In February 2019, I traveled to Vietnam for the second summit meeting between Donald Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. When I checked into the Meliá hotel in Hanoi, I found a note in my room from the hotel management:
We would like to inform you that the security scanner will be installed at our hotel lobby by the diplomatic protocol of Vietnam due to the visit of a Head of State staying at our hotel. Please also note that the security will be re-inforced in all areas at the hotel.
This was strange. The entire city was essentially shut down in advance of the summit. I knew President Trump wasn’t staying in my hotel. He would be arriving the next day and staying at the JW Marriott. Could Kim Jong Un—North Korea’s famously reclusive dictator—also be staying at the Meliá hotel? There was no way that could happen.
After all, it wasn’t just me staying at this hotel. The hotel’s main ballroom had been transformed into a so-called White House filing center—equipped with workspaces for about one hundred reporters along with monitors and fiber-optic cables to send video from the summit back to the American television networks. And on the hotel rooftop, there were platforms equipped with lights and video cameras for television correspondents like me to do our live reports. Only about a dozen reporters were staying at the Meliá, but the entire US press corps would be working there during the summit.
If Kim Jong Un was also going to be staying at the Meliá hotel, surely somebody would have told us.
I assumed the note from hotel management was either a mistake or a prank and went to sleep. I had just spent almost exactly twenty-four hours traveling from Washington to Vietnam and was dead tired.
While I was falling asleep, wondering what head of state could be staying at my hotel, Kim Jong Un was on a sixty-hour train ride from Pyongyang to Vietnam. North Korea may have nuclear weapons and advanced missiles, but it doesn’t have quality airplanes. As with the first Trump/Kim summit in Singapore, there was no North Korean aircraft capable of making the trip. So, rather than rely again on the Chinese to lend him one, as he had done the first time he met with President Trump, Kim opted to take the train.
It was a long journey, to be sure, but the train was outfitted to accommodate a supreme leader, equipped with plush private cabins, North Korean chefs, and satellite TV.
The TV turned out to be a problem.
Somewhere during the marathon train ride, the supreme ruler was watching cable news coverage of his upcoming summit meeting. He noticed a correspondent reporting from the rooftop of a hotel in Hanoi. He was then informed that the correspondent he was watching was standing on the roof of the very hotel where he would be staying in Hanoi. In fact, he was told, the entire US press corps would be working out of the hotel for the duration of the summit. The arrangement had actually been approved by a member of the North Korean delegation, but nobody had told Kim.
The reclusive North Korean dictator was apparently apoplectic about the idea of sharing a hotel with a horde of American journalists. The Vietnamese government got a panicked phone call from a North Korean official traveling on the train with Kim. He had an ultimatum: Get the American reporters off the roof of Chairman Kim’s hotel, or the train would turn around and Kim would return to Pyongyang.
This set off a diplomatic red alert that went from Kim Jong Un’s train to the office of the Vietnamese president to the Trump national security team and back to my hotel room in Hanoi.
By the time I awoke at dawn the next morning, Rebecca Wasserstein, the director of the White House Travel Office, had sent out an urgent alert to the entire traveling US press corps:
Due to technical issues, the White House Press Filing Center will be relocated. . . .
Well, yes. The “technical issues” were really one issue. An outraged madman armed with nuclear weapons was heading in our direction and there was no way in hell he was going to allow a hundred or so American reporters to be working right there in his hotel.
With great expense and even greater hassle, the entire US press operation was moved out of Kim’s hotel. We would have to work and broadcast from elsewhere. After some intense negotiating, the few of us who were staying in the hotel were able to keep our rooms. For me and a small group of my fellow White House correspondents, this made for a strange couple of days in Hanoi, sharing the Meliá hotel with Kim Jong Un.
Kim had rented out the two top floors of the hotel and brought his own food, chefs, and kitchen equipment to prepare his meals. That meant nobody saw him except when he was entering or exiting the hotel. But his goons were everywhere. The tables surrounding the piano bar in the shiny marble lobby were filled with stern and unsmiling North Korean security guards.
