Weekend p. W. This is a country where the war never end. Every morning at exactly 6 am loudspeakers across north korea sound a morning wake up Call Featuring the same melody every day. 2 a melody familiar from a revolutionary opera. It tells the story of a young nurse at the front who has dedicated her life to the party and is searching for the beloved general who summons her to show him the way. This is a country at war against the border that divides it. All. To. Come up is one of them i was always at the top of my class the teachers all rated me highly. Even at school there was a hierarchy among the pupils at the top youre always at the class representatives and the political representatives. And i always held both positions come with there is a coffee they put together that there was no. It thats how i learned to give orders and how to lead people. At the border between the 2 koreas divided by a cold war time stand still with no Peace Agreement ever signed the war has been suspended since hostilities ceased in 1953 in the course of the next 6 decades the north secretly developed a weapon that the worlds major powers believed only they had the secret to the nuclear bomb. How is a country considered one of the poorest on the planet and which is also shunned by most other nations able to afford such weaponry. Only those who were part of the system are privy to the secret. It took me years to track them down those who we were able to ask had a tragic tale to tell of men and women who were tasked with earning money for their country whatever the price the money of the dictators men. Seoul just 50 kilometers away from the border to north korea in the space of just 20 years the south korean capital became the 4th richest city on the planet after tokyo new york and los angeles. This is where the ordeal ends for many of the refugees from north korea. This young high ranking official from the north traveled thousands of kilometers on a trek across china all the way to seoul hes been living here with a new identity for 2 years today he calls himself michael kim hes 28 years old and works part time as a museum attendant. I mean they want to this is an exhibition organized by the sole authorities. It shows a model apartment in north korea. To illustrate what life looks like for the residents of pyongyang there with the in the team is of highway in this it is it was having actually lived there myself ive been asked to explain in further detail. Both on a. Ride on the way i began my career in the state Security Agency the cia of north korea. I worked in the Financial Department where i came to attention due to my expertise i was transferred to office 39. Years and that was unusual. Is that you know want to listen. I was only 25 when i joined i was the youngest member of staff there said it was an issue because it was a bold and kills it to win it offers 39 manages and directs all the Economic Activities of thousands of firms and factories are to know will only pay so well hire him and the office was set up to earn money for the regime outside the country. So i thought i was over there to kind of a true because im half of north koreas Gross Domestic Product comes from office 39 sort of on the. Coast closer to them and always will. Michael fled from one day to the next without warning his family he knew too much to be able to keep on believing in the regime he decided to meet us 3 weeks ago he insisted on showing his face while being interviewed in the hope of becoming too well known to be secretly assassinated. Reports from men who have been involved in office 39 the guardians of north koreas many Financial Secrets are extremely rare there have been precious few defectors fleeing the country means putting yourself in danger as well as family members left behind. Limb ill on the other hand was right at the bottom of the hierarchy upon who was sent halfway around the world to work on a construction site in the desert of kuwait or were taught and up with oh there was a good for me it wasnt about whether i wanted to do it time was running out i wanted to leave quickly so that we could get something to eat as our leader kim il sung died in july 994 and starting a year later in may 995 the state was no longer able to provide the normal food ration people started to panic. This was the 1st time they had reduced the russians feel good i had a 2 year old daughter over there in order to leave you had to be married and have children if you dont have any children they wont let you out i thought it was a family of 4 or 5 can live for at least 6 months on my salary of over 120. 00 a month if i sent it in pyongyang with her with a new crew. And after 2 months we asked why we werent getting paid hundreds when they said they had not been instructed by the party to pay our salary for the party in north korea was kim jong il our commander in chief. That answer silenced us we were the hundreds of workers had to keep their mouths shut. We kept on working at night to using our flashlights and. Wed fight off sleep and just carry on. I kept working like that for 5 months and all that time i didnt get paid. I felt cheated and. Sending workers abroad was an idea 1st introduced in 1974 a Gigantic Network of clandestine companies and financial constructs gradually evolved all of them with one sole goal earning money for office 39. This man was likewise born in the north in pyongyang in early 2000 he was sent to singapore he earned tens of millions of dollars for north korea as a representative of pyongyangs North East Asia bank in 2003 he was suspected of having passed on information about the regimes finances he fled to south korea today the former banker works for his new countrys intelligence agencies he supports them in their struggle against the regime he wants war eternal allegiance to our main goal is to make for in cash and this foreign cash business is secret. Complete the secret Office Number for ny and Community Created that the system is setup like its all north korean institutions where these foreign cash is generated there is to report it to can to the top and then should bring that should pay that in cash to family and now turns on and before comes a real so you get there all this and then spend it or coding to his priorities so 2. 