The Reluctant Communist (23 page)

I understand now that the Japanese were only doing what they needed to do, and that the biggest concern was not my freedom or even my safety but unfavorable attention from the press. I was being scrutinized much more closely by the Japanese press than I realized, and the government and the guards were really just looking out for my best interests. After forty years in North Korea, I didn’t even know how the press worked, and to this day, dealing with the press is not something I am good at or comfortable with. It is one of the most challenging and wearying parts of living in Japan today. I know that rumors of the scuffle have leaked out since then, and none of it reflects very well on me, but believe it or not, the Japanese delegation didn’t mention it the next morning, and, in fact, they never brought it up again.

A few days into our stay, we met the Japanese ambassador to Indonesia and had dinner at his house. During that dinner, someone from the house staff told me that I had a phone call and showed me to the living room. I honestly had no idea who it was, though I suspected it was someone from the North Korean delegation wanting to check up on me. I got on the line, and it was my sister Pat, calling from Weldon, North Carolina. “What’s up, Bubba?” she asked. Bubba was her private name for me. Hearing that, I started to sob. I couldn’t believe it. Even though all of these events were happening to me in such quick succession, that was the first time it really hit me that I was like a dead man who had come back to life. We were only able to talk for fifteen or twenty minutes, but we packed as much catching up into that time as possible. It was then that I learned that two of my sisters, Olivia and Audrey, had died of cancer in the 1990s. The four others were doing well, though, as was my brother, Gene. Pat told me that our mother had heard that I had gotten out of North Korea and was asking, “Where’s Robert? When is Robert coming home?” I told Pat to tell Mama that she needed to hold on but that I was going to get there just as soon as I could. I didn’t know when, I said. I still had so many more obstacles to clear, but soon. After crying my way through that conversation, I told my sister I loved her and would talk to her soon.

Over the course of the rest of the week, I had been to the hospital once in Jakarta and got daily checkups from the two Japanese doctors seeing to me in the hotel to monitor how my recovery from the prostate surgery I had in April in North Korea was progressing. Other than that, there was a lot of waiting around while both sides finished their diplomacy. Near the end of the week, we had another meeting with the Japanese to finalize how we were actually going to get to Japan. The Japanese asked me if I wanted to stay in Indonesia any longer. I responded that as long as we had decided on the plan, we might as well get it over with. The Japanese said that either way, I needed urgent medical care as soon as possible, and if we went to Japan, I would need to go straight to a hospital in Tokyo as soon as we landed. I needed daily medical attention to clean my wound. It was not healing properly, and both Japanese doctors had become increasingly concerned about my condition. They said I needed a detailed medical examination and dedicated inpatient care.

Once we had decided on the plan for leaving Indonesia, I told Saiki that I needed to write the North Koreans a letter, telling them of my intentions. After I had slept on it, though, I decided that I needed to tell them in person. If there was one thing I have learned as a consequence of my desertion forty years ago, it’s that the big decisions need to be confronted head-on. I had to face the North Koreans and tell them myself that my family was not coming back. Saiki said the next morning that he was relieved to hear me say so. He had been thinking that a face-to-face meeting was essential but for a different reason: Unless I told them in person, he said, the North Koreans could claim that a letter from me had been coerced or forged.

A few nights later, a man from the Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs came and got Hitomi and me and brought us up to a meeting room on the thirty-fourth floor. My wife and I decided not to bring our daughters, mostly for fear that Mika might not just make a scene but declare that, as a twenty-oneyear-old adult, she did not agree, could not be forced, and wanted to go back to North Korea. The North Koreans probably would have taken her up on it, and that would have been the end of that. The family would have been permanently split. We couldn’t have that happen, so we didn’t even tell the girls that we were going to this meeting. We just told them we had to go out for a little while, and we left them playing cards with some of the guards.

The Indonesians went down and got the three-person North Korean delegation. The Japanese government had set up a video camera in the corner. A man from the Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, an interpreter, one of the Japanese doctors, and the three Koreans were the only ones in the room besides me and my wife. We made small talk for a few minutes, and then I got down to business. I told them that none of us were going back to North Korea. I was expecting the worst, waiting for the outburst and the shouting and table pounding. But none of that happened. They listened quietly, took it pretty well, and put up no fight. Within a few moments, they said that they had even expected this.

