Top aide from N. Korea arrives for talks in U.S.
NEW YORK — A top North Korean official arrived Wednesday in the U.S. for the highest-level talks between the two countries on American soil in 18 years, as President Donald Trump’s administration works to prepare for a summit with the isolated regime less than two weeks from now.
Kim Yong Chol, North Korea’s former spy chief and a trusted aide to the country’s leader, Kim Jong Un, touched down at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport in the early afternoon and later had dinner with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Manhattan ahead of meetings today.
U.S. officials have been tight-lipped about the agenda except to say they’ll discuss preparations for the summit, set for June 12 in Singapore.
“I know all of you would like a detailed play-by-play of all the meetings, the conversations that we’re having, what happened when, what did they eat, what kind of flowers were there and all that,” State Department spokesman Heather Nauert told reporters Tuesday. “We’re not going to get into all of the nitty-gritty.”
Although Pompeo has traveled twice to North Ko-
rea in recent weeks, the meeting this week will be the highest-level talks between the two sides in the U.S. since 2000, when Vice Marshal Jo Myong Rok flew to Washington to meet with then-President Bill Clinton.
Analysts said they believe that Pompeo will seek to clarify the North’s position on its nuclear program, which may have gotten muddled during Pompeo’s previous visits to Pyongyang. Kim Yong Chol also attended those meetings.
“The gap they have to work on between them is a road map toward denuclearization,” said Ri Pyong Hwi, an associate professor at Korea University, a pro-Pyongyang institution in Tokyo. “How they narrow the gap is the point.”
Elsewhere Wednesday, logistical meetings between the sides were being held in Singapore. The U.S. and North Korean teams, which were shielded from journalists, were discussing technical details about the summit, including venue spaces, transportation, security and group photographs.
Kim Jong Un sent his chief of staff, Kim Chang Son, one of the country’s most powerful officials, to lead the North Korean team. The U.S. team is led by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin, who has served in every Republican administration since Ronald Reagan’s.
As Hagin entered a meeting with Kim Chang Son, he told a reporter that the teams were still discussing the venue for the summit. “We’re working at it,” he said.
Diplomats at the Demilitarized Zone that divides North and South Korea were also busy making preparations Wednesday.
“If it happens, we’ll certainly be ready,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said of the June 12 summit.
The back-and-forth reflects how much has changed since March, when Kim Jong Un indicated he may be prepared to give up his nuclear weapons program and Trump accepted his invitation to meet.
It remains unclear what exactly Trump and Kim could agree to during the summit. In a letter to Kim last week, Trump abruptly called off their meeting, citing escalating rhetoric from North Korea. Pompeo later said people on the U.S. side had heard only “dial tones” when they tried to contact North Korean counterparts to make preparations.
Within hours, however, Pyongyang signaled a continued interest in holdings talks, and Trump and his team hinted that the meeting was back on.
Despite a dearth of details from the State Department on Pompeo’s schedule and goals this week, there are weighty issues to sort through. Pompeo has been an advocate for a TrumpKim meeting, convinced after his two encounters with the North Korean leader that the regime was genuinely ready to consider dismantling its nuclear program.
Yet after North Korea agreed to the summit, those intentions were thrown into arkansasonline.com/northkorea
doubt when Pyongyang rejected calls from U.S. national security adviser John Bolton to follow the so-called Libya model of giving up its nuclear weapons quickly before getting anything in return.
“I can say that the differences in stances between North Korea and the U.S. remain quite significant,” South Korea Unification Minister Cho Myoung Gyon said last week, according to South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency. “It will not be easy to narrow the gap and find common ground, but I think it would not be impossible.”
Nonetheless, in a surprise meeting last week, Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in affirmed their shared goal of achieving complete dismantlement of North Korea’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and ballistic missile programs, according to a statement.
In Hawaii, meanwhile, Trump’s nominee to be the next U.S. ambassador to South Korea, Adm. Harry Harris, called North Korea “our most imminent threat.”
As he stepped down as commander of the U.S. Pacific Command on Wednesday, Harris also called China a “long-term challenge.”
“Great power conflict is back,” said Harris, who is retiring from the military and awaits Senate confirmation of his nomination for the diplomatic post in South Korea.
The Pentagon is renaming the military’s Pacific Command the Indo-Pacific Command to reflect the region’s geographical challenges. The name change also underscores the military’s growing emphasis on operations with countries such as South Korea, Japan and India.