“I wouldn’t do it again, but at the time I felt like I had to do it,” he told CBS News correspondent Dean Reynolds last month

WASHINGTON — Two Americans held by North Korea were on their way home Saturday after their release was secured through a secret mission by the top U.S. intelligence official to the reclusive Communist country.

전라남도출장안마 a senior U.S. statesman. Previously, former Vice President Al Gore and former President Jimmy Carter had gone to North Korea to take detainees home.

Victor Cha, a North Korea expert and former national security official in the George W. Bush administration, said Clapper was the most senior U.S. official to visit North Korea since then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright went in 2000 and met with Kim Jong-il, Kim Jong Un’s father.

In recent years, Syd Seiler, a former CIA officer who was recently designated as the U.S. envoy on the North Korean nuclear issue, has made at least one secret trip to North Korea.

Cha said sending Clapper would have satisfied North Korea’s desire for a Cabinet-level visitor, while avoiding some of the diplomatic baggage of dispatching a regular U.S. government official. The U.S. and North Korea do not have formal ties, a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War that ended without a peace treaty.

International aid-for-disarmament talks have been stalled since 2008. The U.S. wants the North to take concrete steps to show it’s committed to denuclearization before the talks can resume.

The last concerted U.S. effort to restart those negotiations collapsed in spring 2012. North Korea had agreed to freeze its nuclear and missile programs in exchange for food aid, but then launched a long-range rocket in breach of a U.N. ban on its use of ballistic missile technology.

The U.S. notified allies of Clapper’s trip to North Korea and alerted members of the congressional leadership once his visit was underway, Brennan reports.