How to make a living after defecting to North Korea
~~I am inserting that subject line because I saw it on google news today and was intrigued~~
Great read from The Atlantic
The U.S. Soldier Who Defected to North Korea
... and now lives in Japan selling crackers
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/09/the-defector/309436/
We all do stupid things when we’re drunk, but among bad decisions, this one deserves special distinction: on the night of January 4, 1965, U.S. Army Sergeant Charles Robert Jenkins pounded 10 beers, deserted his infantry company at the edge of the Korean Demilitarized Zone, walked alone across a minefield, and defected to North Korea. He was thrown into a chilly, spartan house (he tried, unsuccessfully, to leave) and forced to study the works of the North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung for 11 hours every day. By 1972, he could recite Kim’s core principles by heart in Korean. That year, he was forcibly naturalized as a North Korean citizen. He went on to work as an English teacher, a translator, and an actor, under 24-hour surveillance and conditions of near-starvation.
All told, Jenkins would spend nearly 40 years in North Korea, a state that he says bred foreigners like animals, for the purpose of recruiting their ethnically ambiguous offspring for espionage. He himself had two daughters by Hitomi Soga, a Japanese woman whom North Korean agents kidnapped in 1978, apparently to enslave her as a teacher of Japanese language and customs for North Korean spies. Soga, who is 19 years Jenkins’s junior, was freed in 2002 when Kim Jong Il attempted détente with Japan. Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi personally ensured that Jenkins and their daughters, Mika and Brinda, now 30 and 28, could join her. After Jenkins finally left North Korea in 2004, at age 64, the U.S. Army threw him in the stockade for 24 days and discharged him dishonorably. But since then he has lived a quiet life on Sado, his wife’s home island, a speck in the Sea of Japan that has served historically as a Japanese Elba, a secluded site for the exile of political undesirables.
Jenkins is one of four American soldiers to defect to North Korea after the Korean War. The others—only one of whom, a burly Virginian named James Joseph Dresnok, is still alive and in North Korea—married a series of other foreigners, including a Lebanese woman and a Romanian woman. Some of the children from these unions attended Pyongyang’s diplomatic academy. One defector, Larry Abshier, married a young Thai woman, Anocha Panjoy, who had been working in a Macau bathhouse when she disappeared in 1978; she almost certainly was abducted. After Abshier suffered a fatal heart attack in 1983, Panjoy married a German man who traveled internationally as a paid agent of North Korea, according to Jenkins. He alluded darkly to a larger set of such foreigners who work as North Korean agents abroad, presumably with their families and loved ones kept in Pyongyang as collateral. “If I had stayed in North Korea,” Jenkins said, “my daughters would be in South Korea right now as spies.”
When I later asked Andrei Lankov, a prominent Russian expert on East Asia who spent a year studying in North Korea, what he made of Jenkins’s allegations, he was dryly skeptical. “So little is known about North Korea that people take seriously even the most outrageous stories,” he replied.) I wanted to ask Jenkins: Wasn’t the idea of a spy-breeding program so insanely evil, as well as impractical, that even North Korea wouldn’t bother with it? Then again, I reminded myself, the story of Jenkins’s wife’s kidnapping was itself insanely evil and impractical—and true. My lunch companion knew North Korean evil more intimately than I ever would.