Jack Barsky is a former KGB spy and author of "Deep Undercover: My Secret Life and Tangled Allegiances as a KGB Spy in America". Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:18 - KGB
14:09 - Communism
33:10 - Childhood
39:57 - Becoming a KGB agent
1:18:30 - Training
1:32:19 - Language
1:38:10 - Moscow
1:53:11 - Spying
2:10:09 - Putin
2:13:01 - War in Ukraine
2:24:28 - Putin in the KGB
2:31:21 - Yuri Bezmenov
2:41:59 - FSB and CIA
2:49:49 - Putin and Zelenskyy
2:58:39 - Quitting the KGB
3:24:57 - Love and regrets
3:33:10 - Mortality

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Something happened where they forced my hand.

This is the only time that a Soviet agent was anywhere near me on the territory of the United States.

So I'm waiting for the A train on a dark morning still in Queens and there's this man in a black trench coat comes up to me from my right, and he whispers into my ears, you gotta come back or else you're dead.

The following is a conversation with Jack Barsky, a former KGB spy, author of Deep Undercover, and the subject of an excellent podcast series called The Agent.

There are very few people who have defected from the KGB and live to tell the story.

It is 1 of the most powerful intelligence organizations in history.

And this conversation gives a window into its operation, both from an ideological and psychological perspectives, but also it tells the story of a man who lived 1 heck of an incredible life.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, Here's Jack Barsky.

Right, so that is the Committee of State Security.

Bezopasnost, this is a, opasnost is a threat, right?

And I guess that directly translates to security, without threat.

It was disbanded when the Soviet Union fell apart and the successor agencies are now the SVR and the FSB.

FSB supposedly the equivalent to the FBI and SVR, the CIA, but the SVR is relatively weak and the FSB has taken on a lot of espionage and active measures and they're much bigger and stronger.

But the most capable intelligence agency in Russia is the GRU, military intelligence.

That's right, when I was in the KGB, I had no idea that there was military intelligence.

Nobody ever mentioned anything like that.

And by the way, I recently had the pleasure to give a talk at the DIA.

When they reached out to me, I didn't know they existed either.

If you want to be an intelligence agency, should the world know anything about you?

Because in some sense, you want to create the legend in order to attract great, competent individuals to work for you, but at the same time, you wanted to be shrouded in complete mystery.

If nobody knows you exist, you might be able to operate well as an intelligence agency.

That is fascinating, but FSB is the thing that carries the flag of KGB, KGB being probably 1 of, if not the most, sort of infamous, famous, infamous, and powerful intelligence agencies

It was founded in 1954 after the death of Stalin.

You've, in writing your book, looked back at the predecessors of the history.

Is there some way in which the KGB is grounded in the culture, the spirit, the soul of its predecessors?

They just changed names and they changed personnel rather frequently and that had something to do with Stalin's paranoia.

From between 1923, and I don't remember what, I think it may have been the NKVD at that time, it started as a Cheka, and then it became the GPU, the NKVD.

Yes, but with those name changes, you also had changes at the top.

Between 1923 and 1953, when Stalin died, that is 30 years, they had 8 heads of intelligence and of those 8, 6 were executed when they were replaced.

So that's an indication that this was an organization that ate itself from the inside.

The Soviet Union was the only dictatorship in history that did not rest its powers on the military.

They rested its powers on the intelligence apparatus.

Eventually if you rest your power on something that is made out of bricks that don't hold a lot of load, it will fall apart.

On sand, why was it unstable, would you say?

Stalin was always worried about the most powerful people coming after him.

So he proactively killed off heads of the KGB and he had this great purge where he got rid of a lot of his generals, really capable generals.

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.

And so if the top doesn't trust you, you always have to worry about your peers snitching on you.

Okay, so, and I think we have a very similar situation in Russia today.

And in this kind of atmosphere, the truth will never get to the top.

So no matter what moral rules the organization operates under, trust is fundamental to its competence.

Oh, absolutely, and I wanna extend this to my own existence.

And this is kind of strange, it's almost dichotomous, because 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.

If they don't trust me, they don't send me out.

And if I don't trust them, I'm not going.

And I eventually broke that trust And they knew there was always that danger.

They knew that because something about you or just something about human beings.

No, there were hints about how long my assignment would be, so 10 to 12 years.

