Nearly 40 years after he allegedly left his Army unit and defected to North Korea, Sergeant Charles Jenkins surrendered to US military authorities in Japan yesterday.
Looking frail but determined, Jenkins, accompanied by his Japanese wife and two North Korea-born daughters, stood at attention and saluted as he was received by military police at the gate of this base just south of Tokyo.
"Sir, I'm Sergeant Jenkins and I'm reporting," he said.
"You are now under the control of the US Army," Lieutenant Colonel Paul Nigara told him in response.
Army officials said Jenkins, now 64, would be put back on active duty, issued an ID card and given a uniform and haircut pending legal action.
His reprocessing back into the Army was expected to take a week or so.
No date has yet been determined for his court martial, which was expected to be held in Camp Zama. The court martial was expected to take five or six days.
He'll be treated with dignity and fairness, said Army spokesman Major John Amberg.
Jenkins is charged with defecting to the North, where he lived for 39 years, and faces a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted. While in the North, he made propaganda broadcasts, played devilish Americans in anti-US films and taught English at a school for spies.
The North Carolina native is widely expected to strike a plea bargain with military authorities to avert imprisonment. He has met several times in recent weeks with an Army-appointed attorney to prepare his case.
The attorney also accompanied Jenkins to Camp Zama yesterday.
"I expect we have a lot more to face in the days to come," Jenkins' wife, Hitomi Soga, said as she left a Tokyo hotel where Jenkins had been under medical care since July.
"But we hope that the four of us can live together as soon as possible," she said.
Jenkins' fate has become the focus of intense interest in Japan because of Soga, who was one of more than a dozen Japanese citizens abducted by North Korean agents in the 1970s and 1980s and taken to North Korea.
She and Jenkins met soon after she arrived in the North in 1978. Soga was allowed to return to Japan after a historic Japan-North Korea summit in Pyongyang in 2002, but Jenkins and the couple's daughters remained in the North until this summer.
Soga's plight has inspired widespread sympathy here. Tokyo arranged a reunion of the family in Indonesia in July, and then convinced Jenkins to come to Japan for treatment for ailments linked to an operation he had in North Korea.
Jenkins has not addressed the charges against him.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
RSS