North Korea News Podcast by NK News - Joel Wit: An inside look at US-North Korea nuclear diplomacy

Episode Date: May 22, 2025

This week, veteran North Korea negotiator Joel Wit joins the podcast to revisit his decades of experience negotiating with Pyongyang, what went wrong in efforts to stop the DPRK’s nuclear development and what, if anything, can still be done. He shares insights from high-level talks, including surreal moments inside the DPRK, and discusses whether dialogue […]

You're listening to an exclusive episode of the NK News podcast available only to subscribers. You can listen to this and other episodes from your preferred podcast player by accessing the Private Podcast feed. For more detailed instructions, please see the step-by-step guide on the NK News website at nknews.org slash private-feed. Hello, listeners, and welcome to the MK News podcast. I'm your host, Jaco's Wedslute. And this episode was recorded via StreamYard on April 15. That's Kim Il-sung's birthday, 2025. And joining me via StreamYard is Joel Witt, who is the distinguished fellow in Asian and security Studies at the Stimson Center. As a US State Department official, Joel helped to negotiate the 1994

USDPRK agreed framework, and he was in charge of its implementation until he left government in 2002, holding countless talks with North Korean officials, including people from the military and nuclear establishments. Joel Witt is the author of a new book called, Fall Out, the Inside Story of How America Failed to Disarm North Korea, to be published by Yale University Press. And you'll find a lot of Joel's other output at the website 38north.org,

which he founded and formally operated. Joel, welcome on the podcast. I'm glad to be here. Now you've sat across from North Korean officials in secret meetings, you've been held hostage near a suspected nuclear site, and you helped negotiate the agreed framework as I mentioned. What's the most surreal or revealing moment from your experience in engaging with North Korea that listeners won't find in the headlines or history books but can read about in your new book? Well, I think the most interesting thing is when most

people hear about North Korea and North Koreans, they think that they're robots. And that may not be true for a lot of your listeners who are more well informed. I hope yeah, but the fact is they're not robots. And, you know, if you're sitting in a meeting with them and they know who you are and you know who they are and you've met before, it can actually be quite productive. You know, once the official line is recited on their side, you can get down to serious give and take. And, you know, that's been the experience I've had,

certainly in negotiations, government to government negotiations, but especially in Track 2 meetings, unofficial meetings, that I participated in, I guess, for almost a decade up until 2016. Okay, so that's a good rule of thumb to bear in mind that North Koreans aren't robots. I guess what I'm hoping for is whether you if you have an anecdote of a moment that seemed quite surreal or revealing something very specific or concrete. something very specific or concrete? You know, off the top of my head, I don't accept, I don't know if this is surreal,

but you know, when I and a team of US inspectors, we were held hostage in North Korea in 1998, and that was just for a day while we were on an inspection. And one of our team violated the rules of the inspection. So we were immediately taken to a conference room and surrounding the conference room were windows. And there were all these North Korean soldiers around the windows, sort of, you know, it looked like they were getting ready to rip us apart. So that was surreal, but even more surreal, we got out of that situation with the assistance of

the North Korean Foreign Ministry and some other North Korean officials who sort of led us to a solution and led us to a way to satisfy all these soldiers who were surrounding us. So I found that very surprising that, you know, they had bigger issues in mind than North Korean foreign ministry officials. And the soldiers, of course, just didn't like Americans, didn't like the fact that we were there at their base, and were looking for an excuse to do something bad to us. Right. That must have been quite surreal, even just for a day. That would be quite hard to keep a straight head, I think, in the middle of all that.

Yeah. Well, you know, some of the team, we had a team of, I can say it now, a lot of them were intelligence analysts from different intelligence agencies who had been, you know, desk bound for years and jumped at the chance to visit North Korea. And a number of them were from nuclear weapons labs, because we were there to see whether the North Koreans were building a nuclear installation, cheating on the 1994 deal. And I know afterwards, a number of them said they thought we were going to be shot. Now, we're recording this interview, as I said earlier, on the 113th birthday of Kim Il-sung, the founder of North Korea. Now, Kim has been dead for

almost 30 years, and it seems a little bit that his memory and his legacy are fading or at least receding a bit in North Korea. To what extent do you believe that this is due to a change in leadership style or substance by his grandson Kim Jong-un or simply by him trying to build his own legacy? Well, I think it's probably both. Time has gone by. Kim Il-sung has sort of faded in the minds of many North Koreans. But more important than that, Kim Jong-un is really trying to build his own legacy. And he's really done an interesting job of it because the growth of their nuclear arsenal probably far exceeds anything his father or grandfather expected might have. So on that front, he's really done his own. He's only created his own legacy. Does it make you think that the North Korea that if a young Joel Witt were to be sent into North Korea today on a mission to negotiate with the powers that be in Pyongyang, does it make you think that today's North Korea is quite different from the one that you dealt with 30 years ago?

Oh, it's completely different. And that has to do with the history of the past 30 years and the failure of their attempts to reach some sort of accommodation with the United States. So if you flash back to 1990 or around that time period, the North Koreans made a decision the North Koreans made a decision to build better relations with the United States, and in part, that was because of the geopolitical changes surrounding, you know, the Soviet Union was gone, and you had Gorbachev, you had the Chinese reaching out to the South Koreans, and so the North Koreans decided at that point, they needed to have a better relations with the United States.

And that has drove their policy for three decades. But that of course has recently just disappeared. Kim Jong-un got tired of trying to reach a better relationship with Washington, and now he's turned to Russia. So it would be a very different conversation. And if Donald Trump does reengage the North Koreans, it's going to be a very different conversation than even the ones he had in 2019 in Hanoi and at the DMZ summit.

Now, in your new book, Fallout, you argue that multiple US administrations have misunderstood opportunities to resolve the nuclear issue. What are one or two of the most important missed chances in your view, the hinge points where the path might have truly diverged? Well, if I had to pick one critical moment, it would be when the agreed framework collapsed. And, you know, at that point, When do you put that? What year was that? Oh, that was 2002. So the agreement, just a little background, the agreement was reached in 1994. What most people miss is that according to our intelligence analysts, by the 2000s, North

Korea could have built almost 100 nuclear weapons. And that fact is totally missed in any analysis done of that time period. So if you fast forward to 2002, the North Koreans had maybe some fizzle material to build a handful of weapons, and they had started to cheat. There's no doubt about it. They had started to explore building weapons using uranium

as opposed to the ones they had started to explore building weapons using uranium, as opposed to the ones they had that were based on plutonium. So with that background in 2002, the Bush administration essentially took a number of steps that resulted in the collapse of the agreement. And the problem was they hadn't thought about what would happen after the agreement collapsed for a number of reasons.

First of all, the administration was about to invade Iraq, you know, it was distracting. But the problem is once the agreement collapsed, the North Koreans just moved forward rapidly with their own nuclear program. Now, it would have been hard, but what the Bush administration should have done was to use the continuing negotiations with North Korea to tell them cut out the cheating or else. And there were clear signs that the North Koreans were willing to concede on that point, even reach a more strict agreement with the United States. But as Dick Cheney used to say, we don't negotiate with evil.

So that was it. Does your view closely align with that of Sig Hecker, whom I interviewed just over two years ago about his own book, Hinge Points, an inside look at North Korea's nuclear program? And if not, where are the major points of divergence between you two? Curious to hear the rest? points of divergence between you two. your preferred podcast player by accessing the Private Podcast Feed. For more detailed instructions, please see the step-by-step guide on the NK News website at nknews.org slash private dash feed.