Re: The US Defector, Japan and North Korea

Date: May 22, 2004

" U.S. defector complicating release of abductees' families
He wed abducted woman; Japan wants their children to leave North Korea

By Barbara Demick Los Angeles Times

TOKYO - In present-day photographs, the jug ears and prominent nose are the same. But Charles Robert Jenkins is now an old man, with creases running across his brow and a small picture of the late North Korean founder Kim Il Sung pinned to the lapel of his shiny suit.

On the morning of Jan. 5, 1965, Jenkins was a 24-year-old buck sergeant stationed in South Korea. It was 2:30 a.m., and he was leading a patrol into the demilitarized zone separating the Koreas. He told his buddies he'd heard a noise and wanted to investigate. He never came back.

Three and half weeks later, his voice was heard in a propaganda broadcast saying that he had found himself in "Shangri-La" in North Korea.

Over the ensuing decades, little was heard from or about the high-school dropout from North Carolina except for an occasional appearance in North Korean propaganda. Family members for most of that time were unsure whether he was still alive.

Jenkins - one of a handful of Americans who apparently defected to Communist North Korea - would probably be lost in the dusty archives of the Cold War were it not for a recent chain of events that make him a pawn in the tangled relationship between the United States, North Korea and Japan.

Jenkins came out of the shadows in September 2002, when Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi traveled to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, to meet with leader Kim Jong Il. During that summit, Kim made an astonishing confession - that over the years, North Korea had systematically kidnapped Japanese citizens to train as spies. There was more: One of those abductees, a woman named Hitomi Soga, was married to Jenkins.

This most unlikely couple, the former GI and the kidnap victim, were said to be living in Pyongyang with their two daughters.

After Kim's admission, Soga and four other abductees were sent home for visits. None have returned. The Japanese government is now pushing North Korea to release their families - including Jenkins and the couple's daughters, now 22 and 19.

But one impediment to such an arrangement is Jenkins, who would be subject to extradition to the United States from Japan to stand trial for desertion and possibly treason.

Given the tension over North Korea's pursuit of nuclear weapons, the Pentagon has shown little inclination to show forgiveness.

Japan has made repeated high-level requests to the United States to grant Jenkins a pardon so he can come to Japan. The requests have been denied, with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld personally putting his foot down, diplomatic sources said.

The matter has grown more urgent by the day with Koizumi's visit to North Korea this weekend. It is hoped that he will bring out family members of the five abductees released in 2002. It was unclear, because of the extradition issue, whether Jenkins and his daughters would be included.

Back in North Carolina, Jenkins' supporters worry that he'll become a scapegoat for the anti-North Korea lobby. James Hyman, a nephew and the family member most active in the case, says there are dozens of Cold War defectors to Communist countries who now live quiet lives in the United States.

"I don't know why they want to crucify my uncle when there are others who deserted who are buried in Arlington Cemetery," said Hyman, who was 5 when Jenkins vanished.

Although he has only vague recollections of a man in uniform who gave him a cap gun, Hyman remains unconvinced that Jenkins was a traitor. North Korea's admission that it had abducted Japanese citizens started family members thinking that perhaps Jenkins, too, was a kidnapping victim.

"If they kidnapped Japanese, why not Americans? Until I hear from my uncle's lips that 'I did defect,' I won't believe it," said Hyman, who started a Web site last year dedicated to proving that his uncle did not go to North Korea freely.

When Jenkins was 15, he volunteered to join the National Guard, persuading his mother to lie about his age. He later switched to the Army. He was sufficiently proud of his status as a soldier that he had "U.S. Army" tattooed on one arm, "Mom and Dad" on the other.

After a tour in Germany, he re-enlisted in 1964 and was assigned to Korea. Just a few days before he was due to leave, he pulled aside some friends and showed them about $1,200 that he said was his re-enlistment bonus. "I've got to spend all this money, because I'm not coming back here," boyhood friend Wayne Pope recalls Jenkins saying.

Shortly after his disappearance, investigators said they broke into a locker under Jenkins' bed and found a letter to his mother.

"Dear Mother. I am sorry for the trouble I will cause you. I know what I will have to do. I am going to North Korea. Tell the family I love them very much," the letter read, according to a telegram later sent to the family.

On the face of it, the letter would seem to be incontrovertible evidence that Jenkins voluntarily defected.

