WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama wrote a personal letter to North Korean leader Kim Jong Il in an intense effort to attract the cloud the nation back to negotiations on nuclear disarmament, a senior Foreign Ministry said Tuesday.
The letter was delivered to North Korean officials last week by Obama's special envoy to North Korea, Stephen Bosworth, during a visit to Pyongyang aimed at resuming negotiations stalled, officials said.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of sensitive diplomacy, would not describe the contents of the letter, but said that they are consistent with the general message Bosworth.
"North Koreans have a choice: to continue and further isolation or benefits to return to six-party talks and the settlement of their nuclear weapons program," the official said.
The official did not know if Kim has responded to the Obama missive. Visit Bosworth does not include a meeting with North Korean leader.
The existence of this letter was arranged in close association with the administration of encouraging its partners in the disarmament negotiations with North Korea that it is not publicly discussed, according to the Washington Post, which said Tuesday evening that the letter had been delivered.
Bosworth talks were Obama administration first high level contact with North Korea. He said after leaving the north Thursday, the two sides reached a common understanding "about the need to restart the nuclear talks involving the two Koreas, China, Japan, USA and Russia. Negotiations aimed at denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.
Bosworth, who has visited the capitals of these countries last week and this, to brief journalists scheduled presentation of his trip Wednesday at the State Department.
After his return to Washington from Moscow Tuesday Bosworth held behind closed doors negotiations with the Minister Hillary Rodham Clinton to discuss her visit to North Korea, his first in the country's current position.
President George W. Bush and Bill Clinton also sent personal letters to Kim, but not so early in their time as Obama. Kim Bush, wrote in December 2007, raising the prospect of normalized relations if the North Korean leader fully informed of its nuclear programs by year's end. Bush's letter was seen as a time for a president who had dominated the communist regime part of an "axis of evil" with Iran and Iraq before the war.
Clinton wrote to Kim in October 1994, promised to arrange for financing of a nuclear power 4 billion dollars to replace equipment which is suspected of making plutonium for nuclear weapons if the North has kept its new agreement to waive equipment. As Ambassador-at-Large Robert Gallucci told reporters the letter was addressed "to the Head of the DPRK - Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
The Washington Post's early efforts in the Bush presidency to send a letter has been thwarted by an intense debate about whether to use an honors as "His Excellency" on Kim. GM Hot News
