Kind: captions
Language: en
something happened
where
they forced my hand it's the only time
that the 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 uh
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 friedman podcast to
support it please check out our sponsors
in the description and now dear friends
here's jack
barski
let's start with a big basic question
what is the kgb committee
right so that is the committee of uh
state security yeah there's an
apostrophe
threat okay and bs means this without
right
and i guess that directly translates to
security without threat so and
don't don't exist anymore it was
disbanded when the soviet union fell
apart and
the successor agencies were are now the
svr and and the fsb
fsb supposedly the equivalent to the fbi
and svr the cia but
the svr is is relatively weak
and the fsb has 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 is the gru military intelligence
then nobody knows very much that's right
i 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 a
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
uh 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 that
is fascinating but fsb is the thing that
carries the flag right of
of kgb kgb being
probably one of if not the most
sort of infamous famous infamous and
powerful intelligence agencies
in history yes ever absolutely 100
it was founded in 1954 after the death
of stalin you've uh in writing your book
looked back at the predecessors of the
history right is there some way in which
the kgb
is grounded
in um
the culture the spirit the soul
of its predecessors oh absolutely they
just changed names and they changed
uh personnel rather
frequently and that had had something to
do with uh 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 chika and then
it became the
the gepe gpu the
three or four letters
yes
but with those name changes you also had
changes at the top
between 1923 and 1953 when stalin died
that is uh 30 years they had eight
heads of uh intelligence
and of of those eight
six were executed when they were
replaced so that's an um
that's an indication that uh 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 it will fall apart
on sand yeah why was it unstable would
you say what what of human nature
or what does that mean
it's the paranoia it's a you know stalin
was always worried about
uh you know what the the most powerful
people coming after him
so he proactively killed off heads of
the kgb and uh and he had this great
purge where he got rid of a lot of his
generals you know really capable
generals
uh and uh that that cost him dearly when
world war ii started because you know he
he started off with uh
with a uh a force that wasn't as capable
as it could have been uh was it paranoid
at all levels i believe so i believe so
it it comes from the top and so if the
top doesn't trust you
uh you always have to worry about
um
your peers
snitching on you
yeah okay so so and and i think
we have a very similar situation in
russia today
uh and uh and and in this in in this
kind of atmosphere
um the truth
will never get to the top so no matter
what moral rules the organization
operates under trust is fundamental to
its uh
competence oh absolutely and i want to
extend this to my own existence
um
and this is kind of strange it's it's
almost dichotomous uh
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 if they don't trust me they don't
send me out and if i don't trust him 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 no
there were
there were hints about uh
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 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
who i didn't want to leave when they
wanted me back so love always screws up
oh
your employment competence yes you're
absolutely right
yes so that but they thought you know
that
i had an anchor at home because i had a
wife and a son at home which
uh you know you've got to worry about
them if you defect
uh because
in the past the kgb was would go after
after family
ruthlessly
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
uh
that they would not cross
political legal ethical
or does anything goes to achieve the
goal
i was only
uh
in touch with the two types of agents as
well
the technical experts the ones that
taught me tradecraft
and they were like engineers and uh you
know they were in charge of the secret
writing and the uh
uh
the morse code shortwave radio and
reception uh decryption encryption
and that kind of stuff um
those were just doing their job
all right
and the others the ones that trained me
that uh
prepared me for life in the united
states
they were nice people
they were elegant people
i i i don't think they that they would
not uh
um
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 the
parts of the kgb that that are the
quote-unquote muscle oh
i didn't know i would find out
afterwards after i you know retired and
then started doing some research i had
no clue you're kind of operating in a
bubble oh we very much so i mean this is
what the kgb did really really well
compartmentalization
uh and and that
was based on
you know the communist movement while it
was still underground
you know the the cells were very small
and the 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 with
the bottom line is if if you got one one
of those folks were caught
they could maybe betray four people or
three something like that and in the kgb
continued with that tradition
uh i have reason to believe that the my
handler the person in moscow that sort
of directed me and made decisions uh
what to do and where to go
never met me personally
there's no reason to right why wouldn't
so uh and and this this uh actually
uh was a big advantage uh 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
so 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 let's talk
uh 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
the values of the people those kinds of
things
i believe we were all pretty much uh
strong uh believers in communism in the
future of the world being in kgb yes i
think that that unified us uh to a large
degree even the technicians so even
it wasn't
something like yeah yeah the
the parents believe this thing
but we know the truth you really believe
the story of conor absolutely did and it
and you need to look at the time frame
uh
the soviet union uh after world war ii
made uh quite a bit of progress in uh uh
influencing the third world and i still
remember uh in when i was in middle
school
we had a map
on the map of the world and it was
color-coded
so red was communism that was the soviet
union and then the the eastern states
and then blue was uh capitalism and then
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 uh angola i'm i'm looking at uh um
vietnam
a lot of these countries uh were uh very
sympathetic to to uh the soviet union
and so we
sort of knew that this would go on like
that and eventually we would take over
and and you know pretty much uh uh
overtake
that was that that was the the myth
overtake the united states
not only militarily but also
in terms of industrial production and
and so forth
that was a stupid pipe dream the
military
it was a standoff as we know
well
uh stupid pipe dream
um hitler had a
stupid pipe dream yeah that he executed
it exceptionally effectively and on
if not for
uh
a handful of military mistakes the world
could look very different 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
yeah for example uh
attacking
skipping kiev and attacking moscow
directly overthrowing the government so
marching i guess that that would be
learning the lessons from napoleon as
opposed to um
as opposed to a different kind of
distribution of forces and then getting
bogged down in the winter but the point
is
these ambitions sometimes do
you know the ambitions of empire
sometimes do materialize in the growth
and the building and the establishment
of those empires and those empires write
the history books
in such a way that we don't think of
them as 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 the book
about the good guys i happen to believe
that book
but
it's we should be humbled and
open-minded
to realize that uh 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 yes
pursuit of happiness
you know it always sounds good if you
look at what the the dream of communism
is it sure as heck
uh in its words on the surface sounds
good 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 uh
and all men are
wonderful people and if they if they go
bad it has something to do with the fact
that they have they have been oppressed
right
and uh that dream just never worked out
and even even it is when you think about
it
and i didn't think about it when you're
young you know you just 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
how does 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
so and who gets to the top
the the ones that are that want to go to
the top the ones that believe in
themselves the ones the ones that know
better than everybody else
and once you have that hierarchy
established there is no guarantee that
it doesn't that that it won't go bad and
actually when you look at history
every such hierarchy has gone bad you
know
you look at cuba for instance i believe
fido castro was a an honest
revolutionary
i do believe that
and so what did cuba turn into
yeah there's something about when 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 on the country
and you very well might first
but then
somehow that grows into uh
a distortion field where you know 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 uh
um 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
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 is a sense
the you have to crack a few eggs to make
an omelet
right this idea that um
sacrifice is necessary to bring about a
greater world
and then the other aspect is
um
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 he i
think he believed he will bring about
another world and by the way the tarot
didn't start with stalin it started
right after the bolsheviks took over
when uh
lenin
uh told uh mr jaczynski commodore
trezinski to build the chicago
and then uh
execute
the
this is what he called it the red terror
so
so at that at the birth of the soviet
union there was already terror
and it was deliberate and it uh
it also was
it wasn't just focused on the enemies it
was focused on whoever
you didn't like there was there was no
rule of law there was no
uh there were there was no no court
cases you know people were just pulled
out of their apartments and shot on site
yeah
and
the this was done by
con 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
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 um
i don't know what that is that's almost
like a subconscious fear
like don't there's a dark room with the
locked door don't look in that door
don't check that door and there's
something about the united states that
says
uh especially modern culture so go to
that door first and sort of question
everything kind of uh that's the power
of the freedom of speech and the freedom
of the press but you can
get um
almost become too critical and too
cynical of your own culture in that way
so there's a balance of strike of course
but
man
is if that's if communism is not a
lesson of human nature i don't know what
it is but you believed
without thinking too much about it you
believe right in the story of khan what
did you see just
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 and me believing in
communism was that
com the communists when when
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 yes and and
communists were
hunted down by the nazis killed
uh put in concentration camps
and
so what we knew
when 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 uh
reinhard galen
who was in charge was the general in
charge of uh
uh
the
intelligence on the eastern front under
hitler
and when
the
the allied won the war
it was decided that galen was too
important uh with his knowledge of the
his and his organization was too
important to uh
to
not use so he was co-opted by the cia
and eventually wound up
being the head of the bundesliga
the cia of west germany
that gave us
us when i say us you know the east
german
party a huge propaganda victory
i wanted to because
his um the emotional aspect of this was
as follows
when we uh we were in uh
uh
juniors in high school
uh and uh and though in those days uh
when you
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 what we as 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
lamp shades made out of human skin
because
they
that skin had tattoos on them and a
shrunken head so heads like the size of
my fist
and i mean the girls all cried
and it would have made a huge impression
and that was the
that was the nazis yeah and then yes the
communists i mean the united
states course you know in in hindsight
if the communists had come to power it
would have been just the other way
around as we know
uh given the example of stalin and mao
right so but we didn't know that
right from the russian soviet
perspective uh the communist regime
banded together
to
win the the great patriotic war and that
was the the second one you know the big
brother the
the soviet union
uh i mean when when i was approached by
the kgb that was like oh i felt so
honored
so we should say um
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 ten days yeah
sort of very good
after uh
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 this the historical context here
what is world war ii again and then
let's do
for uh we don't have to go to uh
world war one which uh the result of
which actually ceded world war ii in
some respects yes um there's a long
history yes uh but let's start with
world war ii so uh
uh when hitler came to power he he and
his uh his uh leadership decided that uh
uh the germans needed more what they
call laban's rom
that means room to live
so uh and they would you know they would
start expanding uh at uh and they went
into france uh
they they took belgium the netherlands
uh
uh they annexed uh
uh austria
and uh and got a piece of the of
czechoslovakia
and then they decided to
uh march into the soviet union and uh
after after they took poland uh
uh
cut up cut up poland together with the
soviet union yes they were friends yes
they were uh no there was a
non-aggression pact but between that was
signed by robin trump and molotov right
i think both parties knew that
eventually they would fall apart but at
the time
uh 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 and the german the germans
had you know
the the time and
the in 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
um read the intelligence that was coming
his way oh his troops are amassing on
the border of the soviet union he didn't
trust his own intelligence apparatus
here's one one example uh
um there was a german communist um who
uh
who went on the ground when hitler took
over and he would he went to japan as a
journalist his name is richard zorger
and godzilla had really really good into
intel
about what the
japanese would do and not do
and it i forgot exactly what it was but
uh it was it came to moscow and stalin
totally totally ignored it
and and when zorga was uh uh captured by
the
uh by the japanese uh the soviet union
denied that uh
he was one of there so he was executed
uh that the paranoia again
uh
does a lot of damage we when you don't
when you don't believe your own
intelligence apparatus why
why bother having one
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 get
become more and more powerful and then
the intelligence apparatus is probably
giving you information you don't like
but it's often
negative information about yeah uh
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 yeah
so there you know in the modern times if
we hop around briefly is uh vladimir
putin
has been
um not happy with the intelligence of
the fsb thereby at least if you read the
news right uh choosing
uh to put more priority to the gru for
the intelligence in ukraine right
but i guess i suppose the same story
happens there as it dis throughout
history is paranoia i i give you an
example that
that comes
from a very reliable source
uh
and that my my best german friend
uh worked as a chemist in the
anastasi east german intelligence
and uh
he
eventually uh he 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 that was uh that was collected to
