Dresnok was among a handful of American servicemen to desert after the Korean war and was loyal to Kim Jong-un 
 
 The only US soldier known to still be living in North Korea after defecting more than five decades ago died last year, pledging his loyalty to the “great leader Kim Jong-un”, his sons have said. 
 
 
 
 James Joseph Dresnok was among a handful of American servicemen to desert following the Korean war, crossing the heavily fortified demilitarised zone in 1962. 
 
 He went on to appear in North Korean propaganda films and was believed to be the last US defector in the country, the others all having died or been allowed to leave. 
 
 North Korea's bold wave of propaganda art - in pictures Read more 
 
 In a video interview posted on the state-run Uriminzokkiri website, Ted and James Dresnok, his two sons, confirmed their father had a fatal stroke in November last year. 
 
 “Our father was in the arms of the republic and received only the love and care of the party until his passing at age 74,” said Ted Dresnok, the elder of the two. 
 
 In the video, Dresnok and his brother wore a Korean People’s army uniform, adorned with a badge depicting the North’s founder Kim Il-sung and his son and successor Kim Jong-il. 
 
 Both men were born in North Korea and spoke Korean with a heavy northern accent. 
 
 “Our father asked us to render devoted service to our great leader Kim Jong-un,” said Ted Dresnok, who also goes by the Korean name Hong Soon-chol. 
 
 Their comments were similar to those of North Koreans, who normally only express officially approved sentiments when speaking for a foreign audience. 
 
 It was the brothers’ second appearance on the programme, after they praised the country in an interview in May 2016. 
 
 Play Video 1:01 Sons of US defector to North Korea James Dresnok speak out after father's death – video 
 
 Addressing the recent tensions between Pyongyang and Washington, Ted Dresnok warned that the “US imperialists” were raising “war hysteria madness” with little knowledge about the North’s military and its people. 
 
 If war breaks out, he said, “we will not miss the opportunity and wipe the land of the US from the earth for ever”. 
 
 Tensions have been mounting in the region since Pyongyang tested two intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) last month that appeared to bring much of the US within range. 
 
 That sparked a volley of threats between Pyongyang and Washington, with the US president, Donald Trump, warning of bringing “fire and fury” on the North while Pyongyang threatened to fire a salvo of missiles towards the US territory of Guam. 
 
 “We have our dear supreme commander Kim Jong-un. If he is by our side, our victory is certain,” said James Dresnok, who also goes by his Korean name Hong Chol, in the video posted on Friday. 
 
 The late James Dresnok, known as Joe, crossed a minefield at 21 to reach North Korea, after his wife divorced him and he was reportedly about to be court martialled. 
 
 He was the subject of a British documentary, Crossing the Line, in 2006 and expressed satisfaction with his life in Pyongyang, whose citizens enjoy better standards of living than those elsewhere in the isolated country. 
 
 He also told CBS that he would not leave even if “you put a billion damn dollars of gold on the table”. ||||| Image copyright Reuters Image caption Mr Jenkins walked across the DMZ and surrendered to North Korean soldiers there when he was 24 
 
 A former US sergeant who defected to North Korea and became Pyongyang's prisoner for nearly 40 years has died. 
 
 Charles Jenkins, 77, lived in Japan where he had settled with his family after his 2004 release. 
 
 He was among four US soldiers who defected in the 1960s and later became North Korean film stars, but was the only one who was released. 
 
 The others reportedly died in North Korea, including James Dresnok who was said to have died of a stroke in 2016. 
 
 Charles Jenkins died on Sado island on Monday, where he was living with his wife Hitomi Soga, also a former prisoner of North Korea. 
 
 He collapsed outside his home, Japanese media reports said, and later died of heart problems in hospital. His wife said in a statement that she was "very surprised" by his death and "cannot think of anything", according to AFP news agency. 
 
 A plan that went wrong 
 
 Mr Jenkins had led an extraordinary but also difficult life in North Korea, which he would later chronicle in a memoir and several interviews. 
 
 In 1965, while stationed with the US Army in South Korea by the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ), Mr Jenkins decided to abandon his unit and defect to the North, fearing he would be killed in patrols or sent to fight in the Vietnam War. 
 
 He said he thought that once in North Korea, he could seek asylum with the Russian embassy, and eventually return to the US in a prisoner swap. 
 
