Pompeo meets with N. Korea’s former spy chief about nuclear weapons

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo spent nearly three hours with North Korea’s former spy chief in Pyongyang, the capital, on the first full day of his mission to move the government closer to serious negotiations on getting rid of its nuclear arsenal.

Pompeo and Kim Yong Chol, widely considered the second most powerful person in North Korea, held talks at the Park Hwa Won guesthouse compound. It was Pompeo’s third visit to a once-hostile and closed country, his first since the June 12 summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that set the disarmament talks in motion.

Other than a tweet from Pompeo, few details emerged after the session.

“We just wrapped our first meeting of the day,” Pompeo wrote on Twitter at what was early Friday in the United States. “I’m proud of my team’s work.”

“The more you come, more trust we can build between one another,” Kim Yong Chol told Pompeo in an exchange of pleasantries while the small contingent of reporters traveling with the secretary was briefly allowed in the room.

Pompeo concurred and added, “I’m looking forward to our time together today.” He joked that at the rate he was visiting North Korea, he’d have to start paying taxes.

Kim Yong Chol, who remains a top official in the ruling Workers Party of Korea after his stint as intelligence chief, was introduced to Americans last month when he was pictured delivering a jumbo letter from Kim to Trump at the White House ahead of the leaders’ summit. He is under U.S. sanctions because he allegedly ordered the 2010 attack on a South Korean naval vessel that killed 46 sailors.

Reporters said the mood seemed relaxed and the two men did not utter the words “nuclear,” “weapons,” and “denuclearization” in their opening remarks. Initially there were not enough chairs around the long, polished wood table for the American delegation.

A second meeting was scheduled for later but it was not yet clear who would be sitting across the table from Pompeo. Having neither a confirmed, consistent interlocutor from the Korean side — so far, it’s only been Kim Jong Un or Kim Yong Chol — nor a more clearcut agenda underscores the obstacles to what would be grueling negotiations in the best of circumstances.

“They need to agree on a framework ... so it’s not improv theater featuring Mike Pompeo,” said Daryl Kimball, a nonproliferation expert with the Arms Control Association, a Washington policy organization.

“You don’t want improvisational diplomacy here,” Kimball added. “You need structure and pace before you get down to a very detailed negotiation.”

Pompeo is under pressure to confirm Pyongyang’s commitment to “work toward complete denuclearization” of the Korean Peninsula. That was the pledge Kim and Trump signed in a brief, vague joint declaration during their oneday summit in Singapore last month.

A first step could be North Korea’s agreement to a more extensive and verifiable freeze on its nuclear and missile production.

According to Kimball and other experts, only when a solid framework for future U.S.North Korea meetings is established will the administration be able to work on even basic steps, like drawing up an inventory of North Korea’s arsenal and a schedule for disarmament.

North Korea is believed to have up to 60 nuclear devices and many ballistic missiles as well as a vast, hidden system for developing both.