Everybody was told to avert their eyes whenever Kim came in or out of the hotel. Hotel employees were under strict orders to never look at him. At one point, I was alone in the elevator when it stopped and six North Koreans, including a woman who was clearly the person in charge, came in. I can’t say with 100 percent certainty who she was. But from the corner of the now-crowded elevator, it appeared I was sharing a ride with Kim Jong Un’s sister. The men with her seemed distressed by my presence. She, however, didn’t seem concerned in the least.
From the start, the summit seemed unlikely to produce an agreement. In fact, in the aftermath of Trump’s first meeting with Kim in Singapore eight months earlier, the relationship had become more strained. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had planned to travel to Pyongyang in August to meet with Kim, but President Trump had postponed the trip at the last minute, blaming China for a lack of progress on denuclearization talks. The meeting was rescheduled for November, but then Kim Jong Un abruptly disinvited the secretary of state.
The only real diplomatic activity going on was an occasional exchange of letters between Trump and Kim. The president spoke about them often, even at political rallies.
“He wrote me beautiful letters, and they’re great letters,” Trump said at a rally in West Virginia in September 2018.
But while the president often talked about the “beautiful letters” from Kim, neither he nor the White House revealed what they said.
I was intrigued. “Beautiful letters” from the world’s most notorious dictator? What could they say? For months, I tried to find out.
Eventually I had a chance to see Kim’s letters to the president. I was not permitted to take notes, but I was given the chance to read through English-language translations of the six letters Kim had sent the president before their second summit meeting.
Reading them, I could see instantly why the Donald Trump called them “beautiful letters.” The letters are each addressed to the president as “Your Esteemed Excellency.” They vary in length, but all of them praise the president’s political skills and talk of a new era of relations between the United States and North Korea. Kim doesn’t include much substance, but he never fails to offer best wishes for the president’s family and his health. The longest letter was sent in December 2018. In that letter, Kim explains why he abruptly disinvited Secretary Pompeo to Pyongyang in November. The primary reason, Kim writes, is that the only person who can truly represent the president’s mind is Trump himself. And with this, Kim Jong Un hit upon an essential truth about the Trump presidency.
The two-day Trump/Kim summit began with dinner at the historic Metropole hotel in downtown Hanoi. The Metropole is an elegant place to talk about nuclear weapons. Walking into the lobby, you feel like you are walking back in time to when Vietnam was a French colony. The architecture is French colonial, the restaurants have Michelin-starred chefs, and the legendary Bamboo Bar has fifteen-dollar beers. Scores of famous guests have stayed there over the years. Charlie Chaplin celebrated his honeymoon there in 1936. Jane Fonda stayed there in 1972, when she was protesting the Vietnam War with the Vietcong (there’s a bomb shelter beneath the Bamboo Bar). John McCain stayed there when he returned to Hanoi years after the war.
The Trump/Kim dinner was an intimate one. President Trump was joined by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney. Kim Jong Un was joined by Vice Chairman Kim Yong Chol and North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho. They sat in a private room at a round table, female translators at their sides. Food security was carefully monitored by both parties: The North Koreans took responsibility for the appetizer (shrimp cocktail), the two sides jointly handled the main course (steak), and the Americans handled dessert (chocolate cake).
Except for a brief photo op at the start, the dinner was private, but here is what I have learned about how the conversation went.
The dinner began with some small talk about the American and North Korean flags, which were flying together over the city. After an explanation that each star on the American flag stands for a state, Kim’s vice chairman asked if the Americans were going to be adding any additional states and, by extension, more stars to the flag. One of the Americans joked that Greenland was for sale. When the joke was not understood as a joke, there was a clarification from the American side: No, the United States is not going to be adding any more states.*
In that case, the vice chairman said, the Americans should announce publicly that the United States was not trying to add more territory.
Toward the end of the dinner, Kim Jong Un outlined the offer he was bringing to the summit. North Korea would agree to dismantling its Yongbyon nuclear facilities, which were believed to be just one component of the North Korean nuclear program, in exchange for the immediate lifting of all sanctions put in place since 2016.
When President Trump told him he couldn’t accept that offer, Kim appeared taken aback, surprised to hear the offer so quickly rejected. The dinner ended soon after that.