 One January night, Mr Jenkins said he downed several beers, walked across the DMZ, and surrendered to North Korean soldiers there. He was only 24 years old. 
 
 But Russia did not grant him or the other Americans asylum. Instead, they were held as prisoners by the North Koreans. 
 
 "Thinking back now, I was a fool. If there's a God in the heaven, he carried me through it," said Mr Jenkins in a 2005 interview with US broadcaster CBS. 
 
 The men were forced to study the teachings of then-leader Kim Il-sung; did translation work; and taught English. But they also became minor celebrities when they acted in North Korean propaganda films, starring as Western villains. 
 
 Mr Jenkins said his captors often beat him, and conducted medical procedures on him that were sometimes unnecessary or brutal, including cutting off a US Army tattoo without anaesthesia, an experience which Mr Jenkins had described as "hell". 
 
 'Oyasumi' and 'Goodnight' 
 
 But one bright spot in his life was Ms Soga, who was abducted from Japan to teach North Korean spies her language. 
 
 Image copyright AFP/Getty Images Image caption Ms Soga, seen here in a 2004 file picture, was taken from Sado island 
 
 In 1980, North Korean officials moved her in with Mr Jenkins. Within two weeks they were forced to marry, according to Mr Jenkins, but they eventually fell in love, bonded by their mutual hatred of their captors. 
 
 "Well, I'll put it like this. I looked at her one time. I wasn't letting her go," he told CBS. 
 
 In his memoir, Mr Jenkins said that every night before they went to bed, he would say "oyasumi" (Japanese for goodnight) to his wife and she would respond in English. 
 
 "We did this so we would never forget who we really were and where we came from," he wrote. 
 
 You might also like: 
 
 The couple had two daughters, Mika and Brinda. Mr Jenkins said that as foreign prisoners, they were treated better than ordinary North Koreans and given rations, even during the famine that swept North Korea in the 1990s. 
 
 In 2002, Ms Soga was freed after negotiations by the Japanese government. Pyongyang then allowed Mr Jenkins to leave two years later, along with their daughters. 
 
 The family reunited under intense scrutiny from the press in Japan, where there was widespread sympathy. 
 
 Image copyright AFP/JIJI PRESS Image caption Mr Jenkins and his family left North Korea in the early 2000s 
 
 In Japan, he surrendered to the US Army, almost four decades after he had defected, and was court-martialled. 
 
 He was eventually given a 30-day prison sentence, and a dishonourable discharge. 
 
 'North Korea wants me dead' 
 
 The family settled in Sado island, Ms Soga's hometown, and Mr Jenkins eventually found work as a greeter in a tourist park. 
 
 But he had to cope with the culture shock of adapting to the modern world, after spending so many years in an isolated country. 
 
 He claimed he had never touched a computer, let alone used the internet, and was surprised to see many women serving in the army as well as black people working as policemen, according to CBS. 
 
 Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Mr Jenkins was given computer training by the US Army while waiting for his court martial in 2004 
 
 He also suffered from lingering complications from medical procedures he received in North Korea and had to be hospitalised after his release, he told the Los Angeles Times in one of his last media interviews published in August. 
 
 Even while living in freedom, Mr Jenkins still remained afraid of his former captors, and was constantly worried that he or his family would eventually be assassinated. 
 
 "North Korea wants me dead," he told the paper. ||||| HONG KONG — There are 5,500 missing American soldiers buried in North Korea. Buried, of course, is not exactly the right word. 
 
 They are missing in action, to be sure, but they are more covered up than buried. Their bodies remain undiscovered on Korean War battlefields and in unmarked prisoner-of-war graveyards, hidden now by 60 years of frozen mud, floods, neglect, diplomatic strains, political mud. 
 
 Jung Yeon-Je/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images 
 
 And they will remain missing for some time longer: The Pentagon has suspended a new search-and-recovery program in the North, an effort that was due to begin in the next several days. 
 
 North Korea’s planned launch of a satellite with a long-range missile has angered the United States and other nations, and the recovery of dead soldiers appears to be one of the tools that will be used to punish the North or pressure it to call off the launch. 
 
 “We have suspended that effort because we believe that North Korea has not acted appropriately in recent days and weeks and that it’s important for them to return to the standards of behavior that the international community has called for,” the Pentagon press secretary, George Little, said Wednesday. 
 
 The State Department has already said that a new food-aid deal with North Korea would be killed because of the launch. 
 
