For some in North Korea, Jared Kushner appeared to be a promising contact. As a member of the president’s family, they thought Kushner would have the ear of his father-in-law and be immune from the personnel changes that had convulsed the early months of the administration.
WASHINGTON — An American financier approached the Trump administration this past summer with an unusual proposition: The North Korean government wanted to talk to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser.
The financier, Gabriel Schulze, explained that a top North Korean official was seeking a back channel to explore a meeting between President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un, who for months had traded threats of military confrontation. Schulze, who lives in Singapore, had built a network of contacts in North Korea on trips he had taken to develop business opportunities in the isolated state.
For some in North Korea, Kushner appeared to be a promising contact. As a member of the president’s family, officials in Pyongyang judged, Kushner would have the ear of his father-in-law and be immune from the personnel changes that had convulsed the early months of the administration.
Schulze’s quiet outreach was but one step in a circuitous path that led to last week’s handshake between Trump and Kim at a colonial-style island hotel in Singapore — a path that involved secret meetings among spies, discussions between profit-minded entrepreneurs, and a previously unreported role for Kushner, according to interviews with current and former American officials and others familiar with the negotiations.
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In reaching out to Kushner, the North Koreans were following the example of the Chinese, who had early on identified the husband of Ivanka Trump as a well-connected “princeling,” who could be a conduit to Donald Trump and allow them to bypass the bureaucracy of the State Department.
The overture by Schulze, who had first met Trump family members several years ago when they were exploring business deals in Asia, came during a period of sharp division inside the administration over how to deal with North Korea’s growing nuclear arsenal, with some officials even advocating a pre-emptive military strike.
Other figures besides Schulze played important roles in bringing about Trump’s summit with Kim, not least South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in. But people familiar with the negotiations said Schulze’s early contacts were useful in setting in motion the diplomacy that led to Singapore.
Kushner did not play a direct role in back-channel negotiations with North Korean officials, according to people familiar with the matter. He instead notified Mike Pompeo, the CIA director at the time, about Schulze’s outreach and requested that the agency be in charge of the discussions.
It is unclear why Kushner thought the CIA — rather than the State Department — should take the lead, though he had an antagonistic relationship with Rex Tillerson, who was the secretary of state at the time, and a good rapport with Pompeo. It is also unclear whether Kushner’s lack of a permanent top-secret security clearance at the time was a factor.
The White House and the CIA declined to comment on Kushner’s contact with Schulze.
For Schulze, the scion of a family that made billions in mining, a thaw in the United States’ relationship with North Korea would be potentially lucrative. His firm, SGI Frontier Capital, adopts a high-risk strategy of investing in so-called frontier markets — Ethiopia, Mongolia and elsewhere. He did a number of small deals in North Korea before the Obama administration imposed new sanctions in 2016.
In a statement, Schulze said, “I do not discuss the nature of my business or personal relationships.”
Schulze is not the only person who has offered to act as a broker for talks between the United States and North Korea. More than a dozen people approached the State Department during the last year with claims to have ties to people high in the North Korean government, according to current and former officials. Most led nowhere.