Former US president Jimmy Carter said that North Korea's leader Kim Jong-Il denied in talks with China that he would anoint his youngest son as his heir, as believed by many analysts.

Carter, who last month visited North Korea to free a detained American, said he later spoke about his trip with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao who told the former president about his recent talks with Kim Jong-Il.

Wen "surprised us by quoting the DPRK (North Korea) leader regarding the prospective promotion of his son, Kim Jong-Un, as 'a false rumor from the West,'" Carter wrote in an entry this week on his website.

"We'll just have to wait to learn the truth about the succession in power," Carter said.

Experts for months have pointed to signs that North Korea's ruling party to anoint Kim Jong-Un, who is in his 20s, as the successor to Kim Jong-Il, 68, who is in uncertain health after an apparent stroke in 2008.

But South Korean reports said North Korea has told international agencies that it is putting off the political gathering -- its largest in 30 years -- due to damage from storms.

The delay has caused a new buzz among North Korea watchers, some of whom questioned if the storms were the main reason for the delay.

Carter last month visited North Korea but did not meet Kim Jong-Il, who was touring neighboring China.

In an opinion piece published Thursday in The New York Times, Carter said North Korea specifically sought the former president, who defused a nuclear crisis in 1994.

Carter urged the United States to engage in talks, saying North Korea was eager for peace. President Barack Obama's administration took a distance from Carter, saying Pyongyang must prove it is ready to give up nuclear weapons.

In his web entry, Carter said both he and Wen heard "positive messages" from North Korea.

US officials have been cautious on predicting succession in North Korea.

Kurt Campbell, the assistant US secretary of state for East Asia, conceded at a Senate hearing on Thursday that North Korea is "probably the hardest target that we face in the global arena."

"In fundamental ways North Korea is still a black box," Campbell testified.

"We have some glimpses and some intelligence and the like, but the truth is, oftentimes in retrospect, some of that intelligence has proven to be wrong," Campbell said.

earlier related report
Carter says North Korea wants peace
Washington (AFP) Sept 16, 2010 - Former US president Jimmy Carter has called on the United States to pursue peace "aggressively" with North Korea, saying its leaders told him they wanted better relations with the world.

In his first public remarks on his mission last month to the reclusive communist state to free a US prisoner, Carter said that North Korean leaders voiced concern over recent pressure by South Korea and the United States.

"Still, they said, they were ready to demonstrate their desire for peace and denuclearization," Carter wrote in an op-ed piece Thursday in The New York Times.

"They referred to the six-party talks as being 'sentenced to death but not yet executed'," Carter said, referring to denuclearization talks from which North Korea withdrew last year.

Carter -- who negotiated an earlier deal to end a crisis with North Korea in 1994 -- said he made clear to the North Koreans that he was not an official US emissary. But he said he relayed their messages to Washington.

"A settlement on the Korean Peninsula is crucial to peace and stability in Asia, and it is long overdue," said Carter, a Nobel Peace prize laureate.

"These positive messages from North Korea should be pursued aggressively and without delay, with each step in the process carefully and thoroughly confirmed," Carter said.

Carter met senior leaders but not supremo Kim Jong-Il, who was on a visit to neighboring China.

Carter said the leaders told him they wanted to "expand on the good relationships that had developed earlier in the decade" with South Korea's then president Kim Dae-Jung and Japan's then prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, who both traveled to Pyongyang.

But the administration of President Barack Obama -- a member of Carter's Democratic Party who supports engagement with the world -- has been cautious on resuming talks with North Korea which last year tested a second atomic bomb.

In his opinion piece, Carter made no mention of the March sinking of South Korea's Cheonan vessel that left 46 sailors said. South Korea and the United States say the North torpedoed the vessel; Pyongyang denies the charges.

Senator Joseph Lieberman, an independent who was the Democratic vice presidential candidate in 2000, denounced Carter's piece as "awful."

"He fails to mention the Cheonan incident and that certainly puts in doubt his conclusion that the leadership of North Korea that he spoke to is anxious" for reconciliation, Lieberman told a congressional hearing.

Questioned by Lieberman, Kurt Campbell, the assistant secretary of state for East Asia, said that North Korea's appeals for talks as relayed by Carter were "well known to us."

"Frankly, I too was surprised by the omission of the Cheonan in President Carter's op-ed today," Campbell said, while voicing gratitude to Carter for for his efforts to procure freedom for Aijalon Mahli Gomes, an English teacher who entered North Korea.

Campbell said that the United States wanted a "sincere and clear signal" from North Korea that it wanted a real process of negotiation.

His remarks echoed Stephen Bosworth, the US pointman on North Korea, who said in Beijing at the end of a regional tour that Pyongyang needed to do more if the six-party talks are to resume.