North Korea Undercover (32 page)

Dresnok says in the film: ‘One day he tried to push me around with his so-called rank and there was two blows. [Jenkins had been a sergeant, Dresnok a private.] I hit him and he hit the ground. I think you know
Alice in Wonderland.
Well, I just wonder if it’s not Jenkins in Wonderland.’

Crossing the Line
does reflect Jenkins’s version of events, but the star of the film is Dresnok, not Jenkins. Nick Bonner, at a Q&A after a screening ofthe film in Beijing, faces the question, which of the two men does he believe? He answers it by imitating Dresnok’s southern drawl, mocking Jenkins’s claims that he was tied up, then beaten: ‘Tie him up? Why would I need to tie him up? I could hold him in one hand and beat him with the other.’ The audience laughs. Perhaps they haven’t been to North Korea.
¹⁰

The detail of Jenkins’s account in his book of Dresnok beating
him up is compelling. For example, Jenkins specifically recalls the date on which Dresnok’s attacks on him began: 9 September 1972, the anniversary of the foundation of the Workers’ Party. Jenkins angers his minder, whom he calls the Tall Cadre. The Americans are held under loose house arrest because they know that they stand out a mile in racially pure North Korea. The Tall Cadre ties Jenkins up and orders Dresnok to hit him. Jenkins is small and compact, Dresnok a much biggerman:

The sick bastard enjoyed it. He took solid, square-knuckled cracks at me across my face, one after another... My nose began to gush blood after the first few swings. By the time he had finished, my top lip had split in two places, and my bottom teeth were sticking out of the skin between my lower and my chin... Why was he always an eager torturer? He had become a stooge.
¹¹

So who to believe? If Jenkins is a liar, as Dresnok insists, then his information about Doina cannot be relied upon.

The fine detail of Dresnok’s military record does not feature in
Crossing the Line.
His old local paper,
The Virginian
, dug it up: on 26 January 1960, Dresnok stole a Volkswagen valued at $715 from its owner, Franz Schuhmann, and threatened a second German with a bayonet. He was court-martialled, but got a suspended sentence. In South Korea, he made a poor impression: one report described him as ‘a chronic complainer, lazy’ and ‘defiant to authority’. In July of 1962 he faced a second court martial over a forged pass, drinking, indebtedness and promiscuity.
¹²
A few days before the hearing, he crossed ‘the Z’. None of the above
makes Dresnok out to be a bad bad man, but it is evidence of a weakness of character the Organization could play on.

In the film Dresnok does not come across well. One newspaper reviewer in the States found Dresnok unconvincing: ‘Although a curious study in political exploitation for most of the film – snippets of the Kim Jong Il-directed propaganda epic “Nameless Heroes,” starring Dresnok as a sinister American, are fascinating – by the end, his sallow, corpulent frame has settled into stooge-like, Kool-Aid-drunk offensiveness.’
¹³

What about Jenkins the man? His ghost-writer,
Time
journalist Jim Frederick, says: ‘Robert [Jenkins] tells the truth. There have been numerous times when Robert told me something that either sounded insane, trumped up, or nonsensical only to have my doubts shattered by the realization that he was absolutely correct... Although Dresnok recently denied to a documentary film crew in North Korea’ – Bonner and Gordon – ‘that he ever beat up Robert in anything more than a single fair fist fight, it seems to me to be such an odd thing to fabricate, and a thing that reflects poorly on Robert.’ Frederick asks: ‘What soldier would want to admit that he couldn’t defend himself against another? I can’t imagine why he would make a story like that up.’

To this day, the regime does not admit that it abducted anyone else apart from the thirteen Japanese they have already confessed to kidnapping. But there are seriously evidenced reports that South Korean, Thai and Lebanese women were also kidnapped. And, perhaps, too, one Romanian.

Jenkins in his book touches on an eastern European woman who ended up marrying Dresnok. He calls her ‘Dona’. Her story, says
Jenkins, was that she met this Italian ‘big shot’ art dealer, who was in retrospect a North Korean sympathizer or paid agent. He invited her to‘Hong Kong’. She didn’t have an Italian or Romanian passport at the time, but the Italian supplied her with North Korean papers. On the way to Hong Kong, they stopped over in Pyongyang: there, she faced hostile interrogation, that her papers were fake. The trap was sprung. There was no way out.

