Former U.S. President Bill Clinton made a surprise trip to North Korea on Tuesday amid an international standoff over the country's nuclear program and concerns about two U.S. reporters imprisoned in Pyongyang since March.
Clinton landed in the North Korean capital in an unmarked jet and was greeted at the airport by North Korean officials, including chief nuclear negotiator Kim Kye Gwan, North Korea's state news agency said in a brief dispatch. "A little girl presented a bouquet to Bill Clinton," the report said.
His visit comes amid heightened tensions over North Korea's string of nuclear and missile tests in defiance of U.N. resolutions, and calls from Washington for amnesty for the two reporters.
Ling and Lee, reporters for former Vice President Al Gore's California-based Current TV media venture, were arrested in March while on a reporting trip to the Chinese-North Korean border. They were sentenced in June to 12 years of hard labor for entering the country illegally and engaging in "hostile acts."
Clinton, whose administration had relatively good relations with Pyongyang; Gore, his vice president; and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who in the 1990s traveled twice to North Korea to secure the freedom of detained Americans, had all been named as possible envoys to bring back Lee and Ling.
However, the decision to send Clinton, whose wife is now secretary of state, was kept quiet. A senior U.S. official later confirmed to reporters traveling to Africa with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that the former president was in North Korea.
"While the mission is in progress, we will have no comment," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the negotiations. "Our interest is the successful completion of the mission and the safe return of the journalists."
Clinton would be the second former U.S. president to visit North Korea; Jimmy Carter visited Pyongyang in 1994,when Clinton was in office, and met with then-North Korean leader Kim Il Sung, late father of current leader Kim Jong Il.
That visit came amid spiraling nuclear tensions - and led to a breakthrough accord between the two sides months later.
Analysts have said the communist regime is expected to use the detained reporters as a negotiating card to win concessions from Washington
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