During the 1960s, four US soldiers, in separate incidents, deserted and went to North Korea. Only one of them ever got out. Charles Robert Jenkins was 24 years old in 1965, and desperately wanted to avoid being transferred to Vietnam. His plan was to surrender to North Korean authorities, then defect to the Soviet Union and eventually get home through a prisoner exchange. But in 1965, Jenkins knew little about the kind of country Kim Il-sung was building.
Jenkins was kept under constant surveillance, physically abused, underwent indoctrination, and was used in propaganda films. He lived with the other American defectors for years, and afterward taught English to North Korean spies. The authorities arranged his 1980 marriage to Hitomi Soga, a kidnapped Japanese woman almost twenty years younger than Jenkins, and they had two daughters. When a thawing in relations between Japan and North Korea began in 2002, Jenkins confronted the possibility of leaving North Korea. He knew he would be charged with desertion, but was more concerned about his daughters, who were being groomed as potential spies. Read the story of the soldier who spent more than 39 years in North Korea and made it back to see his 91-year-old mother at Smithsonian.
(Image credit: US Army)
