Hospitals & Asylums
Updated: 2:32 PM EST
In From
the Cold
Charles Jenkins Tells His Story
of Life in North Korea
By JIM
FREDERICK, TIME
CAMP
ZAMA (Dec. 6) - Sergeant Charles Robert Jenkins arrived at south Korea's Camp Clinch
in 1964. Although he had already served in the Army for six years and had
overseas postings, this was by far his most perilous assignment.
The Americans patrolled along the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that
separated the two Koreas and occasionally drew hostile fire from North Korean
soldiers across the border—even though an official cease-fire had been in place
since 1953. Jenkins had served with enough distinction to find himself leading
reconnaissance missions.
But he couldn't cope with the danger.
A seventh-grade dropout from Rich Square, N.C., Jenkins possessed
an intelligence that military aptitude tests determined was far below average.
He had doubts about his ability to lead men into battle, and he slid into bouts
of depression and heavy drinking. His life was about to get worse.
Jenkins' unit, he had learned, was scheduled to ship out soon to
the live war in Vietnam, a prospect that terrified him. "I did not want to
be responsible for the lives of other soldiers under me," he said during
his court-martial trial last month. So Jenkins looked for a way out. He could
confess his cowardice to superiors and accept the consequences or attempt
somehow to flee. He chose the latter option.
In the wee hours of Jan. 5, 1965, having downed 10 cans of beer a
few hours earlier, Jenkins, then 24, made his move. At first he stuck to his
routine, taking command of a dawn patrol near the DMZ. But at about 2:30 a.m.,
he told his men he was going to check on something up ahead. He disappeared
down a hill and never returned. It would be nearly 40 years before he would
return to face the U.S. military.
As it turned out, Jenkins' plan wasn't much of a plan. He figured
he would cross into North Korea and then try to find a way to Russia, where he
would seek some form of diplomatic deportation back to the U.S. and turn
himself in. As he made his way toward the border, he tied a white T shirt over
the muzzle of his M-14 rifle and traipsed for several hours through the bitter
cold, stepping lightly so as not to trip a land mine. Not long after dawn,
Jenkins came upon a 10-ft.-high fence. A North Korean soldier spotted him,
alerted his comrades, and they whisked Jenkins inside. The American says he
realized almost immediately that he had made a mistake.
The North Koreans moved Jenkins to a one-room house that was home
to three other U.S. Army deserters: Private First Class James Joseph Dresnok,
Private Larry Allan Abshier and Corporal Jerry Wayne Parrish. Life in that
initial period, Jenkins says, was an unrelenting hell of hunger, cold and
abuse, both physical and psychological. There were no beds or running water;
electricity and heat were unreliable. The men were assigned a
"leader" who watched their every move, listened to their
conversations and constantly threatened them. They were forced to study
propaganda 10 hours a day, six days a week, and memorize it in Korean. (To this
day, Jenkins can recite lengthy propaganda monologues: "The Great Leader
Kim Il Sung taught ...") There were frequent exams. If any of the men
failed one, they would all be forced to increase their study to 16 hours a day,
every day. Jenkins' tale adds intriguing detail to the outside world's sketchy
understanding of North Korean society. No other American who has spent so long
a time or seen so much inside what may be the world's most despotic, secretive
and brutal society has escaped to tell the tale. While a steady stream of
Korean defectors, as well as escapees from its prison camps, has talked of the
horrors of the Hermit Kingdom, Jenkins is the first to provide a detailed view
of this little-known land from the perspective of an outsider who became
intimately familiar with its perverse inner workings.
While unique, Jenkins' experience mirrored the bleak existence
that North Koreans have lived through. Ordinary citizens are similarly
terrorized and watched over by "leaders" directed by the ruling
Workers' Party. Hunger and deprivation are the norm. Speaking in his barely
intelligible rural Carolina drawl, Jenkins says North Korean society is "backwards."
He seems, even now, like a man on the verge of collapse, his voice cracking as
he recalls painful memories. He frequently breaks down in tears.
When Jenkins and the three other American defectors were living
together, they barely got along. "It was uneasy," says Jenkins.
"The North Koreans made it like that." Under 24-hour surveillance,
the four managed a difficult coexistence. When one would commit an
infraction—failing to memorize propaganda lessons, complaining about something,
leaving the house without permission—their leader would get one of the other
soldiers (usually the 6-ft. 4-in., 280-lb. Dresnok) to severely beat the
offender. Jenkins soon concluded that feigning fealty was the only way to
survive. "In North Korea, when you lie they think you are telling the
truth," he says, "and when you tell the truth they think you are
lying. You learn real quick to say no when you mean yes, and yes when you mean
no."
