By Arshad Mohammed and Paul Eckert

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States laid out intelligence on Thursday it believes shows North Korea helped Syria build a suspected nuclear reactor destroyed by Israel last year, a step that may complicate its diplomacy both on the Korean Peninsula and in the Middle East.

In breaking its official silence on the mysterious September 6 Israeli air strike, the Bush administration is taking the risk that Syria could be angered by the public disclosures and could seek to retaliate against Israel.

The closed-door briefings to U.S. lawmakers could also make it harder for the United States to carry out a multilateral agreement under which North Korea promised to disclose all of its nuclear programs and, ultimately, to abandon them and any nuclear weapons it may have.

While lawmakers declined to discuss the intelligence after the briefings, some described them as “compelling.

A U.S. official, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to discuss classified matters, said that among the intelligence the United States has was an image of what appeared to be people of Korean descent at the facility.

However, the official stressed this image was only part of a wider array of information gathered from multiple sources on the suspected cooperation between Syria and North Korea.

While some lawmakers last year got classified information about the September 6 Israeli air strike, they voiced bitterness that the administration had only shared the intelligence more widely nearly eight months after the incident.

Syrian Ambassador to the United Nations Bashar Ja’afari told reporters on Wednesday that “there was no Syria-North Korea cooperation whatsoever in Syria. We deny these rumors.”  Continued…