Jack Barsky: KGB Spy | Lex Fridman Podcast #301
- Something happened,
where they forced my hand, and this is the only
time that a Soviet agent was anywhere near me on the
territory of the United States. So I'm waiting for the A train on a dark morning, still in Queens, and there's this man
in a black trench coat, comes up to me from my right and he whispers into my ears, "You gotta come back or else you're dead." - The following is a
conversation with Jack Barsky, a former KGB spy, author
of "Deep Undercover" and the subject of an
excellent podcast series called "The Agent." There are very few people who
have defected from the KGB and live to tell the story. It is one of the most powerful intelligence organizations in history and this conversation gives
a window into its operation, both from an ideological and
psychological perspectives, but also it tells the story of a man who lived one heck of an incredible life. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please
check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Jack Barsky. Let's start with a big basic
question, what is the KGB? (Lex speaking Russian) - Right, so that is the
Committee of State Security. Bezopasnost, this is a... Opasnost is a threat, right? - Right.
- Okay, and bez means- - Without.
- Right. - And I guess that directly translates to security without threat. - And don't exist anymore. It was disbanded when the
Soviet Union fell apart and the successor agencies are now the SVR and the FSB. FSB, supposedly the equivalent to the FBI and SVR the CIA. But the SVR is relatively weak and the FSB has taken
on a lot of espionage and, you know, active measures and they're much bigger and stronger. But the most capable
intelligence agency in Russia is the GRU military intelligence. - Then nobody knows very much about- - That's right. When I was in the KGB, I had no idea that there
was military intelligence. Nobody ever mentioned anything like that. And by the way, I
recently had the pleasure to give a talk at the DIA. When they reached out to me, I didn't know they existed either. - Interesting. Yeah, that's always the question. If you want to be an intelligence agency, should the world know anything about you? Because in some sense, you
want to create the legend in order to attract great,
competent individuals to work for you, but at the same time, you want it to be shrouded
in complete mystery. If nobody knows you exist, you
might be able to operate well as an intelligence agency. That is fascinating. But FSB is the thing that
carries the flag of KGB, KGB being probably one of, if not the most sort of infamous, famous, infamous, and powerful intelligence agencies ever.
- In history, yes. - Ever.
- Absolutely, 100%. - It was founded in 1954
after the death of Stalin. You've, in writing your book, looked back at the
predecessors, at the history, is there some way in which the KGB is grounded in the culture, the spirit, the soul of its predecessors? - Oh, absolutely. They just changed names and they changed personnel
rather frequently, and that had had something
to do with Stalin's paranoia. From between 1923, and
I don't remember what, I think it may have been
the NKVD at that time. It started as a Cheka and
then it became the GPU, the- - It's three or four letter words.
- NKVD, yes. - Keep changing.
- But with those name changes, you also had changes at the top. Between 1923 and 1953 when Stalin died, that is 30 years, they had
eight heads of intelligence and of those eight, six were executed when they were replaced. So that's an indication that, you know, this was an organization that
ate itself from the inside. The Soviet Union was the
only dictatorship in history that did not rest its
powers on the military. They rested its powers on
the intelligence apparatus, and that thing was unstable. So you know where that leads? Eventually, if you rest your power on something that is made out of bricks that don't hold a lot of
load, it will fall apart. - On sand.
- Yeah. - Why was it unstable, would you say? What of human nature, makes it unstable?
- It's the paranoia. You know, Stalin was always
worried about, you know, the most powerful people coming after him. So he proactively killed
off heads of the KGB, and he had this great purge where he got rid of a lot of his generals, you know, really capable generals, and that cost him dearly
when World War II started, because, you know, he
started off with a force that wasn't as capable
as it could have been. - Was it paranoia at all levels? - I believe so. I believe so. It comes from the top. And so if the top doesn't trust you, you always have to worry about your peers snitching on you. - Yeah.
- Okay? And I think we have a
very similar situation in Russia today. And in this kind of atmosphere, the truth will never get to the top. - So no matter what moral rules the
organization operates under, trust is fundamental to its competence? - Oh, absolutely. And I wanna extend this
to my own existence. And this is kind of strange, it's almost dichotomous because, you know, I was running around lying
to everybody and, you know, I couldn't fundamentally be trusted, but the relationship
that I had with the KGB was based on trust. If they don't trust me,
they don't send me out. And if I don't trust them, I'm not going. And I eventually broke that trust. And they knew there
was always that danger. - They knew that because
something about you or just something about human beings that can be broken?
- No, there were hints about, you know, how long my assignment
would be, so 10 to 12 years. And you see, it makes sense, all right? I was becoming an American and over time I would become
more and more American and there was always a chance that I liked it more here than there, that I was really successful
in what I was supposed to do. And it sort of happened, but in my case, it happened because of, I fathered a child who I didn't wanna leave
when they wanted me back, so. - Love always screws up- - [Jack] Oh. (both laughing) - your employment competence, yes. - You are absolutely right. But they thought, you know, that I had an anchor at home because I had a wife and a
son at home, which, you know, you've gotta worry about
them if you defect, because in the past, the KGB would go after family ruthlessly. - [Lex] Including perhaps violence? - Yeah.
- This is a hard question about the KGB because it's one of the
most ruthless organizations, but in general, are there lines, KGB agents at every level of the hierarchy that they would not cross? Political, legal, ethical, or does anything goes to achieve the goal? - I was only in touch with two types of agents,
were the technical experts, the ones that taught me trade craft, and they were like
engineers and, you know, they were in charge of the secret writing and the Morse code,
shortwave radio reception, decryption, encryption
and that kind of stuff. Those were just doing
their job, all right? And the others, the ones that trained me, that prepared me for a
life in the United States, they were nice people. They were elegant people. I don't think they... They would not fit into the stereotype of the ruthless gun-carrying agent. - Is it possible that
you would not be aware of the parts of the KGB, I mean, it's very modular, would you- - Yeah.
- It's possible that you're not aware
of the parts of the KGB that are the quote, unquote, "muscle"? - Oh, I didn't know. I would find out afterwards,
after I, you know, retired and started doing some research. I had no clue. - So you're kind of operating in a bubble? - Oh, very much so. I mean, this is what the
KGB did really, really well, compartmentalization. And that was based on, you know, the communist movement while
it was still underground. You know, the cells were very small so that maybe there
were three, four members in one cell that knew one another, and then they had a
liaison to another cell. So the bottom line is, if one of those folks were caught, they could maybe betray
four people or three, something like that. And the KGB continued with that tradition. I have reason to believe that my handler, the person in Moscow
that sort of directed me and made decisions what
to do and where to go, never met me personally. There's no reason to, right? And this actually was a big advantage over other intelligence services because, you know, you
look at what the CIA does, everybody blabs, there's a lot of leaks coming out of American intelligence. I don't think there's as many leaks coming out of the Mossad. - Strong words from
Jack Barsky, by the way. (Jack laughing) - I mean, that is a question I want to ask a little more systematically. Is there something unique about the KGB compared to the other
intelligence agencies? Let's talk the British intelligence, MI6, Mossad, CIA, is there unique cultures, spirits, souls of the
different organizations that maybe somehow connect to
the structures of government, connect maybe the values of the people, those kinds of things? - I believe we were all
pretty much strong believers in communism in the
future of the world being- - In KGB?
- Yes. I think that unified us to a large degree, even the technicians. - So even. it wasn't
something like, "Yeah, yeah, the parents believe this thing, but we know the truth." You really believe the story of communism- - Absolutely did. And you need to look at the timeframe. The Soviet Union after World War II, made quite a bit of progress
in influencing the Third World. I still remember when
I was in middle school, we had a map, the map of the
world, and it was color coded. So red was communism,
that was the Soviet Union and the eastern states. And then blue was capitalism. And then we had green, which were the Third World countries. And the green slowly turned pink because a lot of Third World governments, like I'm looking at Angola. - Yeah.
- I'm looking at Vietnam. A lot of these countries were very sympathetic to the Soviet Union. And so we sort of knew that
this would go on like that, and eventually we would take over and, you know, pretty much overtake, that was the myth,
overtake the United States, not only militarily, but also in terms of industrial
production and so forth. Now that was a stupid pipe dream. The military, it was a
standoff, as we know. - Well, stupid pipe dream, Hitler had a stupid pipe dream. - Yeah.
- That he executed it exceptionally effectively on. If not for a handful of military mistakes, a world could look very different today. - Well, the biggest one being
invading the Soviet Union, particularly at the time that he did it, because he ran into the same thing that Napoleon ran into, General Winter. - Well, within, so Operation Barbarossa, within that, he could have
made different decisions, for example, skipping Kyiv and
attacking Moscow directly, overthrowing the government. So marching... I guess, that would be
learning lessons from Napoleon, as opposed to a different
kind of distribution of forces and then getting bogged on in the winter. But the point is, these
ambitions sometimes do, you know, the ambitions of empires
sometimes do materialize in the growth and the building and the establishment of those empires. And those empires write the history books, and in such a way that we
don't think of them as empires, or we certainly don't think
of them as the bad guys. They write the history books, therefore they're the good guys. And right now, America has
effectively written a book about the good guys. I happen to believe that book. But we should be humbled and open-minded to realize that that is
in fact what is happening, is effective empires
write the history books and tell us stories and tell us propaganda and tell us narratives that we believe because we are human beings and we love to get
together and believe ideas. We love to dream of a beautiful world and try to build that
beautiful world together. In the United States,
that's a beautiful world, the freedom of respect of human rights, of all men are created equal, pursuit of happiness, you know, it always sounds good. If you look at what the
dream of communism is, it's sure as heck, in its words, on the surface, sounds good. - Yes.
- Respect for the workers. - Yes.
- The working class, the lower classes that
have been trodden on, that have been stolen
from by the powerful, they deserve to have the money, the power, the respect that they have
earned through their hard work. Sounds great. - And everybody gets along
and we just have to... You know, all men are wonderful people. And if they go bad, it has
something to do with the fact that they have been oppressed, right? And that dream just never worked out. And even it is, when you think about it, and I didn't think about
it, when you're young, you know, emotionally you accept it. But when you think about it, somehow that new wonderful organization has to organize itself, even though Lenin predicted that the state eventually would go away. Well, how does that work? Then you have, like, anarchy, right? You have to have an organization. And the only way to really
organize a large number of people is with a hierarchy. And who gets to the top? The ones that want to go to the top, the ones that believe in themselves, the ones that know better
than everybody else. And once you have that
hierarchy established, there is no guarantee that it won't go bad. And actually, when you look at history, every such hierarchy has gone bad. You know, when you look
at Cuba, for instance, I believe Fidel Castro was
an honest revolutionary. I do believe that. And so what did Cuba turn into? - Yeah, there's something about, and you speak about
Vladimir Putin in this way, but let's step away
from that for a second. Is there something about
being an honest revolutionary that wants to do good for their country, and you start to believe that you know better than everyone else how to do good in the country, and you very well might first, but then somehow that grows
into a distortion field where you keep believing
you know what's right. And all the people who disagree with you, you stop seeing them as having a point. You instead see them as like, evil manipulators of the truth, that are actually trying to hurt people for their own greed, for their own power, and you will protect the people because you know what's good. In the case of Stalin, I mean, I don't know, but it seems like he really believed that communism would bring
about a much better world. I mean, there was a sense, you have to crack a few
eggs to make an omelet, this idea that sacrifice is necessary to bring about a greater world. And then the other aspect is sort of ruling by terror, creating terrorism,
justified political mechanism to achieve a better world. So it wasn't, I mean,
perhaps he had to do that to be able to sleep at night with the atrocities he's committing. I think he believed he will
bring about a better world. - And by the way, the terror
didn't start with Stalin. It started right after
the Bolsheviks took over when Lenin told Mr. Dzerzhinsky, comrade Dzerzhinsky, to build a Cheka and then execute the,
this is what he called it, the Red Terror. So-
- Red Terror. So at the birth of the Soviet Union, there was already terror
and it was deliberate. And it wasn't just focused on the enemies, it was focused on whoever you didn't like. There was no rule of law. There was no court cases, you know, people were just pulled
out of their apartments and shot on sight. Yeah. And this was done by revolutionaries who were convinced that
eventually, you know, that these sacrifices had to be made and eventually that would
lead to a much better planet. - And the populists believe this too, that those sacrifices, in part. - Yes.
- I mean, this is such a dark thing
about dictatorships is, you believe it, but you're also too afraid
to question your beliefs. Like, you're not directly afraid, but almost like, I
don't know what that is, that's almost like a subconscious fear. Like, there's a dark
room with a locked door, don't look in that door,
don't check that door. And then there's something
about the United States that says, especially modern culture, it's like, go to that door first and sort of question everything kind of. That's the power of the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press. But you can almost become too critical and too cynical of your
own culture in that way. So there's a balance to strike, of course. But, man, if communism is
not a lesson of human nature, I don't know what is. But you believed without
thinking too much about it, you believed in the story of... What did you see? You know, I came from the Soviet Union. What did you maybe feel that's right and good about communism, about the vision of communism? Do you remember, like- - I think the biggest impetus
in me believing in communism was that the communists, just before Hitler took over, the communists were the
only force in Germany that fought the Nazis in the streets. And that's a historic truth. - [Lex] Yes. - And communists were
hunted down by the Nazis, killed, put in concentration camps. And so what we knew, what we were taught, and I think that was a huge unforced era by the Western countries, particularly the United States, that there were ex Nazis in
the government in West Germany. - Yeah. - And the most famous
one was Reinhard Gehlen, who was the general in
charge of the intelligence on the eastern front under Hitler. And when the Allied won the war, it was decided that
Gehlen was too important with his knowledge in his organization, was
too important to not use. So he was co-opted by the CIA and eventually wound up being the head of the
Bundesnachrichtendienst, the CIA of West Germany. That gave us, when I say us, you know, the East German party, a
huge propaganda victory. The emotional aspect
of this was as follows, when we were juniors in high school, and in those days, you were only allowed to go to high school if you were in the top
10% of students, okay? So this was going to be the next set of ruling elite in the country. We were sent, we were required to visit a concentration camp. And if you know what we, as 17-year olds, were made to look at, it was gut-wrenching. How can men do something like that to men? Piles of corpses, lampshades made out of human skin because that skin had tattoos on them and a shrunken head and heads
like the size of my fist. And I mean, the girls all cried and it would've made a huge impression. - And that was the Nazis and the communists-
- The communists were the Nazi fighters.
- defeated the- - They were the good guys. Of course, you know, in hindsight, if the communists had come to power, it would've been just
the other way around, as we know, given the example
of Stalin and Mao, right? But we didn't know that. Right? - From the Russian Soviet perspective, the communist regime banded together to win the Great Patriotic War. - And that was the second one, you know, the big brother, the Soviet Union. I mean, when I was approached by the KGB, that was like, oh, I felt so honored. - Yeah. So we should say that we're
talking about East Germany, that you're from East Germany. Can you describe, you were born four years and what is it? - Yeah, four years-
- 10 days? - Yeah, sort of. Very good. (laughing) - After Germany's-
- World War II, yeah - unconditional surrender in World War II. So what is East Germany? What is West Germany? What is East and West Germany? What is that? What's the difference? What's the historical context here? What is World War II again? And then... (both laughing) Let's do, for- - Look, we don't have
to go to World War I, the result of which
actually seeded World War II in some respects. - [Lex] Yes, there's a long history, yes. - But let's start with World War II. So when Hitler came to power, he and his leadership decided that the Germans needed more,
what they call Lebensraum, that means room to live. And they would, you know, they would start expanding. And they went into France. They took Belgium, the Netherlands, they annexed Austria and got a piece of Czechoslovakia. And then they decided to
march into the Soviet Union after they took Poland and-
- Cut up. Cut up Poland together
with the Soviet Union, - [Jack] Yes. - They were friends.
- Yes. - They were not- - It was a non-aggression pact, that was signed by Ribbentrop
and Molotov, right? I think both parties knew that eventually they would fall apart. But at the time, it gave the Soviet Union a little more, a piece of Poland, and a little more time to prepare what they thought might
happen down the road. And the Germans had, you know, the time and the ability to pretty much conquer
all of Western Europe. - Do you think Stalin really knew that it's gonna fall apart? - Why would somebody like Stalin
trust somebody like Hitler? - But why did he blunder so bad not to read the intelligence
that was coming his way? - Oh, he-
- That the troops are amassing on the border of the Soviet Union. - He didn't trust his own
intelligence apparatus. - Boy.
