Bill Clinton visits North Korea, secures pardon for journalists

It was one of the best kept secrets in the annals of international diplomacy, clandestine, triumphant and potentially momentous.

The former US president Bill Clinton yesterday travelled to North Korea, the most insular nation on Earth, on a surprise mission to seek the release of two imprisoned US journalists.

Within hours of a face-to-face meeting with its ruler Kim Jong-il, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, sentenced to 12 years hard labour for engaging in "hostile acts", had been granted a special pardon.

In Pyongyang, Clinton was ushered into talks with Kim, the so-called "Dear Leader" of the secretive state that George Bush included in his "Axis of Evil".

The breakthrough will bring relief to the families of the jailed women, but Clinton's mission also appeared to have a much broader agenda.

Arranged in utter secrecy it had the all the appearance of an enormous diplomatic gamble.

North Korea has the capacity - and the paranoia - to deliver to Barack Obama the biggest foreign crisis of his presidency.

It has tested a large nuclear device and long-range missiles. Japan is in range. Alaska and Hawaii almost are.

No one was fooled by the shoulder-shrugging of the White House after the news broke of Clinton arriving in an unmarked plane to seek the release of two imprisoned US journalists from their incarceration in the secretive communist state.

It was a "private" mission, aides insisted, and they denied reports in the official North Korean media that he had "courteously" delivered a verbal message to Kim from Obama.

But the last time an American official met Kim was in 2000. So this was not something that just happened without lengthy preparations, not to say agonising, by both sides.

There was a reception committee waiting for Clinton when he landed, consisting of the Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan, who has been chief nuclear negotiator in the past, and a young girl bearing flowers.

Television pictures showed him sitting within hours at a negotiating table with the North Korean leader.

That he was granted a swift audience seemed like a good sign from the point of view of the two women, Laura Ling, 32, and Euna Lee, 36, who, on assignment for San Francisco-based CurrentTV, were arrested for allegedly erring onto North Korean soil while at the border with China, reporting a story about women fleeing the prison state.

But much more was potentially at stake than the pair's liberty.

Is it possible that Clinton and Kim sat at that table with their dour-faced aides and posed for propaganda photographs and did not take time to discuss other matters outstanding?

The US wants the women released. But much more it wants North Korea to stop its dangerous nuclear posturing, to return to international talks on disarming itself and cease proliferating weapons of mass destruction.

State media said in a report that the two men had indeed engaged in "exhaustive talks" on a range of topics.

And opportunities like this to peer inside North Korea n and the eyes of Kim, who, at 67, is known to be in faltering health after a reported stroke last year - do not come often.

Analysts in the US ache for new pictures of the man to gauge his health.

It is unlikely the deeply delicate topic of the succession came up directly. The West believes Kim favours handing power to his 26-year-old, Swiss-educated son, Jong-un.

But whether the mission indeed held promise of easing all the re-accumulated tensions between Pyongyang and Washington (and Seoul), it was the choice of envoy that was intriguing.

Clinton was dogged by North Korea while in office, wavering between threatening war and then doing deals - deals to trade aid for suspensions in their nuclear doings that eventually fell apart.

In recent weeks there had been speculation that Al Gore, a co-founder of CurrentTV, or the New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, would be chosen to embark on a mission to negotiate a release for the two journalists.

Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, was en route to Africa early yesterday when she confirmed to the small group of reporters travelling with her that her husband was at the unfriendly end of the Korean peninsula.

An unanswered question remained why, if she has been fretting recently about her fading profile, she had apparently sub-contracted a mission of such scale to her husband.

It was not so long ago that the foreign policy community was wondering out loud about the wisdom of choosing Mrs Clinton as Secretary of State precisely because of the obstacles posed by the man she called husband.

They worried about conflicts of interest with Mr Clinton's travels on behalf of his international foundation. Would he embarrass her, perhaps by tapping undesirable potentates for money?

Now we have a different scenario, where Mr Clinton serves as a crucial ambassador abroad for Obama's foreign policy priorities.

The threading of Democratic presidents past through the eye of the Pyongyang needle is also arresting.

The best hope of a breakthrough for Clinton came in 1994 when he sent an envoy of his own there - Jimmy Carter. Carter, who met Kim's father, Kim Il-sung, was building his own career as special envoy for Uncle Sam.

Any breakthrough for the two reporters will bring their families much yearned-for relief.

"We are still very distressed by the absence of Laura and Euna but remain hopeful that a positive resolution can be reached," TV journalist Lisa Ling, Ms Ling's older sister, told the Committee to Protect Journalists a few weeks ago.

Laura Ling has an unidentified medical condition that needs attention while Lee has a four-year-old daughter.

What benefits such a deal would bring in easing tensions between the US and North Korea on the full range of difficulties may not become obvious for weeks or months to come.

True, Pyongyang has taken one step after another of late to aggravate the US, which, in turn, led efforts at the United Nations to turn up sanctions.

The North Koreans have also withdrawn from six-party talks on suspending its nuclear programmes and vowed never to return.

The White House insists that the plight of the women is being treated completely separately from its other problems with North Korea.

But the mere fact of Clinton being in Pyongyang and speaking directly to the North Korean leadership, may become a precursor to the two countries entering a dialogue, possibly even to a resumption of the six-party negotiations which also involve Japan, China, South Korea and Russia.

Thanks to the two women reporters, both sides see a chance to gain leverage on one another.

"This is a very potentially rewarding trip," noted Mike Chinoy, a commentator on the Korean peninsula.

"It could be a very significant opening and breaking this downward cycle of tension and recrimination between the US and North Korea."

- INDEPENDENT