While details about the diplomacy that led to King’s transfer remained scarce, the development was a rare example of cooperation between the United States, North Korea and China. The State Department said King was expected to return to the United States later on Wednesday.

King, 23, made a sudden dash into North Korea from the South on July 18 while on a civilian tour of their heavily fortified border and was immediately taken into North Korean custody.

Washington declined to declare him a prisoner of war despite heated debate within the government. For its part, North Korea appears to have treated his case as one of illegal immigration.

North Korea’s KCNA state news agency said King told Pyongyang he entered North Korea illegally because he was disillusioned about unequal U.S. society.”

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North Korea’s decision to expel King, published by KCNA, detailed the final results of an investigation into his border crossing. Last month, it said that he wanted refuge in North Korea or elsewhere because of maltreatment and racial discrimination within the U.S. army.

KING IN ‘GOOD HEALTH’

The Swedish government, which represents U.S. interests in North Korea because Washington has no diplomatic presence in the country, retrieved King in North Korea and brought him to China.

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters that King was met by the U.S. ambassador to Beijing, Nicholas Burns, in Dandong, China, a river city bordering North Korea. Miller said King flew from there to Shenyang, China, then to Osan Air Force Base in South Korea.

Expressing gratitude to Sweden and China, U.S. officials, citing U.S. diplomatic representatives who saw King, told reporters he appeared in good health and was “very happy” to be on his way home. He was able to speak with his family after his release from North Korea.

His release followed months of intense diplomacy, the U.S. officials said, adding that no concessions were made to the North in exchange for King.

“This incident, to our minds, demonstrates that keeping lines of communication open even when ties are strained is a really important thing to do and can deliver results,” one senior administration official said.

“We, again, stand by ready for any further diplomacy (with North Korea) that might be possible.”

Miller said he did not view King’s return as a sign of a wider breakthrough with North Korea and that China had not served as a mediator in the matter, but rather as a transit point for the soldier.

China’s embassy in Washington did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

DISCIPLINE FOR KING POSSIBLE

Jonathan Franks, spokesperson for King’s mother, Claudine Gates, said: “Ms. Gates will be forever grateful to the United States Army and all its interagency partners for a job well done.”

King’s uncle, Myron Gates, told ABC News in August that his nephew, who is Black, experienced racism during his military deployment, and that after he spent time in a South Korean jail, he did not sound like himself.

King, who joined the U.S. army in January 2021, faced two allegations of assault in South Korea. He pleaded guilty to one instance of assault and destroying public property for damaging a police car during a profanity-laced tirade against Koreans, according to court documents. He had been due to face more disciplinary measures when he arrived back in the United States.

King had finished serving military detention and was at the airport awaiting U.S. military transport to his home unit in the United States. Instead, he left the airport and joined a tour of the border area, where he ran across despite attempts by South Korean and U.S. guards to stop him.

One U.S. official said the military would consider administrative actions against King after he was evaluated, taken through a reintegration process and reunited with his family in the United States. The official declined to answer directly whether King would face a court martial.

A different U.S. official said King was heading to Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas, which is located at Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston. It is the same base that treated basketball star Brittney Griner in December last year after a prisoner swap with Russia ended her 10 months in Russian detention.

Source: Reuters

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Kang Sun Nam’s comments, reported on Thursday by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), came in response to the US sending a submarine with nuclear-armed ballistic missiles to South Korea this week for the first time in decades.

“The ever-increasing visibility of the deployment of the strategic nuclear submarine and other strategic assets may fall under the conditions of the use of nuclear weapons specified in the DPRK law,” Kang said in a statement, referring to his country by its official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Tensions between the US and North Korea have been on the rise in recent weeks with Pyongyang increasing its ballistic missile testing in defiance of Washington and international sanctions.

Late last week, the US, South Korea and Japan released a joint statement condemning the launch of a North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile days earlier.

“The United States reiterated that its commitments to defend the ROK [Republic of Korea, or South Korea] and Japan are ironclad and backed by the full range of capabilities, including nuclear,” the statement said.

The three allies went on to hold a joint military drill on Sunday.

On Wednesday, South Korea and Japan reported that North Korea had launched two more ballistic missiles.

The US and South Korea also held their first so-called Nuclear Consultative Group meeting this week. The White House said it provided a chance for the US to reaffirm its commitment to provide “extended deterrence” to South Korea.