- Here's one example. There was a German communist who went underground when Hitler took over and he went to Japan as a journalist. His name is Richard Sorge. Richard Sorge had
really, really good intel about what the Japanese
would do and not do. And I forgot exactly what it was, but it came to Moscow and Stalin totally ignored it. And when Sorge was captured by the Japanese, the Soviet Union denied
that he was one of theirs, so he was executed. The paranoia, again, does a lot of damage. When you don't believe your
own intelligence apparatus, why bother having one? - (sighs) Yeah, I mean, there... But I'm sure there's
contradictory information coming in from the intelligence apparatus. So it's difficult. I mean, first of all, nobody
likes to be disagreed with, especially when you become
more and more powerful. And then the intelligence apparatus is probably giving you
information you don't like. It's often negative information about- - [Jack] Yeah. - Basically, information that says that the decisions you made in the past
are not great decisions, and that's a difficult truth to deal with. - [Jack] Yeah. - So there, you know, in the modern times, if we hop around briefly,
is Vladimir Putin has been not happy with the
intelligence of the FSB, thereby, at least if you read the news, choosing to put more priority to the GRU for the intelligence in Ukraine. - [Jack] Right. - But I guess, I suppose
the same story happens there as it does throughout
history, is paranoia. - I give you an example that comes from a very reliable source. And that my best German
friend worked as a chemist in the Stasi, East German intelligence, and eventually, he rose to the rank of major and was in charge of
the forgery department. It's very likely that he made passports that I used to travel. He was aware that there was intelligence that was collected. The Stasi was really good. They had about 1,000
people in West Germany, undercover agents, some
of them in government, and the central committee of the party, the decision-makers, ignored it because it didn't quite
fit in their worldview. It didn't quite fit into their plans, so. And one delicious thing that I just want to add onto this. When Gorbachev wrote his book
about perestroika and glasnost the East German rulers did not like it. They were much more orthodox. So they had to print the
books in translation. Guess where they wound up? They were piled up in the
hallways of the Stasi. They bought the entire print run. - It's fascinating. But let's backtrack. So Operation Barbarossa,
invasion to Hitler, to the Soviet Union, and then hopefully that leads us all the way to
the East Germany, West Germany after the end of the war. - So what happened was the Soviet Union rolled into the eastern part of Germany, and the Western allies
took a larger chunk, it was occupied by the three allies, the French, the English and the Americans. And the Eastern part was
occupied by the Soviet troops. And the Soviet troops
actually conquered Berlin. - Yeah.
- But in a contract, they decided that Berlin would be
ruled by the four allies. And they all had, you know,
had free access to that city. I was born in the East German part, which very quickly became
ruled by communist/socialists, the Communist Party and
the Socialist Party United. But the leaders of that new
party were all communists. - It's nevertheless called Democratic. - Yes, German Democratic Republic, which was formed a couple
of months after I was born. I was born into the
remote southeastern corner of East Germany. And interestingly enough,
genetically I'm only half German. The other-
- What's the other half? - The other half is Czech and Polish. - [Lex] Nice. - Because where I grew up, you know, I could walk to the Neisse River, which was the border with Poland, and it was only about an hour by bus to get to the Czech border. So that's why I'm a mix. - So, okay, so East Germany after the war was communist, socialists and then the West Germany was representing the Western
world with the democracy. - And what the United States did, this was really, really
very forward-looking, very strategic, the Marshall Plan, to rebuild the economy in the West as compared to what the Soviet Union did. Whatever they hadn't
destroyed on the way in, they took with them on the
way out for reparations because, you know, they
had every right to do that. But it was not a good
idea because, you know, East Germany was always
behind in economic development to their western counterpart. - So when you were young, as today, but when you were young, you were clearly an exceptional student. You're a brilliant academic superstar. Let's go to your childhood. What's a fond memory from
childhood that you have and being woken up to
the beauty of this world and sort of being curious about
all the mysteries around you that I think ultimately
lead to academic success? (Jack laughing) Or was it- - The fondest memory that
comes to mind is my first kiss. - How's that? Do you wanna go to the details of that? What'd you make of that? What'd you make of that kiss? What'd that teach you about yourself and human nature and all that? - It taught me, only in hindsight, at the time, I was just like, my God, I was head over heels in
love, I was 16 years old. And I knew in those days, I admired girls. I knew that girls were like,
sort of magical beings. They were not capable
of doing evil things. They were beautiful and
they had to be adored. And one of them actually loved me too. She came after me initially, right? - And that was like... That too was magical for you. - Oh, my God, yeah. And I, literally, I dedicated... That's when I started studying. Up until that point, I just like did whatever I had to do to be an A- student. And that's when I started
studying, and every A that I got, I dedicated to her, sometimes explicitly, because I knew I was gonna
take care of her, you know, as I grow up. - So you're gonna have to
work hard in this world to be somebody that could
be adored by those you love. - Yes, you're right. You know, that that kiss, (clears throat) the next day I was
running around in school with a grin in my face. - And maybe that, in some
way, that grin never fades. So what about the
heartbreak that followed? - Well, the heartbreak-
- Surely followed. - But just to expand
on this a little more, because that passion that I had was an indication that eventually love would play a big role in my life. I wasn't aware of it, I was just directed as this one girl, but- - But you understood that that feeling- - Oh, my God, yeah. - that taught you something
like that you're somebody that can feel those things and- - Absolutely.
- And that's a strong kind of part of who you are and therefore it will also be a part of directing your life trajectory. - Yeah, so we were an item for two years. I lost my virginity. - Congratulations.
- She was not a virgin at the time. My competitor was- - There always is a competitor. Isn't that how it works? - He studied medicine in college already. In which ways was he better than you? - He wasn't, he was older
and he was more experienced. And he was gonna be a doctor, but you know, I was there and he was not. - [Lex] Ah. - You know, presence wins. - Yeah, but you still had big dreams. You wanted to be a tenured professor. - [Jack] Yes, yes. - So you still want to outdo that guy. - Oh, yeah, and she eventually
told me that, you know, he was not in the picture anymore. So it was back and forth, back and forth. And our senior year we were an item and I was just dreaming
of, you know, the future. But sort of, we didn't
figure out that, you know, in those days, if she
went to college in Berlin and I went to college in Jena, and the distance between the two cities, it was too much for a
weekend visit, you know, public transportation was
very slow and nobody had cars. So- - So the circumstance of life, you drift apart.
- Yeah. And so we interacted
with a couple of letters, and then I got the goodbye letter. Oh, my God.
- That hurt? - I can still feel it. (Lex laughing) You know, when-
- That's a good thing that you could feel, the pain
that's still part of love. The pain of loss is still part of love. And then you kinda change that, you shape it and you give that love in deeper, more profound
ways to future people. - That's very well put. But at the time, it emptied me out. - [Lex] Yeah. If I had a tendency to, you know, to have suicidal thoughts,
I might have killed myself. - So would you say that was
one of the darker moments of your life? - Let me see. (Lex laughing) As a single moment, yes. So, you know, I still remember we had a mail slot in the front door and I was expecting a letter any day, and then there was the letter. I go upstairs into my bedroom and I opened it and I read it and I was just like, the life
went out of me, you know? - You're just there alone and you have to experience
this pain alone. And now you're deeply alone in this world. - Yes, because I didn't have a... There was no emotional
relationship with my parents. I literally had nobody. - So this love you have
in you had no place to go. - It was choked off, all right, but what I did was I
wanted to go on, right? And so I threw myself into
the study of chemistry. I outworked all of my fellow
students in a big way. I just, like, I worked my ass off and since I was pretty smart too, I just aced practically everything. And for the first two years in college, and look, we go to college,
there are all these pretty girls and there's dances and everything. We had this great student club where I didn't look at any girls. Eventually, I knew I
was going to, you know, want to have female companionship,
but love, uh-uh, no more. That hurts. (Lex laughing) There's a song that goes... ♪ Love hurts ♪ - Yeah, yeah, I know that one. That's true, there's actually many songs that have a similar message, yes. So during that time,
during your excellence, just being an exceptional
student of chemistry, let's go to your story. So in your book, "Deep Undercover: My Secret Life and Tangled Allegiances as a KGB Spy in America," and in the really, really
excellent podcast series that I've been listening to, people should definitely listen to, it's called "The Agent," you document your time as a KGB spy before, during, and after. Can you tell the story of when you first were
contacted by the KGB, how you were invited, the
offer to join was made? - Well, it was a big surprise, and I never thought of myself as a potential agent. You know, I was gonna
be a tenured professor and join the ruling elite because in Europe, tenured
professors are a few. It's not like in the
United States, you know, anybody who teaches at colleges has a title of professor. - [Lex] Easy now. - It's true.
- Yes. - [Jack] That's not a criticism. It's just a-
- 100%. So we should also clarify
that tenure professor or not, it is a very prestigious position throughout history of Europe. - Yeah. Yeah. - And I would say especially communist. I don't actually know the
full landscape of the respect, but at least in the Soviet
Union where I grew up, it's a prestigious position. - Absolutely was. And the town, you know, had about 100,000 people live there. And I would, it's a wild guess, but maybe 30 tenured professors, and they were part of the ruling elite. I was trying to do it as much as I can to live the good life, right, you know? You know, have access
to things that are nice. - Yeah, but I think the powerful thing about being a professor in that context of East
Germany is the prestige. - And the feeling of superiority. You know, I was full of myself. You know, when you are
the best of the best, and in my third year, I
received a scholarship, the Karl Marx scholarship,
that was limited to 100 concurrent
recipients in the country. So, my God, no, I was full of myself. I believed in myself,
hook, line, and sinker. And I was also... I got a lot of accolades from
teachers and fellow students. - They were feeding the ego. The old... I mean, you have to believe in yourself often when you're young to truly sort of-
- Right, right. - To excel, and you sure as heck did. - But, you know, as a
balance, you need a mentor, somebody who puts things in perspective, and I didn't have one. My father was a non-entity
and nobody else... They all looked up to me. I was an up-and-coming guy, right? - So there's no father figure
that put you in your place. - Not at all. And I give you one extreme example. It was down the road when I fathered a child out of wedlock. That was in my fifth year, I believe. The Communist Party in East
Germany was very moralistic. If you did that, they
would have a talk with you and give you, whatever,
a severe reprimand. Nobody even mentioned a word about this. Yeah, so this is how
this ego gets nurtured. But anyway, getting back to
how the KGB came in contact. So they most likely got knowledge of me by, you know, looking at Stasi records, the Stasi-
- What's Stasi? - Oh, that was East German secret police, Staatssicherheit, security for the state. - There's that word security again. - And they pretty much kept a record on everybody in the country. And so when you look through this, and this is what the KTB was looking for, they were looking for candidates, particularly for this kind of job that they had in mind for me, for candidates who were not, you know, in their mid 20s, who were
not fully developed yet, but mature enough to get there and still young enough, right? - 'Cause at that level of maturity, you can test whether they can handle this kind of a job.
- Yes, absolutely right. So, and one day I got a knock on my door, at my dorm room door, was on a Saturday. And they knew that I was by myself. How did they know it? We had a, I pieced this together, (Lex laughing) we had an exchange student
from the Soviet Union, and he was next door
to me and he, you know, he befriended me, so he
got to know me a little bit and the pattern was that my roommate would always go home for the weekend. And of course they also
knew which door to knock on, even though there were
no nameplates, right? So somebody knocks, and I knew it was a stranger because if it had been a student, the pattern was that we
would knock on the door and then go in. We wouldn't wait for
somebody to let us in. So I waited for 10 seconds and he didn't come in. I knew that it was a stranger,
I said, "Come on in." And in came a person
who spoke fluent German. So that was not a KGB guy,
that was a collaborator,. And so he started making
a bunch of small talk. He introduced himself as a representative of Carl Zeiss Jena, which was the optics company that made really, really
good optical instruments, was one of the best in the world. - So it's like the, you know, the super prestigious
company in that place. - Right, and he said, you know, that he was a representative
of that company and he would just wanna find out what my plans were after
graduating from college. And at that point I knew he
wasn't from Carl Zeiss Jena, because in those days
there was no recruitment. When you were done, if you were in the top
10% of the graduates, you would most likely pick to stay and get a doctorate, right? And the rest of them
were assigned, you know, where you had no choice. So that guy was an idiot. - [Lex] Mm-hmm. - He didn't know the basics about- - You interviewed him a
little bit to understand like- - [Jack] Oh, sure, you know, I started- - Like, feel out, is
this guy full of shit? - Yeah.
- Because, yeah, there's a stranger showing
up to your dorm room. - And at that point I
knew that he was Stasi, which is wrong, but it doesn't
matter because he was German and I had no idea that
the KGB would be involved. - Sorry to pause briefly. Did you have a sense... Did people know that there's
a Stasi type of organization, that there is a large number of people doing this kind of work in East Germany? In order for you to make that guess- - Yeah, we knew that the Stasi existed. We even had our James Bond, you know, we had a series called
"The Invisible Visor," where a Stasi employee in East German would go into West Germany
and hunt down Nazis. - Yes.
- So, yes, the Stasi was known to be there. - And admired in part or feared or both? - I thought they were
necessary and I admired them. - [Lex] James Bond? - Yes, the reason I did so, because I had no
information to the contrary. I never knew anybody personally or even, you know, somewhat removed, who was followed by the Stasi, was, you know, put in jail. I had no clue. I had no clue that they
did a lot of damage and that they were like
doing a lot of surveillance of the East German population the same way the KGB did
for the Soviet Union. So for me to be talking to
somebody from the Stasi, it raised my interest. I was curious what comes next, because I sort of knew
something interesting would be coming at me. And I had no other thoughts
about that at that point. So when he was finally, when he went for the kill
by reversing himself. He said, "You know, I gotta tell you that I really am not from Carl Zeiss Jena, I'm from the government." Okay, thank you for pointing that out. And then he asked this question, he says, "Can you imagine to one day work for the government?" And so I gave a pretty clever answer. I said, "Yes, but not as a chemist." So I answered the question
that he didn't ask. I helped him out. So we made an arrangement
to meet for lunch, which in Germany is the main meal, at the number one restaurant in Jena. You know, I still remember what I ate. - What was that?
- Rump steak with butter on top and french
fries, it was my favorite. Anyway, so when I get to the restaurant, I saw this fellow sitting in
the back there at the table and there was another person at the table. So I was a little bit hesitant because in those days it was not unusual for perfect strangers to share a table 'cause there weren't enough
tables and chairs and so forth. So I didn't know if I could approach him. But he got up and came to me
and he took me to the table and he said, "I want to introduce Herman. We worked with our Soviet comrades." Aha, KGB. And then he disappeared. He says, "I got something else to do." I never knew his name. He just handed me over to the KGB. - What was the relationship
between the KGB and the Stasis as collaborators, close collaborators or
just distant associates? - They were pretty close collaborators, as I told you that, you know, they bought forged documents
that the Germans made because the Germans
were better at forgery. They also exchanged information, but they didn't trust each other 100%. And I tell you why I know that. So they recruited me to
send me to West Germany. As I already said, East Germany had 1,000 agents over there. Why would they wanna have their own? - Yeah. Yeah, okay, this is a fascinating internal and external dynamic of distrust. - Yeah.
- Okay. So there you are, welcomed by the KGB. When did the offer, the invite come? - Well, that took a while. So Herman and I had an
unofficial relationship for about a year and a half. I would meet him maybe once
a week, once every two weeks, initially in his car, but then he took me to
a conspiratorial flat that was an apartment that was
occupied by a party member, a lady, single lady. When we came in, she would leave. She left us tea and cookies
and then we could freely talk. He also, at that time, gave me some West German
literature, magazines to read, which was of course forbidden. So already starting to
feel somewhat special. And as we were talking
about what they had in mind for me in general, I knew that I was gonna
be even more special because I would be above the law. I would operate outside the law of the countries I would go to as well as East Germany,
because, you know, the magazines. And eventually when I joined up, they told me I better watch
West German television, which was also not explicitly prohibited, but it was something that
could get you in trouble, so. - So on many levels, you're super special. You're the (indistinct).
- Yes, yes, yes. - So what was that recruitment
testing process like? Testing whether you have what it takes to be a KGB agent.
- Well, first of all, we had very in-depth talks, Herman and I, about life. And I still am very honest in sharing my feelings. - Philosophical or personal? - [Jack] Personal. - Personal.
- I even told him that I was shy around the girls. - He was giving you
relationship advice or what? How old was he? So what was the dynamic? Can you tell me, was it a father-son? Was it a cop?
- No, older brother. Older brother.
- Older brother. - Yeah, he was maybe
in his early to mid-30s and I was maybe 10 years younger. - And what languages did he speak? - He spoke German pretty well. - [Lex] But he's originally from Russia? - Yeah, with a Russian accent. So I got in trouble one time with him when I asked him, "Is
your real name Herman?" He didn't like that. - He didn't like it. Was he good with girls? - No, no. (Lex and Jack talking clamoring) I remember what he told me. He says, "You know, you
gotta understand one thing. They're looking for guys too." That's all. - Oh, girls are looking for guys too. - Absolutely, tough choice.
