President George W. Bush apparently directly instructed U.S. delegates in negotiating over North Korea’s nuclear program in six-nation talks in Beijing. Abandoning pressure and hostility for dialogue and negotiations, Bush was briefed about the development and results of the nuclear negotiations in detail and approved every move.

This was confirmed by a press conference he gave at the White House on Wednesday, where he showed a firm grasp of the jargon -- “shut down”, “seal” and “disable” -- of the complicated agreement defining the two phases of actions. He explained in detail how North Korea will receive 50,000 tons of heavy fuel oil first and the remaining 950,000 tons in rewards depending on how far it goes toward disabling its nuclear facilities.

Based on the explanations, the U.S. president called the Beijing agreement “a continuation of one first proposed in September 2005,” to be implemented on “a step-by-step basis,” which he said was a “unique deal.” He said his former ambassador to the UN John Bolton’s was “flat wrong” in criticizing the agreement. Bush explained, “At the second phase is to disable and abandon their facilities. If they do the second phase ... there will be about the equivalent of a million tons, minus the 50,000 tons [from South Korea] available [in] food, economic assistance and fuel. Now, that's not going to happen until there's some verifiable measures that have been taken.”

President Bush pauses during a news conference in the East Room at the White House in Washington on Wednesday./AP

It was U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and top nuclear envoy Christopher Hill who sought direct instruction from Bush. The New York Times reports that a “turning point came Jan. 17,” when Hill met with his North Korean counterpart Kim Kye-gwan in Berlin. According to the newspaper, Bush approved last-ditch negotiations after getting a phone call from Rice, who stopped in Berlin on her way home from talks with Arab leaders in Kuwait. At the time, she made phone calls to President Bush and White House National Security Advisor Steven Hadley after receiving a one-page document on North Korea’s demand from Assistant Secretary of State Hill. In the phone call, she asked President Bush, “Do you think we should proceed on this basis?” and Bush answered, “Yes.”

In the Berlin meetings, the U.S. promised North Korea to settle the issue of Pyongyang’s frozen accounts with the Macau-based Banco Delta Asia. The Washington Post says informal talks with Victor Cha, the Korean-American director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council, “including a chance encounter in the Beijing airport in December, helped lead to the unusual negotiations Hill and Cha held with North Korean counterparts in Berlin last month.” Cha in those informal talks hinted at the possibility of unfreezing some BDA accounts which North Korea calls legitimate, leading to the Berlin meeting and thus to the latest round of the six-way nuclear talks in Beijing. Bush seems to have been directly briefed about nuclear negotiations and given direct orders since then.

Former U.S. negotiator Jack Pritchard said the Berlin meetings were held with Bush’s direct approval. Facing the threat of becoming a lame duck and bogged down in Iraq and Iran’s nuclear development, the U.S. president appears to have undergone a profound change from the man who once called North Korean leader Kim Jong-il a “tyrant.”

(englishnews@chosun.comm )