Is the woman Jenkins calls Dona the Romanian artist Doina who disappeared in 1978? Ceausescu’s former interpreter, Izidor Urian, is haunted by Doina’s story. He sounded wretched when he explained that he went through all of the old Romanian archives, trying to find any mention of her case. There was nothing there. But if Doina’s kidnap was a black operation by the North Koreans, the absence of evidence in the Bucharest archives does not mean much.

Jenkins gets one detail wrong, saying that the Italian who kidnapped her promised her work in the art scene in Hong Kong, not Tokyo, where she told her family she was going. But people often mistake small details of a story like that. There are two more facts the old sergeant does remember. The first is that Jenkins says of Dona: ‘She was one hell of an artist... she could draw like she knew what she was doing.’

Dona’s second boy, James Gabriel, the blue-eyed star of
Crossing the Line
, was known as Gabi to Jenkins. Doina’s younger brother, the one she is seen cuddling in the photograph when he was around three, is called Gabriel.

‘It’s the same woman,’Gabriel Bumbea told me. ‘She is my sister. I am 100 per cent convinced. Jenkins and Hitomi lived with my sister for nineteen years.’

After the film was aired, Gabriel flew to Japan in 2007 and met Jenkins and Hitomi. Jenkins gave Gabriel a much fuller picture of
Doina than he set out in his book, written in 2004. Jenkins said that Doina told him about the mystery Italian, how they had stopped off in Moscow but ended up in Pyongyang. First, in 1978, she was sent to a paramilitary training camp, which sounds pretty much like one described by Len the IRA man. There, she was taught Kimilsungism, martial arts and that, in North Korea, to eat, you had to obey. Noone in the outside world knew where she was. She had no hope of escape; no hope at all.

The marriage with Dresnok was arranged by the Organization. Jenkins recalls meeting Doina just after the birthday of Larry Abshier’s son: ‘She was beautiful and intelligent.’ In 1981, she still dreamed of escape back to Italy. At the birthday party, Doina asked Jenkins: ‘When will I be free?’ Jenkins replied: ‘Never.’ Jenkins said that the marriage with Dresnok was not happy: there were endless rows, beatings too. Doina ran away from home at times; but in North Korea, where any Caucasian stands out a mile, she had no chance.

The four couples lived in a compound not far from Pyongyang, Dresnok and Doina and their two boys, known as Ricardo and Gabi; Jenkins and Hitomi and their two daughters; Abshier and his wife, who Dresnok in
Crossing the Line
claims was a Korean, but Jenkins says is a Thai, Anocha Panjoy, also kidnapped; and Jerry Parrish and his wife, Siham Shrieteh, originally from the Lebanon, and their three sons. Siham says in
Crossing the Line
that she is happy to stay in North Korea. The film does not point out the strong likelihood that her three boys are effective hostages and that Siham may have been rehearsing her gaolers’ script; as she talks her face looks unbearably strained.

They did not make for ‘Happy Families’. Jenkins says that was because of Dresnok. Jenkins says that as well as being violent
towards him and Doina, Dresnok beat up Abshier,‘a simple, sweet, good hearted soul who was more than a little dumb and easy to take advantage of.
¹⁴
At one point, on Jenkins’s illicit radio, they heard a dramatization of Steinbeck’s
Of Mice And Men
, after which Dresnok and Parrish would mock Abshier as ‘Lennie’, the dumb giant. Abshier died of a heart attack in 1983. On his tombstone, it was written his place of birth was Pyongyang. That should have read Urbana, Illinois.

Doina sold a gold necklace she’d managed to keep from Italy for a sewing machine. An excellent seamstress, she made clothes for all of the children, and she was a good cook too, magicking flne-ish meals out of miserable ingredients. Her speciality was a Russian salad, and when they had meat she knew how to grill it to perfection. She even cultivated a piece of land, growing corn, potatoes and onions.

Their two sons grew up. Ricardo, the oldest, was more rebellious. Aged twenty, he sneaked out to a party thrown by children of some diplomats in Pyongyang. For this crime, he was sentenced to six months in prison. He pops up in
Crossing the Line
but is not interviewed, unlike his younger brother, James Gabriel, the student at the spy school, although the film does not call it that. It’s possible that the older brother is less compliant, less brainwashed.

