SEOUL, South Korea — There is a precedent for inspecting North Korea’s underground facilities that could be taken as a cautionary tale. In 1999, the United States demanded access to an excavation site called Kumchang-ri that was so large it could accommodate an underground reactor and reprocessing plant. North Korea demanded $300 million in return — which it received in the form of 600,000 tons of food aid supplied by the United States and South Korea.
The team that conducted the inspection May found the facility surrounded by thousands of North Korean soldiers, some of them doing kung-fu exercises, others manning machine-gun nests at the entrance to the tunnel, according to Joel Wit, who headed the inspection team for the State Department.
"It was a little bit surreal," Wit said. "It looked like the set of a World War II movie."
What the inspectors did not find, however, was any evidence of nuclear weapons production despite a thorough scouring of the premises and sophisticated air and soil sampling. They left joking bitterly that the underground complex might be used instead as a mushroom farm or a vast wine cellar for the private stock of North Korean leadership.
"We provided that food aid for nothing," said a South Korean security official. "We were all duped by the North Koreans."
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