Thousands of North Korean tunnels hide arms secrets

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Saturday, November 15, 2003 - Page updated at 12:00 AM

Thousands of North Korean tunnels hide arms secrets

By Barbara Demick

Los Angeles Times

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 labor 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. ph Bermudez, the author of three books on the North Korean

military, puts the total number at between 11,000 and 14,000.

Deters pre-emptive action

North Korea's relentless tunneling has had a profound impact on the U.S. policy

debate over how to handle North Korea's current drive to build nuclear weapons.

It makes the option of pre-emptive military action far less viable because so

much of the nuclear program is out of reach.

Even if the Pentagon were to develop nuclear " bunker-busters, " small devices

that could penetrate the surface before exploding, the United States would be

hard-pressed to use them in North Korea without knowing which of the thousands

of bunkers scattered throughout the country were the ones they needed to target.

" 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, a North Korea

military analyst for the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, Calif.

The North Koreans began tunneling after the 1950-53 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 for Kim's goal.

" 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.

Lim said the North Koreans used mostly Japanese tunneling techniques, although

more-modern tunneling equipment was later imported from Europe.

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

splits the Korean peninsula, the North Koreans have put an estimated 13,000

heavy-artillery pieces into mountain bunkers. The artillery is mounted so that

it can quickly slide in and out on rails, and the doors face to the north so

that South Korean and U.S. troops stationed south of the DMZ could not reach

them with return fire.

North Korean tunneling 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. In Pyongyang, the capital, even the subway system doubles as a bomb

shelter. Some stations in the capital are believed to be as far as 100 yards

underground, with secret tunnels designed for the exclusive purpose of

transporting the leadership in an emergency. Predictably, official maps of

Pyongyang do not show the location of subway stations, and with the exception of

two showcase stations, the system is off-limits to foreigners.

Pyongyang's international airport is believed to have a runway that is largely

underground so that an airplane would not be exposed to hostile fire until the

moment its wheels left the ground.

While the tunnels conceal North Korea's military infrastructure from

surveillance satellites and aerial reconnaissance, people and vehicles going in

and out of the sites can be surveyed, as can utility lines.

When a new facility is built, it is possible to estimate its size through the

" tailings, " the debris that is excavated in the process. But exactly what

happens inside remains shrouded in mystery.

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.

'Like a big prison'

" Once you go in, you don't go out, " said K, the North Korean who worked at the

Musan facility until, through 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. "

When 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 he could visit his

family at their home. Others could see 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.

So extreme was the secrecy that even inside, workers had little idea what was

being produced.

" Some people said it was for chemical weapons. But everything was wrapped

tightly with zinc so that we never really knew what was inside, " K said. " We

weren't supposed to ask questions. "

K's account is corroborated by testimony of other defectors, who speak of

secretive military facilities where workers are virtually prisoners.

" In these places, people have a lot of privileges, " defector Lim said. " 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. "

Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company