start he was really good they had about
a thousand people in west germany
undercover agents
uh some of them in government and the
central committee of the party and the
decision makers ignored it because it
didn't quite fit in their world view it
didn't quite fit into their plans
so uh and and one one delicious uh
uh thing that i just want to add on to
this when when gorbachev uh
um wrote his book about perestroika and
glasnost
uh the
the east german uh rulers did not like
it they were much much more orthodox so
they had to print the books in
translation
guess where they wound up
they were in the host they piled up in
the hallways of the stasi
they they bought the entire
print run
it's fascinating uh so but let's
backtrack so operation barbarossa
invasion a hit right to the soviet union
and then hopefully that leads us all the
way to east germany west germany right
after the end of the war so what
happened was that the soviet union
rolled into the eastern part of germany
and the the western allies uh took
a larger chunk
which was
eventually it was occupied by the three
allies the french the
the english and the americans
and the eastern part was occupied by the
by the soviet troops
and the soviet
uh troops actually
uh conquered berlin yeah but as a and
and
as an in a contract they uh decided that
berlin would be ruled by the four allies
and they all had you know had free
access to uh
that city
i was born in the east german part which
very quickly became uh
ruled by
communist socialists the the communist
party in the socialist party united and
but the leaders of that new party for
all communists it's nevertheless called
democratic
yes the german democratic republic which
was formed a couple of months after i
was born
i was born into a the remote
southeastern corner uh of of east
germany
and uh interestingly enough uh
genetically i'm only half german
the the other half the other half is
czech and polish nice because
uh where i grew up you know we i could
walk to the nicer river which was the
uh
border with poland and and it was only
about an hour by bus to get to the czech
uh border so that's why i'm a mix
so okay so east germany after the war
was
communist socialist yeah then the west
germany was
representing the western world with the
right democracy and what the united
states did when this was
really really very uh
forward-looking very strategic the the
marshall plan
to rebuild the economy in the west
as compared to what the soviet union did
they whatever they hadn't destroyed on
the way in
they took with them uh
on the way out for reparations because
you know they had every right to do that
but it was uh not a good idea because
you know east germany was always behind
in economic development uh to to their
western counterpart
so when you're young
as today but when you were young you
were clearly an exceptional student yeah
you're a brilliant academic
superstar
let's go to your childhood
what's a fond memory
from childhood that you have
in 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 um success
or was it
the fondest memory that comes to mind is
my first kiss
how's that
do you want to go to the details of that
what uh
what what what what'd you make of that
would you make that guess what what
would 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 yeah
and
i
i knew in those days i admired girls i i
knew that girls were like
uh sort of um
uh 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
was that too was magical for you oh my
god yeah
uh and i
literally i
uh dedicated that's when i started
studying up until that point i just like
did whatever i had to do to be in a
minor students and that's when i started
studying in every a that i got i
dedicated to her sometimes explicitly
because i knew i was going to take care
of her you know when as i grow up so
you're going to have to work hard in
this world to be somebody that could be
adored by the by those you lost yes
you're right
you know that that case
the next day i was running around in
school with a grinnell in my face
and maybe that
in some way that grin never fades so um
what about the heartbreak that followed
the heartbreak surely
but
just to uh
expand on this a little more yes because
that 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
at this one girl but uh
but that you understood that that
feeling oh my god that taught you
something like that you're somebody that
can feel those things absolutely and
there's that's a strong
part of who you are and therefore it
will also be a part of directing your
life trajectory
yeah so we we were an item for two years
uh i lost my virginity
congratulations she was not a virgin at
the time
she see my my my competitor was uh
there always is a competitor
isn't that how it works he studied
medicine in in college already in which
ways was he better than you uh he wasn't
he was older and he was more experienced
yeah and he was going to be a doctor and
i but you know i was there and he was
not
ah the you know presence wins yeah but
you still had big dreams you wanted to
be a
a 10-year professor yes yes so you you
still want to outdo that guy oh yeah and
she he eventually told me that uh
you know he was he was not in a picture
anymore
so it was back and forth back and forth
and uh
the
our senior year we were an item and uh
and i was just dreaming of uh 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 yena and
the the distance
to uh between the two cities was too
it was too much to
for a weekend visit you know public
transportation
was very slow and nobody had cars and
so
uh
so the circumstance of life you just
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
[Laughter]
you know when that's that's a good thing
that you could feel that pain
that's still part of love that's that's
that the pain of loss is still part of
love and then you kind of
change that you shape it and you give
that love in deeper more profound ways
to future people very well put but at
the time it emptied me out yeah if if i
had
uh a tendency uh to you know
to have suicidal thoughts i might have
killed myself it was so you
would you say that was one of the darker
moments of your life um
let me see
yeah as a single moment yes so you know
i'm i still remember
uh
we had a
mail slot in the front door
and i
i was expecting a letter any day and
there was the letter i go upstairs into
my uh my bedroom and i open it and i
read it
and
i was just like the life went out of me
you're just there alone and you have to
experience this pain alone so but now
you're deeply alone in this world yes
because i didn't have a
there was no emotional
relationship with my parents
um i i literally had nobody so this love
you have in you had no
had no place to go it was choked off all
right so
uh but i
uh what i did was i
um i 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 all these pretty girls and
their dances and everything we had this
this great student club where
uh i i didn't look at any girls like
eventually i knew i was going to
you know want to have female
companionship but love uh-uh no more
than hurts
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
um
so during that time during your
excellence
just being an exceptional student
of chemistry
let's go to your story so um
in your book deep undercover my secret
life entangled the allegiances as a kgb
spy in america and in the really really
excellent podcast series that i've been
listening to it's 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 when you first
were contacted by the kgb those
how you were
in invited the offer to join was made
well
it was a big surprise and i i never
thought of myself as uh as a potential
agent you know i i was going to be a
tenured professor
and joined the ruling elite because in
in in europe tenured professors are few
it's not like in the united states you
know anybody who teaches at colleges as
a as a title of professor easy now
it's true yes that's not a criticism
so we should also clarify that to any
professor or not
it is a very prestigious position
throughout history of europe
and i would say especially communist i
don't know 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 uh
and the the town of yena had about a
hundred thousand people live there and
um
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 uh
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 i was full of myself
you know when when when you are the best
of the best and i and i in my third year
i received a scholarship
uh the karl marx scholarship uh that was
limited to 100 concurrent recipients in
the country
so my god no i i was full of myself i i
believed in myself hook hook line and
sinker and and and i was also
uh
uh this uh
i got a lot of
accolades from
teachers and
fellow students they were feeding the
ego the old
i mean yeah you have to believe in
yourself uh often when you're young to
truly
try to excel and 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 they all looked up to me yeah
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 the communist party in east germany
was uh 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
so yeah so this is this is how this ego
gets gets nurtured but anyway getting
back to
how the kgb uh
uh came in contact so they most likely
got uh
knowledge of me by you know looking at
the stasi
uh records this stuff what's stasi oh
that was east german secret police stat
zika height
security for the state
there's that word security again
[Laughter]
and that they pretty much kept the
record uh on on everybody in the country
and um
so when you when you look through this
in and and this is what the kgb was
looking for they were looking for
candidates
particularly for this kind of job that
they had in mind for me for candidates
uh
who were not you know in their mid 20s
uh who were not fully developed yet but
mature enough
to to get there
uh
and and and still young enough right
because because at that level of
maturity you can test whether they can
handle this kind of yes absolutely right
so and uh
one day i got a knock on my door and my
dorm room door was on a saturday
and
they knew
that
i was by myself how did they know it
uh we had a
i pieced this together
and we had an
exchange student from the soviet union
and he was next door
and to me
and he
you know he
he befriended me so he got to know me a
little bit
and 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
name plates right so
somebody knocks
uh and uh i knew it was a stranger
because if if it had been a student
the the pattern was that we would knock
on the door and then go in
we wouldn't wait for somebody to to let
us in
so i didn't i waited for 10 seconds and
i
and he didn't come in i knew that it was
a stranger i said come on in
and then came a person
uh who spoke fluent german so that was
not a kgb guy there was a collaborator
uh when and so he started making a bunch
of small talk he introduced himself as
the
as a representative of called seize yana
which was the
optics uh um
um
company that made that was made really
really good optical instruments
was one of the best in the world
so it's it's like though you know
the 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 want to find out if what my
plans were after graduating from college
and at that point i knew he wasn't from
cause i sana
because in those days there was no
recruitment
you when 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 so that guy was
an idiot
he he didn't know the basics
about you interviewed him a little bit
to understand like oh sure you know i
you know i started like feel out is this
guy full of shit
because yeah there's a stranger showing
up to your dorm room and i knew that
at that point i know he was stasi which
was wrong but it doesn't matter because
it was german and i had no idea that the
kgb would be involved so i'm 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 we we knew that the stasi
existed uh
we we even had our uh james bond you
know we had a series
uh called the invisible visor where and
a stasi employee in east german would go
into west germany and hunt down nazis
yes so yes the stasi was was known to be
there and admired in part
or feared or both i i thought they were
necessary and uh i admired them uh james
bond the read 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 uh
uh
followed by the stasi uh uh was uh
you know put in jail
uh i had no clue i i had no clue that
they did a lot of damage and that they
were like
doing a lot of surveillance of of the
east german population the same way the
kgb did for for the soviet union so for
me to
be talking to somebody from the stasi it
was uh it um
it raised my interest i was curious what
comes next because i sort of knew
something interesting would be coming at
me and i i had no i had no other
thoughts about that at that point so
when when he was finally when he uh
he went and he went for the kill by uh
reversing himself he said you know i
gotta tell you that i really i really am
not from cal size you know 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
we i answered the question that he
didn't ask
i helped him out
so we made an arrangement to me meet for
uh
lunch which in germany is the main meal
at the number one restaurant in indiana
you know i still remember what i ate uh
what was that rum steak with uh
with butter on top
and french fries was my favorite
anyway um so
when i get to the restaurant uh
i saw this fellow sitting in the back
there at the table and uh there was
another person at the table so i was a
little bit hesitant because in those
days
uh it was not unusual for for perfect
strangers to share a table because there
wasn't wound enough uh tables and chairs
and so forth so i didn't know if i could
approach him but he he got up and came
to me and he took me to the table and he
said
uh i want to introduce uh
uh herman we work with our
soviet comrades
aha kgb and then he he disappeared he
says i got something else to do i never
knew his name
i he just handed me over to the kgb
what was the relationship between the
kgb and stasis as uh
collaborators close collaborators or
just distant associates uh they were
pretty close collaborators as i told you
that uh you know they they they bought
uh forged documents that the germans
made because the germans were better at
forgery
uh they also exchanged information but
they didn't trust each other 100 and and
and i 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 a
thousand agents over there why would
they have to want to have their own
yeah yeah okay this is a fascinating
internal and external dynamic
of distrust yeah okay so there you are
uh welcomed by the kgb when did the
offer the invite come well that took a
while so herman
and i uh had an unofficial relationship
for
about a year and a half
i would meet him uh
maybe once a week once every two weeks
initially in his car but then uh
uh he uh
he um he took me to a
conspirational flat this was a an
apartment that was
uh occupied by
a 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 i'm 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 going to be even more
special because
i would be above the law
i would i would operate outside the law
of the countries i would go to as well
as
east germany because you know that
the magazines and uh and eventually when
when i joined up
they told me i had better watch west
german television which was also
not explicitly prohibited but it was uh
uh
something that could get you in trouble
so on many levels you're super special
you're the gym
yes yes so what was that
recruitment testing process like
testing whether you
are you have what it takes to be a kgb
agent first of all um
we had very in-depth talks on
herman and i
uh about life
and i
i was i still am
very honest and
sharing my feelings
uh philosophical or personal personal
personally i even i even told him that i
was shy around the girls
uh
he was giving you a relationship advice
or what
how old was he so what was the dynamic
can you tell me was it a father
son no older brother older brother
brother yeah he was uh maybe in his uh
early to mid 30s and i was maybe 10
years younger and what languages did he
speak oh you speak german he spoke
german pretty well oh but he's
originally from ohio yeah with a russian
accent
so i got in trouble one time with him
when when i asked him is your real name
german
he didn't like that he didn't like it
what was he good with girls was was no
no he just you know
i remember what he told me he says you