- Yeah. It's a competitive game, yeah. - Yeah, don't worry about it, you know, don't be so shy. - So that little flame of
love that we talked about... - Yeah.
- In all the shapes that it takes in our life. Did he talk to you about that? That that could be taken advantage of? That that could be used? Or was it implied? - Yeah, it was not very focused, not in great detail. So we talked about personal stuff and, you know, likes, dislikes. He gave me tasks. For instance, when my friend and I hitchhiked from East Germany
all the way down to Bulgaria, he told me to write a
report about it, what I saw. So fundamentally, he wanted
to see how well I can write and how well I can report,
how well I observe. He also asked me to write some profiles about fellow students. I don't believe that was for
them to give them to the Stasi. It was just like, how well
do I characterize people? Which that's important when you're talking about
when I was in the US, active in the US, I operated as a spotter. So I did exactly that. I wrote profiles about people. He also gave me some tasks to do that were rather unpleasant. - [Lex] Like what? - He would give me an address and the name of the people
who lived at the address. And he told me to go
there, ring the doorbell and find out something about a relative who lived in West Germany. That is undercover exploration, right? So you go, you make up a story and somehow win the
confidence of your target to tell you something
that you want to know. - Did that come naturally to you? - [Jack] No, no, I hated it. - The charisma involved? - Which part did you hate?
- Yeah, charisma. I think I didn't know that I had it. - It took you some time to discover - Because, you know, I always was, and I still am
to some degree, a bit shy. I lost a lot of the shyness
after moving to the south because here in the United States, because you don't have
to be shy, you know? (Lex laughs) - You can now let your love shine. - That's exactly right. But anyway, I hated doing
that, but I did it well. I still remember, in
those days, I had a beard and I rang the bell and- - [Lex] Tall handsome fella? - Yeah, and I looked the part. I said, "I'm a sociology
student and I'm doing a survey," and I asked a whole bunch of questions. "Would you like to answer the questions?" "No problem." And then I directed the conversation to the lady's private life and da da. And she actually gave me information. She volunteered information
that I wanted to know. - Beautiful.
- I did well. And the other one that I didn't like, but I also did well with, when Herman drove me around the city and showed me a building and he said, "Find out what
organization is in there, what they do, maybe get
to know some people." And I did that pretty well also. You know, you have to
be inventive, you know, to come up with a cover story, And, and I've always been quite inventive. You know, I'm a storyteller at heart and I didn't know it then. But, you know- - But there was still
something unpleasant about it. - [Jack] Yes, yes. - Which part was unpleasant? - Well, the shyness, and then, you know... You know, I wasn't very comfortable lying. I became comfortable down the road. But, you know, I was brutally honest and never hid anything of me. But, you know, over time you
lose that uncomfortable feeling and you rationalize that you gotta do it. There's only one way, right? And you're serving a good cause. - So you were talking to
Herman for a year and a half. - A year and a half. - And then how did that progress? - Yes, so he finally, I guess, he sent a report to
headquarters in Berlin. And then he sent me on a three-week quote, unquote, "practice trip" to Berlin. That was the first time when I had, like a conspiratorial meeting where I had an address and
a time and a code phrase and I met another agent. His name was Boris. These names were meaningless. They were all like cover names, right? - So what was the code and the meaning? What was the... Can you give a little more detail? - That code I don't remember. - No, not the code, but like
what do you mean by code? So what was-
- Oh, I tell you the code we used when I met while I was active. I would approach the other person who I thought may be
the person I wanna meet. We both had something with us or on us to make us more likely
to be the right person. And I would ask him the
following questions, "Excuse me, I'm looking for Susan Greene." And he would answer,
"Yes, you must be David." Stupid. If I ask a stranger,
they would look at me, "How could I help you?" So, you know it's the wrong guy. - Yeah, it's just a low probability that the right thing would be said. - Oh, absolutely.
- So, it's nice handshake. And it seems like a safe statement. If it's not the right person- - Exactly right.
- You'll just come off absurd or crazy or whatever. - You would've made a good secret agent. You know exactly-
- How do you know I'm not? We'll discuss this with a... I'm dressed like one. Actually, yeah, were there any dress code? - No, just fit in. - Fit in, no matter what. And then be creative. - Yes.
- Figure out ways to fit- - Right. So anyways, he gave me some tasks and since I had rented a room in a house, he gave me western literature to read. And we spent time together and there was a practice run to West Germany. Actually there were two. And that was very important. In hindsight, I figured that out. So I traveled to West Germany, no, not, to West Berlin
with an East German passport that was stamped, that that individual was allowed to go to the West. And there was a part of the border that was only guarded by Soviet troops and that's where they
smuggled me into West Germany. I got on the subway and then appeared in West Berlin? No Americans, no birds, no French knew that I had entered - Forged documents or not at that time? - No, no, this was an
East German passport. It was real.
- Okay, okay. - Okay? And the first trip, all
they wanted me to do was just walk around, you know, smell the air, you know, have a beer or whatever, and eat a sausage and then come back. The second trip, I had a task very similar to the one that I had back in Jena, to ring the doorbell someplace
and talk to some people. And that worked very well also. - I should mention that you
talk about that, you know, eat a sausage, drink some beer, I suppose that's a good test
too, to see how you behave. under western, like when first introduced to the Western college, like, this is why I might not make a good agent, is when I first came to the United States and the supermarket. Like bananas, as many
bananas as I want to eat. (Jack laughing) I think that would break me. - [Jack] It's a shock. - Just, it's a shock to have
access to Western culture. - You're getting very close to the reason they
actually made me do this, these two practice trips. When I first emerged on
West Berlin territory, I felt highly uncomfortable. That was at the enemy, right? - [Lex] Yeah. - And I saw the cops everywhere. And even those cops had
like light blue uniforms. They weren't standouts. So I was wondering, you know, if they knew that, you know, I had like KGB on my forehead. - So you were paranoid that
they would know, they would see. - I was scared, but I overcame that. - So can we just linger on that? Because I suppose that's a natural, like if I give anybody on
the street the mission, to do the mission you had to
do is they would be paranoid. That's the natural human
feeling is, "Am I being watched? Do they know?" Like if you try to steal
something from a store, there's going to be a feeling
like, "Are they watching me? Are the cameras watching? Are the people watching me? They all know," that kind of stuff. So you have to over, or
you have to be somehow rugged and robust to that kind
of feeling and overcome it. - Yes, exactly. And something very interesting happened. While I was being trained in Berlin, I met a classmate of mine from high school and he confided to me that he was recruited by the Stasi to go as a spy to West Germany. And he also had this practice trip, and he peed in his pants. He went back and told
them, "I can't do that." - Just from the terror, the- - [Jack] Yes. - That paranoia. - Now this guy's career was over. He had an engineering degree. He was a pretty smart guy. He was just for the rest of his life, and he's still alive, I believe, floating around and, you know, trading in model railroads
and stuff like that. - You mean, do you think that
experience broke him, or- - They wouldn't let him back in. - Oh, I see, they... - Yeah. - So it's a test that if
you fail, you pay the price for that fear.
- I had no idea that, you know, something bad would happen if I failed that test, but I didn't. - [Lex] Yeah. - I didn't fail. So, and this led then
to the offer, all right? And after, you know,
Boris was happy with me, and he told his boss, who was most likely the head of the KGB in East Berlin. And I had an appointment to meet- - [Lex] In East Germany? - Yes, in East Germany,
yeah, all of East Germany. - Yes.
- That's right. An appointment to meet with him. And as we walk into the room,
there was this huge desk and a little guy sitting behind it, just like little, and unimpressive. Nice. A lot of paraphernalia like, you know, had a bust of Gusinsky on his desk and some paintings, Lenin and so forth. But when the guy opened his
mouth, he went like, "Whoa." A huge psychological energy. He spoke only Russian now. And initially he would, you know, start about with five
minutes worth of propaganda. Why we're doing what we're
doing, I didn't need that. I understood most of it, but when I didn't understand, I asked Boris to translate
and then he sprung it on me and I was not prepared. He said, "So what, are you in or not?" And I was, "No, I'm gonna..." I hadn't made up my mind. I wasn't expecting that would come. And so I said to him, "I'm not really trained, you know? There's a lot of things I need to learn." And I came up with a couple
of really stupid things. One not so stupid, but the other one was, I
don't know why I said that. I said, for instance, "I need
to learn how to drive a car and to type with a typewriter." And he got really annoyed and he said, "Don't worry
about it, we'll train you. But I gotta tell you, we
need people who are decisive. So you got until tomorrow noon
to give Boris your decision." That made for a sleepless night. - So what was going through your mind? - Well, I had... This was almost 50-50. I knew I was gonna have a
huge career, a good career. I was on my way. Because, you know, I was already employed by the university as an assistant professor. - So that career would
be, to become a professor, become a tenure professor,
be a world class... - Yes. Jena had become my hometown. I really loved the place. It was my oyster. And my family was my basketball team, I was- - You love playing basketball. - Oh, absolutely.
- So that's what you mean. Yeah, so this is home. This is home, this is where your love is. - This was home.
- This is where you're comfortable. Did you understand that
the choice involved leaving the home behind?
- Yes. Yes. And the one thing I didn't have, the two things I didn't have, an emotional relationship with my mother, and I didn't have a steady
girlfriend at the time. - I think Freud would have
a lot to say about that. But yeah, go ahead. The connection between those two, but yes. (Jack laughing) Yeah, I'm sure. - By the way, my friend, Gunter, the one who worked for the Stasi, the Stasi tried to
recruit him as an agent, but he had a love
relationship at the time. And he said politely,
"No, I won't, I can't." - So you didn't have, that's the one thing that really could- - [Jack] Would've held me. - Would've held you to this place is love. - So you got the career on the
one hand, my basketball team, the town that I would be
part of the ruling elite of, and then we had this great adventure and the ability to
contribute to the victory, the worldwide victory of communism and stick it to the Nazis. And of course the feeling
that you're really special. - [Lex] Yeah, James Bond. - Yeah. - The question, do I want
to be a tenure professor or James Bond? - [Jack] Yes. - As funny as that sounds, that was probably a difficult decision. - It was a difficult decision,
but fundamentally it wasn't, and it wasn't my zeal
to help the revolution. It was my, what they called, what the KGB was looking
for in a character that they would send over, a well-controlled
inclination to adventure. Okay? - Yeah, yeah, James Bond,
what are you gonna say? And the love of women, yeah. (both laughing) - Yes. I gotta put this in right here because I'm telling people I have two things in
common with James Bond. These are my initials, JB, and I got the girl too, three times. - Yeah. I mean, and that's adventure. - Yeah. And the ability to travel to the West, because the West was closed off to us. We could go to foreign countries, but they all had to be
communist countries. You know, I wanted to see Paris because I had fallen in love with Honore Balzac, who wrote- - [Lex] Balzac, yeah. - A phenomenal set of
novels that I just ate up. And so when I eventually did go to Paris, I knew all the places already
because he described them all. But anyway, so that one, it was 51-49. But eventually it, you know, when you do the side by side
intellectual comparison, that doesn't work. It becomes a tie, and then, you know, you just go with your gut
and I say, "Hey, I'm in." - So now that you
successfully passed the test and you were sitting with
this unimpressive man and had the invite and had to sleep on it and have made the decision to join, what was next? - I was just told, you know,
that I was being recruited by the State Department of East Germany. I was going to become a diplomat. I must have had some paper, but I forgot. Because just by saying so,
that wouldn't have worked. - There's some kind of document that says (indistinct).
- Yeah, yeah. And that was the only entanglement you had to that place. No love, no... - That's right.
- Just the basketball... - Giving a basketball was huge for me. I loved playing that game. I started playing
basketball when I was 18. That's a little late. - Are you better offensive, defensive? What do you like more? Do you like to shoot from a distance? Do you like to lay up? - I was a runner. I was very quick on my feet and I was a good jumper too. I typically played the
four position, you know? - What's that? - Forward. - Oh, the forward position, yeah. - Forward position. But anyway, so that was the
hardest for me to give up. And the other thing that
I remember I had to do, to hand in my party document to the party secretary of the university, and he made a comment, "Yeah, we probably won't
hear much about you, but we know that you're gonna
do something very important." So he sort of had an inkling that I'm gonna go someplace undercover, or something like that. And then I packed my bags and got on a train to Berlin for another one of those secret meetings with my new handler, Nikolai. And here came another test that would've been quite easy to fail. So, all right, I had lived in Jena for
six years in a dorm, even when I became an
employee of the university. They didn't have apartments. I was still living in a dorm in a single room with a
bed, a chair, and a table and a toilet down the hallway. So I figured, you know, Berlin, KGB, I'm gonna get a nice apartment, right? And so Nikolai took me into his car. We started talking a little bit, and then he said, "I have
a task for you already. Your first task is to find
yourself a place to live." I mean, I don't think
I showed it in my face, but you know, my heart dropped like down into my pants. I knew this was nearly impossible because there was a
severe shortage of housing everywhere in Germany, East Germany. And all the apartments and homes were controlled by the government. You know, there were long waiting lists. And I knew couples that
were promised maybe to get an apartment five
years down the road, so... And then they would postpone
their decision to have a child. Anyway, this was impossible. Well, you know, but this was a test, okay? And so, because I had to be inventive now, I had to figure out how to get out of an impossible situation. I didn't realize it then at all. I just, like, went with the flow. You know, what do I do? So what I did, I took the train, the city train to the very last stop, a little town called Erkner. And I wandered around in that town and knocked on doors and asked people if they knew where somebody
might have a place to live. And after a couple of hours, somebody said, "There's this lady that..." And they gave me the address and I talked to the lady and she said, "I happen to have a place where you might be able to stay." It was an outbuilding. I don't know what it served. It was not a garage. It was concrete and it
had a bed and a chair, a running cold water and
a stove, a cold stove. That was going to be my- - Pretty basic, pretty basic. That's your-
- Pretty basic, are you kidding me? (laughing) That's the... - [Jack] Toilet across
the yard, of course. - Yeah. Well, all the essentials. What are you complaining about? So you were... You had to run the special... James Bond had to run
the special operation out of the outhouse.
- Yes. (Jack laughs) To my credit, and I think that established part of my reputation. I didn't complain at all to Nikolai, not- - That was part of the test, probably. - Yeah, I just told him,
you know, I found something. And so for six months, I
would get up in the morning, get on the train and walk around in the city, you know, did some operational stuff,
operational training. I went to the library, did a
lot of reading in the library, and then I found a basketball
team that I could join. So at least I could take
a shower twice a week. And apparently, it took about six months, that I was still on probation, because after six
months, Nikolai, one day, we were still meeting in his car, he handed me a key and he said, "I'm gonna take
you to your new apartment." And I didn't know this, you know, that now I was really in, okay? Imagine, you know, the hurdles you have to jump over and how many times you can fail, but, you know- - But not complaining, not asking questions. - [Jack] Yes. - I mean, that was something
you've written about, I think you wrote that "bosses do not like to hear
complaints or problems; they prefer solutions." - [Jack] That's right. - So what was your interaction
like with the bosses? Is that essentially represent the way it went forward as well?
- Yeah. - No complaints, solve the problem.
- No complaints, no arguments, no I know this better. I was taking it all in. Now the technical guys, you know, they taught me something I
didn't know that made sense. What Nikolai, some of the
stuff that he taught me was somewhat questionable. He was a generalist and there's some things he
didn't know really well. So I could have like asked, and probed a little bit, but I didn't. So I just played along. So this new apartment, it was a studio, it had a kitchen with running cold water. And the bathroom was just one flight down, the toilet, not a bathroom, one flight down the stairs. - [Lex] It's an upgrade. - It was a big upgrade. And he gave me, I think
he gave me 1,000 Mark to buy furniture. And in that place,
actually, I also bought a TV and started watching West
German television, so. So I finally had a decent place to stay. And my training in Berlin
took about two years. - What was the training? What were the interesting
aspects to the training? What were sort of, if you
do an overview systematic of what was the training
process, what was difficult, what are some insights that generalize to the training process of
what it takes to be a KGB spy? - Right. So let me start with a trade craft. So I was taught Morse code. That took a while. I was instructed in how to, you know, use a shortwave radio
and to receive, you know, the shortwave transmissions
with Morse code. I was taught an encryption
and decryption algorithm. Manual algorithm.
