US SAYS CIA DIRECTOR STRUCK UP A ‘GOOD RELATIONSHIP’ WITH KIM AT SECRET TALKS
▶ Mike Pompeo travelled to North Korea to lay groundwork for President Donald Trump’s meeting with Kim Jong-un
CIA Director Mike Pompeo struck up a “good relationship” with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un at their meeting – the highest-level contact between the two countries for 20 years, US President Donald Trump said yesterday.
The covert trip and the meeting between the two men – not announced at the time by Washington or Pyongyang – came as the two states prepared for a historic meeting between Mr Kim and Mr Trump.
Details of the preparatory trip first emerged in The Washington Post, which said the meeting took place just over two weeks ago, shortly after Mr Pompeo was nominated to become the US secretary of state.
Mr Trump confirmed the meeting yesterday in a tweet. “Mike Pompeo met with Kim Jong-un in North Korea last week,” he wrote. “Meeting went very smoothly and a good relationship was formed.”
Mr Trump had alluded to the trip in earlier comments while playing host to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at his Florida estate. “We have had direct talks at very high levels, extremely high levels, with North Korea. And I really believe this allows good will, that good things are happening,” he said.
“We’ll see what happens ... because ultimately it’s the end result that counts, not the fact that we’re thinking about having a meeting, or having a meeting,” the president said.
The planned summit will be the first time the leaders of the nations have met since the armistice of the Korean War in 1953, which divided the peninsula and set the ground for one of the greatest foreign-policy crises for Mr Trump more than six decades later.
The previous most high-level contact was in 2000 when Madeleine Albright, secretary of state at the time, met Mr Kim’s father, Kim Jong-il. She later said it was like being in “some very strange movie”.
The two leaders are due to meet before June, with five locations under consideration for the meeting. None of them is in the US. Officials are said to be looking at venues outside the peninsula, including in South-East Asia and Europe.
The meeting came after the two men traded insults last year amid increasing tensions over missile testing by the pariah state. Mr Trump derided Mr Kim as “little rocket man” and promised to destroy North Korea if the US was threatened.
The meeting – seen by the US as an opportunity to end North Korea’s weapons programme – will also be scrutinised closely by Iranian officials, given Mr Trump’s commitment to end the 2015 accord limiting Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.
Mr Kim made the offer for a summit through South Korea, an offer accepted by the president despite concerns that it would reward North Korea for its aggression and give it extra legitimacy. They two sides have since communicated directly although the countries have no diplomatic relations.
At his confirmation hearing last week to become secretary of state, Mr Pompeo played down expectations for a breakthrough deal, but said it could lay the groundwork for a comprehensive agreement on denuclearisation.
Mr Pompeo’s visit came four years after the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, secretly visited North Korea to take home two American detainees.
Mr Kim is scheduled to meet South Korean President Moon Jae-in in the demilitarised zone between the Koreas on April 27.
Madeleine Albright said her meeting with Kim Jong-il in 2000 was like being in ‘some very strange movie’