know you got to understand one thing
they're looking for guys too
that's that's all you know
oh uh girls are looking good
yeah it's right it's
a competitive game yeah yeah don't don't
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 but not in
it was not very focused not in great
detail so let's uh so we talked about
personal stuff and
you know like dislikes he gave me tasks
for instance uh when
my friend and i hitchhiked from 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 uh i can write
and how well i can report how well i
observe
uh he also asked me to write some
profiles about fellow students i don't
believe that was for them to give him to
the stasi it was just like
how well do i characterize people what's
that that's important when you're
talking about uh
when i was in the u.s
active in the u.s i operated as a
spotter so i did exactly that i wrote
profiles about people
uh he also gave me some tasks to do that
were
rather unpleasant
um
what uh
he would give me an address and the name
of uh
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
uh that is undercover exploration right
so you go you you make up a story and
somehow
win the confidence of your target
to tell you something that you want to
know
was that did that come naturally to you
no no i hated it the charisma involved
uh which part did you hear charisma i
think i didn't know that i had it
it took you some time to discuss because
you know i was i always was and i still
am to some degree a bit shy
uh i lost a lot of the shyness after
moving to the south because uh here in
the united states because
uh you don't have to be shy you know
you can
let your love shine that's exactly right
so but anyway i i hated doing that but i
i did it well i still remember so i in
those days i had a i had a beard
i i
i rang the bell and tall handsome fella
yeah and uh and i i looked the part i
said i'm i'm a sociology student
and i'm i'm doing a survey and i asked a
whole bunch of questions can would you
like to answer the questions
no problem
and then i directed the conversation to
the lady's private life and
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 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
uh maybe get to know some people and i
did that pretty well also
you know
you have to be inventive you know to
to come up with a cover story and and
i've always been quite uh
uh inventive uh you know i'm a
storyteller
and at heart and that i didn't know it
then but you know but there was still
something unpleasant about it yes yes
which part was 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 i was
brutally honest
uh and never
never hid anything of me
but
you know over time
you lose that
that
uncomfortable feeling
and you rationalize that you got to 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 year and
a half and then how did that progress
yes so he said he finally i guess he
sent a report to headquarters in berlin
and then he sent me uh on a three-week
quote-unquote practice trip to berlin
this was the first time when i had an
and like a con conspiracy conspiratorial
meeting where i would i had an address
in a time and a code phrase and i met
another agent
his name was boris
these names me were meaningless they
were all like cover names right and so
what was the code and the meaning what
was then what can you give a little more
code i don't remember no but not the
code but like what do you mean by code
oh i tell you my the
the code we used when i when i met while
i was active
i would approach the other person who i
thought maybe the the person i want to
meet we both had
some something to
with us or on us to make us more likely
to be the right person
so and i would uh i would ask him the
following questions
excuse me or
i'm looking for susan greene
and he's and he would answer yes you
must be david
stupid if if i
if i ask a stranger they would look at
me
how could i help you so yeah no one's
the wrong guy yeah it's just a low
probability that that the right thing
would be so it's absolutely nice
and it seems like a safe statement yes
if it's not the right person exactly
right you'll just come off you're absurd
or crazy or whatever you you would have
you would have made a good secret agent
you you i know i'm not
this is this is
we'll discuss this
uh
i'm dressed like one
actually yeah where there's any dress
code
no just fit in
fit in no matter what and then be
creative
yeah figure out ways to ride
so anyways he give me some tasks and we
and he and since i i had rented a room
in a house he gave me uh
western literature to read
and we spent time together
um
and
there was
a practice run
to west germany actually there were two
and that was very important in hindsight
i figured that out
uh so
i traveled to west germany
you know 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
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 uh and
and then uh
uh appeared in in west berlin no no no
americans no birds no french knew that i
had entered uh forged documents or not
no no no this was a
an east german passport it was real okay
okay so uh and uh the first trip all
they wanted me to do is 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 yana
to ring the doorbell someplace and uh
talk to some people and that worked very
well as also
i 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 uh this is why i
might not make a good
agent
is when i first
came to the united states and the
supermarket
oh like bananas as many bananas as i
want to eat
that i think i would that i think that
would break me
it's just just it's a shock to be uh to
have access to western culture you're
getting very close to the reason they
actually made me do this these two
practice trips the
when i first emerged on west berlin
territory
i felt highly uncomfortable
that was the enemy right yeah and i saw
the cops everywhere and even those
those cops had like light blue uniforms
nothing they weren't standouts so i was
wondering you know if they knew that you
know i had like kgb
yeah on my forehead you were paranoid
that they would know they would see i
was scared but i i overcame that so
that's 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 have to do
is they would be paranoid that's the
natural human
feeling is am i being watched do they
know
um like if you try to steal something
from a store
you're there's going to be a feeling
like
are they watching me are the cameras
watching are there people watching me
they all know that kind of stuff so you
have to overco you have to be somehow
rugged and robust to that kind of
feeling and overcome it yes exactly so
and and uh
something very interesting happened uh
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 become
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 him
i can't do that just from the terror the
yes that paranoia now this guy's career
was
over he hadn't he had an uh he had an
engineering degree
he was a pretty smart guy
he he was just for the rest of his life
and he's still alive i believe floating
around and you know
trading in uh
model railroads and stuff like that you
mean do you think that experience broke
them
or they wouldn't let him back in oh i
see they
yeah so this it's a test that if you
fail you pay the bill i have no idea
that that uh
you know
something bad would happen if i failed
that test but i didn't yeah
i didn't fail so
and this led then to the offer
all right
and after and you know boris was happy
with me and he told his boss who was
most likely the
the head of the kgb in in in east berlin
and i had an appointment to meet 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 uh
there was this huge desk and the little
guy sitting behind it
very very
uh
just like little and
not unimpressive nice
a lot of paraphernalia like you know
the bust of jazinski on on on this desk
and and some some
some paintings uh lennon and so forth
but when the guy opened his mouth
he was like whoa
a huge uh psychological energy
he spoke only russian
now uh 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 uh but what i
when when i didn't understand i asked
boris to translate and then
then he sprung it on me and i was not
prepared
he said so what are you in or not
i was no i'm gonna i'm i hadn't made up
my mind
i wasn't expecting that would come and
so um
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 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 the
typewriter
and he he was he got really annoyed and
he said don't worry about it we'll train
you yeah but
i gotta tell you we need people who are
decisive so i 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 uh
this was almost 50 50. uh i i knew i was
gonna have a huge
career a good career i would i was on my
way
uh because you know this i was already
employed by the university as an
assistant professor so that career would
be uh to become a professor become a
ten-year professor be a world-class yes
uh jenna had become my hometown i really
loved the place it was my oyster
and
and my family
was my basketball team
i was you you loved playing basketball
that's what you mean yeah so this is
home is this home this is where your
love is
home
did you understand that the choice
involved leaving yes behind yes
and and uh 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 but the
connection between those two but yes
yeah i'm sure by the way my my my friend
gunther the one who worked for the stars
he was also the stars he tried to
recruit him as an agent but he
had a love relationship at the time and
uh
he said politely no i i won't i can't
so you didn't have that's the one thing
that really could uh would have helped
me would have 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 uh contribute
to
the victory the worldwide victory of
communism and and stick it to the nazis
and of course the feeling that you're
really special yeah james bond
yeah what's
[Laughter]
the the question do i want to be a
ten-year professor or james bond yes and
and that's as funny as that sounds that
was probably a difficult decision it was
a difficult decision but fundamentally
it wasn't it and it wasn't my uh zeal
to to help the revolution it was
my
uh
my uh what they called what they started
was looking for the kgb was looking for
in in a character that they would send
over a well-controlled inclination to
adventure okay
[Laughter]
yeah yeah james bond what do you say
and the love of women yeah
it was
yes sir but i i got to put this in right
here because i i'm telling people i have
two things in common with james bond
these are my initials jb
and and i got the girl too
three times
[Laughter]
yeah i mean that's and that's adventure
yeah and and uh
and 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
i had
fallen in love with the
onori balzac who wrote zach a
phenomenal set of novels that i just ate
up
and so i 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 a
it was
but eventually it and you know when you
when you do the side by side um
intellectual comparison
that doesn't work
it becomes a tie and then you know you
just go with your guard and i said 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 yeah
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
you just by saying so then that would
that wouldn't have worked there's some
kind of document that says yeah yeah and
that was the only entanglement you had
to that to that place no love no
that's just a basketball
basketball giving up 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 um i was a runner i
i was very very quick on my feet
and i was a good jumper too
i typically pay uh played the uh
the the four position you know what's
that uh forward oh the forward position
forward position but anyway um so that
that that was the hardest uh uh for me
to give up um but and the the other
thing that i remember i had to do
to hand in my party document to the
party secretary of the university
and uh he made a comment
yeah we probably won't hear much about
you but
we know that you're going to do
something very important so he thought i
had an inkling that i'm going i'm gonna
go someplace uh undercover or something
like that
and then i packed my bags
and got on a train uh to berlin for
another one of those secret meetings
with uh
my my new handler
nikolai
so and he
came another test that that
would have been quite easy to fail
so all right
had lived
uh in vienna for six years in a dorm
even when i became a an employee of the
university they didn't
they didn't have apartments i was still
living in a dorm in any one in a single
room with a bed a chair and a table and
a toilet down the down the hallway
so i figured you know berlin kgb i'm
gonna get a nice apartment right
and so uh
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 my my my
heart dropped like down to into my pants
i
i knew this wasn't nearly impossible
because there was a severe shortage of
uh of housing in in in everywhere in
germany east germany
and all the apartments and homes were
controlled by
by the government
you you know there were long waiting
lists uh nine i know i knew couples that
were promised maybe to get an apartment
uh
five years down the road
so
and then they would postpone their
decision to have a child anyway this
wasn't possible
oh well
you know but this was a test i'm gonna
and so again 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 a flow you know
what do i do
so what i did
i went i took the the train the city
train uh
to the very last stop
a little uh town called acna
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
she gave me they gave me the address
and i talked to the lady and she said i
happen to have a place that you might uh
that where you might be able to stay it
was an outbuilding
and
i don't know what it was what it served
it was not a garage it was concrete
and it had
a bed
and a chair
running cold water and a stove a cold
stove that was my was going to be pretty
basic pretty basic that's the basis are
you kidding me
that's the uh toilet across the the yard
of course yeah well all the essentials
what are you complaining about you were
right
you're right you had to run the uh the
special the james bond had to run this
special operation out of the yes
to my credit and i think that that uh
that established part of my reputation i
didn't complain at all to nikolai that
was part of the test probably yeah i
just told him you know i found something
and so uh 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 and
operational training i went to the
library did a lot of reading in the
library
and then i found the basketball team
that i could join so at least i could
take a shower to uh twice a week
um and uh
and
apparently
i 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 said he handed me a key he said
i'm gonna take you to your new apartment
now i 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 yes
i mean that was something you've written
about um i think he wrote that bosses do
not like to hear complaints or problems
they prefer solutions that's right so
what was your interaction like with the
bosses is that
essentially
um represent
the way it went forward as well i no
complaints get no complaints no
arguments no no
i know this better i was taking it all
in
now the the the technical guys you know
they taught me something i didn't know
that made sense uh
um
what nikolai some of the stuff that he
taught me
was somewhat questionable he was a
generalist
and some things he didn't know really
well so i could have like asked probed a
little bit but i didn't
so i just played along
so this new apartment was uh
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 uh one
flight down the
stairs an upgrade it was a big upgrade
yeah and he gave me
uh i think he gave me a thousand mark to
buy buy furniture
and in that place i
actually i also bought a tv and started
watching west german television so
so it
i finally had a
decent place to stay
um and the
the
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 right what
are some insights that generalize
to the training process of what it takes
to be a kgb spy right
so uh let me start with a trade craft
so i was taught morse code that took a
while
uh i i was uh instructed in how to you
know
use a shortwave radio and to receive uh
you know the the shortwave uh
transmissions with morse code
i was taught uh
uh in a encryption and decryption
algorithm manual algorithm
you
you might be interested that eventually
