A top North Korean official sat down for dinner with Donald Trump’s secretary of state after a planned summit with the US was called off last week.
Ex-military spy chief Kim Yong Chol, who is now one of Kim Jong-Un’s closes aides, landed in the US on a flight from Beijing yesterday.
He is the highest-level official to visit the US in 18 years. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had travelled to New York from Washington for the hour-and-a-half dinner before a ‘day full of meetings’ today, the White House said.
The talks are aimed at determining whether a meeting between Trump and Kim, which was planned for June 12 but later cancelled by the US President, can be rescheduled.
Preparations for the highly anticipated summit in Singapore are said to be moving forward on both sides of the Pacific despite uncertainty about whether it will actually go ahead at all.
As Kim and Pompeo met in New York, other US teams were meeting with North Korean officials in Singapore and in the heavily fortified Korean Demilitarised Zone.
‘If it happens, we’ll certainly be ready,’ White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said of the Singapore summit. Regarding the date for the meeting, she added: ‘We’re going to continue to shoot for June 12.’
North Korea’s flurry of diplomatic activity follows a run of nuclear weapons and missile tests in 2017. It is believed Kim Jong-un is eager for international sanctions to be lifted in order to build North Korea’s economy and the meeting with Trump would be seen as a major step towards that.
But there are doubts whether Kim will ever fully relinquish his nuclear weapon arsenal, said to be viewed as his only ‘guarantee of survival’ in a region surrounded by enemies.
Trump announced that Kim Yong Chol was coming to New York for talks with Pompeo in a tweet on Tuesday in which he said he had a ‘great team’ working on the summit.
Last week the president announced in an open he had decided to ‘terminate’ the summit following a provocative statement from the North.
Trump also issued a veiled threat to Kim, saying: ‘You talk about your nuclear capabilities, but ours are so massive and powerful that I pray they will never be used.’
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