Secret diplomacy: US ex-officials, North Koreans quietly meet

Officially, the US and North Korea barely speak to each other, their communications often limited to public exchanges of insults.

The US ambassador in Seoul is “a villain, a crazy person”, a North Korean diplomat said. North Korea is a “wasteland” compared to South Korea, President Obama told the United Nations. But out of the limelight, and sometimes in secret, a small corps of former US diplomats and intelligence officials, often working with academic specialists, meet regularly with high-ranking North Koreans.

They have sat down in Singapore, Berlin, Beijing and elsewhere to discuss everything from the details of North Korea’s nuclear programme to concerns about the effects of international trade sanctions on Pyongyang. They have talked about growing security fears in Washington, Seoul and Tokyo and about the timing of North Korean missile tests. If it’s not quite diplomacy, it sometimes gets pretty close.

“The North Koreans understand that we’re in no way representing the United States government. So sometimes, we can raise things that the US government isn’t able to,” said Leon Sigal, a former State Department policy official and long a key player in what are commonly called Track 2 talks. “I can say to them, ‘Hey, this is why the US government is doing this’. And then probe and say to them: ‘Look, what you’re doing is not going to work. How about this?’”

The two countries did quietly hold a series of discussions, apparently late last year, but those came to nothing. Since then, North Korea has staged two nuclear tests and a flurry of missile tests, building an increasingly sophisticated arsenal, but there have been no known direct communications between Washington and Pyongyang.

While Track 2 talks are common between rival countries – Indian academics, for instance, regularly meet with their Pakistani counterparts – the North Korean discussions are often seen as a key part of Washington-Pyongyang relations.