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Why is Michael Green, senior director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council, touring South Korea, Japan and China? The Washington Post reported that the U.S. security official came to South Korea to tell Seoul of intelligence that North Korea has exported nuclear material. The Korean government had no comment Wednesday.
¡ß ¡°No comment¡±
The Korean government has neither confirmed nor denied the Washington Post¡¯s report. National Security Council spokesperson Lee Ji-hyun said she was not authorized to talk about the issue because she had not been briefed by working-level officials. Kim Sook, director of the North America bureau at the Foreign Affairs Ministry, also declined to comment.
A government official said on condition of anonymity that the purpose of Green¡¯s visit was to discuss several pending issues including the North Korean nuclear issue and the resumption of the six-party talks. That implied that Pyongyang¡¯s presumed nuclear export could be among the ¡°pending issues.¡±
Green flew in from Beijing at 3:00 p.m. and answered no questions from reporters. He met with his Korean counterpart Lee Jong-seok, deputy secretary general of the National Security Council and on Thursday is scheduled to meet with presidential security adviser Kwon Jin-ho, Deputy Foreign Minister Song Min-soon and Cho Tae-yong, head of the Foreign Ministry's task force on the nuclear dispute.
¡ß Speculation is rife
Privately, South Korean government officials were suspicious of the intention of the U.S media reports Wednesday. With U.S. President Bush¡¯s key State of the Union address only a day away, the two major U.S. newspapers ? the New York Times as well as the Post -both carried similar reports on North Korea¡¯s nuclear program on the front page. Korean officials suspect that someone planted the reports.
Two interpretations suggest themselves. One group says that as the second Bush administration favors negotiations over putting pressure on the Stalinist country, U.S. hardliners are spreading misinformation against North Korea. Another school of thought says the Bush administration itself is trying to keep the pressure up and therefore fed the story to the papers. South Korean Foreign Ministry officials are not taking the reports seriously.
(Kwon Dae-yeol, dykwon@chosun.com )
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