The Man Who Robbed Kim Jong-un transcript

August 2016, Seoul. A South Korean official steps in front of reporters and confirms on the record a crime the victim can never report. The man who kept Kim Jong-un's secret money in Europe is gone. So is the money. For 20 years that man was a face in a tram window. A quiet businessman riding the same line into the banking district, eating at the same lunch counter, going home each night to two sons who tease his accent and dream in the local language.

Tellers greeted him by a name invented in Pyongyang. The South Korean press calls it the largest theft of party funds in North Korea's history. Estimates climbing toward a third of a billion dollars. The victim commands nuclear weapons, a million-man army, and hit teams that cross borders on command. And he cannot even admit he's been robbed. The papers print a name for the thief, Kim Yong Chol, and warn in the same breath that it's an alias, state-issued.

To hide his money from the world, Kim Jong-un erased this man's identity, kept the accounts off every ledger, and made him invisible. Then, that man robbed him. That same week, North Korean state media is screaming at the wrong defector. A diplomat who fled to Seoul gets branded human scum in official print. About the man who actually took the leader's fortune, not one word. Listen to that silence. It's a dictator biting down on the worst wound of his reign.

Quietly, [music] on a European news site, an interview with a young fintech founder disappears. Deleted without a note. Remember that deletion. It points somewhere. [music] How does one man end up holding the keys to a dictator's hidden fortune? And how do you survive the state that finds everyone? That isn't a bank. Before the money, watch the man. 20 years, 5,000 warnings, every one a performance. Same tram, same car.

At the lunch counter, he orders whatever the board recommends. A man with preferences is a man people remember and tips exactly enough to be forgotten. That is the finest work of his life. The performance stops at his front door. At his kitchen table, there's a joke he never wins. Two boys correcting their father's accent in the [music] language he pays their school to perfect. He loses on purpose. It is the one softness the job permits.

Hold on to that table. Everything in this story gets decided at it. Outside that flat, this man is the European end of the strangest bank on Earth. A former Office 39 official, a man who ran one of its trading posts in Dalian, China before defecting, described [music] how the leader's cash actually moved. Not by wire, by hand. Millions stuffed into bags, passed to ship [music] captains bound for North Korean ports. One birthday gift for the leader. $20 million zipped into two duffel bags and walked through a port terminal.

For delivering them, he received a medal. The office behind it has a name so dull it works as camouflage. Office 39 of the Workers' Party. In 2010, the US Treasury sanctioned Korea [music] Daesong Bank and Daesong General Trading as owned or controlled by Office 39, the bureau running the Kim family's off-books [music] money through front companies, overseas accounts, and cash couriers. The fortune runs into the billions, and everyone feeds it.

Defectors describe the arithmetic imposed on North Koreans earning abroad. Out of every $300, [music] roughly 200 goes home as a loyalty payment. Restaurant workers, loggers, fishing fleets, diplomats. Here's what you need to understand. A fortune the world's regulators hunt can't sit still. So, it lives in fragments. Borrowed names, shell accounts, cash in transit, and paperwork can't guard a bank like that. A person has to.

For the accounts sitting closest to the cleanest banks on Earth, that person was the man at the lunch counter. One man. One. Who do you trust with a bank that runs on [music] gym bags? 20 years in a single posting. That alone breaks every rule of North Korean tradecraft. Diplomats rotate home every 3 years, precisely so no one grows roots. He stayed. Embassy faces changed around him while he learned which bank managers ask questions, which lobbies keep cameras, [music] which tellers remember a face.

Seoul's press gave him a title, Director General of the Europe Division. Ambassadors, men who outranked him on paper, bowed their heads to an accountant. Inside the missions, they called him the retired king. No throne, no portrait, just the only [music] power that mattered. Every account on the continent answered to his signature alone. And the sons. A man this careful does not accidentally raise two European sons. The older one built a fintech startup under his real face.

That deleted interview from the opening? This is where it points. The younger one left almost no trail, no masthead, no interviews, a life the record barely touched. One brother the internet can find, one it can't. Hold that difference. Every other fortune on Earth is guarded by things. Steel, cameras, codes, courts. [music] This one was guarded by a biography. The most paranoid state on Earth had found its perfect employee.

