US President Donald Trump has confirmed that top North Korean official Kim Yong-chol is heading to New York for talks on an upcoming summit between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
“We have put a great team together for our talks with North Korea. Meetings are currently taking place concerning Summit, and more. Kim Young Chol, the Vice Chairman of North Korea, heading now to New York. Solid response to my letter, thank you!” Trump tweeted early yesterday.
South Korean Yonhap News yesterday said it saw Kim Yong-chol’s name on the passengers’ list for a Tuesday flight from Beijing to Washington.
They later reported that Kim Yong-chol changed his flight to go to New York today.
Kim Yong-chol is a former military intelligence chief and now a vice chairman of the North Korean ruling party’s Central Committee tasked with inter-Korean relations.
Chung Sung-yoon, an analyst at the Korea Institute for National Unification, said Kim Yong-chol would be the most senior North Korean official to step onto US soil since former vice marshall Jo Myong-rok met former US president Bill Clinton in 2000. The general has long been a right-hand man to North Korea’s leader, playing a front-seat role during recent rounds of diplomacy aimed at ending the nuclear stalemate on the Korean Peninsula.
He sat next to Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, who is also a White House aide, during the closing ceremony of the Winter Olympics in South Korea’s Pyeongchang, which was a turning point in the nuclear crisis.
He also accompanied Kim Jong-un on both of his recent trips to China to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and held talks with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo when he traveled to Pyongyang.
Kim Yong-chol is a deeply controversial figure in South Korea, where he is blamed for masterminding the 2010 sinking of the navy corvette the Cheonan, which killed 46 sailors, an attack North Korea denies playing any role in.
From 2009 to 2016, he was also director of North Korea’s General Reconnaissance Bureau, the unit tasked with cyberwarfare and intelligence gathering. During that period, North Korea ramped up its hacking programs, including a hugely costly penetration of Sony Pictures that was seen as an attempt to stop the release of a US comedy film poking fun at the North Korean regime.
Officials have only two weeks left to finalize thorny protocol details such as where in Singapore the talks are to take place and how internationally sanctioned North Korean officials are to travel there.
Another key task is to settle the agenda for the meeting. Both sides say they want “denuclearization,” but there is a yawning gap between their definitions.
Washington wants North Korea to give up all its nuclear weapons in a verifiable way in return for lifting sanctions and economic relief, but analysts believe North Korea will be unwilling to cede its nuclear deterrent unless it is given security guarantees that the US will not try to topple the regime.
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