PYEONGCHANG, South Korea -- A North Korean envoy making a rare visit to South Korea said Sunday that his country was willing to open talks with the United States, a rare step toward diplomacy between enemies after a year of North Korean missile and nuclear tests and direct threats of war from both Pyongyang and Washington.
Kim Yong Chol, who Seoul believes masterminded two attacks in 2010 that killed 50 South Koreans, was in South Korea for the end of the Olympics. He said North Korean leader Kim Jong Un wanted to improve ties with Washington and had "ample intentions of holding talks," according to the South's presidential office.
He made the remarks during a meeting with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who is eager to engage the North after one of the most hostile periods in recent years on the Korean Peninsula.
Moon, who was invited a day after the opening ceremonies to Pyongyang for a summit with Kim Jong Un, also said that Washington and Pyongyang should quickly meet to "fundamentally solve" the standoff on the Korean Peninsula.
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The White House said it would wait and see whether a new overture by North Korea for talks with the United States means it is serious about disarming, a step President Donald Trump and other world leaders agree must be the outcome of any future dialogue.
"We will see," was the response from White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was on the Korean Peninsula Sunday as a member of the U.S. delegation attending the Olympic games in South Korea. The delegation was led by Ivanka Trump, the president's daughter.
Sanders said President Trump remains committed to achieving the "complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization" of the peninsula and that his "maximum pressure campaign" against North Korea must continue until it abandons its nuclear and missile programs.
Trump imposed fresh sanctions against North Korea late last week as part of the pressure effort.
Kim Yong Chol later sat in the VIP box at Olympic Stadium in Pyeongchang for the Olympic closing ceremonies, just feet away from Ivanka Trump and the top U.S. military commander on the peninsula, Gen. Vincent Brooks. The former anti-Seoul military intelligence chief watched K-pop divas and fireworks and stood for the South Korean national anthem. The Americans and North Koreans did not appear to interact when Moon shook hands with dignitaries at the beginning of the ceremony.
Moon has yet to accept the North's invitation for a summit, but he has advocated engagement with Pyongyang his entire political career.
But he must first strike a balance with Washington, which has a policy meant to isolate and sanction the North until it agrees to give up its nukes. Some observers believe that Pyongyang is trying to drive a wedge to win concessions from Seoul.
The North has "ample intentions of holding talks with the United States," Moon's office said. The North's delegation also agreed that "South-North relations and U.S.-North Korean relations should be improved together," the statement said.
The statement did not make any mention of North Korea's nuclear program or whether the dialogue would be about denuclearization. Pyongyang has previously insisted that its nuclear weapons are not up for discussion.
It also did not reveal whether North Korea had attached any preconditions for starting talks with the United States like the suspension of joint South Korea-U.S. military exercises, which it calls a rehearsal for invasion. The North threatened the United States with nuclear attacks just a few weeks ago.
Sanders said the U.S., South Korea and the international community "broadly agree" that denuclearization must be the outcome of any dialogue with North Korea. She said North Korea has a bright path ahead of it if it chooses denuclearization.
"We will see if Pyongyang's message today, that it is willing to hold talks, represents the first steps along the path to denuclearization," she said in a written statement. "In the meantime, the United States and the world must continue to make clear that North Korea's nuclear and missile programs are a dead end."
In closing the Games, Thomas Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee, lauded the cooperation between the Koreas.
"With your joint march, you have shared your faith in a peaceful future for all of us," he said. "Sport brings people together in a very fragile world."
The two Koreas had marched into the stadium wearing the same white uniform and under a unified Korean flag at the opening ceremonies. At the closing, each team wore their national costume and waved all three flags -- North, South and the unified peninsula logo. But they still walked together.
SECRET TALKS
Predictions of secret talks mounted when Choe Kang Il, deputy director of the U.S. affairs division in North Korea's foreign ministry, arrived with the North Korean delegation.
Choe has taken part in talks with former American officials in recent years, including at a security-related forum in Switzerland last September. There, he delivered a strong message: that North Korea's nuclear weapons were not up for discussion.
His attendance surprised analysts because his role has nothing to do with either sports or inter-Korean relations.
Meanwhile, traveling with Ivanka Trump was Allison Hooker, the Korea director on the National Security Council and a key player in the White House's policy on North Korea. Her name was not on the White House's list for the delegation.
Some analysts said that a meeting between Hooker and Choe would be a good way to start easing tensions that have risen over the past year as North Korea has fired missiles and conducted a nuclear test, while the Trump administration has threatened military action to stop it.
"There is no reason for Allison Hooker to come, nor is there any reason for Choe Kang Il to be here," said John Delury, a professor of international relations at Yonsei University in Seoul. "They're both superfluous to the Olympic ceremonies and to inter-Korean relations."
They would, however, be the right officials to meet and have a "preliminary discussion," Delury said. "They could and they should do this."
Sanders said before the closing ceremony that no meetings were scheduled.
TIRADE OVER SANCTIONS
At the opening ceremony earlier this month, Kim Yo Jong sat in the same VIP box with Moon and U.S. Vice President Mike Pence. Though Pence stood to cheer the entrance of the U.S. team, he remained seated when the athletes from North and South Korea marched together behind a unification flag, leaving Moon to turn around and shake Kim's sister's hand.
Pence's office claimed afterward that the North had pulled out of a planned meeting at the last minute.
The North's state-run news agency ran a story Sunday quoting a "spokesman for the Korea Asia-Pacific Peace Committee" as saying that Pence insulted Kim Yo Jong with his hard-line rhetoric after returning to the U.S. and "we will never have face-to-face talks with them even after 100 years or 200 years."
In a reminder that any diplomatic gains will be hard-won, North Korea on Sunday issued a tirade against the Trump administration over its announcement Friday of another wave of sanctions.
The administration blacklisted 56 vessels, shipping companies and other entities in an attempt to cut off North Korea's ability to skirt existing sanctions targeting its nuclear program.
"[The] Trump group's attempt itself to threaten us by such sanctions or wild remarks only reveals its ignorance about us," a foreign ministry spokesman said Sunday, according to the North's state-run Korean Central News Agency. "We came to possess nuclear weapons, the treasured sword of justice, in order to defend ourselves from such threats from the United States."
North Korea's antagonism toward the outside world is rooted in its hatred of the United States, which all but destroyed the country with sustained bombing during the Korean War. That conflict ended in 1953 with an armistice -- signed for the southern side by the United States, not South Korea.
To this day, North Korea says that it needs nuclear weapons to fend off the United States and insists that any normalization will require a peace treaty with the United States, as the signatory to the armistice, not with South Korea.
Information for this article was contributed by Hyung-jin Kim, Kim Tong-hyung, Foster Klug, Eric Talmadge and Darlene Superville of The Associated Press; by Anna Fifield of The Washington Post; and by Choe Sang-hun of The New York Times.
A Section on 02/26/2018