A system like this survives on exactly one assumption. The keeper never leaves. He has a homeland the state owns, a name the state invented, bloodkin inside its borders, and sons the state can always, always reach. Where would he even go? Then came 2016. January 6th, 2016. North Korea detonates its fourth nuclear device and claims it's a hydrogen bomb. Kim Jong-un's decision. He has just lit the fuse under his own hidden fortune.

March 2nd. The UN Security Council answers with resolution 2270. The harshest sanctions in a decade. Buried in the text, a deadline. Member states must close North Korean bank branches and accounts on their soil within 90 days. On the designation list, in print, Office 39 itself beside the Reconnaissance General Bureau, the spy service that runs operations abroad. The vault and the hunters sanctioned on the same page.

Somewhere in Europe, that document lands on the desk of a career accountant. And he reads it the way other men read a diagnosis. 90 days. Spring tightens the vise. Ahead of the first party congress in 36 years, Pyongyang launches a 70-day loyalty campaign. Tribute demands so [music] steep, monitors reported, that officials privately called them a threat to their survival. Every one of it crossing one desk in Europe. His.

Could he just go home? Home had become this. December 2013. Jang Song Thaek, Kim's uncle, the second most powerful man in the country, pulled from a Politburo session on camera, denounced in the party's own newspaper, executed within days. May 2015. The defense minister executed with an anti-aircraft gun for disloyalty, Seoul's intelligence service told lawmakers, a claim the agency later softened. By late 2016, Seoul's Institute for National Security Strategy would count roughly 340 executions under Kim Jong Un.

Rank protected no one. Blood protected no one. For a man two decades deep in the leader's secret money, a recall order needed no interpreter. The translation is basically, "Come home, be audited, be shot." May 18th. Switzerland, home of the continent's most discreet banks, broadens its own sanctions. Within weeks, the Swiss accounts were dying. The last soft door in Europe swinging shut. The evenings are where the decision gets made.

Dinner in the flat, the older son talking through some problem at the company, the younger one half smiling at his phone, both of them easy in a language their grandmother will never hear them speak. A kitchen in Pyongyang opens behind his eyes, his siblings, their children, every name on a family register that his obedience has kept breathing for 20 years. His throat closes around the rice. There is no version where everyone lives.

Some night that spring between the dishes in the dark, with tram bells fading under the window and his sons' voices washing over him in a language his mother will never hear, he chooses the two faces at this table over every face he was born to. Then he stands at the sink >> [music] >> and runs the water hot enough to hurt. His hands do not shake. 20 years ago, he taught them not to. That is the job. June. >> [clears throat] >> The deadline lands.

Two doors, both fatal. But a man who is the security system has a third door no one else can see. And sometime in late June, the Europe division stopped answering. Late June 2016. His last working day looks exactly like the 5,000 before it. That's the whole trick. The tram into the banking district, the marble lobby, the teller's practiced smile, a quiet unremarkable man signs paper the way he has signed it for 20 years.

Except behind this signature, balances are moving. Accounts held by invented people are changing owners. And a fortune no regulator has ever mapped is sliding out of the regime's reach while the pen scratches. No alarm sounds. Nobody countersigns. Nobody else can. One curious clerk, one phone call. That is the entire distance between a routine Tuesday and a recall order with his sons' names attached. So he stays boring.

He thanks the teller and walks out carrying his children's lives through a revolving door. One evening inside [music] that window, a flat that still smells like dinner, dishes in the sink, two grown sons at the kitchen table, and a father who has rehearsed one sentence for months and still has to force it out. If a wife ever stood in this kitchen, no report mentions her. The fourth chair keeps its silence. We're not going home.

The older son starts with the obvious. The company and gets no further. His father is already shaking his head. The company is four years of his real name, his face in the interviews, his signature on the paperwork. The most documented thing about this family just became a searchlight. We're not staying here either. One bag each tonight. The younger son, the quiet one, asks a single question in the local language, because that is the language he thinks in.

For how long? His father doesn't answer. The silence is the answer. Both boys grew up knowing what the state does to families that run. They learned it the way other children learn traffic rules. Nobody argues. The older son slides his office keys into the middle [music] of the table. Then he holds down the power button on his phone and watches four years of a documented life. The investor threads, the group chats, the congratulations he never answered die mid-notification.

