Siegfried Hecker, senior fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory who visited the North's nuclear facilities this month, said officials told him they differed with US interpretations of their meeting with US Asia envoy James Kelly in Pyongyang in October 2002.

In testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations committee, Hecker quoted North Korean Vice Minister Kim Gye Gwan as telling him "'We have no program, we have no equipment, and we have no technical expertise for enriching uranium.

"We decided to go the plutonium route some time ago, and that's where our expertise is."

But the United States contends that North Korean officials stunned Kelly during the 2002 meeting by confirming his claims on a highly enriched uranium program, based on US intelligence.

Hecker said a non-official US delegation to which he belonged had returned from North Korea with a transcript of the Kelly meeting prepared by the Stalinist state, which Pyongyang officials said confirmed their version of events.

But the State Department Wednesday stuck to its guns.

"There were numerous officials at that meeting," said deputy spokesman Adam Ereli.

"What was said was vetted by a number of translators, there was no doubt in the minds of the officials who were in the meeting or in the translations that were made of the comments, and subsequently analyzed, about what was said and what was its import."

Hecker pointed out that a member of his delegation, Jack Pritchard, a former senior State Department official, took part in the Kelly meeting, and was sure he had heard clearly that the North Koreans had admitted to having a highly enriched uranium program.

US accusations that North Korea had embarked on a program to enrich uranium, despite previous undertakings that it would not do so, set off a diplomatic tidal wave, and sent both sides deep into their worst crises in years.

North Korea kicked out international arms inspectors and unfroze a previous nuclear program based on plutonium, which had been mothballed in a 1994 anti-nuclear deal with the United States, and pulled out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The United States cut off fuel shipments mandated by the 1994 deal and warned it would not reward the Stalinist state for "bad behavior."

Feverish diplomatic efforts, lately led by China to convene a second round of six-nation crisis talks have so far failed, though there are hopes for a meeting in Beijing next month.

A previous round of talks in Beijing last August failed to produce a breakthrough.

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