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Crime Story Episode 36: Jean Lee

Host: Kathleen Goldhar

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: The following episode contains difficult subject matter. Please take care while listening.

SOUNDCLIP

[movie clip]

FIRST SPEAKER: You want us to assassinate the leader of North Korea?

SECOND SPEAKER: Yes.

FIRST SPEAKER: Whaaaa! If we kill him, won't they just get another chubby dude with a goofy hairdo to come in and replace him and then the same thing happens?

THIRD SPEAKER: Exactly. Exactly.

FOURTH SPEAKER: Actually, we're aware of a small faction in the existing leadership that already wants him gone.

SECOND SPEAKER: And they need you two to go in there, remove Kim, embolden them to revolt and take over.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: If you don't recognize that movie, it could be because it went straight to rental and maybe only crazy North Korean files like me noticed it. But a little over 10 years ago, Seth Rogen approached a friend with a half-baked idea. He said, what if you were a journalist and you got a chance to interview Osama bin laden, would you kill him during the interview? And then back and forth they went. And eventually, Seth’s friend put out another idea. What if it was Kim Jong Un, the leader of North Korea? That decision, which ended up as a movie called The Interview, would actually end up being a lot less funny than they thought and pretty catastrophic, because despite the fact that North Korea is a poor, isolated country, it is also home to one of the most dangerous criminal enterprises on the planet, and it's called the Lazarus Group.

SOUNDCLIP

FIRST REPORTER: Internal emails reportedly hacked and leaked claimed to show a top producer criticizing Angelina Jolie's talent and ego.

SECOND REPORTER: Badmouthing A-list actors like Tom cruise, who they say can be difficult and demanding.

THIRD REPORTER: Exposing everything from celebrity aliases to employees’ social security number.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: If anybody understands this country and its many, many contradictions, it's Jean Lee. Jean Lee was the first American to open a newsroom in Pyongyang. And in her podcast, The Lazarus Heist, she tells the true story of North Korea's elite hackers. I'm Kathleen Goldhar, and this is Crime Story.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Let's start with North Korea's response to the movie The Interview. Tell us how they reacted when they heard what it was about.

JEAN LEE: Well, I can tell you how I reacted when I heard they were making the movie. I was in Pyongyang at the time, and I talked a little in the podcast about how worried I was when I heard that Seth Rogen and James Franco were making a movie about North Korea that focussed on the leader of North Korea. I at the time, of course, all I heard was that it was a movie about journalists going to North Korea working for the CIA. And as a journalist working in North Korea, not for the CIA, I was really worried about what this would mean for my own safety. So in what other world, with what other country would you actually name a sitting leader or use that as your main character? You would usually come up with a fake name of a leader, a fake name of a country that sounds a lot like a country in real life, right? We see that with movies all the time. But in this case, I think that what that revealed in using North Korea and using Kim Jong Un's name was that Hollywood didn't really see it as a real country. So that's how far removed North Korea seems to us. And I think one of the worries that I had as well was I don't know that people understand how offensive this movie would have been to the North Koreans and how important it would have been for them to seek revenge.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Because the leadership, the Kims of North Korea are more than political leaders. Can you tell us about who the Kims are to that country? And then I'm going to ask you about sort of the legalities of, I mean, nobody in North Korea would make fun of the leaders, but the legalities of honouring those leaders.

JEAN LEE: Yeah. So the first leader of North Korea, Kim Il Sung, he kind of understood what it would take to convince his people to believe in him or to follow him. And by that, he really did replicate what we think of as a monarchy. He treated his family like they were semi gods, demigods.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I was going to say it's almost more than a monarchy, right? Because there is sort of all this mysticism around his birth and about his place. And like it feels like there is like sort of a, like you said, a demigod.

