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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.
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There are very few people who have defected from the KGB and live to tell the story.
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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.
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But also it tells the story of a man who lived one heck of an incredible life.
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And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor.
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I think that s how you dig at the subconscious mind, is by speaking about the darker aspects of your past.
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I think as long as you start talking about it, you kind of start pulling a thread, and then you might be surprised at what you pull out, and as you start pulling it out, you realize that there s a lot more there, and you bring it to light, and that s how you let it go.
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A lot of non-fiction books that I return to over and over and over on there.
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It s basically the best non-fiction books ever written are all on there.
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And now, dear friends, here s Jack Barsky.
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Let s start with a big basic question.
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What is the KGB, Komitet Государственной Безопасности?
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Right, so that is the Committee of State Security.
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Opossumist is a threat, right?
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Threat.
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Okay, and BS means?
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Without.
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Right.
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And I guess that directly translates to security, without threat.
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So, and don t exist anymore.
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It was disbanded when the Soviet Union fell apart and the successor agencies are now the SVR and the FSB.
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FSB supposedly the equivalent to the FBI and SVR, the CIA, but the SVR is relatively weak and the FSB has taken on a lot of espionage and active measures and they re much bigger and stronger.
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but the most capable intelligence agency in Russia is the GRU, military intelligence.
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That nobody knows very much about.
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That s right.
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When I was in the KGB, I had no idea that there was military intelligence.
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Nobody ever mentioned anything like that.
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And by the way, I recently had the pleasure to give a talk at the DIA.
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When they reached out to me, I didn t know they existed either.
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Interesting.
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Yeah, that s always the question.
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If you want to be an intelligence agency, should the world know anything about you?
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Because in some sense, you want to create the legend in order to attract great, competent individuals to work for you, but at the same time,
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you wanted to be shrouded in complete mystery.
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If nobody knows you exist, you might be able to operate well as an intelligence agency.
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That is fascinating, but FSB is the thing that carries the flag of KGB, KGB being probably one of, if not the most,
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sort of infamous, famous, infamous and powerful intelligence agencies.
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In history, yes.
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Absolutely, 100%.
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It was founded in 1954 after the death of Stalin.
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You ve, in writing your book, looked back at the predecessors of the history.
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Right.
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Is there some way in which the KGB
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is grounded in the culture, the spirit, the soul of its predecessors.
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Oh, absolutely.
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They just changed names, and they changed personnel rather frequently, and that had something to do with Stalin s paranoia.
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From between 1923, and I don t remember what, I think it may have been the NKVD at that time, it started as the Cheka, and then it became the,
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the GPU, the NKVD.
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But with those name changes, you also had changes at the top.
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Between 1923 and 1953 when Stalin died, that is 30 years, they had eight heads of intelligence.
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And of those eight, six were executed when they were replaced.
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So that s an indication that this was an organization that ate itself from the inside.
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The Soviet Union was the only dictatorship in history that did not rest its powers on the military.
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They rested its powers on the intelligence apparatus.
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And that thing was unstable.
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So you know where that leads.
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Eventually, if you rest your power on something that is made out of bricks that don t hold a lot of load, it will fall apart.
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On sand, why was it unstable, would you say?
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What of human nature makes it unstable?
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It s the paranoia.
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Stalin was always worried about the most powerful people coming after him.
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So he proactively killed off heads of the KGB and he had this great purge where he got rid of a lot of his generals, really capable generals.
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And that cost him dearly when World War II started because he started off with a force that wasn t as capable as it could have been.
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Was it paranoia at all levels?
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I believe so, I believe so.
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It comes from the top, and so if the top doesn t trust you, you always have to worry about your peers.
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It s snitching on you.
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And I think we have a very similar situation in Russia today.
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And in this kind of atmosphere, the truth will never get to the top.
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what moral rules the organization operates under.
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Trust is fundamental to its competence.
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Oh, absolutely, and I want to extend this to my own existence.
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And this is kind of strange, it s almost dichotomous, because I was running around lying to everybody, and I couldn t fundamentally be trusted, but the relationship that I had with the KGB was based on trust.
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If they don t trust me, they don t send me out.
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And if I don t trust them, I m not going. 
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And I eventually broke that trust, and they knew there was always that danger.
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they knew that because something about you or just something about human beings?
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They can be broken.
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No, there were hints about how long my assignment would be, so 10 to 12 years.
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And you see, it makes sense, all right?
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I was becoming an American, and over time,
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I would become more and more American, and there was always a chance that I liked it more here than there, that I was really successful in what I was supposed to do.
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And it sort of happened, but in my case it happened because I fathered a child who I didn t want to leave when they wanted me back.
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Love always screws up your employment competence, yes.
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You re absolutely right.
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But they thought that I had an anchor at home because I had a wife and a son at home, which you ve got to worry about them if you defect.
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because in the past the KGB would go after family, ruthlessly.
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Including perhaps violence?
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Yeah.
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This is a hard question about the KGB because it s one of the most ruthless organizations, but in general.
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Are there lines, KGB agents at every level of the hierarchy that they would not cross, political, legal, ethical, or does anything goes to achieve the goal?
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I was only in touch with two types of agents, whether the technical experts, the ones that taught me tradecraft,
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And they were like engineers and they were in charge of the secret writing and the Morse code, shortwave radio reception, decryption, encryption, and that kind of stuff.
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Those were just doing their job, all right?
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And the others, the ones that trained me, that prepared me for life in the United States, they were nice people.
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They were elegant people.
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I don t think they would not fit into the stereotype of the ruthless gun-carrying agent.
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Is it possible that you would not be aware of the parts of the KGB
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I mean, it s very modular.
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It s possible that you re not aware of the parts of the KGB that are the quote-unquote muscle.
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Oh, I didn t know.
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I would find out afterwards, after I retired and started doing some research.
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I had no clue.
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So you re kind of operating in a bubble.
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Oh, very much so.
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I mean, this is what the KGB did really, really well, compartmentalization.
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And that was based on
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you know, the communist movement while it was still underground, you know, the cells were very small, and so that maybe there were three, four members in one cell that knew one another, and then they had a liaison to another cell, so the bottom line is if you got, one of those folks were caught,
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they could maybe betray four people or three, something like that.
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And the KGB continued with that tradition.
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I have reason to believe that my handler, the person in Moscow that sort of directed me and made decisions what to do and where to go,
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never met me personally.
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There s no reason to.
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And this actually was a big advantage over other intelligence services because you look at what the CIA does, everybody blabs.
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There s a lot of leaks coming out of American intelligence.
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I don t think there s as many leaks coming out of the Mossad.
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Strong words from Jack Barsky, by the way.
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I mean, that is a question I want to ask a little more systematically.
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Is there something unique about the KGB compared to the other intelligence agencies?
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Let s talk.
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British Intelligence, MI6, Mossad, CIA.
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Is there unique cultures, spirits, souls of the different organizations that maybe somehow connect to the structures of government, connect maybe the values of the people, those kinds of things?
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I believe we were all pretty much strong believers in communism and the future of the world being- In KGB?
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Yes.
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I think that unified us to a large degree, even the technicians.
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So even it wasn t something like, yeah, yeah, the parents believe this thing, but we know the truth.
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You really
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the story of communism.
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Absolutely did, and you need to look at the time frame.
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The Soviet Union, after World War II, made quite a bit of progress in influencing the third world.
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I still remember when I was in middle school, we had a map, the map of the world, and it was color-coded.
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So red was communism, that was the Soviet Union and the eastern states.
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And then blue was capitalism.
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And then we had green, which were the third world countries.
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And the green slowly turned pink because a lot of third world governments, like I m looking at Angola, I m looking at...
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Vietnam, a lot of these countries were very sympathetic to the Soviet Union.
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And so we sort of knew that this would go on like that and eventually we would take over and pretty much overtake, that was the myth, overtake the United States.
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not only militarily, but also in terms of industrial production and so forth.
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That was a stupid pipe dream.
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The military, it was a standoff, as we know.
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Well, stupid pipe dream.
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Hitler had a stupid pipe dream that he executed exceptionally effectively on, if not for a handful of military mistakes, the world could look very different today.
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The biggest one being invading
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the Soviet Union, particularly at the time that he did it, because he ran into the same thing that Napoleon ran into, General Winter.
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Well, within, so Operation Barbarossa, within that, he could have made different decisions.
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Yeah, for example, attacking, skipping Kiev and attacking Moscow directly overthrowing the government.
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So marching, I guess that that would be learning lessons from Napoleon as opposed to as opposed to a different kind of distribution of forces and then getting bogged down in the winter.
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But the point is,
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These ambitions sometimes do, 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 empires, or we certainly don t think of them as the bad guys.
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They write the history books, therefore they re the good guys, and right now,
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America has effectively written the book about the good guys.
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I happen to believe that book, but we should be humbled and open-minded to realize that that is in fact what is happening, is effective empires write the history books and tell us stories and tell us propaganda and tell us narratives that we believe because we are human beings and we love to get together and believe ideas.
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We love to dream of a beautiful world and try to build that beautiful world together.
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In the United States, that s a beautiful world, the freedom of respect of human rights, of all men are created equal.
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Pursuit of happiness.
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It always sounds good.
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If you look at what the dream of communism is, it sure as heck, in its words, on the surface, sounds good.
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Respect for the workers, the working class, the lower classes that have been trodden on, that have been stolen from by the powerful.
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They deserve to have the money, the power, the respect that they have earned through their hard work.
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Sounds great.
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And everybody gets along.
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We just have to, you know, all men are wonderful people.
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And if they go bad, it has something to do with the fact that they have been oppressed, right?
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And that dream just never worked out.
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And even it is, when you think about it,
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And I didn t think about it.
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When you re young, you just emotionally, you accept it.
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But when you think about it, somehow that new wonderful organization has to organize itself.
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even though Lenin predicted that the state eventually would go away.
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Well, how does it work?
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Then you have like anarchy, right?
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You have to have an organization.
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And the only way to really organize a large number of people is with a hierarchy.
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So, and who gets to the top?
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the ones that want to go to the top, the ones that believe in themselves, the ones that know better than everybody else.
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SPEAKER_00
And once you have that hierarchy established, there is no guarantee that it won t go bad.
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SPEAKER_00
And actually, when you look at history, every such hierarchy has gone bad.
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You look at Cuba, for instance.
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I believe Fidel Castro was an honest revolutionary.
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I do believe that.
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And so what did Cuba turn into?
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, there s something about, and you speak about Vladimir Putin in this way, but let s step away from that for a second.
1
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is there something about being an honest revolutionary that wants to do good for their country, and you start to believe that you know better than everyone else how to do good in the country, and you very well might first, but then somehow that grows into a distortion field where you keep believing you know what s right, and all the people who disagree with you
1
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you stop seeing them as having a point, you instead see them as like evil manipulators of the truth that are actually trying to hurt people for their own greed, for their own power, and you will protect the people because you know what s good.
1
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In the case of Stalin, I mean, I don t know, but it seems like he really believed that communism would bring about a much better world.
1
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I mean, there was a sense,
1
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you have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet.
1
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This idea that sacrifice is necessary to bring about a greater world.
1
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And then the other aspect is,
1
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sort of ruling by terror, creating terror as a justified political mechanism to achieve a better world.
1
SPEAKER_01
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.
1
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I think he believed he will bring about a better world.
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And by the way, the terror didn t start with Stalin.
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It started right after the Bolsheviks took over when Lenin told Mr. Dzerzhinsky, Comrade Dzerzhinsky, to build the Chekhov and then execute the, this is what he called it, the Red Terror.
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So at the birth of the Soviet Union, there was already terror, and it was deliberate, and it also was, it wasn t just focused on the enemies, it was focused on whoever you didn t like.
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There was no rule of law, there was no court cases, people were just pulled out of their apartments and shot on sight.
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And this was done by revolutionaries who were convinced that eventually these sacrifices had to be made and eventually that would lead to a much better planet.
1
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And the populace believed this too, that those sacrifices, in part.
1
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Yes.
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I mean, this is such a dark thing about dictatorships is you believe it,
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but you re also too afraid to question your beliefs.
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You re not directly afraid, but almost like a, I don t know what that is.
1
SPEAKER_01
That s almost like a subconscious fear.
1
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There s a dark room with a locked door.
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Don t look in that door.
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Don t check that door.
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And there s something about the United States that says, especially modern culture, it s like go to that door first.
1
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And sort of question everything, that s the power of the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press, but you can almost become too critical and too cynical of your own culture in that way.
1
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So there s a balance to strike, of course, but man, if communism is not a lesson of human nature, I don t know what is, but you believed
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without thinking too much about it, you believe in the story of communism.
1
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What did you see, just, you know, I came from the Soviet Union.
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What did you maybe feel that s right and good about communism, about the vision of communism?
1
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Do you remember, like?
1
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I think the biggest impetus in me believing in communism was that
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the communists, just before Hitler took over, the communists were the only force in Germany that fought the Nazis in the streets, and that s a historic truth.
1
SPEAKER_00
And communists were hunted down by the Nazis, killed, put in concentration camps, and so what we knew
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what we were taught, and I think that was a huge unforced error by the Western countries, particularly the United States, that there were ex-Nazis in the government in West Germany.
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And the most famous one was Reinhard Gehlen.
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who was in charge, was the general in charge of the intelligence on the Eastern Front under Hitler.
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And when the Allied won the war, it was decided that Gehlen was too important with his knowledge and his organization.
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was too important to not use.
1
SPEAKER_00
So he was co-opted by the CIA and eventually wound up being the head of the Bundesnachrichtendienst, the CIA of West Germany.
1
SPEAKER_00
That gave us, when I say us, the East German party a huge propaganda victory.
1
SPEAKER_00
I wanted to, because the emotional aspect of this was as follows.
1
SPEAKER_00
When we were juniors in high school, and in those days,
1
SPEAKER_00
when you, you were only allowed to go to high school if you were in the top 10% of students, okay?
1
SPEAKER_00
So this was going to be the next set of ruling elite in the country.
1
SPEAKER_00
We were sent, we were required to visit a concentration camp.
1
SPEAKER_00
And if you know what we as 17-year-olds were made to look at, it was gut-wrenching.
1
SPEAKER_00
How can men do something like that to men?
1
SPEAKER_00
Piles of corpses, lampshades made out of human skin because that skin had tattoos on them, and a shrunken head, so heads like the size of my fist.
1
SPEAKER_00
I mean, the girls all cried, and it made a huge impression.
1
SPEAKER_00
And that was the Nazis.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
1
SPEAKER_00
And the communists defeated the Nazis.
1
SPEAKER_01
The communists were the Nazi fighters, they were the good guys.
1
SPEAKER_00
Of course, you know, in hindsight, if the communists had come to power, it would have been just the other way around, as we know, given the example of Stalin and Mao, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
But we didn t know that, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
From the Russian and the Soviet perspective, the communist regime,
1
SPEAKER_01
banded together to win the great patriotic war.
1
SPEAKER_00
And that was the second one, you know, the big brother, the Soviet Union.
1
SPEAKER_00
I mean, when I was approached by the KGB, that was like, oh, I felt so honored.
1
SPEAKER_01
So we should say that we re talking about East Germany, that you re from East Germany.
1
SPEAKER_01
Can you describe, you were born four years and what is it, 10 days?
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, sort of, very good.
1
SPEAKER_01
after Germany s unconditional surrender in World War II.
1
SPEAKER_01
So what is East Germany?
1
SPEAKER_01
What is West Germany?
1
SPEAKER_01
What is East and West Germany?
1
SPEAKER_01
What is that?
1
SPEAKER_01
What s the difference?
1
SPEAKER_01
What s the historical context here?
1
SPEAKER_01
What is World War II again?
1
SPEAKER_00
And then... Let s do... We don t have to go to World War I, the result of which actually seeded World War II in some respect.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yes, there s a long history, yes.
1
SPEAKER_00
But that started with World War II, so when Hitler came to power, he and his leadership decided that the Germans needed more what they call Lebensraum, that means room to live.
1
SPEAKER_00
So, and they would start expanding, and they went into France, they took Belgium, the Netherlands, they annexed Austria, and got a piece of Czechoslovakia.
1
SPEAKER_00
And then they decided to march into the Soviet Union after they took Poland.
1
SPEAKER_00
Cut up Poland together with the Soviet Union.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
1
SPEAKER_00
They were friends.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
1
SPEAKER_00
There was a non-aggression pact that was signed by Ribbentrop and Molotov, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
I think both parties knew that eventually they would fall apart, but at the time it gave the Soviet Union
1
SPEAKER_00
a little more, a piece of Poland, and a little more time to prepare what they thought might happen down the road.
1
SPEAKER_00
And the Germans had, you know, the time and the ability to pretty much conquer all of Western Europe.
1
SPEAKER_00
Do you think Stalin really knew that it s gonna fall apart?
1
SPEAKER_01
Why would somebody like Stalin trust somebody like Hitler?
1
SPEAKER_01
But why did he blunder so bad not to read the intelligence that was coming his way?
1
SPEAKER_01
The troops are amassing on the border of the Soviet Union.
1
SPEAKER_00
He didn t trust his own intelligence apparatus.
1
SPEAKER_00
Here s one example.
1
SPEAKER_00
There was a German communist who
1
SPEAKER_00
who went underground when Hitler took over and he went to Japan as a journalist.
1
SPEAKER_00
His name is Richard Sorge.
1
SPEAKER_00
Richard Sorge had really, really good intel about what the Japanese would do and not do.
1
SPEAKER_00
I forgot exactly what it was, but it came to Moscow and Stalin totally ignored it.
1
SPEAKER_00
And when Sorge was captured by the Japanese, the Soviet Union denied that he was one of theirs, so he was executed.
1
SPEAKER_00
The paranoia, again, does a lot of damage.
1
SPEAKER_00
When you don t believe your own intelligence apparatus, why bother having one?
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I mean, there...
1
SPEAKER_01
but I m sure there s contradictory information coming in from the intelligence apparatus, so it s difficult.
1
SPEAKER_01
I mean, first of all, nobody likes to be disagreed with, especially when you become more and more powerful, and then the intelligence apparatus is probably giving you information you don t like, but it s often,
1
SPEAKER_01
negative information about, 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.
1
SPEAKER_01
So in the modern times, if we hop around briefly, Vladimir Putin has been
1
SPEAKER_01
not happy with the intelligence of the FSB, thereby, at least if you read the news, choosing to put more priority to the GRU for the intelligence in Ukraine.
1
SPEAKER_01
But I guess I suppose the same story happens there as it does throughout history is paranoia.
1
SPEAKER_00
I give you an example that comes from a very reliable source.
1
SPEAKER_00
And that my best German friend worked as a chemist in the Stasi, East German intelligence.
1
SPEAKER_00
And he
1
SPEAKER_00
Eventually, he rose to the...
2
SPEAKER_01
rank of major and was in charge of the forgery department.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s very likely that he made passports that I used to travel.
2
SPEAKER_01
He was aware that there was intelligence that was collected.
2
SPEAKER_01
The Stasi was really good.
2
SPEAKER_01
They had about a thousand people in West Germany, undercover agents.
2
SPEAKER_01
some of them in government.
2
SPEAKER_01
And the central committee of the party, the decision makers ignored it because it didn t quite fit in their worldview, it didn t quite fit into their plans.
2
SPEAKER_01
So, and one delicious thing that I just want to add on to this,
2
SPEAKER_01
When Gorbachev wrote his book about Perestroika and Glasnost, the East German rulers did not like it, they were much more orthodox.
2
SPEAKER_01
So they had to print the books in translation.
2
SPEAKER_01
Guess where they wound up?
2
SPEAKER_01
They were piled up in the hallways of the Stasi.
2
SPEAKER_01
They bought the entire print run.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s fascinating.
2
SPEAKER_00
But let s backtrack, so Operation Barbarossa, invasion of Hitler to the Soviet Union, and then hopefully that leads us all the way to East Germany, West Germany, after the end of the war.
2
SPEAKER_01
So what happened was the Soviet Union rolled into the eastern part of Germany, and the Western allies took a larger chunk, which was occupied by the three
2
SPEAKER_01
allies, the French, the English, and the Americans, and the eastern part was occupied by Soviet troops, and the Soviet troops actually conquered Berlin, but as a...
2
SPEAKER_01
In a contract, they decided that Berlin would be ruled by the four allies and they all had free access to that city.
2
SPEAKER_01
I was born in the East German part, which very quickly became ruled by communists slash socialists.
2
SPEAKER_01
the Communist Party and the Socialist Party united, but the leaders of that new party were all communists.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s nevertheless called democratic.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
2
SPEAKER_01
German Democratic Republic, which was formed a couple of months after I was born.
2
SPEAKER_01
I was born into a remote southeastern corner of East Germany, and interestingly enough, genetically I m only half German.
2
SPEAKER_01
What s the other half?
2
SPEAKER_01
The other half is Czech and Polish.
2
SPEAKER_00
Nice.
2
SPEAKER_01
Because where I grew up, I could walk to the Neisse River, which was the border with Poland, and it was only about an hour by bus to get to the Czech border.
2
SPEAKER_01
So that s why I m a mix.
2
SPEAKER_00
So East Germany after the war was communist, socialist, and the West Germany was representing the Western world with democracy.
2
SPEAKER_01
And what the United States did, this was really, really very forward-looking, very strategic, the Marshall Plan to rebuild the economy in the West.
2
SPEAKER_01
as compared to what the Soviet Union did, they, whatever they hadn t destroyed on the way in, they took with them on the way out for reparations because, you know, they had every right to do that.