i figured out
uh at least one of the patterns uh the
the algorithm was such that
the and this was all about digits like
uh and the algorithm was such that in
the end the
uh
the digits that were used to decipher
other digits that were handed that were
sent to me by a shortwave radio
there were let's say if there were a
hundred
digits there were an equal number of
ones twos threes fours fives six and
seven and up until zero
and i was told that
these uh
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 there's probably
they're probably designed in a way that
you can manually
sort of uh it's efficient and convenient
to use them manually well not to
optimize cryptographic security is to
optimize it's like the balance security
and like humans being able to actually
yeah no i got to disagree it was neither
efficient nor convenient okay it would
took a long time
when what was what was significantly
easier to do
uh but uh 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 on the 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 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
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 one time well
one time when i had a pad with multiple
uh
paper right and uh the reason that they
gave me a manual one is because i
literally i had
only when i when i wound up in the
united states i had only one thing with
me
that uh
only a spy can have and that was a
a writing pad with uh
where the first 10 pages or so were
impregnated with a trace of a chemical
that was used for secret writing
uh but you really would have to know
what you're looking for to you know you
see this pad it was bought at you a
walmart and can you explain a little a
little further what what is the chemical
here that
what are we talking about so how i i
don't understand how it's possible to
have a physical pad that does the
encryption without any computing
i how does it include right so so no no
it doesn't it doesn't do any work you
know so
and the uh the communication that the
encrypted communication was uh was a
set of uh
uh groups of five
five digits and then another five and
there's always a gap in between
uh and
so let's say if i get this radio
transmission i write them all down and
then i then i use my uh develop my
algorithm and then i do mathematics
either addition or subtraction
the resulting set of digits
had that then had a one-to-one
correlation to letters and this is an
easy way to then do the correlation yes
well that's cool that's uh you're saying
the algorithm was not efficient it was
not oh the manual it took a long time
and and you can't make an arrow
right uh would you know where can you is
it easy to debug no you no you do it
twice
you do it twice and that's how you
change it's identical then you know
but like if it's not then
then one is right and the other is wrong
you gotta don't make mistakes no that's
right and i really didn't but anyway um
so
i was i was learning that
uh i was also uh
told
that i was required to become proficient
in another language
and they gave me a choice and i picked
english
that's what was the other one oh no they
gave them pick one friend you know
whatever is spoken in the west got it uh
what was what was what would be second
to you would you think french because of
paris what would you what why english
english was a no-brainer because i
i was a straight age to a student in
english without studying like it came so
easily to me yeah so
that's why i
chose it right
uh so that was that uh then uh um
i uh
i was taught the basics of um uh counter
surveillance
you know some trickery and
and uh
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 uh that will
illustrate that
it's my my favorite spot uh when when
when i was in moscow
i did a lot of that also um
and if my favorite spot was i
it wasn't not well traveled uh
uh road it went down the hill and and
curved
and at the bottom of the hill
there was a telephone booth
and when you open 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 uh
you know use um
public transportation uh
big buildings
uh where you
needed to use an elevator and see who's
because
surveillance
the 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 that you're looking for
so somebody
always has to come close right did you
have to also study
surveillance no
counter surveillance
and what helped me in in all my training
uh you know i would
be uh would have a competition with the
folks that were coming that were
following me
and me
and i beat them every time
uh they were at a disadvantage because
one of them always had to be close and
and if you saw the same face twice you
know
that you were being followed and i had a
very very good uh memory for for faces
so basically figure out a fixed route
and then a fixed route that allows you
to uh
survey the area and then record the
faces you've seen inside your mind
and if uh you see multiple times a
single face that's that's a bad sign and
they they could they could uh
you use uh different clothes
yeah uh but they didn't have
was face masks yeah the cia does
nowadays
they can give you a different face
within seconds
yeah
so
i mean again you talk about paranoia
is that part of the is that a big part
of the job
uh counter surveillance like being
constantly paranoid that you're being
watched
yeah i was supposed to isn't that quite
stressful so is that is that one of the
is that actually an effective way to
operate uh no but it sort of becomes a
routine uh i was told to do it uh while
in the u.s uh once a month
and uh 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
a
postbox so this is one of the tools in
your toolbox so there's morse code
there's yes the decryption and
encryption there's the kind of
surveillance photography
photography um making making micro dots
you know what a micro dot is
well that's uh that's uh
you use
you you take a photograph
and you use a microscope in reverse
and make
that photograph
really small
so small that it's like the the
head of a pin
that can be used to uh
hide under opposite stamp
yeah
in reality i knew how to make them
but in reality they
they never asked me to to make use of
that uh technique so it's a sort of an
encryption mechanism for photographs
yeah so what we do nowadays is an embed
code in
in uh pdfs and stuff like that right
yep beautiful okay all right so that
that was a learning a training process
both in the physical space
yes
algorithmically
is there other things oh you bet uh
interestingly enough the uh i was um
the first book i was given to read was
the history of this uh these uh
communist party of the soviet union
also understand that's interesting
because you said you had to read western
literature yeah that too how much how
much reading
so history how much history of politics
geopolitics
not culture
but they made me read that document uh
other than that
i wasn't supposed to study the soviet
union i wasn't supposed that that was
not and i didn't when they sent me to
moscow it wasn't to learn russia russian
right it was to learn english
the the second document they gave me was
the 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
which i uh
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 that that helps you um that
helps you get an understanding of the
culture if you have to do any kind of
uh interaction yes kind of spying then
you have to be and be able to
effectively integrate well you also have
to know like and
that would have been easier
uh
if they had sent me to west germany you
know all the soccer teams you know stuff
that everybody knows when i came to the
u.s 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
uh and the the last thing i want to
mention is uh they uh i was
strongly encouraged to
expand my
my cultural education in other words
go to visit museums uh go to the theater
uh not so much movies uh opera
read
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 not
a
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
uh
and
and a lot of this also they relied on my
initiative
again i mean that's part of the
evaluation too
uh are you able to have creative it's
interesting that they're like developing
a james bond type of character here
which is
what's the reason to go to the opera
as you become yes cultured in a certain
kind of way where perhaps that makes you
um more charming more charismatic in
terms of your ability to integrate
yourself in different situations you are
absolutely right
i
i was
i was uh
when i came to the u.s
after about
two years roughly
i was cultured enough to
not
uh
make a bad impression at it at a
diplomatic soiree in washington dc i
mingled freely yes all right
and and and so the whole idea was for me
to sort of reach into the upper
uh realms of society
where
the targets would be juicier than you
know the worker bees
and
how did you end up in moscow why yeah
what is that journey well so i uh i told
you and i started studying english so i
started back from scratch you know i had
went and they paid for a tutor
and i went from like
english 101
and that i went through that in a couple
of months then and then i got another
guy with whom
we i expanded this we had conversations
rather than working from a textbook
and i and i worked like a maniac i threw
myself into
the study of of uh
uh english like you wouldn't believe um
and 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
um
so you take your index card and you have
five categories
it's a really good way to learn road by
road uh so you got category one that's
the new ones and you got category five
so you start with uh
with five five you already
had right four times if you have it
right again it goes up go ahead to the
archive
oh
like long-term cold archive yeah yeah
four if you get it right it goes to five
if you get it wrong it gets relegated to
three
so and so you go through this
and
and occasionally i would throw the
archived things back into one
so i really i really acquired a
phenomenal vocabulary when i was done
with my english my vocabulary was
significantly higher than the average
american because i
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 yeah and uh and one synonym is
usually the preferable one and and i
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 yeah
now that's requires a computer
to keep track of my information if you
have cars 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
number two 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 because you have to go through
the full step again but that is a really
powerful way to uh
learn
definitely language but also facts like
people that go to medical school
disconnected facts yeah uh and and you
pretty much
when you're done you you know what you
know yeah you don't have that again to
use it to integrate it into the music of
language that's more difficult that's
why you talk exactly right is that there
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 there's a because language
isn't a simple formula
language is the play of words so you're
actually using the incorrect synonym
it you know as a
uh
you know if instead of saying i'm cold
saying i'm chilled yeah something like
using off beat words can actually be
part of the charm so it's interesting if
you can learn how to use that correctly
uh
because i i've know a bunch of people
with the russian accent and i feel like
they get get away with saying a lot of
ridiculous shit
because they're able to sort of leverage
the charm of the uh non-sequiturs and by
the way by the way just one one thing um
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 one because you were
a world-class programmer for time yeah
very good programmer
when did the 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
uh we had to write some programs in
fortran which was what five at the time
it was a
it was a dumbed down fortran
but
listen
so
i i see the ability i see what what you
can do with this i program the sign
curve
and then i
divided
the design 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
it's uh
you're creating you're creating a little
helper yeah that helps you understand
the world to help you analyze the world
and so on uh we'll we'll return to that
because it's interesting okay so you
have so many interesting aspects to your
life but in moscow so yeah no let me let
no let me how i was sent to moscow okay
so one day i had a visitor from moscow
uh and he came to visit me in my
apartment uh together with uh nikolai
and he you know we talked and then he
said so how's your english i said
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 i'm we're
gonna uh send you a tape recorder and
you just talk
say something you know for 20 minutes
whatever you want to talk about
and
they sent this thing and two weeks later
i was on a plane to moscow
because yeah 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
there was an innate ability i would uh
you know when when
when we were in a lab
and
as students i would very often not do uh
monologues uh imitating east german
comedians you know i just impressions
yes yes
i'm not good enough to to make a living
out of it but uh
that
raised
some interest
and so
i went they sent me to moscow that was
the first time on a plane by the way um
and uh i had a conversation with two
ladies who spoke english one was a
russian a professor at
laminas of 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 i she said she was a professor she
may have taught there too and that's an
interesting distinction yeah one is like
a story you tell people no and one is
like you legit are doing the thing but
it also yeah there's a couple anyway
that's
that's that's the intrigue
interesting aspect of how to be a good
liar you might you might as well live
the lie
yeah exactly right uh so uh and the
other one was an
middle-aged the the russian was pretty
young the other one was middle-aged
american and uh and so we talked for
maybe a couple of hours and then they
withdrew and i was left alone
eventually
my my liaison he came back in and he
said
it was close but the american thinks you
can actually
uh
become
you get close enough to become becoming
a native speaker of american english
and he said the russian was very
doubtful
so i think wishful it was a tie
literally wishful thinking prevailed
so uh within a couple of weeks
i was moving to moscow
and what
what was the task in moscow and what
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 it was uh
so it was i
th the american american-born became my
tutor
i met with heart twice a week
uh i uh
i also listened to a lot of bbc
shortwave bbc worldwide
uh i read
more english books so a lot of that was
about the language and the culture of
english american
and 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 was it's mostly about the
vowels by the way most of the accent and
uh
particularly let's say coming from
german into
into english but also russian it's the
violence are we talking about the
so you would have a single word a word
apple and you would just say apple
yes
american english or british no american
english and and i give you one
uh example that
almost nobody gets right the difference
between hot and hot
[Music]
you know yeah yeah you know
yeah and and german speakers it's very
nice you know which one uh
for everyone is different for example uh
i could say this in 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 uh like beach
and bitch
right
and you get so as a young kid also you
get so nervous that i don't want to say
the wrong thing i um
i can also say that this is almost as a
jokey thing but uh there's a there's a
famous philosopher
emmanuel kant and you can uh guess which
other word is very similar to that so
there's a there's a nervousness
about
the what is that that's interesting i
mean and germans probably have a
different
uh 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 this was my discipline
i did this every night routine boring as
hell
uh 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 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 i
also they also taught me how to drive a
car in moscow
finally one skill you need what's uh
surveillance detection okay so this is
what when when you find out whether
you're being followed ah gotta gotta got
it so it's the enter uh yeah the the
abbreviation that's used in uh
congress and and
yes uh in uh
intelligent circles is sdr surveillance
detection route you know when they say
that you know what that is
uh and and that was it uh and a few
other things
