[The 11th-hour accommodation was the culmination of months of quiet discussions and behind-the-scenes diplomacy aimed at persuading North Korea to attend the Olympics, much of which unfolded even as the isolated nation tested its first intercontinental ballistic missiles and detonated its most powerful nuclear device yet.]
By
Jane Perlez, Choe Sang-Hun and Rebecca R. Ruiz
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A visiting North Korean band
leaving a welcoming ceremony for the country’s Olympic athletes in Gangneung,
South Korea, on Thursday. Credit Ed Jones/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images |
BEIJING
— In late December, a group
of teenagers from North Korea traveled to the Chinese city of Kunming to play
in an obscure under-15 soccer tournament. On the field, under a wintry sun,
they faced teams from China and South Korea. Off the field, there was an
unusual spectator: Choi Moon-soon, the governor of the province in South Korea
hosting the Winter Olympics.
Mr. Choi had flown more than 1,000 miles to
meet the North Korean officials accompanying the young players — and to make
the case for North Korea to attend the Olympics. “We were looking for any
contact with North Korea, and the youth soccer teams were the only inter-Korean
exchange still going on,” he later recalled.
Even before Mr. Choi returned to South Korea,
his government sent another signal: In a television interview, the South’s
president, Moon Jae-in, said he favored postponing annual joint military
exercises with the United States — an unmistakable overture to North Korea’s
leader, Kim Jong-un, who had long condemned the exercises.
Mr. Kim soon reciprocated, declaring at the
start of the year that he was sending his athletes to the Olympics. There, they
will march in the opening ceremony on Friday under a unified Korean flag with
the South Koreans — a historic moment for the divided Korean Peninsula.
The 11th-hour accommodation was the
culmination of months of quiet discussions and behind-the-scenes diplomacy
aimed at persuading North Korea to attend the Olympics, much of which unfolded
even as the isolated nation tested its first intercontinental ballistic
missiles and detonated its most powerful nuclear device yet.
With President Trump threatening to respond
to the North with “fire and fury,” the possibility of war on the Korean
Peninsula overshadowed Olympic preparations, frightening fans and athletes
alike, and prompting some nations to consider skipping the Games altogether.
But the International Olympic Committee and
South Korea pressed ahead. It was too late to move the Games, and cancellation
was unthinkable.
The best hope for success, organizers
concluded, was to persuade North Korea to participate. If the North came to the
Games, it seemed more likely to exercise restraint and refrain from the missile
launches and nuclear tests that had rattled the world. Some, including Mr.
Moon, argued that the Olympics could even be the start of talks to resolve the
nuclear crisis.
But getting North Korea to attend the Games
was a diplomatic puzzle in itself, especially amid escalating tensions. Those
interested in a successful Olympics confronted a challenge similar to what
diplomats trying to defuse the nuclear crisis had grappled with for years: Mr.
Kim calls all the shots in North Korea, but no one knows what he wants and
there are few channels for communicating with him.
The
‘Peace Games’
Thomas Bach, now the president of the I.O.C.,
did not want the Olympics in the South Korean resort of Pyeongchang. As South
Korean officials promoted their own country, Mr. Bach, then president of the
German Olympic Sports Confederation, had lobbied hard for Munich to host the
2018 Winter Games.
But South Korea won the bid seven years ago
by turning a potential liability — Pyeongchang’s proximity to the world’s most
heavily armed border — into a selling point. Recalling the Olympic truce of the
ancient Greeks, officials proposed “Peace Games” to promote reconciliation on
the Korean Peninsula.
Now, Mr. Bach had to make them a success.
Even before North Korea accelerated its
missile program last year, the risks were apparent.
Not only did the North boycott the 1988
Summer Games hosted in Seoul, South Korea’s capital, it had detonated a bomb on
a South Korean airliner the year before, killing all 115 people aboard. The
goal, an agent involved in the attack later told investigators, was to disrupt
the Games by scaring off athletes and visitors.
And when South Korea and Japan co-hosted the
soccer World Cup in 2002, the North sank a South Korean patrol boat in disputed
waters, killing six sailors, just hours before the South was to play the
third-place match.
This history cast a shadow over plans for the
2018 Winter Olympics, and early on Mr. Bach tried to win a commitment from
North Korea to attend.
At the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro,
he met North Korean officials and outlined possible financial and logistical
support to bring the North’s athletes to Pyeongchang without violating United
Nations sanctions, according to the Olympic committee.
