The secret agent in North Korea featured in the award-winning documentary 'The Mole: Undercover In North Korea'
From 12.00 noon until 13.00 UK Time
North Korea is the world’s most closed country, a vicious dynastic dictatorship with prison camps and nuclear weapons. Our guest on Purpose Passion and Grit 12.00pm March 22nd is Ulrich Larsen, a former chef who for more than a decade lived a very strange double life. At home, he was an ordinary family man while also infiltrating the North Korean regime and exposing its involvement in the global arms and narcotics trades. Through meticulous planning and patience, he became an insider within the Korean Friendship Association, winning trust and deceiving key officials into revealing sensitive information. He had many close calls of being found out and arrested and, all the time, his wife and family had no idea what he was doing. Ulrich finally blew his own cover with his award-winning documentary The Mole: Undercover In North Korea. In an amazing PPG, Humphrey Hawksley will talk to Ulrich about what passions drove him to keep risking his lifetime and time again, and what grit he needed to finely balance his judgements when dealing with people he was deceiving. As a lone figure, Ulrich achieved what the CIA, with all its resources, had failed to do. North Korea remains one of the most dangerous nations on Earth routinely threatening with its missiles and nuclear weapons. Ulrich Larsen stopped his work there because of illness. He now lives on government benefits.