Escaping North Korea's prison state. (Cover Story: Korea).

Japanese citizens kidnapped decades ago have returned from Communist Korea. Their return raises again the issue of American POWs abandoned after the Korean War.

Kaoru Hasuike and Yukiko Okudo were enjoying a romantic stroll on the beach near Niigata on Japan's northern coast. The year was 1978. Suddenly, four men attacked them, pushed them into bags, and loaded them onto a boat. When they were off-loaded the couple found themselves in Communist North Korea, which was to be their prison for the next 24 years. The same year, 1978, another young Japanese couple, Yasushi Chi mura and Fukie Hamamoto, were also kidnapped as they left a coastal restaurant. They also ended up in North Korea, which was (and which remains) one of the most repressive, tightly closed Communist regimes in the world.

The two young couples comprised four of the 13 known cases in which North Korea has abducted Japanese citizens. Over the past three decades, family members of the kidnap victims have kept a lonely vigil and sought to pressure the Japanese government to take up their cause. But Tokyo had preferred not to press the issue to avoid upsetting potential relations with the Pyongyang regime.

In September 2002, after years of denial, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il unexpectedly admitted to the kidnappings at a meeting in Pyongyang with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. Not only did the Communist despot admit that North Korea had perpetrated the crimes, but he also apologized to Japan. Even more astounding, he said the victims would be allowed to return to their homeland. And most astonishing of all, he actually kept his word, perhaps a first for the North Korean regime. In October, five of the victims did indeed return to Japan: the two couples mentioned above and Hitomi Soga, a female nurse also kidnapped in 1978 when she was 19 years old.

Their joyous homecoming was an emotional national event. Among the other emotions stirred, however, were grief and anger over the eight victims who did not return. What had become of them? There is widespread dissatisfaction with the official North Korean story.

According to Pyongyang, the other eight known abductees all died of natural causes. North Korean officials say two died from gas poisoning, two in a car crash, one from drowning, and one from suicide. The Communist regime says the graves of seven of the eight washed away in floods. Very convenient. Not so convenient is the finding by a Japanese dental forensic expert who examined the one set of bones and ashes returned by North Korea. Ostensibly the remains of Kaoru Matsuki (a male who would now be in his 40s), the remains appear instead to be that of a woman in her 60s.

Mr. Matsuki's family is not buying the North Korean explanation. Neither are the families of Miss Keiko Arimoto and Mr. Torn Ishioka, both of whom were abducted while studying English in Europe.

Mr. Ishioka's family received a letter from him in September 1988 indicating he was living with Miss Arimoto in North Korea. Family members believe that this smuggled communication may have cost both young people their lives. They both died, reportedly, less than a month after the letter was sent. "They must have been executed publicly because of the letter," Mrs. Kayoko Arimoto, the 76-year-old mother of Miss Arimoto, told Kyodo news agency. "They were used as a warning to other Japanese, to show them what would happen to them if they wrote letters to Japan," she said.

Much remains unknown about the details of the abductees' long incarceration. They have been understandably reticent to talk candidly about their ordeals, since all of the five who have returned have children still being held hostage in North Korea. It appears that the primary motive for abducting the Japanese was to obtain teachers to instruct North Korean agents in the Japanese language and culture to better equip them for espionage and other intelligence operations against Japan. Last year a Japanese woman, Megumi Yao, a former member of the Communist terrorist organization known as the Japanese Red Army, admitted working with the North Koreans to ensnare young Japanese women. One of those young women was Keiko Arimoto, who was studying in Europe when she was lured to Denmark with a bogus job offer and then kidnapped.

Under the original plan set out by Kim Jong-Il, the five abductees would only return to Japan for a temporary visit. However, when the returnees indicated that they wanted to stay longer, the dictator's true nature began to show. North Korea issued demands that they be returned to their Korean "home." On December 19th, the five announced their intentions to stay in Japan and symbolically removed the North Korean pins they wore bearing the image of Kim Jong-Il. "Five of us have reaffirmed our decision to stay in Japan and wait for our families," said Mr. Yasushi Chimura, acting as spokesman for the group.

