| In fact, they don't agree to much of anything ... |
Bush took a gamble two months ago when he agreed to remove North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, based on spoken assurances from Pyongyang that it had agreed to a verification plan. At the time, there were signs North Korea was planning to restart its shuttered nuclear plant or even conduct a nuclear test, and administration officials were desperate to avoid a crisis in the final months of Bush's presidency.
U.S. officials at the time asserted that North Korea had privately bent on two key issues: potential access to facilities not included in Pyongyang's nuclear declaration and permission for inspectors to take environmental samples from facilities to determine how much plutonium had been produced. The State Department publicly distributed a statement titled "U.S.-North Korean Understandings on Verification" that listed six key points, but it declined to release the text of the claimed agreement.
Yesterday, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher R. Hill told reporters in Beijing that four days of talks this week had failed because North Korea "was not ready to reach a verification protocol with all the standards that are required." But U.S. officials acknowledge now that most of the purported agreements announced two months ago were simply oral understandings between Hill and his North Korean counterparts.
Before Bush announced he was taking North Korea off the state sponsors of terrorism list -- a significant diplomatic carrot for Pyongyang -- Hill submitted a memorandum to North Korea's mission to the United Nations outlining his understanding of the oral agreements. The North Korean officials did not object to Hill's summary, U.S. officials said, but they would not commit to it in writing.