Trump: Top aide to Kim bound for U.S.
BEIJING — The top nuclear weapons negotiator for North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was headed for New York on Tuesday and expected to meet with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as officials race to settle on an agenda for a June 12 summit meeting between Kim and President Trump in Singapore.
Trump said on Twitter that Kim Yong Chol, one of the most trusted aides to the North’s leader and a former intelligence chief, was “heading now to New York.” In a reference to the moves made since he canceled the onagain-off-again summit meeting, the president added, “Solid response to my letter, thank you!”
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 peninsula and with the Chinese.
Kim’s trip to the United States starts the most important negotiating track leading up to the summit meeting. Over the weekend, a team of U.S. diplomats met with North Korean officials in the Demilitarized Zone and White House logistics experts have been talking with North Koreans in Singapore about arrangements for the leaders’ meeting there.
But a trip to the United States by Kim Yong Chol — who has served the three leaders of the Kim dynasty that has ruled the North — signaled that negotiations were reaching a critical point.
Kim 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 that never came to fruition.
A diplomat in Beijing, where Kim stopped overnight Tuesday, said it was not immediately clear whether the negotiator would meet with the Chinese again before going on to New York, where he is expected to arrive Wednesday.
Kim 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.