During my lost, drunken year, I definitely had a death wish. On New Year’s Day, as is customary, I had to host some cadres. They came over, and I got drunk. After the party was over, I was talking to a few of them in my living room. I pointed to a picture of Kim Jong-il and said, “If it weren’t for that son of a bitch, my family would be together now.” I called Kim a ga-sicki, a dog, the worst curse imaginable. Being disrespectful to the official photos of Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung is one of the most serious crimes there is, and to curse one out is unthinkable. The punishment should be instant execution. Mika was there, and she just about died when she heard what I said. She tugged on my arm, pleading, “Papa, they are going to shoot you if you don’t shut up.” I don’t know why they didn’t, but they didn’t. All I can come up with is that the leaders who were there that night were the few that I had grown to be closest to over many years, and they simply chose to look the other way.
The only thing that got me off the sauce was my prostate trouble. In the spring of 2004, I started having to get up and go to the bathroom every few minutes in the middle of the night. I went to the hospital, and they operated on me around April 15. Every night the leaders would come into my hospital room, sit on the floor, and play cards and drink while I was there with tubes sticking out of my belly and catheters running up my penis. In May, just as I was about to be discharged, one of the nurses came to tell me that Koizumi was coming back to North Korea. I told her that I was going to meet with that bastard while he was in town. I said, “I’m going to give him a good old-fashioned Korean cussing. That son of a bitch stole my wife.” I went home and waited for Koizumi’s arrival, which was less than a week away.
9 | My Escape
On the morning of May 22, Mika, Brinda, and I were picked up by a high cadre from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and taken to an old country house of Kim Jong-il’s about twelve miles outside of Pyongyang. That’s where we were to meet with Prime Minister Koizumi.
We arrived about 9:00 a.m., three hours early, and were taken into a big waiting room where there was fruit on a silver platter and lots of soft drinks on a side table. In that room, over the next few hours, four high-ranking North Koreans I had never seen before came to talk to me. Each one gave me a long lecture, talking to me about what he said would happen to me and my daughters if I left that day. The last person to meet me was very high up, a vice minister of foreign affairs. All of them were singing the same song. They told me that the United States had no respect for me or my family and that I would spend the rest of my life in prison, if I weren’t executed. They brought in faxes and photocopies of news reports from all over the world that suggested the United States would have no mercy on me. (I don’t know how many of those news reports were forged, since they had already been “translated” into Korean. I imagine some were but not all. One of the things that I have learned about reporters is that they are very good at stating things authoritatively, even when it is absolutely impossible for them to have any idea of what they are talking about.) The North Koreans also told me that my daughters would live intolerable lives, that they would be harassed and discriminated against wherever they went, and that they might even be in physical danger.
The North Korean officials never actually told me that they were forbidding me from leaving, but they didn’t have to. They told me that if I decided to go to the airport, I would have to ride in a separate car with my family rather than on the buses that had carried the North Korean and Japanese delegations here. I got the unspoken message very clearly: I was not to leave that day, and if I tried, they would prevent it. People may doubt me on this point. People may say that the only reason I didn’t leave that day was because I was afraid of getting arrested by the Americans once I landed in Japan. They can believe that if they want, but I know the truth. I have lived long enough in North Korea to pick up on signals, to hear the threats that are not actually spoken. I know in my heart if I had tried to get on that plane on that day, the North Koreans would have told the Japanese that I had changed my mind at the last minute, our car would have broken off from the convoy, and we would have been taken God knows where.
Just before noon, someone announced that Koizumi had arrived. We all got up and walked into a conference room. Koizumi came in with an entourage of about seven or eight people. No North Koreans came into the room. They waited just outside with the larger contingent of Japanese. Koizumi walked in, and I shook his hand. I told him it was a great honor to meet him. He sat down across from me and my daughters. There was a note-taker in the corner, two translators at Koizumi’s side, and a couple of other Japanese diplomats hanging out around the edges of the room.
