Gold Silver Reports (GSR) – who’s awaiting confirmation as secretary of state — made the secret visit during the weekend of March 31 and April 1, said the people, who asked not to be identified. The trip, which was first reported by the Washington Post, comes ahead of the unprecedented meeting between the U.S. and North Korean leaders, which Trump said Tuesday could come by “early June or before.”
The U.S. president told reporters the administration had “started talking to North Korea directly.” “We have had direct talks at very high levels, extremely high levels with North Korea,” Trump said after meeting Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
“It makes the proposed summit all the more likely to happen,” Suzanne DiMaggio, director and senior fellow at New America in New York, who facilitated the talks in Oslo that resulted in ailing U.S. citizen Otto Warmbier’s release from North Korea. “It is reassuring that the Trump administration is taking serious steps to prepare for that historic interaction.”
The Pompeo trip is part of a global diplomatic scramble after Trump’s surprise decision last month to meet Kim in an effort to break the decades-long impasse over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. The Central Intelligence Agency chief arrived in North Korea just days after Kim returned from his own surprise visit to Beijing — his first trip outside his country as leader.
Adam Mount, a senior fellow with the Federation of American Scientists, called direct U.S. contact with Kim “a pretty dramatic development.” “Before the summit can happen, talks have to happen at a very high level” to establish an agenda and other details, Mount said.
The U.S. and North Korea are discussing several locations for the Trump-Kim meeting, a person familiar with the talks told Bloomberg earlier. Potential sites include Geneva and several venues in Asia and Southeast Asia, said the official, who declined to further identify the sites.
The person said the U.S. wasn’t considering Beijing, Pyongyang, Seoul or Panmunjom, the site of the Korean armistice signing where South Korean President Moon Jae-in will meet Kim next week.
Moon’s meeting with Kim is expected to lay the ground for Trump’s meeting. The two Koreas are discussing plans to announce an official end to the military conflict between the two countries that are still technically at war, South Korea’s Munhwa Ilbo newspaper reported Tuesday, citing an unidentified South Korean official.
Trump also said he’s given South Korea his “blessing” to negotiate a peace deal with North Korea, and that five locations are under consideration for his meeting with Kim. South Korea never formally ended its war with North Korea, though the armed conflict concluded with a cease-fire in 1953.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that Trump hasn’t spoken directly with the North Korean leader. – Neal Bhai Reports