- Manually, yep. - You might be interested that eventually I figured out
at least one of the patterns The algorithm was such that the, and this was all about digits like, and the algorithm was
such that in the end, the digits that were used
to decipher other digits that were sent to me via shortwave radio, let's say if there were 100 digits, there were an equal number
of ones, twos, threes, fours, five, six, and
seven and up until zero, and I was told that these algorithms, these manual algorithms were good for about 300 uses. After that, they could
still be deciphered. I'm assuming nowadays that
wouldn't take as much. - Yeah, with computers for sure. But they're probably designed in a way that you can manually sort of... It's efficient and convenient
to use them manually. - Well-
- It's not to optimize cryptographic security, it's like the balance, security and, like, humans
being able to actually- - Yeah, no, I gotta disagree. It was neither efficient nor convenient. It took a long time. - [Lex] So it wasn't designed well. - What was significantly easier to do, but that would require you to have spy paraphernalia with you. This is what's called a one-time pad. So you have the set of numbers on a sheet of paper that
had to be developed. I had to use iodine to
make those numbers visible. Those are known to be unbreakable unless they are used multiple times, the same sheet of paper. Because you know, the person who encrypts has the same set of numbers
as the person who decrypts and one time use, you cannot
figure out what the message is. - Oh, interesting, but this is a quick way to communicate from one person to another one time?
- Yes. - One time. - One time, but I had a pad with multiple sheets of paper, all right? And the reason that they
gave me a manual one is because literally, I had only, when I wound up in the United States, I had only one thing with
me that only a spy can have, and that was a writing pad where the first 10 pages or so were impregnated with
a trace of a chemical that was used for secret writing. But you really would have to know what you're looking for to,
you know, you see this pad, it was bought at, you know, Walmart, and - Can you explain a little further, what is the chemical here,
what are we talking about? So I don't understand how it's possible to have a physical pad
that does the encryption without any computing. How does it encrypt?
- All right, so... No, no, it doesn't do any work, you know? The communication, the
encrypted communication was a set of groups of five, five digits and another five and there's always a gap in between. And so let's say if I get
this radio transmission, I write them all down, then I develop my algorithm
and then I do mathematics, either addition or subtraction. The resulting set of digits then had a one-to-one
correlation to letters. - And this is an easy way
to then do the correlation? Got it, okay, I got it.
- Yes. - Well, that's cool. And you're saying the
algorithm was not efficient? It was not- - Oh, the manual, that took a long time and you can't make an error. - Right. Would you know where... Is it easy to debug? No, no.
- No, you do it twice. - You do it twice and
that's how you check, double check.
- If it's identical, then you know. - But like, if it's not-
- If it's not, then one is right and the other is wrong, then you gotta do it again.
- Don't make mistakes. - No, that's right, and I really didn't. But anyway, so I was learning that. I was also told that I was required to become proficient in another language, and they gave me a choice
and I picked English. - [Lex] What was the other one? - Oh, no, they gave, pick
one, French, you know, whatever is spoken in the West. - Got it. What would be second to you? Would you think French because of Paris? What would you... Why English? - English was a no-brainer because I was a straight
A student in English without studying. It came so easily to me. So that's why I chose it, right? So that was that. Then I was taught the basics of counter-surveillance, you know, some trickery and
surveillance detection routes where you wander around in
the city for three hours and determine whether you're
being followed or not. That requires you to
plan the route very well. I give you one example
that will illustrate that. My favorite spot, when I was in Moscow, I
did a lot of that also, and my favorite spot was
a not well traveled road. It went down the hill and curved. And at the bottom of the hill
there was a telephone booth. And when you opened the door and pick up the telephone,
you have to look back. So it wasn't like this, right? It wasn't a giveaway. This was normal, it was natural. So yeah, I could see if somebody would come walking after me, you know, these kinds of things. Or you would, you know, use public transportation, big buildings where you needed to use an
elevator and see who's... Because surveillance, the
object of surveillance is to never lose sight of the individual who you're surveilling because at that point,
you may miss the window where he does something
that you're looking for. So somebody always has
to come close, right? - Did you have to also study surveillance? - No, only counter-surveillance. And what helped me, and in all my training, you know, I would have a competition with the folks that were following me, and me. And I beat them every time. They were at a disadvantage because one of them
always had to be close. And if you saw the same face twice, you knew that you were being followed. And I had a very, very
good memory for faces. - So basically figure out a fixed route and then a fixed route that
allows you to survey the area and then record the faces
you've seen inside your mind. And if you see multiple
times a single face, that's a bad sign. - And they could use different clothes - [Lex] Yeah. - What they didn't have was face masks. - Yeah.
- The CIA does nowadays. They can give you a different
face within seconds. - Oh, my God.
- Yeah. - So how... I mean, again, you talk about paranoia. - [Jack] Uh-huh. - Is that part of the... Is that a big part of the job counter-surveillance, like
being constantly paranoid that you're being watched? - Yeah, I was supposed to. - Isn't that quite stressful? So is that one of the... Is that actually an
effective way to operate? - No, but it sort of becomes a routine. I was told to do it while in the US once a month, and- - Okay, it's like a cleaning out. - Oh, not every day. No, no, no, no, no, once a month or before I would, say, mail
a letter with secret writing. So I was sure that, you know, nobody saw me put an envelope into- - [Lex] Got it. - A post box. - So this is one of the
tools in your toolbox. So there's Morse code, there's the decryption and encryption, there's the car surveillance, - Photography. - [Lex] Photography? - Making microdots. You know what a microdot is? - [Lex] No, what's a micro? - Well, you take a photograph and you use a microscope in reverse and make that photograph really small, so small that it's like the head of a pin, that can be used to hide
under a postage stamp. In reality, I knew how to make them, but in reality they never asked me to make use of that technique. - So it's a sort of an encryption
mechanism for photographs? - Yeah, so what we do
nowadays, embed code in PDFs and stuff like that, right? - Yeah, beautiful, okay, all right. So that was a training process, both in the physical space and sort of algorithmically. Is there other things? - Oh, you bet. Interestingly enough, the first book I was given to read was the history of this communist
party of the Soviet Union. - Oh, so understand,
yeah, that's interesting. 'cause you said you had to
read Western literature. - [Jack] Yeah, that too. - How much reading? So history, how much history
of politics, geopolitics, culture?
- Not much more, but they made me read that document. Other than that I wasn't supposed
to study the Soviet Union. I wasn't supposed, that was not... And I didn't, when they sent me to Moscow, it wasn't to learn Russian, right? It was to learn English. The second document they gave me was the Constitution of West Germany. And then I got lots of
magazines and stuff like that. As I told you, I was also told to watch West German television, which I embraced with a vengeance because it was better than East German. So I would get up in the morning
and have a little breakfast and watch the German
version of "Sesame Street." - And that helps you get an
understanding of the culture. - Oh, you bet.
- Because if you have to do any kind of interaction,
any kind of spying, then you have to be able to
effectively educate yourself. Well, you also have to know, like, and that would've been easier if they had sent me to West Germany near all the soccer teams, you know, stuff that everybody knows. When I came to the US, I knew very little stuff
that everybody knows. That's why I had to be very
cautious and, you know, take it in over time. Anyway. And the the last thing I wanna mention is I was strongly encouraged to expand my cultural education. In other words, go to visit
museums, go to the theater, not so much movies, opera, read books from all kinds of authors. That was important to them. And once a month I had to
write a report what I did. But the interesting thing, there was no curriculum,
there was no agenda, there were no check marks. It was all ad hoc, you know, now you do this and then you do that. And a lot of this also, they relied on my initiative again. - I mean, that's part
of the evaluation too. - [Jack] You bet. - Are you able to have creativity? It's interesting that
they're, like, developing a James Bond type of
character here, which is... What's the reason going to the opera? As you become cultured
in a certain kind of way where perhaps that makes you
more charming, more charismatic in terms of your ability
to integrate yourself in different situations. - You are absolutely right. When I came to the US, after
about two years roughly, I was cultured enough to
not make a bad impression at a diplomatic soiree in
Washington DC, I mingled freely. - Yes.
- All right? And so the whole idea was for me to sort of reach
into the upper realms of society where the targets would
be juicier than, you know, the worker bees. - (sighs) And how did
you end up in Moscow? Why? How? What is that journey? - Well, so I told you I
started studying English. So I started back from scratch. You know, they paid for a tutor and I went from, like, English 101. I went through that in a couple of months. And then I got another guy
with whom I expanded this. We had conversations rather
than working from a textbook. And I worked like a maniac. I threw myself into the study of English like you wouldn't believe. And my inspiration came
from Vladimir Lenin. I had read somewhere in a book
that when Lenin was in exile, he studied German and he learned
100 German words every day, new German words. So I started reading newspapers and every word that I didn't know, I wrote down on an index
card, German, English, and I piled them up. And so I really learned 100
new English words every day. I know this because I counted them. And I had a system how to do this. So you take your index card and you have five categories, it's a really good way
to learn rote by rote. So you got category one,
that's the new ones, and you got category five. So you start with five. Five you already had right four times. If you have it right again, it goes- - It gets upgraded.
- Goes into the archive. - Oh, like long-term cold archive, yeah. - Four, if you get it
right, it goes to five. If you get it wrong, it
gets relegated to three. And so you go through this and occasionally I would
throw the archived things back into one. So I really acquired a
phenomenal vocabulary. When I was done with my English, my vocabulary was significantly higher than the average American because I didn't discriminate. Whatever word I didn't know I learned, which is not necessarily the best way because, you know, English
has a lot of synonyms, right? And one synonym is usually
the preferable one. And when I first interacted with people, I very often used the
one that wasn't as good. And people found that I, you know, I have an interesting way of talking. They didn't know what that meant, but- - Yeah, well, so it builds a
good foundation for a language, just getting a large vocabulary. - Yes.
- It's really interesting, there's something I do, which
is called space repetition, which is a programmatic way
of doing this kind of system that you've developed yourself, which is, if you successfully
remember a thing, it's going to be a longer time before it brings it up to you again. Now that requires a computer to keep track of the information. If you have cards, that's a
really interesting pile system. One, two, three, four, five. You upgrade it. One, two, three, four, five. Maybe I wouldn't go to the archive and go to pile one right away. Maybe I would go to like, I don't know,. pile five perhaps is probably
the right place to put it, 'cause you have to go
through that full step again. But that is a really
powerful way to learn, definitely language, but also facts. Like people that go to medical school, different
- Yes, disconnected facts. - [Lex] Yeah. - And you pretty much, when you're done, you know what you know. - You don't have to-
- But then again, to use it, to integrate it into
the music of language, that's more difficult, that's
what you talking about. - Exactly right. Exactly right. - There's a charm, I mean, maybe it's not good for spycraft, but there's a charm to this kind of, to having an accent and
using words incorrectly, but confidently, because
language isn't a simple formula, language is the play of words. So actually using the
incorrect synonym, you know, instead of saying I'm cold,
saying I'm chilled or something. Like, using offbeat words can
actually be part of the charm. So it's interesting, if you can learn how
to use that correctly. 'Cause I've known a bunch of people with the Russian accent and
I feel like they get away with saying a lot of ridiculous shit, (Jack laughing) because they're able to
sort of leverage the charm of the non sequiturs. - And by the way, by
the way, just one thing. You talked about using a computer. When I had my first personal computer, I actually wrote a program that does that. - It does that? By the way, when was that? 'Cause you were a world
class programmer for a time. You were a very good programmer. When did the birth-
- My first PC was probably 1984. - 1984, when did you fall
in love with programming? - When I went to college in the US and part of the core curriculum was that you were required
to take a course in computer and it was mostly just, you know, talk. But we also had to learn a language. We had to write some programs in FORTRAN, which was Watfiv at the time. It was a dumped down FORTRAN. But listen, so I see the ability, I see what you can do with this. I programmed a sign curve and then I divided the sign curve into really, really small rectangles and then ran the program and
it came up with the right area. Wow, this is great. - That's incredible. It's incredible. It's so powerful. You're creating a little helper. It helps you understand the world, to help you analyze the world and so on. We'll return to that
'cause it's interesting. You have so many interesting
aspects to your life. But in Moscow, so- - Yeah, no, let me, how I was sent to Moscow, okay? So one day I had a visitor from Moscow and he came to visit me in my apartment together with Nikolai. And, you know, we talked and then he said, "So how's your English?" I pulled a book from the shelf and said, "I can read that without the help of a dictionary." "Oh, that's interesting." And he said, "You know what? We're gonna send you a tape recorder and you just talk, say
something, you know, for 20 minutes, whatever
you wanna talk about." They sent this thing and two weeks later I
was on a plane to Moscow. (Lex chuckling) Because I also spoke English, sort of the British variety of English, with not a strong German accent, because I've always had the ability to imitate others and sounds. That was an innate ability. You know, when we were
in a lab, as students, I would very often do monologues imitating East German comedians. You know, I just-
- Do like impressions. - Yes, yes. I'm not good enough to
make a living out of it. But that raised some interest. And so they sent me to Moscow. That was the first time
on a plane, by the way. And I had a conversation with
two ladies who spoke English. One was a Russian, a professor
at Lomonosov University. She was obviously KGB. That was her cover. And the other one was
an American born lady. - Oh, by the way, she
was an actual professor and using that as a cover
or is it just a story? - No, she said she was a professor. She may have taught there too, and- - That's an interesting distinction. One is like a story you tell people - No.
- And one is like, you legit are doing the thing, but are also as a cover.
- Yeah. - Anyway, that's an interesting aspect of how to be a good liar. You might as well live the lie. - Yeah, exactly right. And the other one was a middle-aged... The Russian was pretty young. The other one was middle-aged American. And so we talked for
maybe a couple of hours and then they withdrew
and I was left alone. Eventually, my liaison, he came back in and he said it was close, but the American thinks
you can actually become, you get close enough to
becoming a native speaker of American English. And he said the Russian was very doubtful. And so I think, it was a tie, literally. Wishful thinking prevailed. So within a couple of weeks,
I was moving to Moscow. - Mm-hmm. And what was the task in Moscow? And how long were you in Moscow? - Two years. - And what was the task there? Is it training or is it espionage? - No, it was training. - [Lex] Training. - So the American born became my tutor. I met with her twice a week. I also listened to a lot of BBC, shortwave BBC worldwide. I read more English books. - So a lot of that was about the language and the culture of English, of American. - And I did phonetics exercises. - Nice.
- Every night. I had a tape that was
about a half hour long, and they would say a word and I would repeat the word,
say a word, repeat the word. And it's mostly about
the vowels, by the way, most of the accent. And particularly people, let's say coming from German into English, but also Russian, it's the vowels. - Are we talking about the... So you would have a single word, - A word.
- Like apple, and you would just say apple. - [Jack] Yes. - American English or British English? - No, American English. And I give you one example
that almost nobody gets right. The difference between hot and hut. - [Lex] Mm. - You know what-
- Yeah, yeah. - You know what they-
- Hot and hut, yeah. And a German speaker, it's very tough. - You know which one, or
for everyone it's different? For example, I could
say this on a podcast, something that my brother struggles with, I struggle with too, when I first came to this
country to learn English, is there's differences, there's
embarrassing differences like beach and bitch. (Jack laughing)
Right? And as a young kid also,
you get so nervous. I don't wanna say the wrong thing. I can also say that this
is almost as a jokey thing, but there's a famous
philosopher, Immanuel Kant, and you can guess which other
word is very similar to that. So there's a nervousness
about, what is that? That's interesting, I mean, and Germans probably
have a different tension of like, what is hard to learn, the difference between the
pronunciation of the vowels or the control of the vowels. Yeah, it's interesting. So you had to really
master this daily exercise. - And, you know, and
this was my discipline. I did this every night,
routine, boring as hell. So English was the focus. And I also had interaction
with some agents who had operated in the
United States as diplomats, on a diplomatic cover. They would come and talk to
me a little bit and tell me, and sort of prepare me
what was ahead of me. And then I did a whole lot
of operational training, particularly surveillance detection. That was big. They also taught me how
to drive a car in Moscow. - Finally, the one skill you needed. What's surveillance detection? - Okay, so this is when you find out whether you're being followed. - Ah, got it, got it, got it. So it's the anti, yeah, gotcha. - The abbreviation that's used in- - [Lex] In countries. - Yes. In intelligence circles is SDR, surveillance detection route. You know, when they say
that, you know what that is. And that was it. And a few other things,
you know, one-offs, for instance, I was once taught to read silhouettes of ships. When you see a ship from a distance, what kind of a ship it might be. They thought this would come in handy. Actually, there was in 1982, Andropov started a campaign, it was... Now I forget the name,
Operation something something, where everybody who was in the West was supposed to look for signs that the West was getting ready for a war. And everybody had an
object to pay attention to. I had a harbor, a military harbor in New Jersey near Red Bank that was
called Earle Weapons Station. And the code name for that was early. So they asked me to just wander by there to see if there was
something unusual going on because the Soviet Union
were, at that point, it was Ronald Reagan, were really afraid that
Reagan was gonna start a war. They were absolutely 100% afraid of him. - Is there something memorable
to you on a personal level, on a philosophical level,
about your time in Moscow, something that kind of stays with you, outside of the training stuff maybe, like the details of the training? - You'll love the answer. You will love the answer. - [Lex] I've already guessed. - I was given tickets to two
performances by Americans. There was a theater troop
that played our town, and then there was this, I
forget the name of the guy, but you may not be old enough, have you ever watched "Hee Haw"? - Maybe. - It was a country music
show, real kitschy. But the star of "Hee Haw" was giving a concert in Moscow. And I guarantee you at least
half the audience were KGB. (Lex laughing) - Oh, man. - And at the other end, the opposite of a highlight was my visit to the mausoleum where
Lenin is still today. There was nothing. You know, he was my hero, but he looked like a wax figure. And you walk by there, there was nothing inspirational. It was not a religious
experience, nothing. It was a big old nothing. - Did your faith and belief in communism start to crumble at some point here? - No.
