SEOUL—The chief U.S. envoy to nuclear disarmament negotiations with North Korea said he had "good talks" in Pyongyang, Xinhua news agency reported on Friday at the end of the U.S. diplomat's surprise visit to the isolated state.
The brief bulletin quoted U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Chris Hill as saying in Pyongyang that he had met North Korea's Foreign Minister, Pak Ui-chun, and its chief negotiator, Kim Kye-gwan, in talks aimed at ending the North's nuclear weapons program.
Hill made his previously unannounced trip to North Korea on Thursday. Washington has been pushing the North to implement an initial disarmament deal sealed at six-party talks in February. Those talks also include South Korea, China, Japan and Russia.
North Korea pledged at six-country talks in February to start closing its Soviet-era Yongybon reactor, the country's source of bomb-grade plutonium, in exchange for energy aid.
Washington said Hill's trip to Pyongyang was meant to test "the proposition that North Korea has made that strategic decision to dismantle ... and give up their nuclear programs".
He was due to fly from Pyongyang to Seoul, and then on to Tokyo.
Hill was the highest-ranking State Department official to visit Pyongyang since 2002, when envoy James Kelly confronted the North with evidence Washington said pointed to a covert uranium enrichment program.
The crisis following that confrontation led North Korea to expel U.N. nuclear inspectors and culminated in the communist state's first nuclear test last October.
Money Trail
North Korea said last weekend it would re-admit inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), as required under the February accord.
That followed signs that most of the $25 million in North Korean funds frozen in a Macau bank for nearly two years was making its way back to the North.
However, North Korea said on Thursday a planned visit by U.N. nuclear monitors was on hold because it had not received any of the money.
"So our side has informed the IAEA that we have no objection to them preparing the visit as a plan, but we are not ready to give our official confirmation for the visit as scheduled by the agency," said Hyon Yong-man, counselor at the North Korean embassy in Vienna, headquarters of the IAEA.
However, Moscow—one of the parties in the nuclear talks along with the two Koreas, China, the United States and Japan—said the funds were on their way to a North Korean account in a bank in Russia.
Hill said this week that six-party talks were likely to resume early next month to push forward the February 13 accord, under which North Korea would abandon its nuclear program in exchange for massive aid, security guarantees and better diplomatic standing.
The New York Times reported the Bush administration is considering authorizing Hill to offer to buy nuclear equipment the secretive state purchased from Pakistan to enrich uranium into nuclear bomb-grade material.
It was not clear whether Hill made the offer during his visit, it said.
U.S. officials said Washington is insisting that multiple facilities at the Yongbyon complex be shut down.
Jon Wolfsthal, a former on-site monitor at Yongbyon for the U.S. Department of Energy, told Reuters the complex has over 100 buildings, including dozens of sensitive facilities.
He said the fact that all the Yongbyon sites to be covered by the shutdown were not detailed demonstrates the "inherent challenge of the February agreement where almost nothing is precisely (spelled out) and every step is going to have to be negotiated and hammered out with the North Koreans".
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