The military jeep sped up a dirt path through pastures and chicken farms and halted halfway up a rocky hill bursting with acorn trees and underbrush.
"Nobody comes here," said Maj. Kim Jun-han. "Who would be interested?"In front of his vehicle was The Enemies' Cemetery, the burial ground for North Korean spies. Their remains are unclaimed by the communist regime and forgotten and neglected by rival South Korea.
The cluster of graves in a grassless, weed-infested plot is a tucked-away monument to Cold War tragedies still gripping the divided Koreas.
North Korea, which snubs South Korea, refuses to accept the remains of its own spies and fallen soldiers. South Korea, nervous about even a dead North Korean presence, keeps watch over the graves to see whether any mourners will betray their loyalties.
But at the cemetery itself, there is little sign of the tensions. During a recent visit, the only companions of the dead were a couple of magpies chattering among the thistles and ferns and softly swaying yellow flowers.
Most grave mounds have sunk and disappeared from view. The graves - 78 in all - are arranged in staggered formation to avoid rocks and tree stumps.
There are no marble headstones. Only white wood stakes mark the graves. Over the years, the stakes have deteriorated, split and sometimes completely vanished. Some are tipped on their sides.
"The graveyard is beautiful with azaleas in spring. But it gives me the creeps even in daytime," said Ko Chang-woon, 40, who lives in the village down the hill.
The markers tell little about the people lying beneath them. Many have no names, only burial dates. Some read simply: "Armed North Korean Infiltrator."
Several are slightly more informative, bearing testament to Cold War tensions:
"Affiliation: 124th Unit.
"Rank: Captain.
"Name: Kim Si Eung.
"Age: 28. Killed in the Jan. 21, 1968, incident."
In that incident, Kim and 30 other North Korean commandos penetrated the heavily guarded border and came within a striking distance of the presidential palace in Seoul before they were repelled. All but one were killed.
Somewhere near Kim, among several unmarked graves, lies the body of a North Korean spy who planted a bomb on a Korean Air jetliner that exploded over Burma with 115 people aboard in 1987. The man swallowed poison before he was caught. An accomplice later confessed to the bombing.
The latest arrival was Choe Hong Sok, a North Korean infiltrator killed by South Korean border guards last October as he came ashore after swimming across the border buffer zone.
When South Korea kills North Korean soldiers during border clashes or digs up remains of Korean War dead, it tries to repatriate them through the U.N. Armistice Commission. North Korea has invariably refused to accept the remains.
Pyongyang is happy to negotiate with Washington - it got $2 million for the remains of 208 American soldiers it has turned over since 1993. It also has agreed to cooperate in a joint effort to recover some 8,000 U.S. soldiers still unaccounted for from the 1950-53 war.