The axis of evil lost a charter member this weekend, when the U.S. took North Korea off the State Department's list of terror-sponsoring states. In return, Pyongyang promised to let international inspectors look everywhere except where its nuclear materials might actually be hidden. Kim Jong Il, despite having broken every disarmament promise he's ever made, has thus managed to persuade another U.S. President that he's serious about giving up his nuclear program. President Bush's agreement sends this message to Iran and other rogue states: Go nuclear and your political leverage increases. The U.S. had vowed not to remove North Korea from the terror blacklist until Kim's government had agreed to a "strong verification regime." But then North Korea started calling the U.S. bluff -- most recently on Thursday, when it told the inspectors for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to start packing their bags -- and the U.S. caved. As John Bolton notes nearby, Tehran will get the point.
No verification regime is 100% certain -- and searching for nuclear materials in North Korea, which has a history of lying and cheating, poses special challenges for even the most rigorous inspections. But our sources tell us the U.S. has the technical expertise to get up to 98% accuracy -- providing it can do snap, on-demand inspections anywhere in the country. Instead, Pyongyang will permit the verifiers to have unfettered access only to its declared nuclear sites -- all of which the IAEA has already combed over again and again. Access to any other location will be by "mutual consent." Inspectors will be welcome to search the Yongbyon complex and a few other known nuclear sites, such as universities. If they want to inspect anywhere else, they'll need Kim's assent. If they request access, and Pyongyang agrees, it's a sure bet the offending materials will be long gone before the inspectors arrive. This is trust but pretend to verify.
Meanwhile, the State Department didn't trust its own verification experts to take part in the disarmament process. Late Thursday, less than two days before the agreement was announced, we asked Paula DeSutter, head of the Bureau of Verification, Compliance and Implementation, what she knew about the pending deal: "I have no clue," she said. "I know zero, zip, nada, nothing. . . . That's on the record. Zero, zip, nada, nothing." Ms. DeSutter says that no one from her bureau accompanied State Department negotiator Christopher Hill on his trip to Pyongyang two weeks ago. Nor did anyone from her bureau take part in the interagency process that evaluated the deal. "I was not consulted," she said. The fact that the verification bureau was left out of the loop is further cause to suspect that Mr. Hill and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice cared above all about declaring a diplomatic success. (For the record, Ms. DeSutter said over the weekend that she supports the deal.)
Since the disarmament deal was struck in February 2007, the North has refused to give a complete accounting of its plutonium program, disclose how many nuclear weapons it has and where they are, or come clean on its suspected uranium program. Now it has managed to wriggle out of its commitments on verification -- all without having to wait for an Obama Administration.
A few hours before Washington announced it was taking North Korea off the terror list, the Pyongyang media released the first photographs of Kim Jong Il since he had been rumored to have fallen ill two months ago. He was smiling.