The screen goes black and keeps his reflection in it. The fridge hums. The dishes stay in the sink. Nobody ever comes back for them. From Pyongyang's side, the director general gone. Both sons gone with him. Then the money. The estimates never agreed. A floor around $5 million, a ceiling near a third of a billion in euros, pounds, and dollars. But every source converged on one detail. He took all of it. Down to zero.

[music] The tradecraft is the tell. Cash is weight. Borders, sniffer dogs, luck. Accounts cross no checkpoint. The fortune never crossed one. He took the operating funds, too. South Korean reporting described embassies across Europe in panic. Diplomats scrambling to cover the buildings they slept in, the cars they drove, the salaries that kept the flags flying. Seoul's outlets even reported a member of the ruling family pressed into helping secure what was left.

And the sons, taking both the same night, tripled the risk of the hardest escape on Earth. He did it anyway, and the reason surfaced two months later in Pyongyang's own paperwork. On August 23rd, Pyongyang issued a blanket order. Every overseas diplomat's adult children must return home. That order is the confession. The children stay reachable so the parents stay loyal. Three generations deep, a doctrine the UN's own inquiry documented in 2014.

So the same night the accounts died, the hostages vanished with them. The other side of that trade could pack no bag. His mother's hands, his siblings' children, every name on the family register left to answer for him. He signed anyway. The regime woke up holding the wrong hostages. Blood it could punish, but not one person who could bring the money back or say where it sleeps. And somewhere in those last days of June, a counter started running.

Because robbing Kim Jong Un was the easy part. Surviving it should be impossible. Pyongyang's response ran off the books. No wanted notice, no arrest request. The only document it would ever commit to this wound, that August recall order, was still 2 months out. The immediate answer arrived on foot. Special operatives flood in. Europe's entire North Korean diplomatic corps mobilizes into a search apparatus. Embassy staff turn trackers.

Every mission he once funded now a listening post aimed at its own paymaster. A source inside that mobilization told South Korea's press the regime was hunting him with bloodshot eyes. And it hunted blind. A state cannot ask the world's police to recover money it swears doesn't exist. No account describes the hiding place, but he learned this hunt from the hunter's side. So one one afternoon as he had to live it, a mid-sized city chosen because nothing in it draws anyone from home.

Father and older son crossing a plaza with groceries. Then it comes, drifting over the cobblestones behind them. Korean. Two syllables of home. He does not turn. Turning is what guilty men do. His hand finds his son's sleeve and they drift mid-stride, unhurried. Two shoppers remembering an errand through a pharmacy door and into the smell of antiseptic. Where he stands at the window and reads the plaza in the glass. Counting heads, [music] checking hands, matching caps, a tour flag, a guide's bored voice.

Harmless. 60 seconds. Over. Except it's never over. His son is still staring at a shelf of vitamins. Knuckles white on the grocery bag. A founder who once pitched investors under his own name, rigid at [music] the sound of his first language. Every plaza read like a bank statement forever. In those same weeks, the record catches one move. A European news site deletes the older son's interview. The face, the real name, the searchlight from the kitchen table switched off without a note.

The only footprint this family ever left is the shape of a face being removed from the world. On the far side of that blindness, everyone else. Western intelligence services, souls among them, raced to reach him first. His head holds 20 years of the regime's financial [music] map. Two hunts in the same dark. One to close the father's mouth forever. One to open it. In 2014, >> [music] >> a North Korean banking official in Russia ran with around $5 million.

And Pyongyang formally asked Russia to arrest him. Small enough to disguise. Official enough to name. This time, no arrest request can be written. The loudest story of that August was the wrong one. Thae Yong-ho, deputy ambassador in London, surfaces in Seoul. And state media detonates. Human scum. Criminal. >> [music] >> Embezzler. His mission, like every mission in Europe, had been ordered into the hunt. And Thae picked that window to run so his sons, he said, could cut the chain of slavery.

The man ordered to catch the thief chose the door instead. Now the split screen from the opening decodes. Thae got the screaming because the regime could afford to name him. The thief got the silence because naming him meant admitting he ever existed. Which leaves one tool. The one this regime is actually famous for. >> [music] >> What does it look like when North Korea finds you? February 13th, 2017, Kuala Lumpur International Airport, Terminal 2.

