U.S. Flexibility Credited in Nuclear Deal With N. Korea

North Korean nuclear envoy Kim Kye Kwan, center, at the closing ceremonies of talks in Beijing. The end product was an agreement that North Korea would freeze a nuclear facility. (By Andrew Wong -- Getty Images)

For its part, the United States reiterated an earlier promise to discuss normalizing relations with the Pyongyang government, a long-standing goal of North Korea.

Separately, Hill said, the United States pledged to North Korea and to China, the chair of the six-party process, that it will resolve within 30 days a dispute over U.S. charges that Banco Delta Asia in Macau has been laundering illicit money from North Korea. This represented a retreat for Washington, which had previously insisted that the banking dispute was a law-enforcement matter that should be treated separately from the nuclear diplomacy. The United States is expected to unfreeze as much as a third of $24 million in North Korean accounts, deeming that money to be legitimate, U.S. officials said.

The accord left for future negotiations the question of what to do with North Korea's declared nuclear weapons, estimated to be as many as 10 bombs from a stockpile of perhaps 50 kilograms of plutonium. In a harbinger of the potential difficulties ahead, the official North Korean news agency said the agreement requires only a temporary suspension of the country's nuclear facilities. "At the talks, the parties decided to offer economic and energy aid equivalent to 1 million tons of heavy fuel oil in connection with the DPRK's [North Korea's] temporary suspension of the operation of its nuclear facilities," it said.

Administration officials stressed that the agreement was an improvement over a bilateral deal reached in 1994 under then-President Bill Clinton, which collapsed after the Bush administration accused North Korea of conducting the clandestine uranium program. Under that agreement, North Korea froze the Yongbyon facility and agreed to "eventually dismantle" it in exchange for fuel oil and light-water reactors. Bush administration officials noted yesterday that the new agreement was signed by all of North Korea's neighbors, which they said would make it more difficult to break. Any suggestion of building light-water reactors for North Korea has been pushed far into the future.

Still, critics and supporters said that they were surprised by the extent of the administration's shift.

"All of us have been arguing -- engage, engage, engage," said John W. Lewis, a Stanford University professor who has repeatedly visited North Korea, most recently in November. "It had to begin with something like this, and it has gone far beyond what any one expected. It is really quite astonishing."

At the conservative Heritage Foundation, analyst Bruce Klingner said in a report that "the Bush Administration will be vulnerable to criticism that it has not only abandoned its principles, but that it did so while allowing North Korea to augment its nuclear weapons inventory." North Korean leader Kim Jong Il "used his characteristic mixture of military provocations, brinksmanship and crisis diplomacy to gain benefits for a return to the status quo ante and promises of future steps," Klingner wrote.

Cody reported from Beijing.