Brokers here are busily selling what they call "planned escapes" from North Korea.
Given enough money, the brokers say, they can now get just about anyone out of the dictatorial Stalinist state that human rights activists call the world's largest prison.
A low-budget escape through China via Thailand to Seoul, which requires treacherous river crossings, arduous travel on foot and several miserable weeks in a Thai immigration jail, can cost less than $2,000, according to four brokers here.
A first-class defection, complete with a forged Chinese passport and an airplane ticket from Beijing to Seoul, goes for more than $10,000. From start to finish, it can take as little as three weeks.
North Korea's underground railroad to the South is busier than ever because the number of border guards and low-level security officials in the North who are eager to take bribes has increased exponentially.
With the disintegration of North Korea's communist economy and the near-collapse of its state-run food distribution system, the country's non-elite population is in dire need of cash for food and other essentials, experts agree.
"More than ever, money talks," said Chun Ki-won, a Christian pastor and aid worker in Seoul who says that in the past eight years he has helped 650 people elude Chinese authorities and settle in Seoul.
New breed of defection broker
Religious groups once dominated the defection trade in North Korea, but in recent years defectors themselves, many of them former military and security officers, have begun to take over, several brokers and religious leaders said.
This new breed of broker, based in Seoul, uses personal and institutional contacts to hire North Korean guides and to bribe officials. The guides make clandestine contact with defectors, then escort them to the Chinese border, which in most places is a river that they swim in summer and walk across in winter after it freezes. On the other side, Chinese-speaking guides take over.
"I didn't know it could happen so fast," said a 37-year-old North Korean defector who paid $12,000 to a broker in Seoul in 2002 to get her 11-year-old son out. The woman did not want her name published because this month she and her siblings are paying another broker to smuggle out their mother.
"It only took five days for my son to be plucked out and taken across the river into China," she said, adding that two weeks later he was in South Korea. "I was dumbfounded when I got a call from officials at Seoul airport and my son was here."
For years, North-to-South defections amounted to just a trickle. Most of those coming out were men in their 30s and 40s who held positions that made fleeing relatively easy, such as diplomatic work abroad or border duty with the military. Generally, they escaped without help.
Just 41 defectors sought asylum in South Korea in 1995, but nearly every year since then the number has risen, the flow enhanced by the networks of brokers and agents that sprang up. More than 2,000 North Koreans settled here last year, according to the government in Seoul.
As the number has increased, the typical sex and age of defectors have also changed. There are more women and more families, according to Chun Sung-ho, an official at South Korea's Ministry of Unification.
Those figures do not include the many more North Koreans who are hiding in China without connections to brokers who can bring them on to South Korea. The New York-based human rights group Amnesty International estimates their number at about 100,000, a substantial proportion of whom are women who have been sold into prostitution.
For all the functionaries who are newly willing to take money to look the other way, for all the recent diplomatic optimism that North Korea may be opening up, working on the underground railroad remains extremely risky.
"It is possible to get people out, but you cannot say it is easy," said Lee Jeong-yeon, a former North Korean military officer who defected in 1999. A lot of guides and brokers get caught, he said, adding: "The policy is for 100 percent execution of those caught helping people to defect. I personally saw several such executions."
Lee, whose identity was confirmed by the South Korean government, said he worked for three years along the Chinese-North Korean border, where he supervised agents who pretended to be brokers and guides in order to infiltrate and disrupt the smuggling trade.
"The successful brokers are experienced people who have good contacts in the military, and they bribe the guards," said Lee, who said he has used his contacts to smuggle 34 North Koreans across China and into Southeast Asia. "Guards are rotated often, and new people have to be bribed."
An abundance of risks
The risk is not confined to brokers and agents. Human Rights Watch reported this year that the North Korean government, reacting to the increasing number of defections, has stiffened penalties for citizens it catches trying to flee. Under North Korean law, attempting to leave the country illegally is still classified as treason.
Until 2004, the government imposed relatively light punishment on non-elite citizens attempting to get out, releasing them after questioning or at most sentencing them to a few months in labor camps, Human Rights Watch said.
But since then, North Korea has imposed sentences of up to five years in prison. "Anyone imprisoned in North Korea is liable to face abusive conditions including beatings, forced labor and starvation far worse than among the population at large," Human Rights Watch said.