“Any nuclear attack by North Korea against the United States or its allies is unacceptable and will result in the end of that regime, and the US and ROK sides highlighted that any nuclear attack by the DPRK against the ROK will be met with a swift, overwhelming, and decisive response,” the White House said in a statement after the talks.

On Thursday, North Korea slammed the nuclear meeting. “The phase of a military clash on the Korean Peninsula has surfaced as a dangerous reality,” the KCNA report said.

US soldier crosses border into North Korea

Amid the escalation, 23-year-old US soldier Travis King intentionally crossed into North Korea this week. US officials believe he is now in North Korean custody.

King had served nearly two months in a South Korean prison for assault and was due to travel back to the US, but he skipped his flight, joined a tour group to the demilitarised zone and subsequently ran across the border into North Korea at the village of Panmunjom.

On Wednesday, the US Department of State said the Pentagon had reached out to the North Korean military about the case but “those communications have not yet been answered”.

Former US President Donald Trump engaged in direct talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during his tenure, but high-level meetings between the two countries came to a halt under the current US president, Joe Biden.

After the first meeting between Trump and Kim in 2018, the nations said in a joint statement that North Korea was committed to “work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula”.

But the pledge was never followed by efforts to end the country’s nuclear weapons programme.

North Korea carried out its first nuclear weapons test in 2006 in violation of an international ban on such testing. Since then, the United Nations Security Council has unanimously passed numerous resolutions that have imposed sanctions on the country over its nuclear programme.

Last year, Russia and China vetoed a Security Council proposal to impose more penalties on North Korea, arguing that sanctions have not been effective in curbing its nuclear and missile programmes.

Source: Al Jazeera

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Pte Travis King, who was supposed to be heading to Fort Bliss, Texas, after finishing a prison sentence in South Korea for assault, ran into North Korea while on a civilian tour of the border village of Panmunjom on Tuesday. He is the first known American to be held in North Korea in nearly five years.

“Yesterday the Pentagon reached out to counterparts in the [North] Korean people’s army. My understanding is that those communications have not yet been answered,” Matthew Miller, a spokesperson for the US state department, said on Wednesday in Washington.

Miller said the White House, the Pentagon and the state department were working together to gather information about King’s wellbeing and whereabouts.

The motive for King’s border crossing is unknown. A witness on the same civilian tour said she initially thought his dash was a stunt until she heard an American soldier on patrol shouting for others to try to stop him. But King crossed the border in a matter of seconds.

The 23-year-old was serving in South Korea as a cavalry scout with the 1st Armored Division. Having been convicted of crimes in South Korea, he could be discharged from the military and face other potential penalties.

In February, a Seoul court fined him 5m won (£3,040) for assaulting an unidentified person and damaging a police vehicle in Seoul last October, according to a transcript of the verdict obtained by the Associated Press.

The ruling said King had also been accused of punching a man at a Seoul nightclub, though the court dismissed that charge because the victim did not want King to be punished.

The US secretary of the army, Christine Wormuth, said on Thursday that King “would have faced additional consequences” had he returned to the US as planned, though it was unclear if jail time was on the table.

He “had assaulted an individual in South Korea and had been in custody of the South Korean government and was going to come back to the United States and face the consequences in the army. And I’m sure that he was grappling with that,” she said.

“He may not have been thinking clearly, frankly, but we just don’t know.”

Wormuth said she was worried for King. She told the Aspen Security Forum: “It makes me very, very concerned that Pte King is in the hands of the North Korean authorities … I worry about how they may treat him.”

It was not clear how King spent the hours between leaving the airport on Monday and joining the Panmunjom tour on Tuesday. The US army realised he was missing when he did not get off the flight in Texas as expected.

King’s relatives said the soldier may have felt overwhelmed by his legal troubles and possible discharge from the military. They described him as a quiet loner who did not drink or smoke and enjoyed reading the Bible.

North Korea has previously held a number of Americans who were arrested for anti-state, espionage and other charges. But no other Americans were known to be detained since North Korea expelled Bruce Byron Lowrance in 2018.

During the cold war, a small number of US soldiers who fled to North Korea later appeared in North Korean propaganda films.

Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul, said: “North Korea is not going to ‘catch and release’ a border-crosser because of its strict domestic laws and desire to deter outsiders from breaking them.

