President Donald Trump welcomed home three Americans formerly imprisoned by North Korea on Thursday, greeting them in a dramatic scene that played out in the early morning hours on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews.
The three released prisoners landed Thursday at the Maryland military facility, the home base for Air Force One, at 2:42 a.m., where they were greeted by President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and their respective wives. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who had secured the release of the men on a Wednesday trip to North Korea and arrived at Andrews minutes earlier on his own plane, also greeted the men.
“We want to thank Kim Jong Un,” Trump said after emerging from the medical plane that transported the three prisoners, which he and his wife had boarded to greet the men. “We very much appreciate that he allowed them to go before the meeting. He was nice in letting them go before the meeting . That was a big thing, very important to me.”
Andrews was decorated for the occasion with a massive American flag hanging from the ladders of two fire trucks. Trump joked with reporters that the event “probably broke the all time in history television rating for three o’clock in the morning.”
After arriving, the prisoners were taken to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, for further evaluation and medical treatment. The three men are Korean-Americans Kim Dong Chul, Kim Sang-duk (also known as Tony Kim), and Kim Hak-song. North Korea accused them of anti-state activities.
Pompeo, who flew the three prisoners out of North Korea on his plane Wednesday to Yokota Air Base outside Tokyo, told reporters then that the three men were in good health considering what they had been through and had been able to board the plane in Pyongyang without assistance. In Japan, the former detainees boarded a separate plane that offered better medical facilities, trailing Pompeo first to Anchorage, Alaska, for refueling and then to Andrews.
The release is seen as a further sign of thawing relations between the U.S. and North Korea, after Kim last month pledged to suspend missile tests and close a nuclear test site. But it also comes amid renewed uncertainty around how the summit will pan out, after Trump’s decision earlier this week to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal.
Pompeo’s trip to Pyongyang was scheduled to coincide with the president’s decision to remove the U.S. from the Iran agreement, a move intended to signal progress on one foreign policy front even as the administration withdrew from one of the signature diplomatic deals struck by former President Barack Obama.
Plans for a meeting between Trump and Kim mark a dramatic shift in the relationship between the two men, who spent weeks last summer hurling threats and insults at one another across the Pacific Ocean. A meeting between a sitting U.S. president and the leader of North Korea would be a historic first, and Pompeo’s first visit to North Korea over Easter weekend marked the first known meeting between a U.S. official and a North Korean leader since then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright met with Kim Jong Il, Kim Jong Un’s father, in 2000.
“My proudest achievement will be when we denuclearize that entire peninsula,” Trump said. “This is what people have been waiting a long time for. I’m very honored to free the three folks. The true honor is going to be if we have a victory in getting rid of nuclear weapons.”
Trump predicted that his planned meeting with Kim would be “a very big success” and suggested that his relationship with the North Korean leader is “starting off on a new footing.” Asked if he might visit North Korea, Trump responded “it could happen.”
“I really think he wants to do something. I think he did this because I really think he wants to do something and bring that country into the real world. I really believe that,” Trump said.
The ex-detainees thanked Trump for securing their freedom in a statement released by the State Department on their behalf and one spoke briefly with reporters through a translator. The man said the three prisoners “were treated in many different ways” and that he had been forced to do hard labor but also received medical treatment when he was sick. Their release, he said, is “like a dream we are very, very happy,” he said.
“We would like to express our deep appreciation to the United States government, President Trump, Secretary Pompeo, and the people of the United States for bringing us home,” the former prisoners said in their statement. “We thank God, and all our families and friends who prayed for us and for our return. God Bless America, the greatest nation in the world.”
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