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Last Tuesday, Private Travis King arrived at the demilitarized zone which separates North from South Korea. Hours earlier he had been due to be deported from South Korea back to the United States to face disciplinary action from the Army and a likely dishonorable discharge. Fleeing the airport, he somehow ended up on a tour bus bound for the DMZ. When the tour arrived at the Joint Security Area, the only part of the DMZ where North and South Korean forces stand directly face-to-face, King bolted from the group and ran over the Military Demarcation Line separating the two countries. He reportedly shouted “ha ha ha!” as he went.
King was immediately taken into North Korean custody and spirited away into the Hermit Kingdom. The country’s state media is yet to make any official comment on his capture - when I last looked, the top article was “Floral Basket Sent to Statues of Great Leader”, clearly a much more important matter. But speculation is already rife about the sort of treatment King will face, and whether he’ll ever be seen by the outside world again.
The most recent memory that Americans have of one of their citizens falling into North Korean custody is not encouraging. In 2016, college student Otto Warmbier was arrested in North Korea while on a tour of the country. Accused of plotting to steal a propaganda poster from a hotel at the behest of the CIA, he was sentenced to 15 years’ hard labor. Diplomatic negotiations eventually led to his release, but not before he suffered a massive brain injury which led him to enter a coma and ultimately to die. It’s no surprise that the U.S. government bans any of its citizens from visiting North Korea, much less sprinting across the DMZ shouting “ha ha ha!”
Prisoners vs. defectors
But King will not necessarily suffer exactly the same fate as Warmbier. There’s a long history of North Korea treating military defectors differently than suspected CIA poster-stealers. Pyongyang doesn’t want random Westerners showing up and trying to undermine the regime or proselytize Christianity. Defectors, on the other hand, can serve all sorts of useful purposes - not the least of which is propaganda.
About half a dozen U.S. soldiers have deserted their posts and gone to North Korea since the Korean War ended in 1953. Probably the most famous is James Joseph Dresnok, who ran across a minefield into North Korea in broad daylight in 1962. Facing troubles in his personal life and a likely court martial for a minor offence, Dresnok seems to have genuinely wanted to find what he called a “new life” in North Korea. And that he did. Dresnok eventually decided to settle in North Korea, and the regime soon put him to work.
As a real life American - and a former soldier no less - Dresnok was useful to the North Korean regime for all sorts of propaganda efforts. He featured prominently on the covers of magazines, shouted slogans over the DMZ using a loudspeaker, and starred in a television drama as an American villain called “Arthur Cockstud”. More than any other defector, Dresnok seems to have embraced his new life in the North, allegedly informing on other American prisoners and beating them up at the behest of their Korean captors. Dresnok eventually married a Romanian woman and drank himself into severe health problems, dying in Pyongyang at age 74.
The regime found uses even for other, less cooperative defectors. Among the men who Dresnok allegedly terrorized was Charles Robert Jenkins, who ran across the DMZ after drinking ten beers in January 1965. Fearful that his unit would soon be sent to Vietnam - as indeed it was - Jenkins planned to claim asylum in the Soviet Union and then be included in a prisoner exchanges between the two superpowers. Instead, he was held prisoner in North Korea for nearly 40 years, suffering frequent abuse and being forced to star as an evil capitalist in North Korean movies.
The regime also forced Jenkins and other defectors to marry female prisoners, in his case a Japanese woman called Hitomi Soga. Jenkins believed that the reason for the forced marriages was in order for the regime to breed a future generation of spies. Dresnok eventually remarried a North Korean woman, and his son James now serves in the North Korean military.
Troubled pasts and futures
Most of the American soldiers who have defected to North Korea were facing trouble in their personal lives or in the U.S. military. Travis King appears to be no exception. Family members say that he has been acting erratically after the recent death of his cousin, and he has been accused of assault multiple times in the last year. In one incident reported by CNN, King assaulted someone in a nightclub, was taken into custody by South Korean police, and then unleashed a violent tirade against South Korea which included kicking the door of a police car so hard he caused hundreds of dollars of damage. Refusing to pay for the damage, he was sentenced to 47 days’ hard labor, and upon his release faced discharge from the military.
The word “defector” becomes slippery in cases like this - should it be reserved only for dedicated ideologues who are fleeing to what they consider a superior Communist system, or also for troubled young men who make bad decisions? It’s an interesting debate, but as soon as someone crosses the border, it also becomes somewhat irrelevant. North Korea will now decide the best use for Travis King, and his motivations will matter little when weighed against the regime’s ability to deploy him as part of its ideological and diplomatic struggle with the West.
At least some elements of the North Korean government seem to consider defectors as more trouble than they’re worth - they need to be guarded, chaperoned around, and kept from swaying North Korean citizens with their foreign ideas. The regime seems to place a high premium on keeping them alive, with defectors held during the North Korean famine of the 1990s reportedly given better rations than the average citizen. If King is as erratic and mentally unstable as he appears from reports, he might pose an additional burden. They could mistreat him, but after Warmbier the fatal injuring of another American in North Korean custody might be a risk the regime doesn’t want to take. There’s a reason to think, then, that they might just interrogate him and send him back.
But there are also plenty of reasons to think that King will be retained for some other purpose - either to be put to work on propaganda, or to serve as a bargaining chip in future negotiations with the West. There are currently no diplomatic contacts between America and North Korea, and the U.S. has not even been able to establish communication with the regime about King’s fate. Likely that’s because the country’s leadership wants time to screen King and decide what to do with him. Even if they decide to trade him for something, the process will probably be protracted.
Nor can King be certain of political support for his return to the United States. Just ask Bowe Bergdahl, a U.S. soldier who deserted his post and ended up in the custody of the Taliban in 2014. Bergdahl faced criticism from the right, including Donald Trump, who called him a traitor and suggested he ought to be executed. King’s case hasn’t received much media traction yet, but already prominent figures on the nationalist right like David Clarke are suggesting that the U.S. government shouldn’t lift a figure to secure his return. King can’t be assured that the Biden administration would be guaranteed of political support from around the country if it negotiated for his release, a process that might involve making some concessions to Pyongyang.
So that’s the history of U.S. defectors to North Korea. Which path will King take, or have forced upon him? We’ll have to wait and see.