WASHINGTON -- Vice President Mike Pence was ready to hold a meeting with North Korean officials during the Winter Olympics in South Korea, but Kim Jong Un's government canceled at the last minute, President Donald Trump's administration said Tuesday.
A potential meeting between Pence and the North Koreans had been the most highly anticipated moment of the vice president's visit to Pyeongchang, South Korea, where he led the U.S. delegation to the opening ceremonies.
Ahead of Pence's visit, Trump officials had insisted they'd requested no meeting with North Korea, but left open the possibility one could occur.
There was no indication that a meeting had indeed been planned -- and then canceled on short notice -- until Tuesday, more than a week after Pence returned to the United States. The State Department said Pence had been "ready to take this opportunity" but would have used it to insist North Korea abandon its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs.
"At the last minute, DPRK officials decided not to go forward with the meeting," said State Department spokesman Heather Nauert, using an acronym for the North's formal name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
"We regret their failure to seize this opportunity."
A Trump administration official said the U.S. had expected the meeting to occur Feb. 10, the last day of Pence's three-day visit to the Olympic Games.
The administration did not say exactly how much notice it received from North Korea that the meeting had been called off, nor where the meeting would have taken place or under what conditions.
Nor was it immediately clear whether North Korea scheduled the meeting before the vice president arrived in South Korea or after he had already arrived.
The day before landing in Pyeongchang, Pence told reporters that "we haven't requested a meeting with North Korea."
"But if I have any contact with them -- in any context -- over the next two days, my message will be the same as it was here today: North Korea needs to once and for all abandon its nuclear and ballistic missile ambitions," Pence said.
Pence's chief of staff, Nick Ayers, said Pence's promise of an "uncompromising message" might be why the North chose to abandon the meeting, "or perhaps they were never sincere about sitting down."
North Korea had no immediate response to the news out of Washington. But North Korean officials had said previously that they had no interest or intention of meeting with Pence in Pyeongchang during the games.
A potential high-level interaction between the U.S. and North Korea, which would have broken years of estrangement between the two countries, loomed over the Winter Games, where North Korea made a last-minute move to send its athletes to compete on a combined team with South Korea, the host of the games.
Since taking office, the Trump administration has been working to increase economic pressure on the North to abandon its nuclear program while also threatening military action, insisting at the same time that a diplomatic solution would be preferable for all sides.
North Korea sent its nominal head of state, Kim Yong Nam, the highest-level visitor to the South from the North in recent memory. It also sent Kim Jong Un's sister, Kim Yo Jong.
Ostensibly, Pence would have met with one or both of those significant North Korean figures.
Pence's guest for the Olympic Opening Ceremonies was Fred Warmbier, the father of Otto Warmbier, the U.S. student who died in 2017 shortly after he was released from North Korean detention.
Information for this article was contributed by Zeke Miller of The Associated Press.
A Section on 02/21/2018