WASHINGTON — The visit was arranged under a veil of secrecy with the help of an unlikely broker: a high-level American intelligence officer who spent much of his career trying to unlock the mysteries of North Korea.
When former President Bill Clinton landed in Pyongyang on Aug. 4 to win the release of two imprisoned American journalists, senior officials said he met an unexpectedly spry North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, who welcomed him with a long dinner that night, even proposing to stay up afterward.
Mr. Kim was flanked by two longtime aides, and he gave no hint that North Korea was in the throes of a succession struggle, despite the widespread questions over how long he might live.
Mr. Clinton and the Obama administration were determined not to extend a public-relations coup to Mr. Kim, who expressed a desire for better relations with the United States. But the visit is already setting off ripples that could change the tenor of the relationship between the United States and North Korea.
On Wednesday, diplomats from North Korea plan to visit Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico with an undisclosed agenda, a senior administration official said Tuesday. Like Mr. Clinton, Mr. Richardson has traveled to Pyongyang to negotiate the release of Americans held there, in his case in the mid-1990s.
The White House approved the visit, which the official said did not signal any movement toward the resumption of official talks with North Korea and the United States. But the meeting, which he said the North Koreans requested, comes on the heels of conciliatory gestures toward South Korea, and suggests a concerted effort on the part of the North.
Mr. Clinton steered clear of broader issues during his humanitarian mission, officials said. Indeed, he did not even ask to see Mr. Kim, requesting instead a meeting with “an appropriate official.” To help the former president in case something went awry, the White House recommended John Podesta, an adviser to both Mr. Clinton and President Obama, join his delegation.
And to ensure he would not leave empty-handed, Mr. Clinton asked that a member of his entourage meet with the journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, shortly after he landed to make sure they were safe, said a senior administration official, who had been briefed on the visit.
For all the billions of dollars a year that the United States spends on intelligence gathering about mysterious and unpredictable countries like North Korea, it took just 20 hours on the ground in Pyongyang by a former president to give the Obama administration its first detailed look into a nuclear-armed nation that looms as one of its greatest foreign threats.
The details about Mr. Clinton’s visit came from interviews with multiple government officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
On Tuesday, Mr. Clinton went to the White House to brief Mr. Obama and his top aides about the trip. Even before the 40-minute session in the Situation Room, Mr. Clinton had spoken to the president by phone and briefed his national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones.
But the meeting was rich in symbolism, and the president invited Mr. Clinton to the Oval Office to talk further. The White House said little about what the men discussed, beyond noting that Mr. Obama had wanted to thank Mr. Clinton for winning the release of Ms. Ling and Ms. Lee.
The role of the intelligence officer, Joseph R. DeTrani, in arranging the visit, has not previously been reported. Mr. DeTrani is the government’s senior officer responsible for collecting and analyzing intelligence on North Korea. His efforts to pave the way for Mr. Clinton’s visit offer a glimpse into how the administration has been forced to use unorthodox methods to overcome the lack of formal communications.
During the Bush administration, when the United States was in still in talks with North Korea, the White House did not use intelligence officers for these purposes, an official familiar with the talks said. Indeed, before taking the job of North Korea mission manager in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in 2006, Mr. DeTrani served as the special envoy to the six-party talks with North Korea.
More than anything else, senior officials said, Mr. Clinton’s visit served to clear up some of the shadows surrounding Kim Jong-il’s health. After suffering a stroke last year, he looked frail in photos, spurring questions about who might replace him.
Those questions have not gone away, officials said, but they may recede a bit after Mr. Clinton’s visit. So, too, may the speculation about internal battles, given the apparent good standing of Kim Kye-gwan, the chief nuclear negotiator, and another foreign policy official, Kang Sok-ju, who also took part in the meetings.
The former president did not engage in a substantive discussion about North Korea’s nuclear program. Nor did the North Korean leader give Mr. Clinton any indication that his nation would relinquish its nuclear ambitions — a condition the United States has set for resuming negotiations, officials said.
During his one-hour meeting, officials said, Mr. Clinton advised the North Korean that he could win favor with South Korea and Japan by resolving cases of their citizens who had been abducted by North Korea. The dinner, which lasted over two hours, was “chitchat,” the official said. “It was not substantive.”
North Korea has sent other conciliatory signals. Kim Jong-il met last week with the head of a South Korean conglomerate and agreed to restart several tourism ventures, which allow people from the South to visit the North. North Korea said it would also allow reunions of Korean families divided by the border. Also, Yonhap, the South Korean news agency, said Wednesday the North would send a delegation to the funeral of Kim Dae-jung, a former president of the South.
It is not clear whether the overtures represent a change of heart or a growing desperation for money, as the North comes under increasingly strict United Nations sanctions. The White House says it is determined not to ease the pressure. In a deliberate bit of timing, it dispatched a senior diplomat, Philip S. Goldberg, to Asia on Tuesday to discuss ways to enforce the sanctions.
Still, officials and analysts said, Mr. Clinton’s visit was valuable, largely because North Korea is so opaque. Victor Cha, a top North Korea adviser in the Bush administration, said, “The Clinton trip has got a lot of people rethinking and reassessing.”
Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting.
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