Trump-Kim Summit 2019: US press corps evicted from secretive Kim Jong-un’s Hanoi hotel after awkward double-booking blunder
- Hanoi’s Melia Hotel was supposed to serve as headquarters for American media – but it had also been reserved by none other than North Korean leader Kim Jong-un
In one of the more awkward double bookings in diplomatic history, the Hanoi hotel that was supposed to serve as a headquarters for the US press corps had also been reserved by one of the world’s most press-averse and security-fixated dictators, Kim Jong-un.
Such cohabitation was never going to work for the North Korean security apparatus, which is not accustomed to dealing with inquisitive journalists. Kim’s bodyguards have been known to accost reporters they suspect of having taken pictures of the leader and demand they hand over their smartphones for scrutiny.
After a brief discussion between the North Korean and Vietnamese officials in Hanoi’s Melia Hotel on Tuesday morning, the US journalists were unceremoniously evicted from the media centre that the White House advance teams had spent days erecting.
The fact that the problem was only discovered on Tuesday, the day before Kim was due to meet Donald Trump in the Vietnamese capital, says a lot about the haste with which this second summit between the two leaders has been arranged.
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Hanoi was agreed on as a venue two weeks ago, a win for the North Koreans who wanted to combine the trip with a relationship-building session with the Vietnamese leadership. The Trump administration had wanted to meet in the coastal resort of Da Nang.
Their Vietnamese hosts will put on entertainment, possibly in the French colonial-era opera house in central Hanoi.
A government guest house has been made available for working talks on Thursday, the duration and timing of which remain uncertain, but there may also be talks in the Metropole Hotel, where Graham Greene wrote The Quiet American and where Jane Fonda stayed when she made a wartime visit to North Vietnam in 1972.
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Hanoi, once bombed daily by the US during the Vietnam war, has eagerly embraced its identity as the “City for Peace”, proclaimed by hastily printed billboards and banners around the city.
Truong Thanh Duc, a 56-year-old shopkeeper in Hanoi’s Old Quarter, had printed hundreds of T-shirts of Kim and Trump, with one featuring a stylised likeness of the North Korean leader against a white background, and another showing Trump and Kim’s faces and the words “peace” and “Hanoi 2019”.
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“In my viewpoint, Mr Kim and Mr Trump are two great men,” he said, adding that he thought both men were willing to “sacrifice” for their countries in the name of peace.