We wound up talking for about an hour, and it was one of the most pleasant conversations I can remember ever having with a bunch of North Koreans. They gave me a blue notebook. I gave them the two bottles of ginseng liquor that were left and the carton of Marlboros the high cadre had given me. I also handed them a model of a Boeing 747 that my wife had received as a gift on the plane. I said that Dresnok had wanted a souvenir and asked them to please give it to him. I hope they did. The North Korean delegation went back to North Korea that night. They did not even wait for us to leave for Japan.

Later that night, when we told Mika, she panicked. I had told Brinda a couple of days before, but I told her not to say anything to Mika, since I knew that Mika would take the news harder. I wanted to break it to Mika more slowly. I said to her, “I told you when we got on the plane that we were as good as on Japanese soil. And that is still true. Your mother has thought very hard about it, and she is not going back to North Korea. And I am not splitting up the family. So if she is not going back, then neither are we.” Mika’s biggest worry was what people back in Pyongyang would say. “Back in North Korea,” she said, “they are all going to call me a traitor.” I told her that everybody in America calls me a traitor, but almost no one knows the whole story. “If people knew everything,” I told her, “they would probably think differently.” She was not entirely soothed by this. In the end, I told her that she had no choice and would see eventually that we were making the right decision. I told her she simply had to trust us.

On July 18, we boarded a Japan Airlines charter bound for Tokyo. We got off the plane, packed into a bus, and went to the Tokyo Women’s Medical University Hospital. I have been told that some people were surprised to see those photos and videos of me leaning on a cane as I walked from the plane to the bus. And since no one had ever seen me use a cane before, they assume it was all a big act. Here is the deeper story behind the cane: I was given a walking stick after my first visit to the Jakarta hospital and was encouraged to use it whenever I walked. Even though I was sick and in pain, I did not understand why I needed it, since despite all my medical problems, I did not really have trouble walking. But the doctors told me they had become very concerned that some of my internal incisions, which were not healing properly, would tear open if I was not extremely careful, and the cane would alleviate pressure on my internal organs. So until I made it to the hospital, I used the cane to support my walking. At the hospital, they put me in a large room in a private wing that was heavily guarded. They also provided an adjoining room for my wife and daughters to live in while I was being treated.

Even though no one was certain how long I would need to be hospitalized, I was soon looking ahead to my legal problems. I knew that after I was well, and that would be sooner rather than later, I was going to have to face the fact that I was a wanted man. Every time that we cleared one hurdle, there was always another one up ahead. Now that I was safely in the hospital room, I still wasn’t particularly safe. I had no idea what would happen next. Since I had no money, I knew I could not afford a lawyer. I did not even know what crimes I was actually accused of. My plan, since I didn’t know what else to do, was to plead guilty to absolutely everything the U.S. Army accused me of, no matter what it was, even stuff I didn’t do, and just throw myself upon their mercy.

About a week or so after arriving at the hospital, I received a letter from something called Trial Defense Services (TDS). I had no idea such a thing existed. The way the letter described it, TDS was a branch of the U.S. Army’s legal department that acted like the public defender’s office does for civilians accused of crimes in the United States who cannot afford their own lawyers. I knew about public defenders, but I didn’t think that there were independent lawyers in the U.S. Army who defend soldiers at no cost to the soldier. I thought odds would be stacked against an accused soldier like me. I didn’t think the army would consider me having a qualified lawyer a priority. So getting a free lawyer provided by the government seemed too good to be true.

A few days after receiving the letter from TDS, I got a phone call. On the other end of the line was a man who introduced himself as Capt. James Culp. He said he was a lawyer stationed in Seoul who worked for TDS. He explained that he was assigned to my case and that if I accepted him as my lawyer, even for an initial consultation that was in no way binding, he would come see me within a few days. He also mentioned to me that even though he was a captain now, he had once been an infantry sergeant just like me. When I heard that, I thought, “Okay, he knows my kind.” “Come on in,” I told him. “Let’s talk.” He finished by saying, “Do not speak to anyone besides your doctors, nurses, family, and the people from the Japanese government you have already been dealing with. And even with them, do not talk about your case before I get there. No one. Do you understand?” “Yes, sir,” I told him. “I understand.”

