Top N Korean aide heads for New York
Meeting with Trump may go ahead at summit next month
ASENIOR North Korean official is headed to New York to discuss an upcoming summit, US President Donald Trump said yesterday, the latest indication that an on-again-off-again meeting between Trump and North Korea’s leader may go ahead next month.
“We have put a great team together for our talks with North Korea,” Trump said in a Twitter post. “Meetings are currently taking place concerning Summit, and more. Kim Young (sic) Chol, the Vice Chairman of North Korea, heading now to New York. Solid response to my letter, thank you!”
Kim Yong-chol, vice-chairperson of the ruling Workers’ Party’s Central Committee, was scheduled to fly to the US today after speaking to Chinese officials in Beijing, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency said.
The talks indicate that planning for the unprecedented summit on curbing Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program, initially scheduled for June 12, is moving ahead after Trump called it off last week in a letter to the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un.
A day later, Trump said he had reconsidered and officials from both countries were meeting to work out details.
Kim Yong-chol will be the most senior North Korean official to meet top officials for talks in the UN since Jo Myong-rok, a marshal, met then-president Bill Clinton at the White House in 2000.
Kim Yong-chol, previously chief of the Reconnaissance General Bureau, a top North Korean military intelligence agency, coordinated the North Korean president’s two meetings with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in April and May.
He and Kim Jong-un’s sister were the only North Korean officials to attend the first inter-Korean summit in April.
Analysts believe the US is trying to determine if North Korea is willing to agree to sufficient steps towards denuclearisation to allow a summit to take place.
North Korean leader Kim’s de facto chief of staff, Kim Chang-son, meanwhile, flew to Singapore, the scheduled site of the meeting, via Beijing on Monday. The US team was in Singapore to meet North Koreans.
In Singapore, a team of US officials was at a hotel on the resort island of Sentosa but declined to comment.
North Korea has faced years of isolation and economic sanctions over its nuclear and missile programmes since it conducted its first nuclear test in 2006.
But events have moved quickly since Kim Jong-un made a conciliatory New Year’s address at the end of last year, after months of sharply rising tension and warlike rhetoric between Trump and Kim.
The latest flurry of diplomacy began on Saturday, when Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in held a surprise meeting at the border village of Panmunjom, during which they agreed the North Korea-US summit must be held.
On Sunday, the US State Department said American and North Korean officials had met at Panmunjom. Sung Kim, the former US ambassador to South Korea and current ambassador to the Philippines, led the US delegation, an official said.
Sung Kim will meet North Korean Foreign Ministry official Choi Sun-hee again today on the border, Yonhap reported, adding that the agenda for the Trump-Kim summit would be roughly worked out.
While likely substantive, those discussions could be upstaged by any talks between Kim Yong-chol and officials in the US, said Evans Revere, a former senior diplomat. The future of North Korea’s nuclear programme, a source of international tension for decades, US security guarantees and co-ordination for a Trump-Kim summit are likely to top the agenda, analysts said.
“The most important agenda item would be the method of denuclearisation,” said Moon Sung-mook, a former South Korean military official who negotiated with Kim in the past. “We can expect that Kim (Yong-chol) is visiting the US to do final coordination ahead of the June 12 summit.”
In Kim Jong -un and Moon’s first meeting on April 27, they agreed to seek the “complete denuclearisation” of the Korean peninsula but did not define what that meant or how that would proceed.
Since then, North Korea has rejected US demands for it to unilaterally abandon its nuclear programme, which experts say could threaten the US.
North Korea also demanded the US stop military exercises with South Korea if it truly wished for talks with North Korea.
South Korea’s Defence Ministry said it did not have plans to change exercise schedules with the US military.
North Korea defends its nuclear and missile programmes as a deterrent against what it sees as US aggression. The US stations 28500 troops in South Korea, a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War, which ended in a truce, not a peace treaty.
Kim Yong-chol has played a central role in the recent thaw in relations between North Korea, South Korea and the US.
The US and South Korea blacklisted him for supporting the North’s nuclear and missile programmes in 2010 and 2016 respectively, so a visit to the US would indicate a waiver was granted.
During his tenure as a senior intelligence official, Kim was accused by South Korea of masterminding deadly attacks on a South Korean navy ship and an island in 2010. He was linked by US intelligence to a cyberattack on Sony Pictures in 2014.
North Korea denied any involvement in the attack on the ship or Sony Pictures.
When Kim Chang-son was asked by a reporter at Beijing airport if he was flying to Singapore for talks with the US, he said he was “going there to play”, according to Nippon Television Network.
Choe Kang-il, a North Korean Foreign Ministry official involved with North American issues, also was spotted at Beijing airport, according to Yonhap.
China said it had no information to offer on any North Korean officials travelling to the US via Beijing. – Reuters