WASHINGTON, Oct 8, 2008 (AFP) - US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice insisted Wednesday that North Korea meet proper standards for verifying its nuclear disarmament as she pursued efforts to break a deadlock in negotiations.

'We are continuing to work on it. This is an issue of whether the verification protocol meets our standards,' Rice told reporters when asked if North Korea and the United States had reached a compromise in the talks.

'And so I will get back to you when we have something,' Rice said.

Washington is working on a compromise deal by letting Pyongyang provide verification of its disarmament efforts to ally China rather than sharing with all its negotiating partners, a US State Department official said last week.

The official, who asked not to be named, said the original idea was for North Korea to give the plan to South Korea, China, Japan, Russia and the United States rather than just to its ally China.

Outlining the sequence of steps, The Washington Post reported that after the United States provisionally removes the North from a terrorism blacklist, China would announce North Korea's acceptance of the verification plan.

This would allow Pyongyang to assert that the delisting occurred before the verification plan was in place.

Under a six-nation deal reached in 2007, North Korea began disabling -- with a view toward total disarmament -- its nuclear weapons programs in exchange for energy and other aid.

Pyongyang accuses Washington of breaching the deal by failing to remove it from the blacklist. The United States says the North must first agree to outside verification of a nuclear declaration it submitted in June.

The North counters that verification is not part of this stage of the agreement.