From GI to Pawn in 39 Years

In present-day photographs, the jug ears and prominent nose are the same. But the once-young GI named 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 if he was still alive.

Jenkins -- one of a handful of Americans who apparently defected to Communist North Korea -- probably would be lost in the dusty archives of the Cold War were it not for a chain of recent 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 the 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. In some quarters, Jenkins is viewed almost as another John Walker Lindh, the American who joined the Taliban in Afghanistan.

“Our military feels very strongly about desertion. This is a time of George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, and you are talking about someone who went to the other side at a time of high tension,” said a U.S. diplomat who asked not to be quoted by name.

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 Rumsfeld personally putting his foot down, diplomatic sources say.

The matter has grown more urgent by the day in the wake of Koizumi’s announcement Friday that he planned to return to Pyongyang next Saturday and, it is hoped, 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.

“Although he has U.S. nationality, he is married to Ms. Soga and we of course consider that they are one united family,” Kyoko Nakayama, a Japanese Cabinet official handling the case, said in a March interview. “We hope he’ll come to Japan, where the family will be able to discuss freely where they want to live.”

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 last year started a website dedicated to proving his uncle did not go to North Korea freely.

On the face of it, Jenkins seemed an unlikely candidate to pass through the Iron Curtain. His life was utterly ordinary until he went to North Korea and became the most notorious scion of Rich Square, N.C. (pop. 1,000), 80 miles northeast of Raleigh.

Jenkins was a freckled and slight young man (Army records said he was 5 feet 5 and 118 pounds), but strong enough to have earned the nickname “Super.” His interests were girls and cars. He washed cars at a Ford dealership for spare change. His father died when he was 8, and the family of seven children was one of the poorest in town. He was sometimes teased for his jug ears, a stutter and his difficulty in school. He failed several grades before dropping out in the eighth grade.

When it was revealed in 2002 that Jenkins had been teaching English in North Korea, boyhood friend Wayne Pope remembers chuckling, “Well, if Super Jenkins could be a teacher, anybody could be.” And to the extent that he had any political views, they were by default virulently anti-Communist in keeping with the spirit of the times.

“This was the Cold War. We were taught the Communists were evil and we wanted to kill the suckers,” said Michael Cooke, another friend, who recalls that he and Jenkins used to shoot BB guns and pretend they were fighting Communists.

When he was 15, Jenkins 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.

“He loved the Army. He really found a home for himself there,” Cooke said.

After a tour in Germany, Jenkins reenlisted 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 reenlistment bonus. “I’ve got to spend all this money because I’m not coming back here,” Pope recalls Jenkins saying.

Had Jenkins already planned his defection? Or was it merely a display of bravado by a young man heading off to Korea, then considered a dangerous assignment?

“All I know,” Pope said, “he lived up to that promise. He never came back.”

Shortly after his disappearance, investigators broke into a locker under Jenkins’ bed and said they 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 it or even 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. Unlike a handful of others who deserted before him, Jenkins wasn’t in trouble with the Army. There was a rumor that he had run up debts in Germany, but it was never proved.

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

Shin Sang Ok, a South Korean film director who was kidnapped by North Koreans and spent eight years in Pyongyang before escaping, said that Jenkins was always described in North Korea as a defector but could have been an abductee.

“North Korea is such a peculiar state that even if you were kidnapped, you would say you were not. Really, whatever they wanted you to say, you would oblige,” said Shin, who met Jenkins briefly in the early 1980s.

U.S. officials dismiss such theories as nonsense.

“I’m sure he defected,” said Darrell E. Best, a retired lieutenant colonel who was Jenkins’ commanding officer at the time. “I heard his voice over the loudspeakers. He said I was an SOB. He was clearly working for the North Koreans at the time.”

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

Jenkins also enjoyed a brief career in the North Korean film industry, predictably typecast as the ugly American. He appeared in a popular television spy drama called “Nameless Heroes” playing an archvillain named Mr. Kelton. His screen name in the credits was given as Min Hyong Chan.

Jenkins met Hitomi 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. (In a sign of the North Korean regime’s control over its people, 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. “Thanks to [North Korean leader] Gen. Kim Jong Il, our daughters are studying for free at school. I was given a car by the country. We are living without difficulties.”

Jenkins refused to answer 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.”

Negotiations are still underway between Japan and North Korea for the release of Jenkins and the other abductees’ families, which could serve as a prelude to the normalization of diplomatic relations between the two countries. Japanese officials say the North Korean government has agreed to release Jenkins to the custody of the Japanese government and is well aware of the difficulty his situation creates between the United States and Japan.

“I think the North Koreans are trying to use Jenkins to yank the chain of the United States,” said Scott Snyder, a senior associate with the Washington-based Asia Foundation.

Since returning to Japan, Hitomi Soga, now 44, has been living quietly in her hometown of Mano, avoiding the glare of notoriety that accompanied her release. She has declined repeated requests for interviews but has issued several public statements pleading for her husband and daughters to be sent to Japan and for her husband to be pardoned by the United States.

“I love my family,” she said at a news conference last month. “I dream day after day of flying off to hold them in my arms.”

Among U.S. diplomats, some believe that Jenkins should be promised minimal prosecution as a favor to Japan, a close ally.

Charles Pritchard, who was until last year a top State Department negotiator with North Korea, says Jenkins probably has been punished enough simply by having had the misfortune of going to North Korea.

“If the guy had gone off to Canada and lived a full and wonderful life, that would be one thing,” Pritchard said. “But the chances of this guy having had anything but a miserable life are very slim.”

But there are many others who do not want to forgive -- among them Jenkins’ former commanding officer, who spent days looking for him in the DMZ.

“I wouldn’t forgive him,” Best said. “In fact, if we’d found him, I’d be tempted to shoot him on sight.”

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Times staff writer Mark Magnier in Beijing and special correspondent Colin Joyce and researchers Rie Sasaki and Hisako Ueno in Tokyo contributed to this report.