The Reluctant Communist Read online

  “What are we doing here?” I asked as we sat down in a back booth. “Considering you just patted me down for a wire, it seems like you’re worried about being watched or listened to, so why are we staying in the middle of a military hotel?”

  “No,” he responded. “I was worried that you would tape our conversation or write a story about it, and that would be bad for my guy. I take it as a given that everything I do and everything I say is being watched by the CIA and military intelligence. Wouldn’t you? God, for the good of the country, I kind of hope that they are. I mean, if you were in the CIA, don’t you think I would be a can’t-miss surveillance target? The lawyer of an accused defector to North Korea who they think might be a communist spy? Um, duh. I assume everything I do is being watched, so all I have to do is make sure I don’t do anything illegal or unethical. And the only reason I am here and talking to you is because I think it may be in the best interest of my guy, which is my first priority and legal duty. So start talking: Why do you want to meet him?”

  Despite our mutual wariness, we got on well pretty quickly. At that dinner, we laid the groundwork for what was going to become a fruitful relationship. The hard guy act quickly melted away. Culp mentioned he had been an infantry sergeant himself years ago before he put himself through college and law school, so he could understand and identify with what his enlisted clients were going through in a way that a lot of his current peers couldn’t. (That was part of the reason, I assumed, that Culp always referred to the man he represented not as the somewhat distant “my client” but as the much more intimate “my guy.”) He obviously had a lot of sympathy for Jenkins. In his assessment, Charlie, as Culp called him, was a poor, dumb, unlucky soul who had done an incredibly rash, stupid, and bad thing but who had already paid beyond measure for his crime. He described him as a frail and broken man, one who had no communist sympathies whatsoever, who had suffered constant mental torture while in North Korea, and who would be lucky if he could just live out his last few years on the planet in peace and freedom.

  These would all be opinions I would more or less come to agree with after getting to know Jenkins, but at the time, every word was new territory for me. It was quickly becoming clear that the FEER article had barely touched what was a rich and varied tale. Jenkins was still a cipher, a total unknown. Besides the other American deserters in North Korea, Culp was the only Westerner who had spent any significant time with Jenkins in the last forty years. So every word Culp spoke was a revelation.

  The situation was so politically sensitive it was essential that no one make a misstep, Culp explained. The Japanese government would love the United States to just pardon Jenkins, he said, “but that ain’t gonna happen.” The United States had never wavered from its insistence that justice must be served. “Charlie’s situation is precarious,” Culp continued. “So far, Charlie has benefited from the goodwill extended to him by the Japanese people. Since his wife is a national hero, they are inclined to think the best of her husband, at least in the absence of any further info. And the United States had, at least initially, sent signals that Charlie could recuperate in the hospital unmolested.”

  “But that was, what, six or seven weeks ago?” Culp said. “I could see the tide was beginning to change. The Japanese press was beginning to ask, ‘How long is this guy going to hang out in the hospital at taxpayers’ expense?’ And I could feel that the prosecution and the rest of the U.S. government were getting more and more impatient. I told Charlie a little while ago, ‘I can feel it. Something is happening. They are coming for you soon, if we don’t make the next move first.’ And I knew I needed to take the initiative on the PR front.”

  “But why FEER?” I asked. “It is such a small magazine compared to Time, the New York Times, or any of the other publications that would have killed for that interview.” “For this story,” Culp said, “it didn’t matter how big the publication was. FEER was perfect for my purposes. Our audience was not the whole world. That day will come. But this time around, the audience was actually just a few people in the U.S. and Japanese governments, to tell them to back off, to give us just a little more time and my guy will voluntarily turn himself in very soon. I picked Jeremy because, frankly, I don’t know a lot of journalists, and once I decided I needed to do this, I needed it done quickly and I knew I could control what he wrote. I snuck him in and out of the hospital; they talked for maybe an hour. He had connections at FEER, so FEER it was. The story was a way of delivering a message to people I can’t talk to directly, to tell them that there is no need to make Charlie’s coming under custody ugly if they can wait just a little while longer. And I can feel that the pressure on him has lessened because of it. So on every front, the story was a home run, a huge, huge win for us. But next time when Charlie talks, and there will be a next time, he will want a more global audience, and maybe then it will be for Time.” When Culp said that, toward the end of our dinner, I knew the next big Jenkins story just might be mine. (And when Culp and Kirk had a falling out several weeks later, that cemented it.) We finished the night with two double Crown Royals (Culp’s favorite whiskey) and a promise to keep the conversation going.

