WASHINGTON �� President Donald Trump said Sunday that he hopes to see North Korean leader Kim Jong Un "in the near future" after his top diplomat reported progress Sunday at a meeting with Kim in Pyongyang held to resolve details of a potential second summit.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told South Korean President Moon Jae-in upon his arrival in Seoul that Kim had agreed to meet with Trump "as soon as possible," according to a statement from Moon's office.
The South Koreans said the U.S. and North Korea discussed establishing negotiating groups to set a "denuclearization process" and work out a time and location for a follow-up meeting to the first Trump-Kim summit in June.
"As President Trump said, there are many steps along the way and we took one of them today," Pompeo told Moon in Seoul, in remarks that offered only a broad assessment of his talks with Kim. "It was another step forward."
Pompeo "had a good meeting with Chairman Kim today in Pyongyang," Trump said Sunday on Twitter. "Progress made on Singapore Summit Agreements! I look forward to seeing Chairman Kim again, in the near future."
A U.S. official traveling with Pompeo said the visit to North Korea was "better than" Pompeo's fraught previous trip to the North Korean capital in July, although there is a "long haul" ahead.
The trip was the latest turn in a diplomatic exchange in which Trump and Kim threatened each other with nuclear war last year only for them to meet in Singapore. While the leaders signed a vague agreement to "work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, the two sides have bickered over the pace and sequence of steps to achieve that goal.
Pompeo's brief visit wasn't expected to resolve critical issues over to get North Korea to disarm or make much progress on a peace treaty to officially end the Korean War. Kim's regime has said it wants to focus on more than just its nuclear program, and that it expects the U.S. to show flexibility in its demands.
Pompeo landed in Pyongyang Sunday morning to meet Kim after visiting Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe Saturday in Tokyo. Pompeo will continue traveling to Beijing and then return to Washington on Monday.
In Tokyo, Pompeo told Abe that the U.S. wanted to work closely on nuclear talks and that he would raise with the North Koreans the issue of Japanese abductees held for decades by the regime.
The Sunday stop in Pyongyang was Pompeo's first chance to introduce his special envoy for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, to leaders there. Pompeo had hoped to do that in August, when he appointed Biegun and announced they would travel to the country. But Trump called off the trip a day later, saying North Korea hadn't made sufficient progress toward denuclearization.
It was Pompeo's fourth trip to Pyongyang and his first since July, when he spent the night and left with little to show afterward. Soon after the secretary of state left the country on his last visit, North Korea issued a statement lambasting his "gangster-like" demands.
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(Lee reported from Seoul, South Korea. Isabel Reynolds and Jihye Lee contributed to this report.