- Is that around... That was still pretty strong? - What I did notice that the
standard of living in Moscow was significantly lower
than in East Germany. In the supermarkets, you could expect with reliability that you can find canned
fish and mineral water. Everything else was whatever. And if you saw a line at
a store, you just line up. You don't even ask what they have because if you don't like
it, somebody else will. It was not poverty, but it was close to poverty. There were a lot of
drunken men in the streets. And-
- This is the '80s? - [Jack] No, this is the late '70s. - Late '70s. - Mid to late '70s. And also they had these high
rise apartment buildings that looked pretty good from the front, but you went into the backyard. - [Lex] I know. - Ouch, you know? - Yeah, you're describing
my childhood here. Okay.
(Jack laughing) - Okay, sorry. - But it's interesting,
even with a professor, even with everything
else, it's interesting because I think the standard
of living was much lower. You're right, even in Moscow. - Yeah, absolutely was. The one thing that they always had, at least in my days, in those two years, there was always fresh
bread in the bulochnayas. - [Lex] Yeah. - Always.
- Yeah. That's probably one of the
memories I have of childhood is, well, you're hungry a lot,
but when you eat, it's bread. - [Jack] Yeah, and the bread was good. - It was good, I mean, I actually wonder, I wonder how good it was, but I remember it being incredibly good. - To me it was really good. And, you know, you had it from white to very dark and all the varieties. The other thing that was good was, if you knew where to get it, Stolichnaya, was four rubles. - Not only is it good vodka, but it's a cheap vodka, I like it. - Yeah, but you had to
know where, you know, this would be like holes
in the wall someplace. - Well, I think a lot
of the way they operate, I wonder if East Germany's this way, but a lot of the ways that Moscow operate is you kind of, you had to know. - Yes.
- Like there's a very kind of, if you make the right friends, if you give money to the right guy, the guy, the friend of
the friend of the friend is gonna hook you up. And there's a culture
that this is how you work around a very big bureaucracy. - [Jack] A underground economy. - Yeah, underground economy, yeah. Which is a, boy, such a stark contrast between that and the United States, the capital system. Yeah, that was a very
big culture shock to me to understand the fundamentally different way of life. But the interesting thing is, human nature pervades both systems. And there is something
about the Russian system that reveals human nature more intensely because of the underground nature of it. Because you get to deal
with greed and trust and all those kinds of things. And the United States,
there is much more power to the rule of law. So there's rules and
people follow those rules. They had to break the rules nonstop. - Well, in East Germany and Russia, I believe theft, if you
could get away with it, was part of your economic activity. - [Lex] Yeah. (Lex laughs) - I have a friend, you know, who I went to school with
up until my fourth year and we reconnected, and he
told me how he survived. You know, he would just steal stuff and then sell it or trade it. - Yeah, thefts, I mean, it's
a relative concept, you know? - [Jack] You are taking stuff. - Bribery, all those kinds of things. People, you know... Corruption, you know,
it's a relative term. No, I'm just kidding, I mean, it is, you have to work around
the giant bureaucracy about the giant corruption. Corruption builds on top of corruption and then it just becomes this giant system that's unstable as you talked about. - One last word.
- Yes. - The two years in Moscow
taught me how to be alone. I had no social interaction. - Not with friends, not with women, not with-
- No. The only interaction I had was with the folks that trained me. So I was alone, it was a lonely two years. - For a person who loves love, was that difficult?
- Yes, but that prepared me for my first and second
year in the United States because I could not interact socially without giving away that
something was wrong with me. I had to learn how to be an American. They didn't teach me in Moscow. They couldn't, they didn't. - So the first two years in America, you had to kind of listen more than talk. - Oh, you bet. The very first year, I couldn't even work because I had to acquire the documents, a social security card and a driver's license to get a job. And then when I had the job and I worked as a bike messenger, that gave me a good opportunity
to listen as, you know, because these people, they weren't real very curious about me. - What was your name in East Germany? What was your name in Moscow? What was your name in America? - Okay, so the name I was given at birth is Albrecht Dittrich. Nobody-
- It's so sexy when you speak in German
with the German accent. - I hated that name, the
Albrecht, I didn't like it. It was very rarely used. My mother named me after
a famous German painter, Albrecht Durer. My cover name in Moscow,
I was known as Dieter. And in the United States,
I became Jack Barsky. In between, I used a
whole bunch of other names that were associated with
false passports that I used. One of the names and I
remember is William Dyson, because that is the name that
was on the Canadian passport I used to enter the United States. - So how did you enter the United States? Can we take the journey from
Moscow to the United States? - Yeah.
- What was the assignment? What was that leap? - Just one thing in between. I had a three months
practice trip to Canada. That was a good idea. And I gotta tell you this one
thing that happened there. - Yes, please.
- Okay. Because, you know, the one thing that I like to tell people nowadays is one of the secrets to
happiness is the ability to make fun of the worst
situations that you're in. - Yes, absolutely.
- You see the humor? - Yes.
- Okay. So here comes something quite humorous, in hindsight at least. One of the tasks that I had in Canada was to acquire a birth certificate. But the name was Henry van Randall, who was born someplace in California and I was supposed to, you know, write a little letter saying,
"I'm Henry van Randall, please send me a copy
of my birth certificate. The fee is enclosed." And I lived in a small
hotel, so the return address, it wasn't visible that it was a hotel. That was important. And it took like three
weeks and I get nothing. Four weeks, I get nothing. Eventually I got annoyed and I mustered the courage to call them up from a payphone. I called up the office registrar,
whatever they were called, in this town in California. And I yelled at them, I
said, "You got my money. Where's my birth certificate?" Well, a couple of weeks later it came. So I see the envelope and it
says, "Henry van Randall." Yes. I had prepared the
caretakers of the hotel too that I'm expecting a letter for my friend. So I went up to my room, I opened it and I was like, "Yes,
yes, this is success." And I opened this thing and it was a copy of a birth certificate, but it was stamped with big letters across in red, "deceased." Now think about it. So here's the dead people, that person was asking
for a birth certificate. (Lex laughing) I had the presence of mind to leave. Okay?
- Yeah. - I went to a couple of other cities. I should have left the country. But I know that the Royal
Mounted Police was following me. I was given that information
by the FBI later on. And they were-
- But you were able to... Oh, you were able to at least
suspect that at the time, through the (indistinct). - I knew that there was trouble. So my counter-surveillance route- - SDR.
- Yes, didn't discover anything. So I kept on going. I was supposed to visit two more cities and they were always one step behind. What is interesting to me is that they didn't
catch me on the way out. You have to show your
passport to the airline. I mean, I was known by name. Because I had to give
that to the hotel, right? And I escaped with (indistinct). - So how would-
- By a hair. - They would have to keep
you on a list, right? - [Jack] Yeah. - Yeah, that's interesting. But that requires like a good
computerized, updated system to keep track of that stuff.
- Yeah, and this was Swiss Air, so. - [Lex] Well, you got lucky. - Yeah.
- Part of life is luck. - You bet. And other than that, the trip
to Canada was a big success because it gave me the culture shock that I needed to not be
blown out of the water when I get to the United States. - So you hopped a few places in Canada. - Yeah.
- And then Swiss Air. - I even had a relationship
with a young lady. - Canadian, French
Canadian, regular Canadian? - French Canadian. And she gave me a book, "Winnie the Pooh," because we went to see the movie. And then she wrote the dedication, she says, "To the nicest
German I've ever met." - [Lex] Was she lying? (chuckles) - No. - Or you don't know, maybe, speaking of spycraft. And that led to heartbreak too? - No. That was sexual. I was not at that point- - Ready for love? - No.
- Ready to return to that whole... - [Jack] Well, and I was
already married in Germany. Okay, that woman I loved, - We should return to this. - [Jack] Yeah. - So Swiss Air, where did you land in the United States? - Oh, when I came, where did I land? American Airlines, a flight from Mexico City to Toronto. But they made me deplane in Chicago. I have no idea, I think that was over engineering. That didn't make any sense to me. You know, why can't the Canadian just take a flight from Mexico City? With this stop over,
this kind of nonsense. - Yeah, but okay, but
nevertheless, that was it. And then you landed in Chicago. - [Jack] Right. - And tell me the story in America. What was the day-to-day life? Now this is, now you're a spy, you're- - No, no, no, no. I gotta tell you another funny story. - [Lex] Yes? - So it's another, there's two things that happened that could have ended my career as a spy right then and there. So I'm arriving in Chicago in the evening, it's already dark. I had no idea what kind of
a hotel to take, you know, I picked one out of a yellow pages and then got a taxi. When I gave him the address, he looked at me like a little funny, whatever, what do I know? You know, just keep on going. I need to get sleep. Because I was extremely tense, you know, having gone through
customs and border control. And we were going in
the southern direction and I noticed that the neighborhoods became less and less inviting. Didn't know what that meant either. And I enter the hotel, it was a five-story brownstone, and something else looked funny. So the reception desk was
protected by plexiglass. Not having enough background, I didn't know that this was unusual. All I knew that there was a lot of crime in the United States so I thought maybe every
hotel was like that. So I go up into my room and drink a half a bottle
of Johnny Walker Red, because I-
- As one does, yeah. (Jack laughing) - It's just because I was so damn tense, I just wanted to sleep. I wanted to get into a coma, which I did. And next day I woke up with a head that was twice as big
as, felt twice as big. But, you know, I was prepared,
I had aspirin with me, so I killed the headache and went outside to see if
I can get something to eat. And so I was right smack in the middle of the south side of Chicago. I didn't know that this
outside of Chicago existed. Later I found out where I was. So it was time to go
very quickly, go up there and at that point I decided I would register at the next
hotel under Jack Barsky. So I went to the bathroom and I tried to kill off Mr.
Dyson by burning his passport. Unfortunately, I was not trained in how to destroy passports. So I tried to burn it and these
things were flame retardant and it created a cloud of smoke. And I'm looking up there and
there's a smoke detector. - Yeah. Oh, no. - Okay, so a presence of mind, I threw this thing in the toilet and then took out a pair of scissors and cut it into small
pieces and flush it down. If that smoke alarm goes
off, I'm busted, right? If some criminal steals, I
had $6,000 on me in cash, steals either my passport or my money or both, I
don't know what to do. - Yeah, you can't go to the authorities, you can't do anything. There weren't any Russian,
the Soviets in Chicago. - Do you have any contacts-
- No. - Inside the America? - There was no plan B for Chicago at all. That's an oversight. I shouldn't have gone to Chicago. They could have shipped
me into San Francisco or Washington DC, because
both of them had Soviets. My end goal was to go to New York. Fine. You know, I would've been a
really, really dangerous agent if I had gone back and
worked with the KGB, 'cause I could have told them all the things, how to do it right, right? - So in that sense, given the scale of the KGB, there is some incompetence in the- - [Jack] Some? - A lot of incompetence. - With regard to preparing
me to be an American was almost total incompetent. - And do you think that's representative of the way they operate,
is there's an incompetence like to the logistics, to
the strategies involved, all that kind of stuff? - Yeah, none of these guys
had operated as illegals. They were outsiders to American society. They had interaction with Americans but they all lived in,
you know, in New York, they lived in a compound
in Northern Manhattan where they all lived
together with their families. And most of the time they spent
interacting with themselves, with their own people at work. - So they really didn't integrate well. - They did not know what
it's like to be an American, to have a job, to, you know, live like an American,
they didn't know it. - It's interesting that KGB didn't put a high value to
that kind of integration. - They didn't know what they didn't know. - Yeah. - And by the way, this was mutual. Do you think the CIA had good knowledge of the Russian culture? Uh-uh, same thing. And so there was a lot
of lack of understanding because good intelligence
could have possibly avoided some of the high
tension situations that we had when in the '80s we got
close to nuclear war. - So good intelligence would be integrating yourself in society. - Yes.
- But much, much deeper. - And understanding that Ronald
Reagan was not a warmonger, but he was talking about the end times because he was a Christian. - But then that kind of
integration can be dangerous because you start to
question the propaganda, the narratives on which the KGB is built, on which the CIA is built. - And then they always
have had the options of ignoring the intelligence
that they're getting, right? - Well, let me ask you this
question sort of to jump around. There's a lot of conspiracy theories in this current climate, I
mean, throughout history, but now especially, and some of the conspiracy
theories put a lot of power in the hands of the intelligence agencies, like CIA, FSB, Mossad, MI6. They're basically, the
conspiracy theories go that they control the
powerful people in this world, and they're able to thereby
manipulate those powerful people and manipulate the populace in order to deliver different
kinds of messages and so on. Given your experience
with this kind of tension between competence and malevolence, would you say there's some truth to those conspiracy theories? - Not one way. I think there's collusion,
there's collaboration. But I would think that, like for instance, some folks in the CIA and the FBI are being used by the ones
that are really in power. Power is money, power is wealth. I know power is not- - It can go both directions. You can acquire wealth first,
which leads you to power, or you can acquire power first. - Yeah, power is also
knowledge, I understand, and a position in society in
the military or intelligence. But I don't think it's a straight one way that all the intelligence agencies control the powerful
people in their country. You see what's happening in Russia, I mean, Putin dominates his
intelligence agencies, right? - Well, so the question is
which way the direction goes, but you're saying that it's
not one way flow of power. - I would think so. And I also believe it exists, but it's not as prevalent as, you know, not every conspiracy theory pans out, and most of them don't. They're just damn rumors. But that doesn't mean they don't exist. I guarantee you that they exist. There's collusion, there's
people getting together and not necessarily
preparing a specific action, but more sort of a plan to go forward and maintain the position
or even, you know, strengthen the position
that they already have. - So KGB, who can generalize FSB, CIA, do you think a KGB
agent would kill someone against international law if
they were ordered to do so? So we talked about-
- They did. They did. And there's a famous case of one, I think it's Vasili Khokhlov
who defected, he was a killer. He was a trained killer, and he had done assassinations
in other countries. He was sent to West
Germany to kill a defector, a KGB defector, and he
decided not to do it. He talked to the guy and he said, "I'm supposed
to kill you, I'm not." And then he eventually wound
up in the United States. I have a connection to this fellow because the KGB once asked
me to go to California and see if the guy still
lives and works there. And I found him and we looked at each other. So there was an active
KGB agent looking at a man that he didn't know was the KGB defector, looking at each other. Neither one knew who the other one was, and I found out later. - But he was able to survive? - Yes, and, you know, there have been assassinations, not a lot. And you know that- - [Lex] That we know of. - A good point. - This is very difficult. The question is, how many lines are intelligence agencies willing to cross to achieve the goal? - I think none of these agencies have the ultimate line. I think eventually, the
last line will be crossed if they believe it's necessary. - Well, I think you can
justify a lot of things, especially in this modern
world with nuclear weapons, that you can justify it that you're saving the world actually. Let me ask a few difficult questions, and we'll jump back to
your time in America. But Vladimir Putin has been accused of ordering the poisoning and assassination of several people, including Alexander Litvinenko early on, all the way to Alexei Navalny. Do you think these accusations
are grouted in truth? And we'll return to a
couple more questions maybe about Vladimir Putin's
early days in the KGB, which would be interesting. - Yeah, there's a phrase
that I'd like to say in the response, it's called
plausible deniability. I don't think Putin gave a direct command to say, "Do that." He would just maybe muse, "It would be nice if
something were to happen," and then somebody picks it up and does it. - Can you steel man the case that Putin did not have
direct or indirect involvement with this?