Morning crowds, check-in kiosks, coffee lines. A heavy-set traveler in a gray blazer heads for a flight to Macau. Two young women close in from behind. One reaches around. A wipe across the face. 9 seconds approach to walk away. He flags down airport staff. A liquid, he says, a burning. Very painful. They walk him toward the clinic. He never makes his flight. Within the hour he is dead. The traveler was Kim Jong-nam, Kim Jong-un's own half-brother, the exiled eldest son of the previous ruler, a man who had lived quietly out of the regime's reach for years.

Malaysian police announced what killed him. VX, a nerve agent classified as a weapon of mass destruction, smeared across a man's skin in a crowded airport in a friendly country in daylight on camera. The two women told the court they believed they were filming a hidden camera prank, paid about $100. Their handlers, four North Korean men, Malaysian police said, flew out the same day. Then North Korea blocked Malaysian citizens from leaving its borders until Kuala Lumpur released the body and the regime's suspects.

Malaysia complied. The women walked free without murder convictions. No one anywhere was ever convicted of killing him. Let that sink in. The machine reached across a continent, put a chemical weapon on the leader's own blood, held a nation's citizens as leverage, and walked away whole in weeks. That is what finding you looks like. For days, the footage loops on every screen in Europe. >> [music] >> 9 seconds on repeat.

In a rented flat, a phone lies face up on a table. The younger son sees it first and says nothing. He doesn't speak Korean anymore, [music] even indoors. He turns the screen toward his father, and together they watch the leader's own blood die in a crowd that noticed nothing. The message wasn't addressed to them. They received it anyway. The uncle, found by his own party. The half-brother, by 9 seconds of VX. [music] They, the loud defector, found the day he surfaced.

And the quiet one? While those airport cameras were recording, the hunt for him was entering month eight. Think about what that means. The state that could plan 9 seconds down to the chemistry on a killer's palm had spent 8 months failing to attach a single verifiable fact to its own missing accountant. So, what was 8 months of missing doing to it? At home? In the accounts? In the leader's own room? Month by month, the machine pays, and it pays crooked.

A wound it cannot name is a wound it cannot dress. Only one document ever answers the theft. That August 23rd recall order. Around the world, embassy families put adult children on flights home, degrees abandoned, jobs quit, half-built lives folded into suitcases. Every one of those seats is the seat his sons refused. The regime is patching in public the exact hole one father walked through. With everyone else's children.

And the register he left behind? Silence. His mother? His siblings? Their children? No report about their fate has ever surfaced. The doctrine that reaches three generations does not publish results, so he cannot even grieve. Grief needs a fact. A date, a grave, a phone call. And one ring on a Pyongyang line would be a flare over every head he left behind. It comes out sideways instead. Some nights he cooks the rice too soft, the way she made it the morning those cracked knuckles pressed his shirts flat, and eats it standing at the sink, and his sons know not to ask.

Is he remembering a living woman or mourning a dead one? The regime will make sure he never finds out. The rest of 2016 lands like aftershocks. Eight days after the recall order, Seoul reports a vice premier executed, one table from the top. October 1st, South Korea's president stands at an Armed Forces Day podium and openly invites North Koreans to defect, an offer aimed straight at an elite that just watched its most trusted accountant walk out the door.

November 30th, resolution 2321, coal exports capped at exactly 400 million 870,000 and $18, not a typo, and every mission abroad cut to one bank account. The gym bag empire he ran for 20 years now fits inside a single monitored checking account per embassy. By year's end, Seoul counts defections up 11%, the first rise of the Kim Jong-un era. The wall is leaking people now, along with the money. Then the entry that outweighs all of it.

June 2017, one year almost to the season after the accounts emptied. The story reached Seoul through defector networks. The head of Office 39 stands before Kim Jong-un and reports the fund is choking, strangled by sanctions outside, bleeding from the hole within. And Kim, a man whose displeasure is a death sentence, answers his own money men in private. Bear with me a little. It will be resolved soon. Read it again. The most dangerous man on Earth, by Western analysts' [music] reckoning, reduced inside his own vault to the language of a debtor asking for patience.

