TOKYO - The United States made its first direct contact with North Korea in nearly half a year via Pyongyang's UN mission in New York amid a deadlock over the communist state's drive for nuclear weapons, a US embassy official said Thursday.
The Japanese newspaper the Asahi Shimbun said US officials had told North Korea that Washington recognizes Pyongyang as a sovereign state and had no intention of attacking it.
Asked about the report, a US embassy official confirmed there was "working-level contact" in New York.
"As previously, this channel is used to convey messages about US policy, not to negotiate," the official said.
According to the Asahi, the US team included Joseph DeTrani, the special envoy for stalled six-party talks on the North's nuclear arms ambitions, involving the two Koreas, the United States, China, Japan and Russia.
DeTrani suggested to the North Korean side that Washington was willing to normalize ties with Pyongyang if it gave up its nuclear ambitions, the report said.
Pak Kil-Yon, the North Korean ambassador to the United Nations, and his deputy Han Song-Ryol attended the meeting with DeTrani and Jim Foster, who heads the US State Department's office of Korean affairs, the Japanese daily said quoting sources close to the six-nation talks.
The North Korean side is expected to respond within two weeks to points made by the US side at the New York meeting, the Japanese agency Kyodo News said quoting sources familiar with US-North Korean relations.
It was the first direct US-North Korea contact at that level since DeTrani visited the North Korean mission in early December, the report said.
The visit comes with Washington trying hard to broker a new round of six-nation talks, boycotted since the third round in June in Beijing last year by Pyongyang, which has blamed the breakdown on a "hostile" American policy.
"As the six-nation talks have been suspended for a long time, it is necessary to make various kinds of approaches, responses and steps if there is a way to resume the talks," Japan's government spokesman, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda, told a news conference.
After declaring itself a nuclear-armed country in February, North Korea said this month it had unloaded 8,000 spent fuel rods from its reactor, a step that would allow it to reprocess weapons-grade plutonium for more nuclear bombs.
US officials in recent weeks have also said there were signs the North is preparing for its first nuclear test.
The Asahi Shimbun reported that a US State Department official telephoned Han, the deputy North Korean representative at the world body, last week to revive direct bilateral contact.
The reported contact preceded inter-Korean talks this week at the level of vice ministers this week, in which Seoul and Pyongyang discussed the nuclear issue as well as efforts to improve bilateral ties.
05/19/2005 10:18 GMT