But family members have challenged the letter's authenticity and whether it existed at all. It was never mailed to his mother, and nobody in the family ever saw a copy. His mother, Pattie Casper, made repeated efforts over the 1960s and 1970s to obtain the letter, at one point asking a congressman to intercede. One thing the family found suspicious was that the telegram said the letter was signed "Charles." Jenkins always used his middle name, Robert.

Friends and family scratched their heads in bewilderment trying to figure out the motive.

Various POW advocates, among them the National Alliance of Families for the Return of America's Missing Servicemen, maintain that the Army never adequately investigated the possibility that Jenkins had been abducted.

The North Koreans at the time were known to be prolific kidnappers of South Koreans, Japanese and anybody else they thought could be of use. A declassified Army document dated 1962 and obtained by the national alliance tells of a North Korean agent captured at the DMZ who admitted under interrogation that he was trying to kidnap U.S. servicemen.

Robert Egan, a New Jersey businessman and POW activist who has frequently visited North Korea, says that the U.S. military covered up Jenkins' abduction because it didn't want to raise tensions with North Korea. "They couldn't afford to have a problem on the DMZ at the height of the Vietnam War," Egan said.

Today, the Pentagon may have reasons for wanting Jenkins out of North Korea: Some believe he might have information about reports of U.S. prisoners of war held after the Korean War. Larry Greer, a Pentagon spokesman, said that the team engaged in recovery of Korean War remains recently asked the North Korean government for permission to interview Jenkins on the subject of POWs

For several years after his arrival, Jenkins was a popular feature in North Korean propaganda. He often spoke over the crackling loudspeaker system at the DMZ, ranting about American imperialism. In one leaflet from the late 1960s, he is shown smiling broadly with three other deserters who are touring a lake and posing with attractive women.

"More and more American soldiers are coming over to North Korea ... in quest of genuine freedom and happiness, casting off their disgraceful lot of being mercenaries for the Pentagon's policy of aggression and war," boasted the leaflet, titled "Fortune's Favorites."

Jenkins met Soga in 1980. He was 40 by then and teaching English in Pyongyang. She was 21 and one of his students.

He knew only that she was Japanese - not that she had been kidnapped from an island in northern Japan two years earlier while shopping with her mother. (Soga apparently did not tell her husband or daughters the truth until two weeks before she went to Japan.)

"We were both lonely without families. We felt sympathetic towards each other," Jenkins said in a rare interview in late 2002 with a Japanese magazine. The interview and a photo session were arranged by the North Korean government, which was at the time campaigning for Soga to be returned to North Korea. Jenkins spent most of the interview explaining why Soga should come back and praising life in North Korea.

"I am a North Korean citizen," he said. "We are living without difficulties."

Jenkins refused to answer any questions about why he went to North Korea.

"I don't want to talk about it. One thing I can say is I walked to North Korea."

The Los Angeles Times is a Tribune Publishing newspaper.

© 2004, The Baltimore Sun"

AND

"U.S. defector remains in North Korea

By Eric Talmadge ASSOCIATED PRESS

PYONGYANG, North Korea - Nearly 40 years ago, Charles Robert Jenkins allegedly deserted his U.S. Army unit to start a new life in North Korea. He taught English, acted in propaganda films, married a woman 20 years his junior and had two daughters.

Then, two years ago, his life started to fall apart.

In an unprecedented 2002 summit with Japan's Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il admitted that Jenkins' wife, Hitomi Soga, had been abducted and brought to the North against her will. With four other abductees, she was allowed to return home to Japan.

But what North Korea said was supposed to be a short homecoming became a political tug of war. Tokyo refused to send Soga and the others back; Pyongyang kept their families virtual hostage.

For the other families, that saga ended yesterday: Koizumi returned for his second summit with Kim and won the freedom of the other abductees' North Korea-born children in exchange for 250,000 tons of rice and $10 million worth of medical supplies.

Jenkins, however, refused to leave.

The Jenkinses' fate is a major issue in Japan, mainly because of an outpouring of sympathy for his wife, who has lived alone in her hometown on a small island since her return.

According to American military officials, Jenkins, a native of Rich Square, N.C., was a 24-year-old sergeant when he left a border patrol on the South Korean side of the Demilitarized Zone to defect to the North. For defecting, the North Korean government gave him a car and a job teaching English.""