South Korea's national security adviser Kim Kwan-Jin, left, shakes hands with Hwang Pyong-So , director of the North Korean military's General Political Bureau, the top military post in North Korea, during a luncheon meeting. (Korea Pool/AFP/Getty Images) 
 
 North and South Korea have agreed to hold another round of high-level talks after a top-level Northern delegation, including the men thought to be second and third in command behind Kim Jong Un, paid a surprise visit to the South on Saturday. 
 
 The unusual and unannounced trip — the first such high-level visit in more than five years — comes at a time of intense speculation about North Korea’s leadership, given that Kim, the third-generation leader of the communist state, has not been seen in public for a month. 
 
 It also comes amid a steady stream of disparaging comments from both sides, with South Korean President Park Geun-hye recently calling for the international community to help in “tearing down the world’s last remaining wall of division,” and the North calling Park an “eternal traitor” in response. 
 
 “It’s a big deal, it’s really a big deal, because it’s completely unprecedented,” said Andrei Lankov, a North Korea scholar who studied in Pyongyang and now teaches in Seoul. 
 
 The 11-strong group from North Korea was led by Hwang Pyong So, widely considered Kim’s deputy. He’s the top political official in the Korean People’s Army and vice chairman of the National Defense Commission, which is led by Kim. 
 
 North Korean state TV said leader Kim Jong Un is suffering from "discomfort," the first official acknowledgment that he is unwell after a period out of the public eye. (Reuters) 
 
 Another member of the delegation was Choe Ryong Hae, who has performed both of the roles currently performed by Hwang and is chairman of the State Physical Culture and Sports Commission. That job was previously held by Jang Song Taek, the influential uncle that Kim Jong Un had executed last December, according to NK News, a Web site that monitors the North. 
 
 The third top official was Kim Yang Gon, secretary of the central committee of the Korean Workers’ Party and head of the United Front Department, the North’s equivalent of the South’s unification ministry. 
 
 The delegation had lunch with South Korea’s unification minister, Ryoo Kihl-jae, and Kim Kwan-jin, the national security adviser to Park. South Korean media showed photos of Ryoo shaking hands with Hwang, in North Korean military uniform bedecked with medals, and later sitting down for a meeting together.They also met South Korean Prime Minister Chung Hong-won, who later said he viewed the visit as a good omen. “I hope that it will lead to South-North cooperation and exchanges,” his office said he told the North Koreans, according to Yonhap News. 
 
 The two sides agreed to hold another round of talks, perhaps even before the end of this month, and in a sign of what counts as progress when it comes to diplomatic relations with North Korea, the delegation from Pyongyang agreed to call them “talks.” 
 
 “The delegates agreed to have working-level consultations on specific matters ahead of the high-level meeting,” a spokesman for the South’s unification ministry said in a statement after the meetings. “The North explained that it intends to continue inter-Korean dialogue by naming the upcoming meeting the second round of talks.” 
 
 However, the North Koreans did not meet Park, the South Korean president, with the spokesman saying a meeting “was not realized due to limited time.” 
 
 Still, the sudden visit, which analysts said appeared to take South Korea by surprise, sparked talk of a thaw on the divided peninsula. The delegation arrived Saturday morning, ostensibly to attend the closing ceremony of the Asian Games, which had been held in Incheon, the airport city about an hour west of Seoul. 
 
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 “This group has way too much firepower for the closing ceremony of the Asian Games,” said John Delury, a North Korea watcher at Yonsei University in Seoul. “The games are a subterfuge for some kind of inter-Korean movement. I do think they’re coming with a substantive agenda for Park.” 
 
 This is the highest-level North Korean delegation to visit the South since 2009, when two top officials — including Kim Yang Gon, who visited again Saturday — visited to pay the North’s respects after the death of Kim Dae-jung, the president who championed rapprochement between the two Koreas. 
 
 Lankov said North Korea appeared to be enlarging its “charm offensive” as it tries to “get away from excessive Chinese influence.” North Korea’s foreign minister has been traveling the world, speaking to the United Nations General Assembly last month and now visiting Russia. Officials have been holding talks with the Japanese government over a decades-old abduction dispute. 
 
