The US Secretary of State, Mrs Madeleine Albright, confirmed yesterday that she planned to visit North Korea this month to prepare for a historic visit by President Clinton.
Mrs Albright would be the highest-ranking US official ever to visit the communist state.
"I will be going very soon, by the end of the month probably," she told a news conference, adding that the two sides would work "very hard to make it possible" for Mr Clinton to visit.
"The purpose of my trip will be to explore opportunities for further progress on a range of regional and bilateral issues," and to prepare for Mr Clinton's visit, Mrs Albright said.
Korea's official news agency announced earlier yesterday that Mrs Albright would visit to pave the way for Mr Clinton's trip.
There were no details as to the timing of a visit by Mr Clinton, whose term ends in January.
The State Department announced on Wednesday that Mrs Albright had accepted an invitation to visit from North Korean leader Mr Kim Jong-il's deputy, Vice-Marshal Jo Myong-rok, who arrived in Washington for the two countries' highest-level talks on Tuesday.
Mrs Albright would be the first member of a US cabinet to visit North Korea since its foundation from Soviet-occupied territory at the end of the Second World War. The two countries have never had ties and were enemies in the 1950-1953 Korean War, which ended in a truce rather than a peace treaty.
But the US has adopted a policy of trying to engage rather than isolate Pyongyang in the hope of reducing tensions surrounding its missile programme, one reason behind Mr Clinton's consideration of a new defence system costing tens of billions of dollars.
The US ambassador, Ms Wendy Sherman, heavily involved in efforts to improve relations with Pyongyang, told a news briefing no date had been set yet for Mrs Albright's trip.
She said the US was still taking seriously an offer by Mr Kim to the Russian President, Mr Putin, to abandon his missile programme in return for help with satellite launches for peaceful purposes. Mr Kim was later quoted by South Korean media as saying the offer was a joke.
Though North Korea is on a list of state sponsors of terrorism because of its past activities and failure so far to hand over members of the Japanese Red Army who hijacked a Japanese airliner to North Korea in 1970, there is no bar to Mrs Albright travelling there while it is still on the list.