James Joseph Dresnok

James Joseph Dresnok (, November 24, 1941 – November 2016) was an American defector to North Korea, one of seven U.S. soldiers to defect after the Korean War.

After defecting, Dresnok worked as an actor in propaganda films, some directed by Kim Jong Il, and as an English teacher in Pyongyang. He was featured on the CBS magazine program 60 Minutes on January 28, 2007, as the last U.S. defector alive in North Korea.

Dresnok most often called himself Joe Dresnok but was also referred to as "James" or "Jim" Dresnok

Joseph and Margaret Dresnok divorced on July 10, 1951, in Richmond, Virginia. Dresnok's father initiated the divorce action, claiming that Dresnok's mother was "legally married to another." Eventually, James's aunt returned him to his father's house in Pennsylvania, unwilling to deal with him anymore. However, by this point his father had already found a second wife, and his brother had moved back in with them, with Joseph, Sr. lying to his wife, saying he only ever had one son. After his father and stepmother got into an argument that night, the following morning, James's father drove him to a retirement home a few towns away, saying they were on the way to visit a relative. Telling James to wait in the reception area, Joseph Sr. got back into his car and drove away. Dresnok reported that after this, he left the building and stole $20, then stole a nearby unattended bicycle, eventually being caught by the police. where he felt welcomed.

Dresnok would end up dropping out of high school, and joined the Army the day after his 17th birthday, believing it was one of the few opportunities available left for him. During a short-term leave period, he returned to Richmond, Virginia and married Kathleen Ringwood, who he had met at church a short time earlier. After returning to the United States and finding out that his wife had cheated and left him for another man, he filed divorce papers at the request of his wife, and he re-enlisted and was sent to South Korea.

Having lost hope for his life and future and being unwilling to face punishment, on August 15, 1962, three hours before he was due to meet with Captain Thomas Bryan regarding the court martial, while his fellow soldiers were eating lunch, he ran across a minefield in broad daylight into Kijong-dong in North Korean territory, where he was quickly apprehended by North Korean soldiers. and he became a celebrity in the country as a result. He was called "Arthur" by his North Korean friends, after the name of his character in Unsung Heroes. He also translated some of North Korean leader Kim Il Sung's writings into English.

In his book The Reluctant Communist, Jenkins claims that Dresnok was a bully, betraying the other Americans' confidences to the North Koreans, and beating up Jenkins on 30 or more occasions on the orders of their Korean handlers. during the North Korean famine of the 1990s, he was always given his full food ration by the government. "Why? Why do they let their own people starve to death to feed an American?" he asked. "The Great Leader has given us a special solicitude. The government is going to take care of me until my dying day."

Personal life and marriages In December 1959, Dresnok married Kathleen Ringwood, a 19-year-old from New York City. In Crossing the Line, Dresnok explains that after getting married at a young age, he was deployed in West Germany for two years while she remained in the U.S. He prided himself on "truly loving her and being loyal to her", but when he returned, he found out that she was already in another relationship. He was quoted as saying, "The good thing was that she did not get pregnant by me because I had promised that I would never abandon my children." However, they remained legally married until after his defection in 1962. She filed for divorce the next year, citing "willful desertion" on his part as grounds.

Dresnok was married twice more after defecting to North Korea. His second marriage was to a Romanian woman, Doina Bumbea (referred to as "Dona" in Jenkins's autobiography), with whom he had two sons, Theodore "Ted" Ricardo Dresnok (born 1980) Bumbea supposedly worked at the Romanian Embassy, but some accounts say that she never worked there and was in fact an abductee who had been taken by the North Korean secret service. According to Bumbea's family, she was living in Italy as an art student when she vanished, after telling people that she had met a man who promised to help arrange exhibitions of her art in Asia. After viewing Crossing the Line and seeing one of Dresnok's sons, Bumbea's brother stated he bore a startling resemblance to his missing sister. According to Jenkins' book, Bumbea was abducted in order to be the wife of one of the American deserters. Bumbea reportedly died of lung cancer in 1997.

After Bumbea's death, Dresnok married his third wife, identified by Jenkins as "Dada", the daughter of a North Korean woman and a Togolese diplomat. They had a son, Tony, in 2001. The family lived in a small apartment in Pyongyang, provided to them along with a monthly stipend by the North Korean government. Dresnok was in failing health, with a bad heart and liver (Dresnok described his liver as "full of fat"), which he attributed to smoking and drinking too much.

His younger son from his second marriage, James Dresnok, was a student at the Pyongyang University of Foreign Studies, where his father taught English in the 1980s. Both the younger James and the older Ted Dresnok are now married and they also have children of their own in North Korea. Like their father, they have also appeared as villainous Americans in North Korean films.

Dresnok stated that he intended to spend the rest of his life in North Korea, and no amount of money could have enticed him to move back to the West. Dresnok retired and occasionally gave lectures in North Korea and went fishing "just to pass the time." In August 2017, Dresnok's sons confirmed that he had died of a stroke in November 2016. They released a statement saying that their father told them to remain loyal to Kim Jong Un and they also stated that the US would be destroyed if it launched a preemptive strike against North Korea.

Filmography While Dresnok was involved in many propaganda films, the specific number is unknown.