 Even as his top aides visited South Korea, Kim Jong Un remained mysteriously missing from the public eye. He has not been seen since Sept. 3, and his unusual absence from a session of the Supreme People’s Assembly in Pyongyang last month was followed by even more unusual reports in the state media that he was in an “indisposed condition.” 
 
 This triggered rumors covering every possibility from a stroke to a coup d’etat. A South Korean newspaper reported that the leader is merely recovering from surgery on both ankles, although, as with most reports about North Korea, this cannot be verified. 
 
 The visit of such a high-level delegation to South Korea on Saturday — combined with the flurry of other trips — added weight to the theory that Kim is simply ill, Delury said. 
 
 “This kind of travel would be way too out there if anything serious was going on in North Korea, so I don’t think it’s a sign of a coup,” he said. “But to what extent are they doing this because of all the speculation? We can’t rule out that this is part of a campaign to show that everything is normal there.” 
 
 If the Asian Games were just a pretense, it was one that the North Koreans were keeping up. 
 
 “As I watched some people [in the stands] shouting unification slogans and waving unification flags on TV, I’m proud that the sports sector is taking the initiative in terms of the national unification,” Choe said Saturday, according to reports from Seoul. 
 
 North Korea competed at the Asian Games, with its men’s soccer team playing South Korea in the final this week. The South won 1-0. 
 
 While both Koreas espouse unification for the peninsula, divided since the end of World War II, each has different ideas about what a reunited country should look like: The industrialized South thinks capitalism and democracy should prevail, while the communist, impoverished North maintains that its system is morally superior. ||||| Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The BBC's Stephen Evans says the "out of the blue" visit suggests a hint of changed attitudes in North Korea 
 
 North and South Korea have agreed to resume formal high-level talks that had effectively been suspended since February, reports from South Korea say. 
 
 The agreement came during a surprise visit to South Korea by North Korean officials for the closing ceremony of the Asian Games. 
 
 The visit was led by two top-ranking North Korean officials seen as close aides to leader Kim Jong-un. 
 
 Both sides were said to have agreed to meet again within the next few weeks. 
 
 Hwang Pyong-so, seen as the second-most powerful man in North Korea, held talks with Ryoo Kihl-jae, the South's reunification minister, on Saturday after flying to Incheon to attend the sporting event. 
 
 Image copyright AP Image caption Both sides agreed to hold high-level talks before the end of the year to try to improve relations 
 
 Mr Hwang is the top political officer at the Korean People's Army. The other two members of the North's delegation were Choe Ryong-hae and Kim Yang-gon - key members of the ruling Workers' Party. 
 
 It is not known what was discussed at the meeting and neither party has commented publicly on the talks. 
 
 A change of tack 
 
 The BBC's Stephen Evans in Seoul says the talks are something of a breakthrough given the level of insult thrown at the South by the North in recent years. 
 
 Relations between the two have been practically non-existent for four years, but the North's economic troubles seem to have forced a change of tack, our correspondent adds. 
 
 The two Koreas remain technically at war because the 1950-53 conflict was ended with a truce. 
 
 The surprise meeting comes amid ongoing speculation about the health of the North's leader. 
 
 Mr Kim has not been seen in public since 3 September. A recent official documentary showed him limping. 
 
 Meanwhile, North Korea's ambassador to the UN, So Se Pyong, said on Friday that the country was ready to resume talks on its nuclear programme. 
 
 In an interview with Reuters news agency, Mr So also said the North was not planning any missile or nuclear tests. 
 
 North Korea pledged to abandon its nuclear programme in 2005, but it has been conducting missile and nuclear tests since the negotiations broke down in 2008. ||||| North Korea's three officials closest to its leader Kim Jong-un made a surprise visit to South Korea on Saturday, signaling an ease of tensions on the Korean Peninsula. 
 
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 The highest level visit in five years was announced by the South's government only an hour before the delegation arrived at Incheon International Airport on Kim's personal presidential, Russian-made aircraft. 
 
 Pyongyang's 11-member delegation was led by Hwang Pyong So, 66, who - with five promotions this year alone - has become the second most powerful official after Kim. He is the top political officer for the Korean People's Army, the vice chairman of the powerful National Defense Commission and the vice marshal of the army. 
 
