SEOUL — At a sensitive time when the United States is trying to build a consensus on North Korea, South Koreans are in a furor over allegations that Washington hyped intelligence about the North's nuclear activities.
The flap, which roughly parallels some of the disputes over Iraq, concerns a trip by National Security Council officials through Asia this year to present evidence to Chinese, Japanese and South Korean officials about North Korea's alleged role in supplying Libya with uranium hexafluoride. The gas is used to make weapons-grade uranium.
In a Washington Post report Sunday, two U.S. officials were quoted as saying the U.S. had covered up a key role played by Pakistan as middleman to bolster the case against North Korea as a dangerous proliferator of nuclear material.
North Korea and Pakistan are known to have exchanged weapons technology for years, so a transaction between them would not have been particularly shocking or new intelligence.
"Another Intelligence Fiasco," is how the English-language Korea Times referred to it in an article Wednesday. The conservative newspaper, Chosun Ilbo, has demanded an investigation.
"If the U.S. administration really offered false information ... Washington's credibility and morality would be in tatters," the Chosun editorialized under the headline, "Did Washington Lie to Seoul?"
Although the South Korean government remained silent, the left-of-center ruling Uri Party issued a tough statement Tuesday accusing the Bush administration of destabilizing the Korean peninsula with its "distorted" intelligence and "oppressive" policies toward the North.
The State Department released a statement Tuesday in Seoul saying, "The United States has not misled allies or anyone else about the matter."
South Korean experts who have reviewed the U.S. evidence of a North Korean sale of uranium hexafluoride to Libya say it is a murky case.
For one, it is difficult to determine whether the uranium hexafluoride that was turned over by Libya as part of its nuclear dismantling originated in North Korea.
Even if it did, experts said, North Korea most likely had supplied the uranium hexafluoride to Pakistan and the rogue network of Abdul Qadeer Khan, that country's top nuclear scientist, had sold it to Libya.
"It looks like these were separate deals. North Korea supplied Pakistan. Pakistan supplied Libya. There is no evidence that North Korea knew anything about Libya," said a South Korean official who asked not to be quoted by name.
