summer of 1998. At that moment of maximum peril to the administration's North Korea policy, it was widely agreed in the US Congress, the executive branch, and among numerous foreign policy professionals that the best chance for preservation was a high-level review and revision headed by a respected outsider. Nearly everyone's number-one choice to undertake this job was William J. Perry, the seventy-one-year-old former secretary of defense, who had led the nation's military establishment during the 1994 nuclear crisis. Perry was a figure of strength, maturity, and experience. More than almost anyone else, he had looked into the abyss of horrific bloodshed and destruction that had been threatened. Unknown to most outsiders, he had been seared by the experience. Having returned to the comfortable life of a Stanfordit planned to do next, or what it had just done, in the nuclear program. In 2004, explaining the rationale for bringing the Americans to Yongbyon, a North Korean Foreign Ministry statement argued that "transparency serves as a basis of realistic thinking and, at the same time, a basis for solving the issue." The statement went on to say, "We never employ a sleight of hand. Whenever an opportunity presented itself, we opened to the public our fair and aboveboard nuclear activities as they were and informed the U.S. side of them through a diplomatic channel."

Some observers viewed these notifications of what was widely considered provocative actions not as transparency but as "blackmail," an effort to strengthen the North's bargaining position and extract maximum concessions from Washington. A