SEOUL, South Korea _ President Donald Trump scored a diplomatic victory on Wednesday as North Korea freed three U.S. citizens from prison to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a goodwill gesture prior to a planned summit between the president and the North's dictator, Kim Jong Un.
Trump announced the men's freedom on Twitter on Wednesday morning, and two reporters traveling with Pompeo later saw the three Korean-American men boarding the secretary's plane without assistance as it was set to return to Washington. Trump said he would meet the plane at 2 a.m. Thursday at Joint Base Andrews.
"I am pleased to inform you that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is in the air and on his way back from North Korea with the 3 wonderful gentlemen that everyone is looking so forward to meeting," Trump tweeted.
Later, talking briefly to reporters before a Cabinet meeting, Trump thanked Kim in language that was unimaginable just months ago, as the two exchanged threats of nuclear annihilation. "I appreciate Kim for doing this," Trump said.
The president also indulged in some self-congratulation. Asked if he thought he deserved a Nobel Peace Prize, Trump replied, "Everyone thinks so but I would never say it."
The administration was eager to win the men's release to provide good diplomatic news to offset the international opprobrium after Trump on Tuesday withdrew the United States from the 2015 multinational nuclear agreement with Iran. Last week the president had tweeted that three men's freedom was "imminent."
Despite the gesture from Kim, Trump acknowledged that his meeting with the North Korean leader _ the first between an American president and a leader of the long-isolated country _ could still be "scuttled." The U.S. is demanding that North Korea unilaterally give up its nuclear arsenal and building program, something Kim is widely expected to resist.
"Everything can be scuttled," Trump said.
Kim's overture on the prisoners, two of whom were detained last year and one late in former President Barack Obama's tenure, came after he and Pompeo met for 90 minutes in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, to finish plans for Kim's meeting with Trump. Trump told reporters that the two sides had agreed to a place and time. It would not be held in the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea, he said, though more details weren't immediately available.
The short trip this week by Pompeo _ his second visit to Pyongyang in just over a month _ came a day after Kim traveled by plane to northeast China to confer with President Xi Jinping of China, North Korea's closest ally. It was Kim's second meeting with Xi in recent months.
The administration had faced questions for weeks about whether it would demand the imprisoned men be freed as a precondition for the summit. The three citizens, ethnic Koreans, are Kim Dong-chul, a businessman arrested in 2015 and serving 10 years on espionage charges; and Kim Sang-duk and Kim Hak-song, professors associated with Pyongyang University of Science and Technology who were captured last year.
Trump and Pompeo said the men appeared to be in good health. "Doctors are with them now," Pompeo told the two reporters aboard his plane once it took off. "All indications are that their health is as good as could be, given what they have been through."
Their release comes just under a year after the death of Otto Warmbier, an American college student detained on theft charges in Pyongyang in 2016. The North released Warmbier in a coma, and he died a week after returning to the United States.
His father, Fred Warmbier, sought to remind the world about the case amid the diplomatic glow celebrating North and South Koreas' seeming rapprochement during the recent Winter Olympics held in the South. He traveled in February to the games' site in Pyeongchang, South Korea, and attended the opening ceremony to highlight North Korea's record of human rights abuses.
For Pompeo, just two weeks into his job as the nation's top diplomat, the release of the three men _ together with planning what could be a historic summit meeting _ has made for a heady start. His previous clandestine visit with Kim was over Easter weekend, when Pompeo was still CIA director, awaiting Senate confirmation to become secretary of state.
The release was not without last-minute drama.
After his 90-minute discussion with Kim earlier Wednesday, Pompeo returned to his hotel, and when reporters asked if there was good news on the detainees, he crossed his fingers.
A North Korean official later sought out Pompeo at his hotel and informed him that Kim had granted the men "amnesty."
The North Korean official told Pompeo the men would be released at 7 p.m. local time, according to a senior U.S. official present for the exchange. Carl Risch, the assistant secretary of state for consular affairs and a doctor, then went to another hotel to pick the men up. He accompanied them to the airport, the official said.
They arrived at the airport at 8:25 p.m. local time, after leaving the hotel where they were being held at 7:45 p.m. That means they were in the air less than an hour after leaving custody.
"We're granting amnesty to the three detained Americans," the official quoted the North Korean emissary as telling Pompeo. "We issued the order to grant immediate amnesty to the detainees."
Pompeo replied: "That's great," according to the official.
"It should be a very brief ceremony," the official quoted the North Korean as saying, noting that the "ceremony" was more like a legal process.
"You should make care that they do not make the same mistakes again," the North Korean said in closing, according to the U.S. official. "This was a hard decision."
All three men were accused by Pyongyang of subversion and "anti-state" activities. That is a catchall phrase that the North Koreans use to incarcerate people and often foreigners for a range of supposed crimes, big and small.
Yoon Young-chan, a spokesman for South Korean President Moon Jae-in, welcomed the decision as a positive step toward a successful summit between Kim and Trump.
He also noted that the North's decision to release the three ethnic Koreans could signal that Pyongyang might consider releasing six South Koreans who remain detained there, as Moon recently requested during a summit with Kim.
"We hope that the South Koreans be released soon to expand reconciliation between the two Koreas and to extend the peaceful mood on the Korean Peninsula," Yoon said.
On Wednesday, officials at the South Korean president's office, known as the Blue House, said privately that they expected Pompeo to discuss the prisoners and obtain their freedom. But they said it would be more appropriate for the United States to discuss the issue publicly.
According to reports by pool reporters traveling with Pompeo, the secretary met with Kim Yong Chol, the North's former military intelligence chief, and Ri Su Yong, its former foreign minister, on Wednesday.
"It's wonderful," said Alex Gladstein, the chief strategy officer at the Human Rights Foundation, a group that's smuggled news media into the closed country in an effort to inform and help its population, which doesn't have access to the internet. "As an American, I'm thrilled that these people are coming home to their families."
Yet Gladstein, who works with North Korean defectors, hoped the release wouldn't distract from the documented evidence of the state's abysmal human rights record against its own people, including labor camps, torture and political executions on mass scales.
He said these internal conditions persist, even after years of diplomatic talks with the United States, South Korea and others that focused on easing external tensions or the state's nuclear program.
"The government is at war with them every day," he said of the North Korean people. "And that's not the war that people are excited to end."
Human rights remain a concern for American officials, but their immediate focus is on convincing the North to take steps toward denuclearization, perhaps in the form of an agreement after the Trump-Kim meeting.
While uncertainty about the summit and its outcome persist, the diplomatic developments in recent months, sparked by the inter-Korean participation in the Olympics, have been striking to many experts.
The North, after all, has test launched dozens of ballistic missiles and conducted three underground nuclear tests _ all violations of international norms _ to build its weapons program in recent years.
Last year, Kim's nation launched three missiles into space that, in theory, could have reached the United States mainland, sparking an international crisis and new rounds of economic sanctions.
Kim proclaimed on New Year's Day that his nation had achieved a national nuclear force that could counter any aggression by the United States, its main security concern. In the same speech, he also noted his desire to participate in the Games, sparking months of talks that led to the recent summits _ and the freeing of the prisoners.
