Seoul, South Korea ? Tales about life on the run from repressive North Korea — women who end up at the mercy of human traffickers, children who grow up in hiding — drew the team of American reporters to the Chinese-North Korean border.

“Spent the day interviewing young N. Koreans who escaped their country. Too many sad stories,” journalist Laura Ling wrote on her Twitter page.

But their quest to document the plight of North Korean refugees may have put them in danger. Ling and fellow reporter Euna Lee were missing Friday, three days after they reportedly were seized by North Korean soldiers along the border.

A third member of the crew, cameraman Mitch Koss, and a guide eluded capture but were being held in China, the Chosun Ilbo newspaper reported Friday. Their whereabouts were unclear.

Diplomatic officials from China, the U.S., South Korea and at North Korea’s U.N. Mission have been tightlipped about the reported detentions and on any negotiations under way for the release of the women, reporters for the California-based online news outlet Current TV.

“When you have two American citizens who are being held against their will, we want to find out all the facts and gain their release,” State Department spokesman Robert A. Wood said Thursday in Washington.

A State Department official said Friday that U.S. officials were in contact with North Korea through its mission to the United Nations. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks were at a sensitive point.

In Seoul, U.S. Ambassador Kathleen Stephens said U.S. officials were “still trying to get a sense of exactly what the situation is, what has happened.”

The incident comes at a sensitive time on the Korean peninsula, with North Korea declaring its intention to fire a satellite-equipped rocket into space in early April, a launch some fear will be a cover for the test-fire of a long-range missile.

The North also is locked in a standoff with regional powers over its nuclear program, and this week ordered out five U.S. groups that distribute much-needed food aid in a country where the World Food Program says millions are going hungry.

The Rev. Chun Ki-won of the Seoul-based Durihana Mission, a Christian group that aids defectors, said Ling and Lee contacted him three months ago asking for help organizing a trip to China to report on North Korean refugees.

“I exchanged e-mails with the journalists for about three months to coordinate their itineraries, to discuss the news and to give them advice,” he said by telephone Friday from the United States.

Chun said he also warned them about the dangers of reporting in the border area.

“I told them to consult with me first if they head toward the border,” he said, adding the border region can be “dangerous and difficult for foreigners.”

Their first stop: Seoul. “On plane headed to S Korea,” Ling, 32, wrote on her Twitter page on March 10.

Chun said they met at his Seoul office the next day, and he helped arrange for them to meet with defectors in South Korea and China.

The Current TV team then hit the road again. “At Seoul airport grubbing on bibimbap & kimchee. Heading to the China/NKorea border. Hoping my kimchee breath will ward off all danger,” Ling wrote. The date: Friday the 13th.

Chun said the journalists headed to the Chinese city of Yanji, across the border from North Korea’s far northeastern corner, where they planned to interview women forced by human traffickers to strip for online customers.

They also planned to meet with children of defectors, Chun said. Many children who grow up on the run in China live in legal limbo, unable even to attend school, according to a 2008 Human Rights Watch report. His group, Durihana Mission, works to help them get asylum.

“Missing home,” Ling wrote on Twitter on Monday.

Chun said he spoke to the women by phone early the next morning. They said they were heading to the Chinese border town of Dandong, some 500 miles from Yangji, and then on to the city of Shenyang.

That was the last he heard from them.

The North Korean-Chinese border is long, porous and not very well demarcated. The two countries are divided by the Tumen River in North Korea’s northeast and by the Yalu to the southwest.

Ling’s older sister, Lisa Ling, a former co-host of the American TV talk show “The View” and now a correspondent for National Geographic Channel’s “Explorer,” has declined to comment.

But her Web site, lisaling.com, on Friday featured her account of a 2005 trip to North Korea, a country she described as “the most isolated country on the planet about which very little is known” but the one “I wanted to visit most.”