you know one-offs for instance uh
i was once uh
taught
uh to read silhouettes of ships when you
see a ship from a distance what kind of
a ship it
might be
they they thought this would come in
handy actually that they uh there was in
in 1982 andropov started uh
a campaign was uh
now i forget the name operation
something something where everybody who
was in the west was supposed to uh look
for signs that uh the west was uh uh
getting ready for war
and i had an everybody had an object to
uh
to pay attention to i
had a uh
a harbor and military harbor in um
in new jersey uh
near red bank it was called earl weapon
station
and this 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 going to 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
love the answer you will love the answer
uh
i i was uh really guest
i was given tickets to two uh
performances by americans
uh there was a theater troupe that
played our town
uh and then there was this i forgot the
name of the guy but uh uh
you may not be old enough have you ever
watched hee haw
uh
maybe uh there was a it was a country
music show
real kitschy but uh the star of hee haw
uh
was giving a concert in moscow
and i guarantee you at least half the
audience were kgb
oh man and at the other end the uh uh
um
the the the opposite of uh of of a
highlight was my
visit to the uh to to
to the mausoleum where lenin
is still
still today
there there was so
there wasn't nothing
you know he was he was my hero but he he
looked like a wax figure
and and and you walk by there
there was nothing inspirational not not
it was not a religious experience
nothing it was
it was a big old nothing
is that did did your
faith and belief in communism start to
crumble at some point here is that
around that was still pretty small what
i did notice that uh the standard of
living in
in moscow was significantly lower than
in east germany
the uh uh in the supermarkets
you could
you could expect
uh with reliability that you can find
canned fish and
mineral water everything else was
whatever and if you saw a line and 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 it was
uh
not poverty but it was close to poverty
there were a lot of drunken men in the
streets
and uh this is the 80s
no this is the late 70s
mid to late 70s and uh and also the
they had these high-rise apartment
buildings that looked pretty good from
the front but you went into the backyard
ouch you know yeah you're describing my
childhood here okay
but it's interesting even even with the
professor even with everything else
um
it's interesting because i think the
standard of living was much lower yeah
right even in moscow yeah absolutely was
though the one thing that they always
had at least in my days was in those two
years there was always fresh bread in
the bullet snails 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 is bread yeah and the bread was good
it was good i mean i don't i actually
wonder
i wonder how good it was but i remember
it being incredibly good to me it was
really good and and you know you had it
from white to very dark and in all the
varieties the other thing that was good
was um
if you knew where to get it
was four rubles
not only is it good vodka but it's a
cheap vodka i like it yeah but you had
to know whether you know this would be
like holes in the wall someplace
well i think a lot of the way they
operate i wonder if these germany's this
way but a lot of the ways that moscow
operates you kind of
you had to know
yes like there's a very kind of
um 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 this
there's a culture this this is how you
work around a very big bureaucracy
underground economy yeah underground
economy yeah you have to which is a
boy
um
such a stark contrast between between
that and the united states the
capitalist system
um
yeah that was a very big culture shock
to me
to understand yeah the the different way
the different
fundamentally different way of life but
the interesting thing is
um human nature pervades both systems
and
there's 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 in
the united states there is much more
power to the rule of law so there's
rules right and people follow those
rules right
they have to break the rules nonstop
well in in east germany and russia i
believe uh
theft
if you could get away with it was part
of your economic activity yeah
i have a friend you know who who i went
to uh school with
uh up until my fourth year and uh we
reconnected and he told me how he
survived you know he would you know he
would just steal stuff and then sell it
and or trade it
yeah thefts i mean it's a relative
concept
you are taking stuff bro bribery all
those kinds of things people you know
um
corruption you know it's a relative term
no i'm just kidding i mean
it is you have to work around the giant
barack bureaucracy about the
uh the giant corruption corruption
builds on top of corruption and 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 no
i was 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 who loves love yes
that prepared me for my
first year and 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
so if the first two years in uh in
america you had to kind of
listen more than two you you bet the
very first year i i couldn't even work
because i had to acquire the ducking
documents and a social security card and
a driver's license uh to get a job
and then when i had the job
uh
and i worked as a bike messenger
uh that gave me a good opportunity to
listen as
you know because these people did
they weren't 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 in my the name i was given at
birth is ibrahim
nobody's so sexy when you speak in
german the german asset
i hate i hated that name they i didn't
like it it was it was very rarely used
uh my mother named me after a famous
german painter ibrahimo
my cover name in moscow was known as
dita and in
in in the united states i became jack
barsky in between i used a whole bunch
of other names
that were associated with uh false
passports that uh
i used the 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
was states assignment what was the
what was that leap what was like what uh
just one one one thing in between i had
a three months practice trip to
to uh canada that was that was a good
idea
and i got to tell you this this one
thing that happened there okay
so
because you know the one one thing that
that i like to tell people nowadays is
the 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's
come here comes something quite humorous
in hindsight at least
uh one of my the tasks that i had in in
canada was to acquire a birth
certificate
but the name the name was henry van
randle
who was born someplace in california and
i was supposed to
you know write a little letter saying
i'm henry van randle please send me a
copy of my birth certificate the fee is
enclosed
and uh and
and i uh
i lived in a small hotel so
the return address it wasn't visible
there was a hotel that was important
so and it took like
three weeks and i get nothing four weeks
i get nothing
eventually i got annoyed and i i i
i
mustered the courage to call
them up for myself from a pay phone i
called up the office
registrar whatever they were called
in this in this town in california and i
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 this is the henry
van randle yes
i had prepared the
caretakers of the
um of the hotel to
that i'm expecting a letter from my
friend
so i went up to my room i opened it and
i was like yes yes this is a success and
and then i opened this thing and it was
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 who was asking for that person
who was asking for more birth
certificate uh
i i had the presence of mine to to leave
okay i went to a couple of other cities
i should have left the country
uh but i know that the royal mounted
police
was following me and i was given that
information by the fbi later on
and they were you were able to just oh
you were able to at least suspect that
at the time i would through the the the
the
i knew that i knew that
there was trouble so
i
[Music]
my counter surveillance
route
yes didn't discover anything
so i kept on going uh i had to supposed
to i was supposed to visit two more
cities and uh
they were always one step behind what
what 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 i was known by name i would in
the past because i had to give that to
the hotel right
and i and i escaped with that so how
would they buy a hair
they would have to keep you on a list
right
yeah
yeah that's interesting but that
requires like um
a good computerized updated yeah
this was swiss air so
[Music]
well you got lucky yeah
part of life is luck you bet so so
and and uh other than that the the trip
to uh
uh canada was a big success because
it it uh
gave me the culture shock
that that i needed to not
be blown out of out of the water and
when i could get to the united states so
you hopped a few places in canada yeah
and then swiss i even had an i even had
a relationship with a young lady
uh canadian french canadian regular
canadian french canadian and she uh she
gave me
uh a book uh 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
was she lying
no
or you don't know maybe
uh speaking of uh spycraft and that that
led to heartbreak too no
that was uh
sexual
i was not at that point
ready for love not ready to return to
that dog
well and i was all i was already already
married in germany
okay that woman i loved
we should return to this yeah
so swiss air
where did you land in the united states
oh when i came where did i land i i an
american airlines uh flight from mexico
city to
uh
toronto but they made me deep plane in
chicago
i have no idea i think there was over
engineering that didn't make any sense
to me
you know why can't the canadian just
take it take a flight from mexico city
i don't know with this stopover this
kind of nonsense yeah but okay but
nevertheless that was it and then you
landed in chicago right
and then tell me the story in america
what was the day-to-day life now this is
now you're a spy
no no no no i got to tell you another
funny story yes
so this is another uh
there's two things that happened that
could have ended my
career as a spy right then and there
so i'm uh so i'm i'm arriving in
in um
chicago
in the evening it's already dark
uh i
i had no idea what kind of a hotel to
take you know i picked one out of a
out of uh 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 i need to
get sleep because i was extremely
uh tense
you know having gone through customs and
border control
so and we were going in the southern
direction and i noticed that the
neighborhoods were
became less and less inviting didn't
didn't know what that meant either and
i get uh
entered 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 because 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 uh johnny
walker red because
as one does yeah
because i was so damn tense i just
wanted to sleep i wanted to get into a
coma
which i did and yes and the next day i
woke up with a head it 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
uh
so i was right smack in in the middle of
the south side of chicago i didn't know
that this outside of chicago existed i
found 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 uh
i would register
at the next hotel on the jack barsky
so i went to the bathroom and i tried to
kill kill off
mr dyson by
burning his passport
um unfortunately i was not trained in
how to train passport
i don't know 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 presence of mind i threw this
thing in the toilet and then
then took out a pair of scissors and cut
it into small pieces and flushed it down
yeah if that smoke alarm goes off i'm
busted
right if somebody if if some some
criminal steals i had six thousand
dollars on me in cash uh steals either
my passport or my or my money or both
i don't know what to do yeah you can't
go to authorities you can't do there
weren't there weren't any russian
soviets in chicago do you have any
contacts no
there was no there was no um there was
no
plan b for chicago at all
that's an oversight and i shouldn't i
shouldn't have gone to chicago they they
could have shipped me into uh um
uh san francisco or washington dc
because both of them had soviets
my end goal was
was to go to to new york fine uh you
know i would have been a really really
uh dangerous agent if i had gone back
and worked with a kgb because i could
have told him all the things
how to do it right right so in that
sense
there is some
given the scale of the kgb there is uh
some incompetence and some a lot of
encouragement with regard to preparing
me to be an american is it was almost
totally incompetent and that do you
think that's representative of the way
they operate
as uh there's an incompetence like to
the
uh logistics to the
strategies involved all that kind of
stuff
none of these guys had operated as
illegals they they were outsiders to
american society they had interaction
with americans
and uh but they all lived in you know in
new york they lived in a compound
in in northern manhattan where they all
lived together with their families and
and they most of the time they spent uh
interacting with 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
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 and by the way this was mutual
do you think the cia had
good knowledge of the russian culture ah
same thing
and so um
there was a lot of lack of understanding
because good good intelligence could
have uh possibly avoided some of the
uh high tension that situations that we
had when when in the 80s we got close to
nuclear war
so good intelligence would be
integrating yourself in society yes
and understanding that ronald reagan was
not a warmonger but he was talking about
the end times because he was a a
christian
but then that kind of integration can be
dangerous because
you start to question the propaganda the
narratives
that on which the kgb is built oh yeah
he's built and and then they they have
all they always have to have 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 um 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 are 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 i think there is there's
collusion there's collaboration
but
i would think that uh like for instance
uh
uh some folks in the cia and the fbi are
are being used by the ones that are
really in power
power is money power is wealth
i know power is going to go the other 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 uh in a
in a position in society in the military
or in intelligence but i 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
uh
so the question is which way the
direction goes but you're saying that
there is um it's not one way flow of
power i would think so
and and i also believe it exists but
it's not as prevalent as you know not
every conspiracy theory uh
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 then there's there's
collusion there's people getting
together
and not necessarily
uh preparing a specific action but more
sort of a plan to go forward and
maintain the position or even you know
uh 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
uh
and there's uh there's a
famous uh case of uh one uh
uh
i think it's vasily kuklov
who defected he was a killer he was a
train 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 he talked to the guy and he said i'm
supposed to kill you i'm not and then
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
we
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 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 that there have been
assassinations
not not a lot
and uh
you know that that we know of
a good point this is very difficult uh
the the the question is
how many lines
are intelligence agencies
willing to cross
to attain
to achieve the goal i
i i think none of these agencies
have the ultimate line i 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 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
livenenko early on all the way to alexey
navalny do you think these accusations
are grouded in truth
and we will return
to a couple more questions maybe about
vladimir putin's early days in the kgb
which would be interesting yeah there's
a there's a phrase that i'd like to uh
say in response it's called plausible
deniability
i don't think putin gave a direct
command as they 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