  Charles Robert Jenkins is, quite simply, a figure of lasting historical importance. He has lived a life that’s unique in twentiethcentury history. No other Westerner has survived so long in the world’s least known, least visited, and least understood country on the planet and been able to return to tell the tale. And what he has to say is vitally important: Is there any country in the world harder to get a handle on than North Korea? And while there are certainly rivals when it comes to the intensity of American diplomatic bungling, has any country been a U.S. foreign relations debacle so consistently for so many years? While native North Korean defectors and escapees from its gulags have made some horrors of that nation known to the world, Jenkins is the first Westerner able to provide a long-term, detailed view of this secretive and brutal society from the perspective of an outsider who became intimately familiar with its inner workings. I do not profess to know much about North Korea, but I’m confident Charles Robert Jenkins knows more about it than just about any foreigner on the planet.

  Perhaps this does not sound like as great a feat as it is. Very few people know much at all about North Korea, even the people who most prominently hold themselves out as experts. If from within, the nation is a prison nearly impossible to escape from, from without, it is a vault of information nearly impossible to crack into. Very few Western countries have diplomatic presences in Pyongyang. Entry for Western journalists is severely limited (I have never been), and once there, writers (like all visitors and virtually all residents) are accompanied or watched wherever they go. For this reason, because so little new information about North Korea ever leaks out, many of the stories that make their way into print are recycled over and over again for years. Throughout the 1990s, for example, it was an oft-printed truism that the U.S. government suspected North Korea possessed one or two nuclear weapons. The “one or two” total had been bandied about so long, journalists didn’t even bother to source it. It was simply accepted as fact. In his book North Korea: Another Country, Bruce Cumings tracks the ultimate source of the story down to a 1993 National Intelligence Estimate. It was arrived at, he writes, “by gathering all the government experts on North Korea together and asking for a show of hands as to how many thought the North has made atomic bombs. A bit over half raised their hands.”

  So what about North Korea is known? To begin with, it’s abundantly clear that the current, unhappy state of the Korean peninsula was born in the waning days of World War II. As victory over Japan became imminent, U.S. military planners were already looking to contain what they perceived as the next likely threat: the Soviet Union. Working to construct a power-sharing agreement for the soon-to-be liberated Korea, or so the story goes, a young colonel by the name of Dean Rusk (who would later be secretary of state under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson) arbitrarily chose the 38th parallel as the div
iding point between the Soviet-controlled North and the U.S.-controlled South for no reason other than it bisected the landmass into two roughly equal halves.

  Unable to settle on a common form of government, the Soviets and Americans installed regimes of their own choosing. The Soviets selected a young, former anti-Japanese revolutionary named Kim Il-sung, while the staunchly anticommunist Syngman Rhee took over in Seoul. After American and Soviet troops withdrew from the peninsula in 1949, each Korean leader aimed to unify the country under his government. Peaceful unification plans broke down. Tensions increased. After a swift military buildup and the blessing of Stalin, Kim invaded the South on June 25, 1950, to quick and devastating effect, almost conquering the entire peninsula in days. To Kim’s surprise, however, the United States rose to action immediately. It rallied the United Nations, and by October, UN forces had recaptured all of South Korea, taken Pyongyang, and were headed for the Yalu River, the border between China and Korea. The push greatly alarmed Mao, and he ordered 270,000 “volunteers” into battle to push back the U.S.-led UN forces across the 38th parallel and back into southern territory. Inconclusive battles and lengthy peace negotiations continued for two more years until a ceasefire was declared on July 27, 1953. More than three million people were dead, and the borders fell almost exactly where they stood before the fighting started.

