[Yonhap News Photo]
WASHINGTON -- U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will meet with a senior North Korean official in New York this week, the White House said, as the two sides ramp up preparations for a potential summit between their leaders.
Kim Yong-chol, a vice chairman of North Korea's ruling Workers' Party's Central Committee, is traveling to New York and will meet with Pompeo "later this week," White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement.
Trump tweeted earlier that the senior North Korean official was en route to the U.S., calling the visit a "solid response to my letter." Kim is scheduled to arrive in New York Wednesday afternoon.
Trump and the North Korean leader agreed to meet in Singapore June 12 to discuss the dismantlement of the regime's nuclear weapons program. But Trump canceled the summit in a letter to Kim, citing Pyongyang's "open hostility." Soon after he reversed course to suggest it could go ahead as planned.
"Since the President's May 24th letter to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, the North Koreans have been engaging," Sanders said. "The United States continues to actively prepare for President Trump's expected summit with leader Kim in Singapore."
Kim Yong-chol is the highest-ranking North Korean official to visit the U.S., after Jo Myong-rok, a special envoy of then-leader Kim Jong-il, met with Bill Clinton at the White House in 2000. He is under U.S. and South Korean sanctions for his role in various illicit activities linked to Pyongyang, including the 2010 torpedoing of a South Korean warship that killed 46 sailors.
Kim, who formerly headed the North's reconnaissance bureau, is expected to have been granted a temporary waiver to travel to the U.S. The two countries do not have formal diplomatic relations and therefore no representation in each other's capitals, but North Korea does have a diplomatic mission to the United Nations in New York.
That likely contributed to the decision to travel there, in addition to U.S. considerations of the political symbolism of a visit to Washington. Pompeo and Kim met during the secretary of state's two trips to Pyongyang in April and May. During those visits, Pompeo laid the groundwork for the summit and brought home three American prisoners the North released in a show of good faith.
(Yonhap)
reporter
Lim Chang-won
cwlim34@ajunews.com
