WASHINGTON — An American financier approached the Trump administration last 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 Trump and Kim Jong-un, who for months had traded threats of military confrontation. Mr. 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, which has been ruled since its founding by a family dynasty, Mr. Kushner appeared to be a promising contact. As a member of the president’s family, officials in Pyongyang judged, Mr. 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.
Mr. Schulze’s quiet outreach was but one step in a circuitous path that led to last week’s handshake between Mr. Trump and Mr. 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 Mr. Kushner, according to interviews with current and former American officials and others familiar with the negotiations.
In reaching out to Mr. Kushner, the North Koreans were following the example of the Chinese, who had early on identified the 37-year-old husband of Ivanka Trump as a well-connected “princeling,” someone who could be a conduit to Mr. Trump and allow them to bypass the bureaucracy of the State Department.
And in reaching out to the White House, Mr. Schulze was taking advantage of an unusual opening in an administration where matters of policy and business often seem to blur. The overture by Mr. 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.
