Deserter Recalls N. Korean Hell

This segment was originally broadcast on Oct. 23, 2005.

In 1965, Charles "Robert" Jenkins, an American soldier, did something impossible to understand. He deserted to North Korea and got stuck there.

For 39 years, six months and four days, he was trapped in a bizarre Stalinist state — hungry, suffering, told by the government how to live, what to read, and even when to have sex. Never before has an American lived among the secretive North Koreans so long and escaped to tell the tale.

Correspondent Scott Pelley reports.

Robert Jenkins tells his story, an American Rip Van Winkle who, one night, crossed a minefield into a nightmare.

"Thinking back now, I was a fool. If there's a God in the heaven, he carried me through it," said Jenkins.

"Robert, if God in heaven carried you through it, you ended up in hell," said Pelley.

"That's it. Yeah. I got my punishment," Jenkins replied, in a drawl showing his roots in North Carolina, where he grew up in a large but poor family.

Jenkins dropped out of high school and joined the military. In 1964, he volunteered for a second tour on the hostile border between North and South Korea.

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.

What would he tell the men from that squad watching the interview? "I apologize for leaving them. They had faith that I would take them through. But I betrayed them," said Jenkins.

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.

Jenkins says he knows he made a mistake. "I made a lot of mistakes in my life, maybe, but that was the worst mistake anybody ever make. That's for sure."

What was Jenkins thinking? Jenkins says he was no communist sympathizer and imagined the North Koreans would send him to Russia and the Russians would trade him to America in some sort of a Cold War swap. It's a nice plot for a novel but not the script North Korea had in mind.

Jenkins joined the North's collection of American Army deserters. At the time, there were three others already living in North Korea. He shared a house with Larry Abshier, Jerry Parrish and James Dresnok.

"Dresnok told me, 'You're here, you'll never leave,'" Jenkins said.

Then, as now, North Korea was a totalitarian state straight out of the pages of George Orwell. The dictatorship of Kim Il Sung imposed complete control of body and mind.

What did the four American soldiers do all day long in Pyongyang? 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. And even now, the words lie on his memory like a scar.

While reciting one of Kim Il Sung's teachings in Korean for Pelley, Jenkins had a pained look on his face. "In words, I cannot express the feelings I have towards North Korea, the harassment I got. The hard life," he said.

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.

Jenkins says he got the worst beating ever for talking back to a leader. He showed Pelley a scar where he says his teeth came through his lower lip.

But even that beating wasn't as bad as the day someone noticed Jenkins' tattoo with the words "U.S. Army" inked into his forearm below crossed rifles.

Jenkins says the North Koreans held him down and cut off the tattoo with scissors and no anesthetic. "They told me the anesthetic was for the battlefield," Jenkins said. "It was hell."

He wanted to believe he was still in the Army but now the North Koreans had cut the words right out of his flesh.

"It's really in the details that you start to understand just how bad his life was," says Jim Frederick, Time magazine's Tokyo bureau chief, and co-author of a book Jenkins published in Japan.

Much of the book deals with Jenkins' description of his struggle to survive the pervasive poverty of the North.

"He never had any heat. Or, well, when we had heat, you know we had to stoke the boiler ourselves," says Frederick. "He had an apartment, but the toilet didn't flush. You had to flush it by hand. And it didn't really have a septic tank, it had a pipe. An outlet pipe out the back, so rats would come up."

And consider, the Americans were being treated better than most North Koreans because the government was using them – posing them in staged propaganda fliers, forcing them to teach English to military cadets and would-be spies.

Jenkins was also ordered to act in the movies. In one film he played the evil American Dr. Kelton. Jenkins' family got a copy of this movie from a reporter 32 years after he disappeared.

"What did you say when you saw that face on the screen?" Pelley asked Jenkins' sister Pat Harrell.

"It was the first ray of hope that I had actually had in all those years, that he is alive. He looked well," she recalled.

