SEOUL - Intelligence analysts here dismissed New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof as "a mouthpiece for North Korean propagandists" after publishing columns during a visit to Pyongyang last week with Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr.
Kristof emphatically conveyed that Kim Jong-Il was not only "very firmly in control" but also that new reactor construction showed that "U.S. policy toward North Korea has utterly failed."
|
New York Times Publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr.
|
|
The question after the visit was whether North Korean officials had given messages for Kristof and Sulzberger to relay to Christopher Hill, assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific, and chief of the U.S. negotiating team that goes to Beijing next week for the first multilateral talks in more than a year on North Korea's nukes.
The presence of Sulzberger in Pyongyang suggested the anxiety of North Korean leaders to be certain The Times was firmly on board in convincing influential Americans that the Bush administration was to blame for ignoring North Korean demands while the country built up its nuclear arsenal.
The North Koreans had little trouble handling Sulzberger and Kristof.
Kristof's first column declared: "President Bush and his top officials are studiously pretending not to notice" that North Korea has resumed building "two major nuclear reactors that it stopped work on back in 1994" when the U.S. and North Korean negotiators hammered out the Geneva framework agreement. Under this accord, North Korea promised to give up its nuclear weapons program in exchange for construction of twin lightwater nuclear energy reactors.
A U.S. military intelligence analyst noted that Kristof's source for his seemingly sensational rush to judgment was none other than Li Chan-Bok, the North Korean lieutenant general who has been confronting American major generals in intermittent talks at the truce village of Panmunjom for more than 25 years. "President Bush is being suckered" into thinking multilateral talks are the answer, said Kristof, concluding the only way out was for Washington to open direct dialogue with Pyongyang.
"Kristof is the one who's being suckered," said the analyst. "He was completely taken in by his hosts."
