By Thomas W. Lippman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 11, 1998; Page A25

The Clinton administration announced a package of agreements with North Korea yesterday aimed at defusing tensions on the Korean Peninsula and restarting stalled diplomatic initiatives. But the landmark 1994 agreement limiting Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program was jeopardized anew by congressional anger over recent provocative actions by North Korea.

In an effort to keep the agreement alive in the face of growing antipathy on Capitol Hill, U.S. negotiators have told North Korea that access for international inspectors to a suspected underground nuclear weapons development site is a non-negotiable condition for further U.S. compliance with the deal, State Department officials said.

Washington's inspection demand was conveyed during talks in New York last week, the officials said. Those talks produced several agreements that the Clinton administration hailed as landmarks in the quest for a working relationship with North Korea, including a resumption of talks on missile proliferation and of so-called Four Party talks about a permanent peace agreement on the peninsula. But they apparently did little to help salvage the 1994 pact known as the Framework Agreement.

Under that pact, the United States, Japan and South Korea agreed to arrange for construction of two light-water nuclear power reactors in North Korea in exchange for suspension of activities at North Korea's nuclear weapons development facilities in Yongbyon.

Implementation of the agreement is now in serious trouble because of the discovery by U.S. intelligence of a vast, secret underground facility where North Korea is believed to be carrying out nuclear weapons development activities not covered by the Framework Agreement, and because of North Korea's recent firing of a ballistic missile over Japan.

Discovery of the underground facility, followed by the missile test, has prompted both houses of Congress to adopt restrictions on further U.S. funding to implement the agreement. A key House Appropriations subcommittee voted 29 to 16 yesterday to drop all funding for the Korea deal next year.

The money could be restored in a House-Senate conference on the foreign operations spending bill. But congressional sources said the final version of the measure is certain to include a requirement that funding be continued only if the president certifies that North Korea has suspended all nuclear weapons activities -- a requirement that many members do not believe can be met.

In addition, Japan responded to the missile test by backing off from a final agreement on financing the nuclear reactors. Without Japan's promised $1 billion contribution, the entire project is in jeopardy, officials said.

Administration officials said that a U.S. failure to carry out its commitments under the Framework Agreement, including the promise to supply 500,000 metric tons annually of heavy fuel oil, would incite North Korea to resume production of plutonium, increasing the danger of a war that could threaten Japan as well as South Korea and the 37,000 U.S. troops there.

"The first principle is that we have two allies in the region whose security is directly affected by how we handle it," Charles Kartman, the State Department's chief negotiator with North Korea, told a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee.

Washington and Seoul share the view that North Korea has not violated the agreed framework, which applies only to the facilities at Yongbyon. Kartman said, however, that "we made it clear in New York that the North Koreans need to satisfy our concerns about suspect construction. This is essential for the agreed framework. . . . Clarification will have to include access to the site. We made it quite plain to the North Koreans that verbal assurances will not suffice."

Kartman and other officials acknowledged their dilemma in dealing with Pyongyang. North Korea is truculent and unpredictable, they say; its actions, such as sending a submarine full of saboteurs into South Korea or firing the missile across Japan, stir fear and anger, and fuel sentiment against further negotiations.

But they said abandonment of the Framework Agreement and the multiple diplomatic tracks might drive famine-stricken North Korea into war.

"We have no illusions about the difficulty of dealing with the North Korean government," State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said, "and we do not trust North Korea, but we have a system in place now, a series of talks in which our concerns on the nuclear side and the missile side can be addressed if the North Koreans so choose."

Kartman said North Korea has agreed to resume the "canning," or sealing, of spent nuclear fuel at Yongbyon, a process that makes the fuel unavailable for reprocessing to extract plutonium. North Korea suspended the canning last spring, but the significance of resumption is hard to assess because Clinton administration officials said at the time that the process was virtually complete anyway.

Meanwhile, in what administration officials told members of Congress was an unrelated action, the administration has agreed to send about 300,000 tons of emergency food aid to North Korea, several sources said. Sources who were briefed on the donation, which was first reported in yesterday's New York Times, said the administration planned to announce it separately next week so it would not appear to be a payoff for the agreements announced yesterday.