The Reluctant Communist (21 page)

Later in March 2003, they moved me back to Li Suk. Why? I looked at it like this: If my wife wasn’t coming back, then they didn’t need to give a damn about me anymore, which was all fine by me. With my daughters back in the dorms at college and me living alone, there was nothing to stop me from being drunk almost all the time.

After moving back to Li Suk, I fell into a pattern of constant drunkenness. On Monday, I would go into town. The cheapest, nastiest booze I could find was Chinese ginseng liquor, which was eighty proof and came in five-liter jugs that cost $2.50. I would buy two jugs. I bought it at the Daesong Department Store in East Pyongyang, not far from the Romanian, Libyan, and Egyptian embassies. By Monday afternoon, I was home drinking by myself, and sometimes I would not wake up until Friday. Often, I would not recall a thing that had transpired from the week. Sometimes the dog would wake me up to get fed by licking my face, but that was about it. Many weeks, no one would come to my house for days, which was how I liked it. Every once in a while, Dresnok and Siham would drop by to see how I was doing. They even developed a joke about it. “Is he all right?” one would ask. “I don’t know. He was passed out, face down on the floor,” the other would say. “Well, at least he’s alive, because two days ago he was passed out on the bed!” On Fridays, I had to straighten myself and the house up because the girls would come home for the weekend. I would spend the weekend relatively sober, and then, after they shipped back off to school, I would start the process all over again. In no time, whenever I walked into the department store, the liquor counter salesgirl had my order lined up as soon as she saw me. I did this routine, staying drunk, for a year straight.

By the spring of 2003, Hitomi and the other abductees had decided that they were not going to go back to North Korea, and on April 15, 2003, they had a press conference to declare as much. They said they had decided that there was no benefit to anyone if they returned, and they believed that the Japanese government would be successful in negotiating the handover of the rest of their families still stuck in North Korea, even me. Hitomi told me later that she had been convinced that with good diplomacy, patience, and pressure applied at the right places at the right time, chances were good for me to someday live as a free man.

The update I got from the leader about the press conference was a lie. He said that my wife and the others had had a press conference where they condemned the Japanese government for not being allowed to return to North Korea. I believed what he said absolutely. I was so furious that night that I sat down and wrote Koizumi a letter where I called him a son of a bitch and every other name in the book. I wrote, “To be kidnapped twice in one lifetime, that is just too much!” I marched down to the post office and mailed it myself. I assume it was never sent because I never heard about it again. I continued to think that Hitomi was not being allowed to return all the way up until I talked to her in person in Indonesia. I don’t know how, in all of the secret news radio broadcasts that I listened to over the next fifteen months, I managed to miss that piece of information, but I did. My understanding of the April press conference just added more misery to my already miserable existence. It only intensified my desire to stay wasted all the time. Some mornings, I would wake up and my hands would be shaking so badly, I couldn’t raise a coffee cup to my lips without spilling.

During my lost, drunken year, I definitely had a death wish. On New Year’s Day, as is customary, I had to host some cadres. They came over, and I got drunk. After the party was over, I was talking to a few of them in my living room. I pointed to a picture of Kim Jong-il and said, “If it weren’t for that son of a bitch, my family would be together now.” I called Kim a ga-sicki, a dog, the worst curse imaginable. Being disrespectful to the official photos of Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung is one of the most serious crimes there is, and to curse one out is unthinkable. The punishment should be instant execution. Mika was there, and she just about died when she heard what I said. She tugged on my arm, pleading, “Papa, they are going to shoot you if you don’t shut up.” I don’t know why they didn’t, but they didn’t. All I can come up with is that the leaders who were there that night were the few that I had grown to be closest to over many years, and they simply chose to look the other way.

