The Record on the Eve of a Handshake
A single appearance can do more diplomatic work than a formal statement. In the days before the first meeting between the leaders of North and South Korea, American diplomats in Seoul were tracking exactly that: how a few relaxed minutes of Kim Jong Il standing beside Chinese leaders in Beijing had already started to change what South Koreans expected of him. The cable survives largely intact; only its closing pages are unreadable, apparently due to a scanning fault.
The Cable
The document is SEOUL 003037, sent in two sections, 01 OF 02 and 02 OF 02, from the American Embassy in Seoul to the Secretary of State in Washington. It was classified Secret, a level below Top Secret, and marked IMMEDIATE, the precedence used for cable traffic that needs to move ahead of the routine queue. Copies went to the embassies in Beijing, Tokyo, and Moscow, to the National Security Council (NSC), to the Joint Staff, and to Commander, U.S. Forces Korea (COMUSKOREA). Inside the State Department it was routed to officials named Pickering, Sherman, Einhorn, Roth, Deming, and Kartman, with instructions to pass a copy to the NSC’s Lieberthal.
The release carries Case No. C05635999. The drafting officer had originally marked it to stay classified until Korean reunification, an instruction that would have kept it sealed indefinitely. Instead it followed the ordinary review schedule: classification extended on September 21, 2016, declassification authorized on June 8, 2025, under Authority DSCG 11-1. The National Security Archive published the scan on December 8, 2017, as part of a briefing book on North Korea policy under the Clinton administration.
Written on the Eve
The cable is dated June 9, 2000, describing a summit the Embassy expected to open on June 12 in Pyongyang, between President Kim Dae Jung and North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. It records that South Korean public expectations were already running ahead of what Kim Dae Jung’s government wanted, though the Embassy calls the gap “manageable.” Part of the reason, it suggests, was Kim Jong Il’s own conduct on a recent trip to Beijing: his composed, at-ease appearances alongside Chinese leaders had visibly shifted how South Koreans saw him. The same passage notes that South Korean conservatives, in the cable’s own phrase, still regarded him as “devil incarnate.” Both readings sit in the same paragraph, unresolved.
Managing the Public
The record shows Kim Dae Jung’s government working against what the cable calls “irrational exuberance,” trying to lower hopes for a quick breakthrough on issues like family reunifications. Officials instead framed the summit’s occurrence itself, two Korean leaders meeting for the first time, as the historic achievement, regardless of what came out of the talks. The cable separately notes that none of this had moved South Korean opinion on the continued need for U.S. Forces Korea (USFK), the American military command in the country. It records that detail without further comment and moves to the next paragraph.
The Embassy’s Forecast
Set apart from its account of public mood, the cable offers the Embassy’s own forecast, filed before anyone could know how the meeting would go. Its judgment: the summit would almost certainly proceed, and the one-on-one sessions between the two leaders would likely run open-ended rather than to a fixed agenda, but concrete outcomes would be constrained by domestic politics in both Koreas and by the broader geopolitics of the region. The cable does add, in a passage that survived the scan intact, what a genuinely successful dialogue might mean at the widest scale: a “paradigm shift” in how Washington, Seoul, and Tokyo coordinated their North Korea policy, with South Korea taking the lead role. This is a period judgment, not a verified result. Filed three days ahead of the opening session, it cannot describe what the two leaders actually did in the room.
Where the Page Fails
The second section is where a fuller discussion of USFK, and of what success would actually require, appears to have been laid out. It is also where the scan gives out. Blocks of text near the end are garbled past reading, mixed with reversed and scrambled character strings that look like scanning artifacts rather than sentences. Even the cable’s own transmission timestamp is affected, rendered as “0908582 JUN 00,” one digit too many for a standard date-time group, the string cables use to mark exactly when they were sent. A single garbled digit inside an otherwise legible stamp reads more like a scanning defect than a redaction. Redacted material in a declassified file is normally blacked out in a clean block with an exemption cited; this is not that. The file does not say what caused the corruption. It is simply broken.
What the Document Cannot Tell You
Because it was written on June 9, 2000, three days before the summit’s planned opening, the cable cannot record what the two leaders produced, what success came to mean for the Embassy once the meeting happened, or how the corrupted passage on USFK would read if the scan had come through clean. No later cable in this release fills that gap. The Embassy’s own planning window, June 12 through 14, also differs from the dates the summit was actually held, June 13 through 15; the record does not explain the three-day shift. What remains is a snapshot taken before the fact: a careful, hedged assessment of a meeting that had not yet happened, written by people who could not know how it would turn out, attached to a second section the scanner never fully recovered. Anyone reading this cable now is reading exactly what the desk officer wrote and nothing that later events added to it, which is the whole point of a document like this one.