Joe Dresnok: An American In North Korea

This segment was originally broadcast on Jan. 28, 2007. It was updated on July 15, 2007.

Joe Dresnok could be the ultimate runaway. Growing up an orphan in Virginia, he kept running away from abusive foster homes. Then, as a soldier serving on the DMZ between North and South Korea, Dresnok did the unthinkable: in 1962, he ran through a minefield and defected into North Korea, where his unthinkable act led to an unimaginable life.

As Bob Simon reports, Dresnok has had for 44 years a mysterious isolated existence in that mysterious isolated country. No one outside North Korea has heard from Dresnok – until now.

Gordon and Bonner earned the government's trust, so much so that after six years of trying they finally met Joe Dresnok.

"This is a man who disappeared off the face of the known world in 1962. And I went into this room, very sort of dark brick room. This sort of tall man in a black uniform came in. And he sat down, said, 'Hello Boy. I gather you wanna, gather you wanna talk about making a film about me.' And it would have been less surprising to have met Elvis Presley," Bonner recalls. "And yet here was this man in front of me, sat there, Joe Dresnok, who no one has seen since 1962."

Back in 1962, JFK was president and Dresnok was depressed and desperate. His wife had just divorced him, and then after leaving his base without permission for a night of womanizing, he was about to be court-martialed.

"I was fed up with my childhood, my marriage my military life, everything . I was finished. There's only one place to go," Dresnok told the filmmakers. "On August 15th, at noon in broad daylight when everybody was eating lunch, I hit the road. Yes I was afraid. Am I gonna live or die? And when I stepped into the minefield and I seen it with my own eyes, I started sweating. I crossed over, looking for my new life."

North Korean soldiers surrounded him, as portrayed in the documentary, and some wanted to kill him. Instead, Dresnok was taken by train to the capital, Pyongyang, for interrogation. He was used to running away but he had never run to a place like this before.

Much of North Korea was in ruins a decade after the war. Kim Il Sung, known as "The Great Leader," was Asia's version of Joseph Stalin. One morning, Dresnok woke up to discover that North Korea already had an American defector.

"I opened my eyes. I didn't believe myself. I shut them again. I must be dreaming. I opened them again and looked and, 'Who in the hell are you?' He says, 'I'm Abshier.' 'Abshier? I don't know no Abshier,'" Dresnok remembers.

Larry Abshier was another American soldier who had defected three months before Dresnok. Two more GIs would follow over the next two years, Jerry Parish and then Sgt. Charles Jenkins.

They were a propaganda bonanza for the north, which put them on magazine covers, looking pleased and prosperous in paradise. They broadcast their happiness in the north through loudspeakers to American troops at the border.

All were high school dropouts, who had thought more about what they were running from, than where they were going. Misfits in the Army, they were outcasts in North Korea.

"Different customs. A different ideology," Dresnok explains. "The uneasiness of the way people look at me when I walk down the street. 'Oh, there goes that American bastard.' I didn't want to stay, I didn't think I could adapt."

Four years after Dresnok defected, he and the other Americans had had enough. They sought asylum in the Soviet embassy but the Soviets handed them right back to the North Koreans.

"I think all four of them thought they'd be shot. And what's remarkable to me is that they weren't. The authorities painstakingly decided that we will convert them almost. That, you know they will come to our system," Dan Gordon says.

The filmmaker says that conversion process worked. Running away was no longer an option. So, since he couldn't get out, Dresnok vowed to fit in.

"They might be a different race. They might be a different color. But God damn it I'm gonna sit down and I'm gonna learn their way of life. I did everything I could. Learning the language. Learning the customs. Learning their greetings. Their life. Oh, I gotta think like this, I gotta act like this. I've studied their revolutionary history, their lofty virtues about the Great Leader," Dresnok recalled. "Little by little, I came to understand the Korean people.

And "the Korean people" finally accepted the Americans when they started starring in propaganda films that were big hits in the north.

In their first epic in 1978, Dresnok played the brutal American commander of a POW camp.

"I don't consider it a propaganda movie. I took great honor in doing it," Dresnok said.

"And that was how he found salvation in North Korea is that he played the part of an evil American," Gordon says.

"And he's the John Wayne of North Korea," Bonner adds.

"The John Wayne of North Korea playing the villain," Simon remarks, laughing.

And Dresnok enjoyed becoming a celebrity. "We walk around with him and people say, 'Come here, come here,'" explains Gordon. "He'd never have done that in Virginia, you know? He wasn't exactly Hollywood material."

Beyond starring in dozens of movies, he translated the Great Leader's writings into English. He taught some English as well.

