CIA director Mike Pompeo, U.S. President Donald Trump’s nominee to become the top U.S. diplomat, visited North Korea last week and met leader Kim Jong-un with whom he formed a “good relationship”, Mr. Trump said on Wednesday.
Mr. Pompeo became the most senior U.S. official known to have met Mr. Kim when he visited Pyongyang to discuss a planned summit with U.S. President Donald Trump.
“Mike Pompeo met with Kim Jong-un in North Korea last week. Meeting went very smoothly and a good relationship was formed. Details of Summit are being worked out now. Denuclearisation will be a great thing for World, but also for North Korea!” Mr. Trump said on Twitter.
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Mr. Pompeo’s visit and the Tweet provide the strongest sign yet about Mr. Trump’s willingness to become the first serving U.S. President ever to meet a North Korean leader, amid a protracted standoff over the North’s nuclear and missile programmes it pursues in defiance of UN Security Council resolutions.
U.S. officials said earlier Mr. Pompeo visited over the Easter weekend, March 31 to April 2. Representatives for the White House and the State Department did not immediately respond to a query on the exact date of the meeting with Mr. Kim.
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Inter-Korean summit
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At the same time, old rivals North Korea and South Korea are preparing for their own summit, between Mr. Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in, on April 27, with a bid to formally end the 1950-53 Korean War a major factor in talks.
“As one of the plans, we are looking at a possibility of shifting the Korean Peninsula’s armistice to a peace regime,” a top South Korean presidential official told reporters in Seoul earlier on Wednesday when asked about the North-South summit.
“But that’s not a matter than can be resolved between the two Koreas alone. It requires close consultations with other concerned nations, as well as North Korea,” the official said.
South Korea and a U.S.-led U.N. force are technically still at war with North Korea after the Korean War ended with a truce, not a peace treaty. The U.S.-led UN Command, Chinese forces and North Korea signed the 1953 armistice, to which South Korea is not a party.
“I do not know if any joint statement to be reached at the inter-Korean summit would include wording about ending the war, but we certainly hope to be able to include an agreement to end hostile acts between the South and North,” the official said. Mr. Trump said on Tuesday he backed efforts between North and South Korea aimed at ending the state of war.
Such discussions between the two Koreas, and between North Korea and the U.S., would have been unthinkable at the end of last year, after months of escalating tension, and fear of war, over the North's weapons programmes.
But then Mr. Kim declared in a New Year’s speech his country was “a peace-loving and responsible nuclear power” and called for lower military tension and improved ties with the South.
Evasion of sanctions
He also said he was considering sending a delegation to the Winter Olympics in South Korea in February, a visit that began a succession of steps to improve ties.
But Finance Ministers from the the Group of Seven industrialised countries said in a statement they were still concerned about North Korea’s evasion of sanctions.
Mr. Pompeo’s visit to the North was arranged by South Korean intelligence chief Suh Hoon with his North Korean counterpart, Kim Yong Chol, and was intended to assess whether Mr. Kim was prepared to hold serious talks, a U.S. official said.
Mr. Pompeo flew from a U.S. air force base in Osan, south of Seoul, an official with the South’s Defense Ministry said. The South’s presidential office declined to comment on the trip.
The two Koreas have meanwhile been pressing ahead with preparations for the inter-Korean summit scheduled to take place next week.
South Korea’s presidential office said they had agreed to broadcast live, for the first time, parts of the summit, including the hand shake between the two leaders.