And last February, the committee sent North
Korea a formal invitation, offering to pay for athletes’ travel and
accommodations and waive certain qualification standards for them.
But the North demurred.
Mr. Bach sought help from South Korea, meeting
at least three times with Mr. Moon’s conservative predecessor, Park Geun-hye,
according to Olympic committee statements. But she had adopted a hard line
toward the North, and soon had other things to worry about. Beginning in late
2016, large-scale protests over a corruption scandal engulfed the nation. South
Korea was all but paralyzed for months as Ms. Park was impeached and removed
from office.
With Seoul gripped by political turmoil, Mr.
Bach reached out to the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, hosting him in January
2017 in the Swiss city of Lausanne, where the I.O.C. is based.
Mr. Xi seemed receptive to Mr. Bach’s
questions and willing to help, and over dinner he laid out the history of
regional relations with the North, Olympic officials said. But the message was
clear: China’s influence over North Korea was limited.
In June, Mr. Bach turned to Washington,
meeting with President Trump at the White House. But the visit barely
registered in policy discussions on North Korea, an administration official
said.
Then, on the Fourth of July, as Mr. Bach was
finishing a trip to Beijing and Seoul, everything changed. North Korea tested
its first intercontinental ballistic missile, which appeared capable of
reaching Alaska. The North’s state news media quoted Mr. Kim describing it as a
“gift package” to the Trump administration.
A
Darker Mood
The missile test was a blow to Mr. Moon, a
former human rights lawyer whose election had ended a decade of conservative
rule in South Korea and restored to power the nation’s progressive left, which
favors closer ties with North Korea.
Mr. Moon saw the Olympics as his best chance
to ease tensions with the North, and in his first weeks in office he had gone
out of his way to welcome a North Korean team to a taekwondo competition in the
South Korean city of Muju.
Even after the missile test in July, Mr. Moon
extended an olive branch, using a speech in Berlin to invite the North to the
Games and remind Mr. Kim that the I.O.C. was on hand to make the arrangements.
But Mr. Kim launched another ICBM that same
month, this one capable of hitting California. About a week later, Mr. Trump
warned that he would unleash “fire and fury” against the North if it endangered
the United States.
Amid the rising hostilities, the Olympics
receded from the agenda. Pressing forward, Mr. Bach turned again to China,
meeting Mr. Xi in the eastern city of Tianjin at the opening of the China
National Games in August, Olympic officials announced. But China was so angry
at North Korea for its missile tests that it had little interest in lobbying
Mr. Kim about the Olympics, Chinese officials said.
Prospects for the “Peace Games” hit another
low in early September after the North conducted a powerful underground nuclear
test, which analysts have since concluded was its first successful detonation
of a hydrogen bomb.
France’s sports minister, Laura Flessel-Colovic,
said her nation’s team would stay home if its security could not be guaranteed.
Canada and Australia also expressed safety concerns and said they were
reviewing the situation.
Mr. Bach was on the defensive, forced to deny
the need for any backup plan to move the Games. “Speaking now about different
scenarios for the Olympic Winter Games would send the wrong message,” he said.
“It would be a message against our own belief in peace and diplomacy.”
Mr. Bach traveled to Seoul again in late
September to huddle with Mr. Moon. The meeting took place a day after Mr. Trump
addressed the United Nations General Assembly and threatened to “totally
destroy” North Korea if it threatened the United States.
In his own speech at the United Nations, Mr.
Moon made the case again for Pyeongchang. “My heart is filled with great joy
when I imagine North Korean athletes marching into the stadium during the opening
ceremony,” he said.
But his plea was overshadowed by Mr. Kim, who
issued an unusual personal statement that denounced Mr. Trump as a “mentally
deranged U.S. dotard.”
Another problem for Mr. Moon was the lack of
a reliable channel of communication with Mr. Kim.
Some of the South’s former contacts in North
Korea had been purged by Mr. Kim or had retired, and relations between the two
Koreas had soured under the conservative governments that preceded Mr. Moon’s
election. When three of Mr. Kim’s top aides traveled to South Korea to attend
the Asian Games in 2014, for example, Ms. Park declined to even meet with them.
In late November, North Korea tested another
ICBM, the Hwasong-15, a new model that flew higher and longer than the previous
ones, putting the entire continental United States within target range.
