North Korea

Yeah

... there's mentions of North Korea.

Obviously, there's a case that involved the DEA in the US.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And this is how Shackels comes to get caught up in this methamphetamine plot which sees him, uh, arrested in, um, in Manhattan.

Now, the methamphetamine in this particular plot was coming from North Korea-

Yeah

I am Nicole Perlroth, the cybersecurity journalist and author of This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends about the cyber weapons arms race.

I have covered everything from the Snowden files to the recent Chinese cyber attacks on our critical infrastructure, and more recently, I've been tracking North Korean efforts to secure remote IT work at US companies on my podcast, To Catch a Thief.

I am also actually a Flock customer.

Our street set up Flock safety cameras after we were broken into, but perhaps more than anyone in the neighborhood, I'm also acutely aware that we are creating an ambient surveillance network, where the people getting caught in these dragnets never opted in and really never have a way to meaningfully opt out.

Yeah.

So there was this thing where we were, uh, a lot of Korean churches in the area were trying to give aid [laughs] to North Korea-

Okay

... to a lot of North Korean people.

Yeah.

So there was people who would, um, record what was going on in North Korea-

Uh-huh

...

Oh, wow

... immigration in North Korea.

No, bro.

You know the North Korea story?

No.

What is that?

[laughs]

[laughs]

He says, the war against Russia, us fighting with Ukraine is a struggle between good and evil.

And then he says, we need to be helping them get even more long-range precision weapons so that Ukraine can take the fight to Moscow and St. Petersburg, Vladivostok, heck, even maybe North Korea.

Can people like this, it's like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, off with their head.

I mean, it is living in a dream world that is impossible to rationally encompass.

He preferred to operate dynamically behind the scenes and is best known for his indefatigable support for Yugoslav partisans in 1943 to 1944, his involvement in regime change in Guatemala in 1954, and his most impressive accomplishment, which is likely the Korean War's Operation TP Stol.

in which he cut off critical medical supplies to Chinese forces fighting in North Korea clandestinely supplied by the Indian government, saving the U.S. government $1 million and hiding the U.S. hand in the operation, while simultaneously saving many American lives.

It's my great honor to welcome author and former intelligence officer David A. Foy to today's episode of Heroes Behind Headlines.

Heroes Behind Headlines with Ralph Pizzullo.

Well, of course, as it happens, June 1950, Tofta is doing his reserve duty for three weeks.

He's a lieutenant colonel of military intelligence in the Army Reserve.

doing his reserve duty, and all of a sudden, North Korea sweeps into South Korea, and the Korean War has broken out.

The very next day, one of his buddies calls him and said, so is this enough of an emergency for you? And Tofta assures him that yes, this is enough of an emergency, and he'll be heading to Washington very soon in order to lend his talents to the CIA.

Spain will be versing Portugal.

North Korea will be facing Japan.

France will be versing Canada.

England will be versing Nigeria.

And to be honest, I have to give props to Canada doing really well in this performance, almost getting knocked off.

But being third spot in the group is something a lot of fans didn't knew that there was a possibility they could have been eliminated, but did really well to survive that group.

And seeing how the, who are the top scorers in this World Cup, Anika Paz from Argentina is right now scoring lights for Argentina and and probably will be doing really well to try to win the golden boot race and to try to and to try to make Argentina win the world cup but you look at North Korea has been doing really well in historical moments for the under 20s.

And you have many more Spanish players out there.

And so all of their rocket engineers suddenly needed jobs.

And did the U.S. want them to stay in Russia or maybe take a job at North Korea, make building ICBMs for them or Iran or whatever kind of threatening country you can imagine at the time.

Also by so that there became this U.S. policy of investing in Russian aerospace in order to keep that both contained, but also give insights into their capability.

And it became this kind of post-war, post-Cold War symbol of unity that and this is where the space station was refashioned into what we know now as the International Space Station with the Russian rocket capability and engineering capability of designing some of the core segments.

30% chance that we become a...

Basically, a very... very dangerous North Korean state run by a faceless bureaucrat that is the AI that completely controls everything that we can't do anything about.

That

was like a 30% chance, 35% chance.