Inside North Korea
Dan Snow's History Hit
History Hit
4.7 • 12.9K Ratings
🗓️ 8 December 2021
⏱️ 42 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 | Hi there and welcome to Dan's nose history. You know any galaxy of existential threats |
| 0:06.1 | to the international order at the moment we've slightly forgotten about North Korea since |
| 0:09.7 | like slip down the list of you places. Plenty of competition out there, don't be too |
| 0:13.4 | hard on yourselves but you know we're not quite as focused on North Korea's ballistic missile |
| 0:17.3 | program you know intercontinental rockets which have nuclear tips and can destroy the |
| 0:22.9 | lives of tens of millions of people. So I thought you know let's drag our gaze back onto |
| 0:28.3 | that little fly in the ointment and for that I've got the greatest. I've got Jean Lee. She's |
| 0:33.6 | a scholar for the Wilson Center. She's one of the hosts of the BBC World Service Hit Podcast. |
| 0:38.9 | This was a hit podcast, it was good. The Lazarus Heist, about the Lazarus Group, the North |
| 0:43.6 | Korean hacking ring who attempted a billion dollar Heist from Bangladesh Bank in February 2016. |
| 0:50.3 | It's an amazing story we talk about that on this podcast as well. So she was actually reporting |
| 0:54.1 | in North Korean 2008. She'll tell you why it was a sort of brief hopeful thought in US North |
| 1:00.8 | Korean relations. She was able to go to North Korea and actually live there and spend three years |
| 1:04.0 | on the ground there. 2011, 2012, 2013. And she was the first American journalist allowed to |
| 1:10.3 | join very small foreign press corps in Pyongyang. She actually opened the AP Bureau there in January 2012. |
| 1:18.0 | As you'll hear her family of Koreans, her personal history, her professional history is very |
| 1:22.4 | much tied up with the terrible upheavals of 20th century history in Korea. It is such a fascinating |
| 1:29.7 | story. We're going to talk about the Kim dynasty, these three father-to-son despots. We're going |
| 1:36.0 | to talk about how they descended from a mountain. The skies crack open, the vaults of heaven cracks open |
| 1:40.0 | when the Kims are born and how Kim Jong-un was driving a car at the age of three. |
| 1:45.8 | Jean is an amazing broadcast. It was a huge treat to have her on the podcast. If you want to go and |
| 1:50.4 | check out our Korean War Continental, some amazing interviews with Korean War veterans made some |
... |
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