  With the balance of power thus definitively laid down, Kim Ilsung went on to create one of the most idiosyncratic regimes in modern history. The cornerstone of his communist dictatorship was the concept of Juche, or self-reliance, in all things, from economics and politics to international relations and defense. He embarked upon a series of Soviet-style five-year plans that emphasized state-controlled agriculture and heavy industry as well as titanic defense spending. Simultaneously, he built a cult of personality that outdid Stalin’s, one that rivals most religions in terms of fervent devotion. He fashioned himself the Great Leader: textbooks and state-controlled media invested him with almost magical powers, and towns and cities are littered with innumerable heroic murals and statues. Interaction and free exchange with the outside world was severely limited in favor of state-controlled propaganda, every citizen to this day must wear a red enameled pin of Kim’s face, and his birthplace is both a pilgrimage and shrine.

  While in the early years, North Korea’s economy actually outperformed the South’s, the inefficiencies of command economics soon appeared and, over time, intensified. Always more dependent on the communist bloc than Juche rhetoric ever admitted, North Korea’s eventual estrangement from both the Soviet Union and China accelerated the country’s economic decline. (Since Kim’s death, the Soviet Union’s disintegration and China’s barely disguised embrace of capitalism—including its normalization of relations with South Korea—have hurt even worse.) Meanwhile, Kim Il-sung created one of the most militarized societies the world has ever known. One million of the nation’s twenty-three million citizens are active-duty military, seven million are in the reserves, and an estimated 30 percent of the government budget goes to defense spending. A final and key ingredient of North Korea’s peculiar political stew: heaping measures of anti-Americanism.

  Among the central targets (both literally and figuratively) of North Korean anti-Americanism are the twenty-nine thousand U.S. troops who still defend the southern side of the DMZ and, in cooperation with the South Korean military, the rest of the country. Since arriving in September 1945, American troops have rarely been absent from this area, and despite recent force reductions, there is little chance that America will leave completely any time soon. “Demilitarized Zone” is a misnomer, of course. The two-and-a-half-mile-wide DMZ is actually one of the most heavily fortified and militarized borders on the planet. And, until the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, Korea was wellknown as the most dangerous, least desirable assignment in the U.S. Army.

  This was Jenkins’s posting in the months before his decision to defect, on the front lines of the taut tripwire that separated Seoul from an uneasy peace and “a sea of fire,” as one of North Korea’s favorite turns of propaganda phrasing puts it. Both before and after Jenkins crossed over, that wire was frequently almost tripped. Although he played no active role in any of them, Jenkins’s life was affected by all of the major standoffs the United States and North Korea had since 1964, including the 1968 capture of the U.S.S. Pueblo spy ship and the 1976 Panmunjom Incident, when North Korean soldiers hacked two U.S. Army officers to death over a dispute about whether to cut down a poplar tree that was interfering with U.S. sight lines in the DMZ.

  Upon Kim Il-sung’s death in 1994, he was elevated to Eternal President. His son, Kim Jong-il, took over as the nation’s supreme (earthbound) leader. Although Kim Jong-il had been the expected successor since the mid-1980s (and had, in fact, been running much of the day-to-day affairs of the country for years), leaders in Washington and throughout the world greeted his ascension with fear and suspicion. Whereas Kim Il-sung had earned grudging respect as a canny operator and formidable foreign relations combatant (and had the added credibility of being an actual former soldier), Kim the younger was seen as a spoiled playboy and prat, a fat and pretentious dilettante who was undisciplined and possibly crazy. The (poorly sourced) stories of his love for French cognac, fresh sushi, and a never-ending supply of nubile women, all while his people starved, were legion. A dozen years later, however, those assessments of the man who in North Korea has long been called the Dear Leader have had to be revised. He has far outlived the early predictions of his ouster or the collapse of his nation. Indeed, Kim the younger has managed to not only retain but also increase his hold on power. And he has arguably managed to confound the United States even more successfully than his father by relentlessly taunting Washington about his country’s on-again, offagain nuclear power and weapons development projects. One instrument Kim has used to retain power is to yoke himself more tightly to the military, pursuing a “military first” policy for food and resources distribution.