The men shared the house for seven years, doing little apart from
studying. Gradually, they began to despair. They took risks, Jenkins says, that
they knew could lead to death. In his amused telling today, their escapades
sound almost as if they could be ripped from the pages of Tom Sawyer and
Huckleberry Finn—except that the punishment for getting caught would not be a
few lashes with a belt from Aunt Sally but execution.
The Americans even coined a word for doing things without
permission in this land of the unfree: "freedalisms." On one
occasion, the four swam across a river to pilfer a bag of coal tar from a
government construction site to repair their (illegal) fishing boat. "To
steal something from the North Korean government is immediately punishable by
death," Jenkins said during his court-martial. "I think we all
secretly wished we would be caught." Another time, they stumbled upon an
array of microphones in the attic of their house and blackmailed their leader
(who feared he would suffer if his superiors learned that the bugging had been
exposed) into taking one of them into town to buy wine. On yet another
occasion, Parrish sneaked out of the house one night to go looking for a girl
he had a crush on. But Jenkins, as a practical joke, had given him a bogus
address, and Parrish wandered the streets aimlessly for hours. He ultimately
got picked up in central Pyongyang by police, who suspected he was meeting a
spy contact; the leader had to get him out of jail.
Despite the Americans' penchant for freedalisms, the North Koreans
were, after seven years, evidently pleased with their behavior and apparent
indoctrination. In 1972, the four received North Korean citizenship
("Whether we wanted it or not," says Jenkins) and were ordered to
start teaching English at a military school in Pyongyang, run by the party's
Reconnaissance Bureau. Jenkins taught three 90-minute classes a day, 10 to 15
days a month. There were about 30 students in each class. "They wanted us
to teach them American pronunciation," he says, a prospect that seems
amusing considering many Americans would have trouble deciphering Jenkins'
thick accent.
Often the text consisted of translated utterances by Kim Il Sung,
who became the North's first leader in 1948, when Korea split into two
countries, and remained in power until his death in 1994. The classes studied
the guerrilla fighters who took on Japanese soldiers during World War II and
discussed the "news" students had heard that morning on
state-controlled radio.
Although the four Americans attained a new level of comfort around
this time, when they were allowed to move into their own homes, they were still
subject to constant surveillance, beatings and, occasionally, torture. For
example, according to Jenkins, in the summer of his first year teaching, the
short-sleeve shirts he began to wear to class with the warmer weather revealed
an old tattoo on his left forearm: an infantry insignia of crossed rifles above
the inscription U.S. army. Officials deemed the tattoo unacceptable, and
Jenkins was carted off to a hospital. A doctor, he claims, cut the flesh
bearing the offending words from his arm with a knife and scissors—and no
anesthetic. "The doctor told me that they save anesthetic for the
battlefield," he recalls.
Politics further scrambled Jenkins' life. The school suddenly shut
down, he says, just after a deadly exchange along the DMZ that became known as
the Panmunjom incident. On Aug. 18, 1976, two American officers were hacked to
death with axes and metal pikes by a band of North Korean border guards. The
melee broke out after the North Koreans tried to stop American and South Korean
soldiers from trimming tree branches that blocked the line of sight. The North
Koreans expected retaliation for the killings. "They mobilized for war
instantly," Jenkins says. "Everybody evacuated and joined up with
their units. It was very tense. Me, I just went home." Over the next
several years, Jenkins says, he was forced to study more propaganda and
translate English radio broadcasts into Korean. In 1981 the school finally
reopened, under the name Mydanghi University, and Jenkins taught there for four
more years. In 1985 he was fired for good, he says with a laugh, when the
Koreans realized that his English was actually having a negative impact on the
students' skills.
But Pyongyang had designs on Jenkins beyond teaching English. Like
his three colleagues, Jenkins was a prize cold-war souvenir: an American who
had voluntarily wandered into North Korean hands. He was an asset and certainly
more valuable alive than dead. "At some point, someone told us that Kim Il
Sung said that one American was worth 100 Koreans," says Jenkins.
"After that, I didn't think they would kill us without a good
reason." His first experience as a propaganda tool occurred soon after he
was captured, when he and his fellow deserters were profiled in a cover story
in Fortune's Favorites, a state-run publication. And in 1984 he was cast in the
North Korean film Nameless Heroes, playing the part of an evil U.S.
imperialist.
Jenkins also became convinced that he was unwittingly being used
as an asset in another way: to produce Western-looking children that the state
could turn into spies. In the mid-1970s, the Americans were allowed to consort
only with Korean women the government believed to be infertile. (When Abshier
unexpectedly got his Korean girlfriend pregnant, she disappeared.) The regime
then decided the deserters should marry foreigners from among the East
European, Asian and Middle Eastern women brought to North Korea against their
will.
