SEOUL, South Korea — Like so many worker ants, the North Korean soldiers spent their days underground in a vast labyrinth of tunnels.
Their daily commute involved walking down four steep flights of stairs and then along a corridor that went nearly 800 yards into a mountain. They carried tightly sealed cartons, believed to contain raw materials for North Korea’s secretive weapons program. Some days, especially if they were being punished, they were assigned simply to dig more tunnels.
K., a North Korean now in his 30s, was recruited at age 17 into an elite military unit working for the agency responsible for weapons production in North Korea. He took an oath to work underground for the rest of his working life and was assigned to a cave in remote Musan County in North Hamgyong province, about 15 miles from the Chinese border.
"This is how we hide from our enemies. Everything in North Korea is underground," said K., who described the cave where he worked on the condition that he be quoted using only his first initial and that certain identifying details be kept vague.
North Korea is riddled with caves like the one where K. worked. In that most paranoid of countries, virtually everything of military significance is manufactured underground, whether it be buttons for soldiers’ uniforms or enriched uranium for nuclear weapons. A South Korean intelligence source estimates that there are several hundred large underground factories in North Korea and more than 10,000 smaller facilities. Joseph Bermudez, the author of three books on the North Korean military, puts the total number between 11,000 to 14,000.
The North Koreans began tunneling after the Korean War, when U.S. bombing destroyed most of their industrial base and infrastructure. The late North Korean founder Kim Il Sung is believed to have been so awed by American air power that he directed key industrial facilities be built underground.
"The entire nation must be made into a fortress," Kim wrote in 1963. "We must dig ourselves into the ground to protect ourselves." North Korea’s mountainous topography, inhospitable for agriculture and transportation, proved to be singularly well-suited to become what Bermudez calls "the most heavily fortified country in the world."
North Korea, a country of a mere 22 million people, developed the fifth-largest army in the world, while the mountains provided natural cover when the North Koreans looked for ways to conceal their military infrastructure.
"We would dig horizontally into the mountains rather than going straight down because we didn’t have good technology for waterproofing and we didn’t want to run into the water table," said Lim Young Sun, a North Korean defector who worked from 1980 to 1993 in a construction bureau assigned to build underground facilities.
In the countryside, small entryways can be seen dug into the sides of most hills, with slabs of concrete covering them. Above the Demilitarized Zone that bifurcates the Korean peninsula, the North Koreans have put an estimated 13,000 heavy artillery pieces into mountain bunkers. The doors face to the north — the artillery is mounted so that it can quickly slide in and out on rails — so that South Korean and U.S. troops stationed south of the DMZ cannot reach them with return fire.
The North Korean tunneling activity hasn’t stopped at the border: Over the years, four infiltration tunnels have been discovered in South Korean territory. Based on defector testimony, South Korean investigators believe there could be as many as 20 more still hidden beneath the earth.
Because so much happens below the surface of the earth, the North Koreans are able to conceal their military infrastructure from the prying eyes of surveillance satellites and aerial reconnaissance. But people and vehicles going in and out of the tunnels can be surveyed, as can utility lines. When a new facility is built, it is possible to estimate the size through the tailings, or debris that is excavated in the process. But exactly what happens inside remains shrouded in mystery.
For example, confusion reigns over the question of whether North Korea has, as it claims, extracted plutonium from 8,000 nuclear-reactor fuel rods and, if so, where the reprocessing has taken place — the critical step in producing the fissile material that is the heart of a nuclear bomb.
Until recently, it was assumed that the only possible location was at Yongbyon, a sprawling compound 55 miles north of Pyongyang that has a building six stories high and the length of two football fields designed expressly for plutonium extraction — or reprocessing. U.N. arms inspectors were expelled from the premises at the end of last year. And now it appears that this imposing building, clearly visible in satellite imagery, might be merely a decoy, while the actual reprocessing could have taken place at undiscovered locations underground.
Even more confusion exists over the North’s production of highly enriched uranium, also used in nuclear warheads. The process involves centrifuges, which are small and even easier to conceal than the technology used in processing plutonium. The North Koreans acknowledged in October 2002 that they had a secret uranium program, but U.S. and South Korean intelligence have been unable to determine where.
"Uranium does not give you the same punch for the pound as plutonium, but it has the advantage that it is almost impossible to detect and you can easily hide it underground," said one U.S. military intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
There is a short-list of suspected sites for the highly enriched uranium program — among them underground facilities in Yongjo-ri, about 12 miles from the Chinese border in Yanggang province, and in Jagang province, north of Pyongyang.
The North Koreans help maintain the extreme secrecy of the underground facilities by keeping their personnel virtually locked inside. This is particularly true for facilities that are used for weapons of mass destruction.
"Once you go in, you don’t go out," said K., the North Korean who worked at the Musan county facility until, though a combination of bribery, guile and family connections, he escaped in 1996. "I volunteered for this, but then I came to realize that it was like a big prison and we were slaves."
K. was assigned to work for the 2nd Economic Committee of the National Defense Commission, which despite its innocuously bureaucratic name is the organization believed responsible for making weapons of mass destruction.
At the time he was sworn in, he took an oath promising to work there until he was 60. During nine years, he left only once — bribing somebody so that he could visit his family at their home. Others could see their relatives only at a reception area outside the facility where visits were heavily supervised by authorities.
Had he remained, K. said, he would have been expected to find a wife from among the women assigned to his unit and to raise a family within the compound, which had schools, canteens and other facilities to keep employees relatively content for life. Most of the facilities for staff are within the compound but above ground, and they are visible.
K.’s account is corroborated by testimony of other defectors, who speak of secretive military facilities where the staff are virtually prisoners.
"In these places, people have a lot of privileges. There is no problem with food and there are good schools, but they are like concentration camps, too. You live in secrecy under constant suspicion," defector Lim said.
The North Koreans’ talent for concealment complicates efforts to forge a diplomatic solution to the current nuclear crisis. President Bush announced Oct. 19 at a meeting of Asian leaders in Bangkok, Thailand, that he would consider giving North Korea a written guarantee that the United States won’t attack if Pyongyang verifiably and irreversibly dismantled its nuclear program. But how is complete verification possible when so much is hidden underground? "Unless you are prepared to invade and occupy the whole country, you might never be able to find what you’re looking for," said Pinkston of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies.
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