A few days later, he showed up in my hospital room. He’s a big bear of a guy and wore a suit rather than a uniform. He later told me that he chose to wear a suit against his boss’s advice because he wanted me to know that he represented me, not the U.S. Army. And he was right. It helped put me at ease. I think I would have been more uncomfortable if he had showed up in full uniform.

He introduced himself, and we made a little small talk. He asked me what he should call me. I told him something we used to say ages ago in the army: “You can call me anything you want, as long as you call me three times a day for chow and once a month to get paid.” So with that, he started calling me Charlie. I had never been called Charlie before in my life. Growing up, I was always Robert. When I was a teenager, I was Super. In the army, I was Jenkins. In North Korea, the three other Americans took to calling me C. R., while the Koreans sometimes called me Min Hyung-chan. (They gave me this name when I started acting— they needed something to put on the credits—but in person, I refused to answer to it.) So, although I have gone by many names in my life, Charlie was a new one. But now, thanks to Capt. Culp, a lot of people, especially everyone I now know in the U.S. Army stationed in Japan, refer to me as “Charlie.”

After that, Capt. Culp took out a notebook, pointed at the ceiling, and scribbled: “We don’t know who could be listening, so I am going to write.”

I wrote back, “OK.”
He tore the page off and wrote, “Were you kidnapped?” I wrote back, “No.”
He wrote, “Did you decide to cross the DMZ on your own?” I wrote, “Yes.”
“Why?” he wrote.
For all of that session and for much of the time I spent in the hospital, we did a lot of our communicating silently, using handwritten notes.

Capt. Culp spent many full days with me those first few weeks, asking every little thing about my desertion and case. He told me everything I was accused of—desertion, aiding the enemy, soliciting others to desert, and encouraging disloyalty— and we talked about all of the things that I did and did not do. I was accused of a lot of stuff that I simply didn’t do. Part of the “soliciting others to desert” and “encouraging disloyalty” charges, for example, were based on the prosecution’s assertion that I had made propaganda broadcasts across the DMZ, during which I supposedly told American soldiers to turn their guns on their own officers and come join me in the North. But I never made any broadcasts across the DMZ of any kind, much less ones saying things like that. Dresnok, Abshier, or Parrish may have, I don’t really know, but I never did. And then, some of the stuff that I did do, such as teaching English the first time, from 1973 to 1976, Culp successfully argued to prosecutors that I did out of fear of grievous bodily harm if I refused (which was true), and in a military court, that can often make you innocent of the charge. Eventually, Capt. Culp and I decided that I would plead guilt only to one count of desertion and one count of aiding the enemy (for my second stint teaching college English, from 1981 to 1984).

After a couple of weeks and many, many sessions, Capt. Culp went to Camp Zama, the U.S. Army base about an hour outside of Tokyo, to negotiate with the prosecutors who were going to try my case. He left in the morning and was back in the hospital by the afternoon. When he came back, I could not believe my ears: While Capt. Culp told me that the prosecution could not formally guarantee anything until I had actually turned myself in, he said that he had gotten a verbal commitment that they were willing to accept a pretrial agreement sentencing me to a maximum of thirty days in jail.

A lot of people who are in no position to know such things confidently declare that my jail sentence was some sort of political arrangement brokered at the highest levels of the Japanese and American governments. This could not be further from the truth. While both governments may have agreed diplomatically and informally that it would be in the best interest of both countries if there was an amicable solution to my case, and there may have been some conversations about me at the highest levels, the United States, all the way up to President George W. Bush, always maintained that my case would never be resolved without going through proper legal process. And today, I am grateful for the United States’ hard line. Once the process was established, there was no outside manipulation or pressure put on the army about my case by anyone. I am grateful that the United States said no special deals would be cut on my behalf, since that allows me to say today that I have made my peace with the U.S. Army and have done the time it judged appropriate.