Sung Kim

Sung Kim, Washington's special envoy to the six-party talks on North Korea's nuclear issues, has been named the next ambassador to Seoul. The government apparently has high hopes for the first Korean-American ambassador since the two nations established diplomatic ties in 1882.

A senior government official said, "We will grant agrément as soon as possible since we are confident that he is the right person who can improve bilateral relations further."

Born in Seoul in 1960, Kim moved to the U.S. in 1973 after his father, a diplomat at the Korean Embassy in Tokyo, retired from public service in the wake of the kidnapping of the then opposition leader Kim Dae-jung, who later became president. Sung was close to his father, taking a one-year leave of absence from the State Department to take care of him when he had lung cancer in 1993. Kim senior died a year later.

He had been one of the people aboard a light plane from Busan to Seoul that an unidentified assailant abducted to the North in 1958. He was released after 20 days.

Sung Kim's mother is a sister of a famous former anchorman, Yim Taek-geun, and his cousins are singer Yim Jae-beum and actor and singer Son Ji-chang.  

Kim has been dealing with North Korean affairs since he was appointed chief of political-military affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Seoul in 2003. He has attended almost all the six-party nuclear talks and visited North Korea a dozen times.

He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and Loyola University Law School and worked as a public prosecutor before becoming a diplomat. He is fluent in Korean, but always spoke English in negotiations with North Korea, where he gained a reputation for firmness.