N. Korea Says It Wants Its Money Back, Then It’ll Talk

North Korea will return to talks on its nuclear program if the United States releases $24 million in frozen funds held in a bank in Macao, a senior diplomat said in an interview published today.

In the most explicit statement of its demands since a barrage of missile tests Wednesday, North Korea’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations, Han Song Ryol, said his country was looking for a “minimal gesture to restore trust.”

Han also said that an invitation to Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill to visit the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, was still open and that such a visit would be “advantageous for us to correctly understand the U.S. position and to precisely express our own position.”

The interview with the New York-based diplomat was published in Hankyoreh, a left-wing South Korean newspaper frequently sympathetic to Pyongyang.

The money has been a bone of contention between the United States and North Korea since September, when the Treasury Department accused Banco Delta Asia in the tiny Chinese enclave of Macao of laundering proceeds of counterfeiting and other illicit activities on behalf of North Korea.

The Bush administration is likely to reject the North’s demands. It has consistently said Pyongyang should make its position known within the context of multilateral talks and not set preconditions.

But a U.S. official intimated that it was possible some of the $24 million would eventually be released if it was determined it was not linked to illicit activity. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Treasury investigators were painstakingly going through handwritten records trying to determine the origins of the money.