Deserter Recalls N. Korean Hell

Charles Jenkins Shares His Story Of A Hard Life Under Abusive Regime

(CBS) 
"It's really in the details that you start to understand just how bad his life was," says Jim Frederick, Time magazine's Tokyo bureau chief, and co-author of a book Jenkins published in Japan.

Much of the book deals with Jenkins' description of his struggle to survive the pervasive poverty of the North.

"He never had any heat. Or, well, when we had heat, you know we had to stoke the boiler ourselves," says Frederick. "He had an apartment, but the toilet didn't flush. You had to flush it by hand. And it didn't really have a septic tank, it had a pipe. An outlet pipe out the back, so rats would come up."

And consider, the Americans were being treated better than most North Koreans because the government was using them – posing them in staged propaganda fliers, forcing them to teach English to military cadets and would-be spies.

Jenkins was also ordered to act in the movies. In one film he played the evil American Dr. Kelton. Jenkins' family got a copy of this movie from a reporter 32 years after he disappeared.

"What did you say when you saw that face on the screen?" Pelley asked Jenkins’ sister Pat Harrell.

"It was the first ray of hope that I had actually had in all those years, that he is alive. He looked well," she recalled.

And back in North Korea, Jenkins was also touched by a ray of hope. In 1980, after 15 lonely years, his leaders brought a 21-year-old Japanese girl to his door. "Well, I'll put it like this. I looked at her one time. I wasn't letting her go," said Jenkins.

She was Hitomi Soga, and she had been kidnapped in one of the most bizarre intelligence operations in modern history.

North Korea was abducting ordinary Japanese citizens and forcing them to teach Japanese to North Korean spies. In 1978, Hitomi was kidnapped by North Korean agents on a road on Sado Island, Japan.

She was shoved onto a boat and disappeared. No one in Japan knew why or how.

Soga and Jenkins were from two completely different worlds but he says they had something in common. "She was a prisoner. I was a prisoner. We're both the same. We both hated North Korea. So that's really about the only thing you'd say we had in common."

Within weeks they were married, a union arranged by the government they despised, but Jenkins says it bloomed into a true marriage.

Each night before going to bed in North Korea, Jenkins said good night to his wife in Japanese, rather than Korean. He did it, he tells Pelley, to "remind her that she's still Japanese, that she's not Korean. She's not obligated to Korea. She is Japanese and she spoke to me in English, every night. Regardless of how hard things got, we always stuck as one."

They "stuck as one" for 22 years, raising two daughters, Mika and Brinda. Then in 2002, the completely unexpected happened.

To improve relations, the new dictator of North Korea, Kim's son, Kim Jong Il, admitted to Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi that North Korea had kidnapped 13 Japanese citizens.

The survivors, including Hitomi, returned home, where she became a national hero.

But Jenkins and the girls stayed behind. The North didn’t want them to go, and Jenkins knew that he would be arrested by the U.S. Army for desertion if he left.

He spent two more lonely years in North Korea, until there was a diplomatic breakthrough and Jenkins decided that going to prison would be worth it if he could see his wife again. Hitomi was reunited with Jenkins and their daughters in Indonesia.