July 5, 2002: National Security Adviser Rice Says US Will Continue Providing Nuclear Assistance to North Korea, but Must Know It Has Violated Treaty

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice writes to US congresspeople, telling them that the Bush administration will continue to provide North Korea with shipments of heavy fuel oil and nuclear technology. These deliveries are in accordance with the Agreed Framework (see October 21, 1994). However, a few weeks previously the CIA had informed the White House that the Koreans had violated the framework by starting uranium enrichment, with Pakistani help (see June 2002). This meant that the Koreans had forfeited any entitlement to US assistance, but Rice, in the words of authors Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, “plumped for ignorance” of the CIA report. [New Yorker, 1/27/2003; Levy and Scott-Clark, 2007, pp. 336-337]