00 economies one is 2 family economy and the other one is the National Economy run by the cabinet and run by their so called inner Central Planning so to family i called it you know royal Court Economy royal Court Economy they possess all the best profitable businesses best hotels this Department Stores you know those services in the rest trunks they are making money for in cash and then it also goes to interview mountains are. Sold separately quantum. The money that you make will never good central economy not. Central bank. Finance ministry and trade bank they can never. What pope their nose into our business is in that they can never they can not ask a tipping can get up or and then read a look at the so lets say a 1000000000 years dollar a year to get that cash in cash and then to use that now Nuclear Missile program if you know consumes a lot of money its from james holmes pocket there are different will curse you know at most 150000 maybe 50000. 00 in russia and a little more in china and others is scattered around the world so true than 50 thought and they make a lot of money theres only. So 70 percent 80 percentage of the celery cuts and sent to the state and the party so if they make all of them a 100. 00. The amount is how much civil man knowing it. Put in your own. Pair were smug 1515000000. 00 a month they dont make only 100 years bucks a year 5 or month when they make more maybe several 100 at least so a lot of money is going to control. The volume of their cash income consume ones Fund Increased dramatically in the past in the past 20 years in the past 20 years or so or you can buy more and he can. To continue this in a nuclear and Missile Program for the crew of the younger the mother thought they are not of a poet oh god especially in places where we have a special agreement in places like Eastern EuropeSoutheast Asia africa. The rio workers everywhere. In poland the ukraine the pakistan mongolia the big distant. One. While traditional your dwellings dot the modern city scape the noise from the pneumatic hammers is omnipresent every day the concrete expanses continue to spread a little more in the mongolian capital. For a period of over 70 years the country had a communist regime the citys grand monuments honoring the eastern bloc are a legacy of that era but after the collapse of the soviet Union Mongolia switched to the western capitalist camp people left Rural Regions in droves for the citys tar is an urgent need of new housing but lacks sufficient manpower to build it the government has therefore been hiring workers from China Vietnam and north korea for reinforcement the work is assigned the same way in each construction site. The mongolian workers are used for exteriors jobs while the Better QualifiedNorth Koreans for example take care of the interior. The workers from pyongyang are under observation day and night we want to approach them discreetly and 1st just send our interpreter. Hello hello to them all the North Koreans working today sure. Do they sleep here yes. And they never go out just to go shopping thats all. And they eat and sleep here yes inside. North korea goes to extreme lengths to prevent its workers from coming into contact with the outside world and discovering a reality that is other than the one depicted in the daily propaganda theyre only allowed to go out in groups so that they can keep an eye on each other but in the narrow market aisles of all on but are we spot a north korean worker who appears to be on his own. Can we talk while we look at the shoes. Yes thats. When did you come here to mongolia. 3 years ago. Thats a long time yes and when are you going back home soon in a month. And have you and much money no i have not earned a lot of mongolian money and why not and she paid i didnt get much not much you know ive been working but i never got any money and they must be bad people has a lot of bad people around really. So do you have family north korea how many childrens are there. I have one child. My wife was pregnant when i left. I have never seen much on old. So 3 years old 3 yes. I got a letter saying it was a boy im desperate to go and see my son. The workers usually have 3 year contracts and are not allowed to go home during a time only very few use their stay abroad to defect due to their family still living in north korea they are all too aware that they would never see them again. Is mongolia covering up the presence of these workers within its borders neither the government nor the companies employing them were prepared to talk to us but allegedly there are 1200 North Koreans in the country they are there legally at the invitation of the mongolian government. The companies transfer the salaries directly to the north Korean Embassy and. From where the money is then confiscated by the regime in pyongyang a fraction of the somme a few dozen euros a month at most is paid to the workers who use it to support their families in north korea. The construction workers are not the only money makers for the regime it also dispatches loggers to the forests of siberia peasants to farms young young