2
SPEAKER_01
But it was not a good idea because, you know, East Germany was always behind in economic development to their Western counterpart.
2
SPEAKER_00
So when you were young,
2
SPEAKER_00
as today, but when you were young, you were clearly an exceptional student.
2
SPEAKER_00
You re a brilliant academic superstar.
2
SPEAKER_00
Let s go to your childhood.
2
SPEAKER_00
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 success?
2
SPEAKER_00
Or was it?
2
SPEAKER_01
The fondest memory that comes to mind is my first kiss.
2
SPEAKER_00
How s that?
2
SPEAKER_00
Do you wanna go to the details of that?
2
SPEAKER_00
What d you make of that?
2
SPEAKER_00
What d you make of that kiss?
2
SPEAKER_00
What d that teach you about yourself and human nature and all that?
2
SPEAKER_01
It taught me only in hindsight.
2
SPEAKER_01
At the time I was just like, my God, I was head over heels in love.
2
SPEAKER_01
I was 16 years old.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I knew in those days, I admired girls.
2
SPEAKER_01
I knew that girls were like sort of magical beings.
2
SPEAKER_01
They were not capable of doing evil things.
2
SPEAKER_01
They were beautiful and they had to be adored.
2
SPEAKER_01
And one of them actually loved me too.
2
SPEAKER_01
She came after me initially, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
And that was like, that too was magical for you.
2
SPEAKER_00
Oh my God, yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I literally, I...
2
SPEAKER_01
That s when I started studying.
2
SPEAKER_01
Up until that point, I just did whatever I had to do to be in A-minus students, and that s when I started studying.
2
SPEAKER_01
And every A that I got, I dedicated to her, sometimes explicitly, because I knew I was gonna take care of her as I grew up.
2
SPEAKER_00
So you re gonna have to work hard in this world to be somebody that could be adored by those you love.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yes, you re right.
2
SPEAKER_01
You know, that kiss.
2
SPEAKER_01
The next day, I was running around in school with a grin on my face.
2
SPEAKER_00
And maybe that, in some way, that grin never fades.
2
SPEAKER_00
So, what about the heartbreak that followed?
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, the heartbreak surely followed.
2
SPEAKER_01
But just to expand on this a little more.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
2
SPEAKER_01
Because
2
SPEAKER_01
That passion that I had was an indication that eventually love would play a big role in my life.
2
SPEAKER_01
I wasn t aware of it, I was just directed at this one girl, but.
2
SPEAKER_00
But you understood that that feeling.
2
SPEAKER_00
Oh my God, yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
That taught you something, like that you re somebody that can feel those things.
2
SPEAKER_00
Absolutely.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that s a strong kind of part of who you are, and therefore it will also be a part of directing your life trajectory.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so we were an item for two years.
2
SPEAKER_01
I lost my virginity.
2
SPEAKER_01
She was not a virgin at the time.
2
SPEAKER_01
My competitor was... There always is a competitor, isn t there?
2
SPEAKER_01
Isn t that how it works?
2
SPEAKER_01
He studied medicine in college already.
2
SPEAKER_01
In which ways was he better than you?
2
SPEAKER_01
He wasn t.
2
SPEAKER_01
He was older and he was more experienced.
2
SPEAKER_01
And he was gonna be a doctor.
2
SPEAKER_01
But I was there and he was not.
2
SPEAKER_01
You know, presence wins.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, but you still had big dreams.
2
SPEAKER_00
You wanted to be a tenured professor.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yes, yes.
2
SPEAKER_00
So you still want to outdo that guy.
2
SPEAKER_01
Oh yeah, and she eventually told me that, you know, he was not in the picture anymore.
2
SPEAKER_01
So it was back and forth, back and forth, and our senior year, we were an item, and I was just dreaming of the future, but sort of, we didn t figure out that, you know, in those days, if she went to college in Berlin, and I went to college in Jena, and the distance between the two cities was too,
2
SPEAKER_01
It was too much for a weekend visit.
2
SPEAKER_01
Public transportation was very slow and nobody had cars.
2
SPEAKER_00
So... So the circumstance of life, you drifted apart.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and so we interacted with a couple of letters and then I got the goodbye letter.
2
SPEAKER_01
Oh my God.
2
SPEAKER_01
That hurt?
2
SPEAKER_00
I can still feel it.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s a good thing that you could feel the pain.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s still part of love.
2
SPEAKER_00
The pain of loss is still part of love.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then you kind of...
2
SPEAKER_00
change that, you shape it, and you give that love in deeper, more profound ways to future people.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s very well put, but at the time, it emptied me out.
2
SPEAKER_01
If I had a tendency to have suicidal thoughts, I might have killed myself.
2
SPEAKER_00
Would you say that was one of the darker moments of your life?
2
SPEAKER_00
Let me see.
2
SPEAKER_01
As a single moment, yes.
2
SPEAKER_01
I still remember.
2
SPEAKER_01
We had a mail slot in the front door and I was expecting a letter any day and there was the letter.
2
SPEAKER_01
I go upstairs into my bedroom and I open it and I read it.
2
SPEAKER_01
And it s just like the life went out of me.
2
SPEAKER_00
You re just there alone, and you have to experience this pain alone.
2
SPEAKER_00
And now you re deeply alone in this world.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yes, because I didn t have a, there was no emotional relationship with my parents.
2
SPEAKER_01
I literally had nobody.
2
SPEAKER_01
So this love you have in you had no,
2
SPEAKER_00
Had no place to go.
2
SPEAKER_01
It was choked off, all right?
2
SPEAKER_01
But what I did was I wanted to go on, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
And so I threw myself into the study of chemistry.
2
SPEAKER_01
I outworked all of my fellow students in a big way.
2
SPEAKER_01
I just like, I worked my ass off and since I was pretty smart too, I just aced practically everything.
2
SPEAKER_01
And for the first two years in college, and look, we go to college, there are all these pretty girls and there s dancers and everything.
2
SPEAKER_01
We had this great student club where I didn t look at any girls.
2
SPEAKER_01
Eventually I knew I was going to...
2
SPEAKER_01
you wanna have female companionship, but love, uh-uh, no more, that hurts.
2
SPEAKER_01
There s a song that goes, love hurts.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah, I know that one.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s true, there s actually many songs that have a similar message, yes.
2
SPEAKER_00
So during that time, during your excellence, just being an exceptional student of chemistry,
2
SPEAKER_00
Let s go to your story, so in your book, Deep Undercover, My Secret Life, Entangled Allegiances as a KGB Spy in America, and in the really, really excellent podcast series that I ve been listening to, people should definitely listen to it, it s called The Agent.
2
SPEAKER_00
You document your time as a KGB spy before, during, and after.
2
SPEAKER_00
Can you tell the story of when you first were contacted by the KGB, how you were invited, the offer to join was made?
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, it was a big surprise and I never thought of myself as a potential agent.
2
SPEAKER_01
I was gonna be a tenured professor and join the ruling elite because in Europe, tenured professors are few.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s not like in the United States.
2
SPEAKER_01
Anybody who teaches at colleges has a title of professor.
2
SPEAKER_01
Easy now.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s true.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s not a criticism.
2
100%.
2
SPEAKER_00
So we should also clarify that tenured professor or not,
2
SPEAKER_00
It is a very prestigious position throughout history of Europe.
2
SPEAKER_00
I would say, especially communists, I don t actually know the full landscape of the respect, but at least in the Soviet Union where I grew up, it s a prestigious position.
2
SPEAKER_01
Absolutely was.
2
SPEAKER_01
And the town of Yenna had about 100,000 people live there.
2
SPEAKER_01
I would, it s a wild guess, but maybe 30 tenured professors, and they were part of the ruling elite.
2
SPEAKER_01
I was trying to do as much as I can to live the good life, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
You know, have access to things that are nice.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, but I think the powerful thing about being a professor in that context of East Germany is the prestige.
2
SPEAKER_01
and the feeling of superiority, you know, I was full of myself.
2
SPEAKER_01
You know, when you are the best of the best, and my third year I received a scholarship, the Karl Marx scholarship, that was limited to 100 concurrent recipients in the country.
2
SPEAKER_01
So my God, no, I was full of myself.
2
SPEAKER_01
I believed in myself, hook, line, and sinker, and I was also, I got a lot of accolades from teachers and fellow students.
2
SPEAKER_00
They were feeding the ego, the old, I mean.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
You have to believe in yourself often when you re young to truly.
2
SPEAKER_00
Right, right.
2
SPEAKER_00
To excel, and you sure as heck did.
2
SPEAKER_01
But you know, as a balance, you need a mentor, somebody who puts things in perspective, and I didn t have one.
2
SPEAKER_01
My father was a non-entity and nobody else, they all looked up to me.
2
SPEAKER_01
I was an up-and-coming guy, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
So there s no father figure that put you in your place?
2
SPEAKER_01
Not at all.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I give you one extreme example.
2
SPEAKER_01
It was down the road when I fathered a child out of wedlock.
2
SPEAKER_01
That was in my fifth year, I believe.
2
SPEAKER_01
the Communist Party in East Germany was very moralistic.
2
SPEAKER_01
If you did that, they would have a talk with you and give you whatever, severe reprimand.
2
SPEAKER_01
Nobody even mentioned a word about this.
2
SPEAKER_01
So yeah, so this is how this ego gets nurtured.
2
SPEAKER_01
But anyway, getting back to how the KGB came in contact.
2
SPEAKER_01
So they most likely,
2
SPEAKER_01
got knowledge of me by looking at Stasi records.
2
SPEAKER_01
What s Stasi?
2
SPEAKER_01
Oh, that was East German secret police, Staatssicherheit, security for the state.
2
SPEAKER_01
There s that word security again.
2
SPEAKER_01
And they pretty much kept a record on everybody in the country.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so when you look through this, and this is what the KGB was looking for.
2
SPEAKER_01
They were looking for candidates, particularly for this kind of job that they had in mind for me, for candidates who were not, you know, in their mid-20s, who were not fully developed yet, but mature enough
2
SPEAKER_01
to get there and still young enough, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
Because at that level of maturity you can test whether they can handle this kind of... Yes, absolutely right.
2
SPEAKER_01
So, and one day I got a knock on my door and my dorm room door was on a Saturday.
2
SPEAKER_01
And they knew that I was by myself.
2
SPEAKER_01
How did they know it?
2
SPEAKER_01
We had a, I pieced this together.
2
SPEAKER_01
We had an exchange student from the Soviet Union.
2
SPEAKER_01
And he was next door to me.
2
SPEAKER_01
And he befriended me, so he got to know me a little bit.
2
SPEAKER_01
And the pattern was that my roommate would always go home for the weekend.
2
SPEAKER_01
And of course they also knew which door to knock on, even though there were no nameplates, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
So somebody knocks, and I knew it was a stranger because if it had been a student, the pattern was that we would knock on the door and then go in.
2
SPEAKER_01
We wouldn t wait for somebody to let us in.
2
SPEAKER_01
So I waited for 10 seconds and he didn t come in.
2
SPEAKER_01
I knew that it was a stranger, I said, come on in.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then came a person who spoke fluent German, so that was not a KGB guy, that was a collaborator.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so he started making a bunch of small talk.
2
SPEAKER_01
He introduced himself as a representative of Carl Zeiss Jena, which was the optics company that made really, really good optical instruments.
2
SPEAKER_01
It was one of the best in the world.
2
SPEAKER_00
So it s like the super prestigious company in that place.
2
SPEAKER_01
Right, and he said that he was a representative of that company.
2
SPEAKER_01
And he would just want to find out what my plans were after graduating from college.
2
SPEAKER_01
And at that point, I knew he wasn t from Carl Zeiss Jena, because in those days, there was no recruitment.
2
SPEAKER_01
When you were done, if you were in the top 10% of the graduates,
3
SPEAKER_00
you would most likely pick to stay and get a doctorate, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
And the rest of them were assigned, you know, wherever, you had no choice.
3
SPEAKER_00
So that guy was,
3
SPEAKER_00
an idiot.
3
SPEAKER_01
He didn t know the basics about- You interviewed him a little bit to understand like- Oh sure, you know I started- Like feel out, is this guy full of shit?
3
SPEAKER_01
Because yeah, he s a stranger showing up to your dorm room.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I knew that, at that point I knew he was Stasi, which is wrong, but it doesn t matter because he was German and I had no idea that the KGB would be involved.
3
SPEAKER_00
So sorry to pause briefly,
3
SPEAKER_01
Did you have a sense, did people know that there s a Stasi type of organization?
3
SPEAKER_01
that there s a large number of people doing this kind of work in East Germany, in order for you to make that guess.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, we knew that the Stasi existed.
3
SPEAKER_00
We even had our James Bond, you know, we had a series called the Invisible Visor where a Stasi employee in East Germany would go into West Germany and hunt down Nazis.
3
SPEAKER_00
So yes, the Stasi was known to be there.
3
SPEAKER_00
And admired in part?
3
SPEAKER_00
or feared, or both?
3
SPEAKER_00
I thought they were necessary and I admired them.
3
SPEAKER_00
James Bond.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yes, the reason I did so, because I had no information to the contrary, I never knew anybody personally or even, you know,
3
SPEAKER_00
somewhat removed, who was followed by the Stasi, was, you know, put in jail.
3
SPEAKER_00
I had no clue.
3
SPEAKER_00
I had no clue that they did a lot of damage and that they were like doing a lot of surveillance of the East German population the same way the KGB did for the Soviet Union.
3
SPEAKER_00
So for me to
3
SPEAKER_00
be talking to somebody from the Stasi, it raised my interest.
3
SPEAKER_00
I was curious what comes next, because I sort of knew something interesting would be coming at me, and I had no other thoughts about that at that point.
3
SPEAKER_00
So when he was finally, when he went for the kill by reversing himself, he said, you know, I gotta tell you that I really am not from Carl Zeiss, you know, I m from the government.
3
SPEAKER_00
Okay, thank you for pointing that out.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then he asked this question, he says, can you imagine to one day work for the government?
3
SPEAKER_00
And so I...
3
SPEAKER_00
gave a pretty clever answer.
3
SPEAKER_00
I said, yes, but not as a chemist.
3
SPEAKER_00
So I answered the question that he didn t ask.
3
SPEAKER_00
I helped him out.
3
SPEAKER_00
So we made an arrangement to meet for lunch, which in Germany is the main meal, at the number one restaurant in Jena.
3
SPEAKER_00
I still remember what I ate.
3
SPEAKER_00
What was that?
3
SPEAKER_00
Rump steak with butter on top and French fries.
3
SPEAKER_00
It was my favorite.
3
SPEAKER_00
Anyway, so when I get to the restaurant, I saw this fellow sitting in the back there at the table, and there was another person at the table.
3
SPEAKER_00
So I was a little bit hesitant, because in those days, it was not unusual for perfect strangers to share a table, because there wasn t enough tables and chairs and so forth.
3
SPEAKER_00
So I didn t know if I could approach him, but he got up and came to me and he took me to the table and he said, I want to introduce Herman.
3
SPEAKER_00
We work with our Soviet comrades.
3
SPEAKER_00
Aha, KGB.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then he disappeared.
3
SPEAKER_00
He says, I got something else to do.
3
SPEAKER_00
I never knew his name.
3
SPEAKER_00
He just handed me over to the KGB.
3
SPEAKER_01
What was the relationship between the KGB and the Stasi as collaborators, close collaborators, or just distant associates?
3
SPEAKER_00
They were pretty close collaborators.
3
SPEAKER_00
As I told you, they bought forged documents that the Germans made because the Germans were better at forgery.
3
SPEAKER_00
They also exchanged information, but they didn t trust each other 100%.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I tell you why I know that.
3
SPEAKER_00
So they recruited me to send me to West Germany.
3
SPEAKER_00
As I already said, East Germany had a thousand agents over there.
3
SPEAKER_00
Why would they want to have their own?
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
3
SPEAKER_01
This is a fascinating internal and external dynamic of distrust.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
3
SPEAKER_01
So there you are.
3
SPEAKER_01
welcomed by the KGB.
3
SPEAKER_01
When did the offer, the invite come?
3
SPEAKER_01
Well that took a while.
3
SPEAKER_00
So Herman and I had an unofficial relationship for about a year and a half.
3
SPEAKER_00
I would meet him
3
SPEAKER_00
once a week, once every two weeks, initially in his car, but then he took me to a conspirational flat.
3
SPEAKER_00
It was an apartment that was occupied by a party member, a lady, single lady.
3
SPEAKER_00
When we came in, she would leave.
3
SPEAKER_00
She left us tea and cookies, and then we could freely talk.
3
SPEAKER_00
He also, at that time, gave me some
3
SPEAKER_00
West German literature magazines to read, which was of course forbidden.
3
SPEAKER_00
So already I m starting to feel somewhat special.
3
SPEAKER_00
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.
3
SPEAKER_00
I would operate outside the law of the countries I would go to as well as East Germany because you know the magazines and eventually when I joined up they told me I better watch West German television which was also
3
SPEAKER_00
not explicitly prohibited, but it was something that could get you in trouble.
3
SPEAKER_00
So.
3
SPEAKER_01
So on many levels, you re super special.
3
SPEAKER_01
You re the James Bond.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yes, yes, yes.
3
SPEAKER_01
So what was that recruitment testing process like?
3
SPEAKER_01
Testing whether you are, you have what it takes to be a KGB agent.
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, first of all,
3
SPEAKER_00
We had very in-depth talks, Herman and I, about life.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I was, I still am, very honest and sharing my feelings.
3
SPEAKER_00
Philosophical or personal?
3
SPEAKER_00
Personal.
3
SPEAKER_00
I even told him that I was shy around the girls.
3
SPEAKER_01
He was giving you relationship advice or what?
3
SPEAKER_01
How old was he?
3
SPEAKER_01
So what was the dynamic?
3
SPEAKER_01
Can you tell me, was it a father, son?
3
SPEAKER_00
No, older brother, older brother.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, he was maybe in his early to mid 30s and I was maybe 10 years younger.
3
SPEAKER_01
And what languages did he speak?
3
SPEAKER_00
He spoke German pretty well.
3
SPEAKER_00
But he s originally from Russia?
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, with a Russian accent.
3
SPEAKER_00
So I got in trouble one time with him when I asked him, is your real name German?
3
SPEAKER_00
He didn t like that.
3
SPEAKER_00
He didn t like it.
3
SPEAKER_01
Was he good with girls?
3
SPEAKER_00
No, no, he just, you know, I remember what he told me.
3
SPEAKER_00
He says, you know, you gotta understand one thing.
3
SPEAKER_00
They re looking for guys too.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s all.
3
SPEAKER_00
Oh, girls are looking for that stuff.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s a competitive game, yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, don t worry about it, you know, don t be so shy.
3
SPEAKER_01
So that little flame of love that we talked about, 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?
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, but not in,
3
SPEAKER_00
It was not very focused, not in great detail.
3
SPEAKER_00
So we talked about personal stuff and dislikes.
3
SPEAKER_00
He gave me tasks.
3
SPEAKER_00
For instance, when my friend and I hitchhiked from East Germany all the way down to Bulgaria,
3
SPEAKER_00
he told me to write a report about it, what I saw.
3
SPEAKER_00
So fundamentally he wanted to see how well I can write and how well I can report, how well I observe.
3
SPEAKER_00
He also asked me to write some profiles about fellow students.
3
SPEAKER_00
I don t believe that was for them to give him to the Stasi.
3
SPEAKER_00
It was just like, how well do I characterize people?
3
SPEAKER_00
That s important when you re talking about
3
SPEAKER_00
When I was in the US, active in the US, I operated as a spotter, so I did exactly that.
3
SPEAKER_00
I wrote profiles about people.
3
SPEAKER_00
He also gave me some tasks to do that were rather unpleasant.
3
SPEAKER_00
He would give me an address and a name of the people who lived at the address, and he told me to go there, ring the doorbell, and find out something about a relative who lived in West Germany.
3
SPEAKER_00
that is undercover exploration, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
So you go, you make up a story and somehow win the confidence of your target to tell you something that you want to know.
3
SPEAKER_01
Was that, did that come naturally to you?
3
SPEAKER_01
No, no, I hated it.
3
SPEAKER_01
The charisma involved?
3
SPEAKER_01
Which part did you hate?
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, charisma, I think, I didn t know that I had it.
3
SPEAKER_00
It took you some time to discover.
3
SPEAKER_00
Because, you know, I was, I always was and I still am to some degree a bit shy.
3
SPEAKER_00
I lost a lot of the shyness after moving to the South, here in the United States, because you don t have to be shy, you know?
3
SPEAKER_00
You can let your love shine.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s exactly right.
3
SPEAKER_00
But anyway, I hated doing that, but I did it well.
3
SPEAKER_00
I still remember, so in those days, I had a beard, and I rang the bell.
3
SPEAKER_00
Tall, handsome fellow?
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and I looked the part.
3
SPEAKER_00
I said, I m a sociology student, and I m doing a survey, and I asked a whole bunch of questions.
3
SPEAKER_00
Would you like to answer the questions?
3
SPEAKER_00
No problem.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then I directed the conversation to the lady s private life, and she actually gave me information.
3
SPEAKER_00
She volunteered information that I wanted to know.
3
SPEAKER_00
I did well and the other one that I didn t like but I also did well with when Herman drove me around the city and showed me a building and he said find out what organization is in there what they do
3
SPEAKER_00
maybe get to know some people, and I did that pretty well also.
3
SPEAKER_00
You have to be inventive to come up with a cover story, and I ve always been quite inventive.
3
SPEAKER_00
I m a storyteller at heart, and I didn t know it then, but you know.
