Against the backdrop of increasing expectation for diplomatic progress through upcoming summits between South and North Korea as well as the United States and North Korea, a former U.S. veteran diplomat revealed failed efforts to realize a U.S.-North summit in 2000, during a recent interview with Kyodo News.

He also stressed the extreme difficulty of implementing an agreement with North Korea for the entire denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

(David Straub)

"The North Koreans caused a tremendous amount of difficulty in implementing the Agreed Framework, (even though) we agreed to set up diplomatic liaison offices, in other words de-facto embassies." said David Straub, a retired Korean specialist with the State Department.

The Agreed Framework is a bilateral deal signed by the United States and North Korea in October 1994 that suspended the latter's nuclear program in Yongbyon in return for the United States, Japan and South Korea supplying two light-water nuclear reactors and heavy fuel oil.

The agreement was the end result of the diplomatic process to ease the high tension caused by the first Korean nuclear crisis earlier that year.

"We speculated that it was a combination of reasons. The North Koreans didn't have any money to buy an embassy in Washington, or they had money but probably wanted to use it on nuclear weapons. They were worried that we would have some sort of intelligence capability if we had an embassy there (Pyongyang)."

Explaining why the implementation process of the Agreed Framework was delayed and sometimes stymied, he said, "Even though we went to a great deal of effort to pick an embassy staff, to get an embassy facility, the old East German facility, and even trained our diplomats in North Korean-style Korean, the North Koreans never allowed it to happen."

"When I was the deputy director of the Korea Desk in 1996, we had the North Koreans come to Washington and showed them around to all the properties. They never wanted to finalize that," Straub said.

In October 2000, the United States and North Korea dramatically moved toward changing their longstanding hostile relationship through mutual high-level delegation visits to Pyongyang and Washington.

(Bill Clinton, 3rd from left, and Kim Jong Il, 3rd from right, in Pyongyang on Aug. 4, 2018. Straub on the left)

Then U.S. President Bill Clinton and North Korean leader Kim Jong Il exchanged personal messages through envoys, but a potential first summit meeting by the end of the Clinton administration never materialized.

"We agreed that we would send our top expert on missiles down to a Southeast Asian country to meet with the North Korean counterpart. The U.S. expert had all sorts of detailed questions about what a missile agreement would be," Straub said.

In 1998, North Korea launched a long-range Taepodong missile over the Japanese archipelago. This event increased the sense of insecurity in Japan, and the United states negotiated with North Korea to address the latter's missile problem. "But the North Korean expert refused to provide any details," he said.

"He said, 'I can't give you any details. Our dear leader has already told you if you come we'll take good care of you. So please don't ask me to comment on what the dear leader's intentions are.' So, we had no basis to be confident that if Bill Clinton went that he would not be embarrassed."

Two years later, the Agreed Framework collapsed soon after Straub and his diplomatic colleagues visited Pyongyang in October 2002 to discuss North Korea's covert nuclear program utilizing uranium enrichment technology.

"Kang Suk Ju never denied it," Straub said, referring to a top foreign policy advisor to Kim Jong Il. "He basically went on about the history of our relationship and how North Korea has this and that, and 'We're entitled to have even more, and more powerful things than uranium enrichment.'"

Straub said a lack of contingency plan after the collapse of the Agreed Framework under the George W. Bush administration made the situation worse, leading to another nuclear crisis that the current administration of President Donald Trump is trying to resolve through unprecedented summit diplomacy.

"I think it's unlikely that any administration could have maintained the Agreed Framework, after we discovered that the North Koreans were fundamentally cheating on the Agreed Framework with developing highly-enriched uranium," Straub said.

"But, I don't think that the Bush administration had thought ahead. I think they were like a little boy playing checkers...And, of course, the North Koreans did what many experts probably would have anticipated; they started withdrawing from the NPT (Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty), kicking out the inspectors (from the nuclear site)."