THE US Secretary of State, Mr Warren Christopher, was last night planning to join Israeli and Syrian peace negotiators to assess their progress in preparation for his trip to the Middle East next week.
"He wants to get a first hand account and take the temperature, so that he can fully report next week" to the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Shimon Peres, and President Hafez el Assad of Syria, a senior State Department official said.
Mr Christopher was also planning to advise the two leaders "on what we think should happen next substantively and procedurally", the official said.
The talks that began on Wednesday at Wye Plantation, a secluded conference centre in eastern Maryland, are scheduled to end this afternoon. They are a follow up session to the December 27th-29th negotiations that ended on an optimistic note but without any concrete result.
A State Department spokesman, Mr Nicholas Burns, tried to dispel any impression that Mr Christopher's visit to Wye Plantation, during which he joined negotiators for dinner, was a sign of substantive progress in the discussions, or on the contrary, of a renewed effort by Washington to unblock them.
"I would not see this as the secretary rushing in at some climactic or defining moment in the negotiation," he told journalists.
"Peace is not around the corner," he added, though he predicted it could come "sometime in 1996".
The State Department declined to comment on progress in the talks which centre on an Israeli retreat from Syria's Golan Heights, a strategic plateau seized by Israel in the 1967 war, in exchange for normalisation of relations.
One official would only say that the negotiators have a "full agenda" and are engaged in "very substantive talks".
Mr Burns said little would be divulged at the close of the current round of talks today, though he said US officials may make a public statement.
The Israeli Foreign Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, predicted yesterday that the peace talks still had many months" to go.
"We have not started talking about a withdrawal" from the Golan Heights, "but about the nature of peace, normalisation and co operation," he said during a visit to Shefaram, an Arab town north of Tel Aviv.
The talks at Wye Plantation mark the resumption of face to face talks between Israel and Syria which were suspended six months ago. The two countries have held intermittent negotiations in the Middle East peace process since 1991.
On January 10th Mr Christopher will begin his Middle East tour in Israel, where he is to attend a ceremony commemorating the assassination of Mr Yitzhak Rabin, accompanied by Mr Peres and King Hussein of Jordan.
Next the US diplomat will visit Syria. The details of this part of his trip are still flexible, but intense shuttle diplomacy between Jerusalem and Damascus is expected before he returns to Washington, scheduled at the latest on January 15th.