Oh, who would know? Who would know, you know, just... - Well, the international, the reputation perhaps catalyzed by Putin himself is that he is the kind of person that would directly or
indirectly make those orders. Perhaps the case there is he's somebody to be feared and thereby you want that (indistinct)-
- Yeah, we aren't sure. out there. - But the act itself, the poisoning of Litvinenko and, oh, and then the assassination
of the Bulgarian, Markov, with the umbrella, and they all directly traced back to Russia's Soviet intelligence. And so that's enough to be feared, right? My answer that I gave
you is an educated guess. You know, I can't pretend
to know this for sure, but- - It's frustrating to me because there's a lot of
people listening to this would chuckle at the naive
nature of the question. But if you actually keep an open mind, you have to understand what is the way that intelligence agencies function. Is it possible to the head
of an intelligence agency not to make direct orders of that kind, where there's a distributed- - No, the head of the intelligence agency would most likely give the order. - [Lex] Even though
it's compartmentalized? - Yeah, but not the head of state. - Maybe not the head of state. - Although this is the case
in the United States as well, but certainly is the case in Russia. There are close relationships
between the head of the FSB and the GRU and personal
relationships, not just even- - The head of the FSB who's now in jail? - There's interesting details, especially coming out recently,
around the war in Ukraine. So let me actually ask
about the war in Ukraine. - [Jack] All right. - What is your analysis
of the war in Ukraine from 2014 to the full-on
invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February 2022? (sighs) There's many questions we could ask. One is, what are the sins
of the governments involved? What are the sins of Russia, Ukraine, America, China? Are those sins comparable? Who are the good guys and the bad guys? - That was more than one question now. Let me just give you
the basics about this. Savvy observers saw this coming. They were very small minority. Because Vladimir Putin was pretty open about what he told the
world his mission was, was the reestablishment
of a strong Russia, the reestablishment of something
like the Russian Empire, to unite all the Russian speaking
people under one country. And the world ignored him. I mean, he was open. It was at a conference
in France, I believe, when he set this out in the open. And then what we had in the United States, we had wishful thinking. You know, Obama had
this reset with Russia, you know, we all get friendly and then when Putin invaded
Crimea, we did nothing. And it just escalated slowly but surely. It was pretty clear. And they said, it was,
I think, two years ago, there was an essay published by Putin. Whether he wrote it or
not, doesn't matter. But that was also out in public where he was, again, quite
clear what he was gonna do. Now how do you do this? With force. And the sins committed by
the American government was that we ignored it. We were engaged in wishful thinking, and we didn't stop it with sanctions before the shooting started. - To push back, I don't think
you're fully describing... You are describing the sins of the Russian government and Putin, I don't think you're
fully describing the sins of the American government here, because not only didn't... You're describing the miscalculation. So not only did they
not pressure correctly with sanctions and so on, and clearly respond to
the actual statements and the essays and the word spoken- - [Jack] I know where you're
going, but keep on speaking. - Yes, but they also at the same time, pressured Russia. And they also, as Putin himself said, sort of, there's a rat and they pushed the rat towards the corner by expanding NATO and- - [Jack] And arming Ukraine. - Well, the military industrial complex is a machine that led us. And I think a lot of younger people... I mean, when I came to this country, and this is the country I love. I lived through 9/11. I lived through the full
rollercoaster of emotion. - [Jack] Yeah. - At that time, before that and after, I was a proud American, I went through the whole rollercoaster of being sold, I would say a lie, about the reason to invade
Iraq and even Afghanistan. And I got to live through understanding of this military industrial complex that leads to the expansion of empires, of the delusion that we
have in the populace, in the government that convinces us that we are the good guys and somehow with military force we can instill our
values, instill happiness, the pursuit of happiness that
all men are created equal, these ideas into other lands. And we can do so with drones
and we can do so with weapons and we could do so without
significant cost to our own, from our own pockets. And so this idea, this machine doesn't just apply to
Afghanistan and Iraq. It doesn't just apply to Yemen and Syria. It doesn't just apply to China. It also applies to Ukraine. It also applies to Russia. - Agreed, and two thoughts, if I may. First of all, one does not hear the term military industrial complex in the public discourse these days. Eisenhower warned about it. Eisenhower was a capitalist. He was the president of the United States. So it exists and it is very powerful. The more weapons you can sell, the more you have to replace them, or send over, you have
to replace them, so yes. The other thing is, there's
also a messianic streak that powers American foreign policy. We want to make the world just like us. Why don't they get it? Because they don't want to. It's almost like, it's not communism, but it's a very similar romantic idea that we can make the world
and fashion the world the way we are. And that's the romantic side and the sort of honest side. But it doesn't work. It failed every time, right? You know, Afghanistan is a royal mess and would never have become
a functioning democracy. I don't know if Ukraine can become a functioning democracy, so. - Well, I don't know if American weapons can help Ukraine become
a functional democracy. - [Jack] Yeah, absolutely right. - But there's a huge amount of interest in seeing the world in black and white and selling the story of the
world as black and white, that Ukraine is the symbol of democracy in this eastern European world and Russia is the symbol of
authoritarian dictatorship. And the story is not so simple as many indices show, Ukraine and Russia are the number one and the number two most corrupt countries in Europe. - They're two peas in a pod. One is bigger and one is, in this case, the aggressor. Now, you know, two peas, the aggressor is still
ultimately responsible and- - The person that throws the first punch, now there's a lot of
people going to disagree where the first punch came from. - Yeah, sure.
- But there is magnitude. - [Jack] Yes. - And the struggle by
Ukraine for its sovereignty stretches back to the
beginning of the 20th century. It stretches back even further than that. But the Ukrainian people are proud people and they've been, in many cases, tortured by those that sit in the Kremlin, throughout the 20th century. - The famine in the early '30s. - And it's never the middle class and the upper class that suffer. It's always the lower
classes, the peasants in that time. This history stretches back far and this is yet another
manifestation of that. And there's a lot of interest to play. China watches closely, Russia, America watches closely. And there's an extra caveat here that there's nuclear
weapons at play as well. - Exactly. And the situation is as dangerous as I have lived through in
my entire life, I believe. And because it's not necessarily at the highest point of escalation, but it will be, in my
view, a protracted crisis. And the longer that crisis lasts, the more of a chance
there is of an accident. - [Lex] Yeah, one rocket. - Yeah. - There seems to be a
strong incentive to prolong, to do siege tactics to
prolong this conflict over perhaps many years, which
is terrifying to think about. And over that, one, a single rocket can lead to, given that there's leaders that might be losing their mind. And Ukraine is not part of NATO. The thing I'm really afraid of is that somebody might
think it's a good idea for Russia, so Putin might
think it's a good idea for Russia to send a message by launching a nuke against Ukraine. 'Cause they're not part of NATO so surely the West is
not going to respond. What is the West going to do if Russia nukes Ukraine to send a message? I don't know if anyone knows
the answer to that question, but it's a terrifying question. - And I don't know the exact protocol that needs to be followed to launch a nuclear
strike from NATO's end. Because we have several countries in NATO that have nuclear weapons. So let's say, for France to fire a nuke, does the United States have to agree? I don't know how that works. - I don't know if anyone
knows how that works. - [Jack] Okay. Yeah. - I worry... Now we have different, very kind of anecdotal
perspectives on these things. But the people I've interacted with in the DOD, Department of Defense, in the military, there is
a compartmentalization, there is a bureaucracy and within that giant
bureaucracy, there's incompetence. We'd like to think that there is like, really well organized for
really important things, there's going to be the best
of the best in the world that's going to execute
on the correct decisions, both geopolitically, militarily,
all that kind of stuff. And I've seen enough
to know that competence at any level of government, at any level of the
military is not guaranteed. - Let's go back to the law of hierarchy. The government is the
biggest hierarchy there is, and so invariably politicians
find their way to the top. And once you have politics and dictating substantive decisions, they're gonna be weak or wrong. I don't know how this could
work any other way there. Right now we have some functional idiots in the central United States government. - Well, let me, 'cause you
said that, I think elsewhere you said that Putin was
not a good KGB agent. - That's right.
- A mediocre one, but is an excellent politician. - Yep, and a good organizer. He was known as a really,
really good organizer. When Yeltsin hired him as prime minister, he cleaned up the mess too, because under Yeltsin Russia deteriorated tremendously and it became sort of
a mix of an oligarchy and a criminal enterprise and chaotic. - So he had skills that
made him a good executive. - Oh, absolutely. - Now let's go back to him as a KGB agent. He was a KGB agent, I mean, you know, according to him, once a KGB agent, always a KGB agent, but 16 years, let's say,
something like this. What do you think about,
from your experience, now you're maybe same age as him, approximately the same age as him. - [Jack] He's a little younger. - A little younger.
- Yeah. - What do you think about
the KGB experience he had, made him the man he is? What aspect of that,
from your own experience, how much does that define you, who you are, how you
think about the world, how you analyze the
geopolitics of the world, how you analyze human nature? - Now, I gotta tell you one thing, he had a different type
of training than I did. Mine was one-on-one, and he went to school, so to speak, so- - [Lex] (laughing) Classroom training. - Right. But fundamentally he was not a top agent. And this is very simple to... There's only one thing you need to know, he knows German pretty well. So where was he deployed? In East Germany. Not in West Germany, not in
Switzerland, not in Austria. That's where they sent the best, right? One would think. Generally. - We're learning here. - Right. - So this is your classification of where they send the best. You know, people classify
all kinds of stuff, like what is the best
university in the world? What is the best football
team in the world? You start to get a sense, the good guys get sent, the best athletes get sent to, well, we
can disagree on this, but the football team
is, but you have a sense, and you're saying that the best agents would've been sent to the West-
- One would think so. Now that this is not a forcing argument, but I also have a word
from the horse's mouth. - Which horse? I mean, what kind of horse? What's the breed? - Oleg Kalugin. You know who Oleg Kalugin is, and he's still alive. He was at one point the
head of counterintelligence for the First Directorate,
espionage, right? And Putin was in the First Directorate and reported to Kalugin for a while. And Oleg told me to my face that Oleg was not an
impressive agent trainee or agent.
- That Vladimir Putin was not impressive. - Not impressive at all. - Now, he's biased given
his current situation. - Well, yeah, you know, he,
he could still make it up because he had this big ruckus
when he was in parliament and called Putin a war criminal about the war in Serbia. - Not only could he make it up, I wouldn't trust his analysis. (Jack laughing) I mean, I have to, you know, when people, I've been working very
hard, even before this war, to try to understand objective analysis of all the parties involved. You have to really keep an open mind here to see clearly, to understand if you are to try to help in
some way make a better world, in this case, stop this war or have all the countries
involved flourish. Bring out the best of the people, remove the corruption and the greed and the destructive
aspects of the governments, and let the people flourish. For all of that, you have
to put all the biases aside, all the political bickering, all the, I don't know, all the biased analysis. And there's a lot of propaganda that says that in fact,
Putin was a good agent. How else would he rise
through the ranks, right? - Because he was a good politician and he made a lot of good
connections within the KGB. Allow me to say something. You just taught me a lesson and the lesson I should
have figured out myself because I keep on telling people that in the intelligence world, you never know the truth 100%. So when you said, "Oleg
could make that up," of course he could have,
but you get to a point where you're forced to make
a decision or have an opinion and then you use your best educated guess. So I'm gonna take the certainty of the statement that I made back. Because it's quite
possible that you're right. - Well, what I've noticed
about Vladimir Putin, and this is true about,
for example, Donald Trump and all those kinds of divisive figures, that for some reason, people's opinion on the details of those
people are very sticky. Once you decide this is a bad guy, there's like a black hole and people are not able to
think, like, one act at a time. You don't have to, like, that
doesn't somehow justify this, that somehow doesn't
remove all the evil things that are done, but you can analyze clearly each of the actions. And to me, it is interesting to see how did this man
rise through the ranks. Now you're saying that to be a KGB agent, there's a lot of skills involved and perhaps raw technical
skill of spycraft is perhaps not related to the skill of rising through the ranks. - [Jack] Right. - And you're saying, as a politician, he was good at rising through the ranks.
- But lying and influencing, that is something that
is a significant talent and ability that an agent must have, that helps you as a politician. - Continuing the kind of
thread of the role of KGB in defining the heart, soul,
and mind of Vladimir Putin, let me return to Yuri Bezmenov,
who was a Soviet KGB agent that wrote a four-step framework for ideological subversion
on a national scale as practiced by the Soviet Union. So the four steps are demoralization, destabilization, crisis and normalization. He had a lot of other
kind of systematic ways of describing this kind of stuff. So can you speak to some of these ideas about the systematic large scale, ideological subversion goals of the KGB? Is there truth to that
kind of, those ideas? - Yes, but I think I already sort of mentioned it. I think Bezmenov was a fraud. And, I have, again- - Can you elaborate
- Good arguments. - Yes.
- Let's put it this way. First of all, we know that the KGB was involved in active
measures, which is, you know, you can call it fake news. - Yeah.
- Seeding fake news in the countries that
are your adversaries. And the Russians have
been doing this lately by meddling in our election and focusing on the left
and the right fringe and influencing them to become more left and no more right. And Vasili Mitrokhin
has, in one of his books, he has a whole chapter
about active measures. Okay, so what he has to
say about the department, and I forgot what department that was, was the one department that was the least
desirable for KGB agents because these were desk jobs for people who had to come up with
fake stories in countries where they didn't quite know
too much about the country. Now there were some successes, like when one of them... The two most famous
successes, that I'm aware of, is that the canard that the AIDS virus was concocted in a CIA lab. And so a lot of people around
the world believed that. And the other one was that J. Edgar Hoover was a secret cross-dresser. (Lex laughing) That is still known by a lot of Americans who are of a certain age
that this was the truth. But Mitrokhin actually
traces it back to a story that was placed in a sort of left wing, but close to mainstream French magazine. And it was then taken
up by more, you know, larger newspapers and
well-established papers. So they had some successes, but this kind of a massive
well thought out campaign to destabilize the United States, I don't believe the KGB
was capable of doing that. Mitrokhin seems to agree with me. I was trained, I would think, you know, I was one of the
crown jewels of their agents. One would think that they
used the best that they had to help me how to become an American. And they didn't have a clue. So if you don't know
how a country operates, how do you come up with this kind of a very detailed long-term plan, that's also timed, you know, two years this and one
year that and all of that. - Yeah, so we should
actually just clarify, so he has this whole idea that there is a 15 to 20 years
needed for demoralization, where you're basically
infiltrating a country or people from a young age,
manipulating their mind. You're destabilizing them. That's the second step, that
takes two to five years. You target the country's
foreign relations, defense and economy. You create a crisis artificially, and then you normalize it as
if it always was this way. So it's basically saying that the KGB is capable of at scale, over many years, manipulate an entire population of people. - Right.
- And this is kind of... There's a lot of people that
believe in conspiracy theories that are amenable to this kind of idea. Now, my own experience
is that there is in fact just a giant amount of incompetence and that this is something that's actually very
difficult to pull off, 'cause it's incredibly, incredibly difficult to achieve
this kind of manipulation. I think it would require, (sighs) first of all, not much bureaucracy,
not much slowing down. You have to have incredible,
in the modern world, digital systems that are
able to do surveillance, manipulation, there has to be a strategy that is carried out in secrecy across a huge number
of people effectively. That also requires you hire
the best people in the world. And I think it's difficult to execute on this kind of thing
if you compartmentalize, because there has to
be great collaboration. There has to be a great, where there's a unified vision- - [Jack] Coordination. - And coordination across multiple groups. There has to be, I mean, it's very difficult to do. Now, nevertheless,
especially with technology, this becomes easier and easier. So the bar becomes lower and lower. To achieve mass surveillance becomes easier and easier and easier. Mass manipulation through platforms, because we're now digitally connected, you can now do that kind of manipulation so it becomes more and more realistic that you could do this kind of thing. But you're saying that, no, first of all, intelligence is hard. And to do it at scale and to do it well and to do it in a way that it's also not just
collecting information about the populace, but
manipulating the populace is very, very difficult. - Right, now let me give
you another argument why I think that Bezmenov was a fraud. I mean, I have Mitrokhin on my side, and my personal observation of the incompetence that I witnessed, I mean, they really, really didn't know what they didn't know. So now Bezmenov was KGB, where was he stationed? In India. He was a low level agent in India. And I told you, it was the one thing that the KGB was really good at it was compartmentalization. How does Bezmenov in India find
out about this massive plan that should have been super secret, right? He made it up. Sorry.
