Joseph DeTrani, the State Department's special envoy for the six-party talks, was expected to meet Ning Fukui, China's point man on North Korea, and other Chinese officials before leaving Saturday, an embassy official said.

"DeTrani is in Beijing to discuss preparations for the next six-party working group sessions, including dates for the meeting," the official said.

"The US hopes to have a working group session as soon as possible and remains very flexible on timing," the official said.

Meetings at working group level are expected to take place before the start of senior-level six-country talks, involving China, the United States, the two Koreas, Japan and Russia.

At the third round of talks in the Chinese capital in June, the participants agreed to meet for a fourth time before the end of September.

DeTrani's talks come as the US State Department revealed that North Korea's pointman for the six-party talks may make a rare visit to the United States.

Ri Gun has been invited to attend a privately sponsored conference in New York in early August, said spokesman Adam Ereli.

Ereli said there were no plans for bilateral meetings between Ri, vice director of the Institute of Disarmament and Peace in North Korea, and US officials if he accepts the invitation.

Ereli, meanwhile, dismissed speculation that DeTrani, a former CIA official, was in China because the talks were faltering.

"This is part of, I think, a regular and expected pattern of diplomatic consultations between China, as the host of the six-party talks, and the other members of the process in advance of what is expected to be a working group meeting in the near future," he said.

At the June meeting, North Korea proposed freezing its nuclear arms program and pledged to stop building, testing and transferring atomic weapons, but only if the United States helped compensate it for the freeze.

The United States, for its part, made an offer that calls for a step-by-step dismantling of Pyongyang's plutonium and uranium weapons programs in return for aid and security guarantees and easing of its political and economic isolation.

But North Korea warned this week it might consider pulling out of the talks following the passage of a US human rights bill critical of the Stalinist state.

The impasse blew up in October 2002 when Washington said the Stalinist state had broken a 1994 nuclear freeze by launching a secret nuclear weapons program.

While Pyongyang denies it is running a uranium scheme, it has offered to freeze its plutonium facilities in return for simultaneous rewards from the United States.

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