 When Pyongyang and Washington struck a heartening agreement last autumn to resume joint field searches for the M.I.A.’s after a seven-year suspension, the Pentagon said this: “Accounting for Americans missing in action is a standalone humanitarian matter, not tied to any other issue between the two countries.’’ 
 
 That’s no longer the case. A full accounting is no longer a stand-alone. 
 
 Washington agreed to pay the North Koreans $5.7 million to restart the M.I.A. searches, particularly at the Chosin Reservoir battle site and in Unsan County, north of Pyongyang. The actual scouting and digging was due to start any day now, and two 30-member teams of forensic investigators have already assembled. 
 
 A Pentagon spokeswoman said the payments were for North Korean labor, transport and logistical support. In a statement, the military explained its policy: “The U.S. government pays fair and reasonable compensation for the efforts associated with recovering remains, but does not pay for remains or information.’’ 
 
 In all, nearly 8,000 U.S. soldiers are missing from the 1950-53 Korean War, which ended in a truce rather than a full-blown treaty. 
 
 North Korea handed the U.S. military 208 boxes of human remains in 1994, muddy jumbles of degraded bones, skulls, teeth, hair and personal effects. The remains were of some 400 different persons, but forensic examiners have so far been able to identify only 63. 
 
 The North, on its own, also returned six sets of remains in 2007. 
 
 My colleague in the Seoul bureau, Choe Sang-Hun, wrote last year about joint field searches in the North: 
 
 American experts were allowed in North Korea in 1996 to guide more scientific recovery efforts. Thirty-three joint on-site missions yielded more than 220 sets of remains. About 80 have been identified and returned to families for burial. But the operations were halted in 2005 after Washington took issue with the safety and security of its workers. 
 
 North Korea has reportedly earned millions of dollars for cooperation over the remains recovery. It has also used the matter to try to entice the United States into bilateral talks. Washington insists that any talks be within a multilateral framework. “If thousands of U.S. remains buried in our country are washed off and lost due to the U.S. side’s disregard, the U.S. side should be wholly responsible for the consequences as it has developed the humanitarian issue into a political problem,” the North’s official Korean Central News Agency said in April 2010. 
 
 The U.S. Defense Department has collaborated with South Korean intelligence agents in interviewing more than 20,000 defectors from North Korea in recent years. 
 
 “To date, this effort has produced no useful information concerning live Americans,’’ the department said. “Most reports of live Americans in North Korea pertain to six known U.S. defectors. Of the six defectors, only one remains alive in North Korea.’’ 
 
 That defector is James Joseph Dresnok, an Army private from Virginia who, facing court-martial in 1962, ran across a minefield into the North. He enjoys a pleasant retirement from the state, remains unrepentant and is reportedly in failing health. He was profiled in a “60 Minutes” segment in 2007. 
 
 “I really feel at home,’’ he said. “I wouldn’t trade it for nothing.”
– He might have been the most famous American in North Korea. But now James "Joe" Dresnok, a US soldier who defected after fighting in the Korean War, is dead, reports the Guardian. His two Korean-born sons made the news public in a government video, saying their father had suffered a stroke and died at age 74. Dresnok was one of a few American soldiers to cross into North Korea in 1962, and he went on to star in propaganda films, generally as the evil American. The BBC made a documentary about him in 2006 called Crossing the Line in which he said he had no regrets about his defection. "I wouldn't trade it for nothin,'" the native of Richmond, Va., says in the video. (The film is on YouTube. CBS' 60 Minutes also did a feature on Dresnok, which can be seen here.) The few other Americans who defected are believed to have died or left the country. Dresnok, who crossed a minefield into the North, had faced a court-martial for leaving his base without permission for a night on the town. "I was fed up with my childhood, my marriage, my military life, everything," he said. Sons Ted and James Dresnok, aka Hong Soon-chol and Hong Chol, spoke of their father in the new state video. "Our father was in the arms of the republic and received only the love and care of the party until his passing at age 74," said Ted Dresnok. Though half-American himself, Ted Dresnok showed where his loyalties lie, warning that if war breaks out, "we will not miss the opportunity and wipe the land of the US from the earth for ever." His brother had a similar sentiment, saying: "We have our dear supreme commander Kim Jong Un. If he is by our side, our victory is certain." (You can see the two of them in this video from about a year ago.)