The only thing that got me off the sauce was my prostate trouble. In the spring of 2004, I started having to get up and go to the bathroom every few minutes in the middle of the night. I went to the hospital, and they operated on me around April 15. Every night the leaders would come into my hospital room, sit on the floor, and play cards and drink while I was there with tubes sticking out of my belly and catheters running up my penis. In May, just as I was about to be discharged, one of the nurses came to tell me that Koizumi was coming back to North Korea. I told her that I was going to meet with that bastard while he was in town. I said, “I’m going to give him a good old-fashioned Korean cussing. That son of a bitch stole my wife.” I went home and waited for Koizumi’s arrival, which was less than a week away.

9 | My Escape

On the morning of May 22, Mika, Brinda, and I were picked up by a high cadre from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and taken to an old country house of Kim Jong-il’s about twelve miles outside of Pyongyang. That’s where we were to meet with Prime Minister Koizumi.

We arrived about 9:00 a.m., three hours early, and were taken into a big waiting room where there was fruit on a silver platter and lots of soft drinks on a side table. In that room, over the next few hours, four high-ranking North Koreans I had never seen before came to talk to me. Each one gave me a long lecture, talking to me about what he said would happen to me and my daughters if I left that day. The last person to meet me was very high up, a vice minister of foreign affairs. All of them were singing the same song. They told me that the United States had no respect for me or my family and that I would spend the rest of my life in prison, if I weren’t executed. They brought in faxes and photocopies of news reports from all over the world that suggested the United States would have no mercy on me. (I don’t know how many of those news reports were forged, since they had already been “translated” into Korean. I imagine some were but not all. One of the things that I have learned about reporters is that they are very good at stating things authoritatively, even when it is absolutely impossible for them to have any idea of what they are talking about.) The North Koreans also told me that my daughters would live intolerable lives, that they would be harassed and discriminated against wherever they went, and that they might even be in physical danger.

The North Korean officials never actually told me that they were forbidding me from leaving, but they didn’t have to. They told me that if I decided to go to the airport, I would have to ride in a separate car with my family rather than on the buses that had carried the North Korean and Japanese delegations here. I got the unspoken message very clearly: I was not to leave that day, and if I tried, they would prevent it. People may doubt me on this point. People may say that the only reason I didn’t leave that day was because I was afraid of getting arrested by the Americans once I landed in Japan. They can believe that if they want, but I know the truth. I have lived long enough in North Korea to pick up on signals, to hear the threats that are not actually spoken. I know in my heart if I had tried to get on that plane on that day, the North Koreans would have told the Japanese that I had changed my mind at the last minute, our car would have broken off from the convoy, and we would have been taken God knows where.

Just before noon, someone announced that Koizumi had arrived. We all got up and walked into a conference room. Koizumi came in with an entourage of about seven or eight people. No North Koreans came into the room. They waited just outside with the larger contingent of Japanese. Koizumi walked in, and I shook his hand. I told him it was a great honor to meet him. He sat down across from me and my daughters. There was a note-taker in the corner, two translators at Koizumi’s side, and a couple of other Japanese diplomats hanging out around the edges of the room.

Then we launched in on what turned out to be a pretty testy debate. Remember that my family and I were still operating under the assumption that Hitomi was being held in Japan against her will. We had none of the information that the rest of the world considered common knowledge. I had no understanding about how hard my wife was working on my behalf and how strongly all of Japan had rallied to her cause of reuniting her family. Even though I had been listening to foreignlanguage radio broadcasts as often as I could, very little of this part of the story was coming through. Every day now, I thank God for my wife, the Japanese people, and the Japanese government, and I know I am a free man because of them. Today, I have nothing but the highest respect, admiration, and gratitude for everything Koizumi has done for me and my family, persevering on our behalf even when it was politically risky for him to do so. But at that time, I was madder than hell at him.

As he sat down, Koizumi reached into his briefcase and handed me a letter written by my wife. I took it but did not open it right away. “You know why I am here, don’t you?” he asked. “Yeah,” I said. “You are here because you have my wife.” Mika is a feisty one, and she jumped in almost immediately, asking, “Why haven’t you let her come back like you promised?” Koizumi said, “I could never send her back to a country that had stolen her in the first place.” “But this is where her home and her family are,” she said. Koizumi responded, “I am here because I am trying to reunite her with her family.” While Mika and Koizumi were fighting, I was able to read my wife’s letter. In it, she told me to think very hard before making my decision, but she thought I should come with Koizumi.