is there can you steel man the case
that uh putin did not have direct or
indirect obama who who who would know
who would know you know just
well the the international
the reputation
perhaps
um
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 yeah we are sure
out there uh but the act itself
the the
the poisoning of uh
litvinenko and uh
oh and then the the assassination of the
bulgarian uh markov
and with the with the umbrella
and and they all
directly traced back to
russian uh soviet intelligence
uh and so that's enough to be feared
right um
my answer that i gave you is an educated
guess
you know i
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 say
would even
sort of
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 entity 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 even though it's
compartmentalized yeah but but uh but
not the the head of state not maybe not
the head of state
although uh in the case 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 was now in jail
there's there's uh interesting details
especially uh coming out recently around
the war in ukraine so let me actually
ask
about the war in ukraine all right
what is your analysis of
the war in ukraine from 2014 to the
full-on invasion of ukraine by russia in
2022 and february 2022
what um 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 though
um
let me just uh uh
give you my
the basics about this
savvy observers
saw this coming they were
a very small minority
uh because vladimir putin was pretty
open about
what he
told the world his mission was was the
re-establishment of a strong russia
the re-establishment of something like
the the russian empire to unite all the
russian-speaking
uh uh
people
uh in under one country and uh the world
ignored him
i mean he was open uh what was there was
at a conference in in france i believe
when we we set this out out in the open
uh and then what we had uh in the united
states we had wishful wishful thinking
you know obama
had this reset with russia
you know we all get friendly
and then when when uh putin invaded uh
crimea we did nothing
so
and it
and it just escalated slowly but surely
it was pretty clear and then they said
uh it was i think two years ago
there was an essay published by uh 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 going to do now how do you do this
with force
and
uh and the the sins committed by the
american government was that we ignored
it we were in engage 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 doing you're describing the
miscalculation
so not only did they not pressure
correctly with sanctions and so on and
and and clearly
uh respond to the actual statements and
the essays and the words spoken i know
where you're going but
yes but they also at the same time
pressured
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
uh and arming ukraine and
well the military-industrial complex
is a machine
that uh that led us
um
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 roller coaster
of emotion yeah i am a
at that time before that
and after was a proud american i went
through the whole roller coaster
of uh 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 vampires of the delusion
that we have
in the populace in 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 in 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
rock 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 agree two thoughts if i may uh
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
uh so
it exists and it is very powerful the
more weapons you can sell
uh the more you have to replace them or
send over you have to replace them so
yes
uh the the other thing is uh there's
also a
messianic streak
uh 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 it's a very
similar romantic idea that we can make
the world
and fashion the world the way we are
and and and that's the romantic side and
the
sort of honest side but it doesn't work
it
it failed every time right you know
afghanistan
is a royal mess and was would never
become a functioning democracy i don't
know if
if ukraine can become a functioning
democracy
so well i don't know if american weapons
can help ukraine become a functional
democracy i
yeah absolutely but there's a huge
amount of interest in
seeing the world in black and white and
selling the story of the world is black
and white that ukraine
is the symbol of democracy
in this east
eastern european world and russia is the
symbol of authoritarian dictatorship
and the story is not so simple as as 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
and one is in this case the aggressor
now
you know two p's
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 punch came from yeah
sure but there is there is magnitude yes
and 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 there's been 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 the
famine in the in the early 30s
and it's always
it's never the middle class and upper
class that suffer so is the lower
classes the peasants
in that time
that this history stretches back far
and this is yet another manifestation of
that
and
um 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 it's what this is uh the situation
is
as dangerous
as i have uh lived through
in my entire life i believe
and beca 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
yeah
one rocket yep
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 yeah and over that one a
single rocket
can lead to
given that there's leaders
that might not that might be losing
their mind yeah
and ukraine is not part of nato the
thing i'm really afraid of
is that
somebody might think it's a good idea
but for russia so putin might think it's
a good idea for russia to send a message
by launching a nuke against ukraine
because they're not part of nato
so surely the west is not going to
respond what is the west going to do
yeah if uh
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 and i don't know the exact protocol
uh that needs to be followed to
to
launch a nuclear strike from from from
nato's end because we have several
countries in nato that have nuclear
weapons
so for
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
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 and 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 in the military
is not guaranteed let's go back to the
law of hierarchy
the the government is is the biggest
hierarchy there is
and so
invariably politicians find their way to
the top and once you have politics in uh
dictating
substantive decisions they're they're
going to be weak or wrong
it's
i don't i don't know how this could work
any other way there well right now we
have some
functional idiots in in the central
united states
government well let me because you did
you said that um 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 when
yeltsin hired him as a
prime minister
he
he cleaned up the mess to because he
yeltsin
was it was
under yeltsin
russia deteriorated tremendously and it
became sort of an
uh a mix of an oligarchy and a criminal
enterprise and
chaotic
so he had skills that made him a good
executive absolutely now let's go back
to him as a kgb agent he was a kgb agent
i mean
uh you know according to him once a kgb
agent always a kgb agent but
16 years let's say something like this
uh
what do you think about
from your experience
now you're
maybe uh same age as him approximately
the same age as him he's a little
younger a little
younger
what
do you think about the kgb experience he
had
made him the man he is what aspect of
that
from your own experience well how much
that 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 got to 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
classroom journey right
uh
so um but but uh fundamentally he he was
not
a top
agent and this is very simple to there's
only one one thing you need to know he
he knows german pretty well
so he 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 there's people
classify all kinds of stuff like uh 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 the best athletes get sent
to
uh 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 have been
sent one would think so now that this is
not for a forcing argument but uh
uh i
also have it from from a word from the
horse's mouth
uh
which horse
what kind of horse what's the breeze
oleg kalugin uh you you know who oleg
kalugin is and he's still he's still
alive he was at one point uh the head of
counterintelligence for the first
directorate espionage right
and putin was in the first directorate
and reported to collogan for a while
and oleg told me to my face
that oleg was not an impressive
that agent trainee
or aj
vladimir putin was not impressive not
impressive at all now he's biased
given his current situation
and well yeah you know he could still
make it up because he had this big
ruckus when when he was in parliament
and called called putin the war criminal
about the
war in
uh not only could he make it up i
wouldn't trust his analysis
i mean i have to you know what 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 yeah 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 that
you have to put all the biases aside
all the political bickering all the
um
i don't know um
all the biased analysis
and there's
there's a lot of propaganda
that says that in fact
putin was it was a good agent
how else would he rise to the ranks
right because he
he was a good politician and uh he had
made a lot of good connections and
with within the kgb
allow me to say something and you just
uh you just taught me a lesson
and and and the lesson
i i should have figured out myself
because i i keep on telling people that
in the intelligence world you never know
the truth 100
so when you said all i 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 yes so i'm i'm going to
take the certainty of the statement that
i made back yes because you 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
um divisive figures
that some for some reason people's
opinion on the details of those people
are very sticky once you decide this is
a bad guy yeah
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 uh
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 to the ranks
now you're saying that
to be a kgb agent there's a lot of
skills involved
uh and perhaps
raw
um
technical
skill of spycraft
is perhaps not related to the skill of
raising rising through the ranks right
and you're saying as a politician he was
good at right lying and influencing uh
that is something that uh that is um
significant as a significant uh talent
uh 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
the heart soul and mind of vladimir
putin
let me return to yuri bismanov 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 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 um
you know i
i think i already sort of mentioned that
i think bessmanov was a fraud
and i have i have again can you
elaborate good arguments let's put it
this way
uh first of all uh we we know that uh
the kgb was involved in active measures
which is
you know um
you can call it uh uh
fake news
yeah uh seeding fake news into
the advert in the countries that are
your adversaries
and and the russians have been doing
this lately by meddling in our election
and
and focusing on the left and the right
fringe and influencing them to become
more left and no more right so that and
uh and vasily mctoken
uh
has and as in in one of his books uh 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 one of them
the two uh most famous successes uh that
i'm aware of is that uh
uh the canard that the eighth virus was
concocted in a cia lab
and so a lot of people around the world
believe that
and the other one was that uh
j edgar hoover was a secret
cross-dresser
that was that that is still known by a
lot of americans who are of a certain
age that this was the truth but uh
mitrokin actually traces it back to
a story that was placed in a
sort of left wing but
close to mainstream uh french magazine
and it was then taken taken up by
uh more um
you know
larger
newspapers and and well-established
papers
so 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
mitroken seems to agree with me
i was trained i would think
you know i was one of the crown jewels
of the agent
one would think that they used the best
that they had to to help me
how to
become an american and they didn't have
a clue
so how did they co if you don't know how
a country operates how do you come up
with with this this this this kind of a
very detailed
uh long-term plan that's that's also
timed you know two years this and one
year that and all that yeah so we should
actually just clarify so
he has this whole idea
that there's uh 15 to 20 years i need it
for demoralization
where you're
you're basically infiltrating a country
from a young 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 uh target the country's foreign
relations defense and economy you create
a crisis artificially and then you
normalize it as as if it uh always was
this way so it's basically saying
that the kgb is capable of at scale
uh over many years
manipulate an entire population of
people
right and this is kind of um
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 this is something that's actually
very difficult to pull off because yes
it's incredibly
um
incredibly difficult to achieve this
kind of manipulation i think it would it
would require
first of all not much bureaucracy not
much slowing down you have to have
incredible
in the modern world digital systems 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 to hire the best
people in the world
and i think it's difficult to execute on
this kind of thing
with the
if you com compartmentalize
because there has to be great
collaboration there has to be a great
work where there's a unified vision
coordination
and coordination across multiple groups
there has to be i mean there is it's
very difficult to do now
nevertheless especially with technology
this becomes easier and easier so the
bar
comes lower and lower to achieve
mass surveillance becomes easier and
easier and easier uh 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 intelligence 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 now give you an another
argument why i think that besmanov was a
fraud uh i mean i already have i i have
uh uh matrookin on my side and and my
personal observation of uh the
incompetence
that uh that i witnessed i mean they
really really didn't know what they
didn't know so now basmanov was kgb
where was he stationed
in india
he he was a
low-level
agent in india
and i told you with the one thing that
the kgb was really good was
that it was compartmentalization how
does bezn bismanov in india find out
about this massive plan that should have
been super secret right
he made it up sorry yeah and and you
know why he got away with it because
americans eat that up because it's not
our fault
it's like the damn russians that don't
do doing all that that bad stuff
speaking of the damn russians doing all
that bad stuff
you know about the internet research
agency
they have been doing quite a bit of
damage and uh
i i'm now familiar with the world of uh
enhanced artificial persons these are
the avatars
on facebook and twitter and you know
so forth that uh look like real people
and uh and uh and there are quite a few
of them and and i have a good friend who
operates in in that realm
and uh you know he he uses for instance
facial recognition when he
uh
thinks that
there's a suspicious character say on
linkedin or or on facebook
and very often he finds out yeah that
that person exists but it's not the
person who
uh it pretends to be
so basically detecting the artificial
yes the enhanced artificial yes but but
he can also make them
you think the united stand in hand yeah
the united states doesn't do it we do it
too but uh well this is to push back
against your pushback right yeah bezel
might be a fraud
but is it possible especially in the
modern age that there is these kind of
large-scale systematic operator wouldn't
you
as a government more so
uh that's
investing billions of dollars into
military
equipment
in in a world that's
more and more clearly going to be
defined by
uh
cyber war versus
hot war right 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 have 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 is much easier when uh you know all
