Pompeo photos - Trump's media play on Korea summit?

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un shakes hands with the former CIA director, now U.S. Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo in Pyongyang over the 2018 Easter weekend. / AFP-Yonhap

By Oh Young-jin

The case might be based on a great deal of circumstantial evidence without the smoking gun.

But throw into the mix U.S. President Donald Trump's predilection for people's attention, and a credible case could be made.

Trump's White House has released photos showing Mike Pompeo meeting North Korean leader Kim Jong-un during Pompeo's secret visit to Pyongyang over the Easter weekend in April. Pompeo, then Director of Central Intelligence, is now U.S. Secretary of State.

The release of the photos was sudden and timed to coincide with the beginning of the inter-Korean summit between President Moon Jae-in and the North's Kim just before Moon left in a motorcade for the summit at the Pammunjeom truce village.

The photos were generously used by news sites because Pompeo's Pyongyang visit was supposed to be a chance for the U.S. to talk directly with the North about the Kim-Trump summit. Of course, it failed to beat the summit fever but still nicely projected the U.S. role in the Friday summit, which is often portrayed as a stepping stone to the North-U.S. summit.

It would not be a terrible stretch to think that if the release were a media play, Moon and Kim was supposed to be the receiving end of it.

Now Moon and Trump have shown subtle differences about their stated goal of denuclearizing the North, with the North not having said clearly that it is willing to give up nuclear weapons. Therefore, Trump may have wanted to remind the two Korean leaders that they cannot not do a deal without his approval.

Trump told U.S. Fox news some unknown aspects of the Pompeo visit ― for instance, the American master spy was not scheduled to meet Kim, but they managed to say hello to each other.