3
SPEAKER_01
But there was still something unpleasant about it.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yes, yes.
3
SPEAKER_01
Which part was unpleasant?
3
SPEAKER_00
The shyness and then, you know, I wasn t very comfortable lying.
3
SPEAKER_00
I became comfortable down the road, but I was brutally honest, and never hid anything of me.
3
SPEAKER_00
But, you know, over time, you lose that uncomfortable feeling, and you rationalize that you gotta do it.
3
SPEAKER_00
There s only one way, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
And you re serving a good cause.
3
SPEAKER_00
So you were talking to Herman for a year and a half.
3
SPEAKER_00
A year and a half.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then, how did that progress?
3
SPEAKER_00
Yes, so he finally, I guess he sent a report to headquarters in Berlin.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then he sent me on a three week, quote unquote, practice trip to Berlin.
3
SPEAKER_00
This was the first time when I had like a conspiratorial meeting where I had an address and a time and a code phrase and I met another agent.
3
SPEAKER_00
His name was Boris.
3
SPEAKER_00
These names were meaningless, they were all like,
3
SPEAKER_00
cover names, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
So what was the code?
3
SPEAKER_00
Can you give a little more detail?
3
SPEAKER_00
That code I don t remember.
3
SPEAKER_01
Not the code, but what do you mean by code?
3
SPEAKER_00
I tell you the code we used when I met, while I was active.
3
SPEAKER_00
I would approach the other person who I thought may be the person I wanna meet.
3
SPEAKER_00
We both had something with us or on us to make us more likely to be the right person.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I would ask him the following questions.
3
SPEAKER_00
Excuse me, I m looking for Susan Green.
3
SPEAKER_00
And he would answer, yes, you must be David.
3
SPEAKER_00
Stupid.
3
SPEAKER_00
If I ask a stranger and they would look at me, how could I help you?
3
SPEAKER_00
So I know it s the wrong guy.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s just a low probability that the right thing would be said.
3
SPEAKER_00
Oh, absolutely.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it seems like a safe statement if it s not the right person.
3
SPEAKER_00
Exactly right.
3
SPEAKER_01
It would just come off absurd or crazy or whatever.
3
SPEAKER_00
You would have made a good secret agent.
3
SPEAKER_00
You know exactly.
3
SPEAKER_01
I know I m not.
3
SPEAKER_01
This is, we ll discuss this.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m dressed like one.
3
SPEAKER_01
Actually, yeah, where there s any dress code?
3
SPEAKER_01
No, just fit in.
3
SPEAKER_01
Fit in, no matter what.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then be creative.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
Figure out ways to fit in.
3
SPEAKER_00
Right.
3
SPEAKER_00
So anyways, he gave me some tasks, and we, and he, since I had rented a room in a house, he gave me Western literature to read, and we spent time together, and
3
SPEAKER_00
there was a practice run to West Germany.
3
SPEAKER_00
Actually, there were two.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that was very important.
3
SPEAKER_00
In hindsight, I figured that out.
3
SPEAKER_00
So I traveled to West Germany.
3
SPEAKER_00
no, not to West Berlin, with an East German passport that was stamped that that individual was allowed to go to the West.
3
SPEAKER_00
And there was a part of the border that was only guarded by Soviet troops.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that s where they smuggled me into West Germany.
3
SPEAKER_00
I got on the subway and then appeared in West Berlin,
3
SPEAKER_00
no Americans, no Brits, no French knew that I had entered.
3
SPEAKER_01
Forged documents or not?
3
SPEAKER_00
No, no, this was an East German passport, it was real.
3
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
3
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
3
SPEAKER_00
So, and 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.
3
SPEAKER_00
The second trip, I had a task, very similar to the one that I had back in Jena, to ring the doorbell someplace and talk to some people, and that worked very well also.
3
SPEAKER_01
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,
3
SPEAKER_01
like when first introduced to the Western culture.
3
SPEAKER_01
Like this is why I might not make a good agent is when I first came to the United States in the supermarket.
3
SPEAKER_01
like bananas, as many bananas as I wanna eat.
3
SPEAKER_01
That, I think that would break me.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s a shock to have access to Western culture.
3
SPEAKER_00
You re getting very close to the reason they actually made me do these two practice trips.
3
SPEAKER_00
When I first emerged on West Berlin territory, I felt highly uncomfortable.
3
SPEAKER_00
That was the enemy, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
And I saw the cops everywhere, and even those cops had light blue uniforms, they weren t standouts.
3
SPEAKER_00
So I was wondering if they knew that I had KGB on my forehead.
3
SPEAKER_00
So you were paranoid that they would know, they would see.
3
SPEAKER_00
I was scared, but I overcame that.
3
SPEAKER_01
So that s, can we just linger on that?
3
SPEAKER_01
Because I suppose that s a natural, like if I give anybody on the street the mission to do the mission you had to do, is they would be paranoid.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s a natural human feeling is, am I being watched?
3
SPEAKER_01
Do they know?
3
SPEAKER_01
Like if you try to steal something from a store, there s going to be a feeling like, are they watching me?
3
SPEAKER_01
Are the cameras watching?
3
SPEAKER_01
Are the people watching me?
3
SPEAKER_01
They all know, that kind of stuff.
3
SPEAKER_01
So you have to overcome,
4
SPEAKER_00
while rugged and robust to that kind of feeling and overcome it.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yes, exactly.
4
SPEAKER_01
And something very interesting happened.
4
SPEAKER_01
While I was being trained in Berlin, I met a classmate of mine from high school.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he confided to me that he was recruited by the Stasi to go as a spy to West Germany.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he also had this practice trip.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he peed in his pants.
4
SPEAKER_01
He went back and told him, I can t do that.
4
SPEAKER_00
Just from the terror, the- Yes.
4
SPEAKER_00
That paranoia.
4
SPEAKER_01
Now, this guy s career was over.
4
SPEAKER_01
He had an engineering degree.
4
SPEAKER_01
He was a pretty smart guy.
4
SPEAKER_01
He was just, for the rest of his life, and he s still alive, I believe, floating around and, you know,
4
SPEAKER_01
trading in model railroads and stuff like that.
4
SPEAKER_00
You mean, do you think that experience broke them?
4
SPEAKER_01
They wouldn t let him back in.
4
SPEAKER_00
Oh, I see.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s a test that if you fail, you pay the price.
4
SPEAKER_01
I had no idea that, you know,
4
SPEAKER_01
something bad would happen if I failed that test, but I didn t.
4
SPEAKER_01
I didn t fail.
4
SPEAKER_01
So, and this led then to the offer, all right?
4
SPEAKER_01
You know, Boris was happy with me, and he told his boss, who was most likely the head of the KGB in East Berlin, and I had an appointment to meet.
4
SPEAKER_01
In East Germany.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yes, in East Germany, yeah, all of East Germany, that s right.
4
SPEAKER_01
An appointment to meet with him,
4
SPEAKER_01
And as we walk into the room, there was this huge desk and a little guy sitting behind it.
4
SPEAKER_01
Very, very, just like little and unimpressive, nice.
4
SPEAKER_01
A lot of paraphernalia, like, you know, had a bust of Dzerzhinsky on this desk and some paintings, Lenin and so forth.
4
SPEAKER_01
But when the guy opened his mouth,
4
SPEAKER_01
He was like, whoa.
4
SPEAKER_01
Huge psychological energy.
4
SPEAKER_01
He spoke only Russian.
4
SPEAKER_01
Now, and initially he would start with five minutes worth of propaganda, why we re doing what we re doing.
4
SPEAKER_01
I didn t need that.
4
SPEAKER_01
I understood most of it, but when I didn t understand, I d ask Boris to translate.
4
SPEAKER_01
And then he sprung it on me, and I was not prepared.
4
SPEAKER_01
He said, so what, are you in or not?
4
SPEAKER_01
And I was, no, I hadn t made up my mind.
4
SPEAKER_01
I wasn t expecting that would come.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so I said to him,
4
SPEAKER_01
I m not really trained.
4
SPEAKER_01
You know, there s a lot of things I need to learn and I came up with a couple of really stupid things.
4
SPEAKER_01
One not so stupid, but the other one was, I don t know why I said that.
4
SPEAKER_01
I said, for instance, I need to learn how to drive a car and to type with a typewriter.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he got really annoyed and he said, don t worry about it, we ll train you.
4
SPEAKER_01
But I gotta tell you, we need people who are decisive.
4
SPEAKER_01
So you got until tomorrow noon to give Boris your decision.
4
SPEAKER_01
That made for a sleepless night.
4
SPEAKER_01
So what was going through your mind?
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, I had, this was almost 50-50.
4
SPEAKER_01
I knew I was gonna have a huge career, a good career.
4
SPEAKER_01
I was on my way because I was already employed by the university as an assistant professor.
4
SPEAKER_00
So that career would be to become a professor, become a tenured professor, be a world class?
4
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
4
SPEAKER_01
Jena had become my hometown.
4
SPEAKER_01
I really loved the place.
4
SPEAKER_01
It was my oyster.
4
SPEAKER_01
And my family
4
SPEAKER_01
was my basketball team.
4
SPEAKER_00
I was- You love playing basketball.
4
SPEAKER_00
Oh, absolutely.
4
SPEAKER_00
So that s what you mean.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so this is home.
4
SPEAKER_00
This is home.
4
SPEAKER_00
This is where your love is.
4
SPEAKER_00
This was home.
4
SPEAKER_00
Did you understand that the choice involved leaving the home behind?
4
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
4
SPEAKER_01
And the one thing I didn t have,
4
SPEAKER_01
The two things I didn t have, an emotional relationship with my mother, and I didn t have a steady girlfriend at the time.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think Freud would have a lot to say about that, but yeah, go ahead.
4
SPEAKER_00
But the connection between those two, but yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I m sure.
4
SPEAKER_01
By the way, my friend Gunther, the one who worked for the Stasi, was also, the Stasi tried to recruit him as an agent.
4
SPEAKER_01
But he had a love relationship at the time and he said politely, no, I won t, I can t.
4
SPEAKER_00
So you didn t have, that s the one thing that really could.
4
SPEAKER_00
Would have held me.
4
SPEAKER_00
Would have held you to this place is love.
4
SPEAKER_01
So you got the career on the one hand, my basketball team, the town that I would be part of the ruling elite of.
4
SPEAKER_01
And then we had this great adventure and the ability to contribute
4
SPEAKER_01
to the victory, the worldwide victory of communism, and stick it to the Nazis, and of course the feeling that you re really special.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, James Bond.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_00
What s, the question, do I wanna be a tenured professor or James Bond?
4
SPEAKER_00
Yes, and.
4
SPEAKER_00
As funny as that sounds, that was probably a difficult decision.
4
SPEAKER_01
It was a difficult decision, but fundamentally it wasn t, and it wasn t my zeal,
4
SPEAKER_01
to help the revolution.
4
SPEAKER_01
It was my, what they called, what the Stasi was looking for, the KGB was looking for in a character that they would send over, a well-controlled inclination to adventure, okay?
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, James Bond, what do you say?
4
SPEAKER_00
And the love of women, yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yes, I got to put this in right here because I m telling people I have two things in common with James Bond.
4
SPEAKER_01
These are my initials, JB, and I got the girl too, three times.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I mean, and that s adventure.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and the ability to travel to the West, because the West was closed off to us.
4
SPEAKER_01
We could go to foreign countries, but they all had to be communist countries.
4
SPEAKER_01
You know, I wanted to see Paris because I had fallen in love with Honoré Balzac, who wrote a phenomenal set of novels that I just ate up.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so when I eventually did go to Paris, I knew all the places already because he described them all.
4
SPEAKER_01
But anyway, so that one, it was 51-49.
4
SPEAKER_01
But eventually, when you do the side-by-side intellectual comparison,
4
SPEAKER_01
That doesn t work.
4
SPEAKER_01
It becomes a tie.
4
SPEAKER_01
And then you just go with your gut and say, hey, I m in.
4
SPEAKER_00
So now that you successfully passed the test and you were sitting with this unimpressive man and had the invite and had to sleep on it and have made the decision to join, what was next?
4
SPEAKER_01
I was just told that I was being recruited by the State Department of East Germany.
4
SPEAKER_01
I was going to become a diplomat.
4
SPEAKER_01
I must have had some paper, but I forgot, because just by saying so, that wouldn t have worked.
4
SPEAKER_01
There s some kind of document that says you can t... Yeah, yeah.
4
SPEAKER_00
And that was the only entanglement you had to that place.
4
SPEAKER_00
No love, no... That s right.
4
SPEAKER_00
Just the basketball.
4
SPEAKER_01
Basketball, giving up basketball was huge for me.
4
SPEAKER_01
I loved playing that game.
4
SPEAKER_01
I started playing basketball when I was 18.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s a little late.
4
SPEAKER_00
Are you better offensive, defensive?
4
SPEAKER_00
What do you like more?
4
SPEAKER_00
Do you like to shoot from a distance?
4
SPEAKER_01
I was a runner.
4
SPEAKER_01
I was very quick on my feet.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I was a good jumper too.
4
SPEAKER_01
I typically played the four position.
4
SPEAKER_00
What s that?
4
SPEAKER_01
Forward.
4
SPEAKER_01
Oh, the forward position.
4
SPEAKER_01
But anyway, so that was the hardest for me to give up.
4
SPEAKER_01
But the other thing that I remember I had to do to hand in my party document to the party secretary of the university.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he made a comment, yeah, we probably won t hear much about you, but we know that you re gonna do something very important.
4
SPEAKER_01
So he sort of had an inkling that I m gonna go someplace undercover or something like that.
4
SPEAKER_01
And then I packed my bags and got on a train to Berlin for another one of those secret meetings with my new handler, Nikolai.
4
SPEAKER_01
So, and here came another test that would have been quite easy to fail.
4
SPEAKER_01
So, I had lived in Jena for six years in a dorm.
4
SPEAKER_01
Even when I became an employee of the university, they didn t have apartments.
4
SPEAKER_01
I was still living in a dorm in a single room with a bed, a chair, and a table.
4
SPEAKER_01
and a toilet down the hallway.
4
SPEAKER_01
So I figured, you know, Berlin, KGB, I m gonna get a nice apartment, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
And so Nikolai took me into his car, we started talking a little bit, and then he said, I have a task for you already.
4
SPEAKER_01
Your first task is to find yourself a place to live.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I don t think I showed it in my face, but, you know, my heart dropped like down into my pants.
4
SPEAKER_01
I knew this was nearly impossible because there was a severe shortage of housing everywhere in Germany, East Germany, and all the apartments and homes were controlled by the government.
4
SPEAKER_01
You know, there were long waiting lists.
4
SPEAKER_01
I knew couples that were promised maybe to get an apartment five years down the road.
4
SPEAKER_01
So, and then they would postpone their decision to have a child.
4
SPEAKER_01
Anyway, this was impossible.
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, you know, but this was a test.
4
SPEAKER_01
Because I had to be inventive now.
4
SPEAKER_01
I had to figure out how to get out of an impossible situation.
4
SPEAKER_01
I didn t realize it then, at all.
4
SPEAKER_01
I just went with the flow, you know, what do I do?
4
SPEAKER_01
So what I did, I went, I took the train, the city train, to the very last stop, a little town called Acna.
4
SPEAKER_01
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.
4
SPEAKER_01
And after a couple of hours, somebody said, there s this lady, and they gave me the address.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I talked to the lady and she said, I happen to have a place where you might be able to stay.
4
SPEAKER_01
It was an outbuilding.
4
SPEAKER_01
I don t know what it served.
4
SPEAKER_01
It was not a garage, it was concrete.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it had a bed and a chair, running cold water, and a stove, a cold stove.
4
SPEAKER_01
That was going to be my... Pretty basic, pretty basic.
4
SPEAKER_01
Pretty basic?
4
SPEAKER_01
Are you kidding me?
4
SPEAKER_00
That s the... Toilet across the yard, of course.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, well all the essentials, what are you complaining about?
4
SPEAKER_00
So you were right, you had to run the special, James Bond had to run the special operation out of the house.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yes, to my credit, and I think that established part of my reputation, I didn t complain at all to Nikolai.
4
SPEAKER_00
That was part of the test probably.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I just told him, you know, I found something.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so for six months, I would get up in the morning, get on the train, and walk around in the city, you know, did some operational stuff, operational training.
4
SPEAKER_01
I went to the library, did a lot of reading in the library.
4
SPEAKER_01
And then I found a basketball team that I could join, so at least I could take a shower twice a week.
4
SPEAKER_01
And apparently, it took about six months that I was still on probation, because after six months, Nikolai, one day, we were still meeting in his car, he handed me a key and he said, I m gonna take you to your new apartment.
4
SPEAKER_01
Now, and I didn t know this, now I was really in, okay?
4
SPEAKER_01
Imagine the hurdles you have to jump over and how many times you can fail, but you know.
4
SPEAKER_00
But not complaining, not asking questions.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, that was something you ve written about, I think you wrote that bosses do not like to hear complaints or problems, they prefer solutions.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s right.
4
SPEAKER_00
So what was your interaction like with the bosses?
4
SPEAKER_00
essentially represent the way it went forward as well?
4
SPEAKER_00
No complaints, get to solve the problem.
4
SPEAKER_01
No complaints, no arguments, no, I know this better.
4
SPEAKER_01
I was taking it all in.
4
SPEAKER_01
Now the technical guys, they taught me something I didn t know that made sense.
4
SPEAKER_01
What Nikolai, some of the stuff that he taught me was somewhat questionable.
4
SPEAKER_01
He was a generalist.
4
SPEAKER_01
And there s some things he didn t know really well.
4
SPEAKER_01
So I could have asked and probed a little bit, but I didn t.
4
SPEAKER_01
So I just played along.
4
SPEAKER_01
So this new apartment, it was a studio.
4
SPEAKER_01
It had a kitchen with running cold water.
4
SPEAKER_01
And the bathroom was just one flight down the toilet, not a bathroom.
4
SPEAKER_01
One flight down the stairs.
4
SPEAKER_01
It was an upgrade.
4
SPEAKER_01
It was a big upgrade.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he gave me, I think he gave me a thousand mark to buy furniture.
4
SPEAKER_01
And in that place, actually I also bought a TV and started watching West German television.
4
SPEAKER_01
So I finally had a decent place to stay.
4
SPEAKER_01
And my training in Berlin took about two years.
4
SPEAKER_00
What was the training?
4
SPEAKER_00
What were the interesting aspects?
4
SPEAKER_00
to the training, what were sort of, if you do an overview systematic of what was the training process, what was difficult, what are some insights that generalize to the training process of what it takes to be a KGB spy?
4
SPEAKER_01
Right.
4
SPEAKER_01
So let me start with a tradecraft.
4
SPEAKER_01
So I was taught Morse code, that took a while.
4
SPEAKER_01
I was instructed in how to use a shortwave radio and to receive the shortwave transmissions with Morse code.
4
SPEAKER_01
I was taught an encryption and decryption algorithm, manual algorithm.
4
SPEAKER_01
you might be interested that eventually I figured out at least one of the patterns.
4
SPEAKER_01
The algorithm was such that, and this was all about digits, and the algorithm was such that in the end, the digits that were used to decipher other digits that were sent to me via shortwave radio,
4
SPEAKER_01
There were, let s say, if there were 100 digits, there were an equal number of ones, twos, threes, fours, fives, sixes, and sevens, up until zero.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I was told that these algorithms, these manual algorithms were good for about 300 uses.
4
SPEAKER_01
After that, they could still be deciphered.
4
SPEAKER_01
I m assuming nowadays that wouldn t take as much.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, with computers for sure, but there s probably... they re probably designed in a way that you can manually...
4
SPEAKER_00
sort of it s efficient and convenient to use them manually.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s not to optimize cryptographic security, it s to optimize, it s like to balance security and like humans being able to actually.
4
SPEAKER_01
No, I gotta disagree.
4
SPEAKER_01
It was neither efficient nor convenient.
4
SPEAKER_01
It took a long time.
4
SPEAKER_01
When what was significantly easier to do
4
SPEAKER_01
But that would require you to have spy paraphernalia with you.
4
SPEAKER_01
This is what s called a one-time pad.
4
SPEAKER_01
So you have the set of numbers on a sheet of paper that had to be developed.
4
SPEAKER_01
I had to use iodine to make those numbers visible.
4
SPEAKER_01
Those are known to be unbreakable unless they are used multiple times, the same sheet of paper.
4
SPEAKER_01
Because the person who encrypts has the same set of numbers as the person who decrypts.
4
SPEAKER_01
One time use, you cannot figure out what the message is.
5
SPEAKER_01
is the quick way to communicate from one person to another one time.
5
SPEAKER_01
One time.
5
SPEAKER_01
Well, one time, but I had a pad with multiple sheets of paper, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
And the reason that they gave me a manual one is because I literally, I had only, when I wound up in the United States, I had only one thing with me that only a spy can have, and that was a writing pad with,
5
SPEAKER_01
where the first 10 pages or so were impregnated with a trace of a chemical that was used for secret writing.
5
SPEAKER_01
But you really would have to know what you re looking for to, you know, you see this pad that was bought at Walmart and... Can you explain a little further, what is the chemical here that
5
SPEAKER_00
What are we talking about?
5
SPEAKER_00
So how, I don t understand how it s possible to have a physical pad that does the encryption without any computing.
5
SPEAKER_00
How does it encrypt?
5
SPEAKER_01
All right, so no, no, it doesn t do any work.
