Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in an interview recorded by VOA, published on youtube on October 19, said that he expected to "...have senior (North Korean) leaders meeting us here in the next week and a half or so, between myself and my counterpart." Today, South Korean analysts from Channel A News Top Ten program have suggested that Pompeo's call for top level talks with North Korean representatives may result in a visit by Kim Jong Un's sister, Kim Yo Jong, to the US before the scheduled US mid-term elections. The analysts speculated that such a meeting would be politically motivated and mostly form over substance serving political campaign needs for the Trump administration. Pompeo said that the meeting would focus on the time, date and place for the anticipated second summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un, which have not yet been settled upon. The need for the US administration according to these conservative South Korean analysts is to present an image of progress in the stalled negotiation process since the Singapore Summit, before the imminent US midterm elections.
It is commonly assumed in South Korean pundit circles that Mike Pompeo and his "counterpart," Worker Party Vice Chairman Kim Yong Chol don't get along very well. Since the relative failure of their meeting in early July in Pyongyang where Pompeo made little headway with Kim Yong Chol on the issue of denuclearization, and failed to meet with Kim Jong Un, Pompeo has seemed to get along better with DPRK Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho, in diplomatic encounters. The South Korean analysts at Top Ten did not discuss the possibility of Ri being assigned the role of counterpart for this expected meeting with Pompeo in the US. Perhaps because Ri is relatively junior in status among the inner circle in Pyongyang. The program focused on the more appealing prospect, media wise, that Kim Yo Jong, Kim Jong Un's sister and aide, might fill the bill for the "counterpart" to Secretary Pompeo at the meeting. While Kim Yo Jong is nominally junior to Kim Yong Chol in formal political status and power, she shares the family relationship with Kim Jong Un, appears to have his trust, and knows his intentions. She serves as his personal aide for public affairs and functions as a director of propaganda. She is almost always either present or nearby at Kim's public appearances, and is believed to be the chief organizer of his public events.
The recent suspension of the large joint Vigilant Ace US- ROK military air exercises nominally scheduled for December is conducive to arranging a future summit meeting with Kim Jong Un while smoothing over recent frictions with South Korea over the military agreement it reached with North Korea, particularly with respect to airspace restrictions on military aircraft in regions proximate to the DMZ. This program also discussed the possibility of Kim Jong Un visiting Seoul before the end of the year, in light of the prospect of a Trump-Kim summit and perhaps a possible visit by the Pope to North Korea. The analysts felt Kim might visit Seoul irrespective of the timing of the DPRK/US summit but that it might cause domestic political difficulties particularly with opposition parties in the National Assembly if no concrete progress is being made on denuclearization by North Korea. The situation was regarded as fluid despite the Blue House announcement today that a Kim visit to Seoul was still anticipated before the end of the year.
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