(CNN) — Merrill Newman — the 85-year-old American detained by North Korean authorities earlier this fall — has been “deported,” North Korea’s state news agency KCNA reported early Saturday.
A senior Obama administration official said soon after the North Korean announcement that U.S. authorities have Newman “in hand in Beijing.”
The KCNA report stated that investigators determined that “Newman entered the DPRK with a wrong understanding of it and perpetrated a hostile act against it.”
“Taking into consideration his admittance of the act committed by him on the basis of his wrong understanding (and the) apology made by him for it, his sincere repentance of it and his advanced age and health condition, the above-said institution deported him from the country from a humanitarian viewpoint,” the official North Korean report added.
Just on Thursday, State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said American officials had spoken the previous day with relatives of Newman and Kenneth Bae, another American being held in North Korea, but added little else.
Harf offered no update on Friday. Still — whether it was a coincidence or not — the news of Newman’s release came on the day that Vice President Joe Biden was in South Korea, where he was to lay a wreath at a memorial for veterans of the war that pitted North Korea against its southern neighbor as well as the United States.
According to his family, the Palo Alto, California, resident had gone on a 10-day organized private tour of North Korea in October. From phone calls and postcards he sent, the trip was going well and there was no indication of any kind of problem, son Jeff Newman said.
The day before he was to leave, “one or two Korean authorities” met with Newman and his tour guide, the son added. They talked about Newman’s service record, which left “my dad … a bit bothered,” according to Jeff Newman.
Then, just minutes before his Beijing-bound plane was set to depart Pyongyang in late October, he was taken off the aircraft by North Korean authorities.
For weeks, the Pyongyang government didn’t explain why they were holding Newman.
An explanation came a few days ago, when state media published and broadcast what they described as the Korean War veteran’s “apology.” In fact, that word — “apology” — was written atop the first of four handwritten pages detailing his alleged indiscretions.
In the note — which was dated November 9 — Newman talked about his having advised the Kuwol Unit, part of the “intelligence bureau” fighting against Pyongyang during the Korean War. He detailed how he commanded troops to collect “information” and wage various deadly attacks.
“After I killed so many civilians and (North Korean) soldiers and destroyed strategic objects in the DPRK during the Korean War, I committed indelible offensive acts against the DPRK government and Korean people,” Newman said, according to that KCNA report.
The reported message also touched on his return 60 years later to North Korea, admitting that he “shamelessly … had a plan to meet any surviving soldiers and pray for the souls of the dead soldiers.”
His statement ended: “If I go back to (the) USA, I will tell the true features of the DPRK and the life the Korean people are leading.”
This public apology — which University of California, Berkeley, professor Steve Weber characterized as “highly scripted political theater” — left some wondering what would happen to Newman.
Would he join Bae, an American arrested in North Korea in November 2012 who last May was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor after North Korea’s government found him guilty of “hostile acts” and attempts to topple the government?
Or would he be released?
As Weber said: “When it comes to North Korea, nobody knows very much.”
Newman’s wife, Lee, said in early November that she hoped he would be home for Thanksgiving.
“We need to have Merrill back at the head of the table for the holidays,” Lee Newman told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “And we ask — respectfully for them to release him and let him come home.”
Merrill Newman didn’t make it back to bond with his family over Thanksgiving turkey. But it now appears that he will soon be back with them, back home.