5
SPEAKER_01
So the communication, the encrypted communication was a set of groups of five,
5
SPEAKER_01
five digits and then another five, and there s always a gap in between.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so let s say if I get this radio transmission, I write them all down, and then I use my, develop my algorithm, and then I do mathematics, either addition or subtraction.
5
SPEAKER_01
The resulting set of digits then had a one-to-one correlation to letters.
5
SPEAKER_00
And this is an easy way to then do the correlation.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yes, yes.
5
SPEAKER_00
Oh, that s cool.
5
SPEAKER_00
And you re saying the algorithm was not efficient.
5
SPEAKER_01
It was not... Oh, the manual, it took a long time.
5
SPEAKER_01
And you can t make an error.
5
SPEAKER_00
Right.
5
SPEAKER_00
Would you know where... Is it easy to debug?
5
SPEAKER_00
No, you do it twice.
5
SPEAKER_00
You do it twice and that s how you check.
5
SPEAKER_01
If it s identical, then you know.
5
SPEAKER_01
If it s not, then one is right and the other is wrong.
5
SPEAKER_01
You gotta do it again.
5
SPEAKER_01
So just don t make mistakes.
5
SPEAKER_01
No, that s right.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I really didn t.
5
SPEAKER_01
But anyway, so I was learning that.
5
SPEAKER_01
I was also told that I was required to become proficient in another language.
5
SPEAKER_01
and they gave me a choice, and I picked English.
5
SPEAKER_01
That s... What was the other one?
5
SPEAKER_01
Oh no, pick one, French, you know, whatever is spoken in the West.
5
SPEAKER_00
Got it.
5
SPEAKER_00
What would be second to you?
5
SPEAKER_00
Would you think French because of Paris?
5
SPEAKER_00
What would you...
5
SPEAKER_01
Why English?
5
SPEAKER_01
English was a no-brainer because I was a straight A student in English without studying.
5
SPEAKER_01
It came so easily to me.
5
SPEAKER_01
So that s why I chose it, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
So that was that.
5
SPEAKER_01
Then I was taught the basics of counter surveillance.
5
SPEAKER_01
Some trickery and surveillance detection routes where you
5
SPEAKER_01
wander around in the city for three hours and determine whether you re being followed or not.
5
SPEAKER_01
That requires you to plan the route very well.
5
SPEAKER_01
I give you one example that will illustrate that.
5
SPEAKER_01
My favorite spot, when I was in Moscow, I did a lot of that also.
5
SPEAKER_01
And my favorite spot was a not well-traveled road.
5
SPEAKER_01
It went down the hill and curved.
5
SPEAKER_01
And at the bottom of the hill, there was a telephone booth.
5
SPEAKER_01
And when you open the door and pick up the telephone, you have to look back.
5
SPEAKER_01
So it wasn t like this, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
It wasn t a giveaway.
5
SPEAKER_01
This was normal.
5
SPEAKER_01
It was natural.
5
SPEAKER_01
So I could see if somebody would come walking after me.
5
SPEAKER_01
these kinds of things, or you would use public transportation, big buildings where you needed to use an elevator and see who s, because surveillance, the object of surveillance is to never lose sight of the individual who you re surveilling because at that point, you may miss the window where he does something that you re looking for.
5
SPEAKER_01
So somebody always has to come close, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
Did you have to also study surveillance?
5
SPEAKER_01
No, only counter surveillance.
5
SPEAKER_01
And what helped me in all my training, I would have a competition with the folks that were coming, that were following me, and me.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I beat them every time.
5
SPEAKER_01
they were at a disadvantage because one of them always had to be close, and if you saw the same face twice, you knew that you were being followed, and I had a very, very good memory for faces.
5
SPEAKER_00
So basically figure out a fixed route, and then a fixed route that allows you to survey the area, and then record the faces you ve seen inside your mind,
5
SPEAKER_00
And if you see multiple times a single face, that s a bad sign.
5
SPEAKER_01
And they could use different clothes.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_01
What they didn t have was face masks.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_01
The CIA does nowadays.
5
SPEAKER_01
They can give you a different face within seconds.
5
SPEAKER_01
Oh my God.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_00
So how... I mean, again, you talk about paranoia.
5
SPEAKER_00
Uh-huh.
5
SPEAKER_00
Is that a big part of the job?
5
SPEAKER_00
Counter surveillance, like being constantly paranoid that you re being watched?
5
SPEAKER_00
Isn t that quite stressful?
5
SPEAKER_00
So is that actually an effective way to operate?
5
SPEAKER_01
No, but it sort of becomes a routine.
5
SPEAKER_01
I was told to do it while in the US once a month.
5
SPEAKER_01
Okay, it s like a cleaning out.
5
SPEAKER_01
Oh, not every day, no, no, no, no, no, once a month.
5
SPEAKER_01
Before I would, say, mail a letter with secret writing, so I was sure that nobody saw me put an envelope into a post box.
5
SPEAKER_00
So this is one of the tools in your toolbox.
5
SPEAKER_00
So there s Morse code, there s the decryption and the encryption, there s the car surveillance.
5
SPEAKER_01
Photography.
5
SPEAKER_01
Making micro dots.
5
SPEAKER_01
You know what a micro dot is?
5
SPEAKER_01
You take a photograph and you use a microscope in reverse and make that photograph really small.
5
SPEAKER_01
So small that it s like the head of a pin.
5
SPEAKER_01
that can be used to hide under a postage stamp.
5
SPEAKER_01
In reality, I knew how to make them, but in reality they never asked me to make use of that technique.
5
SPEAKER_01
So it s sort of an encryption mechanism for photographs.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so what we do nowadays, embed code in PDFs and stuff like that, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, beautiful, okay.
5
SPEAKER_00
All right, so that was a learning, a training process, both in the physical space and sort of algorithmically.
5
SPEAKER_01
Is there other things?
5
SPEAKER_01
Oh, you bet.
5
SPEAKER_01
Interestingly enough, I was the first person
5
SPEAKER_01
The first book I was given to read was the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
5
SPEAKER_00
Oh, so understand, that s interesting, because you said you had to read Western literature.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that too.
5
SPEAKER_00
How much reading, so history, how much history, politics, geopolitics, culture?
5
SPEAKER_01
Not much more, but they made me read that document.
5
SPEAKER_01
Other than that, I wasn t supposed to study the Soviet Union.
5
SPEAKER_01
I wasn t supposed, that was not, and I didn t, when they sent me to Moscow, it wasn t to learn Russian, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
It wasn t to learn English.
5
SPEAKER_01
The second document they gave me was the constitution of West Germany.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then I got lots of magazines and stuff like that.
5
SPEAKER_01
As I told you, I was also told to watch West German television, which I embraced with a vengeance because it was better than East German.
5
SPEAKER_01
So I would get up in the morning and have a little breakfast and watch the German version of Sesame Street.
5
SPEAKER_00
And that helps you get an understanding of the culture, because if you have to do any kind of interaction, any kind of spying, then you have to be able to effectively integrate yourself.
5
SPEAKER_01
Well, you also have to know, that would have been easier if they had sent me to West Germany, all the soccer teams, stuff that everybody knows.
5
SPEAKER_01
When I came to the US, I knew very little stuff that everybody knows.
5
SPEAKER_01
That s why I had to be very cautious.
5
SPEAKER_01
you know, take it in all the time.
5
SPEAKER_01
Anyway, and the last thing I want to mention is I was strongly encouraged to expand my cultural education.
5
SPEAKER_01
In other words, go to visit museums, go to the theater, not so much movies, opera, read books from all kinds of authors.
5
SPEAKER_01
That was important to them.
5
SPEAKER_01
And once a month I had to write a report, what I did.
5
SPEAKER_01
But the interesting thing, there was no curriculum, there was no agenda, there were no check marks.
5
SPEAKER_01
It was all ad hoc.
5
SPEAKER_01
Now you do this, and then you do that.
5
SPEAKER_01
And a lot of this also, they relied on my initiative.
5
SPEAKER_00
Again.
5
SPEAKER_00
I mean, that s part of the evaluation too.
5
SPEAKER_00
You bet.
5
SPEAKER_00
Are you able to have creative, it s interesting that they re developing a James Bond type of character here, which is, what s the reason to go to the opera?
5
SPEAKER_00
As you become cultured in a certain kind of way, where perhaps that makes you more charming, more charismatic, in terms of your ability to integrate yourself in different situations.
5
SPEAKER_01
You re absolutely right.
5
SPEAKER_01
I was, I was,
5
SPEAKER_01
When I came to the U.S.
5
SPEAKER_01
after about two years roughly,
5
SPEAKER_01
I was cultured enough to not make a bad impression at a diplomatic soiree in Washington, D.C.
5
SPEAKER_01
I mingled freely, all right?
5
SPEAKER_01
And so the whole idea was for me to sort of reach into the upper realms of society where the targets would be juicier than, you know, the worker bees.
5
SPEAKER_00
And how did you end up in Moscow?
5
SPEAKER_01
Why?
5
SPEAKER_01
How?
5
SPEAKER_00
What is that journey?
5
SPEAKER_01
Well, so I told you I started studying English.
5
SPEAKER_01
So I started back from scratch.
5
SPEAKER_01
They paid for a tutor and I went from like English 101.
5
SPEAKER_01
I went through that in a couple of months and then I got another guy with whom
5
SPEAKER_01
I expanded this, we had conversations rather than working from a textbook.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I worked like a maniac.
5
SPEAKER_01
I threw myself into the study of English like you wouldn t believe.
5
SPEAKER_01
And my inspiration came from Vladimir Lenin.
5
SPEAKER_01
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.
5
SPEAKER_01
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.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so I really learned 100 new English words every day.
5
SPEAKER_01
I know this because I counted them.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I had a system how to do this.
5
SPEAKER_01
So you take your index card and you have five categories.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s a really good way to learn rote by rote.
5
SPEAKER_01
So you ve got category one, that s the new ones, and you ve got category five.
5
SPEAKER_01
So you start with five.
5
SPEAKER_01
Five you already had right four times.
5
SPEAKER_01
If you have it right again, it goes into the archive.
5
SPEAKER_00
Oh, like long-term cold archive, yeah.
5
SPEAKER_01
Four, if you get it right, it goes to five.
5
SPEAKER_01
If you get it wrong, it gets relegated to three.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so you go through this, and occasionally I would throw the archived things back into one.
5
SPEAKER_01
So I really acquired a phenomenal vocabulary.
5
SPEAKER_01
When I was done with my English, my vocabulary was significantly higher than the average American because I didn t discriminate.
5
SPEAKER_01
Whatever word I didn t know, I learned.
5
SPEAKER_01
which is not necessarily the best way because, you know, English has a lot of synonyms, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
And one synonym is usually the preferable one.
5
SPEAKER_01
And when I first interacted with people, I very often used the one that wasn t as good.
5
SPEAKER_01
and people found that I have an interesting way of talking.
5
SPEAKER_01
They didn t know what that meant, but.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so it builds a good foundation for a language.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s getting a large vocabulary.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s really interesting.
5
SPEAKER_00
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.
5
SPEAKER_00
Now, that requires a computer
5
SPEAKER_00
to keep track of the information.
5
SPEAKER_00
If you have cars, that s a really interesting pile system.
5
SPEAKER_00
One, two, three, four, five, you upgrade it, one, two, three, four, five.
5
SPEAKER_00
Maybe I wouldn t go to the archive and go to pile one right away, maybe I would.
5
SPEAKER_00
go to like, I don t know, pile five, perhaps, is probably the right place to put it, because you have to go through that full step again.
5
SPEAKER_00
But that is a really powerful way to learn, definitely language, but also facts, like people that go to medical school.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yes, disconnected fact.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_01
And you pretty much, when you re done, you know what you know.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_00
But then again, to use it, to integrate it into the music of language, that s more difficult, that s what you re talking about.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, exactly right.
5
SPEAKER_00
There s a charm,
5
SPEAKER_00
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.
5
SPEAKER_00
Because language isn t a simple formula.
5
SPEAKER_00
Language is the play of words.
5
SPEAKER_00
So actually using the incorrect synonym, you know, as...
5
SPEAKER_00
You know, if instead of saying, I m cold, saying I m chilled or something like using off beat words can actually be part of the charm.
5
SPEAKER_00
So it s interesting if you can learn how to use that correctly, because I know a bunch of people with the Russian accent and I feel like they get get away with saying a lot of ridiculous shit.
5
SPEAKER_00
because they re able to sort of leverage the charm of the non sequiturs.
5
SPEAKER_01
By the way, just one thing, you talked about using a computer.
5
SPEAKER_01
When I had my first personal computer, I actually wrote a program.
5
SPEAKER_00
that does that.
5
SPEAKER_00
It does that.
5
SPEAKER_00
By the way, when was that?
5
SPEAKER_00
Because you were a world-class programmer for a time.
5
SPEAKER_00
You were a very good programmer.
5
SPEAKER_00
When did the birdie... Birdie C was probably 1984.
5
1984.
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SPEAKER_00
When did you fall in love with programming?
5
SPEAKER_01
When I went to college in the US.
5
SPEAKER_01
And part of the core curriculum was that you were required to take a course in computer, and it was mostly just talk, but we also had to learn a language.
5
SPEAKER_01
We had to write some programs in Fortran, which was what, five at the time.
5
SPEAKER_01
It was a dumbed down Fortran.
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SPEAKER_01
But listen, so...
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SPEAKER_01
I see the ability, I see what you can do with this.
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SPEAKER_01
I programmed a sine curve and then I divided the sine curve into really, really small rectangles and then ran the program and it came up with the right area.
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SPEAKER_00
Wow, this is great.
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SPEAKER_00
It s incredible.
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SPEAKER_00
It s incredible, it s so powerful.
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SPEAKER_00
You re creating a little helper that helps you understand the world, to help you analyze the world and so on.
5
SPEAKER_00
We ll return to that, because it s interesting.
5
SPEAKER_00
You have so many interesting aspects to your life, but Moscow, so.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, no, let me, how I was sent to Moscow.
5
SPEAKER_01
So one day I had a visitor from Moscow,
5
SPEAKER_01
And he came to visit me in my apartment together with Nikolai and we talked and then he said, so how s your English?
5
SPEAKER_01
I said, I pulled a book from the shelf and says I can read that without the help of
6
SPEAKER_00
of a dictionary, oh, that s interesting.
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SPEAKER_00
And he said, you know what, we re gonna send you a tape recorder and you just talk, say something, you know, for 20 minutes, whatever you wanna talk about.
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SPEAKER_00
They sent this thing and two weeks later I was on a plane to Moscow.
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SPEAKER_00
Because I also spoke English, sort of the British variety of English, with not a strong German accent, because I ve always had the ability to imitate others and sounds.
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SPEAKER_00
That was an innate ability.
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SPEAKER_00
I would, you know, when we were in a lab as students, I would very often do monologues imitating East German comedians.
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SPEAKER_00
You know, I just... Compressions.
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SPEAKER_00
Yes, yes.
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SPEAKER_00
I m not good enough to make a living out of it, but that raised some interest.
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SPEAKER_00
And so they sent me to Moscow.
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SPEAKER_00
That was the first time on a plane, by the way.
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SPEAKER_00
And I had a conversation with two ladies who spoke English.
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SPEAKER_00
One was a Russian, a professor at Harvard.
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SPEAKER_00
Laminas of University, she was obviously KGB, that was her cover.
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SPEAKER_00
And the other one was an American-born lady.
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SPEAKER_01
By the way, she was an actual professor, and you re using that as the cover, or is it just a story?
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SPEAKER_00
No, she said she was a professor.
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SPEAKER_00
She may have taught there too.
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SPEAKER_00
That s an interesting distinction.
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SPEAKER_01
One is like a story you tell people and one is like you legit are doing the thing but are also as a cover.
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SPEAKER_01
Anyway, that s an interesting aspect of how to be a good liar.
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SPEAKER_01
You might as well live the lie.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, exactly right.
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SPEAKER_00
So the other one was a middle-aged, the Russian was pretty young, the other one was middle-aged American and so we talked for maybe a couple of hours and then they withdrew and I was left alone.
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SPEAKER_00
Eventually, my liaison, he came back in and he said,
6
SPEAKER_00
it was close, but the American thinks you can actually become, you get close enough to becoming a native speaker of American English.
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SPEAKER_00
And he said, the Russian was very doubtful.
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SPEAKER_00
So I think wishful, it was a tie, literally.
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SPEAKER_00
Wishful thinking prevailed.
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SPEAKER_00
So within a couple of weeks, I was moving to Moscow.
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SPEAKER_01
And what was the task in Moscow?
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SPEAKER_01
How long were you in Moscow?
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SPEAKER_01
Two years.
6
SPEAKER_01
And what was the task there?
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SPEAKER_01
Is it training or is it espionage?
6
SPEAKER_00
No, it was training.
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SPEAKER_00
So it was, the American born became my tutor.
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SPEAKER_00
I met with her twice a week.
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SPEAKER_00
I also listened to a lot of BBC, shortwave BBC Worldwide.
6
SPEAKER_00
I read more English books.
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SPEAKER_00
So a lot of that was about the language and the culture of English, American.
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SPEAKER_00
And I did phonetics exercises.
6
SPEAKER_00
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 mostly about the vowels, by the way, most of the accent, and particularly, let s say, coming from German into English, but also Russian, it s the vowels.
6
SPEAKER_01
So you would have a single word, like apple, and you would just say apple.
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SPEAKER_00
American English or British English?
6
SPEAKER_00
No, American English.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I give you one example that almost nobody gets right.
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SPEAKER_00
The difference between hot and hut.
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SPEAKER_00
You know?
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
Hot and hut, yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
And German speakers, it s very tough.
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SPEAKER_01
You know which one, for everyone it s different.
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SPEAKER_01
For example, I could say this on a podcast.
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SPEAKER_01
Something that my brother struggles with, I struggled with too when I first came to this country to learn English.
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SPEAKER_01
is there s differences, there s embarrassing differences, like beach and bitch, right?
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SPEAKER_01
And you get so, as a young kid also, you get so nervous.
6
SPEAKER_01
I don t wanna say the wrong thing.
6
SPEAKER_01
I can also say that this is almost a jokey thing, but there s a famous philosopher, Immanuel Kant, and you can guess which other word is very similar to that.
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SPEAKER_01
So there s a nervousness about,
6
SPEAKER_01
What is that?
6
SPEAKER_01
That s interesting.
6
SPEAKER_01
I mean, and Germans probably have a different tension of like, what is hard to learn, the difference between the pronunciation of the vowels or the control of the vowels.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s interesting.
6
SPEAKER_01
So you had to really master this daily exercise.
6
SPEAKER_00
And you know, and this was my discipline.
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SPEAKER_00
I did this every night, routine, boring as hell.
6
SPEAKER_00
So English was the focus.
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SPEAKER_00
And I also had interaction with some agents who had operated in the United States as diplomats on a diplomatic cover.
6
SPEAKER_00
They would come and talk to me a little bit and tell me and sort of prepare me what was ahead of me.
6
SPEAKER_00
And then I did a whole lot of operational training, particularly surveillance detection.
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SPEAKER_00
That was big.
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SPEAKER_00
They also taught me how to drive a car in Moscow.
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SPEAKER_00
Finally, the one skill you needed.
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SPEAKER_00
What s surveillance detection?
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SPEAKER_00
Okay, so this is when you find out whether you re being followed.
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SPEAKER_01
Ah, got it, got it, got it.
6
SPEAKER_01
So it s the anti-surveillance, yeah, gotcha.
6
SPEAKER_00
The abbreviation that s used in, yes, in intelligence circles is SDR, surveillance detection route.
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SPEAKER_00
When they say that, you know what that is.
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SPEAKER_00
And that was it.
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SPEAKER_00
And a few other things, you know, one-offs, for instance, I was once taught to read silhouettes of ships.
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SPEAKER_00
When you see a ship from a distance, what kind of a ship it might be.
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SPEAKER_00
They thought this would come in handy, actually.
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SPEAKER_00
There was, in 1982, Andropov started
6
SPEAKER_00
a campaign that was
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SPEAKER_00
now I forget the name, Operation Something Something, where everybody who was in the West was supposed to look for signs that the West was getting ready for war.
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SPEAKER_00
And everybody had an object to pay attention to.
6
SPEAKER_00
I had a harbor, a military harbor in New Jersey, near Red Bank, it was called Earl Weapon Station.
6
SPEAKER_00
And the code name for that was early, so they asked me to just wander by there to see if there was something unusual going on.
6
SPEAKER_00
Because the Soviet Union at that point, it was Ronald Reagan, were really afraid that Reagan was gonna start a war.
6
SPEAKER_00
They were absolutely 100% afraid of him.
6
SPEAKER_01
Is there something memorable to you on a personal level, on a philosophical level about your time in Moscow?
6
SPEAKER_01
something that kind of stays with you.
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SPEAKER_01
Outside of the training stuff, maybe.
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SPEAKER_01
Like the details of the training.
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SPEAKER_00
You ll love the answer.
6
SPEAKER_00
You will love the answer.
6
SPEAKER_00
I was given tickets to two performances by Americans.
6
SPEAKER_00
There was a theater troupe that played Our Town, and then there was this, I forget the name of the guy, but you may not be old enough, have you ever watched Hee Haw?
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SPEAKER_00
Maybe.
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SPEAKER_00
It was a country music show, real kitschy, but the star of Hee Haw was giving a concert in Moscow, and I guarantee you at least half the audience were KGB.
6
SPEAKER_00
And at the other end, the opposite of a highlight was my visit to the mausoleum where Lenin is still today.
6
SPEAKER_00
There was so
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SPEAKER_00
There was a nothing.
