Shigefumi Takasuka/The Yomiuri Shimbun

Advertisement

SADO, Japan - Charles Jenkins, a U.S. Army deserter to North Korea and husband of Hitomi Soga, a repatriated Japanese abductee, said Thursday that North Korean agents had targeted Soga and waited a month to get a chance to kidnap her.

The Rich Square native also confirmed he intends to seek Japanese citizenship.

“I was told by a female North Korean agent in 1980 that North Korean agents waited for her for one month,” Jenkins said during an interview with The Daily Yomiuri, the English-language version of The Yomiuri Shimbun, at a hotel in Sado, Japan.

Soga and her mother, Miyoshi, reportedly were kidnapped in Sado by three men on Aug. 12, 1975. Asked why the North Koreans planned to kidnap Soga, an associate nurse, and her mother, Jenkins said that the North Koreans said they wanted teachers of Japanese language and customs.

But Jenkins added that he did not know the specific reason why they planned to kidnap the two.

Jenkins also said he saw in Pyongyang many Europeans who could have been abducted by North Korean agents because they were in cars that bore number plates of a North Korean spy organization and were always escorted by North Korean officials.

“But I can't prove that,” he said. “I couldn't talk to them. If I talked to them, I'd be in trouble.”

Jenkins also said that the North Korean government proposed to him in November 2002 that he marry Anocha Panjoy, a Thai woman believed to have been abducted to North Korea, if Soga did not return from Japan to North Korea. But he said he immediately rejected the proposal.

But this means that Anocha, whose whereabouts are unknown, was still alive at that time, according to Jenkins.

“Also, just before I went to Indonesia (in July 2004), she was still alive because many people who knew her also knew me,” he added. “If anything happened (to Anocha), they would tell me.”

Asked if he believed that many of the Japanese abductees who remain missing are still alive in North Korea, Jenkins said: “ I think some are still alive. But the reason North Korea didn't admit it is because they married North Koreans, maybe.”

Jenkins also said he was planning to apply for Japanese citizenship in July.

“I am planning (to become a Japanese citizen),” he said. “What happened is I must wait for one year since the day I got my Japanese identification card. That'll be July, I think.”

Jenkins returned home to the United States and North Carolina last year for the first time in four decades to visit family.

Jenkins said his decision to defect to communist North Korea in 1965 was wrong.

"I let my soldiers down. I let the U.S. Army down. I let the government down, and I made it very difficult for my family in the United States to live," Jenkins said last summer.

The 65-year-old Jenkins said he lived in harsh conditions in North Korea.

Jenkins was a 24-year-old sergeant with the U.S. Army's 1st Calvary Division when he left the squad he was leading on patrol in the Demilitarized Zone and walked into North Korea on July 5, 1965.

While he appeared in North Korean propaganda films and taught English, Jenkins said North Korean agents were never able to break him and he was never brainwashed. On Monday, he called North Korean leader Kim Jong Il "an evil man."

Jenkins remained in North Korea after his Japanese-born wife, who had been kidnapped from Japan in 1978, returned to her home country in 2002. The couple was reunited last year in Japan, where he was court-martialed and served 25 days in a U.S. military jail.

Last week, he told a Japanese newspaper he had been asked by a local tourist association in Sado to work as a tour guide during the summer.

“I think I'll do that,” Jenkins said.