Anonymous ID: 20975b April 25, 2018, 11:08 p.m. No.1192348   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>2365 >>2377

Staging?

 

https:// www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-usa-trump-kim-insight/understanding-kim-inside-the-u-s-effort-to-profile-the-secretive-north-korean-leader-idUSKBN1HX0GK

http:// archive.li/ALy9e

 

A White House official declined to confirm any specifics about the drive to better understand Kim, except to say: “There is a robust whole of government effort under way to prepare for the president’s summit,” which is targeted for late May or early June.

 

When Kim first came to power, the CIA predicted that Kim’s rule might be short-lived. Seven years later that prediction has been dropped and he is now seen as a shrewd and ruthless leader. More recently, many U.S. experts were caught off-guard by how nimbly Kim shifted from his saber-rattling drive to build a nuclear missile arsenal to diplomatic outreach.

 

The emerging U.S. consensus on Kim is similar to what many outside experts have publicly concluded. He is seen as a “rational actor,” said U.S. officials – not the “total nut job” that Trump once branded him. He craves international stature but his main aim is “regime survival” and perpetuating his family dynasty, suggesting it will be hard for him to agree to full nuclear disarmament, the officials said.

 

Shielded by North Korea’s extreme opaqueness, Kim has posed a special set of profiling problems for U.S. spy agencies. U.S. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said in a speech earlier this month that North Korea’s leadership was “one of the hardest collection components out there” for intelligence gathering.

 

Amid the scramble to put together the Kim profile, the U.S. officials said another challenge was determining how much information to give Trump - known to have little patience for detailed briefings or lengthy documents - and then persuading him not to act purely on gut instinct, as he often does with foreign leaders.

 

Early in his administration, Trump was shown a scale model of North Korea’s sprawling nuclear bomb test site with a removable mountaintop and a miniature Statue of Liberty inside so he could grasp the size of the facility, two U.S. officials said.

A White House official declined comment on the episode.

 

For instance, initial bare-bones assessments of Kim put together soon after he took power in 2011 suggested he was possibly too inexperienced to survive internal struggles but that if he did he would likely be more interested in reforming North Korea’s battered economy than pursuing nuclear weapons.

 

“We all listen to the forensic psychiatrists of the intelligence community,” said Wendy Sherman, a former U.S. negotiator with North Korea who traveled to Pyongyang with then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in 2000 to meet Kim’s father, Kim Jong Il.

But she suggested face-to-face contact was the best way to take the measure of a North Korean leader. “I’m sure Mike Pompeo, having gone with an intelligence team, came back with a lot of useful information,” she told Reuters.