So what prompted the Stalinist North Korean regime to release the abductees in the first place? No, it was not a sudden burst of magnanimity or a change of heart by Kim Jong-Il. He seems as megalomaniacal as his late father Kim Il-Sung. The younger Kim is angling for the billions of dollars in aid and technology that would start flowing once he normalizes relations with Japan. For this prize he is reluctantly willing to make some concessions.

U.S. and South Korean POWs

The return of the five Japanese abductees raises the unresolved issue of POWs still held by the Communists since the Korean War. One of the five who returned, Hitomi Soga, is married to Charles Robert Jenkins, an American, who remains in North Korea with the couple's two children. According to North Korea, he is a U.S. Army deserter who defected to the Communists in 1965. Is he a deserter, or was he abducted, as many other U.S. servicemen have been? What is known is that following the main Korean War prisoner exchanges (Operations Little Switch and Big Switch) in 1953, the North Korean Communists still held as many as 8,000 or more American soldiers and as many as 100,000 South Koreans. The U.S. and South Korean governments have both covered up this disgraceful abandonment of their soldiers, but embarrassing evidence continues to surface.

In 1994, South Korean Cho Chang-ho escaped, after being held captive in North Korea for 43 years. In 1951, he had been declared "Killed in Action--Body Not Recovered." Yet, after more than four decades as a slave laborer in coal mines in remote areas of North Korea, the former lieutenant made a daring bid for freedom. After his escape, Cho Chang-ho reported: "I have seen thousands of ROK [Republic of Korea] POW's in reeducation camps, special concentration camps, and other places; none of them have been repatriated to South Korea."

In 1953, General James Van Fleet retired as commander of the U.S. 8th Army in Korea. He was quoted in the New York Times of August 7, 1953 as stating: "A large percentage of the 8,000 American soldiers listed as Missing In Action in Korea are still alive." Nearly 40 years later, Lieutenant Colonel Philip J. Corso stated in his 1992 U.S. Senate testimony: "Upon completion of 'Operation Big Switch,' the final exchange of POWs in September 1953, we concluded--based on reliable intelligence--that more than 8,000 American POW/MIAs were not returned or accounted for by the Communists." Col. Corso served on President Dwight Eisenhower's National Security Council staff. As the chief U.S. investigator on the status of U.S. Korean War prisoners, he presented Eisenhower with evidence that many of these POWs had been taken to China and the Soviet Union. Eisenhower's policy was to bury the evidence - along with the live POWs.

Even more appalling information about our Korean POWs has surfaced now with the recent publication of Betrayed by Joseph D. Douglass Jr. Dr. Douglass spent many years befriending and debriefing General Major Jan Sejna of Czechoslovakia, one of the highest officials of the Soviet bloc ever to defect to the West. Douglass tapped into Gen. Sejna's vast knowledge to reveal in Betrayed one of the most horrible secrets about our POWs: Many of them have been subjected to hideous experimentation using mind-control drugs and biological, chemical, and radiological weapons. According to Gen. Sejna, Czech intelligence, operating under Soviet direction, built an experimental "hospital" in North Korea that used American POWs as medical guinea pigs. Staffed with Czech doctors under the direction of a Dr. Dufek and Col. Rudolf Babka, the North Korean facility also subjected POWs to live amputation, dissection, and vivisection--without the benefit of anesthetics. The remains of hundreds of these test "subjects" were burned in the facility's crematorium to destroy all evidence. In 1954, the detailed records from these brutal atrocities were sealed and sent to the Soviet Union. President Bush and members of Congress must prevail on our supposed friend, President Putin, to open these Soviet "Dr. Mengele files," and to account for the additional thousands of U.S. POWs from Korea and Vietnam who disappeared into the Soviet gulag state.