North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has reportedly ordered the Foreign Ministry to actively pursue visits by top U.S officials to the communist state.

A South Korean source familiar with North Korean affairs said Friday that Kim had specifically named U.S. President George W. Bush and State Secretary Condoleezza Rice as the officials he wishes to see visit Pyongyang.

The source said Kim seems to believe that inviting senior U.S. officials to the North would be helpful in settling the North’s nuclear issue as well as normalizing Washington-Pyongyang ties and ultimately raising his international status.

Pyongyang has shown the tendency to favor resolving major issues through high-level discussions, as was seen in the inter-Korean summit in 2000 and the Japan-North Korea summit in 2002.

Back in 2000, the North invited then-U.S. State Secretary Madeleine Albright to Pyongyang, apparently as part of active efforts to engage with the U.S. in discussions on its missile program. Kim met with Albright and later sought unsuccessfully to get President Bill Clinton to visit North Korea.