Top North Korean Adviser Meets Pompeo in New York to Plan Summit
A top North Korean official met Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for dinner in New York on Thursday night, the highest-level talks between the two countries on American soil in 18 years as the Trump administration works to prepare for a summit in Singapore with the isolated regime.
Kim Yong Chol, North Korea’s former spy chief and a trusted aide to the country’s leader, Kim Jong Un, met Pompeo at a U.S. government-owned apartment on New York’s East Side before two rounds of meetings set for tomorrow.
A senior State Department official said the talks — along with another set of meetings between American and North Korean officials along the border between South and North Korea going on at the same time — are going to determine if Pyongyang is serious enough about denuclearization for President Donald Trump to meet Kim in Singapore on June 12.
The official, who asked not to be identified discussing private deliberations, told reporters the administration was looking for a “historic” commitment from North Korea and something that “has never been done before.” Trump would be willing to stay for longer than just one day in Singapore if the results are promising, the official said. The dinner lasted about an hour and a half, according to the official.
Afterward, Pompeo said the dinner was “great” and noted they ate “American beef.” He didn’t take any other questions.
While Pompeo has traveled twice to North Korea in recent weeks, the meetings Wednesday and Thursday 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. The back-and-forth reflects just how much has changed since March, when Kim Jong Un indicated he might be prepared to give up his nuclear weapons program and Trump accepted his invitation to meet.
The key issue remains what, exactly, Trump and Kim could agree to during the summit. In a letter to Kim last week, Trump abruptly called off the meeting, citing escalating rhetoric from North Korea. Pompeo later said the Americans had heard only “dial tones” when they tried to contact their North Korean counterparts to make preparations.
Within hours, however, Pyongyang signaled a continued interest in holding talks, and Trump and his aides hinted that the meeting was back on. By Wednesday, discussions between the two nations were taking place on at least three parallel tracks: between Pompeo and Kim in New York; in Singapore, where teams are planning logistics for the summit; and along the North Korean-South Korean border.
Details Scarce
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 Trump-Kim 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 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 Thursday, 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 earlier this week, Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in affirmed their shared goal of achieving complete dismantlement of the North’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and ballistic missile programs, according to a statement.
The State Department official told reporters that North Korea must make clear what it’s willing to do before Trump agrees to the summit. The U.S. is demanding what the administration calls “complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization,” or CVID, from North Korea.
Courtesy : Bloomberg
Photo : Star Tribune
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