About halfway through the flight, I was smoking, and one of the leaders joined me. “It will be good to see your wife,” he said. “Yes, it will,” I said. “You have a lot of family in Japan,” he said. “I suppose I do,” I said. “It is good to have family,” he said. “Yes, I suppose it is,” I said. I didn’t know exactly where he was heading with this, but I had a feeling. The ashtray was a plastic cup half-filled with water. As he leaned over to drop the butt into the cup, he said to me very quietly, “If you don’t come back, there is nothing we can do.”
Once we touched down in Jakarta, my wife was there on the tarmac along with throngs of media. She arrived a day or two before we did. She met me on the stairs of the plane, and as I stumbled down the steps, I fell into her arms, and she planted a big kiss on me. I was a little surprised, but not as much as I have been told the Japanese were, who it seems found this extreme display of affection a little shocking. As a joke these days, she denies she did this, saying that I grabbed her, but my daughters always interject, “Mama, that’s a lie! They have pictures! The whole world saw it! You grabbed him!”
The bus ride into the city took two hours. I had never seen such a bad traffic jam in my life. In Pyongyang there was rarely any traffic at all, even in the center of the city, but here the streets were jammed with cars. I did not wait long before getting down to business with my wife. I had already been waiting so long, I didn’t see any reason to delay the discussion any further. The bus was full of the Japanese delegation, so I still had to be a little discreet. We sat side by side, not looking at each other while we talked. “Why didn’t you want to have this meeting in China?” I asked. “If we met in China,” she said, “I may have been sent back to North Korea.” So I asked, “You don’t want to go back to North Korea?” “No,” she said quietly but firmly. “But I thought you did,” I said. “The Organization told me that you have been trying and wanting to come back this whole time.” “Gae-so-ri,” she said. (That is dog talk.) “Well,” I thought, “that’s it, then. The decision has been made. We are not going back.”
They put us up in a hotel downtown that was the nicest place I think I have ever stayed. We were in a suite on the fourteenth floor. It was larger than any house I had ever lived in. Brinda and Mika were in a state of shock. The television just blew them away. Actually, it blew me away, too. All those channels. The size of it. The brightness of all the colors. Some of the stuff that was shown, and the fact that it was on twenty-four hours a day. I think that was their very first whiff that there might be a lot more to the outside world than the North Koreans had ever told them. It didn’t take them long to sense that the rest of the world was much more free than North Korea had been. At the same time, there was only so much freedom for us: There was a guard on our door (officers from the Niigata police force, to be specific) twenty-four hours a day. Right across the hall from us was the Japanese delegation, including Saiki and Nakayama.
The next morning, my wife and I continued the discussion we had been having on the bus. To test her resolve on the matter, I said to her, “If you are not going back, then there is no point to me being here. The girls and I will go to China for a little while and then return to North Korea to pick up our new house. I don’t see what the problem is for you to come to North Korea. The Organization says you can go and come as you please. You can take the ferry back and forth. You can visit anytime you want.” She responded, “You know one big reason why I am not going back? It is not just because of me. It is because of you. Because of your family in the United States. If you go back to North Korea, you will never see your mother and sisters again.” “But I am not going to see them anyway, since I am going to go to jail for life!” I yelled. “You are not going to go to jail!” she yelled back. “How can you say that?” I asked. “You can’t say that for sure.” I had realized by then that she and Koizumi were doing everything they could to appeal to the Americans for understanding and leniency in my case, but I also knew that my wife was in no position to offer me assurances about how the U.S. Army was going to choose to punish me. Whenever it was I had to face my accusers, I knew at least on that count, I would be doing it alone.
It was around that time I also realized that the power between my wife and me had changed. In North Korea, I was primarily responsible for protecting her and providing for her, and she would do what I thought was best for us almost without exception. She needed me. Now, however, the equation had changed. I would have to listen to her; she would be my guide. I now needed her more than she needed me. This change in our relationship has been one of the most noteworthy parts of our lives together since 2002, and, to be honest, sometimes one of the hardest for me to adjust to.
Not long after that conversation with my wife, we called the Japanese delegation in to tell them our news: We had decided not to return to North Korea. We had a meeting and discussed where we were going to live, my fears of the U.S. government taking me by force, things like that. We had little meetings like that often over the eight or nine days we were in Indonesia.
It would be wrong to assume from the way that I am talking about this that any of these decisions were easy or that I was not feeling a tremendous amount of anxiety. On that second night, my nerves were a mess. I drank two bottles of the ginseng liquor that the high cadre had given me the night before I left. As liquor tends to do, it made me feel good at first. I asked my wife if she wanted to go dancing downstairs at the cabaret they had at the hotel. She said, “Hell, no.” I said, “Suit yourself. I’m going down.”
I started to walk out the door, but the guard at the door wasn’t letting me out. I told him to get out of the way. Before I knew it, there were four Japanese at the door, and the argument moved into the suite. I said, “You are not the bosses of me. I am not Japanese. You cannot tell me what to do.” They didn’t speak much English or Korean, but they were not budging. I started yelling, “I spent forty years being a prisoner and now I am a prisoner again? Who do you think you are? Get the hell out of my way!” They kept talking, and talking turned to yelling, and then the pushing started. A government official, someone I had never seen before (and never saw again), moved to the front. I grabbed his necktie with two hands—at the end and at the knot— putting him in a hold. He wasn’t going anywhere. They pulled me off of him, which was a good thing, since I can’t imagine what I would have done to him next. I realized it could not escalate any further without there being big problems. Saiki had showed up by that time and yelled, “If you don’t sit down and stay where you are for the rest of the night, I will turn you over to the Americans right away!” I told Saiki, “Go ahead. I know the Americans can’t touch me here!” But after I had calmed down, I told them, “It’s fine. I’m not going to the bar.”
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 TD
S. 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.”
The Reluctant Communist Page 18
