Rift seen in S. Korean and US intelligence sharing

Then, when a North Korean officer in charge of a missile unit and a former senior official at North Korea's Nuclear Research Institute came to South Korea last year, said Mr. Lee, "our government hid them in a rural area."

One exception may have been a report from a North Korean defector three years ago that the regime had been pursuing a centrifuge enrichment program needed to process highly enriched uranium for the core of nuclear warheads.

Even so, the information was far from complete.

"The location of the production plant and related facilities were apparently not identified," said a study issued by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. The word of the defector, whose identity has never been revealed, corroborated reports that US intelligence had already received from Pakistani sources as well as from contacts familiar with North Korean procurement efforts in Japan and Germany.

Now South Korean officials question privately whether they should have gone as far as they did in supporting US intelligence aims.

The word of the defector was one element that led US analysts to conclude in July 2002 that North Korea had a uranium enrichment program entirely separate from the program at the Yongbyon facility that was shut down under the 1994 Agreed Framework. Four months later, armed with this information, James Kelly, US assistant secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific, confronted North Korean officials in Pyongyang with the facts, detonating a chain reaction that blew apart the agreement and led to the current standoff.

Behind an appearance of cooperation with the US in negotiations, South Korean officials have repeatedly expressed concern about the danger of the "hard-line" US response. They question whether the uranium program has gone far and warn there's no way, short of war, of uncovering all the sites, a number which are hidden in caves scattered throughout the North.

As a result, information may be harder to come by than ever.

"There was always a lag time with defectors," said Gary Samore, principal editor of the IISS report. "Eventually we got access, but there was some unhappiness when we didn't get to debrief defectors."

Park Young Ho, a senior researcher at the Korea Institute of National Unification, affiliated with the government, also perceived disagreement in analyzing the information. One reason for the difference may be that ready access to defectors gives South Korean analysts a better sense of the validity of what they are told.

"The US and South Korea have differences in interpreting intelligence," said Mr. Park. "While the US has the advantage in gathering scientific intelligence from satellites, South Korea has the advantage in gathering human intelligence. Both countries should share."

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