National Post (National Edition)
U.S. SOLDIER DEFECTED TO NORTH KOREA — AND IMMEDIATELY REGRETTED IT.
CHARLES JENKINS, 77, HAD SPENT 40 YEARS INSIDE NORTH KOREA
Charles Jenkins was drunk when he made the decision that would trap him in North Korea for 40 years — and unwittingly make him into a film star against his will.
The 24-year-old U.S. Army sergeant, who died at the age of 77 Monday in Japan, had slammed 10 beers back at Camp Clinch, a U.S. outpost along the Korean Demilitarized Zone. But somehow, Jenkins’ commanders had not noticed his pungent odour or glassy eyes when, on the night of Jan. 4, 1965, he reported for duty to lead a patrol along the border with North and South Korea.
A rumour was going around that Jenkins’ unit, the 1st Cavalry Division, was soon going to be mobilized to join the escalating war in Vietnam. Fearful of a “war in the jungle,” Jenkins had begun assembling plans for what he would later call his “despicable crime.”
The scheme seems startlingly naïve in hindsight. Jenkins would walk into North Korea, surrender to the first soldiers he saw and ask to be taken to the Russian embassy.
From there, he figured it was a simple matter of arranging an extradition, serving some prison time and then heading back to his old life in North Carolina.
“I was so ignorant. I did not understand that the country I was seeking temporary refuge in was literally a giant, demented prison; once someone goes there, they almost never, ever get out,” he wrote later in his 2009 biography, Reluctant Communist.
Jenkins’ sentence in this 120,000-square-km prison ended up stretching 40 years.
As a “guest” of the North Korean regime, Jenkins would be spared the worst deprivations of the next decades, including a famine that would kill as many as 3.5 million.
Nevertheless, he settled into a life in Pyongyang without heat, electricity or proper plumbing and where he was forced to be re-educated with socialist principles.
From the outset, it was clear he was to be a captive tool of North Korean espionage and propaganda. The sergeant was joining three other U.S. defectors already in the country. “You’re here, you’ll never leave,” was how one of them, James Dresnok, greeted Jenkins.
To the U.S. soldiers Jenkins had abandoned at Camp Clitch, the only sign of premeditated desertion was the cryptic notes the sergeant had left around barracks instructing friends that they could have his abandoned kit. But soon, the American soldiers guarding South Korea began to be deluged with propaganda pamphlets showing images of Jenkins and the other three Americans living a life of leisure, wealth and women.
“He was putting on a real line of shit. He’d found la-la land,” Darrell E. Best, Jenkins’ former company commander, would later tell a BBC documentary.
These pamphlets were often paired with price lists showing what North Korea was willing to pay for surrendered U.S. military equipment. Jenkins, for his part, would forever receive extra rations in North Korea because, unlike the other Americans, he had brought over an M14 rifle.
Soon, Jenkins and the other Americans became mainstays of North Korean film. The movie-obsessed Kim Jong-il — who would succeed his father as the country’s dictator in 1994 — oversaw a vast expansion of the country’s film industry. Most notable was Nameless Heroes, a series that pitted brave North Koreans against corrupt, bumbling Western imperialists.
Jenkins’ rural accent made his Korean almost impossible to understand and his acting needed work, but his large ears and beady eyes made him the perfect standin for North Korea’s enemies.
All four Americans were “given” foreign brides, some of whom had been kidnapped for the purpose. In 1980, Jenkins was matched with 21-year-old Hitomi Soga, a Japanese woman who, along with her mother, had been snatched from the streets of Japan’s Sado Island by North Korean agents. They were among at least 17 Japanese civilians abducted during the 1970s and 1980s and forced to work as trainers of North Korean spies. Soga never saw her mother again.
Jenkins and Soga, separated by 20 years, were forced into an arranged marriage. Neither would fully learn the other’s language, and they would always communicate in the language of their captors.
Nevertheless, an unlikely and devoted romance bloomed that would last for the rest of Jenkins’ life.
It was Soga who would eventually free Jenkins from North Korea. In 2002, in a sudden bid to curry favour with neighbouring Asian countries, North Korea freed the five surviving Japanese abductees.
Two years later Jenkins, along with the couple’s two daughters, was allowed to visit Soga in Indonesia. It was supposed to be temporary, but the family soon jumped a plane to Japan. Visibly aged beyond his 64 years, the ex-soldier reported for duty at a U.S. base in Japan, where he received a 25-day sentence for desertion.
Jenkins retains the title for the longest desertion in U.S. history.
When Jenkins first set foot on Sado, he told reporters through tears that this was where he wanted to spend his “remaining days.”
He got his wish. Jenkins became a fixture at a local historical museum, where he sold crackers and posed for pictures with tourists who knew him from television. “Everyone in Japan knows who I am,” he told the Washington Post in 2008.
Jenkins is believed to have suffered heart failure and collapsed outside his home on Monday. The last of the four American deserters to die, he was the only who did so on free soil.