U.S. Korea experts going to Pyongyang amid rising tensions: sources

WASHINGTON, Jan. 30 (Yonhap) -- A former U.S. ambassador to South Korea and a few other U.S. experts on Korea will travel to Pyongyang next week, sources said Friday, amid the North repeating threats against South Korea as the new U.S. administration launches.

"Former ambassador Stephen Bosworth and several other delegates will visit
Pyongyang on Feb. 3 and meet with North Korea's Vice Foreign Minister Kim
Kye-gwan before coming back home at around the 7th (of February)," a source said.
A State Department official said it "can't confirm this kind of thing," adding
that such a trip, if any, "should not be an official trip" and would have nothing
to do with the U.S. government.
A South Korean diplomat based here said the trip by Bosworth and his colleagues
is a private one for which they do not need permission from the State Department.
The diplomat described the trip as part of North Korea's track II diplomacy,
involving civilians to promote its cause in six-party nuclear talks and its
bilateral relations with the U.S., coinciding with the advent of the Barack Obama
administration a couple of weeks ago.
He said the trip is "a private one which does not carry any official message of
the Obama administration," adding that Bosworth had already made a couple of
private visits to Pyongyang.
The diplomat compared the Pyongyang trip to a similar one two weeks ago by Selig
Harrison, director of the Washington-based Asia Program at the Center for
International Policy.
After returning from Pyongyang, Harrison last week quoted North Korean officials
as saying that the North has weaponized all 30 kilograms of the weapons-grade
plutonium it declared in June as part of the six-party aid-for-denuclearization
deal.
The U.S. scholar also said that North Korea will not abandon its nuclear
warheads, of which it is believed to have several, even after normalization of
diplomatic ties with Washington.
The North's position was seen as a message to the fledgling Obama administration.
Obama has said he will pursue the six-party talks while trying to engage the
North bilaterally in a more active manner to persuade the North to abandon its
nuclear arsenal.
The new U.S. president, however, has yet to take any concrete measures on the
North, although he has nominated former Sen. George Mitchell as the U.S. special
envoy for the Middle East and sent him there to mediate peace between warring
Israelis and Hamas.
hdh@yna.co.kr
(END)