"I've taught in a foreign language college in 1986. I poured all my knowledge and effort to help them, to teach them. Some of the places in the educational fields, they invite me to give a lecture once in a while," Dresnok says.

In North Korea, Dresnok finally got what he had never had in America: a family. He married an eastern European woman and had two sons. But his wife died young. Then, he married the daughter of a Korean woman and an African diplomat; she and Dresnok have a six-year-old.

The British filmmakers were stunned by his eldest son James, who's studying at Pyongyang's elite foreign language college.

"My father is American and I've got American blood. But as I born here I consider myself as Korean," James told the filmmakers.

"He speaks and acts like a Korean. He speaks English in a Korean accent. It's a very strange thing," says Gordon.

"When we interviewed him he says you know, you want peace in this world. I don't understand what all this war is going on—or "wer" as he calls it. I would like to be in a position where we can we can stop all this," Bonner adds.

"I start to learn English to become a diplomat. I'd like to make the world which has no war at all. And no terror at all," James told the film team.

"He thinks of himself as Korean. His friends are Korean. But you mentioned, he doesn't want to marry a Korean woman," Simon asks Gordon.

"Yeah. I mean, that's what he was saying. But you know, his best friend, who's Korean is like, 'All the Korean girls love him,' you know," he replies laughing.

Gordon says James is a popular kid. "I mean they love him. And you know, he's got blond hair and blue eyes."

Now his father's days are pretty dull—fishing, and smoking, and drinking. The government provides a small apartment and a monthly stipend, but even in the capital, where only the privileged are allowed to live, blackouts are frequent, and running water seldom runs. All homes have a built-in radio speaker that pipes out propaganda. The radio can be turned down, but not off.

"There is this propaganda everywhere in North Korea," explains Gordon. "You walk down the street, there's all sorts of revolutionary music that will just play out from loud speakers. Down the escalators into the metro, propaganda is playing. If you're in the fields, you'll have news read to you. And that's all part and parcel of their propaganda machine."

The wide streets of the capital see little traffic and surprisingly few bicycles. The government believes bikes give people too much mobility and make them too hard to keep track of.

But Joe Dresnok doesn't want to go anywhere. He's the last American defector alive in North Korea. Abshier reportedly died from a heart attack; Parish from kidney failure; and Jenkins was allowed to follow his Japanese wife back to Japan. Dresnok doesn't miss him.

Speaking about Jenkins, Dresnok says, "Bye-bye, baby! Who cares?"

Their hostility is mutual: in Japan a year ago, Jenkins told Scott Pelley in a 60 Minutes interview, that when the North Koreans wanted to punish him, they would tie his hands behind his back and tell Dresnok to beat him.

"He beat me. Dresnok is a man that likes to hurt someone believe it our not. He told me, he feels good after he does it," Jenkins told Pelley, recalling the beatings.

But Dresnok says Jenkins is a "liar."

Asked if there was any sense of the government ordering Dresnok to beat Jenkins, Gordon says, "We never got that sense from Dresnok. He just denied and denied and denied that he was like the North Korean strong arm."

"Jenkins has a scar where he says Dresnok knocked his tooth through his lower lip," Simon remarks.

"From what we can gather there was a lot of times when it was drink oriented. They went out and they drank and they drank and they had a fight," Gordon replies.

"One day he tried to push me around with his so called rank and there was two blows. I hit him and he hit the ground," Dresnok told the filmmakers. "I think you know Alice in Wonderland. Well, I just wonder if it's not Jenkins in Wonderland."

But it has been Dresnok in Wonderland for 44 years, a Caucasian among Asians; an isolated man in an isolated country. He is an outsider who claims to fit in.

"I don't have intentions of leaving. Couldn't give a s--- if you put a billion damn dollars of gold on the table," he told the filmmakers.

"He really doesn't have any desire to leave North Korea at all," says Gordon.

Asked if they asked him political questions, Gordon says, "We asked him about the nuclear issue, you know? And he was like, 'If America attacks, we're ready.'

His health is failing now. The smoking and drinking have taken their toll. "I go to the doctor when necessary. Right now this doctor is necessary," Dresnok says. "I'm too old and wore out. I'm getting old quick."

The government he ran to still takes care of him and didn't cut his rations even during the recent famine when perhaps a million North Koreans starved to death.

"When I eat my rice I think about the people who died who starved to death but yet they fed me. Why do they let their own people starve to death and feed an American?" Dresnok wonders.

And so, appreciative of his treatment; and fulfilled by his family and his celebrity, Joe Dresnok says he has no regrets about running through a mine field and into the unknown.

"I feel at home. I really feel at home," he says. "I wouldn't trade it for nothing."