News-Info-Alerts

Re: What Happened to GI Patrolling DMZ in '65?

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: January 03, 2003

"What happened to GI patrolling DMZ in '65?

By Wayne Specht, Stars and StripesPacific edition, Monday, October 21, 2002


While international attention this week focused on Japanese abducted by North Korea 20 years ago, a backstage mystery involving a U.S. serviceman is waiting to unfold.

The name Sgt. Charles Robert Jenkins returned to the public’s attention this week when his Japanese wife, Hitomi Soga, arrived in Japan for the first time in more than two decades. She and her mother, Miyoshi, were snatched by North Korean spies 24 years ago from Sado Island in the Sea of Japan off Niigata Prefecture.

But the one person who holds the key to Jenkins’ past and present has offered little information about their lives in North Korea.

As more than 200 reporters and camera crews swarmed around her Tuesday at a Tokyo hotel, Soga kept her head bowed, her demeanor somber. She uttered only one sentence.

“I’m glad to see” everyone, she said with very little emotion.

Few other details have been released.

What is known is Soga, 43, married Jenkins, 62, in 1980, not long after meeting him to learn English, said Shigeru Yokota, father of Megumi Yokota, an abductee who reportedly died after being taken to North Korea in 1977. Yokota and other families of abductees spoke at a news conference Wednesday.

The five are among at least 13 Japanese kidnapped by North Korean agents in the 1970s and 1980s; they were taken to the secretive communist country to train spies in the Japanese language and culture. They are the only ones known to be alive.

After denying any role in the disappearances for years, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il admitted in an unprecedented Sept. 17 summit with Japan’s Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi that the Japanese were kidnapped. Kim’s acknowledgment was seen as a major breakthrough for North Korea’s regime, which has been characterized by its isolation.

But that breakthrough has yet to lead to full disclosure of the abductees’ stories.

Relatives said they believed the five were pressured not to speak about their abductions, fearing it might endanger their children, who remained in North Korea.

Jenkins was at the Pyongyang airport where his wife, and the four other abductees, boarded an All Nippon Airways jet for the flight to Tokyo. The couple’s two daughters, ages 17 and 19, also came to see their mother off.

Akitaka Saiki, deputy general director of the Foreign Ministry’s Asian and Oceanian Affairs Bureau, told reporters he spoke briefly with Jenkins. He said he asked Jenkins if he wanted to visit Japan with his wife, but Jenkins replied that an immediate visit “is not easy.”

Note left behind

At age 24, Jenkins of Rich Square, N.C., had compiled a good service record and attained the rank of sergeant, according to Army records. He was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 8th Cavalry, 1st Cavalry Division in South Korea.

On Jan. 5, 1965, Jenkins led a four-man patrol in a wooded area just outside of the southern boundary of the Demilitarized Zone, 6 miles south of Panmunjom, and disappeared, according to a UPI wire story published in Stars and Stripes on Jan. 19, 1965.

As Army officials searched for information about his location, they found a note left behind near his footlocker, 8th Army officials said later. It was addressed to his mother, Pattie Casper.

“I am sorry for the trouble I will cause you. I know what I have to do I am going to North Korea. Tell family I love them very much. Love, Charles.”

“The last time I saw him, he had come home for Christmas in 1964,” said Wayne Pope, a classmate of Jenkins, in a April 15, 1996, People magazine story. “He kept saying we would never see him again.”

The 1965 UPI story quoted Army officials as saying Jenkins “has some indebtedness.” But little more was reported.

Military officials today would not discuss Jenkins’ personnel records.

Since Jenkins’ name was linked to the Japanese abductees, his sister, Pat Harrell, of Weldon, N.C., has refused all requests for interviews.

For decades after the Korean armistice, the U.S. government never asserted publicly that any American servicemen from the Korean War still were alive in North Korea.

However, in a 1996 internal assessment report, a team of Pentagon analysts wrote that the Defense Department’s POW-MIA Office “concludes that there are two groups of Americans in North Korea: a small group of defectors and a larger group of 10-15 possible POWs.”

Propaganda tape

A man the Pentagon said it believes is Jenkins appeared in a widely viewed propaganda videotape the North Koreans made several years ago.

In the tape, the man plays a senior intelligence official in a film titled “Nameless Heroes, Chapter 20.”

Larry Greer, spokesman for the Defense POW/Missing Personnel office at the Pentagon, said a team of five intelligence specialists analyzed “Nameless Heroes” in 1996.

He said examining the videotape confirmed that Jenkins was in the production with other American deserters known to be living in North Korea.

Jenkins and the three other American deserters also appeared on the cover of “Fortune’s Favorites,” a circa-1965 North Korean propaganda pamphlet, People magazine reported.

Greer did not say which of the other known American defectors — Pvt. Larry Allen Abshier of Normal, Ill.; Pfc. James Joseph Dresnok of Glenn Allen, Va., and Cpl. Jerry Wayne Parrish of Henderson, Ky. — appeared in the videotape. North Korean government officials steadfastly have refused repeated U.S. requests for access to the men.

Greer added that North Korean officials publicly announced the deaths several years ago of two other American soldiers listed as deserters, Pfc. Roy Chung and Pfc. Joseph White.

Two years ago, North Korea agreed to appoint a government representative to discuss U.S. questions about American servicemen missing from the Korean War who might be alive in North Korea.

In an Oct. 19, 2001, letter to a North Korean official, Jerry Jennings, deputy assistant secretary of defense for POW-MIA affairs at the Pentagon, said he was disappointed by a lack of progress on the issue.

“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 said.

Last week during a one-day meeting in Bangkok with a North Korean delegation, Jennings renewed a U.S. request for help in resolving reports that other Americans may be held in North Korea.

The North Koreans agreed to Jennings’ request for follow-up talks in December, Pentagon sources said.

Rush to judgment?

Lynn O’Shea, New York state director of the nonprofit National Alliance of Families for the Return of America’s Missing Servicemen, said she believes labeling Jenkins a deserter may be a rush to judgment.

“We’re all not that sure he did desert,” she said in a telephone interview with Stars and Stripes.

“His record was very good; he was a sergeant, and had just returned from a month of leave in the States,” she said. “If he was thinking of going AWOL, he would have had better places to go.”

Jenkins had one disciplinary report about 10 months prior to his disappearance, an infraction, O’Shea says, “but not a major incident because he held his rank, so it was probably not a critical incident.”

Military officials acknowledged an infraction on Jenkins’ record but would not specify.

With North Korea’s recent admission of kidnapping of Japanese citizens, O’Shea believes the Jenkins issue remains a question mark.

“Until somebody gets face to face with him where he can speak freely,” she said, “I don’t think anybody will ever really know the truth whether Jenkins walked across the border or was kidnapped.”

Greer said of Jenkins and the other three known deserters, “There is no evidence they were abducted, and there’s considerable evidence that they deserted voluntarily. Speculation by uninformed amateurs could best be characterized as ‘fiction.’”

“Inducements by North Korean agents, such as money or a better life, may have included assistance in facilitating flight,” said retired Army Col. Dan Smith, senior adviser for Military Affairs at the Friends Committee on National Legislation.

Neither Jenkins nor the three other known soldiers living in North Korea are listed on a database of missing or killed Americans maintained at the Pentagon’s POW/MIA Web site.

Because the Army lists Jenkins as a deserter, he could face a court-martial if U.S. authorities can apprehend him.

Army public affairs officials at the Pentagon did not respond to Stripes’ request for information about Jenkins and the other three American deserters.

— Hana Kusumoto contributed to this report.

© 2002 Stars and Stripes. All Rights Reserved. "