JEAN LEE: Yeah. It's interesting to see that Kim Jong Un has shaken that up just a little bit. He does want his people to see him as being more human, but he also wants to maintain that Kim family hold on power. So what it means when, you know, it's similar to a god. There are certainly some countries and some religions where it would be considered sacrilegious to deface or defame their God. And in the same way, in North Korea, to deface or defame the Kim family in any way is serious business. There is no freedom of speech in North Korea. And to do anything against the Kim family, you could be prosecuted for an anti-state crime. So there's a real correlation between going against the Kims as going against the state. And that's partly because the Kims did set up a country that is so inextricably linked to their leadership. And that's what Kim Jong Un, he's the third generation, that's what he's trying to do as well, is to tell his people that our country will not exist if I am not in power or if a member of my family is not in power.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And they're everywhere, right? I mean, there's the big statues which we all know, but there's no home or business where the pictures of the Kims are not present. And it's law, right?

JEAN LEE: So I had to have the portraits in my office as well. So I had an AP office in Pyongyang, and we had the portraits up. And my staff had a little red cloth in a special little box, and it was their job to make sure it was clean, wipe all the dust off.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Really.

JEAN LEE: And in the homes, it's really interesting when you go to a home of a North Korean. The homes I visited, the Kim portraits are prominently displayed in the living room kind of like the way that we might put up family portraits. And it's interesting too, you'll see if they can't afford to have, they will have the portraits, but they will also buy calendars with the Kims. And even if they’re calendars from, say, years ago, they're outdated and no longer still active, they will still have them up in a place of pride in the living room. They are everywhere, and that's by design. It's part of surveillance. It's also part of a campaign to really put the Kim family first. We saw campaigns to encourage the people to think of the Kims as their father. And we're seeing that campaign going on right now with Kim Jong Un, trying to create this image that the Kim family is your family, but you see them everywhere. If you go to karaoke, it's like the first several pages are all about the Kims. So yeah, they're everywhere.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So you've set the stage. Now we understand how important this movie, this American movie with American stars, although Seth Rogen is Canadian, comes out. And you understand right away, even before it comes out, that this is going to be problematic. What happens? How does North Korea react? How does the leadership react to the idea that this movie is in existence?

JEAN LEE: So this is exactly where our podcast, The Lazarus Heist, starts. And we start with this crime that unfolds in the heart of Hollywood, at a very iconic place, the former MGM studio lot. That's where The Wizard of Oz was filmed, and the place that is now occupied by Sony Pictures, which is the company, the entertainment company that made The Interview. And, you know, we start with this young woman who works at Sony Pictures, and she gets to work. Her past doesn't work. Okay. So they wave her in. And she realizes the computer doesn't work. The printer doesn't work. The Xerox machine doesn’t. The copy machine doesn't work. Everything's networked. The whole place has been shut down. And it turns out that a couple days earlier, someone had gotten an email, a very threatening email, and had clicked on a link, and it had spawned a virus that just spread throughout the network, took it captive, and also stole a ton of information, including confidential information, personnel records, but also unreleased movies, including The Interview. And then what we saw from there was really a campaign to derail the launch of this movie, The Interview, about the assassination, spoiler alert, the assassination of Kim Jong Un. And I do think that in that sense, the hackers, you know, the North Koreans do not claim responsibility. The United States has fingered North Korea behind this attack, but the attack did. It was a campaign designed to disrupt, censor and control the release and dissemination of this movie, The Interview. And it happened at a time where people were very concerned about what would happen if they did theatrically release this film.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So they were already concerned about it before this happened.

JEAN LEE: Yeah. There was some question about whether to, even earlier on, whether to name Kim Jong Un and North Korea in the film, but they decided and they believed that was, you know, Seth Rogen and James Franco decided to go for it, or the filmmakers decided to go for it. And then I think there was a lot of concern, a lot of anxiety about how to handle the theatrical release and the concern about the responsibility if there was some sort of terrorist attack associated to the theatrical release. And I mean, that is really about disruption. Now, the North Koreans did not claim credit. They will say that, well, maybe it was supporters of North Korea who carried out this, this cyberattack in our defence. But I think if the United States, if President Barack Obama was able to say in a news conference that it was the North Koreans, there must be pretty conclusive proof. And to me, it made absolute sense. There would have been a strong push to seek retribution. But also, I see this as a way to plant a flag. We hadn't seen a cyberattack from the North Koreans like this before the Sony hack. We had seen cyberattacks in South Korea, but if you were going to plant a flag and show that you were a threat, wow, this was a huge one because it had repercussions not only financially, but it also accomplished, financially for Sony Pictures, but it also accomplished the goal of disrupting society, disrupting the lives of many, many people, engaging the president of the United States and really…

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Which is so often a goal, right, for the Kim. Whoever the leader of North Korea is at the time, it's such a goal, right, for them to engage the president.