Over the course of the following day, the North Korean proposal did not change at all. Kim wouldn’t budge and showed absolutely no interest in the other issues the United States was prepared to discuss. He didn’t want to talk about a peace declaration, something that had long been a North Korean demand. He didn’t want to talk about opening liaison offices—a North Korean office in Washington and a US office in Pyongyang. He wanted one thing and one thing only: an end to economic sanctions.
At the last photo op, reporters asked Kim several questions, making the North Korean side uncomfortable. After the pool reporters were escorted out with some commotion while continuing to shout questions, Trump turned and asked a question of Kim: “Do you have that problem in your country?”
“I think you know the answer to that question,” replied Kim, the absolute dictator of a country where there was no free press and shouting a question at the leaders would almost certainly result in a trip to a prison camp, or worse, for whoever did the shouting.
The closed-door discussion that followed proved as fruitless as the meetings that preceded it. The president told Kim he would like to cancel the closing lunch they had planned to attend next. They shook hands, and the North Koreans quickly left the room without retrieving Kim’s water glass, as they had usually done. A member of the White House team took the glass and asked one of the intelligence analysts on the delegation if they needed it, presumably thinking it would have traces of Kim’s DNA that the CIA might find useful.
“That’s okay. We’re good,” the analyst said. Apparently they already had that base covered.
One key Trump advisor was neither surprised nor disappointed with the breakdown of the Hanoi summit: National Security Advisor John Bolton. He thought the talks were a terrible idea to begin with and had predicted the Hanoi summit would be a failure. For Bolton, the only downside was that it didn’t end more acrimoniously. President Trump showed no anger and left Hanoi saying he wanted to continue his dialogue with Kim Jong Un.
Three weeks after Hanoi, Bolton saw an opportunity to drive a stake through the idea of negotiating with Kim Jong Un. Two Chinese-based shipping companies had been caught trading with North Korea in violation of US and UN sanctions. Violations of this kind were common and usually handled without fanfare. But Bolton convened two National Security Council meetings to lay out a plan to publicly announce the violations and to add the offending companies to a list of sanctioned organizations.
According to a source who attended both meetings, Bolton was asked at each meeting if President Trump had signed off on the strategy. After all, the president had told his national security team that he did not want to do anything to surprise or provoke North Korea while he was pursuing his diplomatic opening with Kim Jong Un. The source tells me Bolton, clearly irritated, responded that he was the national security advisor and was, of course, acting consistently with the president’s desires.
The enforcement actions against the two Chinese-based companies were announced with fanfare by the Treasury Department as a senior official on the National Security Council briefed the White House press corps on the action, portraying it as part of the president’s maximum-pressure campaign on North Korea. Bolton himself touted the move on Twitter.
Bolton knew the sanctions announcement would provoke the North Koreans, and if the age-old pattern of North Korean behavior held, they would do something provocative in return.
But hours after the sanctions were announced, the president stepped in and reversed the whole thing. On Twitter, of course.
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
It was announced today by the U.S. Treasury that additional large scale Sanctions would be added to those already existing Sanctions on North Korea. I have today ordered the withdrawal of those additional Sanctions!
3/22/19, 1:22 PM
As the national security advisor, Bolton may have felt it was important to ratchet up the pressure after the failed Hanoi summit. He may have wanted to put an end to the idea that further talks would yield anything more. But regardless of his title, the real national security advisor when it came to North Korea was Donald Trump, not John Bolton.
Four months after the Hanoi summit, Donald Trump was heading back to Asia to attend a G20 meeting in Japan and a meeting with South Korea’s president in Seoul. The day before I flew to Japan, I asked two different senior officials about rumors President Trump could meet with Kim Jong Un. I was told it was not impossible, but the officials said it was highly unlikely. President Trump did plan to make a visit to the Demilitarized Zone on the border between the Koreas, but Trump and Kim had exchanged another round of letters and there was no mention of a meeting at the DMZ.
Once the president arrived in Japan, there was still no talk about a Kim Jong Un meeting, but he did have an odd meeting with Vladimir Putin. As reporters were coming in for the photo op at the beginning of the meeting, Trump leaned over to Putin and motioned in the direction of the press.
