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North Korea has almost completed rebuilding a long-range rocket site it had promised to close, South Korean lawmakers told reporters on Friday after a closed-door meeting with intelligence officials in Seoul. The claim comes a month after a second summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in February ended without an agreement, deepening a gap between the two on how to achieve Mr. Trump's stated goal of "complete denuclearization."

Shortly after the end of the Hanoi summit, a series of satellite images emerged suggesting increased activity at the North's Sohae rocket site, triggering international alarm that the nuclear-armed state might be preparing a long-range or space launch.

"The North began rebuilding the center, which was partly dismantled last July, before the North-U.S. summit in February," lawmaker Kim Min-ki told reporters after the closed-door briefing by the National Intelligence Service.

"The work is almost complete with some maintenance activity being underway," he said.

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North Korean leader Kim Jong Un heaped praise on President Donald Trump in a letter to the White House before a summit between the two leaders last month in Vietnam, while making clear he wished to negotiate only with the president and not his envoys, current and former U.S. officials told NBC News.

The letter appeared aimed at cutting out the U.S. envoy to North Korea, Stephen Beguin, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in the discussions on the regime's nuclear and missile arsenal, while seeking to appeal to the president's ego, said one current and two former U.S. officials familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

While Kim sought to curry favor with Trump before the Hanoi meeting, their second one-on-one summit, officials across the U.S. government as well as allied governments worked to prevent the president from giving up too much in the negotiations, the current and former officials said.

"A huge amount of energy was devoted to avoiding disaster," said one former U.S. official. "They were playing defense."

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On the day that their talks in Hanoi collapsed last month, U.S. President Donald Trump handed North Korean leader Kim Jong Un a piece of paper that included a blunt call for the transfer of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons and bomb fuel to the United States, according to the document seen by Reuters.

Trump gave Kim both Korean and English-language versions of the U.S. position at Hanoi’s Metropole hotel on Feb. 28, according to a source familiar with the discussions, speaking on condition of anonymity. It was the first time that Trump himself had explicitly defined what he meant by denuclearization directly to Kim, the source said.

A lunch between the two leaders was canceled the same day. While neither side has presented a complete account of why the summit collapsed, the document may help explain it.

The document’s existence was first mentioned by White House national security adviser John Bolton in television interviews he gave after the two-day summit. Bolton did not disclose in those interviews the pivotal U.S. expectation contained in the document that North Korea should transfer its nuclear weapons and fissile material to the United States.

The document appeared to represent Bolton’s long-held and hardline “Libya model” of denuclearization that North Korea has rejected repeatedly. It probably would have been seen by Kim as insulting and provocative, analysts said.

Trump had previously distanced himself in public comments from Bolton’s approach and said a “Libya model” would be employed only if a deal could not be reached.