JEAN LEE: Absolutely. Absolutely. So yeah, I mean, I think that the hackers could have offered this up to Kim Jong Un and they would have received so much. This is how you get glory in North Korea, right? The glory is to do something to honour the leader. And I try to maintain this context throughout the series with all of these, with all of these cyberattacks, because the timing of it is so interesting to me.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I also found it interesting, like you talked about how the world viewed it either as a non-country or as a bit of a bumbling country. You know, what we know about North Korea if we don't spend much time thinking about it is like the human rights disasters and a bit of the fun of making fun of these guys, the silly haircuts and the clothes. But I feel like and there is always the threat of the nuclear issue with North Korea. But this kind of took it into a different realm where all of a sudden, in a world where technology runs the world, North Korea has to be considered to be part of that as well, which we hadn't up until that point. I mean, maybe you had because you're there, but I feel like the rest of the world, even those who had more respect for the country in terms of not seeing it as a sort of bumbling, silly place, were a bit taken aback by the sophistication of their technical savvy.

JEAN LEE: And that's what I mean by planting a flag. So this was their way of jumping onto the world stage as cyber hackers, and to make a very strong show of their investment in cyber warfare and asymmetric warfare. And so I think that that part of North Korea's strategy had been ignored or underestimated, because it is a country that is almost completely cut off from the world. I mean, it's very cut off now, but that's what I like wanted to do with the podcast as well. Because I spent so much time in North Korea on the ground in those early years of Kim Jong Un's leadership, I could see which direction his strategy was going. I could see the investment in science and technology. And I made the podcast partly to wake the world up to this threat, because it's not just about a cyberattack here or there. It is core to Kim Jong Un's strategy to engage in cyber espionage, to engage in cyber warfare, to engage in asymmetric warfare. And cyber theft, that goes back to his weapons program. And so I try to make it clear that we can't underestimate North Korea, even though they are one of the poorest countries in the world and they're so disconnected. With a country like North Korea that has limited resources, they're extremely strategic about how to invest it. And they've invested it in specific experts, hackers, rocket scientists, nuclear scientists, and that can have global consequences.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Right. So they became the Lazarus Group, which was the group that did do this hack. How did they become the expert hackers that they became in a country where they're cut off?

JEAN LEE: That's the mystery that I'd like to solve as well, is how do you, as a country so cut off from the internet, train some of the most aggressive and creative and clever hackers in the world? There are these special afterschool programs in North Korea where they do have computers, and kids who show a gift in math in particular are brought to these afterschool programs so they can use computers. And so I did speak to some defectors or escapees from North Korea who did say that for the most part, North Koreans do not ever get to touch a computer, and they will pretend or practice using a computer just by drawing a piece of paper with a keyboard and pretending they're using computers. So it's a very, very rare thing to touch and use a computer in North Korea. But those who do are given incredible access, and then they are basically put into special academies to really hone their mathematical ability. So I think that that's been part of the whole process for the North Koreans in training like a core elite group of computer experts that they will turn into and train into becoming hackers.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So they do the Sony hack. What was the goal of the Sony hack? I mean, other than the planting the flag, was there a financial goal? Because you did mention that this stuff is to kind of raise money to help support their nuclear program and other more sort of military type stuff going on in North Korea. So let's just stick to the Sony hack and then we can talk about other hacks. What was the goal of the Sony hack?

