BEIJING — North Korea agreed yesterday to rejoin the stalled six-nation talks on its nuclear weapons programs in the last week of July, North Korea and senior U.S. officials said.

The surprise announcement came after weeks of intensive diplomacy among North Korea, its neighbors and the United States. The final deal was struck, officials said, at a dinner meeting in the Chinese capital yesterday between U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill and Kim Gye Gwan, North Korea's vice minister of foreign affairs.

North Korea's agreement to return to the talks, which were last held in June 2004, is a rare bit of hope in a long-running crisis that has rattled Northeast Asia and challenged the Bush administration.

But it remains far from clear whether the negotiations will solve the problem anytime soon.

Three previous rounds made no discernible progress toward U.S. demands that North Korea dismantle its nuclear weapons programs in return for security assurance and economic assistance.

However, a senior U.S. official said the North Koreans, in the dinner with Hill, had specifically agreed that the purpose of the talks was to denuclearize the Korean peninsula and "they intend to come to make progress."

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly in advance of a formal announcement this morning Beijing time by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her Chinese counterpart, Li Zhaoxing.

Prickly North Korea had made a shifting series of demands it said must be met before it would return to the negotiations. Among those was insistence that the Bush administration apologize for Rice's labeling of the country, during her Senate confirmation hearings, as among the "outposts of tyranny."

Pyongyang's state-run Korean Central News Agency said comments by Hill at the Beijing dinner amounted to a "retraction" of that remark.

"The U.S. side clarified its official stand to recognize [North Korea] as a sovereign state, not to invade it and hold bilateral talks within the framework of the six-party talks," KCNA reported.

U.S. officials were not available for comment on the report. But Washington has markedly lowered its harsh rhetoric in recent months, with President Bush pointedly using a polite "Mr." to describe North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il.

Washington has resisted efforts by North Korea to make the nuclear crisis solely a bilateral issue between it and the United States, and insisted substantive negotiations take place in the six-nation format. Those talks also include China, Japan, Russia and South Korea.

North Korea is believed to have enough fissile nuclear material for six, or possibly nine, weapons. Whether it is actually capable of constructing a device and delivering it to a target is less clear.

The United States and its partners are insisting that North Korea abandon an alleged program to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons, and an older, parallel effort involving plutonium reprocessing.

Key issues at the talks will be inspections to verify such dismantlement, and the phasing of aid and other incentives with steps North Korea is supposed to take.