U.S. envoy goes to Pyongyang

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By Jae-soon Chang ASSOCIATED PRESS

SEOUL

Washington's top nuclear negotiator drove to the capital of communist North Korea on Wednesday with a possibly face-saving proposal to persuade the Stalinist regime to honor a nuclear disarmament deal.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack stressed that the envoy, Christopher R. Hill, would not offer substantive changes but would propose alterations in "choreography" that could give North Korea a way out of the current impasse.

Negotiations to disarm the North have stalled since the communist state abandoned a deal struck in February 2007, accusing the U.S. of refusing to fulfill a promise to remove it from a terrorism watchlist. The U.S. maintains that the deal required the North to submit to a thorough verification of its nuclear accounting - a demand the isolated regime has balked at.

Mr. McCormack said Mr. Hill would not offer North Korea a new way of verifying its atomic list but would suggest ways to adjust the sequencing of steps the parties have agreed to take.

A senior U.S. official had earlier said Mr. Hill would offer a proposal that would have North Korea agree to a verification program but submit details first to its Chinese allies. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Mr. Hill went into the North through the heavily fortified demilitarized zone (DMZ) dividing the two Koreas, U.S. Embassy spokesman Aaron Tarver said.

The visit comes amid reports that the North's autocratic leader, Kim Jong-il, suffered a stroke in August. Mr. Kim, 66, has not been seen in public in more than a month, raising concerns that his prolonged illness or sudden death could destabilize the Korean Peninsula.

Relations between the two Koreas have been frayed in recent months. After an eight-month diplomatic freeze, the sides agreed to hold military talks inside the DMZ on Thursday. The working-level talks will be the two Koreas' first official meeting since Seoul's new president, Lee Myung-bak, took office in February with a pledge to take a hard-line stance on North Korea.

In mid-August, Pyongyang stopped disabling and began restoring its nuclear facilities and last week ordered U.N. nuclear monitors to leave its Yongbyon nuclear facility in violation of an international accord.

In a further sign of Pyongyang's defiance, South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported indications that the North had begun restoring the site where it conducted its first nuclear test blast in October 2006.

Smoke was seen rising from the Punggyeri site in the country's northeast, Yonhap cited an unidentified South Korean government official as saying.

Mr. Hill met with his North Korean counterpart Kim Gye-gwan on Wednesday in an effort to try to persuade the regime to return to the nuclear pact, the State Department said.

"He wasn't bringing with him any new substance in terms of proposals," Mr. McCormack told reporters in Washington. "He was talking about the choreography, but not breaking with precedent."

Mr. McCormack noted that China has in the past served "as a repository for documents and information" and could do the same with the verification protocol.

"The ball is in the North Koreans' court," he said. "They have to reverse their reversal, and they have to approve a verification regime."