Sources: Clinton plans to name NKorea envoy soon

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton hopes to appoint a special envoy to deal with U.S. policy on North Korea before she leaves on a trip to Asia next week to demonstrate the Obama administration's commitment to dealing with North Korea's nuclear weapons program, The Associated Press has learned.

Clinton leaves this weekend on a tour of Japan, Indonesia, South Korea and China. Clinton could make the announcement on Friday when she is to give a speech in New York outlining the administration's view of Asia and its growing global importance, according to three sources familiar with the matter. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the appointment has not yet been made public.

The officials said Stephen Bosworth, a former senior State Department official and U.S. ambassador to South Korea, has been offered the job. Bosworth currently is dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts.

The officials said Clinton would like to make the announcement before her Sunday departure for Asia, although they stressed that details of the timing and specifics of the job still were being worked out.

Bosworth's office did not respond to a message seeking comment about the post.

Clinton's trip coincides with new worries that North Korea might be preparing to test a long-range missile.

South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported Wednesday that a vehicle carrying radar equipment was seen moving to a launch site on the North's eastern coast from a munitions factory near Pyongyang.

South Korean and Japanese media said last week that intelligence agents had spotted a train carrying a long, cylinder-shaped object, believed to be a long-range missile, to the launch site at Musudan-ni.

Bosworth, returning from an unofficial trip to the secretive communist nation this past weekend, told reporters in Beijing that North Korean officials had expressed to him a willingness to move forward with long-stalled denuclearization talks.

He also said officials in Pyongyang he had spoken with had minimized reports that the North was preparing to test-fire a missile.

That message was in contrast to increasingly belligerent rhetoric from North Korea in recent weeks during which Pyongyang has announced it would scrap peace agreements with South Korea, warned that the peninsula was on the brink of war and appeared to be preparing to test a missile capable of reaching the western United States.

Bosworth said the officials he saw were upbeat about the nuclear talks and showed a willingness to talk to U.S. President Barack Obama's administration. He also said the delegation of academics he was traveling with had expressed misgivings about the alleged missile launch plans.

"We indicated there was concern that they might be preparing for a missile launch. They said that we should all wait and see," he said.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates also has played down reports of possible North Korean missile launch preparations. He noted this week that Pyongyang's last such test in 2006 was a failure, and the United States could shoot down a North Korean missile "should we deem it necessary."

Still, North Korea's saber-rattling has been interpreted as an attempt to grab Obama's attention, especially ahead of Clinton's visit to Japan, South Korea and China, three nations that, along with the United States and Russia, are pressing the North to abandon its nuclear weapons program in the so-called six-party talks.

Those talks currently are stalled, with the North refusing to agree to a protocol to verify an accounting of its nuclear activities. Pyongyang's declaration last year led the Bush administration to remove North Korea in October from its list of state sponsors of terror.

Despite the stalled talks, the State Department said Wednesday that U.S. officials would attend a related six-party meeting of a Northeast Asia peace and security working group in Russia on Feb. 19-20.