US Nuclear Envoy Hill Flies to Pyongyang

U.S. chief nuclear negotiator Christopher Hill left for North Korea Thusday from a U.S. air base in South Korea, news reports said.

Hill left Osan air base on a U.S. military plane at 11:22 am (0222), Yonhap news agency quoted diplomatic sources as saying. It said the plane would arrive in Pyongyang at 12:30.

The U.S envoy is to meet with North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye-gwan for talks on denuclearization and normalization of the North-U.S. relations during his overnight trip, the agency said.

The North's Korean Central News Agency later reported Hill and his entourage arrived in Pyongyang by air.

The U.S. officials were greeted by Ri Kun, a director in charge of U.S. affairs at the North's Foreign Ministry, the Chosun Sinbo, a pro-North Korea newspaper published in Japan, said in a dispatch from the North Korean capital.

A South Korean foreign ministry official said Hill, concurrently assistant secretary of state, would return to Seoul Friday and brief officials on his trip.

Hill has said he wants the next round of the nuclear disarmament talks to start "immediately after the 4th of July."

An informal six-way talks on N. Korean nuke likely to be held before July 10, Yonhap reported, quoting South Korean top nuclear envoy Chun Yung-woo, who is attending an international conference on peace on Jeju Island.

Seoul officials said Hill is traveling as the chief U.S. negotiator in the nuclear disarmament talks, but noted the possibility of him carrying a special message from U.S. President

George W. Bush, saying approval for his Pyongyang trip "must have come down from the highest office."

Seoul welcomed the U.S. envoy's trip, saying it expects the visit to help "accelerate concrete steps of denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula, such as the initial steps of the Feb. 13 agreement."

"Also, the government hopes Assistant Secretary of State Hill's North Korea visit will help move forward the process of normalizing U.S.-North Korea relations," Foreign Ministry spokesman Cho Hee-yong said in a statement.

North Korea is preparing to finally shut down the Yongbyon complex, over two months after the April 14 deadline under the nuclear accord, as its $25 million held at Banco Delta Asia were released to it via an account at a Russian bank.

An unidentified North Korean diplomatic source was quoted as telling Russia's Interfax news agency Monday that the shutdown of the complex would take place in about a month or "in the second half of July."

Chun Yung-woo, South Korea's top negotiator in the talks that also involve North Korea, Japan, China and Russia, said Thursday that an informal meeting of chief delegates to the nuclear talks could be held in Beijing early next month.

"Informal six-way talks should be held first before July 10 to resume the formal six-way talks," Chun told Yonhap News Agency on South Korea's Jeju Island, where he was attending a regional peace forum.

A foreign ministry official, speaking to reporters in Seoul later, said such a meeting could be a gathering of only the chiefs of delegations and few other officials, "which are usually not

open to the press."

In a related development, Qin Gang, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said that Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi will visit North Korea on July 2-4 to discuss bilateral ties and "the six-party talks" process.

Hill, eager to make up for lost time, urged the communist nation to speed up the process this week, saying it should only take "weeks, not months."

Hill is the highest-ranking official from the U.S. State Department to visit the communist nation since late 2002, when his predecessor James Kelly, following a short trip to Pyongyang, accused the North of running a clandestine uranium-based nuclear weapons program, triggering the nuclear crisis.