White House says US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to head back to North Korea for new talks with Kim Jong-un
US and North Korean officials are reported to have met in the demilitarised zone between the two Koreas over the weekend
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will head back to North Korea for new talks with Kim Jong-un about ending the stand-off over Pyongyang’s nuclear programme, the White House said on Monday.
“To continue the ongoing and important work of denuclearisation on the Korean peninsula, Secretary Pompeo will be leaving for North Korea on July 5 to meet with the leader and the team,” spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters.
US State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said Pompeo’s three-day visit to Pyongyang is “to continue consultations and implement the forward progress made by President Trump and Chairman Kim in Singapore”. Nauert did not elaborate on the detailed agenda of the travel.
The trip would have conflicted with a meeting between Pompeo and his Indian counterpart that was previously scheduled to take place in Washington on July 6. But a State Department official confirmed last Thursday that Pompeo had postponed that meeting.
Pompeo told lawmakers last week that he was confident that North Korea understood the scope of the US desire for complete denuclearisation, as the two countries negotiate after the leaders’ summit.
“We’ve been pretty unambiguous in our conversations about what we mean when we say complete denuclearisation,” Pompeo told a Senate appropriations subcommittee hearing on funding for the State Department.