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The men shared the house for seven years, doing little apart from studying. Gradually, they began to despair. They took risks, Jenkins says, that they knew could lead to death. In his amused telling today, their escapades sound almost as if they could be ripped from the pages of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finnexcept that the punishment for getting caught would not be a few lashes with a belt from Aunt Sally but execution.
The Americans even coined a word for doing things without permission in this land of the unfree: "freedalisms." On one occasion, the four swam across a river to pilfer a bag of coal tar from a government construction site to repair their (illegal) fishing boat. "To steal something from the North Korean government is immediately punishable by death," Jenkins said during his court-martial. "I think we all secretly wished we would be caught." Another time, they stumbled upon an array of microphones in the attic of their house and blackmailed their leader (who feared he would suffer if his superiors learned that the bugging had been exposed) into taking one of them into town to buy wine. On yet another occasion, Parrish sneaked out of the house one night to go looking for a girl he had a crush on. But Jenkins, as a practical joke, had given him a bogus address, and Parrish wandered the streets aimlessly for hours. He ultimately got picked up in central Pyongyang by police, who suspected he was meeting a spy contact; the leader had to get him out of jail.
Despite the Americans' penchant for freedalisms, the North Koreans were, after seven years, evidently pleased with their behavior and apparent indoctrination. In 1972, the four received North Korean citizenship ("Whether we wanted it or not," says Jenkins) and were ordered to start teaching English at a military school in Pyongyang, run by the party's Reconnaissance Bureau. Jenkins taught three 90-minute classes a day, 10 to 15 days a month. There were about 30 students in each class. "They wanted us to teach them American pronunciation," he says, a prospect that seems amusing considering many Americans would have trouble deciphering Jenkins' thick accent. Often the text consisted of translated utterances by Kim Il Sung, who became the North's first leader in 1948, when Korea split into two countries, and remained in power until his death in 1994. The classes studied the guerrilla fighters who took on Japanese soldiers during World War II and discussed the "news" students had heard that morning on state-controlled radio.
Although the four Americans attained a new level of comfort around this time, when they were allowed to move into their own homes, they were still subject to constant surveillance, beatings and, occasionally, torture. For example, according to Jenkins, in the summer of his first year teaching, the short-sleeve shirts he began to wear to class with the warmer weather revealed an old tattoo on his left forearm: an infantry insignia of crossed rifles above the inscription U.S. ARMY. Officials deemed the tattoo unacceptable, and Jenkins was carted off to a hospital. A doctor, he claims, cut the flesh bearing the offending words from his arm with a knife and scissorsand no anesthetic. "The doctor told me that they save anesthetic for the battlefield," he recalls.
Politics further scrambled Jenkins' life. The school suddenly shut down, he says, just after a deadly exchange along the DMZ that became known as the Panmunjom incident. On Aug. 18, 1976, two American officers were hacked to death with axes and metal pikes by a band of North Korean border guards. The melee broke out after the North Koreans tried to stop American and South Korean soldiers from trimming tree branches that blocked the line of sight. The North Koreans expected retaliation for the killings. "They mobilized for war instantly," Jenkins says. "Everybody evacuated and joined up with their units. It was very tense. Me, I just went home." Over the next several years, Jenkins says, he was forced to study more propaganda and translate English radio broadcasts into Korean. In 1981 the school finally reopened, under the name Mydanghi University, and Jenkins taught there for four more years. In 1985 he was fired for good, he says with a laugh, when the Koreans realized that his English was actually having a negative impact on the students' skills.
But Pyongyang had designs on Jenkins beyond teaching English. Like his three colleagues, Jenkins was a prize cold-war souvenir: an American who had voluntarily wandered into North Korean hands. He was an asset and certainly more valuable alive than dead. "At some point, someone told us that Kim Il Sung said that one American was worth 100 Koreans," says Jenkins. "After that, I didn't think they would kill us without a good reason." His first experience as a propaganda tool occurred soon after he was captured, when he and his fellow deserters were profiled in a cover story in Fortune's Favorites, a state-run publication. And in 1984 he was cast in the North Korean film Nameless Heroes, playing the part of an evil U.S. imperialist. Jenkins also became convinced that he was unwittingly being used as an asset in another way: to produce Western-looking children that the state could turn into spies. In the mid-1970s, the Americans were allowed to consort only with Korean women the government believed to be infertile. (When Abshier unexpectedly got his Korean girlfriend pregnant, she disappeared.) The regime then decided the deserters should marry foreigners from among the East European, Asian and Middle Eastern women brought to North Korea against their will.