Then we launched in on what turned out to be a pretty testy debate. Remember that my family and I were still operating under the assumption that Hitomi was being held in Japan against her will. We had none of the information that the rest of the world considered common knowledge. I had no understanding about how hard my wife was working on my behalf and how strongly all of Japan had rallied to her cause of reuniting her family. Even though I had been listening to foreignlanguage radio broadcasts as often as I could, very little of this part of the story was coming through. Every day now, I thank God for my wife, the Japanese people, and the Japanese government, and I know I am a free man because of them. Today, I have nothing but the highest respect, admiration, and gratitude for everything Koizumi has done for me and my family, persevering on our behalf even when it was politically risky for him to do so. But at that time, I was madder than hell at him.
As he sat down, Koizumi reached into his briefcase and handed me a letter written by my wife. I took it but did not open it right away. “You know why I am here, don’t you?” he asked. “Yeah,” I said. “You are here because you have my wife.” Mika is a feisty one, and she jumped in almost immediately, asking, “Why haven’t you let her come back like you promised?” Koizumi said, “I could never send her back to a country that had stolen her in the first place.” “But this is where her home and her family are,” she said. Koizumi responded, “I am here because I am trying to reunite her with her family.” While Mika and Koizumi were fighting, I was able to read my wife’s letter. In it, she told me to think very hard before making my decision, but she thought I should come with Koizumi.
I thought about the letter as I refolded it, and at the time I wondered if much of it had been coerced or if she was just saying what she knew Japan wanted to hear. I put the letter in my jacket pocket and joined the fight. I told Koizumi that my wife was kidnapped right now, in Japan. Koizumi said that that was not true. “She does not want to come back to North Korea,” he said. “She wants you to come to Japan.” I told him that if I came back with him, then I was going to go to jail for a very long time, a prospect I was not too happy about. Koizumi told me that he could not promise anything, but that he would do everything in his power to ensure I would receive fair and compassionate treatment from the United States.
At that point, one of his men passed him a note, which he read. He then ripped a piece of paper from a small notebook of his own. Looking at the note he had been passed, he wrote a new one in his own hand. He then passed me the note he had written across the table. It said, in English, “The Prime Minister of Japan will assure you that he will do the utmost that you can live together happily with Mrs. Jenkins in Japan.” I read it, folded it, put it in my jacket pocket, and did not say a word.
Contrary to a number of news reports that followed this meeting, Prime Minister Koizumi did not make any guarantees regarding how I would be treated by the United States. He said only that he would do the best he could to request humane treatment for me, and that since the United States and Japan were best friends, he was confident that the United States would at least listen to his point of view. Also contrary to some news reports, I never asked Koizumi or anyone else from the Japanese government, during this meeting or at any other time, for a guarantee of a U.S. pardon before I would consider traveling to Japan. It is tr
ue that I was cautious and apprehensive about how the United States might treat me, and I asked the Japanese officials to do everything they could to help me, but I knew from the beginning that if I ever left North Korea, I would have to face the U.S. Army myself, and I never insisted that Japan work a deal for me.
Following this, Koizumi said, “Kim Jong-il has said you can go.” Mika piped up again: “Is that really true?” Koizumi pulled out a piece of paper signed by Kim Jong-il saying so, and he placed it right between me and Mika. Throughout the whole meeting, Brinda didn’t say a word. I was glad, because the thing she was most likely to say was “Let’s go to Japan!” and that would have caused all kinds of trouble. The North Koreans originally told us we would have about ten minutes with Koizumi, but the whole conversation wound up taking an hour. At the end of it, I told him that I appreciated all of his efforts, and he certainly gave me a lot of new stuff to think about, but there was simply no way that we were going to be able to come with him to Japan that day.
