From 1974 to 1996, as a senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, he pursued investigative assignments every year in a variety of countries, especially those where he worked as a journalist, such as India, Pakistan, China, Japan, and the two Koreas.
[4] On June 9, 1994, on his fourth visit, he met Kim Il Sung for three hours and won an agreement to the concept of a freeze and eventual dismantlement of the North Korean nuclear program in exchange for U.S. political and economic concessions.
President Jimmy Carter, meeting Kim Il Sung a week later, persuaded the North Korean leader to initiate the freeze immediately.
"[8] More recently Harrison also characterized South Korean President Lee Myung-bak as a "hard-liner",[9] who had "invited retaliation" from North Korea by reversing the policies of his Sunshine-era predecessors.
In his study of foreign reporting, Between Two Worlds, John Hohenberg, former secretary of the Pulitzer Prize Board, cited Harrison's prediction of the 1965 Indo-Pakistan War 18 months before it happened.
Hohenberg wrote: "What Harrison foresaw came to pass, and when it happened, American editors suddenly rose up in their wrath – as they always do at such times – and demanded, 'why weren't we told about all of this?'
Rep. Stephen Solarz, chairman of the House Subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs, introducing him at a hearing on February 21, 1989, one year after the withdrawal, observed that "with each passing day his reputation as a prophet is enhanced.
"[11] In the wake of the inter-Korean tensions that followed the North Korean shelling of the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong in November 2010, Harrison proposed that the United States solve the crisis by redrawing the Northern Limit Line southward to a position more favorable to North Korea, with South Korea allowed no veto in the matter.
[9] Harrison's editorial was roundly criticized in the pages of the major South Korean newspaper The Chosun Ilbo,[12] and characterized as "simplistic and inaccurate" in The Korea Herald.