“However, the Kim regime has little incentive to hold an American citizen very long, as doing so can entail liabilities.”

Other experts say it is unlikely North Korea will return King easily as he is a soldier who appeared to voluntarily enter North Korea, though many previous US civilian detainees were released after the US sent high-profile missions to Pyongyang to secure their freedom.

The US and North Korea, who fought during the 1950-53 Korean war, still have no diplomatic ties. Sweden has provided consular services for Americans in past cases, but Swedish diplomatic staff reportedly have not returned to North Korea since it ordered foreigners to leave at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“What I will say is that we here at the state department have engaged with counterparts in South Korea and with Sweden on this issue, including here in Washington,” Miller said.

Jeon Ha-kyu, a spokesperson for South Korea’s ministry of defence, said on Thursday his department was sharing related information with the US-led UN command in South Korea, without elaborating.

Currently, there are no known, active dialogues between North Korea and the US or South Korea.

North Korea has been increasing its criticism of the US over its recent moves to bolster its security commitment to South Korea.

Earlier this week, the US deployed a nuclear-armed submarine in South Korea for the first time in four decades. North Korea later test-fired two missiles with the potential range to strike the South Korean port where the US submarine docked.

Source: The Guardian

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Court documents showed he also damaged a police car and had recently spent time in a detention facility in Seoul. 

The 23-year-old serviceman had been recently released and was being sent back to the US when he escaped.

He joined a tour of the Joint Security Area and fled into North Korea, which has not commented so far.

It remains unclear what his intentions were for crossing the border. US authorities have said that he did so “wilfully, of his own volition” and expressed concern about his well-being. 

Private 2nd Class (PV2) King’s mother Claudine Gates told ABC News she could not imagine her son doing such a thing. He “had to be out of his mind”, she said.

Ms Gates said she had last heard from the US soldier “a few days ago”, when he told her he would soon be returning to Fort Bliss, his army base in Texas.

PV2 King was reportedly investigated for assault in South Korea in September 2022. According to local media, he was suspected of punching a Korean national in a nightclub in Seoul. 

He was fined 5m won (£,3,000; $3,950) for “repeatedly kicking” the back door of a police car and screamed “foul language” at the officers trying to apprehend him. 

Local reports quoting officials said he was released on 10 July after serving two months in jail on assault charges, but did not elaborate.

After his release, he was placed under military observation for about a week in South Korea. 

He was escorted to the airport in Incheon, near Seoul, for a flight back to the United States, where he was to face disciplinary action.

But he did not board the plane. The Korea Times, quoting an airport official, said he arrived at the boarding gate alone as military police officers were not allowed to accompany him all the way to the plane.

At the gate, he reportedly approached an American Airlines official and claimed his passport had gone missing. An airline employee then escorted him out of the departures area.

After parting ways with his escort, he is reported to have left the terminal to embark on a tour of the Demilitarised Zone, or DMZ, between North and South Korea, where foreigners can visit via tour companies.

It is not clear how PV2 King managed to get on one of these tours, as it typically takes between three days and a week for an individual to be authorised, and the trips are usually closely monitored. 

An eyewitness on the same border tour described hearing the soldier laughing loudly before making a run across the border. 

The United Nations Command, which operates the DMZ, said it believed the soldier was now in custody of the North. A senior US commander said there had been no contact with the soldier and the incident was being investigated by US Forces Korea.

Retired General Robert Abrams, a former commander of United States Forces Korea, told BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight he believed we were “seeing the opening act” of a “tragedy of the utmost proportion”.

“I’ve got serious concerns for [PV2 King’s] health and welfare… I was actually glad they didn’t shoot him on sight when he came sprinting across the military demarcation line,” Ret. Gen Adams said. “He’s in for a very rude awakening on how North Koreans treat people who unlawfully enter the country.”

Source: BBC

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“The EU calls on DPRK to take credible steps towards complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization,” the statement said.

In this statement, the EU also called on North Korea to stop escalating military tensions by launching missiles and drones.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, at the sixth general assembly of the Workers’ Party of Korea of ​​the eighth meeting, announced the need to strengthen the country’s nuclear forces, mass production of nuclear warheads, and create a new intercontinental ballistic missile system. Quickly complete an instant counterattack and reconnaissance satellite project and launch vehicles for it.