It was never resolved. Pyongyang has never acknowledged the man, the money, or the wound. Secrecy has a tax, [music] and this is it. Whatever the theft cost, the regime eats it in silence, forever. If this story is doing to you what it [music] did to me, take 1 second and subscribe. One loose thread still dangles [music] in Europe. The chair he walked away from. Who sat in it next? The regime filled the seat. Of course it did.

The successor was another [music] trusted insider from the diplomatic elite. A man tasked with procuring the leadership's luxuries. The yachts, the wine, the comfort sanctions exist to deny. Pyongyang had 2 years to [music] study how it was robbed and rebuilt the job around that autopsy. November 2018, he vanishes from his post. The chair empties a second time. >> [music] >> This time the state moves fast. He has a daughter, 17, still in Europe, her whole documented life on the continent.

Within days, she is on a plane to Pyongyang. The North's channels insisted she went at her own request to her grandparents. Defectors who followed the case say she was taken. Two versions of who chose. One gate either way. The cabin door seals, the continent tilts away under the wing, and a 17-year-old flies alone [music] toward the most closed country on Earth, collected like an unpaid debt. Two years earlier, another father stared at exactly [music] this bill and refused to let it be collected.

Somewhere, two brothers read about that plane and understand without a word. That seat was built for people like them. It cost them the lives they built. A company surrendered mid-flight, interviews scrubbed, a first language they flinch from in public. It kept them off that plane. Files like their fathers do not close in Pyongyang. They wait. Here the story stops being about one [music] man. Twice the regime handed the keys of its secret money to a keeper it had made invisible.

Twice that keeper was the only living person who knew where the money slept. And twice, the last two times the job changed hands, the keeper vanished. Once is betrayal, twice is architecture. Design a job only a ghost can hold, and you will keep hiring ghosts. Ghosts know how to disappear. Which brings it back to the first man. Nine years on, what does the record actually hold? Nine years of hunting produced a file that fits in one breath.

No confirmed sighting, no arrest on any public record, no extradition request, no photograph, no real name ever established. The only handle the world ever got is the pseudonym from those first August articles, Kim Young Chol, flagged as borrowed the day it was printed. Even the stories later attached to that name collapse. Contradictory dates, details that cannot coexist. Everyone else in this file has a location. Thae Yong Ho, the screamed-at defector, surfaced so completely he won a seat in South Korea's National Assembly.

The successor from the cursed chair in Seoul, resettled under protection. The Office 39 man from Dalian, the one with the duffel bags and the metal, giving interviews from Virginia. Every row filled except one. The man who took the most from the man who forgives the least. When this regime wins, it tells you. It printed the uncle's death sentence in its own newspaper. About this man, nine years of nothing. The most valuable deterrent story the machine has ever owned, and it has never dared to tell it because telling it requires the one sentence Pyongyang cannot say, he existed.

Now run it backward. A wanted poster [music] needs a name. Pyongyang shredded his years ago. A money trail needs owners. The regime staffed its accounts with people who were never born. A A needs a crime. This fortune never officially existed. Kim Jong-un didn't lose his money to a thief. He spent 20 years manufacturing one and called the finished product security. Somewhere tonight, a father and two sons eat dinner under names no newspaper will ever print.

Three plates. The older one built a company once. The internet remembers it less every year and somebody made sure of that. The younger one orders in the language he dreams in. It isn't Korean. Safe is not the word. Jong-nam lived out of reach for years before the 9 seconds found him. That arithmetic sits down to dinner with them. Not whether the machine still looks, but how long [music] it will wait. Count the table again.

Every chair that should stand beyond those three is in a country he can never search. His mother, the hands [music] that packed the first suitcase, if she outlived his signature. His siblings, their children, grown by now if grown at all. Nine years, not one line of news about any of them. He has never once dialed a number that ends in Pyongyang. He knows the machine too well to read its silence as mercy and too well to break his own.

Nine years ago at a kitchen table, the younger son asked, "For how long?" He has his answer now. The largest theft in North Korean history has no thief on file and the counter that started that June is still running day after day over black. >> [music] >> Nobody robs Kim Jong-un except the man Kim ordered to hide the money. And if this is what it took to slip out of the regime's grip, wait until you see what it took to live inside it.

Six years undercover as the only American spying from within North Korea. That story is next.