Pompeo’s secret visit part of talks bid
UNITED STATES: CIA Director Mike Pompeo made a top-secret visit to North Korea over Easter weekend as an envoy for US President Donald Trump to meet with that country’s leader, Kim Jongun, according to two people with direct knowledge of the trip.
The extraordinary meeting between one of Trump’s most trusted emmisaries and the authoritarian head of a rogue state was part of an effort to lay the groundwork for direct talks between Trump and Kim about North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme, according to the two people, who requested anonymity because of the highly classified nature of the talks.
The clandestine mission came soon after Pompeo was nominated to be US secretary of state. ‘‘I’m optimistic that the United States government can set the conditions for that appropriately so that the president and the North Korean leader can have that conversation will set us down the course of achieving a diplomatic outcome that . . . America and the world so desperately need,’’ Pompeo told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week during his confirmation hearing.
Speaking at a bilateral meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida yesterday, Trump appeared to allude to the extraordinary face-to-face meeting between Kim and Pompeo when he said the US had held direct talks with North Korea ‘‘at very high levels’’. He did not elaborate.
Trump said he would sit down with Kim probably in early June, if not sooner.
Pompeo has taken the lead on the administration’s negotiations with Pyongyang. His meeting with Kim marks the highest-level meeting between the two countries since 2000, when then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright met with Kim Jong-il, the current leader’s father, to discuss strategic issues. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper Jr visited North Korea in 2014 to secure the release of two American captives, and met with a lower-level intelligence official.
The CIA, the White House and the North Korean government declined to comment.
About a week after Pompeo’s trip to North Korea, US officials said officials there had directly confirmed that Kim was willing to negotiate about potential denuclearisation, – a sign that both sides had opened a new communications channel ahead of the summit meeting, and that the administration believed North Korea was serious about holding a summit.
The US has no diplomatic relations with North Korea, but US diplomats have visited and Washington has used several quiet channels to communicate with Pyongyang.
Trump also said he had given ‘‘my blessing’’ to planned discussions between South Korea and North Korea about bringing a formal end to the Korean War.
Opening a two-day summit with Abe, Trump took some credit for the rapid developments related to North Korea, whose nuclear and ballistic missile tests his administration has considered the gravest national security threat to the United States. He that South Korean officials had ‘‘been very generous that without us, and without me in particular, I guess, they wouldn’t be discussing anything and the Olympics would have been a failure’’.
Seoul used the Winter Olympics in PyeongChang in February as a vehicle to reopen diplomatic talks with Pyongyang. North Korea sent athletes and a high-level delegation to the event in a major sign of warming relations.
Abe appeared delighted with the progress he made with Trump, including a pledge from the US president to raise with Kim the issue of the unresolved cases of at least 13 Japanese citizens abducted by North Korean agents in the 1970s and 1980s. Trump met with several families of the abductees during a visit to Tokyo in November.
Trump and Abe entered their summit hoping to repair a relationship that has been strained by Trump’s decisions to meet with Kim and to enact steel and aluminium tariffs. – Washington Post