WASHINGTON (AP) -- Vice President Dick Cheney says North Korea helped Syria build a reactor at a site that Israel suspected of being a nuclear installation and bombed in 2007.

The White House has alleged North Korean involvement before, but top Bush administration officials have said little publicly on the issue, which is still being investigated by the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency.

In an interview with The Associated Press on Thursday, Cheney outlined reasons North Korea remains a trouble spot that President-elect Barack Obama will have to address. He says the communist regime has its own nuclear ambitions, for instance, and "helped the Syrians build a nuclear reactor."