There is a mini-tempest blowing as a result of revelations that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the so-called Iran deal, which limits rather than enhances transparency regarding Iran’s nuclear program. What this effectively means is that the Obama administration, its international partners, and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) designed an inspection and reporting regime to protect the agreement rather than prevent Iranian cheating. After all, if IAEA reporting included details such as the 20 percent enriched uranium stock (that the JCPOA forbids) and Iran’s advanced centrifuge work, then officials might second guess the success of an agreement that the Obama administration wishes to treat as a treaty.
There’s actually precedent here. In an episode I address in Dancing with the Devil, a history of U.S. diplomacy with rogue regimes and terrorist groups, the Clinton administration circled the wagons around its North Korea agreement.
The 1994 Agreed Framework promised North Korea both Light Water Reactors and heavy fuel oil. Shortly after oil shipments to North Korea began, however, the North Korean government began to divert oil to its steel industry in violation of the Agreement. Behind-the-scenes, Robert Gallucci had become so vested in the Framework’s success that he and his team blamed not Pyongyang but rather the Pentagon because it had insisted that the Framework restricted permissible fuel use.
Then, in 1999, the General Accounting Office (GAO) reported that it could no longer verify how North Korea distributed or used its food aid. The communist regime allowed World Food Program monitors to visit only ten percent of institutions receiving food aid, and the North Korean military blocked access to inspectors, much as Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps does today. In a letter responding to the report, the State Department refused to accept the GAO findings: To accept them would be to admit North Korean cheating after the Clinton administration had already invested too much in the process and would not acknowledge evidence tarnishing its agreement. Likewise, when the GAO reported that monitoring of heavy fuel oil had gone awry, the State Department informed Congress that they trusted that the regime’s use of the heavy fuel oil was consistent with the Agreed Framework. Congress did not buy it, but, in an angry exchange of letters, Secretary of State Warren Christopher in effect covered up North Korean non-compliance. The State Department continued to insist that the Agreed Framework was “a concrete success.”
One of Secretary of State John Kerry’s top advisors and assistants on the talks leading up to the JCPOA was Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman, a veteran of the North Korea talks. Today, most honest observers acknowledge that the Agreed Framework with North Korea was a failure, despite the contemporary political spin put on the deal by Clinton administration officials and key enablers in the media. Alas, rather than learn the lessons of the Agreed Framework while hashing out the JCPOA, it seems as if Sherman concluded that the real mistake of the previous agreement with North Korea was instead too much transparency.
