Kyodo/Reuters
Merrill Newman arriving at the Beijing airport after his release. "I'm very glad to be on my way home," Mr. Newman said to the Japanese news media. "I feel good, I feel good. I want to go home to see my wife."
Merrill Newman, 85, active retiree and intrepid traveler, preferred exotic places to popular ones. He had sailed around the world. He had been to Cuba and the Galápagos Islands. So it was not so odd when he decided that his next journey would be a return to North Korea, where 60 years ago he did top-secret work as a United States Army intelligence officer.
The Korean War still echoed within him. In early 1953, he served on the island of Chodo, advising North Korean anti-Communist guerrillas in raids on the mainland. These fighters crossed the Yellow Sea in leaky old junks. They ambushed supply trucks. They stole weapons. They rescued refugees and attacked enemy soldiers and local Communist leaders.
Mr. Newman's wartime years were followed by a successful career, first as a high school teacher and later as an executive for high-tech companies in Silicon Valley. He seems an unlikely person to become a prisoner of war. But on Oct. 26, at the end of a 10-day guided tour, he was pulled from his flight as he was about to leave Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, and accused of war crimes.
Last week, North Korea's state-run news agency released a video of the bespectacled octogenarian reading a stilted "apology" for his "indelible" offenses. Late Friday, that act of contrition appeared to have led to his release and a flight out. He landed in Beijing.
"I'm very glad to be on my way home," Mr. Newman told the Japanese news media at the Beijing airport, Reuters reported. "I feel good, I feel good. I want to go home to see my wife."
The North Korean news agency called the release a humanitarian gesture, saying Mr. Newman had been allowed to leave because of his "sincere repentance" and his "advanced age and health condition."
Just hours earlier, his wife, Lee, had been lamenting his detention in a telephone interview.
"This Thanksgiving, Merrill was absent for the first time in 56 years," she said from the couple's home in Palo Alto, Calif.
Some expressed amazement that Mr. Newman traveled to North Korea. But Mr. Newman's son, Jeff, who is in the real estate business in Los Angeles, said in a telephone interview that he did not find it curious when his father decided to go with a neighbor from their retirement community.
"Why did my dad go to North Korea?" he asked. "It's just like a lot of Vietnam veterans who have gone back to Vietnam and World War II guys going to Normandy."
He said his father grew up in Colusa, Calif., a small farm town on the Sacramento River. "It was a 3,000-person town, Depression, make-do," he said. "He became a guy who could fix things, make things. As an example, when he and Mom got married, he built the bed and the drawer set for their house."
Merrill Newman majored in zoology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was drafted into the Army. He attended Stanford on the G.I. Bill. Years later, he got an M.B.A., going to night classes at Santa Clara University for seven years, his son said. He thrived as a financial officer for several companies, earning enough to afford a second home near the beach in Santa Cruz, Calif.
The Newmans have spent most of their lives in Palo Alto. He retired from full-time work in 1984, but that hardly slowed him down. He sailed to the South Pacific and sub-Saharan Africa. He is an avid scuba diver. He taught swimming. He was a board member of the local chapter of the Red Cross. He was a trustee at the First Congregational Church. Two years ago, the Newmans moved into an apartment in a 10-story retirement community.
But Mr. Newman, like many former servicemen, clung to the past as well. He kept a gold ring given him by the guerrillas, a reminder, he wrote, of "old comrades and their brave deeds."
Many of those men — farmers, students, persecuted Christians — had eventually found their way to the South. He reconnected with some of them late in life and attended reunions of the so-called Mount Kuwol partisans in Seoul in 2003 and 2010.
Barry Bearak reported from New York, and Choe Sang-hun from Seoul, South Korea. Erica Goode contributed reporting from Palo Alto, Calif., and Michael D. Shear from Washington.
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