North Korea\u2019s former top nuclear envoy, Kim Yong Chol, accompanied leader Kim Jong Un to an art performance, state news agency KCNA said on Monday, signalling that the former spymaster is alive and remains a force in the power structure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sunday\u2019s appearance followed conflicting reports of shake-ups in the team that led engagement with the United States last year, only for nuclear talks to collapse after Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump failed to strike a pact at a February summit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
KCNA named Kim Yong Chol as the 10th person among a group of 12 \u201cleading officials\u201d who accompanied Kim Jong Un and his wife, Ri Sol Ju, to an amateur art performance by wives of officers in the North Korean Army on Sunday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That move may have cleared the way for long-time diplomats sidelined during last year\u2019s process to take centre stage if talks with the United States resumed, analysts said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Asked on Sunday about the last US contact with Kim Yong Chol and North Korea in general, Pompeo declined to answer, saying, \u201cWe conduct our negotiations in private.\u201d Asked about reports of a \u201cshakeup\u201d of Kim\u2019s negotiating team in a May 5 interview with ABC News, Pompeo said it did appear that his future counterpart would be somebody else, adding \u201cBut we don\u2019t know that for sure.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On Friday, South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo had said Kim Yong Chol, the leader\u2019s righthand man and a counterpart of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo before the failed summit, had been sent to a labour and re-education camp, citing an unidentified North Korean source.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He said, \u201cJust as President Trump gets to decide who his negotiators will be, Chairman Kim will get to make his own decisions who he asks to have these discussions.\u201d As Kim Jong Un\u2019s point man for the nuclear talks, Kim Yong Chol was stripped of a key party post in apparent censure for the summit\u2019s collapse, a South Korean lawmaker said in April.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cKim Yong Chol appears to have been pushed back from power since the Hanoi summit,\u201d said Shin Beom-chul, a senior fellow at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
North Korea\u2019s former top nuclear envoy, Kim Yong Chol, accompanied leader Kim Jong Un to an art performance, state news agency KCNA said on Monday, signalling that the former spymaster is alive and remains a force in the power structure. Sunday\u2019s appearance followed conflicting reports of shake-ups in the team that led engagement with the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":62820,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-62819","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62819"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62819\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62821,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62819\/revisions\/62821"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}