hankyoreh

By Park Hyun, Washington correspondent

Former US State Department officials are planning to attend a Sept. 18 meeting in Beijing for the tenth anniversary of the first six-party talks on the North Korean nuclear issue, diplomatic sources said.

The list of attendees at the “1.5-track” public and private sector meeting is said to include Evans Revere, non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and former principal deputy assistant secretary for East Asian and pacific affairs, and Robert Carlin, a visiting scholar at the Stanford University Center for International Security and Cooperation and onetime North Korea analyst for the State Department. Tony Namkung, a former deputy director of the Institute of East Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, is also reportedly slated to attend for the US.

Revere and Carlin now work at think tanks, but from the 1990s through the mid-2000s, they were considered some of the leading experts on North Korea, handling negotiations on the nuclear issue for the State Department.

Revere headed the department’s Korea bureau under the Bill Clinton administration and served as principal deputy assistant secretary from 2004 to 2005. He has maintained connections with figures in North Korea since leaving in 2007.

Carlin took part in negotiations with Pyongyang as Northeast Asia official for the department’s intelligence analysis bureau from 1989 to 2002. Between 2002 and 2096, he served as senior policy adviser for the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO).

“My understanding is that the US decided that things weren’t at the point where government authorities from the countries in the six-party talks could be meeting, and sent former officials instead,” said a diplomatic source in Washington on condition of anonymity.

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