>
Article snippet: SEOUL, South Korea — “This is where we’re going,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, told us, holding up a piece of notebook paper on which she had scrawled the letters “DMZ.” I and the other reporters traveling with President Trump on the third day of his 12-day Asia trip had been summoned before dawn to a hotel conference room, and were now being told what we had suspected since late the night before: Mr. Trump would make a surprise, unscheduled visit to the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. A commander in chief with a penchant for insulting a nuclear-armed dictator would be setting foot just steps away from Kim Jong-un’s troops. So sensitive was the trip, so heightened the security posture, Ms. Sanders said, that she had been instructed not even to utter the location aloud. We were sworn to secrecy until Mr. Trump returned here after the visit, a level of caution far greater than past presidents have taken when traveling to war zones in Iraq or Afghanistan. In White House parlance, news of the visit was “embargoed until wheels down” back in Seoul, South Korea’s capital. So began Mr. Trump’s clandestine and ultimately ill-fated attempt on Tuesday to visit one of the world’s most dangerous borders. In the end, dense fog forced Marine One and the helicopter convoy accompanying the president to turn back, costing a frustrated Mr. Trump a potent visual and leaving President Moon Jae-in of South Korea waiting at the DMZ for a co... Link to the full article to read more