Within a few years, all four Americans had wives. Dresnok married
a Romanian, and they had two sons. After she died, he married a half-Korean,
half-Togolese woman, and they had a son. Parrish wed a Lebanese Muslim, and
they had three sons. Abshier married a Thai woman, but they didn't have
children. (Jenkins says Parrish and Abshier are dead. Dresnok, he says, is
still living with his family in Pyongyang.) As might be imagined, these unions
weren't love stories in any traditional sense. In Jenkins' case, the government
in 1980 brought a young Japanese nurse to his door, instructing him to teach
her English. Hitomi Soga, 19 years Jenkins' junior, had been abducted from her
home on Sado Island in Japan two years earlier. Jenkins says they quickly fell
in love, and that his feelings for Soga saved his life. "When I met
her," Jenkins says, "my life changed a lot. Me and her together—I
knew we could make it in North Korea. And we did. Twenty-two years."
Just 38 days after their abrupt introduction, the pair asked to
get married, and the government assented. Jenkins and Soga have two daughters:
Mika, 21, and Brinda, 19. Only many years after the girls were born did Jenkins
start to suspect they were meant to be spy fodder, a theory that can't be
independently confirmed. "They wanted us to have children," he
concludes, "so they could use them later."
Back in the U.S., many Americans viewed Jenkins as nothing more
than a traitor, particularly given his occasional appearances in Korean
propaganda missives. His family had more faith. His nephew James Hyman, for
one, argued vigorously for decades that Jenkins was innocent, that he must have
been kidnapped on that twilight patrol.
But because little information filtered out of North Korea, by the
1990s Jenkins' plight had drifted into the stuff of legend. He had become a
curious cold-war footnote, presumed by many to be dead. Only in 1996 did a
Pentagon report state that it suspected there were at least four American
defectors, including Jenkins, still living in North Korea. For most of those
years, Jenkins was locked in a drab, hardscrabble existence, sustained only by
hope that somehow, someday, he and his family could leave North Korea. The
bleakness was tempered somewhat over the years, as Jenkins attained a standard
of living better than that of most North Koreans. But it was still far below
that of most other countries. The Jenkins house had no hot running water, the
electricity frequently did not work, and the heating was so feeble that during
winter family members wore five layers of clothing at home. By raising their
own chickens and growing their own vegetables, however, they usually had enough
food, even as others in the country were starving.
Indeed, life for Jenkins—as for many others in North
Korea—depended on cleverly working the system. He extended his $120-a-month
income by trading black-market currency with other foreigners. He made contacts
who could smuggle him the occasional English-language novel or Hollywood movie.
He rigged a radio to pick up the BBC and Voice of America. He even managed to
buy a handgun from a Chinese exchange student. But such liberties extended only
so far: even when Jenkins and his family got their hands on a Western
videotape, they had to take precautions, pulling the curtains over their
windows and turning the volume down to the threshold of audibility.
Such comforts did little for Jenkins' morale. He increasingly
became despondent about his children's future. Jenkins was particularly
distressed when the government enrolled the girls in Pyongyang's Foreign
Language College, an elite institution believed to be a training ground for
intelligence operatives. "I knew what they were trying to do," says
Jenkins, starting to sob. "They wanted to turn them into spies. My
daughters, they could pass as South Korean. There are lots of children of
American G.I.s and South Korean mothers in South Korea. No one would doubt them
for a second." Since he believed he was locked forever inside North Korea,
he didn't see how he could fight it.
Jenkins' world suddenly began to brighten two years ago. The
breakthrough was Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's meeting with North
Korean dictator Kim Jong Il (the son and successor of Kim Il Sung) in
Pyongyang. Kim confirmed Japan's long-held suspicion that North Korea had been
kidnapping Japanese citizens and forcing them to teach at its spy schools.
Soga, Jenkins' wife, was acknowledged to be among the abductees. After the
summit, she and the four others Pyongyang said were still alive returned to
Japan for what was meant to be a 10-day visit. They never went back to Korea.
Soga is viewed as a hero in Japan, and it became a national priority to bring
the rest of her family to Japan too. When Koizumi made a follow-up visit to
Pyongyang this past spring to retrieve the abductees' surviving family members,
he personally told Jenkins he would do everything he could to ensure that he
and his family could reunite in Japan. At the time, Jenkins resisted, fearing
North Korea's reaction. "They didn't want me to go," he says. "I
know if I left that time, I never would have made it to the airport."
