A top North Korean official was headed to the U.S. on Wednesday for meetings in hopes of salvaging a summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump.
Associated Press reporters saw Kim Yong Chol at Beijing’s airport just after noon. South Korea’s Yonhap News cited diplomatic sources as saying that Kim was on Air China’s Flight 981 to New York, which departed later Wednesday afternoon. He had arrived in Beijing on Tuesday.
North Korea’s mission to the United Nations in New York is its sole diplomatic presence within the United States.
Trump and Kim Jong Un were set to meet June 12 in Singapore, but Trump announced last week that he was pulling out of the summit.
Since then, Trump has suggested the meeting could be back on and Kim Yong Chol’s trip to the U.S. seemed to imply that preparations for a summit could be in the final stages.
Kim, a top lieutenant to Kim Jong Un, is to meet with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and would be the highest-level North Korean official to travel to the U.S. since 2000.
He is one of a small group of North Korean officials who have accompanied Kim Jong Un to all four of his summits with foreign leaders in recent months — twice with South Korean President Moon Jae-in and twice with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Kim Yong Chol, who is about 72, is a contentious figure outside North Korea.
Before taking responsibility for relations with South Korea in 2016, he was a four-star army general and a military intelligence chief who is thought to have been behind a slew of provocations against South Korea and the West.
Those include two deadly attacks in 2010 that killed 50 South Koreans and an alleged 2014 cyberattack on Sony Pictures. Both Seoul and Washington imposed sanctions on him in recent years.
As a longtime ally and chief trading partner, China has sought to position itself as a key intermediary in talks over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.
Beijing backs the North’s proposal for a phased and synchronized denuclearization process as opposed to the U.S. insistence on a comprehensive one-shot deal in which North Korea eliminates its nukes first and receives rewards later.
