Once seized by the North Korean authorities Jenkins would remain captive in North Korea for the next 39 years. Since 1962 three other US soldiers in South Korea had deserted their posts and fled across the DMZ, and Jenkins would soon join them sharing a single room under constant watch of the suspicious authorities. The life these four men led while in the DPRK would be dangerous at times but mostly filled with tedium while they adjusted to an alien life in the Hermit Kingdom few outsiders had experienced. The boredom and sense of desperation meant the Americans often went to dangerous lengths just to “have fun”: “stealing government property, or going on daredevil hikes, clinging to tiny ledges on the side of canyons,” recalled Jenkins in his 2009 memoir of his time in North Korea, The Reluctant Communist. These became the only outlets for the Americans “because in many ways we felt like we were already dead”.

Like all North Korean citizens, the Americans were assigned a ‘leader’ to administer regular sessions of self-criticism sessions generally to keep them in check. “These cruel bastards hated me and the other Americans so deeply that they refused to see us as human and enjoyed making our lives hell,” remembers Jenkins in his book. Beatings and psychological torture were commonplace, but the captives were always well fed, as they needed to appear fit, healthy and happy in the numerous propaganda leaflets on which they appeared that were dropped over the DMZ into South Korea. But though they faced interrogations and were confronted with hatred from the North Korean people, the most bizarre feature of their lives was how they all, at different times, became stars in North Korean movies.

Strangers in a strange land

Kim Il-sung’s government first came up with a propaganda role for James Joseph Dresnok, a towering man who deserted from the US military in May 1962, by having his voice boomed out over public address systems across the DMZ to the US soldiers on the other side. His messages described a utopian land where other soldiers could live gloriously if they followed his lead in crossing the line into North Korea.