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As might be imagined, these unions weren't love stories in any traditional sense. In Jenkins' case, the government in 1980 brought a young Japanese nurse to his door, instructing him to teach her English. Hitomi Soga, 19 years Jenkins' junior, had been abducted from her home on Sado Island in Japan two years earlier. Jenkins says they quickly fell in love, and that his feelings for Soga saved his life. "When I met her," Jenkins says, "my life changed a lot. Me and her togetherI knew we could make it in North Korea. And we did. Twenty-two years." Just 38 days after their abrupt introduction, the pair asked to get married, and the government assented. Jenkins and Soga have two daughters: Mika, 21, and Brinda, 19. Only many years after the girls were born did Jenkins start to suspect they were meant to be spy fodder, a theory that can't be independently confirmed. "They wanted us to have children," he concludes, "so they could use them later."
Back in the U.S., many Americans viewed Jenkins as nothing more than a traitor, particularly given his occasional appearances in Korean propaganda missives. His family had more faith. His nephew James Hyman, for one, argued vigorously for decades that Jenkins was innocent, that he must have been kidnapped on that twilight patrol. But because little information filtered out of North Korea, by the 1990s Jenkins' plight had drifted into the stuff of legend. He had become a curious cold-war footnote, presumed by many to be dead. Only in 1996 did a Pentagon report state that it suspected there were at least four American defectors, including Jenkins, still living in North Korea.
For most of those years, Jenkins was locked in a drab, hardscrabble existence, sustained only by hope that somehow, someday, he and his family could leave North Korea. The bleakness was tempered somewhat over the years, as Jenkins attained a standard of living better than that of most North Koreans. But it was still far below that of most other countries. The Jenkins house had no hot running water, the electricity frequently did not work, and the heating was so feeble that during winter family members wore five layers of clothing at home. By raising their own chickens and growing their own vegetables, however, they usually had enough food, even as others in the country were starving.
Indeed, life for Jenkinsas for many others in North Koreadepended on cleverly working the system. He extended his $120-a-month income by trading black-market currency with other foreigners. He made contacts who could smuggle him the occasional English-language novel or Hollywood movie. He rigged a radio to pick up the BBC and Voice of America. He even managed to buy a handgun from a Chinese exchange student. But such liberties extended only so far: even when Jenkins and his family got their hands on a Western videotape, they had to take precautions, pulling the curtains over their windows and turning the volume down to the threshold of audibility.
Such comforts did little for Jenkins' morale. He increasingly became despondent about his children's future. Jenkins was particularly distressed when the government enrolled the girls in Pyongyang's Foreign Language College, an lite institution believed to be a training ground for intelligence operatives. "I knew what they were trying to do," says Jenkins, starting to sob. "They wanted to turn them into spies. My daughters, they could pass as South Korean. There are lots of children of American G.I.s and South Korean mothers in South Korea. No one would doubt them for a second." Since he believed he was locked forever inside North Korea, he didn't see how he could fight it.