By Hwang Doo-hyong
WASHINGTON, Aug. 27 (Yonhap) -- Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter returned home Friday with an American held in North Korea for seven months for trespassing.

   A private charter flight carrying Carter, Aijalon Gomes and their entourage arrived at Logan International Airport in Boston, the hometown of Gomes, who was sentenced in May to eight years in a labor and re-education camp and fined US$700,000 for illegal entry in January.

   Carter flew into Pyongyang Wednesday on a private mission to secure Gomes' release. His very presence in Pyongyang was seen as a thaw in U.S. relations with North Korea, which had been chilly since North Korea's torpedoeing of a South Korean warship in March.

   However, the former U.S. president apparently did not meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. who abruptly left for China as Carter flew to Pyongyang.

   North Korean media have said Kim Yong-nam, the president of the presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly, met with Carter over dinner Wednesday without reporting Carter's itinerary on Thursday and Friday.

   Kim, the ceremonial head of state, discussed with Carter bilateral relations and reaffirmed North Korea's denuclearization pledge and intention to return to the six-party talks on ending the North's nuclear weapons programs, according to the North's official Korean Central News Agency.

   Kim Jong-il traveled to Jian, Jilin Province, on a special train Wednesday and visited a school once attended by his father, Kim Il-sung, the founding father of the communist North.

   The reclusive North Korean leader then moved to Changchun, the provincial capital of Jilin Province, and is believed to have met with Chinese President Hu Jintao there Friday over succession to his son, the six-party nuclear talks and food and economic aid. The North recently suffered from massive flooding.

   North Korea and China usually release information on Kim Jong-il's travels only after he returns home. Kim has made five visits to China since 2000, the latest one in May, when he went to Beijing apparently to discuss his plans to transfer power to his son Kim Jong-un, and other issues of mutual concern.

   The 27-year-old Jong-un is reportedly accompanying his father in an apparent move to assure a third-generation power transition, unprecedented in a communist nation.

   Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping, Hu's likely successor, reportedly received the North Korean leader and his heir apparent in Jian Thursday.

   U.S. officials would not comment on Kim Jong-il's meeting with Hu.

   "I defer comment to those governments," State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said.

   Mike Hammer, spokesman for the National Security Council, said, "We have no comment."

   Crowley earlier in the day welcomed Gomes' release, but distanced the Obama administration from Carter's trip.

   "President Carter's trip was a private, humanitarian, and unofficial mission solely for the purpose of bringing Mr. Gomes home," he said. "The U.S. government did not propose or arrange the trip."

   The spokesman also warned American citizens not to travel to North Korea.

   "Travel to North Korea is not routine or risk-free," he said.

   U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he "appreciated" North Korea's decision to release Gomes "on humanitarian considerations" and "commended Mr. Carter for his humanitarian mission." He also encouraged emergency humanitarian assistance to flood-ravaged North Korea.

   Kim Jong-il was widely believed to be amenable to meeting with Carter, who brokered a bilateral deal in 1994 that led to the Geneva Agreed Framework to freeze the North's plutonium-producing nuclear reactor in return for benefits.

   The pact was scrapped in 2002 when the Bush administration denounced Pyongyang for secretly enriching uranium.

   A trip to Pyongyang by former President Bill Clinton to meet with Kim Jong-il last year led to the first high-level contact with North Korea under the Obama administration: Stephen Bosworth, special representative for North Korea policy, flew to the North Korean capital in December.

   Clinton won the release of two American journalists caught illegally entering North Korea in March 2009 while on a reporting tour covering North Korean defectors.

   Scott Snyder, director of the Center for U.S.-Korea Policy at the Asia Foundation, sees no breakthrough with the Carter trip.

   "A Kim Jong-il meeting with Carter would not have had a big impact on US-DPRK relations since it was a private visit," Snyder said. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea is North Korea's official name.

   The scholar was equally pessimistic about the six-party talks despite Friday's summit between Kim and Hu, the second in three months.

   "Conditions will not exist for the resumption of six-party talks unless President Hu was able to convince Kim Jong-il to resume denuclearization commitments under the February 2007 agreement," he said.

   South Korean Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan Wednesday said that a North Korean apology for the sinking of the warship Cheonan is not a precondition for the resumption of the six-party talks, instead calling on Pyongyang to reinstate inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency and restart the disabling of the North's nuclear facilities in advance.

   China's chief nuclear envoy, Wu Dawei, met with South Korean officials in Seoul Thursday, and proposed preparatory talks for another plenary session of the nuclear talks, stalled over U.N. sanctions for North Korea's nuclear and missile tests. The talks involve the two Koreas, the U.S., China, Japan and Russia.

   Wu is also visiting Tokyo and Washington. He visited Pyongyang last week.

   Denny Roy, senior fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu, was also pessimistic about chances of the Kim-Hu summit producing a breakthrough.

   "Beijing and Pyongyang will cooperate in pushing South Korea and the U.S. to return to the six-party talks," Roy said. "They will test the fortitude of the democracies, trying to get them to abandon their preconditions."

   North Korea will continue its brinkmanship, he said.

   "North Korea might appear to agree to discuss denuclearization, seeming to satisfy the first precondition, only to tell us later that what they meant was the U.S. must denuclearize first," he said. "If Seoul and Washington give up the second precondition, that Pyongyang admits to sinking the Cheonan, this would mean North Korea has committed an act of war with no significant negative consequences, and of course this means Pyongyang could go back to this strategy of provocation during the next downturn in relations."

   hdh@yna.co.kr
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