- Yeah. - And you know why he got away with it? Because Americans eat that up,
because it's not our fault, it's now the damn Russians
that doing all that bad stuff. Speaking of the damn Russians
doing all that bad stuff, you know about the
internet research agency? - [Lex] Mm-hmm. - They have been doing
quite a bit of damage and I am now familiar with the world of enhanced artificial persons. These are the avatars
on Facebook and Twitter and, you know, so forth
that look like real people. And there are quite a few of them. And I have a good friend
who operates in that realm and, you know, he uses for
instance, facial recognition when he thinks that there's
a suspicious character, say on LinkedIn or on Facebook. And very often he finds out,
yeah, that person exists, but it's not the person
who it pretends to be. - So basically detecting the enhanced artificial people. - Yes, but he can also make them. You think the United States-
- Right, it goes hand in hand. - The United States doesn't do it? We do it too, but- - Well, this is to push back
against your pushback, right? Yeah, Bezmenov might be a fraud. - [Jack] Uh-huh. - But is it possible,
especially in the modern age, that there is these kind of
large scale systematic... Wouldn't you, as a government- - [Jack] More so. - That's investing billions of dollars into military equipment in a world that's more and more clearly going to be defined by
cyber war versus a hot war. Wouldn't you start to
have serious meetings, large amounts of hires that are working at how do we manipulate the information flow? How do we manipulate the
minds of the populace? How do we sell them a narrative? So even though he might've
been making up a story because people eat it up, could
it speak to some deep truth that's actually different
than the the truth you came up in as a KGB agent? - Oh, I agree with you 100%. It's much easier when, you know, all you need is an army of nerds who also knows-
- No offense. - Hm?
- No offense to nerds. - That's a term of endearment I use. - Yes, of love.
- I love nerds. I used to be one myself, so. But anyway-
- Once a nerd, always a nerd. So, yeah. - So what I was gonna say here is- - [Lex] All you need is an army of nerds. - But also experts in the culture of the target country, okay? And nowadays the world is different. There's a whole lot more fluidity. There's a whole lot more people
that, like, say Russians, for instance, study in
the United States Chinese, an army of Chinese studying
in the United States. They have a lot more knowledge of how we function than the KGB did. And it's vice versa. Not as many Americans in Russia, but we have some. But the Chinese and the
Russians have an advantage here. - Can I ask you a question
based on your experience? So I have been talking to
a lot of powerful people and some of which have
very close connections to, in this particular
conflict, Ukraine and Russia, but in other places as well. I don't believe I've
ever been contacted by or interacted with an intelligence agency, CIA, FSB, MI6, Mossad. I don't think I have, well,
let me say explicitly, I haven't had an official conversation, which is what I assume I would have because I have nothing to hide, right? So I think there's no reason
for people to be secretive. But why is that? Would I know am I interesting at all? How are people determined if they're a person of interest or not? And I guess the question, I mean, some of it I ask in a
bit of a humorous way, but also perhaps there's
truth in some of the humor, is would I know if I have ever interacted with a intelligence agency spy? - Well, you don't know that
you haven't been contacted, but certainly not, I think you never had a conversation that related to intelligence in any way, shape or form, right? - Right, like where
another person introduced- - Yeah, introduced themselves.
- Themselves? - Or, you know, sort of
wants to be your friend and then talks about these
types of topics, right? - Yeah, but, there's people, because of who I'm interacting with, I mean, even with Elon Musk, like if you think about Elon
Musk, there's a lot of people that are part of the
conversations that happen. How do I know they're all trustworthy. They all present
themselves as trustworthy. Now again, I have nothing, so this is for the intelligence agencies, I have nothing to hide. I'm the same person privately as publicly, well intentioned, real, no controlled, no weird sexual stuff where you can manipulate me. (Jack laughing) What else?
- No drug use? - No drug use, no skeletons in the closet, none of that kind of stuff. But, you know, I don't know, I mean, just even having
these conversations, you know, I tend to trust people as a default, like- - Yeah, me too. - And you start, when you think, well, especially with some of the
people I've been talking with and some of the traveling I'm doing, I'm realizing there's a, you know, there's hard men in this world. There's military, there's
serious suffering, and there's war and there's serious people
that are doing serious harm. And so you have to be careful
of thinking who to trust, with a person approaches you with a smile and asks you a question. My natural inclination is
that person is a cool person. I'll answer the question,
I become a friend. But it's becomes
difficult when you realize that there's things like
intelligence agencies with thousands of employees. There's people that are
doing major military actions that involve tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of soldiers. This is serious stuff. And so how do you know how
to operate in this world? - The folks that you're interacting with have a responsibility not to tell you what they shouldn't tell you, right? - [Lex] Right. - And most of them probably won't. And I'm guessing, occasionally they will say,
"Well, I can't go there," right? - Yeah.
- So what you are aware of is sort of public and what you're doing is you're collecting it and you're editing it to some extent. You're not changing the verbiage. You just repeat what they say. So from that angle, you're not privy to any real secrets. What you have possibly
that could be of use is you learn to get to know the person. So I'm thinking that's a good possibility if you get the interviews in the East, that somebody may actually approach you and ask you what's your opinion? - I just hope they approach me and introduce themselves properly. I just-
- Yeah. - There's a kind of, I mean, would you know, like,
how many Russian spies are there in the United States? How many American spies
are there in Russia? Do you have a sense? Is it-
- No idea. - I mean, just like with the GRU. - No idea. - Is it possible there's
like tens of thousands or like thousands? - Not thousands like I used to operate. We are too hard to train and we weren't that
successful to begin with. But particularly Russians
and Chinese, you know, both governments know who is going abroad. And I guarantee you there's
a lot of amateur spies. They're being asked,
you know, "Help us out, you know, do something
for the motherland," and we-
- Like crowdsourced buying. - [Jack] Yeah, sort of and- - Not serious training, but yeah. - And, yeah, for instance, this lady, I forgot her first first name, Butina, she was a rank amateur. She used social media to
communicate with Moscow. So she had no training, but
she was reasonably successful. I mean, she got... And the difference between, let's say, the current Russian
intelligence and the KGB, Vladimir Putin and his henchman are okay with people being caught because, and every time I go and give a talk someplace, I'm always asked this question, "How many Russian spies do
you think we we have here?" Because it scares the people, right? And Putin likes to scare people. The KGB was very
solicitous of their agents. You know, they didn't want
anyone of them caught, right? So that's a big difference. And, you know- - So for the FSB, getting caught sends a strong signal to the world that there's agents everywhere. - Yeah, there could be many more. And there probably are. Because also the world, again, there's a whole lot more travel going on, a whole lot more interaction, studying abroad, doing business. And, you know, there will be attempts at espionage, probably one every minute in this country. That doesn't mean they
would be successful, no. But there is a cottage industry now that is doing quite well, that teaches companies how to, you know, fortify themselves against,
like, industrial espionage or also foreign actors spying. It's all over the place. - Yeah, as it becomes easier
and easier with digital. - Yes.
- With cyber, that becomes a very serious threat. - We might wind up in a world where nobody knows anymore
what's up and what's down. - If I was to have a
conversation with Vladimir Putin and/or Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is there something you would ask about the time in the KGB
and the time in his past? We are, all of us, men and women, are creations of the experiences we have throughout life, early on in life and through the formative experiences, successes, and failures, so- - Yeah, you just said
the key words, you know, I would ask, you know, without giving away anything, you know, just being high level, your biggest success and
your biggest failure. - [Lex] As a politician or as a KGB agent.
- No, we talking in the realm of KGB. When the wall came down and he was in an office, a KGB office in the city of Dresden and East Germans were
besieging Stasi offices, and they also dropped by the KGB office and it was pretty threatening. It looked like they would
actually storm the office and get, you know, the
documents and stuff like that. And initially, the first demonstration was told that if they come any closer, weapons would be used. So they disappeared
and then they came back and I don't know, somebody in that office called Berlin and said, "What are we gonna do? Are we allowed to use force?" And the answer came back that Gorbachev said, "Absolutely not." And so this is where Putin
all of a sudden, you know, he was at one point a
member of the greatest, the most powerful intelligence
organization in the world, and all of a sudden he was powerless. And he had to watch how, you know, this was a defeat. Big one.
- Yeah. It's supposedly a powerful
intelligence agency, cowering. - [Jack] Yeah. - Sort of crawling back
into a position of weakness. - And he probably promised
himself, never again. Russia needs to be great again. - The KGB, FSB, Russia, the Russian Empire needs to rise again. And that there's a feeling for him, as he talks about the collapse of the Soviet Union being a great tragedy, there's a feeling like never again. - Yeah, and I believe that he has a strong conviction that, I don't know if he's religious, he carries a cross now, but I don't know what that means, but that it's the destiny of
the Russian nation to be great. And that that is sort of, whether it's determined by God or some higher power, that
is very important for him. - Of course, that nationalist idea is one that Americans share as well. And, you know, it could
help a nation flourish. So by itself, it's not
necessarily a bad thing. - Oh, I agree.
- But it's how it manifests itself, is the question.
- I agree. Well, one other thing is, if I were to get a chat with
the Ukrainian president, I would ask him, "What is the equation
between giving up some land and how many lives are worth this land?" - And it's a good way
to phrase the question. Of course, that question
gets you killed in Ukraine. (Jack laughs) But because there's another
part of that equation, which is it's not just land versus lives, it's the sovereignty, the knowledge that you're free and you're self-determined. And like, it's not about, like, fighting for the particular land. It's saying, "We are messed up, corrupt, we have problems. It's a messy world, but it's our world." - [Jack] Mm. - I think Stephen Crane has a poem about, like, a
man eating his own heart and he was asked, "How does it taste?" And he said, "It's bitter, but I like it because it is bitter and because it is my heart." And that there's a sense of like, I want, this is not just about land. This is our nation. The same love of nation
that Putin has for Russia, the greater Russia, this
vision of this great empire, I believe Ukraine does as well. Not every, you know,
there's levels to this game, and Ukrainian people are
some of the proudest people throughout the history
of the 20th century, throughout the history of earth. The Polish people are proud people. You could just see in World War II, the people who said, "Fuck
you, you're not having this. We will die to the last man." There's different cultures that kind of really hold their ground and Ukrainian people are that. - You know, I have to
admit in that respect, I'm a bit of a coward. I could not do what
Zelenskyy has been doing. I would sort of try to find a way to carve out something that I can live with. However, if that force, that evil force, gets to my family- - [Lex] Right, there's lines. - Yes. - That's right. You become the world's bravest man if somebody crosses that line. - [Jack] Oh yeah. - You mentioned something about you've not been to Moscow, back, and that it might not be
safe for you to travel there. - [Jack] Yes. - Can you speak to the nature of that? You know, as somebody that successfully got out of the KGB, how
are you still alive? - A number of reasons. First of all, when my story became public,
that was six years ago, I was pretty old, right? And so the folks that may
have a personal interest or may have had a personal
interest in doing me harm, most of them don't live
anymore, all right? That's number one. Number two, I was a hired hand, a German, I did not betray the motherland. Now that's a crime that
is punished by death. You betray the motherland. And the other thing is, you know that these kinds of operations to assassination in another country are very difficult to plan and implement. And if there's a list of
people that they don't like, I may not be at the very top. Having said that, you know,
if I wind up, say in Moscow, or even in countries like Turkey, where there's a lot of lawlessness, you know, accidents
can easily be arranged. And that's just sending another message. You know, just like, you know, we can do a lot of things - [Lex] We're powerful. - Yes. - Do you think it's safe for me to travel in Russia and Ukraine? - I think, you know very well how to communicate in both countries. You know, you've shown
this in this interaction that you have a lot of empathy for the people you'll be talking with. And empathy means good understanding where they're coming from. And then there are lines
that you can't cross. Like the question that I
was gonna ask Zelenskyy, you're not gonna ask, good for you. (Lex laughing) - Yeah, isn't that the funny
thing about this world? There's lines. There's lines everywhere. Even in love, even in
personal relationships, there's lines you should not cross. - [Jack] Yeah. - How did you finally get caught? - I resigned in 1988, so- - Well, let's actually talk about that. There was a-
- Okay, yeah. - Resigned, there's warning signs. - Yeah, yeah, okay.
- There's yet another choice, yet another crossroads. - Yes. Okay. - What was the calculation? What was the choice to be made? - To give a little
background, it was 1988. And I thought, my time in the US would soon end, because, you know, I
thought 10 to 12 years, it was already past 10 years. There was no indication that they indicated, you know, that they said, "You know, you're done." But in December of 1988, I got this one thing that
I never wanted to see. So we had a system of signals that either one of those diplomat agents could set at a spot that
I pass by every day, or I could set where they would pass by, like on their way from where they lived to the United Nations, for instance. We would just drive. And the signal spot for me was on a support beam for the
elevated A train in Queens. And it was a morning in December that I walked by there
and routinely look at it. And I never expected anything. And there was this red dot, it
was about the size of my fist with a, you know, red paint. And since you have done it already, I think I can curse in this moment because it's the only way I
can really indicate how I felt. I said, "Oh, shit," because
that was the danger signal. It was like, you are in severe danger and you need to get out of the
country as soon as possible. There was a protocol that
I was supposed to follow. I wasn't even supposed to go home. I just was supposed to
get my reserve documents that I had hidden in a park in the Bronx and make a beeline to the Canadian border. I wasn't ready, so I just,
like, ignored this thing. I mean, I couldn't ignore it. But I went on to work, got
on the A train, went to work, and then went to my cubicle and stared at the computer screen all day because I couldn't think, I could think only about what
to do, what to do, what to do. The reason for this indecisiveness was that I was a father at the time. My little girl, by the name
of Chelsea, was 18 months old, and I was there when she was born. I took her toward the home, I watched her grow up. I watched her take the first steps and always look at me with these big eyes, lovingly look at me. And that is when I started my reentry into the human race, because I just fell in
love with this girl. That's when love came back, and it was completely unexpected. And there's a lot of
fathers who understand, particularly fathers of girls, who understand what happened there. And I still thought I need to go back because, you know, there
was probably some danger, but I hadn't figured out how
to take care of the girl. You know, I'd leave her, but, you know, maybe she
need to have a good life and grow up and have a chance. And her mother, she
was from South America, she had a fourth grade education. That would've not worked very well. So I played for time. Obviously, I could be sick, you know, I could be in a hospital. There was a precedent where I was sick, where I couldn't communicate
for about three weeks. So I just did nothing. That was on a Monday. On a Thursday was my regular
shortwave transmission. I listened and they explained a little in a few sentences, "We
have reason to believe that the FBI is on your case. You need to execute the
emergency procedure. Come home right away." I still had some time because
the radio could be broken or the transmission was bad, or I still could be in a hospital, right? So I gave myself some more time, and then something happened where they forced my hand. This is the only time that a Soviet agent was anywhere near me on the territory of the United States. So I'm waiting for the A train on a dark morning still, in Queens, and there's this man. The short man in a black trench coat comes up to me from my right, and he whispers into my ears, "You gotta come back or else you're dead." I can't imitate the Russian accent. That was a Russian accent. So now, and it was a pretty strong accent. The "you're dead" phrase
can have two meanings. And an American would've
said, or else you're busted or else you get arrested. Or else you're dead is very strong. So now you have to take it
seriously to some degree, because I know that they had a history of assassinating or at least trying to assassinate the factor. So obviously that raised
the stakes a little bit. But I just talked myself into believing this was just a bad phrasing. But at this point I knew and they knew that we both knew, right? So there was no more guessing. He found me, he talked to me, I know. So now I had to act. So in the next radiogram, I was asked to execute
a dead-drop operation where they would give
me money and a passport. And that was in a park on Staten Island. It was a location that
I found and I described, and I was always praised for my ability to describe
spots that are easy to find. So that was a given. And the only thing that was
different for this operation, they scheduled it for the dark, all right? But it was still no problem because it was in a park and then a couple of, about 100 yards in, next to a fallen tree,
it would be hard to miss. So I go to Staten Island and I read the signal that said, "I put the container in the drop." That was the protocol. There's a signal that the person who hands over or something, puts at a spot not too
far from the spot itself. That means I would go
in and just pick it up. The reason I actually went to pick up this container, because there was money in it, so I didn't have to make
a decision yet, okay? I could throw away the passport. It was like I was still trying
to figure out what to do, what to do, what to do. So I get to the spot, I get to the tree and I had a flashlight with me. There at the park, there
was nobody in the park. Even during the day, this park was not, it was more almost like a little forest. And I don't see the container. It was supposed to be a crushed oil can, pretty sizable, hard to miss. And I do a double take and I look again and I look around, I look
around a little more, see if they misplaced it, I can't find it. That's the only one, that one
of those operations failed. And that just doesn't make a lot of sense. So and as I'm walking away from this, like sort of numb emotionally, I said to myself, "I'm staying." (Lex laughs) - [Lex] Yeah. - That decision-
- Some kind of signal, some kind of a muse just spoke to you. - That decision was made for me. Now you know that I'm a Christian now. And I think that was like,
God told me this, you know? - But it was certain
there, it was right there. It was certain.
- That was it. - That was it.
