Pompeo: CIA focused on blocking shipments to North Korea

CIA Director Mike Pompeo said today the agency has spent the past year increasing its capacity to "interdict shipments" of cargo going into North Korea that could contain materials necessary to build nuclear weapons.

"They have moved at a very rapid clip," Pompeo said during an appearance at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

Pompeo, repeating an assertion he has made in the past, said North Korea is "a handful of months away" from developing a nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile capable of striking the United States.

"Their testing capacity has improved," he said, adding that a single successful test is unlikely to satisfy the regime of Kim Jong Un.

"The logical next step will be to develop an arsenal of weapons," he said.

Pompeo said the CIA believes Kim is a rational leader who wants to reunify the Korean Peninsula.

"It is more than just regime preservation that we are concerned he will use it for," he said.

Since becoming CIA director, Pompeo has established a new Korean Mission Center. He has also streamlined other parts of the CIA so that 40 percent of the decisions that used to be made by the director are no longer brought to his desk.

"Bureaucracies simply slow stuff down," he said.