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SPEAKER_00
He was my hero, but he looked like a wax figure.
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SPEAKER_00
And you walk by there, there was nothing inspirational.
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SPEAKER_00
It was not a religious experience, nothing.
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SPEAKER_00
It was a big old nothing.
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SPEAKER_01
Is that, did your faith and belief in communism start to crumble at some point here?
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SPEAKER_01
Is that around, that was still pretty strong?
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SPEAKER_00
What I did notice that the standard of living in Moscow was significantly lower than in East Germany.
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SPEAKER_00
In the supermarkets, you could expect a lot of people
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SPEAKER_00
with reliability that you can find canned fish and mineral water, everything else was whatever.
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SPEAKER_00
And if you saw a line at a store, you just line up.
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SPEAKER_00
You don t even ask what they have because if you don t like it, somebody else will.
6
SPEAKER_00
It was not poverty, but it was close to poverty.
6
SPEAKER_00
There were a lot of drunken men in the streets.
6
SPEAKER_00
And- This is the 80s?
6
SPEAKER_00
No, this is the late 70s, mid to late 70s.
6
SPEAKER_00
they had these high-rise apartment buildings that looked pretty good from the front, but you went into the backyard, ouch, you know.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, you re describing my childhood here, okay.
6
SPEAKER_01
But it s interesting, even with the professor, even with everything else, it s interesting because I think the standard of living was much lower, you re right, even in Moscow.
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SPEAKER_00
Absolutely was.
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SPEAKER_00
The one thing that they always had, at least in my days, in those two years, there was always fresh bread in the bulochnaya.
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SPEAKER_00
Always.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that s probably one of the memories I have of childhood.
6
SPEAKER_01
Well, you re hungry a lot, but when you eat his bread.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and the bread was good.
6
SPEAKER_01
It was good.
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SPEAKER_01
I mean, I don t, I actually wonder, I wonder how good it was, but I remember it being incredibly good.
6
SPEAKER_00
To me, it was really good.
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SPEAKER_00
And, you know, you had it from white to very dark and all the varieties.
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SPEAKER_00
The other thing that was good was,
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SPEAKER_00
If you knew where to get it, Stolichnaya, was four rubles.
6
SPEAKER_01
Not only is it good vodka, but it s cheap vodka.
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SPEAKER_01
I like it.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, but you had to know where, this would be like holes in the wall someplace.
6
SPEAKER_01
Well, I think a lot of the way they operate, I wonder if East Germany is this way, but a lot of the ways that Moscow operate is you kind of,
6
SPEAKER_01
You had to know.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
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SPEAKER_01
Like there s a very kind of, if you make the right friends, if you give money to the right guy, the guy, the friend of the friend of the friend is gonna hook you up, and there s a culture that this is how you work around a very big bureaucracy.
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SPEAKER_00
Underground economy.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, underground economy, yeah.
6
SPEAKER_01
You have to, which is a, boy,
6
SPEAKER_01
Such a stark contrast between that and the United States, the capitalist system.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that was a very big culture shock to me, to understand the fundamentally different way of life.
6
SPEAKER_01
But the interesting thing is, human nature pervades both systems.
6
SPEAKER_01
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.
6
SPEAKER_01
In the United States, there is much more power to the rule of law.
6
SPEAKER_01
So there s rules and people follow those rules.
6
SPEAKER_01
You get to break the rules nonstop.
6
SPEAKER_00
Well, in East Germany and Russia, I believe theft
6
SPEAKER_00
if you could get away with it, was part of your economic activity.
6
SPEAKER_00
I have a friend who I went to school with up until my fourth year, and we reconnected, and he told me how he survived.
6
SPEAKER_00
He would just steal stuff and then sell it or trade it.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, thefts, I mean, it s a relative concept.
6
SPEAKER_01
You know what, taking stuff.
6
SPEAKER_01
Bribery, all those kinds of things.
6
SPEAKER_01
People, you know.
6
SPEAKER_01
Corruption, you know, it s a relative term.
6
SPEAKER_01
No, I m just kidding.
6
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it is.
6
SPEAKER_01
You have to work around the giant bureaucracy about the giant corruption.
6
SPEAKER_01
Corruption builds on top of corruption and then it just becomes this giant system that s unstable, as you talked about.
6
SPEAKER_00
One last word.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
6
SPEAKER_00
The two years in Moscow taught me how to be alone.
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SPEAKER_00
I had no social interaction.
6
SPEAKER_00
Not with friends, not with women?
6
SPEAKER_00
No.
6
SPEAKER_00
The only interaction I had was with the folks that trained me.
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SPEAKER_00
So I was alone, it was a lonely two years.
6
SPEAKER_00
For a person who loves love, is that difficult?
6
SPEAKER_00
Yes, but 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.
6
SPEAKER_00
I had to learn how to be an American.
6
SPEAKER_00
They didn t teach me in Moscow, they couldn t.
6
SPEAKER_01
So the first two years in America, you had to kind of listen more than talk.
6
SPEAKER_00
Oh, you bet.
6
SPEAKER_00
The very first year, I couldn t even work because I had to acquire the documents, a social security card and a driver s license to get a job.
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SPEAKER_00
And then when I had the job, I worked as a bike messenger.
6
SPEAKER_00
That gave me a good opportunity to listen because these people,
6
SPEAKER_00
They weren t very curious about me.
6
SPEAKER_01
What was your name in East Germany?
6
SPEAKER_01
What was your name in Moscow?
6
SPEAKER_01
What was your name in America?
6
SPEAKER_00
Okay, so the name I was given at birth is Albrecht Dittrich.
6
SPEAKER_00
So sexy when you speak in German, the German accent.
6
SPEAKER_00
I hated that name, Albrecht.
6
SPEAKER_00
I didn t like it.
6
SPEAKER_00
It was very rarely used.
6
SPEAKER_00
My mother named me after a famous German painter, Albrecht de Dürer.
6
SPEAKER_00
My cover name in Moscow was known as Dieter and in the United States I became Jack Barsky.
6
SPEAKER_00
In between I used a whole bunch of other names that were associated with false passports that I used.
6
SPEAKER_00
One of the names that I remember is William Dyson because that is the name that was on the Canadian passport I used to enter the United States.
6
SPEAKER_01
So how did you enter the United States?
6
SPEAKER_01
Can we take the journey from Moscow to the United States?
6
SPEAKER_01
What was the assignment?
6
SPEAKER_01
What was that leap?
6
SPEAKER_00
Just one thing in between.
6
SPEAKER_00
I had a three month practice trip to Canada.
6
SPEAKER_00
That was a good idea.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I gotta tell you this one thing that happens there.
6
SPEAKER_00
Okay, so, because, you know, the one thing 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.
6
SPEAKER_00
You see the humor.
6
SPEAKER_00
Okay, so here comes something quite humorous, in hindsight at least.
6
SPEAKER_00
One of the tasks that I had in Canada was to acquire a birth certificate.
6
SPEAKER_00
But the name was Henry Van Randall, who was born someplace in California, and I was supposed to write a little letter saying, I m Henry Van Randall, please send me a copy of my birth certificate.
6
SPEAKER_00
The fee is enclosed.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I lived in a small hotel, so the return address, it wasn t visible that it was a hotel, that was important.
6
SPEAKER_00
So, and it took like three weeks and I get nothing, four weeks I get nothing.
6
SPEAKER_00
Eventually, I got annoyed and I mustered the courage to call them up from a pay phone.
6
SPEAKER_00
I called up the office registrar, whatever they were called, in this town in California, and I yelled at them, I says, you got my money, where s my birth certificate?
6
SPEAKER_00
Well, a couple of weeks later it came.
6
SPEAKER_00
So I see the envelope.
6
SPEAKER_00
This is the Henry Van Randel, yes.
6
SPEAKER_00
I had prepared the caretakers of the hotel that I m expecting a letter from my friend.
7
SPEAKER_00
So I went up to my room, I opened it, and I was like, yes, yes, this is a success.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I opened this thing, and it was a copy of a birth certificate, but it was stamped with big letters across in red, deceased.
7
SPEAKER_00
Now think about it.
7
SPEAKER_00
So here s a dead person who was asking for his birth certificate.
7
SPEAKER_00
I had the presence of mind to leave.
7
SPEAKER_00
Okay, I went to a couple of other cities.
7
SPEAKER_00
I should have left the country.
7
SPEAKER_00
But I know that the Royal Mounted Police was following me.
7
SPEAKER_00
I was given that information by the FBI later on.
7
SPEAKER_01
And they were- Oh, you were able to at least suspect that at the time through the- I knew that there was trouble.
7
SPEAKER_00
My counter surveillance route didn t discover anything.
7
SPEAKER_00
So I kept on going.
7
SPEAKER_00
I was supposed to visit two more cities and they were always one step behind.
7
SPEAKER_00
What is interesting to me is that they didn t catch me on the way out.
7
SPEAKER_00
You have to show your passport to the airline.
7
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I was known by name, because I had to give that to the hotel, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
And I escaped by air.
7
SPEAKER_01
They would have to keep you on a list, right?
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that s interesting, but that requires a good computerized updated system to keep track of that stuff.
7
SPEAKER_00
This was Swiss air, so.
7
SPEAKER_00
Well, you got lucky.
7
SPEAKER_00
Part of life is luck.
7
SPEAKER_00
You bet.
7
SPEAKER_00
And other than that, the trip to Canada was a big success because it gave me the culture shock.
7
SPEAKER_00
that I needed to not be blown out of the water when I get to the United States.
7
SPEAKER_00
So you hopped a few places in Canada and then Swiss Air.
7
SPEAKER_00
I even had a relationship with a young lady.
7
SPEAKER_01
Canadian, French-Canadian, regular Canadian?
7
SPEAKER_00
French-Canadian, and she gave me a book, Winnie the Pooh, because we went to see the movie, and then she wrote a dedication, she says, to the nicest German I ve ever met.
7
SPEAKER_00
Was she lying?
7
SPEAKER_00
No.
7
SPEAKER_01
Or you don t know.
7
SPEAKER_01
Speaking of Spikecraft, and that led to Heartbreak, too?
7
SPEAKER_00
No.
7
SPEAKER_00
That was,
7
SPEAKER_00
I was not at that point.
7
SPEAKER_00
Ready for love?
7
SPEAKER_00
No.
7
SPEAKER_01
Ready to return to that old.
7
SPEAKER_00
Well, I was already married in Germany.
7
SPEAKER_00
Okay, that woman I loved.
7
SPEAKER_01
We should return to this.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
7
SPEAKER_00
So Swiss Air, where did you land in the United States?
7
SPEAKER_00
or when I came, where did I land?
7
SPEAKER_00
An American Airlines flight from Mexico City to Toronto, but they made me deplane in Chicago.
7
SPEAKER_00
I have no idea.
7
SPEAKER_00
I think that was over-engineering.
7
SPEAKER_00
That didn t make any sense to me.
7
SPEAKER_00
Why can t a Canadian just take a flight from Mexico City?
7
SPEAKER_00
With this stopover, that s kind of nonsense.
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, but okay.
7
SPEAKER_01
But nevertheless, that was it, and then you landed in Chicago.
7
SPEAKER_01
and tell me the story in America.
7
SPEAKER_01
What was the day-to-day life?
7
SPEAKER_01
Now this is, now you re a spy.
7
SPEAKER_00
You re a spy.
7
SPEAKER_00
No, no, no, I gotta tell you another funny story.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
7
SPEAKER_00
So it s another, there s two things that happened that could have ended my career as a spy right then and there.
7
SPEAKER_00
So I m, so I m arriving in, in,
7
SPEAKER_00
in Chicago in the evening, it s already dark.
7
SPEAKER_00
I had no idea what kind of a hotel to take and I picked one out of Yellow Pages and got a taxi.
7
SPEAKER_00
When I gave him the address,
7
SPEAKER_00
He looked at me like a little funny, you know, whatever, what do I know, you know, just keep on going.
7
SPEAKER_00
I need to get, I need to get sleep because I was extremely tense, you know, having gone through customs and border control.
7
SPEAKER_00
So, and we were going in the southern direction and I noticed that the neighborhoods were, became less and less inviting.
7
SPEAKER_00
Didn t know what that meant either.
7
SPEAKER_00
I enter the hotel, it was a five-story brownstone, and something else looked funny.
7
SPEAKER_00
So the reception desk was protected by plexiglass.
7
SPEAKER_00
Not having enough background, I didn t know that this was unusual.
7
SPEAKER_00
All I knew that there was a lot of crime in the United States, so I thought maybe every hotel was like that.
7
SPEAKER_00
So I go up into my room and drink a half a bottle of Johnny Walker Red, because I... As one does, yeah.
7
SPEAKER_00
Because I was so damn tense, I just wanted to sleep.
7
SPEAKER_00
I wanted to get into a coma, which I did.
7
SPEAKER_00
And the next day I woke up with a head that was twice as big as, felt twice as big.
7
SPEAKER_00
But, you know, I was prepared.
7
SPEAKER_00
I had aspirin with me, so I killed the headache and went outside to see if I can get something to eat.
7
SPEAKER_00
So I was right smack in the middle of the south side of Chicago.
7
SPEAKER_00
I didn t know that the south side of Chicago existed.
7
SPEAKER_00
I found later, I found out where I was.
7
SPEAKER_00
So it was time to go very quickly, go up there.
7
SPEAKER_00
And at that point I decided I would register at the next hotel under Jack Barsky.
7
SPEAKER_00
So I went to the bathroom and I tried to kill off Mr. Dyson by burning his passport.
7
SPEAKER_00
Unfortunately, I was not trained in how to train passport, how to destroy passports.
7
SPEAKER_00
So I tried to burn it.
7
SPEAKER_00
And these things are flame retardant.
7
SPEAKER_00
It created a cloud of smoke and I m looking up there and there s a smoke detector.
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, oh no.
7
SPEAKER_00
Okay, so presence of mind, I threw this thing in the toilet and then took out a pair of scissors and cut it into small pieces and flushed it down.
7
SPEAKER_00
If that smoke alarm goes off, I m busted, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
If some criminal steals, I had $6,000 on me in cash, steals either my passport or my money or both,
7
SPEAKER_00
I don t know what to do.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, you can t go to the authorities, you can t do anything.
7
SPEAKER_00
There weren t any Russian Soviets in Chicago.
7
SPEAKER_00
Do you have any contacts inside the American?
7
SPEAKER_00
No, there was no plan B for Chicago at all.
7
SPEAKER_00
That s an oversight.
7
SPEAKER_00
I shouldn t have gone to Chicago.
7
SPEAKER_00
They could have shipped me into San Francisco or Washington D.C.
7
SPEAKER_00
because both of them had Soviets.
7
SPEAKER_00
My end goal was to go to New York.
7
SPEAKER_00
Fine.
7
SPEAKER_00
You know, I would have been a really, really dangerous agent if I had gone back and worked with the KGB, because I could have told them all the things, how to do it right, right?
7
SPEAKER_01
So in that sense, there is some, given the scale of the KGB, there is some incompetence in the system.
7
SPEAKER_00
Some?
7
SPEAKER_00
a lot of incompetence.
7
SPEAKER_00
With regard to preparing me to be an American, it was almost total incompetence.
7
SPEAKER_01
And that, do you think that s representative of the way they operate?
7
SPEAKER_01
Is there s an incompetence like to the logistics, to the...
7
SPEAKER_01
strategies involved, all that kind of stuff.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, none of these guys had operated as illegals.
7
SPEAKER_00
They were outsiders to American society.
7
SPEAKER_00
They had interaction with Americans, but they all lived in New York.
7
SPEAKER_00
They lived in the compound
7
SPEAKER_00
in northern Manhattan, where they all live together with their families, and most of the time they spent interacting with themselves, with their own people at work.
7
SPEAKER_00
So they really didn t integrate well.
7
SPEAKER_00
They did not know what it s like to be an American, to have a job, to live like an American.
7
SPEAKER_00
They didn t know it.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s interesting that KGB didn t put a high value to that kind of integration.
7
SPEAKER_00
They didn t know what they didn t know.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
7
SPEAKER_00
And by the way, this was mutual.
7
SPEAKER_00
Do you think the CIA had good knowledge of the Russian culture?
7
SPEAKER_00
Uh-uh.
7
SPEAKER_00
Same thing.
7
SPEAKER_00
And so there was a lot of lack of understanding because good intelligence could have possibly avoided some of the high tension situations that we had when in the 80s we got close to nuclear war.
7
SPEAKER_00
So good intelligence would be integrating yourself in society much, much deeper.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yes, and understanding that Ronald Reagan was not a warmonger, but he was talking about the end times because he was a Christian.
7
SPEAKER_01
But then that kind of integration can be dangerous because you start to question the propaganda, the narratives on which the KGB is built, on which the CIA is built.
7
SPEAKER_00
Oh yeah, and then they always have had the option of ignoring the intelligence that they re getting, right?
7
SPEAKER_01
Well, let me ask you this question sort of to jump around.
7
SPEAKER_01
There s a lot of conspiracy theories in this current climate, I mean, throughout history, but now especially, and some of the conspiracy theories
7
SPEAKER_01
put a lot of power in the hands of the intelligence agencies like CIA, FSB, Mossad, MI6.
7
SPEAKER_01
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.
7
SPEAKER_01
Given your experience,
7
SPEAKER_01
with this kind of tension between competence and malevolence.
7
SPEAKER_01
Would you say there s some truth to those conspiracy theories?
7
SPEAKER_00
Not one way.
7
SPEAKER_00
I think there is collusion, there s collaboration, but I would think that, like for instance, some folks in the CIA and the FBI are being used by the ones that are really in power.
7
SPEAKER_00
Power is money, power is wealth.
7
SPEAKER_01
I know power is not- You can go both directions.
7
SPEAKER_01
You can acquire wealth first, which leads you to power, or you can acquire power first.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, power is also knowledge, I understand, and a position in society in the military or in intelligence, but I don t think it s a straight one way that all the intelligence agencies control the powerful people in their country.
7
SPEAKER_00
You see what s happening in Russia.
7
SPEAKER_00
I mean, Putin dominates his intelligence agencies, right?
7
SPEAKER_01
Well, so the question is which way the direction goes, but you re saying that there is, it s not one-way flow of power.
7
SPEAKER_00
I would think so.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I also believe it exists, but it s not as prevalent as, you know, not every conspiracy theory pans out, and most of them don t.
7
SPEAKER_00
They re just damn rumors, but that doesn t mean they don t exist.
7
SPEAKER_00
I guarantee you that they exist.
7
SPEAKER_00
There s collusion, there s people getting together, and not necessarily,
7
SPEAKER_00
preparing a specific action, but more sort of a plan to go forward and maintain the position or even, you know, strengthen the position that they already have.
7
SPEAKER_01
So KGB, but we can generalize, FSB, CIA, do you think a KGB agent would kill someone against international law if they were ordered to do so?
7
SPEAKER_01
So we talked about... They did.
7
SPEAKER_00
They did.
7
SPEAKER_00
And there s a famous case of one, I think it s Vasily Kuklov, who defected, he was a killer, he was a trained killer, and he had done assassinations in other countries.
7
SPEAKER_00
He was sent to West Germany to kill a defector, a KGB defector, and he decided not to do it.
7
SPEAKER_00
He talked to the guy and he said, I m supposed to kill you, I m not.
7
SPEAKER_00
And then he eventually wound up in the United States.
7
SPEAKER_00
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.
7
SPEAKER_00
And we, I found him and we looked at each other.
7
SPEAKER_00
So it was an active KGB agent looking at a man that he didn t know was the KGB defector, looking at each other.
7
SPEAKER_00
Neither one knew who the other one was.
7
SPEAKER_00
I found out later.
7
SPEAKER_00
but he was able to survive.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yes, and you know, there have been assassinations, not a lot, and you know that... That we know of.
7
SPEAKER_01
Good point.
7
SPEAKER_01
This is very difficult.
7
SPEAKER_01
The question is, how many lines are intelligence agencies willing to cross to attain...
7
SPEAKER_00
to achieve the goal?
7
SPEAKER_00
I think none of these agencies have the ultimate line.
7
SPEAKER_00
I think eventually the last line will be crossed if they believe it s necessary.
7
SPEAKER_01
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.
7
SPEAKER_01
Let me ask a few difficult questions, and we ll jump back to your time in America.
7
SPEAKER_01
Vladimir Putin.
7
SPEAKER_01
has been accused of ordering the poisoning and assassination of several people, including Alexander Litvinenko early on, all the way to Alexei Navalny.
7
SPEAKER_01
Do you think these accusations are grounded in truth?
7
SPEAKER_01
And we will return to a couple more questions, maybe, above Vladimir Putin s early days in the KGB, which would be interesting.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, there s a phrase that I like to say in response.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s called plausible deniability.
7
SPEAKER_00
I don t think Putin gave a direct command to say, do that.
7
SPEAKER_00
He would just maybe muse.
7
SPEAKER_00
It would be nice if something were to happen.
7
SPEAKER_00
And then somebody picks it up and does it.
7
SPEAKER_01
Is there, can you still man the case that Putin did not have direct or indirect involvement with this?
7
SPEAKER_01
Who would know?
7
SPEAKER_01
Who would know?
7
SPEAKER_01
Well, the international, the reputation, perhaps,
7
SPEAKER_01
perhaps catalyzed by Putin himself is that he s the kind of person that would directly or indirectly make those orders.
7
SPEAKER_01
Perhaps
7
SPEAKER_01
the case there is he s somebody to be feared, and thereby you want that narrative out there.
