The Long Mistake

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Jenkins' world suddenly began to brighten two years ago. The breakthrough was Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il (the son and successor of Kim Il Sung) in Pyongyang. Kim confirmed Japan's long-held suspicion that North Korea had been kidnapping Japanese citizens and forcing them to teach at its spy schools. Soga, Jenkins' wife, was acknowledged to be among the abductees. After the summit, she and the four others Pyongyang said were still alive returned to Japan for what was meant to be a 10-day visit. They never went back to Korea. Soga is viewed as a hero in Japan, and it became a national priority to bring the rest of her family to Japan too. When Koizumi made a follow-up visit to Pyongyang earlier this year to retrieve the abductees' surviving family members, he personally told Jenkins he would do everything he could to ensure that he and his family could reunite in Japan. At the time, Jenkins resisted, fearing North Korea's reaction. "They didn't want me to go," he says. "I know if I left that time, I never would have made it to the airport."

After a series of negotiations to find a suitably neutral country to receive Jenkins, Japan and North Korea finally arranged for the American and his daughters to fly in July to meet Soga in Indonesia. Jenkins had assured Pyongyang that he would return with his daughters and try to persuade Soga to accompany them. "They promised me all kinds of things if I came back with my wife," he says. "They would give me a new car, a new house, new clothes, a new television. They told me everything I wanted would be Kim Jong Il's gift." But Jenkins had resolved instead to turn himself in to the U.S. military, against the urging of his North Korean contacts and Dresnok (the two Americans had met up again in Pyongyang). "They told me, 'If you go, you are going to jail for life,' but I didn't care," Jenkins says. "I thought, If I go to jail, I go to jail. As long as I get my daughters out."

Three days before he left, Jenkins saw Dresnok one final time. Dresnok, Jenkins sensed, knew his friend was leaving for good, although the two didn't dare discuss it. "During the time my wife was gone, Dresnok would come over every day. We would have coffee and talk. He is all by himself now."

As bleak as Jenkins knew North Korea to be, it was the only home his daughters had known, and he had to handle their exit gingerly. He told his younger daughter Brinda that they were leaving for good, but he felt he couldn't tell Mika. "Mika didn't want to leave. They had her thinking that Americans would kill you just as soon as look at you. They educate all Koreans to believe that," says Jenkins. "Brinda also learned that, but she also believed what I said too, though I couldn't ever talk much about what I thought about North Korea. I was too scared to." When Mika arrived in Indonesia, she panicked, Jenkins recalls, saying, "'Back in North Korea, they are all going to call me a traitor.'" Jenkins told her, "America calls me a traitor. If people knew everything, they might think different."

While Jenkins was in Jakarta, Japanese officials became worried about complications from prostate surgery he had had in North Korea, and on July 18 he was flown to Tokyo. While in a hospital there, Jenkins announced that when he was well, he would turn himself in to the U.S. Army. On Sept. 11, Jenkins presented himself at the gates of Camp Zama, a U.S. Army base about an hour's drive from Tokyo. He approached Lieut. Colonel Paul Nigara, provost marshal of the U.S. Army Japan, briskly saluted and said, "Sir, I'm Sergeant Jenkins, and I'm reporting." The longest-missing deserter ever to return to the U.S. Army, he was initially charged with one count of desertion, one of aiding the enemy, two of soliciting others to desert and four charges of encouraging disloyalty (charges that could have carried the death penalty).

When Jenkins arrived at his one-day general court-martial more than seven weeks later, he had won a pretrial agreement in which he would plead guilty only to desertion and aiding the enemy (for the time he spent teaching English). In exchange, his penalty would be a maximum 30 days' confinement, a demotion to private, forfeiture of all pay and benefits and a dishonorable discharge. Military-law experts assume Jenkins won this relatively lenient treatment in exchange for providing intelligence about North Korean spy programs. Neither Jenkins nor the U.S. government will comment on any such discussions.

During a day of dramatic testimony on Nov. 3, veteran defense lawyer Captain Jim Culp, himself a former infantry sergeant, argued that Jenkins shouldn't do time. Culp presented his client as a broken man who had suffered so severely under North Korea's brutal regime that compassion could only dictate he had already paid for his crimes. Colonel Denise Vowell, the Army's chief judge, apparently agreed. She recommended to the commander of the U.S. Army Japan that the 30-day sentence be suspended for clemency's sake. The commander, Major General Elbert Perkins, ignored the suggestion, although according to standard Army confinement rules, Jenkins' sentence was ultimately reduced by five days for good behavior. "I have made my peace with the U.S. Army," Jenkins said after his release, "and they have treated me very fairly."

For now, the Jenkins family lives in standard-issue enlisted-family housing in Camp Zama. When Jenkins is officially discharged from active duty and released from the U.S. base, he plans to settle down in his wife's hometown on Japan's Sado Island. He wants to work, and the local mayor's office has said it will try to help him find a job, although it's unclear what work Jenkins could do, especially since he doesn't speak Japanese. His wife already works at city hall and receives a government stipend every month in a program benefiting North Korean kidnapping victims. At some point Jenkins also wants to visit North Carolina to see family members, including his aging mother. Asked how his daughters are faring, Jenkins concedes that he isn't sure. "I just spent 25 days in jail. I haven't really gotten a chance to talk to them that much yet. But I think they will be all right." He starts to sob. "I made a big mistake of my life, but getting my daughters out of there, that was one right thing I did."