U.S. official ‘buoyed’ by his N. Korea visit

After months of stalled negotiations, international efforts to disarm North Korea of nuclear weapons abruptly shifted into high gear Friday as U.N. inspectors prepared to visit and a senior U.S. diplomat said he had been “buoyed” by his surprise visit to Pyongyang.

Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, the top U.S. negotiator on North Korea, expressed rare optimism that the communist regime would shut and seal its main nuclear fuel processing facility at Yongbyon within weeks, thus completing the first step toward its pledge this year to dismantle its weapons program.

“I come away from this two-day set of meetings buoyed by a sense that we are going to be able to achieve our full objectives, that is, the complete denuclearization,” Hill, who usually speaks in far more cautious language, said at a news conference after arriving in Seoul.

Hill was the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit North Korea in nearly five years. The Bush administration previously refused to conduct one-on-one talks with Pyongyang, but softened its hard-line position after North Korea conducted an underground test of a small nuclear device in October.

The North Korean government, which is believed to possess enough plutonium for six to 10 atomic weapons, has long sought direct relations with Washington.

After joint negotiations with the United States, China, Russia, South Korea and Japan, aides to North Korean leader Kim Jong Il agreed in February to renounce further production of plutonium and ultimately dismantle the nation’s nuclear weapons program in exchange for fuel oil, humanitarian aid and, ultimately, normalized relations with the West.

Hill described his talks with North Korea’s foreign minister, Pak Ui Chun, and its chief nuclear envoy, Kim Gye Gwan, as “very useful and positive.” Hill said the officials “indicated that they are prepared, promptly, to shut down the Yongbyon facility as called for in the February agreement” and to implement a disarmament deal likely to stretch out over several years.

Hill warned that he and other negotiators would “spend a great deal of time, a great deal of effort, a lot of work” in getting North Korea to comply with the next major stages in the deal: disabling the facilities at Yongbyon and fully disclosing the nation’s nuclear program, including whether Pyongyang has enriched uranium.

“That’s an important step,” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said. “You’re really getting into uncharted territory there.”

Hill said U.N. inspectors still needed to visit Yongbyon to monitor and verify the shutdown of the Soviet-era reactor 60 miles north of Pyongyang, the capital.

Hours later, North Korean officials granted the necessary permission. The International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ Vienna-based nuclear watchdog, announced that a five-member team of experts would depart Sunday for North Korea to draw up formal plans for monitoring and verifying the shutdown of Yongbyon.

The IAEA team, led by Olli Heinonen, the agency’s deputy director-general, was due to arrive Tuesday and stay in Pyongyang for five days.

Once the team returns to Austria, the IAEA board of governors must approve deploying a follow-up team because North Korea is not a member of the agency. Barring further difficulties, agency officials in Vienna said, the second team is likely to depart in about two weeks, with the shutdown by late July.

“This is good news,” Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the IAEA, said at a news conference in Vienna. “I think we finally should be able to start a long and complex process, but I believe very much a process in the right direction.”

The flurry of activity follows months of political deadlock. North Korea initially agreed to shut Yongbyon by mid-April, or 60 days after the Feb. 13 deal. But the accord immediately snagged over the failure by the U.S. to meet its pledge to arrange the return of more than $20 million in allegedly illicit North Korean assets frozen at the Banco Delta Asia, a small bank in the Chinese territory of Macao.

The U.S. Treasury had barred financial institutions from doing business with the bank after investigators accused it of sheltering North Korean funds obtained from counterfeiting, and drugs and weapons trafficking. After the ban was imposed, U.S. authorities struggled for months to find a way to return the funds. The U.S. Federal Reserve Bank of New York finally operated as the conduit to transfer the money to Russia’s central bank.

Confusion over the status of the funds continued Friday as Russia’s RIA Novosti and Interfax news agencies quoted an unnamed official as saying Russia would complete the wire transfer to a North Korean bank Monday. Earlier in the day, Itar-Tass news agency quoted a deputy foreign minister as saying the transfer was essentially complete.

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bob.drogin@latimes.com