Washington ? During the final hectic weeks of his administration, former President Bill Clinton secretly invited North Korean leader Kim Jong Il to come to Washington in hopes of building on progress the two countries had been making in easing a half-century of hostility.

Kim turned down the invitation, according to Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, who had met with Kim in October 2000 during a groundbreaking visit to Pyongyang.

Albright’s account appears in her new book, “Madam Secretary,” excerpts of which are published in the September issue of Vanity Fair magazine.

The invitation to Kim was extended after Clinton concluded that time constraints and other factors did not allow him to accept a publicly announced invitation from the North Korean leader to visit Pyongyang in the weeks before he left office.

The purpose of a Clinton visit to Pyongyang would have been to sign a deal featuring a North Korean pledge to curb all of its missile activities, including production, testing, deployment and export. Albright acknowledged that one of her major worries was that North Korea might not comply with any deal that might be reached.

“As the holidays neared, the president felt he had to choose between a trip to North Korea — which would also require stops in Seoul and Tokyo — and a crash effort to reach closure with the Israelis and Palestinians,” Albright wrote.

“In a final effort to sidestep this choice, we invited Chairman Kim to come to Washington. The North Koreans replied they could not accept the invitation.”

Albright said she believed the North Koreans decided to turn down the invitation because of the public character of their invitation to Clinton two months earlier and the importance of “face” in East Asian diplomacy.

She called the North Korean decision “unsurprising but also unfortunate. We had tried, but unlike Chairman Kim, we lived in a democracy, and democracy dictated that our team depart the stage,” she said.

In retrospect, the vision of Kim being welcomed into the White House seems incongruous nowadays, particularly in light of disclosures over the past year that North Korea had been violating international commitments during the 1990s to forswear nuclear weapons.

Over the last few months, the North Koreans also have withdrawn from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and taken steps to revive a dormant plutonium-based weapons program.

Well before those disclosures, President George W. Bush had made clear his contempt for North Korea. Just 14 months after Clinton had invited Kim to the White House, Bush listed North Korea as a member of an international “axis of evil.”