PHOTOGRAPH FOR TIME BY ANDREAS SEIBERT / LOOKAT

REDEEMED: After serving time for desertion from the U.S. Army, Jenkins is now free

From Hell With Love
	In an exclusive excerpt from his autobiography, accidental defector Charles Robert Jenkins tells how he met his Japanese wife in North Korea—and how they were both rescued from captivity
	From Kokuhaku by Charles Jenkins with Jim Frederick. ©2005 by Charles Jenkins and Jim Frederick. Published by Kadokawa Publishing

Posted Monday, October 17, 2005; 20:00 HKT
In January of 1965, Charles Robert Jenkins, a young sergeant in the U.S. Army, abandoned his patrol in South Korea and surrendered to the North, hoping to find a way home. His plan failed: Jenkins spent nearly 40 years in North Korea until the Japanese government negotiated his departure in 2004. In 1980, Jenkins had married Hitomi Soga, a Japanese woman abducted by North Korea, with whom he had two children, Mika and Brinda. They all now live in Japan. In this exclusive excerpt from his autobiography, Jenkins tells how he and Soga met—and how he decided to leave North Korea.

THE COURTSHIP
In early 1980, my leaders told me that there would be a woman coming to live with me soon. But she was not a cook and she was not even Korean, though they called her by a Korean name, Min Hye-gyeong. They did not tell me she was Japanese at the time; only that she was Asian, and that they wanted me to teach her English. Her actual arrival did not come until months later. And even on the day she was finally to appear, she was still very late. That's because of the heavy rains that were coming down that made travel nearly impossible. The little bridge closest to my house had washed out, so they had to hook the 280 Mercedes they were driving to a bulldozer and pull it through the 5-m-wide river. Once they were crossing the river, the water came rushing into the car so high that the girl had to pull her feet up onto the seat and perch there like a bird. When they got to the top of the hill, they decided they could not chance driving down the steep, muddy lane that led to my house and chose to walk. But the girl was wearing high heels, so the leader ran ahead to my house to see if they could borrow a pair of my boots. He took a spare pair of leather boots I'd had for years and ran back up the hill to give them to her so she could come down safely.

Finally, on June 30, 1980 at about 10 p.m., there was a knock on my door. When I opened the door and Hitomi Soga walked in, my heart stopped. I didn't even notice the driver and the leader she was flanked by. I had never seen anybody so beautiful in my life. Just 21 years old, she was wearing a white blouse, a white skirt and white high-heel shoes. In those grubby, old surroundings, it was like she was from a dream or an entirely different planet.

She walked in and sat down with my leader and her leader. The four of us had a toast, including the always-required words of praise to Kim Il Sung, and we started talking. We were guarded, and it was awkward. She was especially spooked, since they did not tell her that she was going to a foreigner's house until she was at the top of the hill. She figured she was going to live with another Japanese girl, or at least a Japanese man. And this was North Korea, after all, where you learn real early not to trust anyone right off the bat. I didn't know much about the abductees, I had heard only rumors, so I figured that even if she were Japanese, which she said within the first few minutes, she could be a true believer, that she must have gone there by her own choice or her family's choice, to study Juche, Kim Il Sung's homegrown communist philosophy of national self-reliance, or something. The leaders left at 11:30 p.m., although I am sure one of them stayed up listening to us. Hitomi's Korean was good, a lot better than mine, and that made me a little suspicious. At that point, who knew who she could have been? She could have been a spy herself.

That first night we stayed up until 3 a.m. talking. Mostly it was small talk about how difficult her trip in the rain had been, where she had traveled from, things like that. As the hours passed and it grew late, I noticed that she was yawning frequently. I asked her if she was tired. She said yes, but she didn't make a move to lie down, even though she was sitting on my bed. I could tell that she was scared that I was going to try to take advantage of her. I tried to reassure her by showing her the extra bedding I had laid down in the corner of the other room. I told her that I would be sleeping in there from now on, and that the bed was hers. She must have been exhausted and relieved, because when she heard that her head hit the pillow, and she was deep asleep within minutes.

Although I was supposed to be teaching her English, both Hitomi and I knew that the Organization wanted us to get married. A man and a woman didn't get thrown together like that unless marriage was part of the plan. Even though our entire courtship wound up taking only a few weeks, the Organization did not force this marriage like they routinely forced marriages between foreigners (and North Koreans, for that matter) in the past. I don't know why, exactly, but I imagine it's because they figured there was no way they could make a young, beautiful woman like Hitomi be with a 40-year-old coot like me unless she really wanted to.

Continued...

	The Long Mistake [Dec. 06, 2004] In a TIME exclusive, American defector Charles Jenkins talks about his life inside North Korea In from the Cold [Nov. 04, 2004] A U.S. defector to North Korea confesses to his crime and recounts his long, strange story Pardon Me [Jul. 27, 2004] Charles Jenkins might be safe after all Left Behind [May. 25, 2004] Koizumi returns from North Korea triumphant—in all ways but one More Related Items | Search all issues of TIME Magazine