Charles Robert Jenkins Comments On Current Life 13-Years After Leaving North Korea

The recent tensions with North Korea has caused the US media to stop in and see what former US Army defector to North Korea, Charles Robert Jenkins is up to:

Now, Jenkins — 77 but looking much older, with a deep-lined face and distant expression — lives a quiet life on Sado, a small, pastoral island in the Sea of Japan. He speaks in the thick Southern accent of his North Carolina childhood, and the stories he tells, 13 years after the end of his North Korean adventure, recall decades of solitude, deprivation and torture.

“In North Korea, I lived a dog’s life,” he said in a rare interview, as he drove his boxy Subaru through Sado Island’s rice paddies and sleepy villages. “Ain’t nobody live good in North Korea. Nothing to eat. No running water. No electricity. In the wintertime you freeze — in my bedroom, the walls were covered in ice.”

Jenkins works now as a greeter in Mano Park, a placid tourist attraction on the Japanese island, selling senbei, a type of rice cracker. Tourists see him and squeal with delight — “Jenkins-san!” — as he passively poses for photos.  [LA Times]

Here is what he had to say about the death of Otto Warmbier and the safety of his family:

Jenkins was aghast that Americans would visit North Korea as tourists. “It’s crazy,” he said. “North Korea will do anything to keep a foreigner.” (The U.S. has banned tourism to the country, starting this month).

Yet he said North Korea’s medical system likely contributed to Warmbier’s death. Authorities there, he said, had forced Jenkins into several seemingly arbitrary medical procedures. “Had about five operations,” he recalled. In one day, they removed his appendix, followed by a testicle. “Because I was kicked when I was a school kid,” he said. “I didn’t have no problem, but they found out about it, and they said, ‘That’s gotta come out.’”

After his release, complications that developed from the two procedures could have killed him — and likely would have, if Japan didn’t immediately hospitalize him on his release.

Then there was the apparent assassination of Kim Jong Nam — Kim Jong Un’s half-brother — in a Malaysian airport in March. Two women ambushed Kim with VX nerve agent, one of the world’s most toxic substances. To Jenkins, it was a reminder that Pyongyang’s brutality knows no bounds — and no one is immune.

“I worry about my daughters more than anything,” he said as he drove his Subaru along the coast. He has forbidden them to comply if Japanese police should attempt to pull them over while driving. Anyone could be a North Korean agent.

“North Korea give them enough money, you don’t know what they’ll do,” he said. “North Korea wants me dead.”

You can read the rest at the link, but it seems that if the Kim regime wanted him dead they would have killed him by now.