His defection to N. Korea 'big mistake' By DAVE GOLDINER Army deserter Charles Jenkins now admits what should have been obvious all along - defecting to Communist North Korea was a real dumb move. After nearly 40 years in the secretive dictatorship, Jenkins said the last straw came when the North Koreans brainwashed his daughters into being spies. "I made a big mistake of my life," Jenkins, 63, told Time for this week's issue. "But getting my daughters out of there, that was one right thing I did." Jenkins managed to leave North Korea this year after the Japanese government won the release of his Japanese-born wife. He admitted deserting and recently finished a short sentence in U.S. military custody. Jenkins, a sergeant, said he walked across the demilitarized zone in 1965 because of nagging insecurities and fears he would let his soldiers down. He landed in a bizarre and secretive Stalinist world, where beatings were common and dissent was forbidden. "In North Korea, you learn real quick to say no when you mean yes, and yes when you mean no," Jenkins said. The seventh-grade dropout from rural North Carolina was ordered to teach English at a college, but ran into trouble when someone noticed a U.S. Army tattoo on his arm one summer. Soon, it was brutally ripped off his flesh with a knife and scissors - and no anesthesia. "The doctor told me that they save anesthetic for the battlefield," he recalled. Jenkins eventually was "introduced" to his future wife - a woman who had been kidnapped from a Japanese island. They had two girls - now 19 and 21 - and he later figured out that the North Koreans wanted them to produce Western-looking kids to make into spies. "They wanted us to have children," he concluded, "so they could use them later." Source: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/wn_report/story/259275p-222082c.html

U.S. Is Shaping Plan to Pressure North Koreans By DAVID E. SANGER WASHINGTON, Feb. 13 - In the months before North Korea announced that it possessed nuclear weapons, the Bush administration began developing new strategies to choke off its few remaining sources of income, based on techniques in use against Al Qaeda, intelligence officials and policy makers involved in the planning say. The initial steps are contained in a classified "tool kit" of techniques to pressure North Korea that has been refined in recent weeks by the National Security Council. The new strategies would intensify and coordinate efforts to track and freeze financial transactions that officials say enable the government of Kim Jong Il to profit from counterfeiting, drug trafficking and the sale of missile and other weapons technology. Some officials describe the steps as building blocks for what could turn into a broader quarantine if American allies in Asia - particularly China and South Korea - can be convinced that Mr. Kim's declaration on nuclear weapons last week means he must finally be forced to choose between disarmament and even deeper isolation. China and South Korea have been reluctant to impose penalties on the North. To some degree the effort arises from Washington's lack of leverage over North Korea, and the absence of good military options, and it is far from clear that the administration's development of what one official calls "new instruments of pressure" will work. More than four decades of economic embargos of Cuba, tried by nine presidents, have failed, largely because European, Canadian and Latin American allies have not joined in. Nor have they succeeded against the Burmese, also a major source of drugs. The Secret Service has tried for years to halt North Korean counterfeiting dollars, and Australia and Japan have tried to end its sales of amphetamines and heroin. In interviews over the past three weeks, administration officials have denied that the renewed effort is part of an unstated initiative to topple Mr. Kim. But several officials say North Korea has stepped up its illicit trafficking and counterfeiting in part to make up for lost missile sales and a crackdown on cash transfers from North Koreans living in Japan, some of which are illegal. "We think they are desperate to put more money into the nuclear program and we're trying to cut that off," said one senior official. More: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/14/politics/14korea.html