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By Susan Cornwell

WASHINGTON, Dec 12 (Reuters) - The United States hopes that North Korea will keep its promise and disclose all its nuclear activities by the end of this year, Washington's envoy to nuclear talks on North Korea said on Wednesday.

"We are hopeful that we will have the complete declaration provided by around the year end," Assistant Secretary of State Chris Hill told reporters on Capitol Hill.

He spoke after briefing senators on efforts to get North Korea to dismantle its nuclear weapons program -- and winning rare Democratic praise for Bush administration foreign policy.

"This is real," California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, who presided at the closed-door briefing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said of the progress Hill described. She is a big critic of some other White House undertakings, such as the war in Iraq.

"We support the president in his request to the North Koreans that this be full disclosure," said Boxer, who chairs the foreign relations subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs.

President George W. Bush, in his first direct communication with North Korea's leader Kim Jong-il, wrote to him last week urging Pyongyang to reveal all nuclear programs.

Under an agreement in six-party talks over North Korea's nuclear program, Pyongyang has pledged to disable its main nuclear complex and declare all of its nuclear activities in exchange for economic and diplomatic incentives.

Hill, who handed Bush's letter to the reclusive state's foreign minister last week while on a visit to Pyongyang, said progress was being made on disabling North Korean nuclear facilities.

Boxer thought Congress would approve "reasonable sums of money" needed to support the process, including $106 million that Hill requested as the U.S. contribution toward fuel oil that is being provided to North Korea as an incentive.

Hill described more diplomatic activity directly ahead, including a trip soon by chairman of the six-party talks, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Wu Dawei, to North Korea.

North Korea is "very interested" in being removed from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism, Hill noted. "We will follow the letter of the law in that regard," he said, but added: "We are making progress on the issue."

Asked about concerns North Korea had nuclear ties with Syria, another country on the terrorism blacklist, Boxer said, "I came away (from the briefing) with the sense that whatever, if anything ever had occurred in the past, it is not occurring now. And I think our negotiators feel that with good confidence."

Hill, standing next to Boxer, did not contradict her. He said the United States must "ensure that as we make progress on this, that proliferation issues, whether they've existed in the past or not, certainly don't exist in the present or in the future."

Boxer said White House policy on North Korea had evolved and such progress demonstrated "we must never take diplomacy off the table. ... Talking to your enemies is hard work, but it's important work."

(Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

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