The most secretive nation on the planet.
A glimpse inside this infamously secretive country.
I’ve created the most comprehensive map of North Korea
available to the general public.
A lot of this is information
they would not like to be out in the public.
I’ve centralized it into one place where you can learn anything:
the ballistic missile bases, where all the tunnels are,
where the palaces are.
The man who inherited the North Korean throne
from his father and his grandfather before him.
The Kims rule over a police state that relies on heavy surveillance.
These are intelligent people that have managed to control a country
for three generations.
And they are ruthless.
Well, a US official warns that
North Korea could conduct another nuclear test at any time.
They don't care about human rights.
They tend to be portrayed as caricatures, but they’re not,
you know, to have been able to hold on to power.
And they're not going to let that go.
Some guy in Florida just put that all out there for the public to see.
I don't imagine they enjoy it.
[SUPER_USERS]
[REVEALING NORTH KOREA’S SECRETS]
My name is Jacob Bogle, and I’m a North Korea analyst.
I estimate that I’ve spent over 7,000 hours mapping
and writing about my finds.
I've always had an interest for maps, for geography.
And so when Google Earth came out,
I started playing around on there.
And I found that a number of other people
had been marking places,
especially military places, in North Korea.
But there were a lot of holes in the data.
So I thought I would take a summer to fill in the missing pieces
and have a complete map of the country.
It was not so simple, and it has taken a decade.
There’s 64,400 places that I’ve now mapped and verified.
I have a personal library
with about 30,000 pages’ worth of material
on every topic imaginable related to North Korea.
This has nuclear sites,
underground sites, archaeological sites.
I think we do a disservice when we hide things behind walls.
Military tensions on the Korean Peninsula
have recently been boiling.
Successfully testing its first intercontinental ballistic missile
capable of hitting the US.
This is exactly the kind of missile
the US knew the North Koreans were working on,
but we never expected it to be launched this soon.
North Korea’s nuclear program goes back...
pretty much to the beginning of the country.
US intelligence sources
indicated
It is a required ingredient
in the most powerful compact nuclear weapons.
In the town of Pyongsan,
they have one of these uranium milling plants.
And what they do is there’s a coal mine.
Coal actually has uranium in it,
and so they take the coal as the uranium ore and process it.
In that process, they produce a lot of waste material:
the leftover burnt coal, a lot of toxic chemicals.
So this is the Pyongsan uranium mill,
this is the factory,
and this is where all the sludge and stuff gets dumped.
Material is brought in through this pipeline,
through this pipe that runs across the river.
You can see this splotch right here, this dark-colored area.
This is March 2019, we have it,
and then we can see it spilling into the river itself right here.
It was picked up by South Korean media.
I’ve got bad news that North Korea is dumping uranium waste into a river.
An American expert analyzed satellite images,
and he suggested the possibility of contamination of the seas
surrounding Yeonpyeong Island and even Ganghwa Island
in our country along the Ryesŏng River.
I started going back through historic imagery
and noticed that this isn’t just bare dirt or something.
This is a leak.
And it’s leaking directly into a river
that provides water for agriculture
and drinking water for thousands of people in North Korea.
And then that flows into South Korean waters
and eventually out into the Yellow Sea.
In North Korea, the individual is not important.
The group is important.
So you can have terrible working conditions,
you can have toxic material flowing into drinking water,
and they don't really care.
North Korea’s conventional military forces,
the tanks, troops, and artillery,
are falling increasingly behind
the capabilities of South Korea and the US.
The North’s Soviet hardware is aging.
Spare parts are becoming more difficult to secure.
They couldn’t survive.
They wouldn’t win against a direct aerial combat.
And so they’ve been taking small steps, but steps nonetheless,
to increase survivability.
So this is Koksan air base.
At the end of the runway,
you have this nice little square right there.
And in this case, it’s just compacted sand.
So 2014, it’s not there.
This the jets lined up.
You’re forward in time, 2015...
brand-new, nice arrestor pad.
They’ve already installed arrestor pads at the end of runways.
These are engineered materials that give way whenever an aircraft hits it
to slow the aircraft down and stop it,
but to not damage the aircraft any further.
So, you know, small things
but potentially important things in a conflict.
North Korea was a creation of World War II.
Japan had occupied the Korean Peninsula.
And when the allies defeated Japan,
the Soviets and the Americans wanted to split territory.
And so they drew just an arbitrary line
across the Korean Peninsula
and created a South Korea and a North Korea.
A few years later, we had the Korean War,
which is when North Korea tried to take over South Korea.
And with their almost defeat,
it became very important for them to classify just about everything.
Even demographics are state secrets,
so we don't have an accurate figure of the population of North Korea.
This family has kept a hold on this country for 70 years
by propagating this myth that they are some kind of quasi deities
who have this divine right to rule.
North Korea as a society is stratified.
They have a class system,
despite technically not having a class system.
And you do have this maybe 10,000, 15,000 people, top of the top elite.
They almost all live in Pyongyang.
Some of them live in mansions.
Others live in luxury apartments.
But then you have the Kim family,
who have a dozen or so mansions spread out throughout the country.
In this particular building right here,
this is Kim Jong-un’s personal--
This is where he actually lives.
These two pyramids are actually--
One is a dining hall, and one has a swimming pool inside.
So that's a pretty unique feature.
One thing that you can tell using satellite imagery
about what’s going on with the elite
is when something gets built or when something gets demolished.
Dictator Kim Jong-un
has executed 70 officials since coming to power in late 2011.
This is what Kim Jong-un is showing the people within North Korea.
This is what he is telling to the elite.
These are the mansions that were demolished.
Early 2011, they’re still there,
and then they’re gone.
And that coincides with purges of top officials.
Some were executed.
Some were sent to prison camps.
I mean, North Korea is a country of 26 million people.
They live their daily lives there.
They’re happy. They’re sad. They get married. They die.
They want a better life for their children.
There have been a number of North Korean state-sponsored agents
that have tried about half a dozen times
to hack into my systems to get emails, databases, and so on.
Naturally, people are going to want to try to stop you.
It’s just... it is part of the job,
and you just have to deal with it, really.
North Korea, there’s always something new going on.
And I think this is a project that’s going to go on
for a number of years to come.