Administration Spurns N. Korea's Ban on Envoy

White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan defended Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton -- also called a "bloodsucker" by North Korea -- and said President Bush would decide who speaks for the United States at the expected six-country meeting on Pyongyang's nuclear program.

In calling North Korean leader Kim Jong Il a "tyrannical rogue" and life in the Stalinist state a "hellish nightmare," Bolton was "speaking for the administration," McClellan told reporters in Crawford, Texas, where the president is taking a monthlong vacation. "His remarks last week reiterated things we have said in the past."

Bolton, the department's arms control chief and one of the administration's most outspoken officials, criticized Kim at length in a speech he delivered last week in South Korea.

Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency fired back Saturday, declaring that in light of Bolton's "political vulgarity and psychopathological condition

State Department spokesman Philip T. Reeker said Bolton was part of the Bush administration, "and his remarks are coordinated as such."

He declined to respond to the North Korean attack, saying, "We're not going to dignify North Korean comments about our undersecretary of State."

World leaders last week welcomed news that the United States, North Korea, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia would sit down this month or next to discuss North Korea's efforts to build nuclear weapons.

Yet the latest exchange of incendiary rhetoric suggested that the United States and North Korea remained on a collision course, analysts said.

L. Gordon Flake, executive director of the Mansfield Center for Pacific Affairs in Washington, said the North Koreans' words demonstrate "how dislocated they are from international reality."

While Pyongyang has hoped to gain leverage by using threatening language and publicizing its desire to build a bomb, the effect has been to frighten and alienate the world community, he said.

At the same time, Flake said, U.S. officials almost certainly understand that when they attack Kim in personal terms, other North Korean officials must "first and foremost lash out, to prove their fealty to the leader."