JEAN LEE: I do think the Sony hack was primarily about retribution. It was revenge. And I think it was a little bit of a test. I think they could possibly have made quite a significant chunk of money, but in a sense, I think they were testing out their own capabilities. And I think that's important because we in the podcast chart how their attacks evolve. The next major attack after that was the Bangladesh Bank heist, which was an attempt to steal one billion USD. And so that one was purely about cyber theft. And I should point out that we believe that there are several different units with different objectives. And so you may have one unit that is primarily focussed on espionage, stealing information, and another that is primarily focussed on cyber theft. So you've got several different units of these North Korean hackers working for the regime. And so it may have been different units as well under that, what we call the Lazarus Group. And I should point out that the Lazarus Group is just a nickname, right, given to them by a cybersecurity firm. I just love that name. The other option, so the US government, when we started the podcast, they were calling them Hidden Cobra. And I just hate snakes. So like I don't like talking about cobras. And now, I think maybe because of the podcast, they're commonly known as the Lazarus Group, but that's really just, that's really just a nickname. Every cybersecurity firm has a kind of different name for these different hacking groups.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So let's move on to the next hack. You mentioned it, the Bangladesh bank heist. What was that? That was financially much bigger impact.

JEAN LEE: So that was purely cyber theft. And I think what the FBI learned from the Sony hack was that these are carefully and meticulously orchestrated, planned out cyberattacks, and that these guys will spend months and months and months, if not years, trying to plot every step, every move so that they can carry out these attacks. Sony was also very carefully calculated. Apparently, the hackers, they had mapped out the entire computer network at Sony, which can't have been easy. So it takes a lot of time and patience to figure that out. And the same thing with Bangladesh. They were preparing and plotting this bank heist for many, many months. And we call the series The Lazarus Heist because we see the Bangladesh bank heist as the modern day bank robbery, kind of like an Ocean's Eleven, but in the modern era, where you don't have guys breaking in, guys or girls breaking into the bank and raiding the vault. You do all of that electronically. And so this was our way of showing that you no longer need to physically break into the bank to steal all that money.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah. Can we break it down? Just let's just break it down a little bit. The original one, it kind of happened over a very quick moment, right? The actual stealing of the money happened all at the same time.

JEAN LEE: So yes. So essentially, what happened, and we start with this printer because the Bangladesh bank, and I've never actually been to the bank, but the Bank of Bangladesh had this printer that spits out all the requests for transactions. And so to make it very simple. The North Koreans figured how to jam everything so that the printer wouldn't work. They just figured out how to write code so that these transaction requests go through and they would be ignored or not noticed by the Bank of Bangladesh, and the Federal Reserve in New York, which was holding on to the money, would put these transactions through. And they also carefully did it at a time, they took advantage of the difference in our weekends. Some parts of the world, especially the Muslim world, you know, they've got different, their weekends are a little bit different from ours. They also took advantage of the fact that there was a long, long weekend coming up because of the Lunar New Year. So the bank that was actually supposed to spit out the cash was in the Philippines. They picked a bank in the Philippines, which was also on holiday. So it gave the North Koreans kind of like a five day stretch where nobody was at the bank, where nobody was at the office and these requests were just going to go through seamlessly. It didn't. Now, they made a couple mistakes, which is a little bit of a hallmark of the Lazarus Group, and which is why I call them a little bit of like breadcrumbs. They do make mistakes here and there, and that's why the FBI has been able to chase them. And so they make mistakes here and there. So they weren't able to get the entire $1 billion, which was their goal. It was just a fluke that the entire billion dollars didn't go through. And I'll just mention that the bank in the Philippines that was supposed to cash the money is on Jupiter Street. Jupiter is in the sanctions list because it's the name, I believe, of an Iranian vessel. And so whenever in a transaction, Jupiter is in the transaction, it raises a red flag. So that is what prompted someone at the Federal Reserve or someone to take a look and say, wait a minute. And so that ended up stopping a big chunk of the transactions from going through. So it ended up only being 81 million. And so the rest, for a couple episodes, we explained how they were able to launder, get that $81 million out in physical cash from a bank in the Philippines. And again, with the bank in the Philippines, the camera was out. They had somehow convinced a bank manager to take that physical money that had been deposited into fake accounts and to put it in her car and take it to some middlemen. And then these middlemen, groups of them, and they were Chinese, went to casinos in Manilla. Now, Manilla, the Philippines at the time, casinos were also not very well regulated. So every step of this process was so carefully considered. Which countries have people who are desperate and easily bribed and willing to make a little bit of money, where there are not many regulations and maybe not such great cooperation with international authorities? So then you had these middlemen whose job it was to launder the money by gambling. And that part of it was fascinating to me too. So the whole money laundering process to make sure that that cash gets anonymized so that they're able to walk out with it and hand it over to the next group of middlemen who are going to transfer it to the North Koreans. So it is a very complicated process. But one thing I think that we learned with the North Koreans is that they have the time and the patience and the resources to really map out and plot these intricate heists, cyberattacks, and they also have no, no sense of guilt about the collateral damage.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And they have the need, right? I mean, the sanctions that have been on the country for all these years, the way that they've been isolated from the world, even though they do have friends still, gives them the impetus, right, to spend the time doing this. Like they do have the need. However you fall on the idea of sanctions or not, they are in need of money.