In recent months, North Korea has beefed up electronic surveillance along the border, strung more barbed wire and erected barriers. Last year, China also increased border security.
Once in China, defectors still face danger, particularly on the low-budget route. Those trying to reach haven in South Korean diplomatic facilities in China are on their own for the last few yards, scrambling to run past Chinese policemen and climb walls. Not all of them make it.
Chun Ki-won, the Seoul-based pastor who helps defectors, said that the Chinese government has cracked down on North Koreans as it prepares to host the Olympic Games in Beijing next summer. "It is getting worse," said Chun, who runs orphanages in China for children abandoned by defectors. "There are an increased number of arrests."
China is not supposed to return people to a country where their lives are at risk. But it routinely repatriates North Koreans it has detained, human rights groups say.
When defectors do succeed in reaching South Korea, they are often debilitated by guilt over the kin they left behind. And such guilt is not unjustified, because the North Korean government often sends relatives of defectors to forced labor camps.
That occurs as a matter of policy when defectors are government or military officials with inside information about the workings of Kim Jong Il's dictatorship.
Defectors from Pyongyang, the capital, can also expect their families to be ordered to labor camps, according to Lee, the former North Korean army officer, who said his relatives were all dead when he defected.
Punishment may also be inflicted on the families of ordinary people who manage to leave. "I just go crazy to think that because of me my parents and my sister may be in a labor camp now," said a 40-year-old woman who two years ago fled her North Korean coastal town in a fishing boat, along with her husband and teenage son. She and her husband had run a small business trading fish for food and consumer goods.
She has since heard that her mother, father and sister were forced from their homes by the authorities and relocated to a farming area in the interior.
"We have hired brokers to try to find them, but the guide sent to find them has been arrested," said the woman, who lives in a Seoul suburb and did not want her name published for fear that her family would be further punished.
"You cannot know how heartbreaking it is to leave your family in this way."
Fees and incentives
Seoul-based brokers say they often accept payment on an installment plan -- with little or no money upfront. Once an installment-plan defector gets to Seoul and has access to some of the $43,700 that South Korea doles out to each new asylum seeker, brokers typically demand far more than their basic fee.
"My boss is willing to put up all the money to pay the bribes to get someone out," said a Seoul-based broker who was formerly a North Korean military officer. "But when you get to Seoul, you have to pay double for this service."
This broker, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he has a child and other relatives back in North Korea, said his company usually charges less than $2,000 for bringing a defector to Seoul via China and Thailand. That automatically jumps to $4,000 for those who cannot offer cash upfront.
To help defectors remain solvent as they adjust to life in the booming capitalist South, the Seoul government now pays out money over time rather than in a lump sum, according to Chun Sung-ho, the Unification Ministry official. It also offers incentives for finding and holding jobs.
About a quarter of the money goes directly for housing, eliminating any chance that it could be paid to a broker.
Guilt and longing
Even after they pay off brokers for their own passage to Seoul, North Koreans who settle in the South often end up spending many thousands of dollars more to try to bring out loved ones left behind.
Lee Moon-jae, 81, fled North Korea more than five decades ago. He soon remarried in the South and raised two sons. But he continues to wrestle with the guilt and longing he feels for the wife and two sons he abandoned.
Two years ago, he said, he paid $4,800 to a broker to bring him face to face with one of his lost sons, who is now 58. They met for three days and two nights in a hotel on the Chinese side of the border.
At the end, Lee said, his son declined to defect -- and returned home to his wife and children. Before his son left, Lee said, he gave him $1,700 in cash, a digital camera and some clothes -- but Lee later learned that his son lost it all while swimming across the Tumen River that separates China from North Korea.
So Lee has raised $3,250 for brokers who promised him they will again contact his family. This month, he said, they hired agents who are already out searching. He has asked them to set up another border meeting or, if possible, smuggle out his entire family, including his aging North Korean wife.
They all live in the interior of the country, and Lee says that moving them to the border is complicated and perhaps foolhardy.
He says he is not sure he should be trying to do this, but he is desperate to see them again. Talking about it brings tears to his rheumy eyes.
"I do not have much time before I die," he said. "What should I do?"
Special correspondent Stella Kim contributed to this report.