"I say that we've made some progress," Hill told reporters after a brief half-hour meeting with the head of the UN nuclear watchdog, Mohamed ElBaradei, here.

"We've by no means resolved the issue up until now, but we're continuing to work with them," Hill said.

Hill, the US undersecretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs and the chief US nuclear negotiator with North Korea, was responding to a Washington Post report that Pyongyang was seeking to prove that US accusations about the uranium-enrichment programme were wrong.

US intelligence first concluded in July 2002 that North Korea had embarked on a large-scale programme to produce highly-enriched uranium for use in weapons.

If Pyongyang could show it never intended to produce highly-enriched uranium for nuclear weapons, it would seriously undermine the US intelligence community's credibility, already undercut by mistaken claims that Iraq was secretly stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) "understands well ... that this matter must be resolved to mutual satisfaction. We all need to be satisfied that this matter is behind us," Hill said.

The US official paid a brief visit to the International Atomic Energy Agency on Wednesday, where he met the UN nuclear watchdog's chief Mohamed ElBaradei and US ambassador Gregory Schulte for 30 minutes.

Both Hill and ElBaradei described the talks, which touched on the role of the IAEA in the denuclearisation of North Korea, as very positive.

"We had an excellent meeting and exchange of views on how to move forward on the DPRK verification issue and the regularisation of relations between the DPRK and the international community," ElBaradei said.

"It was very constructive, very useful for me to have an exchange of views with Secretary Hill. I think we are moving in the right direction. We are on the same page."

For his part, Hill said: "We had a very good discussion, exchanging information. We've been cooperating very closely throughout this process."

IAEA inspectors went to North Korea in July to monitor the initial shutdown of the country's nuclear facility at Yongbyong as agreed in six-party talks in February.

But the US envoy insisted that there was still a lot more to be done.

"We're in the middle of this process, we're certainly not at the end," he said.

"The end of the process is when the DPRK is in the NPT (Non-Proliferation Treaty) with IAEA safeguards. We look forward to continuing to cooperate together and to achieve that end."

Hill said that Pyongyang still needed to come up with a complete list of all its nuclear facilities and fissile materials.

"We're expecting to get the list at some point soon. They're required to provide us a list by the end of the year. We want to make sure that the list is very complete. And obviously we'll be working very, very closely with the IAEA on that matter," Hill said.

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