North Korean Official Blamed for Failed Trump Summit Reappears in Public - The New York Times

SEOUL, South Korea — Kim Yong-chol, a former North Korean spymaster and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s counterpart in recent diplomatic contacts between the North and the United States, resurfaced in public this week, undermining a South Korean newspaper’s report that he was banished to forced labor in a re-education camp.

The conservative Chosun Ilbo, South Korea’s largest daily newspaper, reported on Friday that Mr. Kim had been sent to a re-education camp as part of a political purge of senior North Korean officials held responsible for the breakdown of the second summit meeting held in February between the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and President Trump.

But some analysts in South Korea quickly questioned the report, saying that it was unlikely for Kim Yong-chol to have been banished because he was still being cited in the North Korean news media in the weeks after the summit in Hanoi, Vietnam, and had retained his vice chairmanship in the ruling Workers’ Party. They said Mr. Kim’s influence appears to have been curtailed because he lost another key party post: heading the party’s important United Front Department, which manages relations with South Korea, as well as intelligence affairs.

By Monday, it appeared that the skeptical analysts’ assessments were correct.

The North’s official Korean Central News Agency on Monday included Kim Yong-chol’s name on a list of officials who accompanied Kim Jong-un to an art performance given by the wives of military officers on Sunday.

But on a roster of officials attending the event, Kim Yong-chol’s name was listed 10th among 12 officials named. In North Korea’s opaque regime, an official’s status is commonly gauged by his name’s ranking in leadership rosters carried by the state-run news media.

In another telltale sign of his declining influence, Kim Yong-chol was not seen next to Kim Jong-un, as he often used to be, in photos carried by the North Korean news agency on Monday. South Korean media scrutinizing the photos identified the man seated five seats to the left of Kim Jong-un as Kim Yong-chol.

American officials have been cautious in discussing Kim Yong-chol’s fate in public. But analysts in South Korea have generally agreed that Mr. Kim and his negotiating team, which had driven Kim Jong-un’s diplomatic outreach toward Washington since early last year, have been largely sidelined as the North Korean leader sought a scapegoat to blame for his disastrous second meeting with Mr. Trump.

The Hanoi meeting was widely considered a huge embarrassment for Kim Jong-un, who is seen as infallible in his totalitarian state.

During the summit meeting, Kim Jong-un demanded that Mr. Trump lift the most painful international sanctions against his country in return for partially dismantling his country’s nuclear weapons facilities. The meeting collapsed when Mr. Trump insisted on a quick and comprehensive rollback of the North’s entire weapons of mass destruction program before lifting sanctions, leaving Mr. Kim to return home empty-handed.

Key members of Kim Yong-chol’s team — including the North’s special envoy to the United States, Kim Hyok-chol, and Kim Song-hye, both of whom accompanied Kim Yong-chol when he visited Mr. Trump in the Oval Office in January — have since disappeared from the North’s state-run news media. They led working-level negotiations with United States officials ahead of the Hanoi summit.

But while Kim Yong-chol himself was seen in a meeting of the party’s Political Bureau in April, his visibility too has been vastly curtailed. He failed to accompany Kim Jong-un to Russia in April. In his place were seasoned diplomats from the Foreign Ministry, like Minister Ri Yong-ho and Choi Son-hui, the first vice minister, both of whom had lost prominence when Kim Yong-chol was on the rise in North Korean diplomacy.

Lee Sang-min, a spokesman for the South’s Unification Ministry, said his ministry had no comment on Kim Yong-chol’s reappearance in the North Korean state news media. But he confirmed that the report on Monday marked the first time his name had been mentioned there in 50 days.

Efforts to revive negotiations between the United States and North Korea remain at a stalemate, as North Korea reconsiders its negotiating strategy.

The Chosun Ilbo had reported that Kim Hyok-chol was executed by firing squad in March and that Kim Song-hye was in a prison camp. But South Korean officials could not confirm the report.

In the past, North Korean officials who were reported by the South Korean news media or intelligence officials to have been purged or even executed have sometimes re-emerged.

In 2013, The Chosun Ilbo reported that Hyon Song-wol, a famous North Korean singer the newspaper described as Kim Jong-un’s “ex-girlfriend,” had been executed. But Ms. Hyon has proved to be not only alive but active in North Korean leadership, leading art troupes to South Korea when inter-Korean relations blossomed last year.

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