The Reluctant Communist (3 page)

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 his 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.

That first interview served as the foundation of a five-page Time Magazine story that ran the next week. Already, that first day we talked, he mentioned the book he wanted to write. He said one of the Japanese foreign ministry people who helped him get from Jakarta to the Tokyo hospital had given him the idea. Before either he or the Japanese government realized that the U.S. Army would provide a free defense counsel, the Japanese bureaucrat suggested that writing a book would be one way to pay for a lawyer.

I stayed in touch with Jenkins after the story came out, and after the media furor died down, I followed up on his book idea. “If you really want to do that,” I said, “I would be happy to write it with you.” He agreed, we found a Japanese publisher, and I took two months off work in the summer of 2005 to move near his home on the tiny Japanese island of Sado. Every morning, five days a week, I would pedal three or four miles on my bike from my small waterfront rental to his house. I would interview him for eight hours straight, except when we broke for lunch, eating the food that Hitomi left us before she went to work at City Hall in the morning. I would then write most of the weekend. I have tried to retain in print the very simple and plainspoken way he has of speaking.

Those two months interviewing Robert were some of the most remarkable times of my life. It would be obvious at this point to say that there is no one in the world like him and knowing him is a consistently dumbfounding experience. He is, in many regards, a living, breathing Rip Van Winkle. As he is quick to point out, he did get some of the biggest world news over the years. He knew that a man had walked on the moon, he knew the space shuttle blew up, and, since the United States was always national enemy number one, he always had a pretty good idea who the president was. But the gaps in cultural knowledge were frequently strange. He arrived back in Japan not knowing what a Big Mac or Sixty Minutes was. When Capt. Culp first asked him which publication he’d like to tell his story to, he didn’t say Time but Life, a magazine that suspended weekly publication in 1972. When I arrived in Sado, I brought, as a small gift, a DVD of a movie I thought he’d like: Bonnie and Clyde. He had never heard of it. When he sings karaoke, he sticks to Elvis Presley songs, since they are just about the only ones in a standard karaoke repertoire he is familiar with.

As this memoir shows, some Western popular culture did slip through North Korea’s media blackout, but these limited doses have had an odd effect on him. Ever since a smuggled videotape of a 1980s Michael Jackson concert somehow made its way to him in the 1990s, for example, he’s been something of a Jackson fan. It always amused me that whatever was making the bulk of the entertainment headlines at the time in 2004 and 2005—whether Jennifer Lopez, The Sopranos, or the latest Spider-Man movie— Robert would be oblivious. But whenever a TV segment or newspaper story about Michael Jackson appeared (and this being the mid-2000s, it was always a story about his legal troubles), Robert would be sure to stop and watch or read it. “He does seem to be a lot weirder these days,” Robert once said to me after watching a CNN segment about some court appearance Jackson was involved in.

As we started to get down to work, I have to admit I felt some disappointment when I determined how, generally, the arc of his life and his time in North Korea was going to go. Before I began, I had two equal and opposite storytelling fantasies. On the one hand, I thought it would be ideal if he had lived a life of decadent privilege at the right hand of Kim Jong-il, if he had acted as a kind of senior advisor or even court jester in the Dear Leader’s inner circle. I would think less of him as a person, but what a great story that would have been. Or, I thought, it would have been just as compelling if Jenkins were forced to live a completely opposite life—if, for forty years, he had had to withstand the unending misery of prison, torture, and starvation. From a humanitarian point of view, of course, I would be sorry for any suffering he may have gone through, but if he had endured forty years starring in his own, real-life Deer Hunter, he would have been a true American hero, regardless of his original crimes.

In fact, Robert’s life was neither of these. His was a life of quiet desperation, of suffering an almost unbearably understated evil. He and his fellow Americans were considered special by the Organization—about that, there can be no doubt. They led lives significantly richer in material comforts than most North Koreans were able to. But it is also clear that the North Koreans never figured out what to do with these trophies, how best to put them to use. It’s another, admittedly perverse way in which much of the potential of Jenkins’s life was squandered, not just by himself but also by his overlords. They didn’t know what to do with him, so they let him do, effectively, nothing. Occasionally, I would ask him what he did between the years of, say, 1986 and 1990, and sometimes he would say exactly that. “Nothing. During that time I did nothing.”

Nothing, except to try to stay alive and sane in a country that’s effectively a giant prison. The curtain Robert draws back on the mundane, relentless, dehumanizing operation of the North Korean state—its wastes of money and labor on domestic spying rather than economic output, its language-debasing doublespeak, its interference in the most intimate details of its residents’ lives—helps demonstrate how insidious and debilitating, bizarre and oppressive the country is. The story of Robert’s life was more difficult to tell since it did not reach either extreme of the sensationalism spectrum. He is neither a villain nor a hero, just a man trying to cope with the guilt of a horrible mistake while eking out an existence in a country unimaginably strange and hostile. But I hope that this attention to the quotidian, this focus on the struggle of everyday life, has produced a more nuanced and valuable contribution to our understanding of North Korea.

What are some of my most prominent impressions of Robert, as I got to know him? First and foremost, he is a deeply saddened individual. One story I wrote about him for Time was entitled “The Long Mistake,” and I think that sums up well how he has had to come to terms with his life. Short of teenagers who dive into shallow pools of water, break their necks, and become paralyzed for life or drunk drivers who survive when their victims do not, I can’t think of too many people who have had to live so long with an error they couldn’t undo, and I can’t imagine how that presses on someone’s soul.