 The delegation also included Choe Ryong-hae, who had been the North’s second most powerful official until Hwang replaced him, and Kim Yang-gon, a top Communist Party official who had orchestrated numerous North-South high level talks in the past. 
 
 In a closed-door lunch meeting, the delegation talked with South Korean Unification Minister Ryoo Kihl-jae and national security director Kim Kwan-jin. Unification Ministry spokesman Lim Byeong Cheol told reporters that there were no plans for the North Koreans to meet with President Park. 
 
 Details of the lunch meeting were not made public except that the two sides agreed to more talks at the end of this month or in November. 
 
 Hwang and his entourage attended the closing ceremony of the Asian Games later in the evening. 
 
 After months of tensions, including a steady stream of insults between the divided neighbors and an unusual number of North Korean missile and rocket tests, expectations for a breakthrough weren't high, but even the visit itself was significant, allowing valuable contact between confidants of North Korea's authoritarian leader and Seoul's senior official for North Korean affairs. 
 
 One analyst called it a "golden opportunity" for South Korean President Park Geun-hye to test North Korea's willingness, at the highest levels, to improve shaky ties, but it seemed unlikely that Park would meet with the aides to North Korea's supreme leader, Kim Jong-un. 
 
 The visit comes amid rumors in Seoul about the health of Kim, who has made no public appearances since September 3 and recently skipped a high-profile event he usually attends. A recent official documentary showed footage from August of him limping, overweight and mentioned his "discomfort." 
 
 High-level North Korean visits to South Korea have been scarce since inter-Korean relations became strained after Park's conservative predecessor, Lee Myung-bak, took office in early 2008 with a tough line on the North. Attacks blamed on North Korea in 2010 killed 50 South Koreans. 
 
 The last such senior visit south was in 2009, when high-ranking Workers' Party official Kim Ki Nam and spy chief Kim Yang Gon, the same official who visited Saturday, came to pay their respects to the late liberal South Korean President Kim Dae-jung. The North Koreans met President Lee, conveyed a message from then leader Kim Jong Il and discussed inter-Korean cooperation. 
 
 Besides the North Korean test firings of about 100 rockets and missiles this year, both sides have leveled harsh criticism at each other, with North Korean state media calling the South Korean president a prostitute. 
 
 Word of the North's participation in the Asian Games was welcomed as a step forward. 
 
 North Korea boycotted the 1986 Asian Games and the 1988 Summer Olympics, both in Seoul, but attended the 2002 Asian Games in Busan, the 2003 University Games in Daegu and the 2005 Asian Athletics Championships in Incheon. Those last three came during an era of liberal governments in Seoul that were more accommodating to Pyongyang. 
 
 North Korea had said ahead of these games that it wanted to send both athletes and cheerleaders but later balked at sending cheerleaders because of what it called South Korean hostility. 
 
 The success at the Asian Games for both Koreas, which were in the top 10 for gold medals, is a source of pride for all Koreans, said one of the North Korean officials, Kim Yang Gon, a secretary in the ruling Workers' Party and senior official responsible for South Korean affairs, according to the YTN TV network. Choe Ryong Hae, another Workers' Party secretary and chairman of the State Physical Culture and Sports Guidance Commission, also attended. 
 
 The North Korean officials planned to fly back home later Saturday after the games' closing ceremonies. 
 
 The Associated Press contributed to this story.
– If Kim Jong Un's disappearance from the public arena in recent weeks wasn't strange enough, now factor this in: The No. 2 and No. 3 leaders of North Korea made a surprise visit today to South Korea, reports the Washington Post. Delegations from both nations held their first high-level talks in five years, and while no details were released, they agreed to another round later this month or in November, reports ABC News. Leading the North's delegation was Hwang Pyong So, who has risen this year to become the second most powerful person behind Kim. “It’s a big deal, it's really a big deal, because it’s completely unprecedented,” a North Korea scholar who teaches in Seoul tells the Post. The BBC's Stephen Evans suspects that the North's economic troubles have forced the nation to ditch its old approach of hurling insults and threats at its neighbor. As for Kim, there's still no official explanation for his absence from public events, save for a documentary that showed him limping and referred to his "discomfort." Among the theories: Maybe gout or bum ankles.