CIA chief met secretly with NoKor leader

WEST PALM BEACH — US President Donald Trump dispatched CIA Director Mike Pompeo to North Korea to meet with its leader, Kim Jong-un, in recent weeks to lay the groundwork for a summit meeting between Kim and Trump, two people briefed on the secret trip said Tuesday.

Trump alluded to Pompeo’s mission when he said Tuesday afternoon that the United States was in direct talks with North Korea at “extremely high levels” and that the White House was looking at five sites for a potential meeting of the two leaders.

The White House has used intelligence rather than diplomatic channels to communicate with North Korea since last month, when Trump unexpectedly accepted Kim’s invitation to meet.

Pompeo, who is awaiting confirmation as secretary of state, has been dealing with North Korean representatives through a channel that runs between the CIA and its North Korean counterpart, the Reconnaissance General Bureau, according to other officials.

And he has been in close touch with the director of South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, Suh Hoon, who US officials said brokered Kim’s invitation to Trump.

On Tuesday, Trump also said he would give his blessing to North and South Korea to “discuss the end of the war” when the leaders of those countries meet this month, opening the door to a peace treaty that would replace the armistice that halted the Korean War in 1953.

His statements, which came as he welcomed Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan to his oceanfront estate here, were fresh evidence of a diplomatic thaw underway on the Korean Peninsula and made a once-unthinkable encounter between him and Kim far more likely.

The president did not specify who in his administration was talking to North Korea, nor did he give any hint of the sites under consideration — adding to the aura of mystery that has enveloped this potential meeting.

The Washington Post first reported Pompeo’s trip, which took place over Easter. But his comments could raise other thorny issues.

A peace treaty with North Korea would greatly increase pressure to ease economic sanctions on the North and to withdraw US troops from the Korean Peninsula.

It would also complicate the already tangled diplomacy in East Asia.

In his meeting with Abe, however, Trump projected optimism.

He described North Korea in language worlds away from the speech he gave in November in Seoul, when he called it cruel and barbaric, “the results of a tragic experiment in a laboratory of history.”

“I really believe there’s a lot of goodwill,” Trump said.

“They do respect us. We are respectful of them.” He even suggested that the North and the South might announce some kind of deal before he met Kim.

On Tuesday, a South Korean newspaper, Munhwa Ilbo, reported that the two countries were negotiating an announcement “to ease military tensions and end a military confrontation,” as part of the summit meeting planned between Kim and President Moon Jae-in of South Korea.

That could involve pulling troops out of the Demilitarized Zone, making it a genuinely “demilitarized zone.”

A South Korean government official later played down the report, saying it was too soon to tell what a joint statement by Moon and Kim would contain, other than broad and “abstract” statements about the need for North Korea to “denuclearize.”