N. Korean negotiator set to meet Pompeo in NYC
BEIJING — North Korea’s top nuclear weapons negotiator headed Tuesday for New York to meet with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, as officials raced to settle on an agenda for a June 12 meeting in Singapore between the leaders of the U.S. and North Korea.
President Donald Trump said on Twitter that Kim Yong Chol — one of the most trusted aides to leader Kim Jong Un — was “heading now to New York.” Referring to the moves made since he canceled the on-again, offagain summit, the president added, “Solid response to my letter, thank you!”
Kim Yong Chol will meet with Pompeo in New York this week, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Tuesday.
The former intelligence chief, who is 72, has been at the side of the North Korean leader, 34, during a recent whirl of diplomacy, meeting
with the South Koreans in the Demilitarized Zone dividing the Korean Peninsula and with the Chinese.
Kim Yong Chol’s trip to the United States kicks off the most important negotiating track leading up to the summit. Over the weekend, a team of U.S. diplomats met with North Korean officials in the DMZ, and White House logistics experts have been talking with North Koreans in Singapore about arrangements for the leaders’ meeting there.
Kim Yong Chol — who has served the three leaders of the Kim dynasty that has ruled the North since 1945 — would be the highest-ranking North Korean official to visit the United States since 2000, when Vice Marshal Jo Myong Rok invited President Bill Clinton to the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, with the prospect of sealing an agreement on curbing the North’s missiles. It never came to fruition.
Kim Yong Chol now serves as head of the United Front Department, the arm of the ruling Workers’ Party that handles relations with South Korea. In this role, he traveled to the South in February during the Winter Olympics, which provided the springboard for the current diplomatic frenzy, and was prominent during an inter-Korean summit April 27.
Although Trump has not officially announced that the June 12 summit, which he abruptly canceled Thursday, is back on, his staff is acting as though it is.
During a television interview Tuesday in Washington, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said that if the summit does not take place June 12, it could be held shortly afterward.
“Let’s see what happens, as the president says,” Conway said during an appearance on Fox & Friends on Fox News. “If he’s satisfied, it will go forward.”
Trump views the meeting as an opportunity to make the nuclear deal that has evaded others, but he pledged to walk away from the meeting if he believed the North wasn’t serious about discussing dismantling its nuclear program.
The White House emphasized Tuesday that it has remained in close contact with South Korean and Japanese officials as preparations for the talks continue. Sanders said Trump will host Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on June 7 to coordinate their thinking ahead of the summit. Trump hosted South Korean President Moon Jae-in last week.
Meanwhile Tuesday, a team led by Sung Kim, a former American negotiator with North Korea who currently serves as ambassador to the Philippines, was due to hold another round of talks on the northern side of the DMZ that separates the two Koreas.
Officials began discussing the substance of any summit agreement, focusing on the issue of denuclearization, with a North Korean team led by Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui on Sunday.
In Singapore, an advance team headed by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin is making logistical plans for the summit, should it go ahead. The North Korean side is led by Kim Chang Son, who effectively serves as chief of staff to Kim Jong Un.
Kim Chang Son was seen at the Beijing airport Tuesday and, asked by Japanese reporters if he was heading to Singapore for talks with U.S. officials, he said he was “going there to play.”
BEIJING STOPOVER
Kim Yong Chol, a vice chairman of the Workers’ Party of Korea, also stopped in Beijing on Tuesday — but it was not clear if he met with any Chinese officials.
While there was speculation that he then boarded a New York-bound China Air flight, there was no sign of him when the plane arrived Tuesday at Kennedy Airport, reporters there said.
South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency reported that he was to arrive in New York today.
China’s Foreign Ministry would not confirm the former spymaster’s presence in Beijing, even though video footage showed him at the airport after his arrival from Pyongyang.
In recent weeks, China and the United States have been vying for the attention of Kim Jong Un, with Trump
accusing China of contributing to a toughened North Korean stance on denuclearization after the North Korean and Chinese leaders met this month.
If the former spy chief met with senior Chinese officials in Beijing, he might risk angering Trump again, diplomats said. His stop in Beijing also could be related to his presence on a sanctions list that bars him from entering the United States.
A U.S. diplomat said a waiver would have to be granted for such an individual to enter the United States, although it was likely one would automatically be given under extraordinary circumstances like these.
Kim Yong Chol was probably headed to New York, where North Korea has a mission to the United Nations, rather than to Washington because it was easier for him to get a visa there, another U.S. diplomat said. North Korean diplomats and officials are not allowed to travel more than a few miles outside New York City.
Kim Yong Chol has already met Pompeo twice in Pyongyang. On the second visit, Pompeo expected to come away with a set of details for the Singapore summit meeting relating to the denuclearization of the North, but he failed to do so. Instead he returned to Washington with three Americans who had been detained in North Korea.
In his most recent meeting with Pompeo, Kim Yong Chol struck a defiant tone, saying at a luncheon that North Korea’s willingness to enter into talks was “not a result of sanctions that have been imposed from the outside.” But he reminded the visiting Americans that North Korea intended to focus “all efforts into economic progress in our country.”
Over the past few months, the United States and North Korea have come closer than ever to holding the first summit of the countries’ leaders. In March, Trump surprised many people when he accepted Kim Jong Un’s invitation to meet, which was relayed through South Korean envoys. But on Thursday in a letter to the North Korean leader, Trump abruptly canceled the meeting.
He then changed course again Friday, saying the meeting might take place as scheduled. Officials from the United States and North Korea have since started a whirlwind of working-level diplomacy to try to narrow a gap over how to denuclearize the North and salvage the planned meeting.
Kim Chang Son was seen at the Beijing airport Tuesday and, asked by Japanese reporters if he was heading to Singapore for talks with U.S. officials, he said he was “going there to play.”