Doina died of cancer in 1997, Hitomi giving her shots of morphine to ease the pain. Back in Romania, her family continued to know nothing of her fate for another decade.

Jenkins said: ‘Doina told both of her boys that she is Romanian and she was kidnapped.’ All of this makes Dresnok’s statement in
Crossing the Line
that he did not know where the mother of his two
boys was from – ‘Shut up, don’t ask that question’ – incredible.

Gabriel Bumbea told me: ‘I dream of my nephews getting out of North Korea and coming home to Romania. My mother, Petra, who is now eighty-four, only lives for the day when she can see her grandsons. The two boys are all that’s left of my sister and we want to meet them.’

To lose the blue-eyed, blond-haired James Gabriel Dresnok would, of course, be a disaster for Pyongywood. It’s only because of
Crossing the Line
that Doina’s Romanian family know what happened to her, and for that they are grateful to Bonner and Gordon. But that happy consequence appears to have been unintended. A film setting out North Korea’s version of the Americans who crossed the DMZ ends up revealing, by mistake, a hitherto unknown and monstrous case of kidnapping. Pyongywood’s Dream Factory screwed up, big-time.

Crossing the Line's
emotional crescendo comes when Dresnok weeps at the thought that the regime made sure he was supplied with enough food at the height of the ‘Arduous March’ – the regime’s Newspeak for the famine – while so many perished. Dresnok is moved to tears by the graciousness of the Dear Leader. Thinking about the tragedy of the four Americans who made the long mistake of defecting to North Korea and the crueller fate of the kidnap victims they ended up being married to, one could imagine a different ending. Rather than giving the stage to the regime stooge, better, surely, to use a line from Jim Frederick, Jenkins’s ghost-writer, that they were all consumed by ‘an almost unbearably understated evil’.

And, if Doina’s two boys remain in North Korea, an evil that continues to this day.

¹
Crossing the Line
was broadcast on the BBC in 2007. It's available on YouTube in six parts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okeL5Xklqz4

²
Carole Cadwalladr,
Observer
, 14 February 2010: The strange innocence of the “axis of evil”'.

³
Interview with Nick Bonner: ‘Touring North Korea', Worldhum website: http://www.worldhum.com/features/travel-interviews/interview-with-nick-bonner-head-of-koryo-tours-to-north-korea-20090807/

⁴
For clips of
Unknown Heroes
, watch
Crossing the Line
or look at CBS's short news item which features Dresnok's role: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=2405878n

⁵
https://www.facebook.com/photo.phpPfbid=365015986896971&set=a.364364606962109.86128.215937755138129&type=l&theater

⁶
Yoichi Shimada, Professor of International Politics, Fukui Prefectural University, House Committee on International Relations: Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, Subcommittee on Africa, Global Human Rights and International Operations, 27 April 2006.

⁷
Charles Robert Jenkins with Jim Frederick:
The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea
, University of California Press, London, 2008.

⁸
Jenkins, p53.

⁹
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-2398580.html

¹⁰
Nick Bonner, talking about
Crossing the Line
at a Q&A in Beijing at 22 minutes in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zu8s_zf59e4

¹¹
Jenkins, p64.

¹²
Earl Swift: ‘Why seek solace in N. Korea?’,
The Virginian
, 7 September 2004.

¹³
http://articles.latimes.com/2007/oct/12/entertainment/et-capsulesl2

¹⁴
Jenkins, p46.

18

The Hospital that Has Patients, but Only in the Morning

In the half-light of the morning Wonsan was revealed to us. The sea was calm, the sun shone, but its not exactly San Tropez. The North Korean Riviera has some way to catch up. My father was a ships engineer and he ingrained in me the habit of wandering around harbours, checking out the seaworthiness of the craft. The most striking thing about Wonsan was the absence of small fishing boats, presumably because if any fisherman had the option, he would be on his way to the South as quickly as possible. One of the few vessels in view was an old rust-bucket of a tub, maybe 70 feet long, which looked as though it had not been out to sea for a very long time. One could imagine that with North Korea’s fuel crisis, diesel for domestic consumption would be very hard to come by; the alternative, allowing the market to fund commercial fishing, is not an option. Yet again, the often-voiced commitment to improve the economy is in conflict with North Korea’s core policy of regime security. So ordinary people are denied the opportunity of reaping the sea.