you need is is an army of nerds
who also know that's
no fantastic
that's a term of endearment yes
i love nerds
i i used to be one myself
but anyway
i was a nerd so you know
um
so what i was going to say here is all
you need is an army of nerds and and
what
but also
uh
experts in the culture of the target
country okay and and nowadays the world
is different there's a whole lot more
fluidity there's a whole lot of more
people that like say russians for
instance study in the united states
chinese an army of chinese studying in
the united states they
they have a lot more knowledge of how we
function than the kgb did
and it's vice versa uh not as many
americans in in russia but we have some
but in the the chinese and the russians
have an advantage here
okay ask your question based on your
experience so
i have
been talking to
a lot of powerful people
and
some of which have uh very close
connections to in this particular
conflict uh 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 assad 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
what i
why why is that what i know
am i interesting at all how how are
people determined if they're in person
of interest or not and i guess the
question i mean some of it i asked in a
bit of a humorous way but also perhaps
there's truth in some of the humors
would i know if i have ever interacted
with the
intelligence
agency spy
well you you don't know that you haven't
been contacted uh but you um but
certainly not uh
i think you you never had a conversation
that uh related to intelligence in any
way shape or form right right like where
a person another person introduced yeah
and just themselves or
you know becomes
sort of wants to be your friend and then
uh talks about these types of topics
right yeah but
i
[Laughter]
um
there's people because because of who
i'm interacting with
they're
i mean even just even with elon musk
like if you think about elon musk
there's a lot of people that
are
um
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 this is for the intelligence
agencies i have nothing to hide i am the
same person privately as publicly
well-intentioned
uh real
no no controlled no weird sexual stuff
where you can manipulate me
um what else no drug use no drug use no
no skeletons in the closet
um none of that kind of stuff but you
know i don't i don't know i mean just
even having these conversations you know
i tend to trust people as a default like
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 was
when the person approaches you with a
smile and asks you a question my my
natural inclination is that person is a
cool person i'll answer the question
become a friend but it becomes difficult
when you realize that there's um 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 i how do you know how to operate
in this world the folks that you're
interacting with uh
have a responsibility not to tell you
what they shouldn't tell you right right
so and most of them probably won't
and and i'm guessing occasionally they
will say well i can't go there
right
yeah so so what what
what you are
uh aware of
is sort of public
and what you're doing is you you uh
you're collecting it and you
um
you editing it to some extent you're not
you're not changing the word the verbage
yes you
you just uh
repeat what they say so from that angle
you're not you're not privy to any real
secrets
what you uh
have possibly that could be of use is
you learn to get to know the person
so i'm thinking there's a good
possibility if you get the interviews
uh
in in the east that somebody may
actually approach you and ask you what's
what's your opinion i just hope they
approach me and introduce themselves
properly i i just yeah
there's a kind of
i mean would you know like how many
uh 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 just
like with the gru no idea
is it is it possible there is like tens
of thousands and we're not or like
thousands not not thousands like i used
to operate we were 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 they're they're being asked
you know help us out you know do
something for the motherland
and crowdsource spying
yeah sort of not not seriously training
but yeah and yeah for instance uh this
this lady uh i forgot her first first
name boutina she was a rank amateur she
used
social media to communicate with moscow
uh so she had no training but she was
reasonably successful i mean she
uh and and and uh um
i
the difference between let's say uh
the current russian intelligence and the
kgb
vladimir putin and his uh his henchmen
uh are okay with
people being caught
because and every time i i go and talk
and give a talk someplace i'm always
asked this question honey i mean how
many russian spies do you think
we have here because that it scares the
people right and putin likes to scare
people the kgb was very solicitous of uh
of their agents they were you know they
uh they didn't want any one of them
caught all right so that's that's a big
difference and uh you know so getting
caught so for the fsb getting caught
sends a strong signal to the world that
there's yeah there could be many more
and there probably are but
and uh
because also the world again there's a
whole lot more travel going on a whole
lot more interaction studying abroad
doing business
and uh
you know there's there will be attempted
espionage probably one
every minute in this country that
doesn't mean they will be successful no
uh
uh but uh there is a
a cottage industry now that
is doing quite well that teaches
companies how to
uh 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 yes it becomes a serious
and 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 vladimir zelinski
is there something you would ask
about
the time in the kgb
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 uh yeah you
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
as a politician or
in the realm of uh
uh kgb
when the wall came down and uh
he was in in
an office kgb office in the city of
dresden
and um these germans were
uh
besieging uh stasi offices and they also
dropped by the kgb office and uh they
they were
it was pretty threatening it looked like
they won't actually storm the office and
get you know the
documents and stuff like that
and uh um
initially then the first demonstration
uh was uh
um
um was told that uh if if they come any
closer weapons would be used
so they disappeared and then they came
back and uh and
i don't know some somebody in that
office called berlin and said what are
we going to do can 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 this was a defeat big
one
and and it's a supposedly a powerful
intelligence agency cowering 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 that that's as he talks
about the collapse of the soviet union
being a great tragedy
there's a feeling like
that was uh
um that was
like never again
yeah and and i i believe that uh he has
a he has a strong conviction
uh that
i don't know if he's religious he
carries across now but i don't know what
that means but and somehow but that uh
it's the destiny of the russian nation
to be great
and that that is sort of that that's
whether there's it's it's determined by
god or some some higher power that that
is very important for him of course that
nationalist
idea is uh one that americans share as
well and
you know
it could uh help a nation flourish so by
itself it's not necessarily a bad thing
oh it's how it manifests itself as a
question um well one other thing is
if i were to uh
get a chat with
the ukrainian uh
president i would ask him
how many lives
what what what
what is the equation between giving up
some land and how many lives
uh are worth this land
and that's a it's a good way to phrase
the question of course that question
gets you killed in ukraine
but uh because there's another part of
that equation
which is it's not just land versus lives
it's
the sovereignty the the knowledge
that you're free
and yourself determined
and like it's not about like fighting
for the particular land it's saying
we
are messed up
corrupt
uh
we have problems it's a messy world
but
it's our world
uh i think stephen crane has a poem
about like
a man eating his own heart
and he was asked
uh 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
uh the same love of nation that uh putin
has for russia the greater russia this
vision of this great empire
uh i believe ukraine does as well there
not every nate 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 though 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
uh i'm a bit of a coward i i could not
do what zielinski has been doing
uh i uh
um
i would
sort of
try try to find a way to
carve out
something that
i i can live with
however if
if
that force that evil force ghost gets to
my family
right there's lines
yes that's that's right you're
you become the world's bravest man as
somebody across that line oh yeah
you mentioned something about you've not
been to moscow back
and that you it might not be safe for
you to travel there
yes
um
can you speak to the nature of that
you know as somebody somebody that
successfully
got out of the kgb
how are you still alive
a number of reasons um first of all um
when
my story became public that was six
years ago
i was pretty old right and so
uh 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 i
did not
uh
i wasn't a hired hand a german i did not
betray the motherland that's a crime
that just uh punished by death you
betray the motherland that's
uh
and um
and
and the other thing is um
if there is a you know that these kinds
of operations to assassination on a
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 saying moscow or even in
countries like turkey where there's a
lot of lawlessness you know accidents
can easily be uh arranged and that's
just sending another message you know
just like you know we
we
we can do a lot of things powerful yes
do you think it's safe for me to travel
in russia and ukraine um
i think you uh you know
very well
how to communicate in both countries you
know you've shown this in this
interaction that uh
uh
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 yeah like the question that i was
going to ask zelinski who not going to
ask good for you
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
yeah how did you finally get caught
i resigned
in 1988. so let's actually talk about
that there's a okay resigned
there's there's warning signs there's
another yet another choice yet another
crossroads yes okay what was the
calculation what was the choice to be
made
to um give a little background and it
was it was 1988
and i
i was i thought
they would my
uh
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
that they indicated you know that they
said you know you know we're done you're
done
but
in december of 1988 i got this one
one thing that i never wanted to see so
we had a system of signals
that uh
either
one of those diplomat agents could set
at a spot that i passed by every day
or i could set where they would pass by
uh like on their way from where they
live to the united nations for instance
who would just drive
so and and mine was uh
my the signal spot uh for me was
on a on a support beam for the elevated
atrian and in queens
and it was uh
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 uh
you know since you have done it already
i can 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 yes
there was like you must you are in
severe danger of uh and you you need to
get out of the country as soon as
possible there was a
a protocol that i was supposed to follow
i wasn't even supposed to go home
i just needed to was supposed to get my
my reserve documents that i had
hidden in a park in
in the bronx
and made make a beeline to to the
canadian border
i wasn't ready
so i just like ignored this thing i mean
i did i couldn't ignore it but i went on
to work
got on the a train
get 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 i was
my my little girl by the name of chelsea
was 18 months old
and
i
was there when she was born
i took her to
tour 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 re-entry
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 you
particularly fathers of girls who
understand what happened there
and
i still thought i need to go back
because you know there was
there was probably some danger
but i hadn't figured out how to take
care of the girl you know
and leave her but you know maybe she
need to
she need to have a good life and grow up
and and have a chance and
her mother had a she was from south
america she had a fourth grade education
that would have not worked very well
so i
played for time i
obviously
i could be sick i couldn't 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
um that was on a monday on a thursday
was my regular
shortwave transmission
i listened and they explained a little
in in
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 he still could
be in a hospital right so
uh i gave myself some more time
and then
something happened where
they forced my hand it's the only time
that the soviet agent was anywhere near
me
on the territory of the united states
so i'm waiting for the a train on a
on a
dark morning still in
uh in queens and
there's this uh
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 there
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 have said
or else you're busted or else you get
arrested or else you're dead it's very
strong
so
now you have to have to take it
seriously to some degree because i know
that uh
they didn't they had a history of uh
assassinating or at least trying to
assassinate the factor so
uh that that obviously raised the the
stakes a little bit uh but i i i just
talked myself into believing this was
just uh
a bad phrasing
and but at this point
i knew and they knew that we both knew
right so there was no more guessing he
he found me he talked to me i know
so now i had to act so in in the next
radiogram i was uh
asked for uh to
execute a dead drop operation where they
would give me money
and
a passport
and that was in a park in on staten
island
it was a location that i found
and i
described and and i was always uh
praised for
my my ability to describe spots that are
easy to find
so that what that was a given so
and the only thing that was different in
this for this operation they they
scheduled it for the dark
all right so but
it was still no problem because it was
in a park and then a couple of um about
uh
100 yards in uh by uh next to a a fallen
tree
it would be hard to miss
so i go to staten island and i read the
signal that uh said uh
i i put the container in the drop
that that was the protocol there's a
signal that the person who
uh who
hands over with 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 i
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
uh and i
had a flashlight with me that the park
there was nowhere in the park and it was
even during the day though this park was
not uh it was more almost like a little
forest
uh and uh
i don't see the container
it wasn't supposed to be a
crushed oil can
pretty sizable nothing hard to miss
and i do a double take and i look again
and i look around and 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 when as i'm walking away from this
like sort of
emotionally
i said to myself i'm staying
yeah
that decision kind of signals some kind
of
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 that was it that was it that was
it and uh so what i did uh
uh to
uh well first of all i
divine into intervention helped me to
find find a good
explanation i sent him my last letter
and with secret writing
i uh
i communicated to them i said i
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 i had 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 that
depraved culture and you see when they
they're killing each other and the
debrief culture took you took over your
being and yes
no and and and i was and i was
convincing enough i'd even traced it
back to
a girlfriend i had once that i had
actually reported on that she you know i
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 they sent and i asked
him to
give my my dollar savings to my german
family uh
they gave them some but they
they told 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 uh in the next three
months i made sure that i wasn't
uh reliably
at the same spot
in the same time frame
so i went to work in different
paths at different times just to you
know
