PYONGYANG, North Korea -- North Korea on Saturday bashed the U.S.' hopes for a quick denuclearization deal in a pointed rebuke to the president's top envoy, accusing Washington of making "gangster-like" demands.
Despite the criticism, North Korea's Foreign Ministry said Kim Jong Un still wanted to build on the "friendly relationship and trust" forged with President Donald Trump during their summit in Singapore on June 12. The ministry said Kim had written a personal letter to Trump, reiterating that trust.
After the Singapore summit, Trump declared the North was no longer a threat and would hand over the remains of Americans killed during the Korean War. Now, three weeks later, the two sides are still at odds on all issues, including exactly what denuclearization means and how it might be verified, after a third visit to Pyongyang by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The promised remains have yet to be delivered.
Pompeo on Saturday wrapped up two days of talks in the North Korean capital on an optimistic note even without meeting Kim, as he had on his previous two trips. He said his discussions had been productive and were conducted in good faith, but he allowed that much more work needed to be done. He and other U.S. officials said the two countries, still technically at war after the 1950-53 Korean War, had set up working groups to deal with details of an agreement.
They will be overseen by Sung Kim, the U.S. ambassador to the Philippines who has handled some lower-level discussions, and aim to work out what a State Department spokesman called the "nitty gritty details" of future talks.
Pompeo said he had won commitments for new discussions on denuclearization and announced a meeting this week between U.S. and North Korean military officials on the repatriation of the remains. But in a harsh response issued just hours after Pompeo arrived in Tokyo for a briefing in Japan, the North blasted the discussions, saying the visit had been "regrettable" and that Washington's "gangster-like" demands were aimed at forcing it to abandon nuclear weapons.
In a statement carried by the North's official Korean Central News Agency, the Foreign Ministry said the outcome of Pompeo's talks with senior official Kim Yong Chol was "very concerning" because it has led to a "dangerous phase that might rattle our willingness for denuclearization that had been firm."
"We had expected that the U.S. side would offer constructive measures that would help build trust based on the spirit of the leaders' summit ... we were also thinking about providing reciprocal measures," it said. "However, the attitude and stance the United States showed in the first high-level meeting [between the countries] was no doubt regrettable. Our expectations and hopes were so naive it could be called foolish."
In criticizing the talks with Pompeo, however, North Korea avoided attacking Trump personally, saying that "we wholly maintain our trust toward President Trump." But it stressed that Washington must not allow "headwinds" against the "wills of the leaders." That appeared to be a reference to Trump's national security adviser, John Bolton, a prominent North Korea hawk who has been vilified by Pyongyang in the past.
Pompeo spoke with Trump, Bolton and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly on Saturday before his second round of meetings with Kim Yong Chol.
SEEKING A COMMITMENT
Pompeo went to Pyongyang to try to get the North Koreans to match their vague commitment to denuclearization -- signed by Kim Jong Un in the June meeting with Trump -- with some kind of action. Among the first priorities were a declaration of weapons sites, a timeline of deconstruction efforts and, perhaps, a written statement that the North's definition of denuclearization matched Pompeo's.
Asked if he had gotten any of those, Pompeo declined to divulge details.
The North has long rejected such an approach, instead demanding the United States take reciprocal measures in each "phased" step taken toward denuclearization.
On Saturday, the North Korean statement reiterated that "phased, simultaneous actions" were "the quickest way of realizing the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula."
During their meetings with Pompeo, North Korean officials proposed dismantling a missile engine-test site and opening negotiations for repatriating the remains of American service members killed in the Korean War, the Foreign Ministry said. In return, they proposed the United States take "simultaneous" actions of expanding bilateral exchanges and announcing an end to the Korean War in July.
But the ministry said the United States balked at declaring an end to the war, which North Korea said was a crucial first step toward building trust.
"The issues the U.S. side insisted on during the talks were the same cancerous ones that the past U.S. administrations had insisted on," the ministry said.
It said North Korea has so far taken the "irreversible" action of destroying its underground nuclear test site, while the United States has taken only the "reversible" action of suspending joint military exercises with South Korea.