Realizing we had hit the end, he signaled for one of his people to come over and introduce a new topic. “There is one more thing we could try,” said this Japanese diplomat. “Would you be willing to meet your wife in a third country, maybe China, in a little while, where you could all discuss further what, as a family, you would like to do?” I said, “Yes. That sounds like a very good idea. Let’s do that.” As we were parting, the Japanese gave us a few gifts: a disk of cartoon videos for the girls, an inspirational book in English about a Japanese who overcomes adversity despite being born without any arms and legs, and a carton of Mild Seven cigarettes for me.
As we were walking out, I told Koizumi that I wished we could have spoken in English without interpreters, since I knew that he had studied in England. He looked surprised that I knew that and smiled. I also told him that I loved Japan when I visited Yokohama in 1960 and 1961. He threw up his hands in celebration, as if to say, “That’s great!” I was hoping he would let loose with some English, but he never did. Through his interpreter, he said that he was sorry it didn’t work out this time and that he held out hope that I would be able to come to Japan someday. I said, “We shall see.”
After that meeting, they moved me to a guesthouse rather than back to my house in Li Suk as everybody tried to arrange the next meeting. Word got back that my wife wouldn’t do the meeting in China (which, in retrospect, was probably a wise choice). Someone suggested Singapore. I said no, since I thought it was too close an ally of the United States. Finally, someone said, “How about Indonesia?” Indonesia sounded like a fine choice to me, a very neutral country.
In preparation for the meeting in Indonesia, I had to decide what I was going to do in the face of all of the variables converging around me. Through it all, the one priority that I never deviated from is that I would try to keep my family together no matter what. If my wife wanted to return to North Korea, then that was that: North Korea was where we would stay. If, however, she wanted to return to Japan, then I would do everything I could to make sure Mika, Brinda, and I could get to Japan. If part of that arrangement required me to throw myself at the mercy of the U.S. government, to whom I was a wanted man, then so be it. If all the other factors required that I went to jail for life, then I went to jail for life. I decided that very early on.
For most of this time, however, I was convinced that Hitomi wanted to come back to North Korea. I was operating under the mistaken assumption that Hitomi was being held against her will in Japan. But still, I had to prepare mentally for the possibility that Hitomi was not coming back and that we would follow all the other families to Japan. There was no way I was going to allow my daughters to be permanently split from their mother. I knew that going to Japan was the best prospect for the family, though it was the riskiest for me. I desperately wanted to get my children out of North Korea. And if there was an opportunity to get my daughters off of the spy route I was sure they were traveling down, I was going to take it. But for me to return to North Korea without them was out of the question. And without my wife and my daughters in North Korea, I was as good as dead anyway. So I resolved, if it came to that, to turn myself in, to go along with the wishes of my wife and to ensure that my daughters had a chance at a free, happy, and prosperous life.
The North Koreans, meanwhile, were doing everything in their power to ensure that I would come back with both my wife and kids. In order to do that, they promised me that we would all live like royalty. They promised me a new car with all the gasoline I wanted, a fully furnished new house in the middle of Pyongyang, new clothes, and a new television. They told me they would bury me in the patriot’s cemetery and drove me there to see the plot. (They also showed me the graves of four Japanese buried there. I saw them. I don’t know who they were, but I think they might have been part of the Red Army faction.) They told me everything I wanted would be Kim Jong-il’s gift. They got me a new suit of clothes for the trip. June 1 is Mika’s birthday, and they threw her one hell of a lavish twenty-first birthday party. There were only a handful of people there, but they provided a huge spread of fish, meats, fresh vegetables, and drinks. They gave her a watch and teddy bear. As part of their campaign to get me to return with the whole family, they even gave me an eighteen-karat gold wedding band to give to my wife in Indonesia.
The only thing to do with the cadres was to play along. I had to pretend that I would do everything in my power to convince my wife to return to North Korea when we were in Indonesia. But I also had to pretend that even if I couldn’t convince Hitomi to come back, there was no doubt that I was coming back with my daughters. At the same time, I had to thwart their attempts to take out “insurance” that we would come back by, for example, letting only one of the girls go to Indonesia. I told them no way, that both girls were going. If they had split up the family like that, there was a good chance it would have been split permanently.
