It is before dawn on Jan. 21, on a street outside Bangkok, and the daily chaos of noise and traffic is still hours away. Kim Myong Suk (an alias she uses to protect relatives still in North Korea) rounds a corner, walking to the church group with which she spends her days, the only sound that of stray dogs barking and tussling with each other. She is about to meet—for the first time—the men responsible for getting her to safety. One is Kim Sang Hun, a lay Christian from Seoul, who dedicates himself to helping North Koreans escape to freedom in the South. The other is Rev. Tim Peters, a soft-spoken evangelical Christian pastor from Benton Harbor, Michigan, who runs the Seoul-based charity Helping Hands Korea. Its aim, he says, is to assist "North Koreans in crisis." When she rounds the corner and sees the two men, she grasps Kim Sang Hun's hand and bows her head slightly, staring at the ground, momentarily speechless.

More than any other Westerner, Peters has become the public face of a network of activists, many motivated by their Christian faith, who try against formidable odds to bring North Koreans to Seoul. Peters and others in the network do not shrink from the comparison to the Underground Railroad of the U.S. Civil War era that brought African-American slaves from the South to freedom in the North. They embrace the comparison, convinced that their cause today is as just as the abolitionists' was then. "When we look back at this era, at what [the North Korean government] has done to its people, I'm convinced the civilized world will be shocked—and also shamed," Peters says softly. Shamed, he means, by its inaction, and by its lack of attention. "In the meantime," he says, "we do what we can."

Doing "what we can" is getting riskier by the day. Two governments—North Korea and China—actively seek to put the Seoul Train, as it has been called, out of business. For the past two years, the Chinese have conducted a concerted "strike hard" operation to round up and repatriate North Koreans who are in China illegally. Beijing is determined to maintain stability in the rustbelt northeast of China. The government seeks to break up the networks that help refugees and shut down the safe houses that shelter them—lest too much success draw more. North Korean security agents inside China assist that effort, seeking to bring refugees back home to certain prison terms. The result, says Peters, "is that the whole paradigm of our operations has been changed." Refugees now avoid cities in the northeast of China, hiding instead in forest caves they have dug out for themselves.

The activists running the railroad are often caught in such sweeps. TIME has learned that late last summer, Chinese authorities arrested an American who aids North Korean refugees inside China. He remains jailed in the northeastern city of Yanji, not far from the North Korean border. (The American in question is awaiting sentence and his family has asked TIME to withhold his name and details of his case.) Another South Korean activist involved in extricating Kim Myong Suk from China—who wishes in this article to be known only by his nom de guerre, "Hite"—spent a year and a half in a Chinese prison for helping North Koreans. Upon his release, says Peters, Hite "headed right back into the fight." His "faith," Hite now says, was only "reinforced while I was in prison. I knew I was on the right side."

Peters takes it for granted that North Korea and China will be hostile to his efforts. Far more galling to him is the attitude of the U.S. and South Korea. President Roh Moo Hyun's government in Seoul pursues, in Peters' words, a policy of "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" in its pursuit of engagement with the North. The Seoul government, Peters says, does not want to do anything to upset North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, lest it reduce the chances for peaceful reunification of the Korean peninsula. "Any systematic effort to bring North Koreans to freedom might turn what now amounts to a trickle of refugees into a destabilizing flood—and Roh wants no part of it, nor do most South Koreans," says a Western diplomat in Seoul.

Last year, the South Korean government slashed in half the cash portion of the subsidy it used to pay refugees who make it to the South from 6 million won ($6,320) to 3 million ($3,160). The defectors often used the money they were given to help finance efforts to get their relatives out—typically by paying middlemen who are in the people-smuggling business for profit, but sometimes donating to Christian groups such as Helping Hands. The reduction in funds, coupled with the Chinese crackdown, has had an impact. The number of refugees making it out of China to South Korea fell to 1,217 last year, according to the South Korean government, down from a record 1,894 in 2004.