NEGOTIATING TACTICS
It was unclear whether the North Korean statement represented potential doom for meaningful negotiations, as some analysts believed, or was just Pyongyang's standard negotiating style, as others asserted. Two months ago, a brief blowup between the two countries led Trump to briefly cancel, then reschedule, his summit with Kim.
But North Korea's remarks also played to a larger fear: that the vaguely worded statement by Trump and Kim on a commitment to "the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula" meant something very different in Pyongyang and Washington.
Distrust on both sides has led the Americans to insist on rapid, deep dismantlement and highly intrusive verification; the North Koreans want an early lifting of sanctions and a formal end to the Korean War, among other steps.
Some analysts saw no reason for alarm in Pyongyang's downbeat version of events, considering it a routine North Korean negotiating tactic rather than a full-blown retreat from Pyongyang's seeming commitments.
"They're upping the ante for what they want and downplaying what we want," said Bill Richardson, a former diplomat who has negotiated with North Korea for prisoner releases. "This is typical."
A former top U.S. diplomat for Asia, Daniel Russel, said the setback was to be expected and warned Trump that he is engaged in a long negotiation that would not produce the easy, quick, made-for-television results that the president likely wants.
"Dealing with North Korea is hard because Kim Jong Un wants it to be hard," said Russel, who was assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs in President Barack Obama's administration. "If you make the Americans to fight for every inch, the Americans will start measuring progress in inches -- and will wind up paying by the inch."
"Kim can afford to play hardball because it's clear to him that Trump, who has already told Americans they can sleep soundly because the threat is now over, badly wants a deal," Russel said.
But Evans Revere, a former U.S. diplomat with a long history of negotiating with North Korea, said it was evident that the talks in Pyongyang had not gone well -- and that it appears North Korea may have no intention of actually denuclearizing in the way the United States would want.
"Pompeo appears to have presented the North Koreans with some demands and requirements for real moves toward denuclearization, as opposed to the symbolic steps and empty language Pyongyang has been using so far. He deserves credit for doing so," Revere wrote in an email.
"But in doing so, he has elicited North Korean ire, and he has now seen the reality of North Korea's game plan and intentions that many of us have been describing for some time," Revere added.
In his comments to reporters before leaving Pyongyang, Pompeo said he and Kim Yong Chol had made "a great deal of progress" in some areas. He stressed that "there's still more work to be done" in others, which will be handled by the working groups.
He said North Korea offered to discuss the closure of a missile-engine test site, which would "physically affirm" a move to halt the production of intercontinental-range ballistic missiles, and that the two sides had agreed that a Pentagon team would meet North Korean officials on or about Thursday at the border between North and South Korea to discuss the repatriation of remains.
After his talks in Pyongyang, Pompeo stopped in Tokyo and met with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Pompeo planned to brief Abe on his discussions with North Korean officials.
On the North Korea talks, Pompeo said: "We raised a full range of issues with them, all the issues that are important to both the United States and Japan." He told the Japanese that "there is much work for us to do together, and I'm honored to be with you here today."
Privately, Pompeo has said that he doubts the North Korean leader will ever give up his nuclear weapons. Those doubts have been backed up in recent days by intelligence showing that North Korea, far from dismantling its weapons facilities, has been expanding them and taking steps to conceal the efforts from the United States.
[NUCLEAR NORTH KOREA: Maps, data on country’s nuclear program]
At the airport in Pyongyang, when asked if he had brought up the satellite images that appeared to show that the North was actually expanding its capabilities, Pompeo responded: "We talked about what the North Koreans are continuing to do."
He said they had discussed "achieving what Chairman Kim and President Trump both agreed to, which is the complete denuclearization of North Korea. No one walked away from that, they're still equally committed, Chairman Kim is still committed."
Information for this article was contributed by Andrew Harnik and Matthew Lee of The Associated Press; by Gardiner Harris and Choe Sang-hun of The New York Times; by John Hudson, Carol Morello and Adam Taylor of The Washington Post; and by Nick Wadhams of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 07/08/2018