- That was it. And so what I did, well, first of all, divine intervention helped me to find a good explanation. I sent them my last letter, and with secret writing, I communicated to them, I said, "I wish I could come, but I can't because I have contracted HIV AIDS." That was the best lie ever. Because nobody wanted to
have AIDS in their country. Those days it was a death sentence, right? - Yes.
- And I knew, we had conversations when
I was back in Moscow, how they were snickering about what's going on
in the United States. You know, that depraved culture. And you see, they're killing each other. - And the depraved culture took over your being and
how you're (indistinct). - And I was convincing enough, I even traced it back to
a girlfriend I had once that I had actually reported on that, you know, I
interacted with this lady who had a boyfriend at one
point who was a drug addict, and she was infected and she infected me. So they believed it. And I asked them to give my dollar savings to my German family. They gave them some, but they told my family that I already passed away, that I'm dead. They believed it 100%. And I guess the agent who took the money took half of it for himself. So that was it. And the next three months, I made sure that I wasn't reliably at the same spot in the same timeframe. So I went to work in different
paths at different times just to, you know, just was a
safety measure, so to speak. And not huge, but, you know, it allowed me to keep my sanity. And obviously, after I sent the letter, I threw the shortwave
radio in the Hudson River, destroyed the one-time
pads that I still had. So I was now ready to- - For a new life.
- For a new life and live out my life as
an American undiscovered, but, you know, starting
to work on my version of the American Dream. - [Lex] Yes. - And the first action
was telling my wife, the mother of this child, you know, she always
wanted to have a house. And I said, "You know what? We should buy a house." (Lex laughing) And a year later we moved into the suburbs and then I said, "We
should have another child." And we had another child. And I had a career
where I did pretty well. I moved a couple of times,
wound up in a McMansion. But before that, my second house was
actually in Pennsylvania, in rural Pennsylvania. And this is where I was
discovered by the FBI. And how did they know about me? If it hadn't been for this
defector, Vasili Mitrokhin, who was an archivist in the KGB archives, he was actually pretty high level. He was in charge of the relocation of the archive from Lubyanka to Yasenevo. And he really hated, he
had reason to believe he hated the Soviet system. I think I remember that
his son was quite ill and he could have gotten
treatment in England and he was not allowed to
travel to England with his son. So his hatred, he tried
to figure out what to do and how to do damage to that system. So he started copying notes, little slips of paper, handwritten, that he smuggled out in his underwear and his socks over the years. And then he transcribed
them with the typewriter and then put the pieces of paper into some kind of a container
and buried this in his dacha. It was, I believe, in
1992 when he showed up, the Soviet Union was gone. So he showed up at the
US Embassy in Moscow and told them what he had. And it was on a weekend and apparently there was
a junior person in charge. And he said, "Do you know what? What you got, we are not
interested in, it's really old." That's a career limiting move, right? Because Vasili Mitrokhin then made his way to one
of the Baltic republics and contacted MI6 and they said, "Come on in, old fellow, we'll have a cup of tea." And so they managed to get
this stuff out of the dacha and get it to England. And eventually the MI6
shared it with the FBI, and there wasn't a whole
lot of information about me. It was very, very little. It was like, "There's a person
by the name of Jack Barsky, who is an illegal
operating in the northeast of the United States." Now, if it was Jim Miller,
they wouldn't have found me. Jack Barsky was easy to find. So they checked social security and Jack Barsky had gotten
his social security card at the age of 33. Bingo, okay? All they knew though was
that I was an illegal, that I was still living there. They didn't know whether
I was active, inactive, and the other thing that they knew, that I was a really,
really well-trained agent 'cause I was still there, right? So they took, I think almost three years, to investigate me,
watch me from a distance because, you know, if I was still active, I would've found out that
somebody's investigating me. - So you started being less
and less active in terms of- - [Jack] Oh, I stopped completely. - No, what I mean is- - [Jack] Oh, oh,
surveillance detection route? - Yes, the server detection,
just being careful. - [Jack] After three months,
I stopped altogether. - Okay.
- Yeah, good point. - And FBI is still very careful. - They were very careful. They pretty much watched me. And then, at one point, I
had a house in the country with one neighbor, at one
point that house was for sale. So the FBI bought it and they
put a couple of agents there just to keep a closer eye on me. There was no indication
that I was still active, but they were still cautious. But at one point, they
were able to plant a bug in my kitchen, a listening device. And my wife and I didn't
get along very well. You know, there was a lot of friction and she was constantly
complaining about things and, you know, I got sick and tired of it. And one day we had an
argument in the kitchen and I chose to deploy the nuclear option (Lex laughing) and that is telling her what I sacrificed to be with her so she would understand that I am there on her side. - Yeah.
- I'm supporting her. If something doesn't quite fit, it is not because I don't
love the both of them, Chelsea and Penelope. So when I said that, the
listening device was active, so the FBI was hearing my confession. I was once a KGB agent,
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I quit and then stayed here
because of you and Chelsea. And that also made it clear to the FBI that I wasn't active anymore. So they had both of that. So now they knew an attempt to turn me would've been useless because, you know, because you know, you turn
somebody who's active, but they figured there was
enough reason to treat me nicely because they figured that
I had a lot of information that was, as aged as it was, but it was still important
for the FBI to get to know. And so one day, it was a Friday evening, I'm driving back home from the office and I'm being stopped by a state police on, as I'm going through the toll, oh, it's a bridge over the Hudson. And they had to pay a
toll, and he waved me. He got me right where I stopped and he said, "Could you
please move over here? It's a routine traffic
stop," thought nothing of it. I had forgotten at that
point that I once was a spy. You know, it was like this was gone. And then he said, "Could you
please step out of the car." That should have aroused my suspicion. That's unusual, right? Routine traffic stop. Yeah, I did it, no problem. And then again, somebody
came from the right, came into my view and he flipped this ID and he said, "FBI, we would
like to have a talk with you." Now, this is my now friend, Joe Riley, who actually is, he's the godfather of Trinity, my last child. But anyway, he told me later
that when I heard that phrase, all the blood left my face,
I became totally white. But I recovered very quickly
and he said it himself. So, you know, they took me to a vehicle and there was another agent in the vehicle and he had a gun strapped to his ankle. So that was pretty real. (Lex chuckling) First question I had,
"So am I under arrest?" And the answer was, "No." And then my instinct kicked in, and my ability to operate very well under high pressure situations. And I asked him, "So
what took you so long?" You know, the intent of that was to diffuse any kind of tension. - Yes.
- And I saw a smile. - [Lex] Instant friends. - Yeah, well, I knew that
I had to make them like me. And I think by now I know I'm a pretty likable person, so. - [Lex] I would say so. - And when they took me to a motel, which they had rented, there was the two wings at a right angle. They bought all the rooms in one wing, and they had a guard at
each end of that wing. And they took me in the middle and there were some props there, some binders with labels. And I immediately thought,
"Now this is really silly," because what I noticed that the labels all referred
back to my early years. I knew that they didn't know much else. So I told Joe that afterwards. And that was not a great idea. But anyway. (Lex laughing) But I volunteered, I made
the following statement before we even started the interview. I said, "I know there's only one way for me and my family to have a chance to get through here without much damages, if I'm completely 100% cooperative and it is my intent to do exactly that." All right, so we spent about
two hours in the interview. They allowed me to call my wife, tell her that I'm gonna be late. That indicated to me already
that they would let me go. And after two hours they let me go. But they had the area covered
with a whole bunch of people. And the head of that team talked to me and he said, "If you think of running, we got every intersection in
this area covered, you can't." I didn't say anything, but, you know, I had
no thought of running. And that was the beginning of another phase of my life where I was cooperating with
the FBI for quite a while and living still undercover
for several years until I had real good documentation and became an American
citizen seven years ago. - From today, seven years ago? So it was recently? - [Jack] Yeah. - Wow.
- Quite recent. The bureaucracy took a long time to figure out how to make me real and also not put me in these
witness protection program, you know, to keep my name and then just, you know, make
everything, like, official. So for instance, I had
to change my birth year simply because Jack
Barsky was born in 1944. If I kept 1944, the FBI would've
helped me commit a crime because I would've
collected social security of four years sooner. So, and anyway. - [Lex] The details of that name- - Yes, it took quite a while. And when I finally got the call from the Office of Homeland Security, the lady says, "This is agent so-and-so from Homeland Security, can you come in to the office tomorrow?" And I said, "Let me look at my calendar." And then I said, "Wait a minute, what am I talking about? What time do you want me to be there?" Because I had waited for
that moment for a long time, and I was sworn in right then and there. It was a good feeling to walk out of there because I had a country again, you know, and I love this country just as much as you said you love it, with all its warts and its problems that we're going through right now. And then the last thing
that changed my life again, and I don't wanna get into details because it's a little complicated story. I never wanted to be a public person. And then I was discovered
through a number of dots that were unlikely to be connected. It had to do with a relative, with a half brother of my
wife who lives in Germany, was taken to Germany by his mother, who came to visit somebody, not us, but that somebody that he came to visit lived 50 miles from our house and that my wife and this half brother never met in person before. They knew about each other
through social media. And when he found out my background, he was a conductor of the
German railroad at the time, he said, "Oh, this is a big story. That's gonna be big, big, big." Yeah, okay. Well, he happened to know this one person who happened to know one
of the star reporters of "Der Spiegel." And after she did some research and determined that I was
real, she was on my case and she happened to know Steve Kroft, the guy from "60 Minutes." You see all these connections,
I had nothing to do with it. - That's how life works. Dots get connected somehow, sometimes. - Yeah.
- For most of us, it doesn't. - [Jack] Stuff happens. - You get lucky. - You don't know what happened- - [Lex] (indistinct) been
lucky a few times in your life. - Yeah, I think I must be part Irish too. (Lex laughing) Yeah, so it's been an interesting ride. I'm just still shaking my head about all the stuff that happened. - Well, it's been a fun
one, what you wrote, "Because I'm allowed to leave behind a documented legacy of my unusual life. I'm praying that the
legacy will be described by a single word, love." So, let us return to the thing we started the conversation
with, which is love. What role does love play in this human condition, in your life and in our life here together? - I give you an answer by telling you what happened one day. I gave a presentation at
Microsoft's headquarters. (Lex laughing) - That's a strange beginning
of a love story, but yes. - No, that's not a love story. And then, so there's
this beautiful young lady sitting in the back and she's paying a lot of attention. Found out later that her job at Microsoft, her job title was storyteller. That is soft marketing, right? - [Lex] Yeah, you could say that. - If you can afford somebody
like that, that's good. Anyway. Question and answer, she raised her hand and she asked me, "So all
the things that you have done and you have experienced, what's the the number one lesson you've taken away from your life?" That was a new question for me. Never been asked that question. And I thought about it for 20 seconds, and then I came up with this phrase that we all know, "love conquers all," because in my life it did in the end. And it's the strongest human emotion and that is what makes us human, really. - And you spoke about
the, I mean, offline, as I've spoken with you, it's clear to me how transformative, how powerful the life of your children are, your daughters in your life, and who you are and why
you think life is beautiful and why you think this
country is beautiful. - Now that I'm pretty
mature, to put it mildly, I'm also more loving
towards many more people. You know, these things like random acts of
kindness for strangers, I do them, I'm looking for them now. And you know what? It's good for me. - (laughs) Well, welcome to Texas because this random acts
of kindness to strangers seems to be a way of life, which is one of the
reasons I love it here. It just reminds me why
I love human beings, which is that there's just
this warmth, this connection. - Yeah, and in Georgia,
it's the same thing. - Yeah. Amen. Do you have any regrets? - Yeah.
- Looking back at life, do you wish you've done
something different? - Well, I could have, but then I would have a different regret. I betrayed the wife, the
German wife that I loved. I really did love her and I betrayed her. But if I don't betray her, then I betray the child. - That is a source of so
much love for you now. So maybe life is a kinda, you
get to choose your regrets. You don't get to void them.
- Yeah, it's a little bit of a strange way of putting it, but there's no other choice. And I tell you what I don't regret, and that may be, you
probably understand it now because you have enough
background about me. I don't regret having lied to my mother. Because I had no really strong emotional relationship with her. She took care of me. She was proud of me. But we didn't hug. We didn't interact emotionally whatsoever. - So you don't feel like
you betrayed a love that- - Well, I did. I know that she was looking for me until the day she died. She wrote a letter to President Gorbachev asking him for help to locate me. She checked with the Stasi. She just was like hell-bent on finding me and couldn't find me. So she passed away without
knowing what happened to me. Now there was this rumor
that was flying around, and she possibly may have
bought into that rumor because my cover for when
I went to the United States was that I changed careers again and I joined an institution in Kazakhstan that did space research, Inter Cosmos, something, something. And I had a piece of paper
that invited me to start there, and that was the, it was a forgery, Inter Cosmos, it never existed. But people knew that in Kazakhstan there were super secret facilities. And one of my old
classmates from high school started the rumor that I
died in a rocket accident, and everybody knew that. So when I came back to
Germany, went back to Germany, I found the telephone number of this girl that had dumped me. I called her and I said to her, "So guess who this is? But maybe you hold onto your chair." She says, "Yes." I said, "This is Albrecht." (Jack imitating girlfriend screaming) - It's a good payback. (Jack laughing) - No, we actually met, so there's two elderly people in their 60s who meet each other after so many years. And the one that ended the relationship started the conversation
by saying, "You know what? I made a really bad mistake," and the tears came down her cheeks. I wasn't asking for that. I wasn't happy about it,
but it did feel good. Now, a while later, I knew why she said she made a mistake. I met her husband. - Yeah, I mean, Tom Waits
has a song called "Martha," where an older gentleman calls
somebody he used to love, and they have a conversation. They're both married now. And it's sometimes you can
meet people from your past and it gives you a glimpse of a possible different
life you could have had. - Oh, yeah, and you know, I was actually, when she said, "I made a mistake," and I was thinking to
myself, "No, you didn't." There was nothing left. There was nothing left. And also the person that she became, personality wise wasn't as
attractive as I remembered her. You know, it's puppy love, you know? - [Lex] But it's still love, and it still happened.
- Yeah, oh, it was. It was passionate love for sure. And I would've thrown myself under the bus if I could save her. It was that strong. And it's just as strong as
the love for my two girls. - Yeah. Life is full of moments and
periods like that of love. And that's what makes
life so fricking awesome. But it does come to an end. - [Jack] And so does this
conversation, I guess. - No, this goes on for
many more hours, but yes. Do you think about your own death? - Huh?
- Do you think about death? Do you think about your own death? - Yes. - Are you afraid of it? - Yes, even though I'm a Christian. - As a Christian, do you have
a sense what's coming after? Or is it full of uncertainty? - I have a hope. I have a hope. You know, there's a lot of Christianity which is quite logical,
a lot of Christianity, which is also, you know, the life of Christ has a lot of proof. But, you know, and I became a Christian
starting with the head, and I was already quite old. You know, when you don't
get this faith very early, it's tougher to buy into everything. You know, there are some things that are difficult for me
to understand and believe, but there's many, many other things that I can't explain only
with the existence of a God. But whether He lets us go
again in eternity, I just hope. I won't convince somebody
else at this point, which doesn't make me a
really, really good Christian, because I'm supposed to evangelize. - But there's still a fear. - Yeah.
- There's a fear and a hope. - On the other hand, I know that, you see, this is how I approach
the last years of my life. I will not mentally or
physically get decrepit. I will do everything I can
do to be alert and fit. I still run. I run four or five times a week and I'm going to start
lifting weights again. - Good. So you stay physically and mentally sharp. - [Jack] Yes. - Go out with guns blazing. - And I once read a book written by a medical doctor. He said, most people, when they're becoming mature, the rest of their life
is a slow downward move. - [Lex] Not for you. - No, the last years are pretty bad. Yeah. He said, "You gotta do this, boom." (Lex laughing) - That's pretty good advice from a doctor. And if nothing else from Christianity, whichever parts you take on,
one of the big ones is love. - Yes.
- And that's something you've lived from the very beginning before God was part of your life. Before anything was part of your life, it seemed that love was part of your life and has been a consistent
thread throughout. - Yes, sir, and there's a
short sentence in the Bible, it says, "God is love." Oh, the other thing is, I wanna say, the Christian morality, I can sign that with my blood. Okay?
- God is love. Amen. Jack, you're an incredible person, lived an incredible life. Thank you for talking today. Thank you for telling your story. Thank you for being who you are, and thank you for being all about love. This is a beautiful
conversation, it was an honor. Thank you for talking today.
- Yeah, and I appreciate the tough questions that you asked. - Thanks for listening
to this conversation with Jack Barsky. To support this podcast, please check out our
sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you some
words from Edward Snowden. "You can't come up against the world's most powerful
intelligence agencies and not accept the risk. If they want to get you,
over time they will." Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.