Sons of U.S. defector laud Kim

NORTH KOREA

ANNA FIFIELD Their names are Ted and James, and they look like the kinds of men you might bump into on the streets of Richmond, Va., where their father was born.

But they’re speaking perfect Korean and wearing badges of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, the first two leaders of North Korea, over their hearts. Oh, and the younger one, James, is a captain in North Korea’s army.

They’re the Pyongyangborn sons of James Joseph Dresnok, a former American GI who defected to North Korea in 1962 when he was stationed in South Korea.

And they’ve just appeared in an extraordinary video published online by Minjok Tongshin, a pro-Pyongyang news service based in the United States that runs the kind of stories that wouldn’t look out of place in North Korea’s official media.

“I want to advise the U. S. to drop its hostile policy against North Korea. They’ve done enough wrong and now it’s time for them to wake up from their delusions,” said Ted Dresnok, 36, who goes by the Korean name Hong Sun Chol. He was wearing a navy blue suit with a red Kim badge on it.

His younger br o t h e r, James, or Hong Chol, was wearing a North Korean army uniform and said he held a rank equivalent to a captain. His comments also sounded like they came out of the propaganda department. “The American Imperialists caused the division of the Korean Peninsula,” James said.

Ted and James are the sons of Dresnok, known as Joe, and a Romanian woman, Doina Bumbea, who was reportedly abducted by North Korea. Charles Jenkins, another U.S. serviceman who defected to North Korea but was allowed to leave in 2004, described Bumbea as a Romanian abductee in his memoirs and said she died of cancer in 1997. Dresnok is then thought to have married the daughter of a North Korean woman and a Togolese diplomat, and they are said to have had a son, Tony. (North Korea is big on blood purity and won’t allow foreigners to marry Koreans, meaning foreigners get matched up among themselves.)

Dresnok came from a difficult background and was going through a difficult period — his wife had left him and he was in trouble with his superiors — when he decided to cross the demilitarized zone into North Korea in 1962. He was 21. He taught English and appeared in TV shows and movies — always playing the “evil American.” Now 75 and in poor health, Dresnok hasn’t been heard of for several years.

But his sons were apparently trotted out to extol the glories of the “socialist paradise” into which they were born. Each contact with the media is highly scripted in North Korea, but it’s impossible to tell whether the men were saying what they’d been told to say or if, after spending their entire lives in North Korea, they really think this.