Top North Korean official heads to U.S. for talks

A top North Korean official headed to New York on Wednesday for talks aimed at salvaging a summit between Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump on the future of Kim’s nuclear program, in the North’s highest-level mission to the United States in 18 years. Associated Press reporters saw Kim Yong Chol at Beijing’s airport just after noon. South Korea’s Yonhap news agency cited diplomatic sources as saying that Kim was on an Air China flight to New York that departed Wednesday. Yonhap said Kim, who had arrived in Beijing on Tuesday, was travelling with five other North Korean officials. Kim, one of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s most trusted aides, is a former military intelligence chief and now a vice chairman of the ruling party’s central committee. North Korea’s mission to the United Nations in New York is its sole diplomatic presence in the United States.

That suggests Kim might have chosen to first go to New York because it would make it easier for him to communicate with officials in Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital. North Korea and the United States are still technically at war and have no diplomatic ties because the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty Trump confirmed Tuesday that Kim was to hold talks with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

But it wasn’t immediately known what else he would do in the United States.