Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage met with Fu Ying, the director of the Asian section of the Chinese foreign ministry, to discuss Beijing's efforts to convince the North Koreans to return to the table, a State Department official said.

Asked by reporters after the meeting whether there was progress toward convening a new round, Fu replied: "Yes." She did not elaborate.

Fu is to meet later in the day with James Kelly, the top US envoy for Asia and the Pacific who led the US delegation to the last six-party talks in Beijing which ended inconclusively in August.

A second round -- between China, the United States, the two Koreas, Russia and Japan -- had been expected to be held in the Chinese capital in Beijing in December, but has now been pushed into this year due to conflicts over the contents of what a final communique might say, US officials have said.

The State Department has been guarded about the prospects for a second round with deputy spokesman Adam Ereli telling reporters on Monday only that negotiations were "serious and positive" that Washington is "hopeful" the talks can be resumed.

Meanwhile, US officials were waiting to hear details from members of the two delegations that travelled to North Korea last week and visited Pyongyang's Yongbyon nuclear facility where the Stalinist state claims to have been reprocessing plutonium for nuclear weapons.

North Korea said on Saturday that it had showed its "nuclear deterrent" to its US visitors and US newspapers later reported that delegation appeared to have seen reprocessed plutonium, a key ingredient for making nuclear bombs.

But members of the delegations, as well as South Korean and US officials, said it was not entirely clear what the North Koreans had put on display.

A senior State Department official said Monday that the members of one delegation -- congressional aides Keith Luse and Frank Jannuzi -- had not been able to positively identify what they were shown.

"I don't think they know exactly what they saw," the official told reporters on condition of anonymity. "At least they weren't in a position to provide full details."

The Washington Post reported earlier Tuesday that North Korean officials had told members of the second delegation that Pyongyang was not producing weapons-grade uranium despite the Stalinist state's admission to US diplomats in October 2002 that it was doing just that.

"They absolutely, totally stuck to the script on the HEU (highly enriched uranium) program: 'We don't have one'," the Post quoted a senior US official as saying the delegation had been told.

That delegation included Jack Pritchard, a former State Department official with years of experience in dealing with North Korea, who had been present with Kelly at the October 2002 meeting when the North Koreans made the admission.

The admission of the program -- which violates the terms of a 1994 agreement in which North Korea agreed to abandon its nuclear weapons program in exchange for fuel oil and two light-water reactors -- prompted the current stand-off and the suspension of the so-called "Agreed Framework" deal.

Since then, however, North Korea has consistently denied having a secret uranium enrichment program although it has thrown international inspectors out of its Yongbyon facility, where it claims to be reprocessing plutonium, and withdrawn from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

WAR.WIRE