by BLOOMBERG

SEOUL • South Korean President Moon Jae-in will send his top national security advisor as well as his chief spy as special envoys to Pyongyang today in a bid to persuade Kim Jong-un to open talks with Washington, in the latest bid to avoid a potential conflict over the country’s nuclear programme.

The 10-member group will be led by Chung Eui-yong, national security advisor, and Suh Hoon, the chief of the National Intelligence Service.

They will meet with North Korean officials on the two-day trip, Moon’s top communication officer Yoon Young-chan said at a briefing.

They will discuss the possibility of US and North Korea talks “aimed at denuclearisation” and inter-Korean relations, he said.

The envoys will then travel to Washington to discuss the result of the meeting, Yoon said, adding that South Korea will closely coordinate with Japan and China.

Moon’s intention to dispatch his top aides, revealed after a 30-minute phone conversation with US President Donald Trump last Thursday, came less than a month after Kim invited Moon to visit Pyongyang.

The US and North Korea exchanged war threats last year as Kim detonated his most powerful nuclear device and test fired intercontinental ballistic missiles.

While both the US and the North say they’re open to talks and South Korea is eager to broker an agreement, how much each party will concede in talks is unclear.

The White House’s statement following the Trump-Moon phone conversation said the two leaders “noted their firm position that any dialogue with North Korea must be conducted with the explicit and unwavering goal of complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearisation”.

Moon also wants to rid North Korea of nuclear weapons, but his own road map for North Korea’s denuclearisation consists two steps: Freeze first and complete disarmament second.

North Korea’s spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs told the state-run Korean Central News Agency late on Saturday that it won’t accept US preconditions.

“We have intention to resolve issues in a diplomatic and peaceful way through dialogue and negotiation, but we will neither beg for dialogue, nor evade the military option claimed by the US,” it said.

The 10-member group will also include Vice Unification Minister Chun Hae-sung, who has been working at the centre of the inter-Korean conversations since January.

Suh, who was deeply involved in the coordination and negotiation of two previous inter-Korea summits during his nearly 30-year stint at the intelligence agency, is widely believed to have been orchestrating moves for dialogue recently.

As the chief of the national security council overseeing inter-Korean relations, diplomacy and national defense, Chung is in charge of Seoul’s relations with the Trump administration. — Bloomberg