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U.N. Anti-Poverty Agency Official Stonewalling U.S. Request for Information on North Korean Payments

By George Russell

Fox News

June 17, 2007

At bottom, the issue involves UNDP operations in communist North Korea, which the U.S. has charged were essentially hijacked by the government of dictator Kim Jong Il, and which the U.S. declared only last week were used to funnel millions of dollars in UNDP hard currency into North Korea’s secret nuclear weapons program.

But the struggle has taken on greater tension as it has increasingly pitted the American diplomats against Ad Melkert, a combative former Dutch politician who is now UNDP’s No. 2 official, known as the associate administrator. In a previous career incarnation, Melkert served as chairman of the ethics committee of the World Bank — and just two months ago, he played an important role in the forced resignation of World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz, a Bush Administration appointee.

Now the acerbic Melkert seems to be involved in another highly personal battle, as the UNDP official who has most vocally defended his organization as having done no wrong — but who also, it seems, has been issuing threats against the U.S. government in closed-door meetings over the North Korea affair.

The bare-knuckle dialogue broke into the open yesterday in the form of an extraordinary letter from Zalmay Khalilzad, the newly appointed U.S. ambassador to the U.N., to Kemal Dervis, the top official, or administrator, of UNDP.

In the letter, Khalilzad, formerly the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, declared himself “surprised and concerned” about what transpired in a meeting between Melkert and one of Khalilzad’s top subordinates, Ambassador Mark Wallace, in which the U.S. had been requesting additional information about alleged UNDP money transfers to the Kim regime. As Khalilzad put it, “Mr. Melkert suggested to Ambassador Wallace that UNDP viewed United States inquiry relating to such new information as justifying some kind of ‘retaliation’ against the Government of the United States.”

Emphasizing that the U.S. simply wanted “clarification” on the issue, Khalilzad hoped that UNDP would “avoid comments and action that are confrontational in nature.”

Requests by FOX News for a UNDP response to Khalilzad’s letter drew a terse response from the agency’s chief spokesman, David Morrison. Acknowledging that the agency had received the communication, Morrison declared that UNDP considers correspondence between its administrator and the head of the U.S. mission to be private.

"UNDP of course responds to all letters,” Morrison said.

Much more than private threats are involved in the exchange. Tempers have been rising since last January as the issue of UNDP’s alleged role in funneling hard currency to Kim Jong Il has become more complicated — and more important — with each passing week. The issue has now become central not only to the U.N. agency’s credibility but perhaps also to the question of how the North Korean despot kept his nuclear weapons program going despite increasingly tight international financial strictures on his regime.