Davenport, Iowa

The Bush administration has agreed to lift North Korea's designation as a state sponsor of terror despite the fact that the North Koreans did not sign any formal agreement obligating the rogue state to verifiably abandon its nuclear program, according to two sources with knowledge of the negotiations.

"There is no formal written agreement," says a former top Bush administration official. "The North Koreans haven't signed anything. We are taking them off the terrorist list based on oral understandings and clarifications. This isn't diplomacy, it's lunacy."

A senior adviser to Republican presidential nominee John McCain blasted the deal as a "delusion" and suggested that the administration is seeking agreements for their own sake, not because they make the country safer.

"Few regimes have proven themselves less trustworthy than North Korea. We keep easing sanctions and ignoring our allies' concerns, but verifiable denuclearization doesn't get any closer," says a senior McCain adviser. "That is hardly successful diplomacy; it is delusion."

Another top McCain campaign official confirmed that the candidate talked to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice Friday evening but would not characterize the discussion.

The deal comes after several days of debate inside the Bush administration, during which North Korea's behavior has been increasingly provocative. Over the past week, North Korea has banned UN inspectors from its nuclear facilities and reportedly test-fired short-range missiles.

The United States offered this summer to remove North Korea from the terror list on the condition that it submit a declaration of its nuclear activities and allow the United States and others in the six-party talks verify its claims. But that declaration--just 60 pages in length--failed to account for nuclear activity well known to the international community. Among the most glaring omissions was any acknowledgement that North Korea had supplied nuclear technology to Syria, another state designated by the U.S. government as a state sponsor of terror.

The U.S. government had known about North Korea's role in the reactor since the previous spring and intelligence officials gave congressional leaders a highly classified briefing at the time. But the Bush administration did not want to share the information with the rest of Congress and fought to keep it secret despite pleas from members of Congress to make it public. Several congressional leaders attributed the desire for secrecy to the fierce determination of Rice and her State Department colleagues to strike a deal--any deal--with North Korea. In September 2007, Israeli jets destroyed the reactor and the secret was out.

In an interview with THE WEEKLY STANDARD on May 9, 2008, Rice expressed concern about North Korean proliferation and said the reactor in Syria was one "manifestation" of those activities. She said that future U.S. concessions would require a "verification mechanism" in order "to prevent further circumstances like that or to learn whether there might be other circumstances."

She added that any future deal with North Korea would come only after verification mechanisms had been put in place. "I have not lost my understanding of the North Korean regime, okay? Nobody believes that this is a regime that you can believe. The question is: Is this a regime that, under the right set of incentives and disincentives, is prepared to make some fundamental choices about its nuclear program that would ultimately put the United States and the rest of the world in a safer position vis-à-vis the Korean Peninsula and, most importantly, vis-à-vis proliferation? That's the question."

She continued: "And in order to answer that question, you have to go through negotiations with them. But you also have to have verification mechanisms because, frankly, I don't expect to be able to rely on the North Koreans' telling the truth."