The Bush administration is expected to brief US Congress behind closed doors tomorrow about North Korea's suspected nuclear cooperation with Syria.
The White House has said little in public about the issue since Israel conducted an air strike inside Syria last September that US media reports said was directed at a nuclear site that may have been built with North Korean assistance.
While a handful of lawmakers were briefed on the issue last year, the decision to widen the circle substantially comes as Washington appears closer to a deal for North Korea to provide a long overdue declaration of its nuclear programs.
Once the poor, communist state has produced the declaration, the United States is expected to ease sanctions on Pyongyang that flow from its presence on the US list of state sponsors of terrorism and the US Trading With the Enemy Act.
A senior congressional aide and a former Bush administration North Korea specialist said they believed the briefings were designed to persuade members of Congress that removing those sanctions was justified.
Congressional sources said the briefings would be for members of the House of Representatives and Senate committees that deal with armed services, foreign affairs and intelligence.
North Korea's failure to produce the declaration has bogged down a 2005 multilateral deal under which it committed to abandon all nuclear weapons and programs. The so-called six-party agreement was hammered out among the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States.
The declaration has been held up partly because of Pyongyang's reluctance to discuss any transfer of nuclear technology to other countries, notably Syria, as well as to account for its suspected pursuit of uranium enrichment.
Uranium enrichment could provide North Korea with a second way to produce fissile material for nuclear weapons in addition to its plutonium-based program, which it used to test an atomic device in October 2006.