Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty
SEOUL—When Mike Pompeo as CIA director secretly met North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang two months before Kim and President Donald Trump’s notorious summit, Kim greeted him with the line, “Mr. Director, I didn’t think you’d show up. I know you’ve been trying to kill me.” Pompeo—assuming all was in jest—shot back, “Mr. Chairman, I’m still trying to kill you.”
The Daily Beast has learned that Kim was not joking at all.
A source close to an assassination plot has told The Daily Beast that there was an active plan “to topple the Kim regime.” And a former officer at South Korea’s National Intelligence Service confirms that the intel agency was providing financial backing for a plan that would have shocked the world. North Korea believed the CIA was also part of the plot.