U.S. soldier who bolted to North faced discipline at home

North Korea

Published: 19 Jul. 2023, 17:21 Updated: 19 Jul. 2023, 23:32

U.S. soldier who bolted to North faced discipline at home

A South Korean soldier, left, and a U.S. soldier, right, face the North Korean side of the Joint Security Area (JSA) while a United Nations Command officer leads a tour of the truce village of Panmunjom in Paju, South Korea on Oct 4, 2022. [JOINT PRESS CORPS]

The U.S. soldier who crossed into North Korea on Tuesday was due to face military disciplinary action in the United States for assault charges that arose during his tour of duty in Korea, the U.S. Defense Department said.

The soldier, identified as 23-year-old Private 2nd Class Travis King, was escorted by military police to a security checkpoint at Incheon International Airport, but did not board his flight to Fort Bliss, Texas, instead joining a group of tourists headed to the Joint Security Area (JSA), located within the 160 mile-long demilitarized zone (DMZ) that divides the Korean Peninsula.

There, he ran across the concrete boundary on the ground that marks the Military Demarcation Line (MDL) into North Korea.

Adm. John Aquilino, head of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, said at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado on Tuesday that a U.S. army soldier “made a run” across the border at the JSA and “was picked up by the North Koreans.”

Speaking at a press conference at the Pentagon the same day, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said U.S. officials were still trying to understand how and why the soldier defected.

“What we do know is that one of our service members, who was on a tour, willfully and without authorization” crossed the MDL, he said, adding that U.S. officials are “closely monitoring and investigating the situation and working to notify the soldier’s next of kin.”

The United Nations Command, which is responsible for managing the JSA, said in its initial statement that a U.S. national was “in DPRK custody” after crossing the MDL “without authorization,” referring to the North by acronym for its official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

The command said it was communicating with the North Korean military to “resolve this incident.”

King’s mother, Claudine Gates, expressed shock in an interview with ABC News after the U.S. army told her on Tuesday that her son had crossed into North Korea.

“I can’t see Travis doing anything like that,” she said, adding, “I’m so proud of him. I just want him to come home, come back to America.”

King’s tour of duty in South Korea appears to have been marred by several run-ins with local law enforcement and a two-month stint in a South Korean prison that ended on July 10, when he was released back to U.S. officials.

According to court documents, King was fined 5 million won ($3,940) on Feb. 8 by a court in Seoul for repeatedly kicking a back door of a police patrol vehicle in Mapo District, western Seoul, four months earlier, causing damage that cost 584,000 won to repair.

He was also investigated on suspicion of committing assault against a Korean national at a night club in western Seoul on Sept. 25, but he was ultimately not indicted after the victim declined to press charges.

Defections of Americans or South Koreans to North Korea are rare in comparison to the 33,981 North Koreans who have managed to escape to the South since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War.

Border crossings via the JSA, also known as Panmunjom, are even rarer, with the last known instance being that of North Korean soldier in 2017 who drove a car to the border until it crashed, then sprinted across the MDL dividing the two Koreas under a hail of gunfire from the North.

The JSA is best known for its blue huts, which straddle a low, continuous line of concrete slabs marking the MDL, and images of South and North Korean soldiers facing off only a few feet from each other.

The area was established toward the end of the war in 1953 as a neutral enclave and venue for ceasefire negotiations and implementation of the armistice.

As the most prominent symbol of Korea’s partition and the site where the armistice was signed, the truce village draws thousands of visitors from both sides, and tours from South Korea run by the United Nations Command attracted around 100,000 visitors annually before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Visitors and guards from the North Korean side have not been seen outdoors at the JSA since the pandemic began, although tours from the South Korean side resumed last year.

While visitors to the JSA today are watched by United Nations Command security forces to ensure they do not stray too close to the MDL, the approximately 800-meter- (875-yard-) wide circular area was originally open to free movement by both sides within its bounds.

But after North Korean soldiers wielding axes murdered two U.S. military officers who had been tasked with pruning a tree that obstructed the view from a checkpoint in 1976, the concrete MDL was installed, effectively ending military cohabitation in the zone.

King is the seventh U.S. service member known to have crossed over to the North, and the sixth to do so via the DMZ.

Larry Allen Abshier and James Joseph Dresnok, who were the first and second U.S. soldiers to defect across the DMZ in 1962, later appeared as villainous U.S. soldiers in North Korean films, as did Dresnok’s two elder sons who were born in Pyongyang in 1980 and 1982.

The last to defect across the DMZ was Joseph T. White in 1982.

All of the U.S. soldiers who defected to the North remained and died there except for Charles Robert Jenkins, who married Japanese abductee Hitomi Soga after his 1965 defection and was permitted to leave the North to join his wife in Japan in 2004.

Rep. Tae Yong-ho of the conservative People Power Party (PPP), who formerly served as Pyongyang’s ambassador to London before defecting to Seoul in 2016, predicted in a Facebook post uploaded on Wednesday that King’s decision to cross into the North “is the beginning of his ‘Crash Landing into Hell.’”

“Even if [King] regrets his decision to cross over and asks to be repatriated, there is no way to confirm his intentions,” said Tae, who noted that the Swedish Embassy in Pyongyang, which usually represents U.S. interests to the North, is still closed as a result of Covid-19 restrictions.

The defector-turned-lawmaker also said the U.S. soldier’s defection provides the North with a “favorable way to tarnish the image of the United States Forces Korea” at a time when Seoul and Washington are ramping up security cooperation.

While Tae said that the North “may find it more trouble than it’s worth to keep [King] long-term” given his low rank and corresponding lack of intelligence value, the PPP lawmaker also said the regime would also be “unlikely to return a U.S. soldier who defected immediately,” given its strong objections to Seoul and Washington’s current approach to Pyongyang.

BY MICHAEL LEE,ESTHER CHUNG [lee.junhyuk@joongang.co.kr]