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Russian forces in Ukraine are burning through ammunition faster than the country’s defense industry can replace it, U.S. National Intelligence Director Avril Haines said Saturday.

Russia is using up ammunition “quite quickly,” prompting Moscow to look to other countries for help, including North Korea, Haines told NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell at a panel at the Reagan Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California.

Asked how fast Russia was using up ammunition, Haines said: “I don’t think I can give you precise numbers in this forum. But quite quickly. I mean, it’s really pretty extraordinary.”

She added: “And our own sense is that they are not capable of indigenously producing what they are expending at this stage.

So that is going to be a challenge.”

The Pentagon said last month that Russia is firing off a staggering 20,000 artillery rounds a day, even as it has suffered a series of setbacks on the battlefield. Echoing previous statements from Biden administration officials, Haines said that Russia was using up precision munitions even faster than its conventional ammunition.

The Biden administration previously said Russia has turned to North Korea to secure more supplies of artillery ammunition. Haines said that the extent of North Korea’s assistance appeared limited but that it was something the intelligence community would continue to monitor closely.

“We’ve indicated we’ve seen some movement, but it’s not been a lot at this stage,” she said of North Korea’s role.

The looming shortage of ammunition was just one of a number of challenges facing Russia’s military, Haines said, citing problems with morale and logistics as well. 

The intelligence chief said that the tempo of the war in Ukraine appeared to be slowing down with the onset of winter and that both militaries would be trying to reset and regroup for more fighting in the spring. But she said the intelligence community had a “fair amount of skepticism” that Russian forces would be sufficiently prepared for renewed clashes in March. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin was “surprised” at his military’s disappointing performance after its invasion of Ukraine in February, according to Haines.

“I do think he is becoming more informed of the challenges that the military faces in Russia. But it’s still not clear to us that he has a full picture at this stage of just how challenged they are,” Haines said.

Putin has not changed his political objective to effectively control Ukraine, but it is unclear whether he would accept scaled back military ambitions, Haines said.

“I think our analysts would say he may be willing to do that on a temporary basis with the idea that he might then come back at this issue at a later time,” she said. 

Although recent protests pose no serious challenge to Putin’s grip on power, criticism of the conduct of the war inside Russia has been on the rise from political figures, and that could influence his decision-making on the conflict, according to Haines.

“I think it is fair to say, from our perspective, that Xi’s voice on this is going to be, obviously, among the most compelling to Putin on this issue,” Haines said. 

As for recent protests in China over Covid-19 quarantine rules, Haines said the public displays of anger did not pose a risk to overall stability or the survival of the regime. But she said, “How it develops will be important for Xi’s standing.”

The widespread protests contradicted the Chinese government’s narrative about how the country functions more smoothly than more chaotic democracies, and the Covid-19 restrictions had negatively affected the Chinese economy, Haines said.

Despite the challenges in having to balance containing the virus, addressing public anger over quarantine protocols and ensuring economic growth, Xi has been “unwilling to take a better vaccine from the west,” she said.

The U.S. intelligence director, the first woman to hold the job, also said there were good reasons to be concerned about Chinese-owned Tik-Tok.

Asked whether parents should be worried about their children using the popular video platform, Haines said: “I think you should be.”

China is developing frameworks for collecting foreign data and had the capacity to “turn that around and use it to target audiences for information campaigns or for other things, but also to have it for the future so that they can use it for a variety of means that they’re interested in,” Haines said.

FBI Director Christopher Wray recently warned that he had serious concerns about Tik-Tok, saying that the Chinese government could use it to collect data on millions of users or to control the recommendation algorithm, which could be used to intentionally sway public opinion.

Haines said that more than two months of women-led protests in Iran were “remarkable” but that the Iranian regime did not see the unrest as posing an imminent threat to staying in power. However, the deteriorating economy and the protests over time could fuel unrest and instability, she said.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Iran’s intelligence services have adopted an “extraordinarily aggressive” stance targeting critics both at home and abroad, according to Haines.

Haines’s office is overseeing an assessment of the potential risk to national security from the disclosure of documents taken from former President Donald Trump’s home in Mar-a-Lago. But she and other intelligence officials have declined to comment on the case, which is a Justice Department investigation.

NBC News’ Mitchell asked Haines what would happen if an intelligence officer removed classified documents and then resisted handing them back. 

After a long pause, Haines laughed and said: “Please don’t do this!”

Source: CNBC

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