A senior figure in the North Korean regime was en route to the US on Wednesday, and Russia's top diplomat was preparing to visit Pyongyang as diplomatic preparations for a historic nuclear summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un gathered pace.
General Kim Yong Chol, right-hand man to the North Korean leader, will meet US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in New York, officials said.
Trump confirmed the general was on his way in a tweet and boasted that Washington would have a "great team" for the talks aimed at resolving the nuclear standoff.
The US president still hopes the summit will take place on June 12 in Singapore.
"Meetings are currently taking place concerning Summit, and more. Kim Young (sic) Chol, the Vice Chairman of North Korea, heading now to New York. Solid response to my letter, thank you!" Trump wrote.
Moscow said Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov would travel to North Korea on Thursday to discuss Pyongyang's nuclear programme.
Last month the North's foreign minister Ri Yong Ho held rare talks with Lavrov in Moscow, part of a quickening effort to improve strained ties with global powers.
Russia was a member of six-nation talks held between 2003-8 aimed at persuading the North to scrap its nuclear programme.
Japan is also keenly watching summit preparations. Trump will meet its Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Washington on June 7, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said.
"Since the president's May 24 letter to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, the North Koreans have been engaging," she said.
"The United States continues to actively prepare for President Trump's expected summit with leader Kim in Singapore."
Kim Yong Chol was at Beijing airport Wednesday for his flight to New York. He used the restricted VIP entrance, according to AFP journalists.
Pompeo's spokeswoman said it would be the third meeting between Pompeo — who opened contacts with the isolated Pyongyang regime when he was still CIA director — and Kim.
"We're still finalising exactly what these meetings will look like," she said.
The trip is part of a flurry of diplomacy before the on-again, off-again summit.
– Truce village –
Trump briefly scrapped the talks last week, citing "open hostility" from the North, but since then both sides have dialled down the rhetoric and the process appears to be back on track.
On Sunday US negotiators, headed by Washington's ambassador to the Philippines Sung Kim, began meeting North Korean counterparts in the truce village of Panmunjom that divides the two Koreas.
"They plan to have additional meetings this week," Sanders said.
Kim Yong Chol will be the most senior North Korean on US soil since Vice Marshal Jo Myong Rok met then-president Bill Clinton in 2000.
The general has played a front-seat role during recent rounds of diplomacy aimed at ending the nuclear stalemate on the Korean peninsula.
He sat next to Trump's daughter Ivanka, who is also a White House aide, during February's closing ceremony for the Winter Olympics in South Korea, an event that was seen as a turning point in the nuclear crisis.
He also accompanied Kim Jong Un on both of his recent trips to China to meet President Xi Jinping, and held talks with Pompeo when he travelled to Pyongyang.
– Yawning gap –
The general is a notorious figure in South Korea, where he is accused of masterminding the 2010 sinking of the Cheonan navy corvette, which killed 46 sailors, an attack for which North Korea denies responsibility.
From 2009 to 2016, he also headed North Korea's General Reconnaissance Bureau, the unit tasked with cyber warfare and intelligence gathering.
General Kim is one of several North Korean officials under US sanctions, but State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said she was sure the US had taken appropriate steps to allow him to visit New York unmolested.
His journey to the US caps a frenetic few days of meetings between North Korean and American officials.
An AFP photographer saw Kim Chang Son, Kim Jong Un's de facto chief of staff, in Singapore Tuesday for preparatory discussions there.
The key task is to settle the agenda. The main stumbling block is likely to be the concept of "denuclearization" — both sides say they want it, but there is a yawning gap between their definitions.
Washington wants North Korea to quickly give up all its nuclear weapons in a verifiable way in return for sanctions and economic relief.
But analysts say North Korea will be unwilling to cede its nuclear deterrent unless it is given security guarantees that the US will not try to topple the regime.