The threat to the Olympics was mounting. The
United States ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki R. Haley, even suggested
that American participation in the Games was an “open question.”
The Final Sprint
With time running out, Mr. Moon sought help
from the Trump administration. Just as North Korea preferred to deal with the
United States alone in nuclear negotiations, some argued that the North wanted
Washington to step up on the Olympics, too.
Speaking by telephone the day after the
November missile test, Mr. Moon asked Mr. Trump to announce that he would send
a high-level American delegation to attend the Games. That would help dispel
uncertainty over the event and signal to Mr. Kim that the United States took
the Games seriously.
Mr. Trump agreed it was important that the
Olympics go smoothly, and said Mr. Moon could tell the I.O.C. that Washington
would send a high-level delegation, Mr. Moon’s office said at the time.
Relations between the two presidents were
difficult. They had staked out different positions on the North Korean crisis,
and Mr. Trump had made his disdain of Mr. Moon public, even accusing him of
“appeasement,” an extraordinary dig at any American ally.
A glimmer of interest from the North in
easing tensions came in December, when the government requested a visit by
Jeffrey Feltman, a senior official at the United Nations. The Trump
administration approved of the trip, and Mr. Feltman traveled to Pyongyang, the
North Korean capital, for meetings with diplomats.
“We suggested to them that they needed to
take advantage of the Olympics and use the Olympics as a way to get dialogue
going,” he said. The North Koreans were noncommittal, but Mr. Feltman gently
suggested that the world would be paying attention to whatever Mr. Kim said
next.
In Washington, the Trump administration began
discussing Mr. Moon’s position. The most sensitive question was his proposal to
delay the joint military exercises that were scheduled to begin near the end of
the Olympics and during the Paralympic Games.
Some officials argued that any delay would be
seen as a concession to Mr. Kim and undermine the Trump administration’s
“maximum pressure” approach to the North. But as the administration
deliberated, word of South Korea’s preference for a delay began to appear in
news reports. Then, during the youth soccer tournament in Kunming, Mr. Moon
publicly confirmed that he had suggested postponing the exercises.
In the flurry of diplomacy that followed, the
United States publicly agreed to the delay and Mr. Kim announced that he would
send his athletes, surprising the world.
In Washington, some officials were more
worried about another aspect of Mr. Kim’s proclamations, specifically a
declaration in his New Year’s speech that North Korea would begin “mass
production” of nuclear weapons and missiles in 2018.
But the spotlight had shifted to the
Olympics, and the momentum now was behind diplomacy and good will. The North
received the promised logistical and financial help, and some of its athletes
will be allowed to compete without qualifying.
And in a surprise development on Wednesday,
the North said that Mr. Kim’s influential sister, Kim Yo-jong, would attend the
Games, making her the first immediate member of the North’s ruling family to
set foot in the South.
White House officials have defended delaying
the joint military exercises, saying that South Korea needed to focus on
Olympic security for such a vital event. “For us it’s a practical matter,”
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told reporters.
But the Olympics hardly resolve the nuclear
standoff. Before heading to the Games, Vice President Mike Pence delivered
perhaps his harshest remarks about the North Korean regime. “The American
people, the people of Japan and freedom-loving people across the wider world
long for the day when peace and prosperity replace Pyongyang’s belligerence and
brutality,” he said.
Such language, analysts said, edged the Trump
administration closer to a position of “regime change,” something it has not
formally embraced.
Still, Sue Mi Terry, a senior fellow at the
Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the Games
were a chance for the North to present itself as a normal country rather than a
pariah state. “There’s no political or financial cost for North Korea,” she
said. “So why not?”
Other analysts said the timing also suited
the North’s weapons program, giving its scientists time to study the results of
last year’s missile launches and repair its underground nuclear test facility.
But Mr. Moon continues to argue that the
North’s participation in the Olympics may lead to talks on resolving the
nuclear standoff, and he has publicly credited Mr. Trump’s tough policies with
contributing to the détente.
Mr. Trump has been happy to accept credit, boasting
that the Olympics were moving ahead because of him and expressing satisfaction,
and even a hint of hope, over the North’s decision to attend.
“I’d like to see them getting involved in the
Olympics,” he told reporters in January, “and maybe things go from there.”
Jane Perlez reported from Beijing, Choe
Sang-Hun from Pyeongchang and Seoul, South Korea, and Rebecca R. Ruiz from New
York. Mark Landler contributed reporting from Washington.