After a series of negotiations to find a suitably neutral country
to receive Jenkins, Japan and North Korea finally arranged for the American and
his daughters to fly in July to meet Soga in Indonesia.
Jenkins had assured Pyongyang that he would return with his
daughters and try to persuade Soga to accompany them. "They promised me
all kinds of things if I came back with my wife," he says. "They
would give me a new car, a new house, new clothes, a new television. They told
me everything I wanted would be Kim Jong Il's gift." But Jenkins had
resolved instead to turn himself in to the U.S. military, against the urging of
his North Korean contacts and Dresnok (the two Americans had met up again in
Pyongyang). "They told me, 'If you go, you are going to jail for life,'
but I didn't care," Jenkins says. "I thought, If I go to jail, I go
to jail. As long as I get my daughters out."
Three days before he left, Jenkins saw Dresnok one final time.
Dresnok, Jenkins sensed, knew his friend was leaving for good, although the two
didn't dare discuss it. "During the time my wife was gone, Dresnok would
come over every day. We would have coffee and talk. He is all by himself
now."
As bleak as Jenkins knew North Korea to be, it was the only home
his daughters had known, and he had to handle their exit gingerly. He told his
younger daughter Brinda that they were leaving for good, but he felt he
couldn't tell Mika. "Mika didn't want to leave. They had her thinking that
Americans would kill you just as soon as look at you. They educate all Koreans
to believe that," says Jenkins. "Brinda also learned that, but she
also believed what I said too, though I couldn't ever talk much about what I
thought about North Korea. I was too scared to." When Mika arrived in
Indonesia, she panicked, Jenkins recalls, saying, "'Back in North Korea,
they are all going to call me a traitor.'" Jenkins told her, "America
calls me a traitor. If people knew everything, they might think
different."
While Jenkins was in Jakarta, Japanese officials became worried about
complications from prostate surgery he had had in North Korea, and on July 18
he was flown to Tokyo. While in a hospital there, Jenkins announced that when
he was well, he would turn himself in to the U.S. Army. On Sept. 11, Jenkins
presented himself at the gates of Camp Zama, a U.S. Army base about an hour's
drive from Tokyo. He approached Lieut. Colonel Paul Nigara, provost marshal of
the U.S. Army Japan, briskly saluted and said, "Sir, I'm Sergeant Jenkins,
and I'm reporting." The longest-missing deserter ever to return to the
U.S. Army, he was initially charged with one count of desertion, one of aiding
the enemy, two of soliciting others to desert and four charges of encouraging
disloyalty (charges that could have carried the death penalty).
When Jenkins arrived at his one-day general court-martial more
than seven weeks later, he had won a pretrial agreement in which he would plead
guilty only to desertion and aiding the enemy (for the time he spent teaching
English). In exchange, his penalty would be a maximum 30 days' confinement, a
demotion to private, forfeiture of all pay and benefits and a dishonorable
discharge. Military-law experts assume Jenkins won this relatively lenient
treatment in exchange for providing intelligence about North Korean spy
programs. Neither Jenkins nor the U.S. government will comment on any such
discussions.
During a day of dramatic testimony on Nov. 3, veteran defense
lawyer Captain Jim Culp, himself a former infantry sergeant, argued that
Jenkins shouldn't do time. Culp presented his client as a broken man who had
suffered so severely under North Korea's brutal regime that compassion could
only dictate he had already paid for his crimes.
Colonel Denise Vowell, the Army's chief judge, apparently agreed.
She recommended to the commander of the U.S. Army Japan that the 30-day
sentence be suspended for clemency's sake. The commander, Major General Elbert
Perkins, ignored the suggestion, although according to standard Army
confinement rules, Jenkins' sentence was ultimately reduced by five days for
good behavior. "I have made my peace with the U.S. Army," Jenkins
said after his release, "and they have treated me very fairly."
For now, the Jenkins family lives in standard-issue
enlisted-family housing in Camp Zama. When Jenkins is officially discharged
from active duty and released from the U.S. base, he plans to settle down in
his wife's hometown on Japan's Sado Island. He wants to work, and the local
mayor's office has said it will try to help him find a job, although it's unclear
what work Jenkins could do, especially since he doesn't speak Japanese. His
wife already works at city hall and receives a government stipend every month
in a program benefiting North Korean kidnapping victims. At some point Jenkins
also wants to visit North Carolina to see family members, including his aging
mother. Asked how his daughters are faring, Jenkins concedes that he isn't
sure. "I just spent 25 days in jail. I haven't really gotten a chance to
talk to them that much yet. But I think they will be all right." He starts
to sob. "I made a big mistake of my life, but getting my daughters out of
there, that was one right thing I did."