On June 21, I got another letter from my wife, this one hand carried by a representative of a Japanese NGO. In the letter, my wife told me that she had waited for us to come on May 22. She thought I would come and was disappointed that I didn’t, but she could understand why. She said she was looking forward to meeting in Indonesia and that once we were there, we could decide at our own pace where we should live. First of all, she said, the four of us needed to reunite. And then we could discuss our future at our own pace. “We four can live with no problems regardless of where we wind up,” she wrote. “I am sorry that I missed being with the family on Mika’s birthday, but we will not fail to be together on Brinda’s on July 23. May the days go very fast until we meet again.”
If the North Koreans tried harder than ever to charm me into staying during the two months between the meeting with Koizumi and leaving for Indonesia, they also tried harder than ever to scare the hell out of me about the United States. They continued to show me all these news stories from the West about what the United States planned to do to me and how there would be no mercy for me. Even Dresnok got in on the act. Those final few months, he would come over for coffee as often as he could. He said he didn’t have his radio anymore, so he always wanted to talk about the news. He was just speaking his mind. I don’t think the cadres coached him on what to say, but he would always tell me how the army was going to string me up and send me to jail for life. Considering my nerves at the time, his opinion didn’t help much, but I understood where he was coming from. I think in both of our minds we were seriously considering that I might never be coming back, though we could never discuss that, and a big part of him was afraid of being lonely. We would sit at a table, drinking coffee, mostly silent since we didn’t know who was listening and couldn’t say all the things we wanted to say. He would often say something about us being the only two left, but he would never finish the sentence.
During this time, Brinda was already bugging me to leave and not come back. Whenever we were alone, she would tug on my arm and say, “Let’s go. Let’s get out of here. Let’s go to Japan.” I would always tell
her to be quiet, that she couldn’t say such things out loud. Mika was different. She believed more of the propaganda back then. I don’t know why, but she was a bit more indoctrinated at that point, so I had to be careful about what I said around her regarding any doubts I had as to whether we were coming back.
I tried to prepare for both possibilities. I had to make it look like I was coming back yet also be ready if we didn’t. The trick was to bring things that were important but didn’t look important. The problem was that I couldn’t get back to the house in Li Suk long enough and often enough to be able to pick stuff carefully. I wanted to bring Megumi’s bag, for example, but I couldn’t get to it. In the end, all I was really able to bring was my wedding license and a few dozen photographs.
Some of the photos did turn out to be valuable later. One roll was from May or June. We had to shoot photos of everybody in the apartment building for new citizenship papers: Dresnok, Siham, my daughters, Nahi, Michael, Ricky, and Gabi. Everybody was there but Ricardo. After shooting head shots of everyone, we had some of the thirty-six exposures on Dresnok’s camera left over, so I took some snaps. Once I got to Japan, these were the only photos I had of what the “Western” North Koreans in my little community looked like. I believe that these photos and other information I provided helped me earn a more lenient sentence from the army by convincing prosecutors and investigators that I was sincere in my remorse for deserting and by helping to prove that I would do whatever I could to help America now.
The night before we left, I had dinner with a high cadre at the guesthouse in Pyongyang. Before I left, he gave me five bottles of ginseng liquor to give away as gifts, a carton of Marlboro cigarettes, and $2,000 cash. The next morning, July 8, they picked me and my daughters up, and we paid our respects to the giant statue of Kim Il-sung. We then went to the airport and waited. It wasn’t long before a chartered All Nippon Airways plane pulled up. We got on the Boeing 767. It was a half or a quarter filled. On board, there were Japanese and Korean government people. They had set up a smoking section about midway back on the plane. Mr. Saiki said it was a special concession for the chain-smoking Koreans.
The Reluctant Communist Page 17