But for the Christian activists who staff the Seoul Train, nothing has been more deflating than the actions—or, more precisely, inaction—of the Bush Administration. The activists viewed Bush as one of their own, a conservative Christian committed to human rights, unafraid to speak the truth about North Korea and its dictator. ("I loathe Kim Jong Il," the President famously said in 2002). Last year, Peters believes, Bush showed his true colors when he spent more time in the Oval Office with Kang Chol Hwan, the author of a shattering memoir of life in the North Korean gulag, than he had with Roh Moo Hyun. In October of 2004 Congress passed the North Korean Human Rights Act, and in the summer of 2005, Bush appointed Jay Lefkowitz, a former domestic-policy advisor in the White House, as a special envoy to deal specifically with North Korean human-rights issues. Though Bush called for $24 million a year to accept refugees from North Korea and broadcast news and information there, Congress has yet to appropriate any funding to carry out the policies. TIME has learned, however, that the Administration, under Lefkowitz's prodding, is studying whether the United States might be able to take in a small number of North Korean refugees each year—something which, if it happened, would no doubt anger North Korea. Bush also raised the plight of North Korean refugees directly with Chinese President Hu Jintao during their meeting in Washington last week, seeking, a White House official said, "a more transparent process" in how Beijing deals with those who come across its border. It is, says Peters, about time. "Who but [Secretary of State] Condi Rice, an African American, could better understand the absolute necessity of helping these refugees? The underground railroad is named after the network that helped the slaves, for heaven's sake."

Tim Peters came to be one of the founding members of the effort to aid North Koreans long after he first arrived in South Korea. He was a senior at Michigan State University when he dropped out in the wake, as he puts it, "of a highly transforming conversion to Christ." Within a few months, in 1975, he was in Seoul as a lay missionary, where he joined what has become Christianity's great success story in Asia. "Think of Korea's history," says Peters. "Conquest and occupation by other nations, poverty, civil war. It's fraught with suffering—suffering now experienced most acutely by North Koreans. This is the fertile soil in which the Gospel always thrives so greatly." Today, about 30% of South Korea's population identify themselves as Christians, and at night the neon crosses that sit atop countless churches in Seoul are visible as far as the eye can see.

When Peters arrived, South Korea was an authoritarian state under the leadership of Chun Doo Hwan. As part of his missionary work, Peters became involved in human-rights issues, and was soon thrown out of the country for handing out leaflets that criticized the Seoul government. He returned to live in Seoul in the late '80s, and then for a third time in 1996. South Korea was by then a democratic, prosperous nation, "and for a time I wondered why the Lord had brought me back to this place," says Peters. But North Korea was in the midst of a horrific famine. "One night it just dawned on me, I wasn't here this time for South Korea, I was here for the North, to try to do the Lord's work and help people there. It couldn't have been any clearer." Peters formed Helping Hands Korea in 1996, and within just two years, as refugees tried to escape the famine, the beginnings of the underground railroad took shape. "We were overwhelmed," he says now. That's when the organization's mission became more focused: helping North Koreans in crisis, people who really needed help getting to freedom." Kim Myong Suk was one of them.

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	Missing in Action [Jan. 31, 2005] Is Pyongyang still in the kidnapping game? Waking Up to the Nightmare [Dec. 06, 2004] At last, the world is taking notice of North Korea's brutal prison camps Opening the Gates [Nov. 01, 2004] A U.S. ruling paves the way for North Korean refugees A Whole New World [Aug. 02, 2004] For North Koreans who manage to escape to the South, life is modern, strange and full of challenges Seoul Searching: Mercy Dash [Mar. 15, 2002] Desperate for food and a future, 25 North Koreans storm the Spanish embassy in Beijing seeking asylum Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide [Jun. 18, 2001] North Korean refugees fleeing poverty and repression at home now face a fierce crackdown in China More Related Items | Search all issues of TIME Magazine