7
SPEAKER_00
But the act itself, the poisoning of Litvinenko, and oh, and then the assassination of the Bulgarian Markov with the umbrella, and they all directly trace back to Russian Soviet intelligence.
7
SPEAKER_00
And so that s enough to be feared, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
My answer that I gave you is an educated guess.
7
SPEAKER_00
I can t pretend to know this for sure, but.
7
SPEAKER_01
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.
7
SPEAKER_01
But if you actually keep an open mind, you have to understand what is the way that intelligence agencies function?
7
SPEAKER_01
Is it possible to the head of an intelligence agency not to make direct orders of that kind?
7
SPEAKER_00
Where there s a distributed- No, the head of the intelligence agency would most likely give the order.
7
SPEAKER_00
Even though it s compartmentalized.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, but not the head of state.
7
SPEAKER_00
Maybe not the head of state.
7
SPEAKER_01
Although 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.
7
SPEAKER_01
The head of the FSB was now in jail.
7
SPEAKER_01
There s interesting details, especially coming out recently around the war in Ukraine.
7
SPEAKER_01
So let me actually ask,
7
SPEAKER_01
about the war in Ukraine.
7
SPEAKER_01
What is your analysis of the war in Ukraine from 2014 to the full-on invasion of Ukraine by Russia?
8
SPEAKER_00
in 2022, in February 2022.
8
SPEAKER_00
There s many questions we could ask.
8
SPEAKER_00
One is, what are the sins of the governments involved?
8
SPEAKER_00
What are the sins of Russia, Ukraine,
8
SPEAKER_00
America, China, are those sins comparable?
8
SPEAKER_00
Who are the good guys and the bad guys?
8
SPEAKER_00
That was more than one question though.
8
SPEAKER_01
Let me just give you the basics about this.
8
SPEAKER_01
Savvy observers
8
SPEAKER_01
saw this coming, they were a very small minority, because Vladimir Putin was pretty open about what he told the world his mission was, was the reestablishment of a strong Russia, the reestablishment of something like the Russian Empire to unite all the Russian-speaking people under one country, and the world ignored him.
8
SPEAKER_01
I mean, he was open.
8
SPEAKER_01
It was at a conference in France, I believe, where he said this out in the open.
8
SPEAKER_01
And then what we had in the United States, we had wishful thinking.
8
SPEAKER_01
Obama had this reset with Russia.
8
SPEAKER_01
you know, we all get friendly.
8
SPEAKER_01
And then when Putin invaded Crimea, we did nothing.
8
SPEAKER_01
And it just escalated slowly but surely.
8
SPEAKER_01
It was pretty clear, and they said, it was I think two years ago, there was an essay published by Putin, whether he wrote it or not doesn t matter, but that was also out in public where he was, again, quite clear what he was gonna do.
8
SPEAKER_01
Now how do you do this?
8
SPEAKER_01
With force.
8
SPEAKER_01
And the sins committed by the American government was that we ignored it, we weren t engaged in wishful thinking, and we didn t stop it with sanctions before the shooting started.
8
SPEAKER_00
To push back, I don t think you re fully describing, you are describing the sins of the Russian government and Putin.
8
SPEAKER_00
I don t think you re fully describing the sins of the American government here, because not only did, you re describing the miscalculation.
8
SPEAKER_00
So not only did they not pressure correctly with sanctions and so on, and clearly respond to the actual statements in the essays and the words spoken.
8
SPEAKER_01
I know where you re going, but keep on speaking.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yes, but they also, at the same time, pressured
8
SPEAKER_00
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.
8
SPEAKER_00
And- And arming Ukraine.
8
SPEAKER_00
And, well, the military industrial complex is a machine that led us, and I think a lot of younger people
8
SPEAKER_00
I mean, when I came to this country, and this is the country I love, I lived through 9-11.
8
SPEAKER_00
I lived through the full rollercoaster of emotion.
8
SPEAKER_00
at that time, before that, and after, was a proud American.
8
SPEAKER_00
I went through the whole roller coaster of being sold, I would say, a lie about the reason to invade Iraq and even Afghanistan.
8
SPEAKER_00
And I got to live through understanding of this military industrial complex that leads to the
8
SPEAKER_00
expansion of empires, of the delusion that we have in the populace, in the government, that convinces us that we are the good guys, and somehow with military force, we can instill our values, instill happiness, the pursuit of happiness, that all men are created equal.
8
SPEAKER_00
these ideas into other lands, and we could do so with drones, and we could do so with weapons, and we could do so without significant cost from our own pockets.
8
SPEAKER_00
And so this idea, this machine, doesn t just apply to Afghanistan and Iraq, it doesn t just apply to Yemen and Syria, it doesn t just apply to China, it also applies to Ukraine, it also applies to Russia.
8
SPEAKER_01
Agreed, two thoughts if I may.
8
SPEAKER_01
First of all,
8
SPEAKER_01
One does not hear the term military-industrial complex in the public discourse these days.
8
SPEAKER_01
Eisenhower warned about it.
8
SPEAKER_01
Eisenhower was a capitalist.
8
SPEAKER_01
He was the President of the United States.
8
SPEAKER_01
So it exists, and it is very powerful.
8
SPEAKER_01
The more weapons you can sell, the more you have to replace them, or send over, you have to replace them, so yes.
8
SPEAKER_01
The other thing is, there s also a messianic streak that, you know,
8
SPEAKER_01
powers American foreign policy.
8
SPEAKER_01
We want to make the world just like us.
8
SPEAKER_01
Why don t they get it?
8
SPEAKER_01
Because they don t want to.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s almost like, it s not communism, but it s a very similar romantic idea that we can make the world and fashion the world the way we are.
8
SPEAKER_01
And that s the romantic side and the sort of honest side, but it doesn t work.
8
SPEAKER_01
It failed every time, right?
8
SPEAKER_01
Afghanistan is a royal mess and would never become a functioning democracy.
8
SPEAKER_01
I don t know if Ukraine can become a functioning democracy.
8
SPEAKER_00
Well, I don t know if American weapons can help Ukraine become a functional democracy.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, absolutely right.
8
SPEAKER_00
But there s a huge amount of interest in
8
SPEAKER_00
seeing the world in black and white and selling the story of the world as black and white, that Ukraine is the symbol of democracy in this Eastern European world, and Russia is the symbol of authoritarian dictatorship.
8
SPEAKER_00
And the story is not so simple as many indices show.
8
SPEAKER_00
Ukraine and Russia are the number one and the number two most corrupt countries in Europe.
8
SPEAKER_01
There are two peas in a pod.
8
SPEAKER_01
One is bigger and one is, in this case, the aggressor.
8
SPEAKER_01
Now, two peas, the aggressor is still ultimately responsible.
8
SPEAKER_00
And- The person that throws the first punch, now there s a lot of people going to disagree where the first punch came from.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, sure.
8
SPEAKER_00
But there is magnitude.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
8
SPEAKER_00
And the struggle,
8
SPEAKER_00
by Ukraine for its sovereignty stretches back to the beginning of the 20th century.
8
SPEAKER_00
It stretches back even further than that.
8
SPEAKER_00
But there s been the Ukrainian people are proud people.
8
SPEAKER_00
And they ve been, in many cases, tortured by those that sit in the Kremlin throughout the 20th century.
8
SPEAKER_01
The famine in the early 30s.
8
SPEAKER_00
And it s always, it s never the middle class and the upper class that suffer.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s always the lower classes, the peasants in that time.
8
SPEAKER_00
This history stretches back far, and this is yet another manifestation of that, and there s a lot of interest at play.
8
SPEAKER_00
China watches closely, Russia, America watches closely, and there s an extra caveat here that there s nuclear weapons at play as well.
8
SPEAKER_01
And this is the situation that is as dangerous as I have lived through in my entire life, I believe.
8
SPEAKER_01
And because it s not necessarily at the highest point of escalation, but it will be, in my view, a protracted crisis.
8
SPEAKER_01
And the longer that crisis lasts, the more of a chance there is of an accident.
8
SPEAKER_00
one rocket, there seems to be a strong incentive to do siege tactics to prolong this conflict over perhaps many years, which is terrifying to think about.
8
SPEAKER_00
And over that, a single rocket can lead to, given that there s leaders that might be losing their mind,
8
SPEAKER_00
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.
8
SPEAKER_00
So surely the West is not going to respond.
8
SPEAKER_00
What is the West going to do if Russia nukes Ukraine to send a message?
8
SPEAKER_00
I don t know if anyone knows the answer to that question, but it s a terrifying question.
8
SPEAKER_01
And I don t know the exact protocol that needs to be followed to launch a nuclear strike from NATO s end, because we have several countries in NATO that have nuclear weapons.
8
SPEAKER_01
So let s say for France to fire a nuke, does the United States have to agree?
8
SPEAKER_01
I don t know how that works.
8
SPEAKER_01
I don t know if,
8
SPEAKER_00
Anyone knows how that works.
8
SPEAKER_00
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.
8
SPEAKER_00
There is a bureaucracy, and within that giant bureaucracy, there s incompetence.
8
SPEAKER_00
We d like to think that there is like,
8
SPEAKER_00
really well organized for really important things.
8
SPEAKER_00
There s going to be the best of the best in the world that s going to execute on the correct decisions, both geopolitically, militarily, all that kind of stuff.
8
SPEAKER_00
And I ve seen enough to know that competence at any level of government, at any level of the military is not guaranteed.
8
SPEAKER_01
Let s go back to the law of hierarchy.
8
SPEAKER_01
The government is the biggest hierarchy there is.
8
SPEAKER_01
And so, invariably, politicians find their way to the top.
8
SPEAKER_01
And once you have politics dictating substantive decisions, they re gonna be weak or wrong.
8
SPEAKER_01
I don t know how this could work any other way.
8
SPEAKER_01
Right now we have some functional idiots in the central United States government.
8
SPEAKER_00
Well, let me, because you said that, I think elsewhere you said that Putin was not a good KGB agent, a mediocre one, but is an excellent politician.
8
SPEAKER_01
And a good organizer.
8
SPEAKER_01
He was known as a really, really good organizer.
8
SPEAKER_01
When Yeltsin hired him as prime minister, he cleaned up the mess because Yeltsin, under Yeltsin, Russia deteriorated tremendously and it became sort of a mix of an oligarchy and a criminal enterprise and chaotic.
8
SPEAKER_00
So he had skills that made him a good executive.
8
SPEAKER_00
Absolutely.
8
SPEAKER_00
Now let s go back to him as a KGB agent.
8
SPEAKER_00
He was a KGB agent, I mean, you know, according to him, once a KGB agent, always a KGB agent, but 16 years, let s say, something like this.
8
SPEAKER_00
What do you think about, from your experience, now you re maybe the same age as him, approximately the same age as him.
8
SPEAKER_00
He s a little younger.
8
SPEAKER_00
A little younger.
8
SPEAKER_00
what do you think about the KGB experience he had made him the man he is?
8
SPEAKER_00
What aspect of that, from your own experience, how much does that define you, who you are, how you think about the world, how you analyze the geopolitics of the world, how you analyze human nature?
8
SPEAKER_01
Now, I gotta tell you one thing, he had a different type of training than I did.
8
SPEAKER_01
Mine was one-on-one, and he went to school, so to speak, so.
8
SPEAKER_01
Classroom training.
8
SPEAKER_01
Right.
8
SPEAKER_01
But fundamentally, he was not a top agent.
8
SPEAKER_01
And this is very simple, there s only one thing you need to know.
8
SPEAKER_01
He knows German pretty well.
8
SPEAKER_01
So where was he deployed?
8
SPEAKER_01
in East Germany, not in West Germany, not in Switzerland, not in Austria, that s where they sent the best, right?
8
SPEAKER_01
One would think, generally.
8
SPEAKER_00
We re learning here.
8
SPEAKER_00
Right.
8
SPEAKER_00
So this is your classification of where they sent the best.
8
SPEAKER_00
People classify all kinds of stuff, like what is the best university in the world, what is the best football team in the world, and you start to get a sense, the good guys get sent, the best athletes get sent to, well, we can disagree on this, but what the football team is,
8
SPEAKER_00
But you have a sense, and you re saying that the best agents would have been sent.
8
SPEAKER_01
One would think so.
8
SPEAKER_01
Now, this is not a forcing argument, but I also have it from a word from the horse s mouth.
8
SPEAKER_01
Which horse?
8
SPEAKER_00
I mean, what kind of horse?
8
SPEAKER_00
What s the breed of the horse?
8
SPEAKER_01
Oleg Kalugin.
8
SPEAKER_01
You know who Oleg Kalugin is.
8
SPEAKER_01
He s still alive.
8
SPEAKER_01
He was, at one point,
8
SPEAKER_01
the head of counterintelligence for the first directorate, espionage, right?
8
SPEAKER_01
And Putin was in the first directorate and reported to Kalugin for a while.
8
SPEAKER_01
And Oleg told me to my face that Oleg was not an impressive agent trainee or agent.
8
SPEAKER_00
Vladimir Putin was not impressive.
8
SPEAKER_01
Not impressive at all.
8
SPEAKER_00
Now he s biased, given this current situation,
8
SPEAKER_01
Well, yeah, he could still make it up because he had this big ruckus when he was in parliament and called Putin a war criminal about the war in Serbia.
8
SPEAKER_00
Not only could he make it up, I wouldn t trust his analysis.
8
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I have to, when people, I ve been working very hard even before this war to try to understand objective analysis of all the parties involved.
8
SPEAKER_00
You have to really keep an open mind here to see clearly, to understand.
8
SPEAKER_00
if you are to try to help in some way.
8
SPEAKER_00
make a better world, in this case, stop this war, or have all the countries involved flourish, bring out the best of the people, remove the corruption and the greed and the destructive aspects of the governments and let the people flourish.
8
SPEAKER_00
For all of that, you have to put all the biases aside, all the political bickering, all the, you know,
8
SPEAKER_00
I don t know, all the biased analysis and there s a lot of propaganda that says that in fact
8
SPEAKER_00
Putin was a good agent.
8
SPEAKER_00
How else would he rise to the ranks, right?
8
SPEAKER_01
Because he was a good politician and he made a lot of good connections within the KGB.
8
SPEAKER_01
Allow me to say something.
8
SPEAKER_01
You just taught me a lesson.
8
SPEAKER_01
And the lesson I should have figured out myself because I keep on telling people that in the intelligence world,
8
SPEAKER_01
you never know the truth 100%.
8
SPEAKER_01
So when you said, oh, I could make that up, of course you could have.
8
SPEAKER_01
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.
8
SPEAKER_01
So I m gonna take the certainty of the statement that I made back because it s quite possible that you re right.
8
SPEAKER_00
Well, what I ve noticed about Vladimir Putin, and this is true about, for example, Donald Trump and all those kinds of
8
SPEAKER_00
deficit figures, that for some reason people s opinion on the details of those people are very sticky.
8
SPEAKER_00
Once you decide this is a bad guy, there s like a black hole and people are not able to think like one act at a time.
8
SPEAKER_00
You don t have to like, that doesn t somehow justify this, this somehow doesn t,
8
SPEAKER_00
remove all the evil things that are done, but you can analyze clearly each of the actions.
8
SPEAKER_00
And to me, it is interesting to see how did this man rise through the ranks.
8
SPEAKER_00
Now, you re saying that to be a KGB agent, there s a lot of skills involved.
8
SPEAKER_00
And perhaps raw
9
SPEAKER_01
technical skill of spycraft is perhaps not related to the skill of rising through the ranks.
9
SPEAKER_01
And you re saying as a politician, he was good at rising to the presidency.
9
SPEAKER_00
But lying and influencing, that is something that is significant, is a significant talent and ability that an agent must have.
9
SPEAKER_00
That helps you as a politician.
9
SPEAKER_01
Continuing the kind of thread of the role of KGB in defining the heart, soul, and mind of Vladimir Putin.
9
SPEAKER_01
Let me return to Yuri Bezmenov, who was a Soviet KGB agent that wrote a four-step framework for ideological subversion on a national scale, as practiced by the Soviet Union.
9
SPEAKER_01
So the four steps are demoralization, destabilization, crisis, and normalization.
9
SPEAKER_01
He had a lot of other kind of systematic ways of describing this kind of stuff.
9
SPEAKER_01
So can you speak to some of these ideas about the systematic, large-scale,
9
SPEAKER_01
ideological subversion goals of the KGB, is there truth to that kind of, those ideas?
9
SPEAKER_00
Yes, but I think I already sort of mentioned it, I think Besmanov was a fraud.
9
SPEAKER_00
And I have, again... Can you elaborate?
9
SPEAKER_00
Good arguments, let s put it this way.
9
SPEAKER_00
First of all, we know that the KGB was involved in active measures, which is, you know, you can call it fake news.
9
SPEAKER_00
Seeding fake news into countries that are your adversaries.
9
SPEAKER_00
And the Russians have been doing this lately by meddling in our election.
9
SPEAKER_00
and focusing on the left and the right fringe and influencing them to become more left and more right.
9
SPEAKER_00
And Vasily Mitrokhin has, in one of his books, he has a whole chapter about active measures.
9
SPEAKER_00
Okay, so what he has to say about the department, and I forgot what department it 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.
9
SPEAKER_00
Now, there were some successes, like one of the two most famous successes that I m aware of is that the canard that the AIDS virus was concocted in a CIA lab.
9
SPEAKER_00
A lot of people around the world believe that.
9
SPEAKER_00
And the other one was that J. Edgar Hoover was a secret cross-dresser.
9
SPEAKER_00
That is still known by a lot of Americans who are of a certain age that this was the truth.
9
SPEAKER_00
But Mitrokhin actually traces it back to a story that was placed in a sort of left wing but
9
SPEAKER_00
close to mainstream French magazine, and it was then taken up by larger newspapers and well-established papers.
9
SPEAKER_00
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.
9
SPEAKER_00
Mitrokhin seems to agree with me.
9
SPEAKER_00
I was trained, I would think, you know, I was one of the crown jewels of the agents.
9
SPEAKER_00
One would think that they used the best that they had to help me, how to become an American, and they didn t have a clue.
9
SPEAKER_00
So if you don t know how a country operates, how do you come up with this kind of a very detailed long-term plan that s also timed, two years this and one year that and all of that?
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so we should actually just clarify.
9
SPEAKER_01
So he has this whole idea that there s 15 to 20 years that are needed for demoralization, where you re
9
SPEAKER_01
You re basically infiltrating a country or people from a young age, manipulating their mind, you re destabilizing them, that s the second step that takes two to five years.
9
SPEAKER_01
You target the country s foreign relations, defense and economy, you create a crisis artificially, and then you normalize it as if it always was this way.
9
SPEAKER_01
So it s basically saying that the KGB is capable of, at scale, over many years,
9
SPEAKER_01
manipulate an entire population of people.
9
SPEAKER_01
And this is kind of, there s a lot of people that believe in conspiracy theories that are amenable to this kind of idea.
9
SPEAKER_01
Now, my own experience is that there is, in fact, just a giant amount of incompetence, and that this is something that s actually very difficult to pull off, because it s incredibly,
9
SPEAKER_01
incredibly difficult to achieve this kind of manipulation.
9
SPEAKER_01
I think it would require, first of all, not much bureaucracy, not much slowing down.
9
SPEAKER_01
You have to have incredible, in the modern world, digital systems that are able to do surveillance, manipulation.
9
SPEAKER_01
There has to be a strategy that is carried out in secrecy across a huge number of people effectively that also requires you hire the best people in the world,
9
SPEAKER_01
And I think it s difficult to execute on this kind of thing if you compartmentalize, because there has to be great collaboration.
9
SPEAKER_01
There has to be a great, where there s a unified vision.
9
SPEAKER_01
And coordination across multiple groups.
9
SPEAKER_01
There has to be, I mean, it s very difficult to do.
9
SPEAKER_01
Nevertheless, especially with technology, this becomes easier and easier.
9
SPEAKER_01
So the bar becomes lower and lower.
9
SPEAKER_01
To achieve mass surveillance becomes easier and easier and easier.
9
SPEAKER_01
Mass manipulation through platforms, because we re now digitally connected, you can now...
9
SPEAKER_01
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.
9
SPEAKER_01
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.
9
SPEAKER_00
Right.
9
SPEAKER_00
Now let me give you another argument why I think that Beslanov was a fraud.
9
SPEAKER_00
I mean I already have Mitrokhin on my side and my personal observation of the incompetence that I witnessed.
9
SPEAKER_00
I mean they really, really didn t know what they didn t know.
9
SPEAKER_00
So now Beslanov was KGB.
9
SPEAKER_00
Where was he stationed?
9
SPEAKER_00
In India.
9
SPEAKER_00
He was a low-level agent in India, and I told you the one thing that the KGB was really good at was compartmentalization.
9
SPEAKER_00
How does Beslanov in India find out about this massive plan that should have been super secret, right?
9
SPEAKER_00
He made it up, sorry.
9
SPEAKER_00
And you know why he got away with it?
9
SPEAKER_00
Because Americans eat that up.
9
SPEAKER_00
Because it s not our fault.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s like the damn Russians that are doing all that bad stuff.
9
SPEAKER_00
Speaking of the damn Russians doing all that bad stuff, you know about the Internet Research Agency.
9
SPEAKER_00
they have been doing quite a bit of damage.
9
SPEAKER_00
And I m now familiar with the world of enhanced artificial persons.
9
SPEAKER_00
These are the avatars on Facebook and Twitter and so forth that look like real people.
9
SPEAKER_00
And there are quite a few of them.
9
SPEAKER_00
And I have a good friend who operates in that realm.
