U.S. diplomat seeks to salvage N.Korea deal by trip

By Sue Pleming

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. diplomat Chris Hill will try to re-engage North Korea on how to verify its nuclear claims and rescue a crumbling disarmament-for-aid deal in Pyongyang this week, U.S. officials said on Monday.

Hill's trip to Pyongyang on Wednesday on the invitation of the North Koreans is a concerted effort by the Bush administration in its waning months to revive a six-nation deal after Pyongyang reversed its promises and said it would restart its Soviet-era Yongbyon nuclear plant.

"This is a last-ditch effort to get things on track," said a senior U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Hill, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs and the lead U.S. negotiator with North Korea, is to leave New York on Monday for Seoul, South Korea, from where he will cross into the North on Wednesday for talks.

Last Wednesday, the International Atomic Energy Agency said the North was expelling U.N. monitors from the Yongbyon nuclear plant and planned to start reactivating it.

The North, which conducted a nuclear test in October 2006, is believed to have produced enough plutonium at Yongbyon to make at least eight or nine nuclear weapons.

The United States and North Korea are at loggerheads over a so-called verification mechanism for a declaration Pyongyang made about its plutonium-based nuclear program this summer.

"The North Koreans invited Chris Hill to come and so we hope that there is some effort to address the verification protocol because that is what we need," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters in her New York hotel.

TOO INTRUSIVE?

The North has balked over U.S. demands about the mechanism, fearing it to be too intrusive. Washington countered by making clear it would only remove Pyongyang from its list of state sponsors of terrorism once the North agreed to a "robust" mechanism.

"We encourage the North very strongly to submit that verification regime so that we can move forward on the other aspects, positive aspects of the six-party framework," said State Department spokesman Robert Wood in Washington.

In recent weeks, the North Koreans have not been responsive to U.S. requests to negotiate and the senior official said Hill was going to Pyongyang to try to establish exactly what problems the North had with the verification mechanism and to re-engage them on the issue.

"We have not been engaged with them recently over this. Instead they have started unraveling the deal," he said.

After the North Korea meeting, Hill plans to travel to China and Japan to report on his meetings.

China, Japan, Russia, the United States and South Korea are involved in the disarmament talks with North Korea.