Charles Jenkins on CBS’s 60 Minutes
by Richardson ~ October 27th, 2005. Filed under: North Korea.Earlier this month Charles Jenkins was in the news due to the release of his book in Japan. This past weekend 60 Minutes evidentially ran a story on Charles Jenkins. The CBS website has this story:
When he deserted, Jenkins essentially stepped off the world. He had not driven a car in 40 years. Didn’t know what a Big Mac was. And he says he had never heard of 60 Minutes but hoped to get his story into Life magazine, which stopped publishing as a weekly in 1972…
He was a sergeant, a squad leader, but had been thinking about deserting to the north. On a subzero night, he downed 10 beers and led his men on his last patrol. “Well, I told them I heard something and I would be back in a few minutes. I would go and check it out. And I left and I started walking. Started walking north,” Jenkins recalled. He now realizes that he had abandoned his troops…
He told 60 Minutes he betrayed them and his country because, on the border, he was being asked to lead more aggressive, provocative patrols, and that scared him. He was also hearing his unit might ship out to Vietnam. Instead, he walked through the night and surrendered to an astonished North Korean soldier. Jenkins was 24 years old… “I made a lot of mistakes in my life, maybe, but that was the worst mistake anybody ever make. That’s for sure.”
The article goes on with mostly not new, but interesting information, including how he and other American defectors had to study the writings of Kim Il Sung, and how he was coerced into sexual relations with a North Korean woman:
Jenkins says they were forced to study the teachings of Kim Il Sung. Korean political officers called “leaders” forced the Americans to study Kim’s writings eight hours a day for seven years. They memorized it in Korean, a language they didn’t understand…
At one point, Jenkins was assigned a woman and ordered by the government to have sex with her twice a month.
“The leaders almost tell her when to do it. And I got in a big fight one time over it, because of one leader. I told him it’s none of his business: ‘If I want to sleep with her, she want to sleep, we sleep.’ ‘No, two times a month,’” Jenkins said, recalling the argument.
A related article also from 60 Minutes raises the question of Thais being kidnapped by North Korea:
The photo comes from U.S. army deserter Robert Jenkins, who spent 39 years in North Korea and was released just last year… Jenkins sits beside his wife and oldest child on a beach in North Korea. But the new and potentially explosive information concerns a woman in the left-hand corner of the frame. Jenkins says she is a Thai national who was kidnapped by North Korean agents from Macau, near Hong Kong, in 1978. If what Jenkins says is true, it would represent the first photographic evidence that North Korea abducted ordinary citizens from Asian countries other than Japan and South Korea…
A spokesman for the Thai foreign ministry said it had never heard of any Thai people being kidnapped by North Korean agents, and it would seek more details from Jenkins. But a Japanese official said information about Anoche had been passed to Thai diplomats in May, and there had been no follow-up from the Thais since.
Perfect, just in time for the upcoming Six-Party Talks! Although the upcoming vote in the UN on North Korea’s human rights violations is more apt to rankle them than another mere alleged kidnapping.
October 27th, 2005 at 2:14 pm
Not just Thais, but North Korea has kidnapped people from virtually every continent. I recall reading that a large number of the non-Asians kidnapped have been women, perhaps to stock Kim Jong Il’s harems.
I also recall reading that Jenkins feared that his bi-racial children would be used as spies by North Korea. Given what we know about the Kim’s, I would not be surprised if their had been planning to raise a generation of spies whose more-Western appearance would make them less suspect in the West.
It all sounds like some bizarre episode of the Twilight Zone, but unfortunately it is real.
November 2nd, 2005 at 11:25 am
I had a U.S. Hunter Killer Team in the area of the DMZ that Charles Jenkins defected through on that sub-zero night, he defected, deserting his men and giving up all rights to which his country had readily given him. First point, is that he did not defect because of fear that his unit might go to Vietnam. At approximately 2130 hrs that evening, the north Koreans (nK) turned on their Public Address Systen, that had speakers as large as 8′X 8″ and began broadcasting. All patrols and Guard Posts in the DMZ was required to write down, as closely as possible, the content of the broadcast. The nK said he had one on our commrades that would like to say something to us. Charles Jenkins began the broadcast by saying that he had defected because he had hemroids and was told by a KATUSA Sergent(Korean Augmentation to the U. S. Army) that nk had maricale doctors that could cure his hemorides without surgery. He said he had a Hemorid operation at the 121st Medevac Hospital a couple of months earlier that it was very painful. He said that they reoccured and the pain is what led him to defect. I wish he had came through the DMZ in the vicinity of my Hunter Killer Patrol. If so, it would not be debatable as to the reasons for his desertion. I am available to take a lie detector test, because this is exactly as it happened on that cold night in the DMZ in Korea.