South Korea's Invasion-Tunnel Hunters have cast aside their solvency and their families in a fruitless 10-year search for secret passageways they believe North Korea has burrowed into the South

South Korea's Invasion-Tunnel Hunters have cast aside their solvency and their families in a fruitless 10-year search for secret passageways they believe North Korea has burrowed into the South. 

Divining North Korea's Intent
Takes a Good Dose of Dowsing
By JOHN LARKIN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

SUWON, South Korea -- Holding a pair of short steel rods before him, Choi
Min Young paced around a hole he had bored deep into the earth. Some 60
miles north looms the armed border that divides South Korea from the
Communist North.

Suddenly, the rods twitched in his grip. "Right now there are 30 North
Koreans right beneath us," Mr. Choi said in a hushed voice. Northern
"soldiers are patrolling over to the right."

Mr. Choi uses a scientifically unproven technique called dowsing, or
divining, to seek underground objects. The usual dowser searches for water.
In South Korea, Mr. Choi is part of a small band that chases spies. The
six-man group calls itself the Invasion-Tunnel Hunters. They have been
digging for 10 years in search of passageways they believe North Korea has
burrowed into the South, as invasion routes or to infiltrate spies.

The North has been caught tunneling before but not since 1990. Financing
expensive digs out of their own pockets, some of the unofficial snoops, who
include former members of the South's defense establishment, have flirted
with bankruptcy and have become estranged from their families. They have
alienated South Korean and U.S. authorities with their funky detection
methods -- and with claims that the allies ignore evidence of spy tunnels.

Lt. Col. Mike Caldwell, a U.S. military spokesman in South Korea, denies
those claims and notes that the U.S. uses modern seismic and sonar detectors
to seek infiltrators. The tunnel hunters' information, he adds, "has not led
to any additional tunnel discoveries."

The sleuths may be overzealous, but the North is certainly capable of weird
and chilling acts. It recently confessed to the abduction of at least 13
Japanese citizens and told Washington it was enriching uranium for nuclear
weapons, in violation of a 1994 pledge not to. Four Northern tunnels into
the South have been found, the first in 1974. The U.S., which has 37,000
American troops stationed in the South, estimates there may be as many as 22
undiscovered tunnels. 

The tunnel hunters illustrate the fine line between vigilance and paranoia
in this dangerous part of the world. Repeated provocations by Pyongyang have
derailed South Korean President Kim Dae Jung's "sunshine policy" of engaging
the North. "They can come up from these tunnels and capture us all any
minute," thunders Yoon Yo Kil, a former top South Korean missile scientist
and a leader of the group. "North Korea will never change." 

For Mr. Yoon, 61 years old, the quest is personal. His father was executed
by North Koreans during the Korean War. After earning a doctorate in
chemical engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Mr.
Yoon returned home to become a pioneer designer of so-called bunker-busting
missiles for South Korea's Agency for Defense Development.

In 1992, he began tunnel hunting after he met Jung Ji Yong. Mr. Jung had
quit his job as a counter-espionage officer at the defense ministry to hunt
for tunnels full time. Mr. Jung says he has done about 60 attempted tunnel
excavations and claims he has broken through to at least two near the
demilitarized zone between the two Koreas. (South Korean authorities deny
that such discoveries have been made and describe most of his cavities as
natural formations.)

TELL ME A STORY

Like many of his comrades, Mr. Jung has paid dearly for his quest. He is
reed-thin, his faced creased by stress lines. He is broke, having sold his
house and spent his $24,000 retirement nest egg on drilling expenses. He is
separated from his wife, and his son refuses all contact with him. He
bounces around from cheap hotels to the living rooms of close friends. "But
most of the time my home is wherever we are digging for a tunnel," he says.
"My wife has given up on me. She blames me for thinking tunnels are more
important than family."

The group seeks its targets through its dowser, Mr. Choi. Over the past year
he has traced what he says is a North Korean tunnel 19 miles from the West
Coast to Suwon, a gritty industrial city only 17 miles from the U.S. Osan
air force base.

Dowsers try to act as a human conductor of energy that substances
purportedly throw off. Mr. Choi says he channels vibrations from underground
objects through two thin steel rods, bent 90 degrees at their ends to form
little handles. He holds the rods out in front of him, one in each hand,
parallel to the ground. Mr. Choi insists he can determine the nature, size
and location of objects even if they're 100 yards below ground.

Dowsing is also sometimes used in Korea to find auspiciously located burial
grounds that are free from groundwater. "It's popular among ordinary
Koreans, but it's not scientifically proven at all," says Lim Mu Taek, a
geophysicist at the Korea Institute of Geosciences and Mineral Resources in
Daejon south of Seoul.

Mr. Choi says he honed his craft in Iraq from 1984 to 1986, when he worked
with a Korean construction firm finding cables and pipelines. At the time,
the Koreans were building a highway from Baghdad to the northern city of
Mosul for Saddam Hussein, who slapped $100,000 fines on anyone who cut
underground phone lines crucial to his war against Iran. Mr. Choi says his
record was unblemished: "So I know dowsing works."

The tunnel hunters vie with dozens of other would-be spy-catchers who
occasionally dig near the DMZ. At Suwon, the group has scooped out a
20-yard-deep hole the size of a small house, 200 yards from a South Korean
army base. Short of cash, they couldn't rent a drill rig during a visit to
the site recently and thus were unable to break into a cavity they are
seeking. But they are confident one is there, despite the seeming
improbability that North Korea could drill all the way here, more than 60
miles from the border.

Their evidence is in an on-site hut. A trio of ex-members of the South
Korean establishment -- former missile scientist Mr. Yoon, retired
intelligence agent Kim Chul Hee, and ex-counterespionage investigator Mr.
Jung -- listened in silence to a tape recording made using a microphone
dropped through a tiny hole into the cavity.

Rhythmic tapping sounds, not unlike hammer on rock, are followed by what
sound like muffled human voices and someone saying "yes, yes" in Korean.
Then the sound of sneezing, four times. Mr. Choi brandished fragments of
concrete extracted during a drilling into bedrock. "This is man-made," he
said. "What's it doing 20 yards underground?"

Mr. Jung, the tunnel hunter whose wife has left him, has another reason for
digging. He and his wife haven't legally divorced because divorce still
stigmatizes women in Korea's conservative Confucian culture. So Mr. Jung
thinks he still has a chance to save his marriage.

"Finding a tunnel will give me face," he says. "I'll tell her, and then I'm
sure she'll come back to me."

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