Update 3: Apparently North Korea isn’t all that ready to cooperate after all:

North Korea and Japan failed to achieve a breakthrough in talks on normalizing relations, with both sides reiterating existing positions on the kidnapping of Japanese citizens by North Korean agents.

Update 2: Personally I think it’s 2002 all over again, but North Korea appears to be trying to solve issues with Japan (several billion dollars could be involved, aside from the delisting):

Japanese and North Korean envoys expressed guarded optimism as they met in the Mongolian capital, after Washington and Pyongyang appeared to move forward in similar discussions at the weekend.

“We had meaningful exchanges of views to deepen mutual understanding,” Japan’s chief negotiator, Yoshiki Mine, told reporters.

[. . .]

“I have expectations that there will be results,” Kyodo news agency quoted Song Il-ho as telling reporters in Pyongyang on Tuesday. “As the atmosphere of the six-party talks is positive overall, relations should also move forward in line with that,” the agency quoted him as saying later in Beijing.

Update: It is looking more and more like Chris Hill made some backroom – and what must be conditional – promises to North Korea concerning removal from the U.S. list of terrorist sponsoring nations:

North Korea’s chief nuclear negotiator has insisted that the United States promised to remove Pyongyang from a list of states sponsoring terrorism, a report said Wednesday.

[. . .]

“Something has already been promised,” North Korean top negotiator Kim Kye-Gwan said when asked if Washington would lift Pyongyang from the list, as quoted by Japan’s Jiji Press. “I do not feel this is new,” he said Tuesday…

Original post: Excerpts from the Department of State daily press briefing (huge h/t to a reader!) for 04 September 2007 on the issues of removing North Korea from the U.S. list of terrorist sponsoring nations and those abducted by North Korea (~83,000, including POWs held over from the Korean War). My comments follow. The briefer is Tom Casey, Deputy Spokesman:

QUESTION: Okay. On — can you give us a little more clarity as to where this situation stands with North Korea?

MR. CASEY: Well, I’ll go through a little bit of what we discussed this morning. Basically, in the February 13th agreement, it was stated that the United States would begin the process of removing or looking at removing North Korea from the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism and will also continue the process of doing so for the Trading with the Enemy Act. What has happened is there’s been discussions in the working group about those issues. As Chris said, he feels they made some progress on them. But of course, how this will be done and any timing under which it will be done is something that is yet to be determined and would obviously have to be part of the discussion that the working groups would have in their report to the envoys on ultimately part of any discussion about a agreement that the envoys would reach for the overall next phase of nuclear disarmament. That was easy. (Laughter.)

[. . .]

QUESTION: Do you have a better sense of when that envoy level meeting could take place?

MR. CASEY: No, I don’t have a date for you on that, Kirit. The Japan-North Korea bilateral working group is, I believe, meeting today and tomorrow in Ulan Bator, Mongolia. That is the last working group to meet. Certainly, I think, we would hope to have a envoys-level meeting fairly soon thereafter, but at this point, a date hasn’t been set, though I certainly know we’d like to see some progress made on that this month.

[. . .]

QUESTION: Yeah. As you say that everything comes out of the working group goes to the six-party envoy meeting and it’s released out of there, is there any consideration coming out of this working group, this meeting this weekend between North Korea and the U.S., is there any consideration by the U.S. to present a plan to the six-party envoy group coming — upcoming that will remove North Korea off of the terrorism list?

MR. CASEY: The plan is to do what everyone’s always said we’re going to do. The working groups will meet. They will present their recommendations to the envoys. Based on those recommendations, the envoys will create an overall plan.

Certainly, progress on some of these bilateral issues, actions taken to move forward on some of them, I’m sure will be part of that discussion. But I think it would be wrong to say based on the meeting of this working group that anything has been decided because, again, this is not a matter of the working groups acting in isolation. All of what each of the working groups has done needs to be put together into a coherent package and a coherent agreement among all six parties as to the specific steps that will be taken as well as to the sequencing of them when they put together the next formal agreement on what will now be the disablement phase.

QUESTION: Right. But what I’m asking is, is the United States at the next six-part plenary considering presenting a plan there for discussion about taking North Korea off of the terrorism list.

MR. CASEY: No, I’m sure there will be an opportunity for the working group to report on their recommendations, but there is no separate U.S. plan involved. There are working groups. The working groups make recommendations. The envoys evaluate them and come up with a coherent framework or a coherent agreement to move forward. And that’s how I expect we’ll be continuing.

[. . .]

QUESTION: Tom, this morning at the White House, they’re reading off a group of 83,000-plus names of abductees by the North Koreans. These involve abduct — not just from South Korea but from eight other countries. And there are two groups involved, the Rescuing Abductee Center of Hope — for Hope and the Citizens Coalition for Human Rights of Abductees and North Korean Refugees. Has this been brought to the attention of the North Koreans by Chris Hill and his talks, and what are you going to do along with members of Congress to facilitate the release of these individuals?

