A source close to an assassination plot has told The Daily Beast that there was an active plan ''to topple the Kim regime''

When Mike Pompeo as CIA director secretly met North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang two months before Kim and President Donald Trump’s notorious summit, Kim greeted him with the line, “Mr. Director, I didn’t think you’d show up. I know you’ve been trying to kill me.” Pompeo—assuming all was in jest—shot back, “Mr. Chairman, I’m still trying to kill you.”

The Daily Beast has learned that Kim was not joking at all.

A source close to an assassination plot has told The Daily Beast that there was an active plan “to topple the Kim regime.” And a former officer at South Korea’s National Intelligence Service confirms that the intel agency was providing financial backing for a plan that would have shocked the world. North Korea believed the CIA was also part of the plot.

The team of would-be Kim-killers hatched their plot not only in Pyongyang but in Russia, where they could more easily obtain arms and hoped to avoid the intense scrutiny of Kim’s elite bodyguards.In Seoul, the person closest to the plot was Doh Hee-youn, CEO of the Citizens Commission for Human Rights of Abductees and North Korean Refugees. Doh communicated with plot leader Kim Seong-il, who was based in the Siberian city of Khabarovsk across the border in Russia, where he was supervising a North Korean team hired to cut down trees in surrounding forests.