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US, North Korean negotiators ready for critical talks

US and North Korean negotiators were to open landmark talks yesterday on normalizing relations amid questions over whether US intelligence had exaggerated the communist state's nuclear threat.

US officials cautioned that the talks in New York were only a small first step toward establishing diplomatic ties with a state branded by US President George W. Bush in 2002 as part of an "axis of evil."

They said North Korea needs to meet a series of denuclearization benchmarks to end a half century of enmity between the two sides.

The chief US negotiator, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, and his North Korean counterpart, Kim Kye-gwan, were to kick off meetings with a dinner late yesterday at a New York hotel before a full day of talks today, US officials said.

They came as the International Atomic Energy Agency said its director, Mohamed ElBaradei, will travel to North Korea on March 13 to discuss how to monitor its promised dismantling of nuclear facilities.

The bilateral talks between Washington and Pyongyang meet a long-standing condition set by the reclusive regime for abandoning its nuclear ambitions and could bring the two sides to their closest since the division of Korea after World War II.

In Washington, however, policymakers questioned whether US intelligence agencies overstated Pyongyang's alleged secret uranium enrichment program in 2002 and whether their ability to provide information on the North was reliable.

"We still don't have the intelligence community overall to give us, as policymakers, the information that we need to make good decisions in North Korea, Iran and other places," Representative Peter Hoekstra said on Sunday.

"You always make policy with imprecise information, but you know, there are some things that we've been disappointed with," he told the Fox News on Sunday.

"It's a concern about the leadership in the intelligence community, not the folks who are working this 24/7."

The New York Times reported yesterday that US officials were planning to tell their North Korean counterparts that Washington's doubts about how much progress the country has made in enriching uranium gave North Korea a face-saving way to surrender its nuclear equipment.

Yesterday talks came as part of a six-nation deal reached on Feb. 13 to end North Korea's nuclear weapons program.

Under the agreement, North Korea agreed to shut down its main nuclear facility and begin steps toward giving up its program in exchange for some US$300 million in aid and moves toward "full diplomatic relations" with the US.

While the rapid start to the normalization talks took many by surprise, US officials stressed the talks would yield no breakthroughs but would focus more on "organizational" issues such as setting an agenda for further meetings.

Still, observers of Bush administration foreign policy said Washington was turning a page.

"In and of itself the meeting Monday is historic," said Joseph Cirincione, a North Korea and non-proliferation specialist at the Center for American Progress.

"In the end, the relationship with the US matters more to the North Koreans than their nuclear weapons," he said.

South Korean chief nuclear negotiator Chun Young-woo, who held his own direct meeting on Saturday with the North's Kim, said he was convinced Pyongyang was determined to carry out the initial steps of the nuclear agreement.
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