9
SPEAKER_00
And he uses, for instance, facial recognition when he thinks that there s a suspicious character, say, on LinkedIn or on Facebook.
9
SPEAKER_00
And very often he finds out, yeah, that that person exists, but it s not the person who it pretends to be.
9
SPEAKER_01
So basically detecting the artificial, the enhanced artificial.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yes, but he can also make them.
9
SPEAKER_00
You think the United States.
9
SPEAKER_00
It goes hand in hand, yeah.
9
SPEAKER_00
United States doesn t do it, we do it too, but.
9
SPEAKER_01
Well, this is to push back against your pushback, right?
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, Beslanov might be a fraud, but is it possible, especially in the modern age, that there is these kind of large-scale systematic, wouldn t you,
9
SPEAKER_01
as a government.
9
SPEAKER_01
More so.
9
SPEAKER_01
That s investing billions of dollars into military equipment.
9
SPEAKER_01
In a world that s more and more clearly going to be defined by
9
SPEAKER_01
a cyber war versus a hot war, wouldn t you start to have serious meetings, large amounts of hires that are working at how do we manipulate the information flow?
9
SPEAKER_01
How do we manipulate the minds of the populace?
9
SPEAKER_01
How do we sell them a narrative?
9
SPEAKER_01
So even though he might have been making up a story because people eat it up,
9
SPEAKER_01
could speak to some deep truth that s actually different than the truth you came up in as a KGB agent.
9
SPEAKER_00
Oh, I agree with you 100%.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s much easier when, you know, all you need is an army of nerds who also know... No offense.
9
SPEAKER_00
No offense to the nerds.
9
SPEAKER_00
That s a term of endearment, I guess.
9
SPEAKER_00
I love nerds.
9
SPEAKER_00
I used to be one myself, so.
9
SPEAKER_00
But anyway.
9
SPEAKER_00
Once a nerd, always a nerd.
9
SPEAKER_00
So what I was gonna say here is.
9
SPEAKER_00
All you need is an army of nerds.
9
SPEAKER_00
But also experts in the culture of the target country, okay?
9
SPEAKER_00
And nowadays,
9
SPEAKER_00
The world is different.
9
SPEAKER_00
There s a whole lot more fluidity.
9
SPEAKER_00
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.
9
SPEAKER_00
They have a lot more knowledge of how we function than the KGB did.
9
SPEAKER_00
And it s vice versa.
9
SPEAKER_00
Not as many Americans in Russia, but we have some, but the Chinese and the Russians have an advantage here.
9
SPEAKER_01
Can I ask you a question based on your experience?
9
SPEAKER_01
So I have been talking to a lot of powerful people, and some of which have very close connections in this particular conflict, Ukraine and Russia, but in other places as well.
9
SPEAKER_01
I don t believe I ve ever been contacted by or interacted with an intelligence agency.
9
SPEAKER_01
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?
9
SPEAKER_01
So I think there s no reason for people to be secretive.
9
SPEAKER_01
But what I,
9
SPEAKER_01
Why is that?
9
SPEAKER_01
Would I know?
9
SPEAKER_01
Am I interesting at all?
9
SPEAKER_01
How are people determined if they re a person of interest or not?
9
SPEAKER_01
And I guess the question, I mean, some of it I ask in a bit of a humorous way, but also perhaps there s truth in some of the humor is would I know if I have ever interacted with a intelligence agency spy?
9
SPEAKER_00
Well, you don t know that you haven t been contacted, but certainly not, I think you never had a conversation that related to intelligence in any way, shape, or form, right?
9
SPEAKER_01
Right, like where a person, another person introduced themselves.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, introduced themselves or, you know, becomes, sort of wants to be your friend and then talks about these types of topics, right?
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, but there s people, because of who I m interacting with, I mean, even with Elon Musk, if you think about Elon Musk, there s a lot of people that are
9
SPEAKER_01
that are part of the conversations that happen, how do I know they re all trustworthy?
9
SPEAKER_01
They all present themselves as trustworthy.
9
SPEAKER_01
Now, again, I have nothing, so this is for the intelligence agencies, I have nothing to hide.
9
SPEAKER_01
I am the same person privately as publicly, well-intentioned, real, no controlled, no weird sexual stuff where you can manipulate me.
9
SPEAKER_00
What else?
9
SPEAKER_01
No drug use.
9
SPEAKER_01
No drug use, no skeletons in the closet, none of that kind of stuff.
9
SPEAKER_01
But I don t know, just even having these conversations, I tend to trust people as a default.
9
SPEAKER_01
Me too.
9
SPEAKER_01
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,
9
SPEAKER_01
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.
9
SPEAKER_01
And so you have to be careful of thinking who to trust.
9
SPEAKER_01
When the person approaches you with a smile and asks you a question,
9
SPEAKER_01
My natural inclination is that person is a cool person, I ll answer the question, I ll become a friend.
9
SPEAKER_01
But it becomes difficult when you realize that there s things like intelligence agencies with thousands of employees, there s people that are doing major military actions that involve tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of soldiers.
9
SPEAKER_01
This is serious stuff.
9
SPEAKER_01
And so how do you know how to operate in this world?
9
SPEAKER_00
The folks that you re interacting with,
9
SPEAKER_00
have a responsibility not to tell you what they shouldn t tell you, right?
9
SPEAKER_00
And most of them probably won t.
9
SPEAKER_00
And I m guessing occasionally they will say, well, I can t go there, right?
9
SPEAKER_00
So what you are aware of is sort of public.
9
SPEAKER_00
And what you re doing is you
9
SPEAKER_00
You re collecting it and you re editing it to some extent.
9
SPEAKER_00
You re not changing the verbiage.
9
SPEAKER_00
You just repeat what they say.
9
SPEAKER_00
So from that angle, you re not privy to any real secrets.
9
SPEAKER_00
What you have possibly that could be of use is you learn to get to know the person.
9
SPEAKER_00
So I m thinking there s a good possibility if you get the interviews in the East that somebody may actually approach you and ask you what s your opinion.
9
SPEAKER_01
I just hope they approach me and introduce themselves properly.
9
SPEAKER_01
I just, there s a kind of,
9
SPEAKER_01
I mean, would you know, like how many Russian spies are there in the United States?
9
SPEAKER_01
How many American spies are there in Russia?
9
SPEAKER_01
Do you have a sense?
9
SPEAKER_01
Is it just like with the GRU?
9
SPEAKER_01
Is it possible there s like tens of thousands or like thousands?
9
SPEAKER_00
Not thousands like I used to operate.
9
SPEAKER_00
We are too hard to train and we weren t that successful to begin with.
9
SPEAKER_00
But particularly Russians and Chinese, you know, both governments know who is going abroad.
9
SPEAKER_00
And I guarantee you there s a lot of amateur spies.
9
SPEAKER_00
They re being asked, you know, help us out, you know, do something for the motherland.
9
SPEAKER_00
Crowd-sourced spying.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, sort of.
9
SPEAKER_00
Not serious training, but yeah.
9
SPEAKER_00
And yeah, for instance, this lady, I forgot her first name, Butina, she was a rank amateur.
9
SPEAKER_00
She used social media to communicate with Moscow.
9
SPEAKER_00
So she had no training, but she was reasonably successful.
9
SPEAKER_00
I mean, she got, and,
10
SPEAKER_01
The difference between let s say the current Russian intelligence and the KGB, Vladimir Putin and his henchmen are okay with people being caught.
10
SPEAKER_01
Because, and every time I go and talk and give a talk someplace, I m always asked this question, how many Russian spies do you think we have here?
10
SPEAKER_01
Because it scares the people, right?
10
SPEAKER_01
And Putin likes to scare people.
10
SPEAKER_01
The KGB was very solicitous of the agents.
10
SPEAKER_01
They didn t want anyone of them caught.
10
SPEAKER_01
So that s a big difference.
10
SPEAKER_00
So for the FSB, getting caught sends a strong signal to the world that there s agents everywhere.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, there could be many more.
10
SPEAKER_01
And there probably are.
10
SPEAKER_01
Because the world, again, there s a whole lot more travel going on, a whole lot more interaction, studying abroad, doing business, and there will be attempts at espionage probably every minute in this country.
10
SPEAKER_01
That doesn t mean they will be successful, no.
10
SPEAKER_01
But there is a cottage industry now that is doing quite well that teaches companies how to fortify themselves against industrial espionage or also foreign actors spying.
10
SPEAKER_01
It s all over the place.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, as it becomes easier and easier with digital, with cyber, that becomes a serious, very serious threat.
10
SPEAKER_01
We might wind up in a world where nobody knows anymore what s up and what s down.
10
SPEAKER_00
If I was to have a conversation with Vladimir Putin and or Volodymyr Zelensky, is there something you would ask about the time in the KGB, the time in its past?
10
SPEAKER_00
We are, all of us, men and women are,
10
SPEAKER_00
creations of the experiences we have throughout life, early on in life and through the formative experiences, successes and failures.
10
SPEAKER_01
So... Yeah, you just said the key words.
10
SPEAKER_01
I would ask, without giving away anything, just being high level, your biggest success and your biggest failure?
10
SPEAKER_00
as a politician or as a KGB agent?
10
SPEAKER_01
You ll be talking in the realm of KGB.
10
SPEAKER_01
When the wall came down, and he was in an office, a KGB office in the city of Dresden, and
10
SPEAKER_01
East Germans were besieging Stasi offices, and they also dropped by the KGB office, and it was pretty threatening.
10
SPEAKER_01
It looked like they would actually storm the office and get, you know, the documents and stuff like that.
10
SPEAKER_01
And initially, the first demonstration was
10
SPEAKER_01
was told that if they come any closer, weapons would be used.
10
SPEAKER_01
So they disappeared and then they came back and I don t know, somebody in that office called Berlin and said, what are we gonna do?
10
SPEAKER_01
Are we allowed to use force?
10
SPEAKER_01
And the answer came back that Gorbachev said, absolutely not.
10
SPEAKER_01
And so this is where Putin, all of a sudden, he was at one point a member of the greatest, the most powerful,
10
SPEAKER_01
intelligence organization in the world and all of a sudden he was powerless and he had to watch how, you know, this was a defeat, big one.
10
SPEAKER_00
And... It s supposedly a powerful intelligence agency cowering.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_00
Sort of crawling back into a position of weakness.
10
SPEAKER_01
And he probably promised himself never again, Russia needs to be great again.
10
SPEAKER_00
the KGB, FSB, Russia, the Russian empire needs to rise again.
10
SPEAKER_00
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 like never again.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and I believe that he has a strong conviction that, I don t know if he s religious, he carries a cross now, but I don t know what that means, but somehow it s the destiny of the Russian nation to be great.
10
SPEAKER_01
And that is sort of, whether it s determined by God or some higher power, that is very important for him.
10
SPEAKER_00
Of course, that nationalist idea is one that Americans share as well.
10
SPEAKER_00
It could help a nation flourish.
10
SPEAKER_00
So by itself is not necessarily a bad thing.
10
SPEAKER_00
It s how it manifests itself is the question.
10
SPEAKER_01
One other thing, if I were to get a chat with the Ukrainian president, I would ask him how many lives, what is the equation between giving up some land and how many lives are worth this land?
10
SPEAKER_00
And it s a good way to phrase the question.
10
SPEAKER_00
Of course, that question gets you killed in Ukraine.
10
SPEAKER_00
But because there s another part of that equation, which is it s not just land versus lives.
10
SPEAKER_00
It s the sovereignty, the knowledge that you re free.
10
SPEAKER_00
and you re self-determined.
10
SPEAKER_00
And it s not about fighting for the particular land, it s saying we are messed up, corrupt, we have problems, it s a messy world.
10
SPEAKER_00
but it s our world.
10
SPEAKER_00
I think Stephen Crane has a poem about like a man eating his own heart and he was asked, how does it taste?
10
SPEAKER_00
And he said, it s bitter, but I like it because it is bitter and because it is my heart.
10
SPEAKER_00
And that there s a sense of like, I want, this is not just about land, this is our nation.
10
SPEAKER_00
the same love of nation that Putin has for Russia, the greater Russia, this vision of this great empire, I believe Ukraine does as well.
10
SPEAKER_00
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.
10
SPEAKER_00
The Polish people are proud people.
10
SPEAKER_00
You can just see.
10
SPEAKER_00
in World War II, the people who said, fuck you.
10
SPEAKER_00
You re not having this, we will die to the last man.
10
SPEAKER_00
There s different cultures that kind of really hold their ground, and Ukrainian people are that.
10
SPEAKER_01
You know, I have to admit, in that respect, I m a bit of a coward.
10
SPEAKER_01
I could not do what Zelensky has been doing.
10
SPEAKER_01
I would sort of
10
SPEAKER_01
try to find a way to carve out something that I can live with.
10
SPEAKER_01
However, if that force, that evil force, gets to my family.
10
SPEAKER_00
Right.
10
SPEAKER_01
There s lines.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
10
SPEAKER_00
That s right.
10
SPEAKER_00
You become the world s bravest man if somebody crosses that line.
10
SPEAKER_00
Oh yeah.
10
SPEAKER_00
You mentioned something about you ve not been to Moscow back and that it might not be safe for you to travel there.
10
SPEAKER_00
Can you speak to the nature of that?
10
SPEAKER_00
As somebody that successfully got out of the KGB, how are you still alive?
10
SPEAKER_01
a number of reasons.
10
SPEAKER_01
First of all, when my story became public, that was six years ago, I was pretty old, right?
10
SPEAKER_01
And so the folks that may have a personal interest or may have had a personal interest in doing me harm, most of them don t live anymore, all right?
10
SPEAKER_01
That s number one.
10
SPEAKER_01
Number two, I did not
10
SPEAKER_01
I was a hired hand, a German.
10
SPEAKER_01
I did not betray the motherland.
10
SPEAKER_01
That s a crime that is punished by death.
10
SPEAKER_01
You betray the motherland.
10
SPEAKER_01
And the other thing is,
10
SPEAKER_01
If there is a—you know that these kinds of operations to assassination in another country are very difficult to plan and implement, and if there s a list of people that they don t like, I may not be at the very top.
10
SPEAKER_01
Having said that, you know,
10
SPEAKER_01
If I wind up, say, in Moscow or even in countries like Turkey where there s a lot of lawlessness, you know, accidents can easily be arranged and that s just sending another message.
10
SPEAKER_01
You know, it s like, you know, we can do a lot of things.
10
SPEAKER_00
Powerful.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
10
SPEAKER_00
Do you think it s safe for me to travel in Russia and Ukraine?
10
SPEAKER_01
I think you know very well how to communicate in both countries.
10
SPEAKER_01
You ve shown this in this interaction that you have a lot of empathy for the people that you ll be talking with.
10
SPEAKER_01
And empathy means good understanding where they re coming from.
10
SPEAKER_01
And that there are lines that you can t cross.
10
SPEAKER_01
Like the question that I was gonna ask Zelensky, who I m not gonna ask, good for you.
10
SPEAKER_00
Isn t that the funny thing about this world?
10
SPEAKER_00
There s lines, there s lines everywhere.
10
SPEAKER_00
Even in love, even in personal relationships, there s lines you should not cross.
10
SPEAKER_00
How did you finally get caught?
10
SPEAKER_01
I resigned in 1988.
10
SPEAKER_00
Let s actually talk about that.
10
SPEAKER_00
You resigned, there s warning signs, there s yet another choice, yet another crossroads.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yes, okay.
10
SPEAKER_00
What was the calculation, what was the choice to be made?
10
SPEAKER_01
to give a little background.
10
SPEAKER_01
It was 1988, and I thought my time in the US would soon end, because I thought 10 to 12 years, it was already past 10 years.
10
SPEAKER_01
There was no indication that they indicated, that they said, you re done.
10
SPEAKER_01
But in December of 1988, I got this one thing that I never wanted to see.
10
SPEAKER_01
So we had a system of signals that either one of those diplomat agents could set at a spot that I pass by every day.
10
SPEAKER_01
Or I could set where they would pass by, like on their way from where they live to the United Nations, for instance, who would just drive.
10
SPEAKER_01
So, and mine was, the signal spot for me was on a support beam for the elevated atrium in Queens.
10
SPEAKER_01
And it was,
10
SPEAKER_01
morning in December that I walked by there and routinely look at it and I never expected anything.
10
SPEAKER_01
And there was this red dot, it was about the size of my fist with a red paint.
10
SPEAKER_01
And since you have done it already, I think I can curse in this moment because it s the only way I can really indicate how I felt.
10
SPEAKER_01
Oh shit, because that was the danger signal.
10
SPEAKER_01
It was like, you are in severe danger and you need to get out of the country as soon as possible.
10
SPEAKER_01
There was a protocol that I was supposed to follow.
10
SPEAKER_01
I wasn t even supposed to go home.
10
SPEAKER_01
I just was supposed to get my reserve documents that I had hidden in a park in the Bronx and make a beeline to the Canadian border.
10
SPEAKER_01
I wasn t ready.
10
SPEAKER_01
So I just ignored this thing.
10
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I couldn t ignore it, but I went on to work.
10
SPEAKER_01
Got on the A train, went to work, and then went to my cubicle and stared at the computer screen all day because I couldn t think.
10
SPEAKER_01
I could think only about what to do, what to do, what to do.
10
SPEAKER_01
The reason for this indecisiveness was that I was a father at the time.
10
SPEAKER_01
My little girl by the name of Chelsea was 18 months old and I was there when she was born.
10
SPEAKER_01
I took her to her dorm.
10
SPEAKER_01
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.
10
SPEAKER_01
That s when love came back, and it was completely unexpected.
10
SPEAKER_01
And there s a lot of fathers who understand, particularly fathers of girls who understand what happened there.
10
SPEAKER_01
And I still thought I need to go back because there was probably some danger, but I hadn t figured out how to take care of the girl.
10
SPEAKER_01
leave her, but maybe she needs to have a good life and grow up and have a chance.
10
SPEAKER_01
And her mother, she was from South America, she had a fourth grade education.
10
SPEAKER_01
That would have not worked very well.
10
SPEAKER_01
So I
10
SPEAKER_01
played for time.
10
SPEAKER_01
I obviously, I could be sick.
10
SPEAKER_01
I couldn t, you know, I could be in a hospital.
10
SPEAKER_01
There was a precedent where I was sick, where I couldn t communicate for about three weeks.
10
SPEAKER_01
So I just did nothing.
10
SPEAKER_01
That was on a Monday.
10
SPEAKER_01
On a Thursday was my regular shortwave transmission.
10
SPEAKER_01
I listened and they explained a little in a few sentences.
10
SPEAKER_01
We have reason to believe that the FBI is on your case.
10
SPEAKER_01
You need to execute the emergency procedure.
10
SPEAKER_01
Come home right away.
10
SPEAKER_01
I still had some time because the radio could be broken or the transmission was bad or I still could be in a hospital, right?
10
SPEAKER_01
So I gave myself some more time and then...
10
SPEAKER_01
something happened where they forced my hand.
10
SPEAKER_01
It s the only time that a Soviet agent was anywhere near me on the territory of the United States.
10
SPEAKER_01
So I m waiting for the A-train on a
10
SPEAKER_01
dark morning still in Queens and there s this man, this short man in a black trench coat comes up to me from my right and he whispers into my ears,
10
SPEAKER_01
or else you re dead.
10
SPEAKER_01
I can t imitate the Russian accent.
10
SPEAKER_01
It was a Russian accent.
10
SPEAKER_01
And it was a pretty strong accent.
10
SPEAKER_01
The you re dead phrase can have two meanings.
10
SPEAKER_01
An American would have said,
10
SPEAKER_01
or else you re busted, or else you get arrested, or else you re dead is very strong.
10
SPEAKER_01
So now you have to take it seriously to some degree because I knew that they had a history of assassinating, or at least trying to assassinate defectors.
10
SPEAKER_01
So that obviously raised the stakes a little bit, but I just talked myself into believing this was just bad phrasing.
10
SPEAKER_01
But at this point, I knew and they knew that we both knew, right?
10
SPEAKER_01
So there was no more guessing.
10
SPEAKER_01
He found me, he talked to me, I know.
10
SPEAKER_01
So now I had to act.
10
SPEAKER_01
So in the next radiogram, I was asked to execute a debt drop operation where they would give me money and a passport.
10
SPEAKER_01
And that was in a park on Staten Island.
11
SPEAKER_01
It was a location that I found and I described.
11
SPEAKER_01
And I was always praised for my ability to describe spots that are easy to find.
11
SPEAKER_01
So that was a given.
11
SPEAKER_01
And the only thing that was different for this operation, they scheduled it for the dark.
11
SPEAKER_01
All right, but it was still no problem because it was in a park and a couple of about 100 yards in by next to a fallen tree.
11
SPEAKER_01
It would be hard to miss.
11
SPEAKER_01
So I go to Staten Island and I read the signal that said I put the container in the drop.
11
SPEAKER_01
That was the protocol.
11
SPEAKER_01
There s a signal that the person who hands over something puts at a spot not too far from the spot itself.
11
SPEAKER_01
That means I would go in and just pick it up.
11
SPEAKER_01
The reason I actually went to pick up this container because there was money in it.
11
SPEAKER_01
So I didn t have to make a decision yet, okay?
11
SPEAKER_01
I could throw away the passport.
11
SPEAKER_01
It was like I was still trying to figure out what to do, what to do, what to do.
11
SPEAKER_01
So I get to the spot, I get to the tree, and I had a flashlight with me.
11
SPEAKER_01
The park, there was no way in the park.
11
SPEAKER_01
Even during the day, this park was not, it was more almost like a little forest.
11
SPEAKER_01
I don t see the container.
