News-Info-Alerts

Re: Pentagon Presses N.Korea For Access to Americans

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: October 10, 2002

"Pentagon Presses N. Korea for Talks
ROBERT BURNS AP Military Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - A senior Pentagon official pressed the North Korean military for access to four Americans who defected from the U.S. Army in the 1960s and are living in the communist nation's capital.

In talks Sunday, Jerry D. Jennings, deputy assistant secretary of defense for POW-MIA affairs, also renewed a U.S. request for North Korea to help resolve reports that other Americans may be held in North Korea.

"He emphasized that progress is needed from the North Korean side to establish a mechanism for resolving reports of the possibility of Americans living or being held in North Korea," the Pentagon said in a statement summarizing the result of U.S.-North Korean talks in Bangkok, Thailand, on accounting for missing U.S. soldiers.

The talks follow North Korea's surprising admission to Japan last month that it had abducted about a dozen Japanese civilians decades ago and forced them to help train spies, and that some of them are still alive.

For years North Korea has denied holding any Americans against their will. It has acknowledged that the four Army defectors are living in Pyongyang, but insists they are now North Korean citizens and do not want to talk to U.S. officials.

Japanese officials disclosed last week that one of the U.S. servicemen, Charles Robert Jenkins, who defected in 1965, had married a Japanese woman who had been abducted by North Korean agents in 1978.

In October 2001, Jennings wrote to the North Koreans expressing disappointment at a lack of progress on the issue.

"I ask that you work to ensure that the Foreign Ministry honors the agreement they made last year to appoint a representative to address the issue of live Americans within the DPRK," he wrote, using the initials for .the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the official name of North Korea.

"The recovery of live Americans lost in war is our nation's top priority, one supported by the highest levels of the U.S. government," Jennings wrote.

The U.S. government has never asserted conclusively that there are any Americans servicemen from the Korean War alive in North Korea, although a Pentagon analyst wrote in a 1996 internal report that there probably were 10 to 15 possible prisoners of war in addition to the four known Army defectors.

Details of Jennings' talks Sunday in Bangkok were not available, but a Pentagon statement said he met with Col. Gen. Li Chon Bok of the Korean People's Army. Jennings also pressed for an expansion of efforts underway since 1996 to recover the remains of U.S. servicemen killed during the ,1950-53 Korean War.

The North Koreans agreed to Jennings' request for follow-up talks in December, the Pentagon said."