MR. CASEY: Joel, I am unfamiliar with either of those groups or any of their information. I simply have to refer you to them. However, there is certainly a longstanding issue, and one that we’ve discussed many times before from here, which is the question of abductees, Japanese abductees, to North Korea. This is one of the primary concerns and issues being discussed in the Japan-North Korea Working Group. It is also something that people have heard as recently as last week from the President on that the United States is very concerned about. It is something that Chris Hill discusses in his conversations with the North Koreans. It is a subject of discussion more broadly at the six-party talks. And it is, of course, one of the issues that we need to see progress on as well as we go forward with the overall six-party process and nuclear disarmament on the Korean Peninsula.

[. . .]

QUESTION: Could you please tell us what North Korea should do to get away from this terror list?

MR. CASEY: Well, look, I’m not going to try and give you any kind of detailed listing on this. North Korea is on the list of state sponsors of terror because of actions that it took that were determined a long time ago to have met the legal requirements for this. It — as we move forward with the review process, those questions will have to be answered. Certainly, there is also a series of legal standards both for getting on the list in the first place as well as getting off. And as we’ve seen in other instances where this has occurred, there’ll be some, I’m sure, fairly detailed discussions on those issues so that if this in fact does happen, everyone can be satisfied that U.S. laws and regulations have been fully met.

But these are things that I think will be under continued discussion over time. If you go to the annual report we put out on this issue, you can see the listing of what concerns there are about North Korea, and I think that probably would give you the best idea of what kinds of issues might be subject to discussion.

QUESTION: But based on the state terror — based on the State Department website, the last terrorist act by North Korea was in 1987 in relation to the bombing of the Korean airline flight?

MR. CASEY: Mm-hmm. If that’s what it says on our website, I assume that’s the latest information that we have that’s publicly available. Obviously, there are other issues and concerns that may be there that are not part of the public dialogue, but I expect that there’ll be some serious discussions about this issue as people move forward with the group meetings.

QUESTION: Do you consider its nuclear weapons program as terrorism?

MR. CASEY: I don’t believe the definition in the law talks about nuclear weapons, no.

QUESTION: So denuclearization is not linked to removal from the terrorism list?

MR. CASEY: The standards for getting on and off the list of state sponsors of terror are in U.S. law. I don’t want to try and interpret it for you. The law is there and I think the terms are pretty clear.

[. . .]

QUESTION: That you would characterize some forward movement in the discussions wouldn’t you because, you know, North Koreans are saying they are going to declare –

MR. CASEY: Well, more important than my characterization of it is Chris Hill, who’s our negotiator, who is out there in the talks. And Chris said that there was — this was a good session; that they made some progress on the issues in the bilateral working group. So definitely, I do think there is — there’s progress and there’s forward movement. But again, the only caution I want to hold out for people is that having these working group sessions, while important, is not an agreement of and by itself, and that we got a long way to go in this game to ultimately achieve what everyone agreed to back in September of ‘05, which is the complete ending, disablement, and dismantling of North Korea’s nuclear program. (emphasis added)

Summary of points on delisting:

• Discussion for delisting are spelled out in the 13 February agreement (DOC).
• Those discussions have been occurring, but, “any timing under which it will be done is something that is yet to be determined” – that’s left for working groups.
• Nothing has been yet been decided (that they yet admit).
• When asked directly, “what North Korea should do to get away from this terror list?” the answer was non-committal, and that, “a series of legal standards both for getting on the list in the first place as well as getting off.”
• The nuclear weapons programs are not considered part of the criteria for being on the list (otherwise allies would have to be added), but denuclearization is not necessarily being excluded as a criteria for getting of the list (it seems the questioner was trying to get the briefer to admit an inconsistency).

The bottom line is that we have agreed to talk about taking North Korea off the list, but have not actually agreed to do so, at least publicly and on the record. This is in more detail than what Chris Hill stated earlier today, but essentially the same.

State’s Country Reports on Terrorism pages lists the reasons for North Korea being on the list (which oddly enough omit the 1983 bombing in Burma):

North Korea

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) is not known to have sponsored any terrorist acts since the bombing of a Korean Airlines flight in 1987.

Pyongyang in 2003 allowed the return to Japan of five surviving abductees, and in 2004 of eight family members, mostly children, of those abductees. Questions about the fate of other abductees remain the subject of ongoing negotiations between Japan and the DPRK. In November, the DPRK returned to Japan what it identified as the remains of two Japanese abductees, whom the North had reported as having died in North Korea. The issue remained contentious at year’s end. There are also credible reports that other nationals were abducted from locations abroad. The ROK government estimates that approximately 485 civilians were abducted or detained since the 1950-53 Korean War. Four Japanese Red Army members remain in the DPRK following their involvement in a jet hijacking in 1970; five of their family members returned to Japan in 2004.

As the Japanese abductees issue is listed here, it seems that North Korea may (or should) need to address that as well. It’s still a waiting game to see how far North Korea will go before they renege (again), and how much the U.S. will pay for it.