The State Department yesterday said senior arms control official John Bolton will not participate in talks with North Korea later this month — but that the decision was not a result of Pyongyang’s demand that he be banned from the meeting.
Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who made the announcement during a visit to Australia, also suggested that not everyone in the Bush administration agreed with Mr. Bolton’s characterization of life in North Korea as a “hellish nightmare.”
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The White House had been much stronger in its defense of Mr. Bolton last week when it said he was speaking for the U.S. government when he made the remark that infuriated Pyongyang.
“Mr. Bolton was not scheduled and will not be participating in those talks. His recent comments reflect a point of view in the United States held by many. Clearly, they did not affect the talks. We are going ahead with them in Beijing in the latter part of this month,” Mr. Armitage said.
“But let me assure you that the United States government, and not the North Korean government, will determine the makeup of our delegation,” he told reporters in Canberra, the Australian capital.
Mr. Bolton has never taken part in the Bush administration’s limited direct meetings with the North. The two times U.S. officials have met with North Koreans, aside from regular sessions on the fate of American defectors, the U.S. delegation was led by James Kelly, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs.
But Mr. Bolton is a key policy-maker on the reclusive state and his public comments are scrutinized by North Korean and other Asian officials.
Asked about Mr. Armitage’s remark, White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan said only that no decision has been made on the composition of the delegation to the Beijing talks, which Mr. Armitage said most likely will begin Aug. 27 and last three days. China, Japan, South Korea and Russia also will participate.
Other officials pointed out that Mr. Armitage had accompanied his boss, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, to President Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, last week.
After hours of discussions with Mr. Bush, he probably would not have made a public comment unless he was certain it reflected the president’s thinking, those officials said.
The speech that angered the North, delivered by Mr. Bolton in Seoul on July 31, was cleared by several government agencies, including the National Security Council, the Pentagon and the State Department, administration officials said.
“Hundreds of thousands of Kim Jong-il’s people [are] locked in prison camps, with millions more mired in abject poverty, scrounging the ground for food,” Mr. Bolton said in reference to the North Korean leader. “For many in North Korea, life is a hellish nightmare.”
The North Korean Foreign Ministry issued a response through the official Korean Central News Agency, saying of Mr. Bolton that “such human scum and bloodsucker is not entitled to take part in the talks.”
White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said last week that Mr. Bolton “was speaking for the administration” and that his remarks “reiterated things that we have said in the past.”
More than a year ago, Mr. Powell made comments about Mr. Kim’s regime similar to Mr. Bolton’s, but they failed to attract nearly as much attention.
“North Korea’s dangerously deluded policies drag its people further and further into a hell of deprivation and oppression,” the secretary said in a speech at the Asia Society in New York in June 2002.
Japanese reporters, citing sources “close to U.S.-North Korean relations,” said Monday that Jack Pritchard, the State Department’s special envoy for talks with the North, and David Straub, the Korea desk officer, told North Korean diplomats in New York last week that Mr. Bolton’s comments reflected his “personal” views.
The State Department declined to say whether the report was accurate, or even whether such a meeting took place.
“We can say, however, that we and the White House have already made clear that Mr. Bolton’s remarks were coordinated and cleared in advance, and he was speaking officially,” one official said.
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