CIA/MIKE POMPEO/NATIONAL SECURITY/NORTH KOREA/NUCLEAR: “CIA Director Mike Pompeo on Thursday [7-21-17] evening offered some of the most aggressive comments yet from the Trump administration with regard to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.
Although Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has in the past said the US was against forcing Kim out of power or the collapse of his government, Pompeo said that the administration needed to find a way to separate Kim from his growing nuclear stockpile.
‘It would be a great thing to denuclearize the peninsula, to get those weapons off of that, but the thing that is most dangerous about it is the character who holds the control over them today,’ Pompeo said in a discussion moderated by conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens at the Aspen Security Forum.
He continued, ‘So from the administration’s perspective, the most important thing we can do is separate those two. Right? Separate capacity and someone who might well have intent and break those two apart.’
Pompeo said both the intelligence community and the Department of Defense have been tasked with drafting plans for what ‘ultimately needs to be achieved’ with regard to the North Korean nuclear threat.”
-Eli Watkins, “CIA chief signals desire for regime change in North Korea,” CNN Politics, CNN.com, July 21, 2017 08:34am