And back in North Korea, Jenkins was also touched by a ray of hope. In 1980, after 15 lonely years, his leaders brought a 21-year-old Japanese girl to his door. "Well, I'll put it like this. I looked at her one time. I wasn't letting her go," said Jenkins.

She was Hitomi Soga, and she had been kidnapped in one of the most bizarre intelligence operations in modern history.

North Korea was abducting ordinary Japanese citizens and forcing them to teach Japanese to North Korean spies. In 1978, Hitomi was kidnapped by North Korean agents on a road on Sado Island, Japan.

She was shoved onto a boat and disappeared. No one in Japan knew why or how.

Soga and Jenkins were from two completely different worlds but he says they had something in common. "She was a prisoner. I was a prisoner. We're both the same. We both hated North Korea. So that's really about the only thing you'd say we had in common."

Within weeks they were married, a union arranged by the government they despised, but Jenkins says it bloomed into a true marriage.

Each night before going to bed in North Korea, Jenkins said good night to his wife in Japanese, rather than Korean. He did it, he tells Pelley, to "remind her that she's still Japanese, that she's not Korean. She's not obligated to Korea. She is Japanese and she spoke to me in English, every night. Regardless of how hard things got, we always stuck as one."

They "stuck as one" for 22 years, raising two daughters, Mika and Brinda. Then in 2002, the completely unexpected happened.

To improve relations, the new dictator of North Korea, Kim's son, Kim Jong Il, admitted to Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi that North Korea had kidnapped 13 Japanese citizens.

The survivors, including Hitomi, returned home, where she became a national hero.

But Jenkins and the girls stayed behind. The North didn't want them to go, and Jenkins knew that he would be arrested by the U.S. Army for desertion if he left.

He spent two more lonely years in North Korea, until there was a diplomatic breakthrough and Jenkins decided that going to prison would be worth it if he could see his wife again. Hitomi was reunited with Jenkins and their daughters in Indonesia.

In September 2004, Sgt. Jenkins reported for duty at a U.S. base in Japan. It appears no deserter has ever come back after being gone so long.

Jenkins said it felt good to be in uniform again after 40 years.

"Felt good? Why so?" Pelley asked.

"I correct my mistake. I come back," Jenkins said. "And Mika and Brinda, they had never seen me, they never saw me in uniform and I didn't think they ever would."

He pled guilty to desertion and aiding the enemy and was released from the brig after 25 days. "I've paid my debt to society. I don't expect people to run up to me and hug me and kiss me. I don't want them to," said Jenkins.

And Jenkins does not think of himself as a traitor. "If I was a traitor, I wouldn't have come back."

Pelley asked Jenkins what amazed him the most about the world since he left it in 1965.

He had never laid a hand on a computer, much less been on the Internet. He told 60 Minutes he was surprised there were so many women in the Army, that there were black policemen, and, as he put it, you can't smoke anywhere anymore.

Jenkins says he had been told about the historic landing of men of the moon. "I was told that by the Koreans, one of the officers. They wouldn't say what country, but they said, 'Una handa la'… some country landed on the moon."

Today, Jenkins has landed on Sado Island, Japan, not far from the spot where his wife was kidnapped. But before he came to the family farm, he had to know that Hitomi's love flowed from freedom, not slavery.

Jenkins volunteered to dissolve the marriage. "I told her, 'In North Korea, it's one thing. This is Japan. You're still young. If you wish for me to go, I'll go.' "

But Hitomi said no.

After Hitomi, there was just one other woman in the world he needed to see: his mother. When he left for duty in South Korea, he told her he would be back in a year.

Last summer, Jenkins visited North Carolina where, at the age of 91, his mother, Pattie Casper, had lived long enough to see her son come home.

"Yeah, I love you. … I didn't think you would ever get here," his mother said during the reunion.

"It was hard, very difficult, very hard," Jenkins tearfully replied.