“Fake news,” he said. “You don’t have this problem with Russia that we have. You don’t have it.”
“Yes, yes,” Putin, smiling, responded in English. “We have, too. The same.”
It was like a little comedy routine, except Trump was joking with a leader who has been accused of ordering the killing of journalists who have dared criticize his government.
After their opening remarks, the comedy routine continued on another serious subject when an American reporter asked President Trump if he would tell Putin not to meddle in the 2020 election.
“Of course I will,” Trump responded. And then, with a smile, he turned to Putin and said, “Don’t meddle in the election, President. Don’t meddle in the election.”
After the cameras left, the joking continued. A source familiar with the conversation tells me Putin began his conversation with President Trump and the US delegation by telling a joke about a short man raping a tall woman. That’s right, the Russian president began the conversation with a joke about rape. Not only was the joke wildly inappropriate, it left the Trump team puzzled. After the joke was translated into English, the US delegation looked perplexed, unable to understand the meaning of the punch line.
Before leaving Japan for South Korea, President Trump tweeted his extraordinary invitation to Kim Jong Un to rendezvous with him at the DMZ. The Twitter invite caught both Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and National Security Advisor John Bolton by surprise.
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
After some very important meetings, including my meeting with President Xi of China, I will be leaving Japan for South Korea (with President Moon). While there, if Chairman Kim of North Korea sees this, I would meet him at the Border/DMZ just to shake his hand and say Hello(?)!
6/28/19, 6:51 PM
North Korean state-controlled media responded to the tweet by calling the invitation “interesting,” but there was no indication at first of whether Kim would accept. Before flying out to South Korea, President Trump held a press conference in Japan. I asked about the prospect of Kim’s RSVPing with regrets.
“Will it be a bad sign if he doesn’t show up?” I asked.
“No. Of course, I thought of it because I know if he didn’t, everyone would say, ‘Oh, he was stood up by Chairman Kim.’ No, I understood that,” he answered, adding, “He follows me on Twitter.”
“He follows you on Twitter?” I asked.
“I guess so, because we got a call very quickly.”
The North Koreans did in fact call after the president’s tweet.
A source involved in the communication later told me the North Koreans reached out through a lower-level channel to say Kim Jong Un would not be able to respond to the invitation unless it was in writing. A Twitter invite did not count.
So, while the president was in meetings at the G20, the president’s team crafted a formal, written invitation, which the president signed between meetings.
Now the challenge was getting the invitation delivered. A US official called the North Koreans to arrange delivery, but the North Koreans did not pick up the phone. Several more calls went unanswered. The letter traveled aboard Air Force One when the president flew to Seoul and was promptly transported to the DMZ. But still, the North Koreans were not picking up the phone. Finally, somebody on the South Korean side of the DMZ pulled out a bullhorn and called over to the North Koreans to tell them to pick up the phone. They did, and the letter was handed over.
After some back-and-forth, the North Koreans agreed to the meeting. And just eighteen hours later, the president shook hands with Kim Jong Un at the line separating North and South Korea. The scene was chaotic because there had been virtually no advance preparations. President Trump walked with Kim over to the North Korean side, making history as the first sitting US president to set foot in North Korea. As they walked back to the South Korea side, they appeared uncertain where they were going.
This wasn’t a full-blown summit meeting. Trump had pitched it as a quick hello. But in reality it was a performance. Trump knew the meeting would dominate global news coverage, and it did. The nature of his invitation contributed to the drama by making it a diplomatic cliffhanger: Would he or would he not show up?
To Trump this was never about the substance; it was about the show. Trump and Kim spoke for about forty minutes, but there was no agreement beyond a commitment to keep talking. After all the fanfare, the North Korean nuclear program stood exactly where it had before. Trump was criticized for once again giving Kim Jong Un a great moment on the world stage without getting any concessions. And one person close to the president was also unhappy. John Bolton skipped the trip to the Demilitarized Zone, opting instead to fly to the capital of Mongolia for meetings that had nothing to do with Kim Jong Un.