JEAN LEE: Yeah, and I think that context is important. That's the why. You know, for me, it's just there's the how. How do they carry this out? But then also, why? How have they gotten to this point? And we do go into the history of all the crazy illicit moneymaking schemes that the North Koreans are accused of, because they're constantly trying to find ways to make money because they're not part of the banking system, and they can't make money legitimately because of sanctions. And, you know, it's making meth. It's making counterfeit hundred dollar bills. And then cyber is just the latest in that illicit money making campaign. But yeah, absolutely. I think that it's, I call it a cat and mouse game between the FBI and the North Koreans. The FBI is constantly trying to chase and stop their ability to make hard cash, because there's a belief that the bulk of it is going straight to the regime, straight to Kim, the Kim family, and straight to the nuclear program.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Do you believe that? Is that what you think is the case?

JEAN LEE: Yes. And so the collateral damage is the North Korean people who can't make an honest living. And in a sense, I would say that the regime, the leadership is holding their people hostage in that way. So the people are suffering because of the sanctions. I mean, I can't even imagine how difficult it has become for them. But that's in a sense, the Kim family has decided they're playing the long game, that it will benefit the country in the long run for them to pour this money into nuclear weapons and that eventually, when they, if and when they get back to the negotiating table, that it will pay off financially.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: How about you? You were there. Was there any blowback? How did it affect you?

JEAN LEE: You mean with the Sony hack?

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah. And the movie and everything. And you were, obviously, they were well aware of your presence as an American in North Korea. So tell me about how it affected you if at all.

JEAN LEE: Yeah. I would say, you know, there was no direct confrontation about the movie itself. We didn't talk about it. I wouldn't talk about something like that while I was in. I mean, I did talk about it in private. It was a topic of private conversation between me and my colleagues, my American colleagues. They knew how concerned I was and how upset I was, because the blowback is just living in North Korea as an American correspondent under this veil of potential espionage, right, and living with the knowledge that they are always looking at you as somebody who may be working or is working for the CIA. And no matter how many times I said I did not work for the US government, I also recognized that that's hard for them to comprehend because they, you know, at the time, the state news agency had correspondents abroad and they did work for the government.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Media is the government. Yeah.

JEAN LEE: Exactly. And so it was very hard for them to really grasp and understand that I wasn't working for the government. But certainly, anytime you work for the US government, it's an extremely dangerous and precarious position to be in in a country that considers you their arch enemy. And North Korea is still technically at war with the United States. So any time as an American, you step into North Korea or a North Korean territory, you have to recognize that you are stepping into enemy territory. And it's for any journalist working in a country like North Korea or Russia or China or any other country that is politically at odds with the United States, you have the potential to be accused of espionage and a potential to become a pawn in the diplomacy. So that's something that I was very, very aware of when I was in North Korea as well, and a movie like The Interview did not help my situation. Nobody reached out to me to give me a heads up or ask me if this was a good idea, but I would have. I would have told them no, not just because it puts me in a more difficult situation, but I would have also told them, please do not do this because you are just giving the North Koreans a reason to seek revenge. And that's also part of, you know, the North Koreans are always looking for any opportunity to engage and fight against the United States.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I mean, I did find that idea of North Korea so interesting. I know like the ship that was captured during the Korean War is still there. It's still part of their present history to talk about Americans and the Korean War, right? I mean, it is very much alive in that country still.

