He said N. Korea had stopped building nukes. Now he heads policy planning at State.

The man who helped engineer the Clinton administration’s failed attempt to buy off North Korea with fuel and nuclear-power technology has been appointed head of a small but powerful strategic planning office in the State Department.

Mitchell Reiss helped start and manage a multinational organization devoted to giving nuclear technology and oil to the North Korean regime during the Clinton administration in an attempt – that the Center for Security Policy rigorously opposed at the time – to try to bribe Stalinist leader Kim Jong-il to stop building nuclear weapons.

Reiss had told Congress during the 2000 election campaign that it was a "myth" that the Clinton administration’s nuclear deal with North Korea "can be attacked without harming U.S. national-security interests." He also said, as a matter of fact, that North Korea had "halted" its nuclear weapons program.

With that record, people wonder why Secretary of State Colin Powell plucked Reiss from Academia last month to be the new head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff.

Reiss doesn’t fit well with the Bush Administration. "Since 1994, billions of dollars in economic and energy assistance have flowed into the coffers of Pyongyang to buy off their nuclear-weapons program," Under Secretary of State John Bolton, responsible for US arms control and nonproliferation policies, said last month in Seoul. "Nine years later, Kim Jong-il has repaid us by threatening the world with not one but two separate nuclear-weapons programs – one based on plutonium, the other highly enriched uranium."