hankyoreh

US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines exchanges a fist bump with South Korean Defense Intelligence Agency head Gen. Lee Young-choul as she arrives at the agency office in Seoul on Wednesday. (Yonhap News)

The US's top intelligence official will be paying a courtesy call on South Korean President Moon Jae-in just one week before Moon's summit with US President Joe Biden, the Hankyoreh has confirmed. The two sides are likely to have an in-depth discussion of solutions for the North Korean nuclear issue, a key item on the agenda for the summit scheduled for May 21.

A senior official at the Blue House said Wednesday that US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines will be visiting the Blue House on Friday to meet with Moon and Blue House Director of National Security Suh Hoon. The official said that Haines, Moon, and Suh are planning to discuss North Korea policy and the upcoming summit.

Haines arrived in South Korea via the US military's Osan Air Base, in Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province, on Wednesday. The following day, she departed from her accommodations at the Shilla Seoul and was driven across the Unification Bridge to The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). After a tour of the area, she was flown by helicopter back to Seoul.

Haines proceeded to the headquarters of South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff, at the Ministry of National Defense in Yongsan, Seoul, for meetings with intelligence officials such as Gen. Lee Young-choul, head of South Korea's Defense Intelligence Agency.

The purpose of Haines' visit to South Korea and Japan is presumed to be sharing the results of the Biden administration's review of North Korea policy, which was wrapped up at the end of April, to intelligence officials in those two countries.

On Tuesday, Haines met with Shigeru Kitamura, secretary general of Japan's National Security Secretariat and the coordinator of Japan's foreign policy and national security policy, in Tokyo. On Wednesday, she attended a trilateral meeting of intelligence chiefs alongside Park Jie-won, head of South Korea's National Intelligence Service, and Hiroaki Takizawa, Japan's cabinet intelligence director.

The Asahi Shimbun, a Japanese newspaper, noted that Haines's visit to Japan came on the heels of the conclusion of the Biden administration's review of its North Korea policy at the end of April and said she'd probably discussed affairs on the Korean Peninsula. Other newspapers suggested that the meetings may have been held to align policy toward China.

Considering that the three countries' top diplomats already met in London on the sidelines of a conference of G7 foreign ministers on May 4-5, Haines' visits to South Korea and Japan were apparently intended to facilitate communication through face-to-face meetings with the heads of their respective intelligence communities.

Park was presumably asked to visit Tokyo to narrow the considerable divide between South Korea and Japan on their approach to North Korea and present a united front between the three countries.

The second objective was to coordinate positions for the South Korea-US summit, which is scheduled to take place next week. According to Japanese news reports on Wednesday and Thursday, Haines only met with Kitamura during her visit to Tokyo without paying a courtesy call on Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga. Since Biden already met Suga on April 16, there was apparently no need for Haines to call on Suga.

But since Moon and Biden are planning to hold their first face-to-face summit on May 21, South Korea and the US need to carefully coordinate their agenda on sensitive and pressing issues, including their North Korea policy, their China policy, and their response to COVID-19, including vaccination.

During a meeting of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on April 14, Haines said that North Korea could resume nuclear tests and test launches of intercontinental ballistic missiles in a bid to open up fissures between the US and its allies. That was an unsurprising diagnosis for the head of the US intelligence community, which has long been skeptical of North Korea's willingness to denuclearize.

During the meeting at South Korea's Defense Intelligence Agency on Thursday, Haines reportedly stressed the need for South Korea and the US to share intelligence about North Korea and showed considerable interest in South Korea's apparent advantage in human intelligence about North Korea.

It doesn't appear that Haines' visit to the DMZ was intended to contact North Korean officials.

"While we can't know every detail of the movements of the US's top intelligence official, we would typically be informed about that sort of thing. We haven't received any intelligence about that," a senior official in the South Korean government said.

Bruce Klingner, senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation who previously served at the CIA's office in Seoul, told Voice of America that Haines' visit to the DMZ was designed to give her a better understanding of the current tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

Klingner said that the potential danger of the situation is obvious in the DMZ but that it's not as apparent in Seoul.

By Gil Yun-hyung, staff reporter

Please direct comments or questions to [english@hani.co.kr]