WASHINGTON — The Bush administration is nearing a decision to remove North Korea from a terrorism blacklist and may do so as early as today in a bid to salvage faltering nuclear disarmament talks, The Associated Press has learned.
U.S. officials said Thursday that no final decision had been made but diplomats briefed on the matter told AP that they believe an announcement that North Korea will be tentatively taken off the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism is imminent.
The delisting depends on North Korea’s agreeing to a plan to verify an account of its nuclear activity that it submitted over the summer, the diplomats said. North Korea would be put back on the list if it doesn’t comply with the plan and abandon nuclear arms, they said.
The diplomats spoke on condition of anonymity ahead of an expected announcement.
The move would be a last-ditch attempt to save a disarmament agreement that has frayed badly in recent months. North Korea moved closer Thursday to relaunching its nuclear-arms program, announcing that it wanted to reactivate the facility that produced its atomic bomb and banning U.N. inspectors from the site.
It also warned South Korea against sending naval ships into its waters and threatened warfare as it reportedly shifted an arsenal of missiles to a nearby island for more test launches.
Saving the disarmament deal and getting Pyong yang to follow through would be a major foreign policy success for the administration in its waning months.
But opponents of the deal, mainly conservative hawks in and out of the administration, say removing the North from the terrorism list now would be a reward for bad behavior from a country that cannot be trusted.
North Korea had disabled its Yongbyon nuclear facility under the initial phases of the deal but since August has been reversing that because the United States has not removed it from the terror list as it agreed after North Korea provided a declaration of its atomic program in June.
The U.S. has said it will fulfill the obligation only when North Korea accepts a plan to verify that accounting.
But while he was in North Korea for talks last week, U.S. envoy Christopher Hill proposed a face-saving compromise under which the North would be provisionally removed from the terrorism list as soon as it deposits with China an agreement on verification, according to U.S. officials.
China, the chair of the six-nation nation negotiations, would then announce that the North Koreans were on board, allowing Pyong yang to claim that Washington moved first, they said.
Late Thursday, amid a swirl of speculation in Washington, Seoul and Tokyo that the delisting would come today, National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe would say only that “no final decision has been made yet.”