  Kim’s successful consolidation and refinement of his powers are even more surprising considering he has managed to do so while his country’s economic situation has become ever more dire. North Korea suffered two years of record-breaking floods in 1995 and 1996, followed by a summer of drought and famine during which, according to some estimates, two million people died. According to the (South Korean) Bank of Korea, North Korea’s GDP has fallen from $21.3 billion in 1994 to $12.6 billion in 1998. In decades past, North Korea had been a grain exporter, but in 2001, it grew only 3.5 million tons, well below its self-sufficiency threshold. More than fifty years of disastrous Juche self-reliance has turned North Korea into one of the world’s biggest food aid recipients. When compared to the South, the North’s decline is particularly striking. As late as 1965, North Korea’s economy was actually three times the size of the South’s. But beginning in the 1980s, South Korea’s investment in international trade began to pay off and then multiply. Today, its economy has vaulted to $1.8 trillion, the eleventh largest in the world, and that country’s citizens now enjoy a per capita annual income of $24,000. Once the seat of dictatorships nearly as brutal as the one above the 38th parallel, South Korea has, over the past twenty years, developed strong and growing democratic institutions and traditions, hosted an Olympics, co-hosted a World Cup, and is home to world-class manufacturers like Samsung and LG. On January 1, 2007, South Korean diplomat Ban Ki-moon became secretary general of the United Nations.

  I interviewed Jenkins for the first time on November 27, 2004, just hours after he finished serving a month in the brig for desertion and aiding the enemy. With the help of Culp and another friend in the army who signed me on to base, I was waiting for Jenkins when he arrived at the small enlisted family home where his wife and daughters had been living during his imprisonment. Though Jenkins was expecting me and wanted to talk, the interview did not start well, primarily because I could barely understand a thing he was saying. Granted, he had just come off of some of the most traumatic times of h
is life (which is saying something, given his trauma-filled life), but as we began to speak (he did not even bother to take off his dress green uniform), I did not, at first, think he was all there mentally. Culp had briefed me about what Robert’s life was like in North Korea, but I don’t think it is possible to be totally prepared for one’s first meeting with Robert. Chain smoking cigarettes, since he wasn’t allowed any in the brig, Robert started talking about the wives of his friends (it wasn’t immediately obvious he was talking about the other American defectors), women who were Romanian, Thai, and Lebanese, and all their children, who had names like Gabi and Nahi. He spoke about “the farm,” “the college,” and “the apartment” as if I would know what those places were. It took me several minutes to figure out that “Pin-yong,” was how he pronounced “Pyongyang,” and not a different town. Sometimes, forgetting who he was talking to or searching for the right word, he would start to speak Korean for sentences at a time before he realized what he was doing. Throw all of this under the thick cover of a deep southern drawl and frequent periods of shouldershaking sobbing, and none of it made any sense. “This is all going to come apart,” I thought. “After all this, I am going to leave here with nothing.”

  But slowly, over about four hours, Robert and I turned things around. He responded patiently to requests to back up, say it again, slow down, explain this part, tell me the significance of that part. Thanks to that patience, I pieced together what I thought was a coherent narrative of his tale and, particularly, his plausible fear that “the Organization” (as I quickly learned he called the all-in-one combination of the Korean Workers’ Party and the government) wanted to turn his Asian American daughters into spies.