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US defector 'wouldn't leave NKorea for a billion dollars'
2007-01-29
The last US defector to North Korea nearly 45 years ago said in a broadcast interview that he felt at home in the isolated Stalinist country, which he would not leave for "a billion damn dollars of gold." Joe Dresnok spoke to two British filmmakers about his decision in 1962-- after his wife divorced him and he was about to be court-martialed -- to cross the mine-filled divide separating South and North Korea. "I was fed up with my childhood, my marriage, my military life, everything. I was finished. There was only one place to go," Dresnok told the filmmakers in an interview shown on CBS television's "60 Minutes" program. "On August 15, at noon in broad daylight when everybody was eating lunch, I hit the road. Yes, I was afraid. Am I going to live or die? And when I stepped into the minefield, and I seen it with my own eyes, I started sweating. I crossed over, looking for my new life," he said. Dresnok later met three other American defectors. Sought asylum at the Soviet embassy, which sent them back to the North Koreans. Unable to leave the country, Dresnok said he had decided to adapt to the North Korean way of life. "Little by little, I came to understand the Korean people," he said. Dresnok starred in dozens of propaganda films, including one in 1978 in which he played the brutal US commander of a prisoner of war camp, CBS said. "I don't consider it a propaganda movie. I took great honor in doing it," said Dresnok, who also taught English and translated writings of "Great Leader" Kim Il-Sung into English. He also rejected allegations by Charles Jenkins, a former US defector who was allowed to leave North Korea in 2004, that Dresnok had beaten him under orders of North Korean officials. "He's a liar," Dresnok said. Dresnok told his story to British filmmakers Dan Gordon and Nick Bonner, who have made a documentary called "Crossing The Line." He had two sons with an eastern European wife who died young. His eldest son James, who is blond-haired and blue-eyed, studies at the foreign language college in Pyongyang, considers himself Korean and wants to become a diplomat, the documentary showed. "I start to learn English to become a diplomat," James told the filmmakers in accented English. "I'd like to make the world which has no war at all. And no terror at all." Dresnok later married the daughter of a Korean woman and an African diplomat, and the two have a six-year-old child. He lives in a small apartment in Pyongyang where he receives a monthly government stipend. "I don't have intentions of leaving, couldn't give a (expletive) if you put a billion damn dollars of gold on the table," he said. "I really feel at home. I wouldn't trade it for nothing."
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