U.S. Soldier Reportedly Cackled ‘HA-HA-HA!’ While Defecting to North Korea
The American citizen who defected to North Korea during a border tour on Tuesday has been identified as U.S. Army private Travis King, according to multiple U.S. officials who spoke to the Associated Press and other outlets.
King had been set to fly back to the U.S. after being detained in South Korea on assault charges for roughly two months, according to the officials, who added that he was escorted to a South Korean airport for his flight back to Fort Bliss, Texas.
The officials told AP that after passing through airport security, King somehow escaped, later joining an organized tour along the South Korean and North Korean border.
The U.S. Army told The Daily Beast that a service member “willfully” slipped away from the tour and crossed into North Korea. It is the first U.S. defection to the communist regime since the 1960s.
The United Nations Command, a force that operates in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) and Joint Security Area (JSA) dividing the Korean Peninsula, initially tweeted that a U.S. national had crossed the border.
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“A U.S. Service member on a JSA orientation tour willfully and without authorization crossed the Military Demarcation Line into the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK),” Col. Isaac Taylor of the United States Forces Korea confirmed to The Daily Beast in a statement. “We believe he is currently in DPRK custody and are working with our KPA counterparts to resolve this incident.”
The United States is now reportedly trying to establish his whereabouts and condition.
According to NK News, a witness on the same tour saw a male member of her group run across the border as they visited the JSA.
“To our right, we hear a loud HA-HA-HA and one guy from OUR GROUP that has been with us all day- runs in between two of the buildings and over to the other side!!” Mikaela Johansson of Sweden wrote. “It took everybody a second to react and grasp what had actually happened, then we were ordered into and through Freedom House and running back to our military bus.”
She reportedly added that visitors at the JSA had been asked by authorities not to share images of the incident.
The JSA, also known as the “Truce Village,” is the border village inside the DMZ where soldiers from the opposing regimes of Pyongyang and Seoul stand and face one another. It’s also the place where diplomatic negotiations take place between the North and the South.
Crossing and defections across the tightly-defended border have happened in the past, though cases involving Americans defecting to North Korea are extremely rare. Following the Korean War, a small group of U.S. servicemen crossed the DMZ in 1962. James Joseph Dresnok was the last American soldier known to still be living in North Korea until his death in 2016, which was confirmed by his family the following year.
In contrast, South Korea estimates that over 33,000 North Koreans have defected to safety in the South since the late 1990s. The majority of those who flee Kim Jong Un’s regime typically do not do so at the dangerous DMZ, however, choosing instead to cross the eastern border into China on a circuitous multinational route which eventually ends in South Korea.
Dramatic defections from North Korea have taken place in the JSA before though. In 2017, a North Korean soldier’s daring bid for freedom was captured on film as he drove a jeep and then ran on foot through the JSA, being shot at least five times by the comrades he was leaving behind before being dragged to safety by soldiers on the southern side.
Earlier in the year, American student Otto Warmbier died after spending a year in a coma following his arrest in North Korea in 2016 for allegedly stealing a propaganda poster. His death at the age of 22 came less than a week after he’d been brought back to the United States while still unresponsive.
Tuesday’s reported defection comes at a time of heightened tensions between Washington and Pyongyang. North Korea has conducted around 100 missile tests since the beginning of last year and last week launched a powerful solid-fueled intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) that state media called a “strong practical warning” to the United States and other adversaries.
North Korea has similarly been angered by an April summit between President Joe Biden and South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol in which the leaders agreed that U.S. nuclear submarines would resume visits to the Korean peninsula after a decades-long hiatus. The arrival of an Ohio-class ballistic missile sub in the South Korean port city of Busan was announced by the country’s Defense Ministry on Tuesday.
The UN Command and the State Department have been contacted for comment.
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