- BEIJING -- On a chilly winter
night in 1965, at the peak of the Cold War, a young American soldier slipped
across a military frontier and disappeared into the shadows of North Korea,
a bizarre and secretive land of brainwashing and totalitarianism.
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- A few weeks later, 24-year-old Charles Robert Jenkins
reappeared on a North Korean propaganda broadcast. He said he had found
his Shangri-La.
-
- Was he a defector or a kidnapping victim? A traitor to
his homeland, or an innocent dupe of psychological pressure tactics? The
question is still fiercely debated, but until now the world has rarely
glimpsed the jug-eared soldier from small-town North Carolina who had vanished
into the world's most isolated state.
-
- Tomorrow, at the age of 64, the exiled GI is finally
coming in from the cold. He will be flown to Indonesia for a reunion with
his Japanese wife, herself a victim of a kidnapping by North Korean agents
in the 1970s.
-
- Foreign intrigue still swirls around Mr. Jenkins.
-
- The Pentagon is determined to arrest him and prosecute
him as an army deserter. Pyongyang continues to exploit him as a propaganda
tool. Tokyo views him as a symbol of successful diplomacy, a useful figure
for political benefit on the eve of parliamentary elections this weekend.
-
- But perhaps the most fascinating question will be Mr.
Jenkins's reaction to the modern world. For almost four decades, he has
seen nothing of it. Subsisting in a grim Orwellian society of shortages
and paranoia, he has been cut off from all foreign influences, a stranger
to capitalism and globalism.
-
- When he arrives with his two North Korean-born daughters
in Jakarta tomorrow, after a Japanese-chartered flight from Pyongyang,
he will find himself in a sprawling metropolis of brightly lit skyscrapers
and ultramodern office towers, a city of giant neon advertisements and
massive traffic jams, its gleaming high-rises interspersed with slums and
crumbling shacks.
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- It will be a profound shock to a man who has spent almost
all his entire adult life in a stagnant, state-controlled country where
food and electricity are strictly rationed, Western influences are forbidden,
the city streets are empty and dark, and official propaganda is the only
permissible form of mass communication.
-
- Mr. Jenkins grew up in the North Carolina town of Rich
Square, population 1,000, about 135 kilometres northeast of Raleigh. One
of seven children in an impoverished family, he was often mocked for his
stutter and his failures at school, where he dropped out of the eighth
grade. He used a B.B. gun to play soldier with his friends, pretending
to fight the communists.
-
- At the age of 15, he lied about his age and joined the
National Guard. Soon he had enlisted in the U.S. Army and was serving in
South Korea with the 8th Cavalry.
-
- On the night of Jan. 6, 1965, the young sergeant was
leading a four-man patrol in a forested area on the southern boundary of
the Demilitarized Zone that marks the ceasefire line between the two Koreas.
Around 2:30 in the morning, he told his squad that he heard a suspicious
noise. Heading off to investigate, he disappeared and never returned.
-
- Three weeks later, he began to surface in propaganda
broadcasts on North Korean radio and loudspeakers at the border, where
he urged his fellow American soldiers to join him in the Shangri-La of
the new socialist state.
-
- In the 1980s, Mr. Jenkins appeared in a famed North Korean
propaganda film, Nameless Heroes, a televised spy drama in which he played
the villainous role of a sinister-looking U.S. intelligence agent called
Mr. Kelton.
-
- His existence remained almost unknown to the outside
world until 2002, when Pyongyang made the shocking admission that it had
kidnapped at least a dozen Japanese citizens. One of the victims was Hitomi
Soga, who had married Mr. Jenkins in 1980. Two years earlier, the teenaged
Ms. Soga had been abducted by North Korean spies on a small island off
the northern coast of Japan's main island. She met the American soldier
when she was a student in an English class he taught in Pyongyang.
-
- In 2002, after a diplomatic dÈtente between Japan
and North Korea, the Japanese woman was allowed to return to her homeland.
But her husband refused to join her, fearing that the United States would
extradite him and prosecute him for desertion.
-
- After another summit between the Japanese and North Korean
leaders this year, the two countries agreed that Mr. Jenkins and his wife
would be allowed to reunite temporarily in Indonesia ó a country
carefully chosen because it does not have an extradition treaty with the
United States.
-
- "The day that the four of us can hug each other
is approaching, it's right in front of us. I am happy and relieved,"
Ms. Soga, 45, told reporters in Tokyo this week.
-
- "I am worried about what comes after seeing them,"
she added. "But I hope that in the end, the four of us can live together
in Japan."
-
- It is not clear how long the couple and their daughters,
now 18 and 20, will be able to spend together, but the visit may stretch
for weeks or months.
-
- Supporters of Mr. Jenkins believe he was abducted in
1965 by North Korean soldiers. But the Pentagon, reportedly at the personal
insistence of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, has refused to give a
pardon to Mr. Jenkins, despite repeated requests from the Japanese government.
It has cited a series of disputed letters that allegedly prove that he
had planned to defect to North Korea.
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