A senior North Korean official traveled on Wednesday to the United States to meet with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, announced officials.
General Kim Yong Chol, right-hand man to the North Korean leader, will meet Pompeo in New York, they said.
North Korea's mission to the United Nations in New York is its sole diplomatic presence in the United States. That suggests Kim might have chosen to first go to New York because it would make it easier for him to communicate with officials in Pyongyang.
North Korea and the United States are still technically at war and have no diplomatic ties because the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty
US President Donald Trump confirmed the general was on his way in a tweet and boasted that Washington would have a "great team" for the talks aimed at resolving the nuclear standoff.
The visit is part of efforts to hold summit between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Trump hopes the summit will take place on June 12 in Singapore even after he had canceled it last week.
"Meetings are currently taking place concerning Summit, and more. Kim Young (sic) Chol, the Vice Chairman of North Korea, heading now to New York. Solid response to my letter, thank you!" Trump wrote.
Later, Moscow announced that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov would travel to North Korea on Thursday to discuss Pyongyang's nuclear program.
Last month the North's foreign minister Ri Yong Ho held rare talks with Lavrov in Moscow, part of a quickening effort to improve strained ties with global powers.
Russia was a member of six-nation talks held between 2003-8 aimed at persuading the North to scrap its nuclear program.
Japan is also keenly watching summit preparations. Trump will meet its Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Washington on June 7, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said.
"Since the president's May 24 letter to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, the North Koreans have been engaging," she said.
"The United States continues to actively prepare for President Trump's expected summit with leader Kim in Singapore."
Kim Yong Chol was at Beijing airport Wednesday for his flight to New York. He used the restricted VIP entrance, according to AFP journalists.
Pompeo's spokeswoman said it would be the third meeting between Pompeo -- who opened contacts with the isolated Pyongyang regime when he was still CIA director -- and Kim.
"We're still finalizing exactly what these meetings will look like," she said.
The trip is part of a flurry of diplomacy before the on-again, off-again summit.
Trump briefly scrapped the talks last week, citing "open hostility" from the North, but since then both sides have dialed down the rhetoric and the process appears to be back on track.
On Sunday US negotiators, headed by Washington's ambassador to the Philippines Sung Kim, began meeting North Korean counterparts in the truce village of Panmunjom that divides the two Koreas.
"They plan to have additional meetings this week," Sanders said.
Kim Yong Chol will be the most senior North Korean on US soil since Vice Marshal Jo Myong Rok met then-president Bill Clinton in 2000.
The general has played a front-seat role during recent rounds of diplomacy aimed at ending the nuclear stalemate on the Korean peninsula.
He sat next to Trump's daughter Ivanka, who is also a White House aide, during February's closing ceremony for the Winter Olympics in South Korea, an event that was seen as a turning point in the nuclear crisis.
He also accompanied Kim Jong Un on both of his recent trips to China to meet President Xi Jinping, and held talks with Pompeo when he travelled to Pyongyang.
The general is a notorious figure in South Korea, where he is accused of masterminding the 2010 sinking of the Cheonan navy corvette, which killed 46 sailors, an attack for which North Korea denies responsibility.
From 2009 to 2016, he also headed North Korea's General Reconnaissance Bureau, the unit tasked with cyber warfare and intelligence gathering.
General Kim is one of several North Korean officials under US sanctions, but State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said she was sure the US had taken appropriate steps to allow him to visit New York unmolested.
