Clear evidence exists on N. Korea-Syria nuke ties: Cheney

By Lee Chi-dong
WASHINGTON, Aug. 30 (Yonhap) -- Former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney said there was a "striking resemblance" between Syria's nuclear facility and North Korea's nuclear reactor in Yongbyon.
In his new memoir, "In My Time," published Tuesday, Cheney also said the North must have provided Syria with uranium-based nuclear technology as it did to Libya.
"Sustained nuclear cooperation between North Korea and Syria likely began as early as 1997," he said, citing information from senior U.S. intelligence officials.
The U.S. received much of the intelligence on the Pyongyang-Damascus relationship from the Israelis, he said. In 2007, Israel carried out an airstrike on a Syrian nuclear site.
A photo showed, Cheney said, that even a North Korean official in his country's delegation at the six-way talks aimed at ending Pyongyang's atomic weapons program had visited Syria for nuclear cooperation.
"It was pretty remarkable -- even for the North Koreans -- for a member of their negotiating team to be spending time, when he wasn't at the negotiating table, proliferating nuclear technology to Syria," he said.
Cheney, who served as vice president from 2001 to 2009, emphasized that current and future American leaders should take lessons from a mistake in North Korea policy during the final years of the Bush administration.
He claimed the State Department's negotiating team, led by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, lost sight of the objective.
"For them, the agreement seemed to become the objective, and we ended up with a clear setback in our nonproliferation efforts," he said.
At that time, Washington agreed to provide Pyongyang with a set of political and economic incentives. In fact, the U.S. removed the communist nation from the blacklist of state sponsors of terrorism in return for its declaration of its nuclear stockpile.
While White House officials made clear that their goal was getting North Koreans to give up their nuclear weapons program, he argued, the State Department came to regard getting the North Koreans to agree to something as the ultimate objective.
"That mistake led our diplomats to respond to Pyongyang's intransigence and dishonesty with ever greater concessions, thereby encouraging duplicity and double-dealing," he said.
North Koreans were "masters of brinkmanship -- creating problems, threatening their neighbors and expecting to be bribed back into cooperation," he said.
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