Inside North Korea
Dan Snow's History Hit
History Hit
4.7 • 13.7K Ratings
🗓️ 8 December 2021
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
With closed borders, a totalitarian regime, electricity blackouts and widespread poverty, North Korea is a brutal place to survive; even looking at a foreign media outlet can get a North Korean citizen sent to a concentration camp. So why, in 2011 did leader Kim Jong Il allow Jean Lee, a celebrated American journalist to set up a news bureau in Pyongyang?
In today's episode, Jean is Dan's guide to North Korea. She tells him about her extraordinary experiences living and working in North Korea as the AP bureau chief. She delves into the history of the Korean peninsula, the Korean War and what made North Korea the country it is today- including the mythology of the Kim dynasty and the famine of the 1990s.
She also talks about her hit podcast on the BBC World Service - The Lazarus Heist- that tells the dramatic story of an elite group of North Korean cyber hackers who not only infiltrated Sony pictures in 2014 but also attempted a one-billion-dollar heist at the Bangladesh bank two years later.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, |
| 0:00.6 | folks, Dan Snow here. |
| 0:01.6 | I am throwing a party to celebrate 10 years of Dan Snow's history hit. |
| 0:06.1 | I'd love for you to be there. |
| 0:07.5 | Join me for a very special live recording of the podcast in London, |
| 0:10.4 | in England on the 12th of September to celebrate the 10 years. |
| 0:14.1 | You can find out more about it and get tickets with the link in the show notes. |
| 0:17.6 | Look forward to seeing you there. |
| 0:29.8 | Hi there, everyone. Welcome to Dan Snow's history. You know in the galaxy of existential threats to the international order at the moment, we've slightly forgotten about North Korea. |
| 0:33.7 | It's like slipped down the list, a few places. Plenty of competition out there. Don't be too hard |
| 0:37.9 | in yourselves. But, you know, we're not quite as focused on North Korea's ballistic missile |
| 0:41.5 | program, you know, intercontinental rockets, which have nuclear tips and can destroy the lives |
| 0:47.5 | of tens of millions of people. So I thought, you know, let's drag our gaze back onto that little |
| 0:53.0 | fly in the ointment. And for that, I've got the greatest. I've got Gene Lee. She's a scholar for the Wilson Centre. She's one of the hosts of the BBC World Service hit podcast. This was a hit podcast. It was good. The Lazarus Heist. The Lazarus Group. The North Korean Hacking Ring, who attempted a billion dollar heist from Bangladesh |
| 1:12.2 | Bank in February 2016. It's an amazing story. We talk about that on this podcast as well. |
| 1:17.3 | So she was actually reporting in North Korea in 2008, and she'll tell you why. There was a sort |
| 1:21.2 | of brief, hopeful thaw in U.S. North Korean relations, when she was able to go to North Korea |
| 1:26.8 | and actually live there and spend three years on the ground there, 2011, 2012, 2013. And she was the first American |
| 1:32.8 | journalist allowed to join very small foreign press corps in Pyongyang. She actually |
| 1:37.9 | opened the AP Bureau there in January 2012. As you'll hear, her family of Koreans, her personal history, her professional |
| 1:46.1 | history is very much tied up with the terrible upheavals of 20th century history in Korea. |
| 1:52.6 | It is such a fascinating story. We're going to talk about the Kim dynasty, these three |
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