JEAN LEE: I think it's so bizarre for us as Americans when we go to North Korea because, you know, I always say that I barely knew anything about the Korean War. Even though my parents survived the Korean War, we never talked about it. I'm sure I was like, yeah, yeah, whenever my parents are like, yeah, talking about it, because it seemed so far off, and then we didn't study it. It was really a blip in my American history classes, which now, when I think about it, it is the one conflict that has endured to this day. And yet, it's not taught at all. It's called the forgotten war in the United States. Then you get to North Korea and you see everywhere that, oh, they have not forgotten about this conflict. And not only have they not forgotten, it is core to their ideology. And it's interesting because it's about a fight against a foreign threat. And that foreign threat at one point was Japan. And currently, it's the United States. And so you see it everywhere. I mean, it is really shocking as an American when you see all this anti-American propaganda posters of Americans being attacked, bayoneted, stomped on. You go to kindergartens. And I remember I went to this kindergarten and they told me they have a special day where the kids get to practice bayoneting Americans. So I think that that is also, that was such a shock to me. But it gave me a lot of insight and context around what it is they're doing and why, what the strategy was when it comes to what the North Koreans want.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Can I just ask you one thing? You mentioned that privately, you talked about it with your colleagues. But do you think any average North Korean ever even knew that that movie existed or anything like that was happening, or even the hacks?

JEAN LEE: No, not the average North Korean. And, you know, there would have been certainly… So there are a certain group of elites, especially the elites who would have been abroad, who were either abroad for studying or diplomats or business reasons or sports, who would have at the time maybe seen some of these reports. I know for me, when I was with North Koreans abroad, they were hungry to find out what the world was saying about North Korea. And that's not information they can get from inside their country. It's too dangerous. And so that's the first thing they would do, is try to figure out what the world was saying about their country, and probably, they probably had to report back. I don't know, I think it would still be offensive to many North Koreans. Say even they were, even if they were abroad and they had the chance to watch it, I still think they would have been extremely offended to watch that. Even most North Koreans who would have been abroad, whether they're escapees or they're abroad legitimately, just to see your country portrayed like that is just not going to be pleasant. So I mean, I found it uncomfortable because the portrayal of North Koreans was so comedic right, and it was such a…

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah.

JEAN LEE: It was so juvenile.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: When did you leave North Korea?

JEAN LEE: So I went on sabbatical in 2014, and then I left the AP after my sabbatical. And I did make a couple trips to North Korea after that. Not in the capacity, not with the AP, but in another capacity. So my last trip to North Korea was in 2017. And I should point out that we have not had Western journalists in North Korea since 2019. So the country has been completely closed, as far as I know, to most, to Western independent news agencies or Western journalists for a very long time.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah. And what do you miss about it?

JEAN LEE: Oh, what do I miss about it? I mean, there's no assignment like North Korea, where every day, every second is a revelation. I mean, it is an unknown, unexplored, little understood country. And I think that if you're a journalist, you're naturally curious. You just want to soak it all in. And for me, as a Korean American, it was very interesting because there's, you look at this, it's a Korea, but it's different than South Korea. They speak a different dialect. So there was the challenge of learning to speak North Korean. My staff, my North Korean staff, their favourite hobby was to turn me into a North Korean, to see how North Korean they could get me. And I think that was great. I think the chance to interact with North Koreans, to get to know them on a human level, on a day to day level, I cherish, although was extremely fraught in so many ways, but also gave me such insight into who they are as people. But I think that opportunity to get to know a new culture and to really be able to sort between the fact and the fiction, because so much of what we do now from the outside is look at what they're feeding us. And I think for that reason, a lot of the coverage is really skewed. It's not the fault of the journalists. And the North Koreans are trying to shape the narrative. But then when you're there on the ground, you can see very clearly what's real and what's not, what's propaganda and what's reality. And I miss that day to day experience, the way the place smells. You know, I don't miss the stress. It’s an extremely stressful, difficult, cold, grueling assignment, but I miss the ability to have just normal conversations with people and to soak in what was happening on the ground. It's very hard for me to really parse that now, although I do lean on my time in North Korea to make a calculated judgement on what's real and what's propaganda.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And I'm assuming, and maybe I'm wrong, that your North Korean colleagues must have been reporting back, am I right? Like you could probably parse it, but you were being carefully watched. So how do you be? How do you report in a country where you have to be so careful and you know that they would see nothing in throwing you in prison and calling you a spy?

