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WASHINGTON: The United States is working on a compromise deal to break the North Korean nuclear deadlock by letting Pyongyang provide verification of its disarmament efforts to ally China rather than sharing with a broader set of nations, State Department officials said on Wednesday.
The officials expected US envoy Christopher Hill to raise the possibility during a visit to North Korea on Wednesday and Thursday in a bid to end a row over Pyongyang's demands to be removed from a US blacklist of countries supporting terrorism.
Department spokesman Sean McCormack declined to offer details of Hill's effort other than to say China could play the "special role" it has in the past "as a repository for documents and information."
However, a senior US official said the deal could involve Washington's removing Pyongyang from the blacklist if North Korea submits a plan to verify its disarmament to China, which chairs the six-party negotiations.
"That's a potential solution here," the official told reporters when asked about news reports of such a deal.
It was conceivable "that you had agreement to the verification protocol deposited with the Chinese, and then others would take the steps they're obligated to," the official told reporters on the condition of anonymity.
The official said the original idea was for North Korea to give the plan to all of its five negotiating partners - South Korea, China, Japan, Russia and the United States - rather than just to its ally China.
Outlining the sequence of steps, The Washington Post reported that after the United States provisionally removes the North from the blacklist, China would announce North Korea's acceptance of the verification plan.
The United States and its partners are anxious to begin verifying documents North Korea submitted in June - to China - that detailed its nuclear programmes.
McCormack firmly denied reports that Hill was carrying proposed changes to the actual verification plan.
"No, he was not, not in terms of the substance and changing the verification proposal, no," he said.
The dispute is threatening to undo a February 2007 six-nation deal which led the North to shut down its plutonium-producing plants.
Pyongyang accuses Washington of breaching the six-nation deal by failing to remove it from the blacklist. The United States says the North must first agree procedures for outside verification of the nuclear declaration.
The North counters that verification is not part of this stage of the agreement and accuses Washington of violating its dignity by seeking Iraq-style "house searches."
The North has announced it will begin work to restart its plutonium reprocessing plant as early as this week. It has barred UN atomic inspectors from the building.
The State Department said Hill met with North Korean representative Kim Gye-Gwan on Wednesday and was to hold more talks with North Korean officials on Thursday before returning to South Korea.
Hill will "have an opportunity to brief the Japanese and Russians in either Seoul or Beijing," it said in an email. He will travel to Beijing on Friday and then to Tokyo before returning to Washington on Saturday. - AFP/de
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