11
SPEAKER_01
It was supposed to be a crushed oil can, pretty sizable, hard to miss.
11
SPEAKER_01
And I do a double take, and I look again, and I look around, I look around a little more, see if they misplaced it.
11
SPEAKER_01
I can t find it.
11
SPEAKER_01
It s the only one that one of those operations failed.
11
SPEAKER_01
And that
11
SPEAKER_01
just doesn t make a lot of sense.
11
SPEAKER_01
So when as I m walking away from this, like sort of numb emotionally, I said to myself, I m staying.
11
SPEAKER_00
That decision.
11
SPEAKER_00
Some kind of signal, some kind of muse just spoke to you.
11
SPEAKER_01
That decision was made for me.
11
SPEAKER_01
Now you know that I m a Christian now and I think that was like, God told me this.
11
SPEAKER_01
You know.
11
SPEAKER_01
But it was certain there.
11
SPEAKER_00
It was right there.
11
SPEAKER_00
It was certain.
11
SPEAKER_00
That was it.
11
SPEAKER_01
That was it.
11
SPEAKER_01
That was it.
11
SPEAKER_01
And so what I did to, well, first of all, divine intervention helped me to find a good explanation.
11
SPEAKER_01
I sent them my last letter with secret writing.
11
SPEAKER_01
I communicated to them.
11
SPEAKER_01
I said, I wish I could come, but I can t because I have contracted HIV AIDS.
11
SPEAKER_01
that was the best lie ever, because nobody wanted to have AIDS in their country.
11
SPEAKER_01
Those days it was a death sentence, right?
11
SPEAKER_01
And I knew, we had conversations when I was back in Moscow, how they were snickering about what s going on in the United States, you know, that depraved culture in New Zealand.
11
SPEAKER_01
They re killing each other.
11
SPEAKER_01
And the depraved culture took over your being and how you re saying.
11
SPEAKER_01
Yes, and I was convincing enough, I even traced it back to a girlfriend I had once that I actually reported on that she, you know, I interacted with this lady who had a boyfriend at one point who was a drug addict and she was infected and she infected me.
11
SPEAKER_01
So.
11
SPEAKER_01
They believed it, they sent, and I asked them to give my dollar savings to my German family.
11
SPEAKER_01
They gave them some, but they told my family that I already passed away, that I m dead.
11
SPEAKER_01
They believed it, 100%.
11
SPEAKER_01
And I guess the agent who took the money took half of it for himself.
11
SPEAKER_01
So that was it, and the next three months I made sure that I wasn t reliably...
11
SPEAKER_01
the same spot in the same time frame.
11
SPEAKER_01
So I went to work in different paths at different times just to, you know, just as a safety measure, so to speak, and not huge, but, you know, it kept me, allowed me to keep my sanity.
11
SPEAKER_01
And obviously after I sent the letter, I threw the shortwave radio in the Hudson River, destroyed the one-time pads that I still had, so I was now ready to... For a new life.
11
SPEAKER_01
For a new life and live out my life as an American, undiscovered, but, you know, starting to work on my version of the American dream.
11
SPEAKER_01
And the first action was, I was telling my wife, the mother of this child, you know, she always wanted to have a house.
11
SPEAKER_01
And I said, you know what, we should buy a house.
11
SPEAKER_01
And a year later, we moved into the suburbs, and then I said, we should have another child, and we had another child.
11
SPEAKER_01
And I had a career, I did pretty well.
11
SPEAKER_01
I moved a couple of times, wound up in a McMansion.
11
SPEAKER_01
But before that, my second house was actually in Pennsylvania, in rural Pennsylvania.
11
SPEAKER_01
And this is where I was discovered by the FBI.
11
SPEAKER_01
And how did they know about me?
11
SPEAKER_01
If it hadn t been for this defector, Vasily Mitrokhin, who was an archivist in the KGB archives,
11
SPEAKER_01
He was actually pretty high level.
11
SPEAKER_01
He was in charge of the relocation of the archive from Lubyanka to Yasenovo.
11
SPEAKER_01
And he really hated, he had reason to believe he hated the Soviet system.
11
SPEAKER_01
I think I remember that his son was quite ill and he could have gotten treatment in England and he was not allowed to travel to England with his son.
11
SPEAKER_01
So his hatred, he tried to figure out what to do and how to do damage to that system.
11
SPEAKER_01
So he started copying notes, little slips of paper, handwritten, that he smuggled out in his underwear and his socks over the years.
11
SPEAKER_01
And then he transcribed them with a typewriter and then put the pieces of paper into some kind of a container and buried this in his stature.
11
SPEAKER_01
It was, I believe, in 1992 when he showed up.
11
SPEAKER_01
That was already, the Soviet Union was gone.
11
SPEAKER_01
So he showed up at the U.S.
11
SPEAKER_01
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.
11
SPEAKER_01
That s a career-limiting move, right?
11
SPEAKER_01
Because Vasily Mitrokhin then made his way to one of the Baltic republics and contacted MI6.
11
SPEAKER_01
And they said, come on in, old fellow.
11
SPEAKER_01
We ll have a cup of tea.
11
SPEAKER_01
And so they managed to get this stuff out of the dacha and get it to England.
11
SPEAKER_01
And eventually the MI6 shared it with the FBI.
11
SPEAKER_01
And there wasn t a whole lot of information about me.
11
SPEAKER_01
It was very, very little.
11
SPEAKER_01
It was like there s a person by the name of Jack Barsky who is an illegal operating in the Northeast of the United States.
11
SPEAKER_01
Now, if it was Jim Miller, they wouldn t have found me.
11
SPEAKER_01
Jack Barsky was easy to find.
11
SPEAKER_01
So they checked social security and Jack Barsky had gotten his social security card at the age of 33.
11
SPEAKER_01
Bingo, okay.
11
SPEAKER_01
All they knew, though, was that I wasn t illegal, that I was still living there.
11
SPEAKER_01
They didn t know whether I was active, inactive.
11
SPEAKER_01
And the other thing that they knew, that I was a really, really well-trained agent, because I was still there, right?
11
SPEAKER_01
So they took, I think, almost three years to investigate me, watch me from a distance, because if I was still active, I would have found out that somebody s
11
SPEAKER_01
investigating here.
11
SPEAKER_00
So you started being less and less active in terms of... Oh, I stopped completely.
11
SPEAKER_00
What I mean is... Oh, surveillance detection.
11
SPEAKER_00
Yes, surveillance detection.
11
SPEAKER_00
After three months, I stopped altogether.
11
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, good point.
11
SPEAKER_00
And FBI is still very careful.
11
SPEAKER_01
They were very careful.
11
SPEAKER_01
They pretty much watched me.
11
SPEAKER_01
And at one point, I had a house in the country with one neighbor.
11
SPEAKER_01
At one point, that house was for sale, so the FBI bought it.
11
SPEAKER_01
and they put a couple of agents there and just didn t keep a closer eye on me.
11
SPEAKER_01
There was no indication that I was still active, but they were still cautious.
11
SPEAKER_01
But at one point, they were able to plant a bug in my kitchen, a listening device.
11
SPEAKER_01
And I
11
SPEAKER_01
My wife and I didn t get along very well.
11
SPEAKER_01
There was a lot of friction and she was constantly complaining about things and I got sick and tired of it.
11
SPEAKER_01
And one day we had an argument in the kitchen and I chose to deploy the nuclear option.
11
SPEAKER_01
And that is telling her what I sacrificed to be with her, so she would understand that I am there on her side.
11
SPEAKER_01
I m supporting her.
11
SPEAKER_01
If something doesn t quite fit, it is not because I don t love the both of them, Chelsea and Penelope.
11
SPEAKER_01
So when I said that, the listening device was active, so the FBI was hearing my confession.
11
SPEAKER_01
I was once a KGB agent, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and I quit and stayed here because of you and Chelsea.
11
SPEAKER_01
That also made it clear to the FBI that I wasn t active anymore.
11
SPEAKER_01
They had both of that.
11
SPEAKER_01
So now they knew an attempt to turn me would have been useless because you turn somebody who s active.
11
SPEAKER_01
But they figured there was enough reason to treat me nicely because they figured that I had a lot of information that
11
SPEAKER_01
was as aged as it was, but it was still important for the FBI to get to know.
11
SPEAKER_01
And so one day, it was a Friday evening, I m driving back home from the office and I m being stopped by a state police.
11
SPEAKER_01
As I m going through the toll, it s a bridge over the Hudson and they had to pay a toll.
11
SPEAKER_01
And he waved me, he got me right where I stopped.
11
SPEAKER_01
And he said, could you please move over here?
11
SPEAKER_01
It s a routine traffic stop.
11
SPEAKER_01
I thought nothing of it.
11
SPEAKER_01
I had forgotten at that point that I once was a spy.
11
SPEAKER_01
It was like, this was gone.
11
SPEAKER_01
And then he said, could you please step out of the car?
11
SPEAKER_01
That should have aroused my suspicion.
11
SPEAKER_01
That s unusual, right?
11
SPEAKER_01
Routine traffic stop.
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I did it, no problem.
11
SPEAKER_01
And then again, somebody came from the right, came into my view, and he flipped his ID and he said, FBI, we would like to have a talk with you.
11
SPEAKER_01
You know, this is my now friend Joe Riley, who actually is the, he s the godfather of Trinity, my last child.
11
SPEAKER_01
But anyway, he told me later that when I heard that phrase, all the blood left my face, I became totally white.
11
SPEAKER_01
But I recovered very quickly, and he said it himself.
11
SPEAKER_01
They took me to a vehicle, and there was another agent in the vehicle, and he had a gun strapped to his ankle, so it was pretty real.
11
SPEAKER_01
First question I had, so am I under arrest?
11
SPEAKER_01
And the answer was no.
11
SPEAKER_01
And then my instinct kicked in and my ability to operate very well under high pressure situations and I asked him, so what took you so long?
11
SPEAKER_01
You know, the intent of that was to
11
SPEAKER_01
to defuse any kind of tension.
11
SPEAKER_01
And I saw a smile.
11
SPEAKER_01
Instant friends.
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I knew that I had to make them like me.
11
SPEAKER_01
And I m...
11
SPEAKER_01
I think by now I know I m a pretty likable person.
11
SPEAKER_01
I would say so.
11
SPEAKER_01
When they took me to a motel, which they had rented, there was two wings at a right angle.
11
SPEAKER_01
They bought all the rooms in one wing, and they had a guard at each end.
11
SPEAKER_01
that wing, and they took me in the middle.
11
SPEAKER_01
And there were some props there, some binders with labels, and I immediately thought, this is pretty silly, because what I noticed is that the labels all referred back to my early years.
11
SPEAKER_01
I knew that they didn t know much else.
11
SPEAKER_01
So I told Joe that afterwards, and that was not a great idea, but anyway.
11
SPEAKER_01
But I volunteered, I made the following statement before we even started the interview.
11
SPEAKER_01
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 completely 100% cooperative, and this is my intent to do exactly that.
11
SPEAKER_01
All right, so we spent about two hours in the interview.
11
SPEAKER_01
They allowed me to call my wife, tell her that I m going to be late.
11
SPEAKER_01
That indicated to me already that they would let me go.
11
SPEAKER_01
And after two hours, they let me go.
11
SPEAKER_01
But they had the area covered.
11
SPEAKER_01
with a whole bunch of people, and the head of that team talked to me and he said, if you think of running, we got every intersection in this area covered, you can t.
11
SPEAKER_01
I didn t say anything, but I had no thought of running.
11
SPEAKER_01
So, and that was the beginning of another phase of my life where I was cooperating with the FBI for quite a while and living still undercover for several years until I had real good documentation and became an American citizen seven years ago.
11
SPEAKER_00
Today s seven years ago, so it was recently.
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, quite recent.
11
SPEAKER_01
The bureaucracy took a long time to figure out how to make me real and also not put me in these witness protection program, you know, to keep my name and then just, you know, make everything like official.
11
SPEAKER_01
So for instance, I had to change my birth year.
11
SPEAKER_01
simply because if I – Jack Barsky was born in 1944.
11
SPEAKER_01
If I kept 1944, the FBI would have helped me commit a crime because I would have collected social security four years sooner.
11
SPEAKER_01
So anyway, it took quite a while and when I finally got the call from the office of Homeland Security, the lady says, this is agent so-and-so from Homeland Security, can you come to the office tomorrow?
11
SPEAKER_01
And I said, let me look at my calendar.
11
SPEAKER_01
And then I said, wait a minute, what am I talking about?
11
SPEAKER_01
What time do you want me to be there?
11
SPEAKER_01
Because I had waited for that moment for a long time.
12
SPEAKER_00
I was sworn in right then and there.
12
SPEAKER_00
It was a good feeling to walk out of there because I had a country again.
12
SPEAKER_00
And I love this country just as much as you said you love it, with all its warts and its problems that we re going through right now.
12
SPEAKER_00
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.
12
SPEAKER_00
And then I was discovered through a number of dots that were unlikely to be connected.
12
SPEAKER_00
It had to do with a relative, with a half-brother of my wife who lives in Germany, was taken to Germany by his mother, who came to visit somebody, not us, but that somebody that he came to visit lived 50 miles from our house.
12
SPEAKER_00
And that my wife and this half-brother never met in person before.
12
SPEAKER_00
They knew about each other through social media.
12
SPEAKER_00
And when he found out my background, he was a conductor of the German railroad at the time.
12
SPEAKER_00
He said, oh, this is a big story.
12
SPEAKER_00
That s gonna be big, big, big.
12
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
12
SPEAKER_00
Well, he happened to know this one person who happened to know one of the star reporters of Der Spiegel.
12
SPEAKER_00
And after she did some research and determined that I was real, she was on my case.
12
SPEAKER_00
And she happened to know Steve Kroft, the guy from 60 Minutes.
12
SPEAKER_00
You see all these connections?
12
SPEAKER_00
I had nothing to do with it.
12
SPEAKER_00
That s how life works.
12
SPEAKER_00
Dots get connected somehow, sometimes.
12
SPEAKER_01
Most of us it doesn t.
12
SPEAKER_00
Stuff happens.
12
SPEAKER_00
You get lucky.
12
SPEAKER_00
You don t know what s happening.
12
SPEAKER_01
You ve gotten lucky a few times in your life.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I think I must be part Irish too.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so it s been an interesting ride.
12
SPEAKER_00
I m just still shaking my head about all the stuff that happened.
12
SPEAKER_01
It s been a fun one.
12
SPEAKER_01
You wrote, because I m allowed to leave behind a documented legacy of my unusual life, I m praying that the legacy will be described by a single word, love.
12
SPEAKER_01
So, let us return to the thing we started the conversation with, which is love.
12
SPEAKER_01
What role does love play in this?
12
SPEAKER_01
human condition in your life and in our life here together.
12
SPEAKER_00
I give you an answer by telling you what happened one day.
12
SPEAKER_00
I gave a presentation at Microsoft headquarters.
12
SPEAKER_00
That s a strange beginning of a love story, but yes.
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No, that s not a love story.
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And so there s this beautiful young lady sitting in the back, and she s paying a lot of attention.
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Found out later that her job at Microsoft, her job title was Storyteller.
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It s soft marketing, right?
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Yeah, you could say that.
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Yeah, but if you can afford somebody like that, that s good.
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Anyway.
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She, question and answer, she raised her hand and she asked me, so all the things that you have done and you have experienced, what s the number one lesson you ve taken away from your life?
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That was a new question for me.
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I ve never been asked that question.
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And I thought about it for 20 seconds and then I came up with this phrase that we all know, love conquers all.
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because in my life it did in the end.
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And it s the strongest human emotion, and that is what makes us human, really.
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Yep.
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And you spoke about the, I mean, offline, as I ve spoken with you, it s clear to me,
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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.
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Now that I m pretty mature, to put it mildly, I m also more loving towards my family,
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many more people.
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You know, these things like random acts of kindness for strangers, I do them.
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I m looking for them now.
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And you know what?
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It s good for me.
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Well, welcome to Texas because this random acts of kindness to strangers seems to be a way of life.
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which is one of the reasons I love it here.
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It just reminds me why I love human beings, is that there s just this warmth, this connection.
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Yeah, and Georgia is the same thing.
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Yeah, amen.
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Do you have any regrets?
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Looking back at life, do you wish you d done something different?
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Well, I could have, but then I would have had a different regret.
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I betrayed the wife, the German wife that I loved.
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I really did love her.
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And I betrayed her.
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But if I don t betray her, then I betray the child.
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that is a source of so much love for you now.
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So maybe life is a kind of, you get to choose your regrets.
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You don t get to avoid them.
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It s a little bit of a strange way of putting it, but there s no other choice.
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I tell you what I don t regret, and that may be, you probably understand it now because you have enough background about me.
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I don t regret having lied to my mother.
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Because I had no really strong emotional relationship with her.
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She took care of me.
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She was proud of me, but we didn t hug.
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We didn t interact emotionally whatsoever.
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So you don t feel like you betrayed that love that... Well, I did.
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I know that she...
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She was looking for me until the day she died.
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She wrote a letter to President Gorbachev asking him for help to locate me.
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She checked with the Stasi.
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She just was like hell-bent on finding me and couldn t find me, so she passed away without knowing
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what happened to me.
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Now there was this rumor that was flying around and she possibly may have bought into that rumor because my cover for when I went to the United States was that I
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changed careers again and I joined an institution in Kazakhstan that did space research.
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Interkosmos something something, and I had a piece of paper that invited me to start there and it was a forgery.
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Interkosmos never existed.
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But people knew that in Kazakhstan there were super secret facilities.
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So one of my classmates, old classmates from high school started the rumor that I died in a rocket accident.
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And everybody knew that.
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So when I came back to Germany, went back to Germany, I found the telephone number of this girl that had dumped me.
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I called her.
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And I said, so guess who this is.
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Maybe you hold on to your chair.
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She says, yes.
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I said, this is Albrecht.
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It s a good payback.
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No, we actually met.
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So there s two elderly people in their 60s who meet each other after so many years.
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And the one that ended the relationship started the conversation by saying, you know what?
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I made a really bad mistake.
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And the tears came down her cheeks.
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I wasn t asking for that.
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I wasn t happy about it, but it did feel good.
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Now, a while later, I knew why she said she made a mistake.
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I met her husband.
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Yeah, I mean, there s a, Tom Waits has a song called Martha, where he made, where an older gentleman calls somebody he used to love, and they have a conversation, they re both married now, and it s, sometimes you can meet people from your past, and it gives you a glimpse of a possible different life you could have had.
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Oh yeah, and you know, I was actually, when she said, I made a mistake, and I was thinking to myself,
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No, you didn t.
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There was none.
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There was nothing left.
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There was nothing left.
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And also, the person that she became, personality-wise, wasn t as attractive as I remembered her.
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You know, it s puppy love, you know.
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But it s still love.
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Yeah, oh, it was.
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It still happened.
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It was passionate love, for sure.
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And I would have,
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I would have thrown myself under the bus if I could save her.
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It was that strong, and just as strong as the love for my two girls.
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Yeah.
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Life is full of moments and periods like that of love, and that s what makes life so frickin  awesome.
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But it does come to an end.
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And so does this conversation, I guess.
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This goes on for many more hours, but yes.
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Do you think about your own death?
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Huh?
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Do you think about death?
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Do you think about your own death?
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Yes.
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Are you afraid of it?
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Yes, even though I m a Christian.
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As a Christian, do you have a sense of what s coming after?
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Or is it full of uncertainty?
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I have a hope.
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I have a hope.
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You know,
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There s a lot of Christianity which is quite logical.
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A lot of Christianity which is also, you know, the life of Christ has a lot of proof.
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But, you know, I became a Christian starting with a head, and I was already
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old, and I
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You know, when you don t get this faith very early, it s tougher to buy into everything.
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You know, there are some things that are difficult for me to understand and believe, but there s many, many other things that I can t explain only with the existence of a God.
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But whether He lets us go again in eternity, I just hope.
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I won t convince somebody else at this point, which doesn t make me a really, really good Christian because I m supposed to evangelize.
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But there s still a fear.
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Yeah.
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There s a fear and a hope.
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On the other hand, I know that, you see, this is how I approach the last years of my life.
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I will not
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I will not mentally or physically get decrepit.
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I will do everything I can do to be alert and fit.
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I still run.
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I run four or five times a week.
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And I m going to start lifting weights again.
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Good.
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So you stay physically and mentally sharp.
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Yes.
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Go out with guns blazing.
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And I once read a book written by a medical doctor.
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He said most people, when they re becoming mature, the rest of their life is a slow downward move.
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Not for you.
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No, the last years are pretty bad.
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He said, you gotta do this, boom.
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That s pretty good advice from a doctor.
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And if nothing else from Christianity, whichever parts you take on, one of the big ones is love.
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That s something you ve lived from the very beginning before God was part of your life, before anything was part of your life.
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It seemed that love was part of your life and has been a consistent thread throughout.
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Yes, sir.
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There s a short sentence in the Bible that says, God is love.
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And the other thing I wanna say, the Christian morality is, I can sign that with my blood.
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Okay?
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God is love, amen.
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Jack, you re an incredible person, lived an incredible life.
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Thank you for talking today.
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Thank you for telling your story.
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Thank you for being who you are.
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And thank you for being all about love.
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This is a beautiful conversation.
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It was an honor.
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Thank you for talking today.
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Yeah, and appreciate the tough questions that you asked.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jack Barsky.
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To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now, let me leave you with some words from Edward Snowden.
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You can t come up against the world s most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept the risk.
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If they want to get you, over time, they will.
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Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.