even exports doctors the regimes most lucrative source of income acupuncturists and chiropractors are sent abroad to open practices there what they earn however goes to the regime back home and there are 3 of them. Would lead to into north korean waters more. Seriously crazy here knows very little i guess no story. Well yes then mr preston we once in a way is our in the world the new here for how long are we here and will be. On. If the doctors are not allowed to talk without permission from the embassy yet. North korea reportedly generates 450000000 euros a year from remittances earned by its citizens secretly working abroad. No records are kept of these secret funds and accounts documentation could potentially be used as evidence Receipts Bank transfers and internal notes are systematically destroyed on the orders of the kim family. This enables the regime to deny their existence in front of the International Community but above all to the starving population back home. They are not to get wind of the millions the kim family earns at their expense. Children both ends of the high school i was a worker too. I didnt get anything for 6 or 8 months. I worked myself to the bone. So i reckoned why not help myself this man spent many years in siberia prior to his defection he worked his way up to Management Level feeling remorse he wanted to break his years of silence in the hope that his testimony could help other former Foreign Workers who are still prisoners of the system or. Where we moved out of the one on the people positioned above the workers siphon off huge sums of money from those salaries for themselves lets say our bosses land a contract for 10000000. Tell us that its 7000000 was a little bit and we tell our foreman that its even lower maybe 5000000. So even then were still able to transfer our mandatory share to the regimes another trick is to negotiate 50 men for a job then we arrange to use only 20 and we send the rest elsewhere that means we can put aside a pile of money for ourselves. In a good month how much did you earn. Around 20000. 00 were in one month yes. Do you know how much office 39. 00 earns per year and how much of that goes into developing missiles. But it is nobody knows that. Thats the most strictly guarded secret of all. Nobody in office 39 can say neither the amount for the Office Workers nor the costs for their workers or any other figure. If they were taught watered it all. Plans to acquire Nuclear Weapons were 1st conceived by the regime back in 1953 during the korean war after the us threatened to deploy its Nuclear Arsenal against the country since coming to power in 2011 kim jong un has launched 85 missiles and conducted for Nuclear Tests twice as many as his father and grandfather combined the test missiles were fired over the sea of japan or in the direction of the pacific with the capability to send Nuclear Warheads as far as california chung young now insists that washington would never dare to attack north korea again. On november 29th 2017 north korea surprised the world with the test launch of an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile kim jong un told his people that the country was now a Nuclear Power and boasted that it could deliver a strike anywhere in the u. S. At the same time a group of 8 men of different nationalities convened at the new york headquarters of the United Nations where a race against time began they comprised experts on Rocket Technology finance aviation and shipping experts some were from the civilian sector others from intelligence agencies their work is top secret their goal to dry up the secret money sources of the kim family for their own safety no photos exist of this Expert Committee only Hugh Griffiths the groups head since 2014 was willing to talk on camera these rockets that years of a stigma so relate to technology that was being recovered by the south Korean Navy Ships close enough. When the wreckage was washed out when theyve recovered it and then theyve invited the panel to inspect this this step and once weve inspected the 3 we note down the serial numbers we take photographs and then in many cases were able to trace back. Just sticks or procurement chain. So thats the roll through and then we have whats left of that. Says one of the 1st those who see killer as a cluster of them roundabouts. You want to skewer this. Well our investigations show the percentage all the components used in iraq some missiles. Have been sourced a broad these goods will be exported in the 1st instance to other countries in asia to business and so such as singapore. Hong kong. So that to a large Multinational Company based in say europe from selling the goods everything appears to be an old those no north korean trace on the only official paperwork in addition to Research Work the committee wields its own weapon the economy they devised sanctions that became progressively more severe in order to isolate north korea. We waited 5 months for official permission to fly to north korea the north korean diplomats didnt want us to film in winter fearing that the Power Outages might leave a bad impression finally in late march 2800 with temperatures rising again it happened we were granted permission to travel by train to north korea via china and the border town of dun dong. We find a country where time appears to have stood still a country that has been largely cut off from the outside world since 1953. Every inch of arable land is farmed. Everything serves to feed the nation. For 7 hours the fields rolled by to this day still farmed using only hand tools and manual labor. Most of north koreas Nuclear Power plants are located in this region our route takes us c