I thought about the letter as I refolded it, and at the time I wondered if much of it had been coerced or if she was just saying what she knew Japan wanted to hear. I put the letter in my jacket pocket and joined the fight. I told Koizumi that my wife was kidnapped right now, in Japan. Koizumi said that that was not true. “She does not want to come back to North Korea,” he said. “She wants you to come to Japan.” I told him that if I came back with him, then I was going to go to jail for a very long time, a prospect I was not too happy about. Koizumi told me that he could not promise anything, but that he would do everything in his power to ensure I would receive fair and compassionate treatment from the United States.

At that point, one of his men passed him a note, which he read. He then ripped a piece of paper from a small notebook of his own. Looking at the note he had been passed, he wrote a new one in his own hand. He then passed me the note he had written across the table. It said, in English, “The Prime Minister of Japan will assure you that he will do the utmost that you can live together happily with Mrs. Jenkins in Japan.” I read it, folded it, put it in my jacket pocket, and did not say a word.

Contrary to a number of news reports that followed this meeting, Prime Minister Koizumi did not make any guarantees regarding how I would be treated by the United States. He said only that he would do the best he could to request humane treatment for me, and that since the United States and Japan were best friends, he was confident that the United States would at least listen to his point of view. Also contrary to some news reports, I never asked Koizumi or anyone else from the Japanese government, during this meeting or at any other time, for a guarantee of a U.S. pardon before I would consider traveling to Japan. It is true that I was cautious and apprehensive about how the United States might treat me, and I asked the Japanese officials to do everything they could to help me, but I knew from the beginning that if I ever left North Korea, I would have to face the U.S. Army myself, and I never insisted that Japan work a deal for me.

Following this, Koizumi said, “Kim Jong-il has said you can go.” Mika piped up again: “Is that really true?” Koizumi pulled out a piece of paper signed by Kim Jong-il saying so, and he placed it right between me and Mika. Throughout the whole meeting, Brinda didn’t say a word. I was glad, because the thing she was most likely to say was “Let’s go to Japan!” and that would have caused all kinds of trouble. The North Koreans originally told us we would have about ten minutes with Koizumi, but the whole conversation wound up taking an hour. At the end of it, I told him that I appreciated all of his efforts, and he certainly gave me a lot of new stuff to think about, but there was simply no way that we were going to be able to come with him to Japan that day.

Realizing we had hit the end, he signaled for one of his people to come over and introduce a new topic. “There is one more thing we could try,” said this Japanese diplomat. “Would you be willing to meet your wife in a third country, maybe China, in a little while, where you could all discuss further what, as a family, you would like to do?” I said, “Yes. That sounds like a very good idea. Let’s do that.” As we were parting, the Japanese gave us a few gifts: a disk of cartoon videos for the girls, an inspirational book in English about a Japanese who overcomes adversity despite being born without any arms and legs, and a carton of Mild Seven cigarettes for me.

As we were walking out, I told Koizumi that I wished we could have spoken in English without interpreters, since I knew that he had studied in England. He looked surprised that I knew that and smiled. I also told him that I loved Japan when I visited Yokohama in 1960 and 1961. He threw up his hands in celebration, as if to say, “That’s great!” I was hoping he would let loose with some English, but he never did. Through his interpreter, he said that he was sorry it didn’t work out this time and that he held out hope that I would be able to come to Japan someday. I said, “We shall see.”

After that meeting, they moved me to a guesthouse rather than back to my house in Li Suk as everybody tried to arrange the next meeting. Word got back that my wife wouldn’t do the meeting in China (which, in retrospect, was probably a wise choice). Someone suggested Singapore. I said no, since I thought it was too close an ally of the United States. Finally, someone said, “How about Indonesia?” Indonesia sounded like a fine choice to me, a very neutral country.