Korean War hero doubtful of Trump-Kim peace prospects
Seoul (AFP) May 29, 2018 –
As a decorated war hero who once took out three machine gun nests with nothing but grenades, Choi Deuk-soo knows first hand what is at stake should US-North Korean peace talks fail — and he is doubtful of an imminent breakthrough.
The wizened 91-year-old is one of just five people still alive to have been awarded South Korea's top military medal, the Taeguk, given for a suicidally brave charge he made up an enemy-held hill in the end stages of the 1950-53 Korean War.
"I hate any war," he told AFP from his apartment in Incheon, west of Seoul, apologising for his poor hearing, the result of firing a heavy machine gun for hours during a battle to repel Chinese troops that had come to the aid of North Korea's communist forces.
That war led to an armistice and the two Koreas divided by the demilitarised zone. It is a festering Cold War sore that lives on today, and US President Donald Trump has vowed to combat the threat posed by the authoritarian, nuclear-armed regime in Pyongyang either by talks with his North Korean opposite Kim Jong Un or "fire and fury".
Choi — who was speaking to AFP before Trump cancelled an upcoming summit with Kim only to suggest it might be back on — is not convinced by the recent flurry of diplomatic detente.
"Another war might have to break out sometime in the future, maybe hundreds of years from now, for the two sides to be reunified," he said.
"I doubt whether any deal with Kim Jong Un would hold long because all the North is interested in is material rewards," he added, questioning whether Pyongyang was really committed to giving up its nuclear weapons or genuinely seeking peace.
– 'No retreat' –
The nonagenarian's cynicism was forged in the crucible of the Korean War and nurtured by decades of failed peace attempts that have seen North Korea's regime remain steadfastly in power and oversee its metamorphosis into a nuclear armed state.
Breathing repeatedly through an inhaler to ease his asthma, Choi recalled his own horrifying experience the last time full-scale war broke out on the Korean Peninsula.
The memory that sticks with him the most was the night that won him the Taeguk.
On 30 June 1953 his unit was ordered to take back Hill 938 from a brigade of Chinese volunteers who had seized the strategic position earlier that month.
Choi's battalion was so depleted its ranks had dropped from 500 to just 30 men.
"The top commander gathered us together and handed out cigarettes. He then said: 'You only move on. No retreat'. The company installed a machine gun, threatening to shoot us if we tried to retreat," he recalled.
To improve their agility, the soldiers were told to ditch their helmets and take only grenades — the commanders noted that if they needed a rifle they could always grab one from the hundreds of bodies littering the hill side.
Under cover of darkness and a smoke screen Choi and his comrades inched towards the enemy.
"I crawled up to a machine gun post and hurled the first grenade. I finished a second one with another grenade and silenced a third machine gun nest with the remaining two grenades," he said.
With the enemy machine guns silenced, reinforcements successfully stormed uphill, bringing an end to the hour-long battle.
Somehow Choi emerged unscathed. But only five men from the original 30 survived the night, he recalled.
The war ended a month later with the armistice, though the two Koreas remain technically still at war.
– 'How long will it last?' –
Choi said he welcomes the fact that Trump was willing to talk to Kim.
But he worries about the more bellicose members of the US administration, particularly National Security Advisor John Bolton, a known North Korea hawk.
Earlier this month Bolton — and later Vice President Mike Pence — raised the spectre of Libyan leader Moamer Khadafi, who gave up atomic weapons only to die years later at the hands of US-backed rebels.
That comparison drew angry responses from North Korea.
"That guy with the thick moustache almost blew it up with reckless, unnecessary statements," Choi fumed, referring to Bolton.
His hopes for peace are tempered by a cynical realism that comes from decades of witnessing the Korean conundrum, one of geopolitics' stickiest issues.
Last month, like millions of others, Choi watched on as South Korean president Moon Jae-in met Kim in the heart of the DMZ. They shook hands and, at the invitation of Kim, Moon briefly stepped into North Korea.
"I thought this was a good thing," Choi recalled thinking about the current detente. "But then the next moment, I wondered how long it would all last this time around."
