A clandestine network that helps North Koreans escape through China has gone deeper underground because of fears over what authorities in both countries have learned from the capture of two U.S. journalists who were released by Pyongyang last month, a missionary said recently.
When they were arrested in March, Laura Ling and Euna Lee were reporting on an underground railroad that has helped thousands of people escape from North Korea.
“Their arrest reverberated through the aid network,” said Tim Peters, a missionary in Seoul who oversees aid work in northeast China. “It has made an already difficult situation 10 times more difficult. We now have to be more prudent in every phase of our operation.”
Much remains unclear about precisely what evidence North Korean and Chinese authorities might have gotten their hands on after the journalists were detained by North Korean border guards.
At the time of their arrest, Ling and Lee were working for Internet-based Current TV. Their American cameraman, Mitch Koss, escaped into China.
In mid-August, a South Korean pastor working with North Korean orphans in China told a Seoul newspaper that Chinese authorities had shut down five safe houses he operates. The TV team visited and filmed one of the secret sites just days before they were captured by the North Koreans.
The Rev. Lee Chan-woo quoted Chinese interrogators as saying that they had confiscated videos from Koss.
He said he had asked the cameraman not to identify the children.
“I allowed them to report on the condition that they would not film the children’s faces,” Lee told the newspaper.
Lee said Chinese police confiscated his computer, camera and some documents. He said the children were dispersed to families in China.
In an e-mail, Koss declined to comment.
In the past, Lisa Ling, sister of Laura Ling, has said that her sister would never knowingly identify people she had interviewed.
The so-called underground refugee railroad is a loosely organized network of independent operators who seek to help defectors either for profit or out of humanitarian interests.
Brokers can charge between $2,000 and $10,000 for the forged paperwork and contacts necessary to spirit people out of North Korea through China, from where they often move to other Asian nations, including South Korea.
In recent years, China has cracked down on the network, imprisoning those caught assisting North Korean defectors.
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jglionna@tribune.com
