Mike Chinoy on Chris Hill

In his confirmation hearing last week, Senator Roger Wicker asked Christopher Hill about reporting that showed he defied the wishes of President George W. Bush and the direct instructions of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in order to meet bilaterally with the North Koreans. Hill, now Barack Obama's nominee to serve as US Ambassador to Iraq, told Wicker that Rice had "agreed to have bilateral -- a bilateral meeting with the understanding that the North Koreans would then announce at the end of the bilateral meeting their participation in the six-party process. But she wanted the Chinese to be there."

But, as I pointed out in a post last week, Rice had not agreed to a bilateral meeting with North Korea. Mike Chinoy, a former CNN reporter and author of "Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis," reported on page 239 of his book:

The North Koreans made clear that, while they were open to returning to the talks, they wanted a bilateral meeting with Hill before making any announcement. Hill's problem was that Rice and other senior officials, while willing to sanction a meeting, insisted that it be trilateral, with China participating as well.

Chinoy further reported that Hill displayed "the willingness to take risks and to stretch -- if not ignore -- his instructions that would characterize his modus operandi in the coming months, Hill decided to go ahead on his own and present her with a fait accompli."

And indeed, Hill did the same thing in the fall of 2006, meeting bilaterally with the North Koreans just three weeks a North Korean nuclear test had pushed Bush to declare publicly, again, that he opposed bilateral meetings with representatives of Kim Jong Il's regime.

Hill also told Senator Wicker that he had not had a "verbal confrontation" with Secretary Rice over the issue. But in his book Chinoy described this exchange between Hill and Rice:

When Rice arrived in Beijing later that night, Hill went to her hotel suite. "The bad news," he told her, "is that the Chinese didn't show up. But the good news is that the North Koreans announced they would come back to the talks." Rice was not amused, although Hill felt that, since getting the talks under way again was one of her goals, her anger would pass.

Chinoy further reported that Rice confronted the Chinese about the premature departure.

Given the apparent contradictions -- between Hill's testimony and Chinoy's reporting -- I asked Chinoy if he stands by his reporting -- he does -- and asked if he had any further thoughts.

Chinoy writes:

There are a couple of issues here. One is the characterization of what happened. The second is the political use of the episode by a conservative senator looking for reasons to oppose Hill's nomination as ambassador to Iraq.

As to the episode itself, a bit of context is needed.

In the summer of 2005, the US was trying to get North Korea to return to the six-party talks, which Pyongyang had been boycotting since the previous fall. The North had signaled that if its envoy could have a bilateral meeting with Hill, it would return to the talks. The official US position, pulled together in Washington in an atmosphere of constant bureaucratic infighting between so-called "hardliners" and "moderates," was that Hill could only meet with the North Koreans with the Chinese present. The Chinese, understandably frustrated by what they saw as American obstinacy on a procedural matter that was blocking a resumption of the six-party talks, tried to square the circle by inviting both Hill and the North Koreans to a dinner in Beijing, and then, as I recount in my book "Meltdown", disappearing. This led Hill to call what he characterized in his testimony as an "audible" - deciding not to walk out of the dinner, which would have almost certainly ensured an angry North Korean reaction that would have destroyed any chance of the six-party talks resuming. Instead, he remained, and at the end of his discussion with the North Koreans, they agreed to return to the talks.