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The White House said Thursday North Korea assisted covert Syrian nuclear activities that were "not intended for peaceful purposes," calling Pyongyang's actions a "dangerous manifestation" of the regime's proliferation.

But it said it is not walking away from the six-party talks on the North's atomic ambitions, calling them a framework to make sure North Korea does not engage in further proliferation.

In the first public claim of a North Korea-Syria nuclear connection after more than eight months of silence, the White House said Damascus was building a secret nuclear reactor capable of producing plutonium until the site was targeted by an Israeli air raid on Sept. 6, 2007.

"We are convinced, based on a variety of information, that North Korea assisted Syria's covert nuclear activities," the White House said in a statement.

"We have long been seriously concerned about North Korea's nuclear weapons program and its proliferation activities. North Korea's clandestine nuclear cooperation with Syria is a dangerous manifestation of those activities," the statement said.

"One way we have chosen to deal with this problem is through the six-party framework. Through this process we are working with our partners to achieve the verifiable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula," it continued.

"The United States is also committed to ensuring that North Korea does not further engage in proliferation activities. We will work with our partners to establish in the six-party framework a rigorous verification mechanism to ensure that such conduct and other nuclear activities have ceased."

The Syrian ambassador to the United States immediately dismissed the White House claims, calling them a "ridiculous story."

Imad Moustapha said in an interview with CNN that he was shown satellite photographs of a building in a desert that U.S. insisted was a nuclear reactor.

"I had to remind them that it is on one hand preposterous. And on the other hand there is something silly about this," he said.

The envoy said his government and North Korea had a "very normal relationship."

The White House came out with the statement shortly after Michael Hayden, chief of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser, briefed Senate and House committees after mounting pressure from Congress for the administration to disclose what it knows about a North Korea-Syria connection.

The Israeli attack in September sparked suspicions of such a link, but administration officials had refused to answer any questions on the issue and only shared the information they had with a handful of legislators.

Thursday's briefings came amid warnings from congressional members that they would resort to cutting funds for the six-party talks unless they were given full details.

One of the expected repercussions is that the U.S. will not remove North Korea from its list of terrorism-sponsoring states soon. The de-listing, highly coveted by Pyongyang, was offered to the North as an incentive for its denuclearization.

With the allegations that Pyongyang had proliferated nuclear technology, the Congress is not likely to approve the de-listing.

But the White House statement did not mention any evidence. U.S. press reports, quoting sources, said Washington had a videotape of the inside of the alleged Syrian nuclear reactor that shows many men who appeared to be Koreans.

The Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, after close analysis of satellite photos of the raided site, said the building closely resembled North Korea's own reactor that has been churning out weapons-grade plutonium.

South and North Korea, the U.S., China, Russia and China are members of the multilateral forum aimed at dismantling Pyongyang's nuclear weapons and programs. The process requires parties other than Pyongyang to provide funding for various incentives for the North, including heavy fuel oil shipments.

Whatever prompted the White House to address the issue, its timing put the six-party process in a quandary despite the reaffirmation that the U.S. will stick with it.

The process has been deadlocked since North Korea missed the Dec. 31, 2007, deadline to provide a declaration detailing its nuclear inventory and proliferation activities. The Syria question has been one of the stumbling blocks to a compromise on the declaration.

A U.S. delegation was in Pyongyang this week to negotiate a deal acceptable to North Korea and other members of the six-party talks. Sung Kim, the head of the delegation, arrived in Seoul on Thursday and said the discussions went well. North Korea also said there was progress.

But reactions were divided between supporters and critics of the compromise with North Korea. Sen. Sam Brownback on Wednesday delayed a vote to confirm the next U.S. ambassador to Seoul as a show of his strong discontent about the administration's handling of the North Korean nuclear issue.

Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, said on Fox News he opposes the deal the administration is trying to make with North Korea.

"The important thing here is that North Korea cannot be trusted," he said.

"I am afraid that the path we are headed down with North Korea is not something we can verify. So, right now I would not agree to the present parameters as I understand it of an agreement with North Korea."

Response from the Congress was varied.

Expressing frustrations and anger that the administration waited this long to brief the Congress, Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, said some members feel they have been "abused."

"There is a friction there that may jeopardize...an agreement that may or may not be reached by the administration in that six-party talks," he told reporters after getting the CIA briefing.

"The administration has made it very difficult that if they do reach some kind of agreement with the six-party talks, it will be much harder for them to go through the Congress and get their agreements approved because they really damaged the relationship between the Congress and the administration," he said.

Asked about the prospects of removing Pyongyang from the U.S.

list of terrorism-sponsoring states, he said, "We would expect to have good, clear, verifiable information from the countries that are involved before any steps like that would be taken by this administration."

But Rep. Howard Berman, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said while the details of North Korea-Syria nuclear cooperation are disturbing, they do not provide a reason to suspend discussions with North Korea.

"Rather, the information that has been released to the public demonstrates the importance of insisting on a verifiable enforcement mechanism to ensure that North Korea honors its commitments to stop spreading the means to create nuclear weapons," he said in a statement.

The administration has been pursuing a more productive path through the six-party talks, he said. "We should stick with that path, and ensure that the North Koreans do not stray from it."

WASHINGTON, April 24 (Yonhap)