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SEOUL: US negotiator Christopher Hill was to hold more talks in North Korea Thursday in an attempt to save a nuclear disarmament deal, as US officials confirmed he will offer his hosts a face-saving compromise.
Hill's visit is seen as crucial for the rescue of the February 2007 six-nation agreement, which led the North to shut down its plutonium-producing plants.
The veteran nuclear negotiator, making his third visit to the hardline communist state, met his counterpart Kim Gye-Gwan on Wednesday.
He was to hold more talks with officials on Thursday before returning to South Korea, the State Department said, adding he is expected to travel on Friday to China, which hosts the six-nation talks.
The North has announced it will begin work to restart its plutonium reprocessing plant as early as this week because the US failed to remove it from a terrorism blacklist, as required under the accord.
The United States says the North must first accept an agreement for outside verification of the nuclear declaration which Pyongyang delivered to China in June.
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."
China, the North's sole major ally, is the focus of a possible face-saving compromise, US officials said Wednesday.
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack gave no details except to say Beijing could play the "special role" it has in the past "as a repository for documents and information."
A senior US official said the deal could see Washington remove Pyongyang from the blacklist if it submits acceptance of the verification plan to China.
The official said the original idea was for the North to submit its agreement to all five negotiating partners - South Korea, China, Japan, Russia and the US.
The Washington Post last week reported that after the US provisionally removes the North from the blacklist, China would announce North Korea's acceptance of the verification plan.
This would allow the Pyongyang government to claim that the US acted first.
However, 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 US-inspired plan reportedly calls for access to undeclared suspected nuclear facilities and for inspectors to take samples of material.
No information has emerged so far on Hill's mission to the secretive state.
The North's official news agency, in a one-sentence report on Wednesday, merely announced that "US Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill and his party arrived here today."
Despite the nuclear tensions, South and North Korea Thursday held working-level military talks, the first official bilateral contacts since conservative President Lee Myung-Bak took office in Seoul in February.
But Yonhap, citing officials, reported they had ended without progress.
Lee has infuriated the North by promising to take a firmer line than his liberal predecessors did on cross-border relations.
The North staged a nuclear weapons test in October 2006 before returning to negotiations.
It shut down its Yongbyon complex in July 2007 and began disabling the plants in November that year. In return Pyongyang was to receive one million tons of fuel oil or equivalent energy aid and Washington was to remove it from the blacklist.
- AFP/yb
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