you know just doing this
safety measure so to speak and not not
not huge
uh but you know i did it
it kept me kept my
allowed me to keep my sanity
uh and and obviously after i
sent the letter i i threw the shortwave
radio in the hudson river
destroyed the one-time pads that i still
had so i was
now uh ready to uh for a new life for a
new life and live out my life as an
american
undiscovered uh but you know
starting to
work on my version of the american dream
and
the first action was
was telling my wife the mother of this
child
you know she always
wanted to have a house and say you know
what we should buy a house
and a year later we moved into the
suburbs and then i said we should have
another child and we had another child
so and i had a career where i did pretty
well uh
i moved
a couple of times wound up in a mech
mansion
but before that
my second house was actually in
pennsylvania in rural pennsylvania and
this is
where uh
i was discovered by the fbi
and how did they know about me uh i if
if it if it hadn't been for this
defector
vasily mitrokin who was an archivist in
in the kgb archives
he was actually pretty high level he was
in charge of the relocation of the
archive
from
lu lubyanka to yasinovo
and he really hated the
he had reason to believe he hated the
soviet system
uh i i think i remember that his son was
quite ill and he could have gotten
treatment in england and he was not
allowed to
to travel to england with his son so
he
uh his hatred he tried to figure out
what to do and how to do damage to that
system so he started copying notes
little
little slips of paper
handwritten that he smuggled out in his
underwear and in socks
over the years
and then he transcribed them with the
typewriter and then put
the
pieces of paper uh
and into some kind of a container and
and and and
buried this in his stature
it was i believe in 1992
when he showed up that was already the
the soviet union was gone
so he showed up at the u.s embassy in
moscow and told him what he had and
it was on a weekend and apparently there
was a junior person in charge and he
said you know what what you got we're
not interested in it's really old
uh that's a career limiting move right
uh because then uh
vasily mitrokin then uh made its way to
one of the baltic republics and uh
contacted mi
six
and they said come on in old fellow have
a cup of tea
and so they they managed to get this
stuff out of the dacha and uh and get it
to england and eventually
uh the
mi6 shared it with the fbi and uh
there wasn't a whole lot of information
about me it was very very little it was
like there's an uh a person by the name
of jack barsky who
isn't 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 was
had gotten his
social security card at the age of 33
bingo okay
the all they knew though was that i
wasn't illegal that i was still living
there they didn't know whether i was
active inactive
uh they and the other thing that they
knew that i was a really really
well-trained agent because i was still
there right
so um 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 would have found out that
somebody's
investigating here so you started being
less and less active in terms of uh oh i
stopped completely
what i mean is oh surveillance detect
remote yes
after three months i stopped all
together okay yeah good point and fbi is
still very careful they were very
careful they they pretty much watched me
and then and 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
and just keep a closer eye on me
there was no
indication that
uh i was still active but they were
still cautious
and
but at one point they
they were able to plant a bug in my
kitchen a listening device
and
i
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 then i
i
chose to
deploy the nuclear option
[Laughter]
and that is that is telling her
what i sacrificed to be with her to so
she would understand that
i am there on her side yeah i'm
supporting her something doesn't quite
fit it is not because i don't love the
both of them chelsea
and penelope
so
i 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 and and i quit because
uh
then because of uh and then state state
here because of you and
chelsea
and um
that also
made it clear to the fbi that i wasn't
active anymore so they had both of that
so
now uh they knew
an attempt to turn me would have been
useless because you know
because you know you turned somebody was
active
but they figured they had
there was enough reason to treat me
nicely because
they figured that i had a lot of
information
that
was as as aged as it was but it was
still important for the fbi to get to
know
and so
one day
uh there was a friday
evening i i
i'm
driving back home from the office
and i'm being stopped by a um
state uh state
state police
and
as i'm going through the toll
uh oh that 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 uh
move over here it's a routine traffic
stop and i 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 uh
and then he said no could you sleep
please step out of the car that should
have uh aroused my suspicion that's
unusual right routine traffic stop
uh yeah i did it no problem and then
again somebody came from the right came
on
into my view and he flipped this uh
id and they said fbi we would like to
have a talk with you
now this is uh my now friend joe riley
who
who actually is
the uh he's the godfather of my of
trinity my last child but anyway
uh he told me later that uh
when when
i heard that phrase
all the blood left my face it became
totally white
uh
but i recovered very quickly and he said
it himself so uh you know he they took
me to
a vehicle
and uh there was an another agent in
the vehicle and he had a gun strapped to
his ankle so
that was pretty real
first question i had so am i under
arrest and the answer was no
and then
my instinct kicked in
uh in my ability to to operate in
very well under high pressure situations
and i asked them so what took you so
long
you know
the intent of that was to
um
to uh
de diffuse any kind of tension
yes and i saw a smile
instant friends uh yeah i i knew i knew
that uh i had to make them
like me
and i'm
i think by now i know i'm a pretty
pretty likable person so i would say so
so so uh and i uh when when they took me
to a motel which they had rented uh
there was an uh
the two two uh
wings at a right angle they they had one
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 pretty
silly because
what what i know but i noticed that the
the labels all referred back to my early
years i knew that they didn't know much
else
so um i told joe that afterwards and
that was not a great idea but anyway
[Laughter]
uh but but i volunteered i made the
following statement before we even
started the the uh interview i said i
know there's only one way for me to and
my family
to have a chance to get through here
without much damages if i'm if i'm
completely 100 cooperative and this 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 going to be late that
that indicated to me already that they
would let me go and after two hours they
let me go
um
but they had the area
covered with a whole bunch of people and
the head of that
that team
talked to me and 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 no thought of running
so and that was the beginning
of uh
another phase of my life where i was on
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 uh seven
years ago
uh today seven years ago so recently uh
yeah wow quite recent the bureaucracy
took a long time to figure out how to
how to make me
real and
and also not put me in
in in this 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
uh simply because if i
jack barsky was born in 1944 if i kept
1944 the fbi would have helped me commit
a crime because i would have uh
collected social security of uh four
years or sooner
so and anyway uh details of that yes it
took quite a while and when i finally
got the call from
the office uh of homeland security
uh since uh
the lady says uh this is agent so and so
uh
uh from
homeland security can you come to the
office tomorrow
and uh
i said um 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
uh it was a good feeling to walk out of
there because i
i had a country again
you know and i love this country just as
much as you said you love it uh
with all its warts and its problems that
we're going through right now um
and
then
the last thing that changed my life
again and i don't want to 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 uh
dots that were unlikely to be connected
it had to do with a relative with with a
half brother of my wife who lives
in germany
was taken to
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 my wife and and this half
brother never
never met in person before they knew
about each other to social media
and when he found out my background he
he was a
conductor who was a german railroad at
the time
he said oh this is a big story and one
that's gonna be big big big
okay
well he happened to know this one person
who happened 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
uh steve croft the guy 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 most of us it does stuff
happens
you get lucky you you don't know
lucky a few times in your life but yeah
i think i'm
must be part irish too
[Laughter]
yeah so uh
it's uh it's been it's been an
interesting ride
um
i'm just
still shaking my head about all the
stuff that happened oh it's been a fun
one what you wrote uh
because i'm allowed to leave behind a
documented legacy of my
unusual life yeah 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 yeah
what role does love play in this
human condition in your life and yeah in
our life here together i
i give you
an
answer
by telling you what happened one day i
i gave a presentation at microsoft
headquarters
that's a strange beginning a long story
but yes
no that's not a love story and so
there's this there's this young this
beautiful young lady sitting in the back
and she's she's paying a lot of
attention uh found out later that uh her
her job at microsoft job job title was
storyteller
it's soft marketing right
yeah you could say that yeah but but
that's if you can't afford somebody like
that that's that's good
anyway
she uh
questioned and answered she raised her
hand and she asked me
so all the things
that you have done and you've
experienced what's the
number one lesson you've taken away from
from your life
that was a new question for me i've
never never been asked that question
and i i thought about
about it for 20 seconds and then i came
up with this uh
this phrase that we all know love
conquers all
because in my life it did
in the end
and uh
and
it's uh it's the strongest human emotion
and that is what makes us human
really
and he spoke about the
i mean offline as i've spoken with you
it's 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 um
that i'm pretty mature
to put it mildly uh
i'm 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
well welcome to texas because this
random kind acts of kindness a stranger
seems to be a way of life
which is one of the reasons i love it
here um it just reminds me why i love
human beings which is that they there's
just this warmth this conduction yeah
and and georgia is the same thing yeah
amen um do you have any regrets
do you
yeah looking back at life do you wish
you've done something different well i
like
i could have but i
then i would have had it 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
i betray the
child
that is a source of so much love for you
now so maybe your life is a kind of
um
you get to choose your regrets
it's a it's a little bit uh of a strange
way of putting it but i there's no other
choice uh and i tell you what what i
don't regret and and that's 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
did we didn't interact emotionally
whatsoever
so you don't feel like you betrayed that
i love that that uh well i i did i know
that i know that she
she was looking for me
until she the day she died she 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 uh this rumor that uh
was flying around and she possibly may
have bought into that rumor because
my cover for
uh when i went to
the united states was that i uh
changed careers again and i joined uh
a um
an institution in kazakhstan that did uh
space research
intercosmos something something
and i had an i had a piece of paper that
one that invited me to start there and
that was theo it was a forgery the
intercosmos didn't never existed but but
people knew that in kazakhstan there
were super secret
uh in
facilities so and some one of my
classmates 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 i said also so guess who this
is but
maybe you hold on to your chair
she says yes i said
this is albrecht
it's a good payback
no we actually met so there's two
elderly people in their 60s
uh 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 and the tears came down her cheeks i
wasn't asking for that i wouldn't i
wasn't happy about it but it did feel
good now now uh uh a while later uh
i knew why she
said she made a mistake
i met her husband
yeah i mean there's uh
this there's a town waist has a song
called martha
where you make
um or 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 uh 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 none there was nothing left
there was nothing left uh and also the
person that you became
uh
personality-wise wasn't as as attractive
as as i
remembered her you know it's puppy love
you know but it's still love yeah it was
happened
it was a passionate love for sure and uh
i i would have uh
i would have thrown myself under the bus
if i could save her
it was that strong and just as strong as
the love for my two girls
yeah
life is full of
moments and periods like that of love
and then that's what makes life so so
freaking awesome
but it does come to an end
and so does this conversation i guess
no this goes on for many more hours but
yes uh 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
um
as a christian you have a sense what's
coming after
or is it full of uncertainty i have a
hope
i have a hope uh
you know um
[Music]
there there's a lot of uh there's a lot
of christianity which is quite logical
a lot of christianity which is also uh
you know the life of christ there's a
lot of a lot of proof uh
but you know
and
i became a christian
uh
starting
with a head
and and and i was already
quite old and
i uh
uh
you know
when you don't when you don't get this
faith very early
uh it's it's it's tougher to buy into
everything you know there are some
there's some things
that are difficult for me to understand
and and believe but
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
for an eternity
i just hope
i won't convince somebody else at this
point which is doesn't make me
a really really good questioning because
i'm supposed to evangelize
but there's still a fear
yeah there's a fear and a hope
uh on the other hand uh i know that
you see see this this is this is how i
approach the the
last years of my life
uh
i will not
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
if you stay physically mentally sharp
yes
go out with guns blazing that's that's
and and i once read a book written by a
by a medical doctor
he said most people uh
uh
when when when when they're becoming
mature that the the rest of their life
is a slow downward move
and
[Music]
not for you
no
the last years are pretty
bad he said you got to do this boom
that's that's pretty good advice from a
doctor
um and if nothing else from christianity
uh whichever parts you take on one of
the big ones is love yeah and that's
something you've lived from the very
beginning before yes
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 uh uh
there's there's a short sentence in in
the bible it says god is love
and and
the other thing is i want to say that
the christian
morality is
is i'm i i can sign that with my blood
okay god is love amen jack you're an
incredible person have lived an
incredible life
thank you for talking today thank you
for telling your story uh
thank you for being who you are and
thank you for being
um all about love this is a this is a
beautiful conversation it was an honor
thank you and uh appreciate the tough
questions that you asked
thanks for listening to this
conversation with jack barski to support
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and now let me leave you with 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
you