Citizen Spies Lift North Korea's Veil

By Evan Ramstad 

 

SEOUL -- In the propaganda blitz that followed North Korea's missile launch last month, the country's state media released photos of leader Kim Jong Il visiting a hydroelectric dam and power station.

Images from the report showed two large pipes descending a hillside. That was enough to allow Curtis Melvin, a doctoral candidate at George Mason University in suburban Virginia, to pinpoint the installation on his online map of North Korea.

Mr. Melvin is at the center of a dozen or so citizen snoops who have spent the past two years filling in the blanks on the map of one of the world's most secretive countries. Seeking clues in photos, news reports and eyewitness accounts, they affix labels to North Korean structures and landscapes captured by Google Earth, an online service that stitches satellite pictures into a virtual globe. The result is an annotated North Korea of rocket-launch sites, prison camps and elite palaces on white-sand beaches.

 

"It's democratized intelligence," says Mr. Melvin.

 

More than 35,000 people have downloaded Mr. Melvin's file, North Korea Uncovered. It has grown to include thousands of tags in categories such as "nuclear issues" (alleged reactors, missile storage), dams (more than 1,200 countrywide) and restaurants (47). Its Wikipedia approach to spying shows how Soviet-style secrecy is facing a new challenge from the Internet's power to unite a disparate community of busybodies.

 

"Here is one of the most closed countries in the world and yet, through this effort on the Internet by a bunch of strangers, the country's visible secrets are being published," says Martyn Williams, a Tokyo-based technology journalist who recently sent Mr. Melvin the locations of about 30 North Korean lighthouses.

An economist who studies developing countries and has traveled from Turkmenistan to Zimbabwe, Mr. Melvin started his project in early 2007 to designate places he visited on two group tours to North Korea earlier this decade. He shared it on several North Korea-related Web sites.

 

People soon started sending him locations they knew, from tourist sites to airfields tucked into valleys near South Korea. Mr. Melvin says that sadness for North Koreans' plight, and the fascination of discovery, motivated him to continue.

Many updates later, Mr. Melvin and his correspondents have plotted out what they say is much of the country's transportation network and electrical grid, and many of its military bases. They've spotted what they believe are mass graves created in the 1995-98 famine that killed an estimated two million people. The vast complexes of Mr. Kim and other North Korean leaders are visible, with palatial homes, pools, even a water slide.

 

An official at North Korea's consulate in Hong Kong declined to grant an interview. Its embassy in London didn't respond to a faxed request for comment.

Mr. Melvin says he cross-checks what information he can and adjusts other facts with the help of collaborators. He says he has met only a few of the contributors. Some have identified themselves as former members of the U.S. military who once studied the country professionally. Some have been anonymous.

 

Joshua Stanton, an attorney in Washington who once served in the U.S. military in South Korea, used Google Earth to look for one of the country's notorious prisons. In early 2007, he read an international news report about a mass escape from Camp 16, which the report mentioned was near the site of a nuclear test conducted the year before.

 

No pictures of Camp 16 are believed to have been seen outside the country. But Mr. Stanton had pored over defector sketches of it and combed the map for familiar structures. "I realized I had already noticed the guard posts" on Google Earth the previous year for the nuclear test site, he says.

 

Mr. Stanton traced what he believed is Camp 16's boundary, enclosing nearly 300 square miles, and those of other large North Korean prisons and shared them with Mr. Melvin. The fences aren't easy to follow because they go over mountain ridges, he says. But satellite images often reveal gaps in the vegetation along the fence line, because trees are cleared on either side to prevent people from climbing over.

 

Last year, Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas used Mr. Stanton's maps in a floor presentation criticizing the North's human-rights record. "Google has made a witness of all of us," Mr. Brownback said. "We can no longer deny these things exist."

Mr. Williams, the technology journalist in Tokyo, first contacted Mr. Melvin two months ago after he ran across a notice that North Korea filed with international maritime authorities ahead of its April 5 missile launch. The filing gave coordinates where North Korea believed its missile or rocket stages would likely fall.

 

The pair figured they could mine other international filings for other interesting sites. Mr. Melvin found one that helped him pinpoint North Korea's aeronautical beacons. Mr. Williams turned up the lighthouse locations, which he sent to Mr. Melvin, along with links to a site with lighthouse images from North Korean postage stamps.

 

"If North Korea came out and published all this, no one would be interested," says Mr. Williams. "But when you're playing detective, it's a lot more fun."

The project has also attracted Andrei Lankov, a Seoul-based historian of North Korea who grew up in the Soviet Union and went to college in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. Last summer, Mr. Lankov wrote about how the evolution of public markets in North Korea has challenged Mr. Kim's authoritarian government. He sent Mr. Melvin the location of several markets, including one called Pyongsong near Pyongyang that the two men think is the biggest in the country.

 

The market is in a town about 10 miles outside the city, the closest that nonresidents can get to the capital. "At the same time, this is a place where the dwellers of Pyongyang can go anytime," Mr. Lankov says.

 

On the satellite images of North Korean towns, it's easy to see many people gathered around the markets and no one in the giant plazas that are tributes to Mr. Kim's government.

 

Mr. Melvin says the images also make clear the gulf between the lives of Mr. Kim and his impoverished people. "Once you start mapping the power plants and substations and wires, you can connect the infrastructure with the elite compounds," Mr. Melvin says. "And then you see towns that have no power supply at all."

Mr. Melvin says he spends hours at the computer tracing power lines, looking for telltale shadows of electric towers or posts. The work is often tedious.

 

Other times it's revelatory. The recent report of Mr. Kim at the hydroelectric station in Wonsan, for example, showed Mr. Kim looking at a painting of the complex. Mr. Melvin studied the painting, noticing it depicted a unique pattern of roads. He then spotted the roads on the satellite image, along with the giant pipes, and added the station to his map.

 

"We're relying on the North Koreans to keep publicizing" Mr. Kim's movements, Mr. Melvin says. "This leads to great discoveries."

 

Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124295017403345489.html

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