JEAN LEE: So I talk a little bit about in the podcast, I talk a little bit about the culture of surveillance, because as somebody who had to live with the culture of surveillance, I mean, it took me years before I could really be comfortable in the world and not totally paranoid, because you live in a constant state of paranoia when you're in North Korea and you're aware. I mean, first time visitors to North Korea are not aware. And I think the more time I spent there, the more paranoid I became because I understood the extent of the surveillance. But one of the interviews I had was with a young North Korean escapee, defector. I wanted to talk to him about that because the North Koreans are very clever, and they do find ways around that surveillance. So it is very much a part of their daily lives, and they learn to live with it. And I think that my staff was the same, that their job was, yes, they probably had to report on everything we were doing, but they found ways to report without getting us in trouble.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So you haven't been there. There hasn't been any Western or North American independent reporters on the ground. Do you have any sense of what we might see next? Do you have any idea like where we might see the Lazarus group pop up again?

JEAN LEE: So, you know, we did two seasons. The first season was, a lot of it was that these heists were very physical. So it was you still had a lot of people in it. But season two, we show how they move into where they're like, actually, it's kind of a pain to have to recruit all these middlemen and these money mules. Let's just go straight to crypto and to try to find ways to move the money around without having to hire all these people abroad. And part of that is that their overseas networks have shrunk. Part of that is sanctions. One of the UN Security Council resolutions was to ask UN member nations to send all the North Koreans home. So it's much harder for them to facilitate all this, all these many mules. So we see them moving into crypto and using technology to anonymize that money. Instead of people gambling in Manilla, using technology. My concern, you know, when we started out with the podcast, nobody was talking about North Korea because they had gone into retreat. And I think that I was trying to put out a warning that just because North Korea's gone quiet doesn't mean they've stopped building nuclear weapons. And then after the podcast came out, we did see them ramp up ballistic missile testing to a degree that we had never seen before. And so we’re certainly, the whole podcast is about where is this money going? And I try to raise the alarm that it is going to work nuclear weapons. Now, where are we going to go with this? I mean, I probably get requests almost every week about a cyberattack that is blamed on the Lazarus Group. So it just continues to evolve. And I think that with the podcast, we create kind of a history of how it began, but it just keeps on going. And it has accelerated exponentially since our last episode. And so that's the challenge for the United States and for other governments, you know, Canada, all the other countries, is to try to figure out how to stop these hackers and to work together to share information on a very sensitive issue. A lot of countries and companies don't want to admit and share information about cyberattacks. So there has to be a real change in thinking. And these cyberattacks need to be treated not like a cybersecurity issue, but we need to start looking at this as being a core part of North Korean strategic thinking. I hope that's what we do with the podcast, is scare people a little bit to taking this threat seriously, and to understand how they're a part of it. Do you want to be that person who clicks on that link and opens up your entire company's network to be taken hostage? Do you want to be the person who clicks on the link that takes your hospital's network offline? You know, in season one, we had this poor guy who was on the operating table waiting for heart surgery, and then the monitors go blank. Do you want to be that person? So it's just a way to also bring the threat closer to home for every single person who's listening to the podcast.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Well, I think you did a great job. I love your work. I'm jealous of your experience.

JEAN LEE: Oh, thank you.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And I really appreciate you taking the time and talking to us.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You've been listening to Crime Story from CBC Podcasts. We drop a new episode every Monday. You can get our next episode a week early on CBC Podcasts’ YouTube channel or by subscribing to the CBC Podcasts’ true crime channel on Apple Podcasts. In addition to Early Access, subscribers to our true crime channel also listen ad free. Crime Story is written and hosted by me. Our producers are Alexis Green and Sarah Claydon. Sound design by Graham MacDonald. Our senior producer is Geoff Turner. Our video producer is Evan Aagaard. Our YouTube producer is Jon Lee. Executive producers are Cesil Fernandes and Chris Oke. Tanya Springer is CBC Podcasts’ senior manager, and Arif Noorani is the director of CBC Podcasts.

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Transcript: Crime Story, Episode 36

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