Inside official Washington, the revelation of a secret meeting at the end of last month between Mike Pompeo and North Korean despot Kim Jong Un was almost as surprising for who led the U.S. delegation as for the fact that it happened at all. Ordinarily, the secretary of state would be expected to have made the clandestine journey to Pyongyang, as Madeleine Albright did at the turn of the century. Instead, with nuclear diplomacy between the United States and North Korea at the most precarious—and promising—point in decades, President Donald Trump dispatched his outgoing C.I.A. director, a former congressman with little diplomatic experience. Of course, there is little that is ordinary about the Trump administration, which currently has no permanent secretary of state at all. “If the State Department was fully staffed, up and running with expertise on the issue, then yeah, it would be a little bit strange to have the C.I.A. doing it,” Robert Carlin, a former U.S. intelligence officer and State Department adviser on North Korea negotiations, told me. “But that’s not the case, so somebody had to fill the vacuum . . . You use the tools that you have.”

The episode undoubtedly boosted Pompeo, who is currently awaiting Senate confirmation to take over the State Department from the unceremoniously axed Rex Tillerson. But among veteran foreign-policy hands, the C.I.A. director’s advance-man trip exposed critical fractures within an administration that has struggled to make use of Foggy Bottom’s diplomatic corps. “They have been completely sidelined from foreign policy, certainly in the last six months—if not the last year,” said a senior administration official familiar with the situation. “Tillerson was an afterthought when these decisions were being made.” And, as a current State Department staffer explained, nothing is likely to change until the president’s most recent Cabinet shake-up comes to a stop. “Until Pompeo comes on board it is like a waiting game,” they told me. “State is just out in the pastures.”

Indeed, the circumstances of the Pompeo-Kim meeting were primarily a function of timing. Tillerson was fired just days after Trump agreed to meet with Kim, leaving Pompeo—nominated by Trump to be Tillerson’s successor—to take the lead on the administration’s negotiations with Pyongyang. As The Washington Post first reported, Pompeo made contact through a back channel between the C.I.A. and its North Korean intelligence counterpart, the Reconnaissance General Bureau. On his visit to North Korea over Easter, Pompeo was reportedly accompanied by a small group of C.I.A. officials, but no one from the White House or the State Department. According to an administration official, Trump’s decision to tap Pompeo to meet with Kim was less about his role as spy chief than his close personal relationship with the former Tea Party lawmaker. “The relationships that we have built with the North Koreans in anticipation of any kind of summit have been more of a personality-driven tasking to Pompeo than necessarily a C.I.A.-is-leading-this tasking,” the official told me. “I think the president, in the absence of Tillerson and in the absence of other options and in the presence of a close tie that he feels to Pompeo and a trust he has in Pompeo—I think this has kind of been handed to Pompeo.”

Of course, nothing is permanent in Trumpworld. The larger question hanging over the upcoming North Korea summit—tentatively planned for late May or early June—is whether Pompeo continues to take point as he tangles with Trump’s equally ambitious national security adviser, John Bolton, a notorious war hawk who has advocated for a pre-emptive military strike. “I think [given] Bolton’s outlook on North Korea, which is well-known because he has written about it extensively, it wouldn’t be surprising if his lack of enthusiasm about a diplomatic solution to the North Korea problem doesn’t get in the way of this process going forward,” said Suzanne DiMaggio, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation who has engaged North Korean officials in unofficial discussions. “It does beg to question whether he’s the right person to be the president’s national security adviser at this time.”