negotiating team, which includes Barack Obama’s former North Korea envoy Stephen Bosworth and George W. Bush’s former nuclear negotiator Joseph DeTrani, will meet with Ri Yong-ho, the DPRK’s top nuclear negotiator, and Jang Il-hun, the deputy ambassador to the United Nations.

The State Department told Foreign Policy it has no involvement in the two days of meetings, but the Americans will debrief the administration after the sensitive discussions take place. Given the seniority of the North Korean officials participating in the talks and the unparalleled reclusiveness of Kim’s regime in recent months, the intelligence value could be significant — especially as Washington tries to see a way past the current impasse with Pyongyang.

“Listening to the North Koreans in this environment can reveal their future game plan,” said Scott Snyder, a senior fellow for Korea studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. And with the Obama administration’s total lack of diplomatic ties with Pyongyang, the retired diplomats are the only current link to the regime.

Outsiders doubt that anyone, much less a team of former diplomats in Singapore, can untangle the riddle that is North Korea. But this weekend’s delegation remains optimistic that progress can be made on the nuclear issue.

“North Koreans have been remarkably forthcoming about their willingness to dismantle their nuclear program lock, stock and barrel,” said Tony Namkung, one of the principal negotiators joining Bosworth and DeTrani. “The problem of courses, as is always the case in diplomacy, is that both sides to a dispute want the other side to move first.”

One participant in Sunday’s talk, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the usefulness of the discussions depends on what the Obama administration does with the intelligence. “We can’t speak for the U.S. government, but we can explore things,” said the negotiator. “There have been occasions when we brought stuff back that’s useful, but it’s only really useful when U.S. officials act on it.”

Until the brazen hacking of Sony Pictures Entertainment in November, the world’s most closed society had largely faded from the global agenda thanks to the spate of crises in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. However, the recent tiff over America’s joint two-day naval drill in South Korea’s east coast is reviving fears of a new flare up on the peninsula and giving new importance to Sunday’s so-called “Track 2” negotiations (a bureaucratic term referring to nongovernmental diplomacy).

Despite the North’s ability to strike South Korea’s capital with conventional weapons or orchestrate a cyber attack against the U.S., what security experts fear most is the regime unleashing a nuclear bomb either by accident or in a fit of a rage.

The North has carried out three nuclear tests, the most recent in February 2013, and is under sanction by the U.N. for flouting international regulations prohibiting the detonation of atomic devices in pursuit of nuclear weaponry.

Last weekend, North Korea said it would suspend upcoming nuclear tests if Washington agreed to cancel its annual military exercises on Thursday, but the U.S. rejected that offer and went ahead with the marine exercises this week involving two U.S. Aegis destroyers and three South Korean assets: The 3,200-ton Aegis destroyer, a P-3C plane and a submarine.

The challenge for Bosworth and DeTrani — whose delegation also includes North Korea hands Leon Sigal, a director at the Social Science Research Council, and Namkung — is to achieve something that decades of Republican and Democratic administrations have failed to do: Find a diplomatic means of ending North Korea’s nuclear program.

Since 2003, the primary method for achieving this has been through six-party denuclearization talks involving China, the U.S., North and South Korea, Russia and Japan. But over the years, those talks have been repeatedly upended by Pyongyang’s recurrent nuclear and missile tests, and other provocative actions.

After getting burned in the past, the U.S. is reluctant to kickstart those six-party talks without Pyongyang first honoring past commitments and making a significant show of good will. For its part, Pyongyang says the United States has reneged on its own promises, such as helping provide the impoverished country with non-nuclear power plants.

Either way, peninsula watchers say significant and disturbing developments have occurred in Pyongyang since the group’s last Track 2 discussion in October 2013, raising the stakes of this latest effort.

According to Siegfried Hecker, a highly-regarded nuclear expert who has visited North Korea several times, Kim’s regime has become increasingly convinced that its survival depends on its nuclear arsenal and that the door is quickly closing on the Western dream of creating a nuclear-free North Korea. “The George W. Bush administration failed miserably and, to date, the Obama administration has done as badly,” Hecker wrote last week in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

For those who believe more engagement with the North could improve the current impasse, kickstarting the six-party talks is crucial. But that would require the U.S. easing its conditions for the resumption of negotiations.

For his part, Namkung said he has detected a “softening” in the U.S. position. “There is a little more flexibility than at the time of the breakdown of the Leap Day talks,” he said, referring to the failed February 2012 negotiations.

This is not Namkung’s first rodeo. Since the early 90s, the self-proclaimed “consultant” and “independent scholar” has been shepherding senior U.S. officials to the Hermit Kingdom through good times and bad.

Some of his most high-profile missions include the 2013 visit to Pyongyang of Google Chairman Eric Schmidt and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson and the trip to Pyongyang of Associated Press Vice President John Daniszewski that same year for the first anniversary of the news agency’s controversial Pyongyang bureau.

Namkung’s ability to penetrate Pyongyang’s opaque bureaucracy makes him a highly sought after interlocutor and a target for critics who say he’s too close to the regime. “The general impression is that I’m not at all critical of the North Korean regime,” he told the Christian Science Monitor in 2013. On the contrary, “my purpose is to act as a back channel,” he said.
“It’s like pulling teeth.”

Bosworth and Segal, two North Korea hands with ties to Democrats, favor engagement with North Korea — acknowledging that neither Bush’s sanctions-intensive approach nor Obama’s “strategic patience” strategy, which relied on freezing out Pyongyang in the absence of positive behavior, succeeded in slowing down the North’s development of nuclear weapons.

DeTrani, meanwhile, has a more hawkish reputation through his work under the Bush administration. In 2006, he worked in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in the counterproliferation center. Before that, he served as special envoy for Six-Party Talks with North Korea and as U.S. Representative to the North Korea Energy Development Organization.

Some outsiders say DeTrani brings a bipartisan sheen to a team that leans more toward engagement with the North than many in Washington’s foreign policy community.

“Certainly, Ambassador DeTrani adds weight to the delegation,” said Jae H. Ku, director of the U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins. “But I think a delegation of this makeup has limitations. Anything Sigal and Namkung bring back to the policy community will be viewed with much skepticism.  Why not add a ‘flame thrower’ to the mix? Someone who is there to read them the Riot Act so to speak. Someone who is known to be a little more aggressive on North Korea.”

Snyder, the CFR expert, said the talks have at times provided valuable information to the Obama administration. He noted that Track 2 discussions carried out in 2012 by Joel Wit, a Korea expert at Columbia University, offered a prescient assessment of the North’s illicit intentions in the run-up to its brazen nuclear test in February 2013. “In my view, it’s advisable for the U.S. government to be familiar with the debrief from the conversation and to pick up any clues that might point to what’s coming,” said Snyder.

Whatever comes of the talks, you can be sure the Obama administration will be following up to read the tea leaves in Pyongyang’s latest overtures.

“There is no U.S. government involvement in this event,” a State Department official told FP. “Of course, we frequently engage with the think-tank and academic community on DPRK issues and will continue to do so.”

Colum Lynch contributed to this report.

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