I was becoming an American, and over time, I would become more and more American, and there was always a chance that I liked it more here than there, that I was really successful in what I was supposed to do.

And it sort of happened, but in my case, it happened because I fathered a child who I didn't want to leave when they wanted me back.

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.

Because in the past, the KGB would go after family, ruthlessly.

This is a hard question about the KGB because it's 1 of the most ruthless organizations, but in general, are there lines, KGB agents at every level of the hierarchy that they would not cross.

Political, legal, ethical, or does anything goes to achieve the goal?

in touch with 2 types of agents, whether the technical experts, the ones that taught me tradecraft, 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.

Those were just doing their job, all right?

And the others, the ones that trained me, that prepared me for life in the United States.

I don't think, they would not fit into the stereotype of the ruthless,

Is it possible that you would not be aware of the parts of the KGB?

Would you, it's possible that you're not aware of the parts of the KGB that are the quote unquote muscle?

I would find out afterwards after I retired and started doing some research.

I mean, this is what the KGB did really, really well, compartmentalization.

And that was based on the communist movement while it was still underground.

And so that maybe there were 3, 4 members in 1 cell that knew 1 another, and then they had a liaison to another cell.

So the bottom line is if you got, 1 of those folks were caught, they could maybe betray 4 people or 3, something like that.

And the KGB continued with that tradition.

I have reason to believe that my handler, the person in Moscow that sort of directed me and made decisions what to do and where to go, never met me personally.

Why would, so, and this actually was a big advantage over other intelligence services because, you know, You look at what the CIA does, everybody blabs.

There's a lot of leaks coming out of American intelligence.

I don't think there's as many leaks coming out of the Mossad.

Strong words from Jack Barsky, by the way.

I mean, that is a question I wanna ask a little more systematically.

Is there something unique about the KGB compared to the other intelligence agencies?

Let's talk British Intelligence, MI6, Assad, CIA.

Is there unique cultures, spirits, souls of the different organizations that maybe somehow connect to the structures of government, connect maybe the values of the people, those kinds of things.

I believe we were all pretty much strong believers in communism and the future of the world being.

Yes, I think that unified us to a large degree, even the technicians.

So even, it wasn't something like, yeah, yeah, the parents believe this thing, but we know the truth.

You really believe the story of communism.

Absolutely did, and you need to look at the time frame.

The Soviet Union after World War II made quite a bit of progress in influencing the third world.

I still remember when I was in middle school, we had a map, the map of the world, and it was color-coded.

So red was communism, that was the Soviet Union and the Eastern states, and then blue was capitalism.

And then we had green, which were the third world countries.

And the green slowly turned pink because a lot of third world governments, like I'm looking at Angola, I'm looking at Vietnam, a lot of these countries were very sympathetic to the Soviet Union.

And so we sort of knew that this would go on like that and eventually we would take over and pretty much overtake, that was the myth, overtake the United States, not only militarily but also in terms of industrial production and so forth.

The military, it was a standoff as we know.

Well, stupid pipe dream, 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.

The biggest 1 being invading the Soviet Union, particularly at the time that he did it, because he ran into the same thing that Napoleon ran into, General Winter.

so Operation Barbarossa, within that, he could have made different decisions.

For example, attacking, skipping Kiev and attacking Moscow directly, overthrowing the government.

So marching, I guess that would be learning lessons from Napoleon as opposed to a different kind of distribution of forces and then getting bogged down in the winter.

But the point is, these ambitions sometimes do, you know, the ambitions of empire sometimes do materialize in the growth and the building and the establishment to 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.

They write the history books, therefore they're the good guys.

And right now, America has effectively written a book about the good guys.

I happen to believe that book, but we should be humbled and open-minded to realize that that is in fact what is happening, is effective empires write the history books and tell us stories and tell us propaganda and tell us narratives that we believe because we are human beings and we love to get together and believe ideas.

We love to dream of a beautiful world and try to build that beautiful world together.

In the United States, that's a beautiful world, the freedom of respect of human rights, of all men are created equal, pursuit of happiness.

If you look at what the dream of communism is, it sure as heck, in its words, on the surface sounds good.

Respect for the workers, the working class, the lower classes that have been trodden on, that have been stolen from by the powerful.

They deserve to have the money, the power, the respect that they have earned through their hard work, sounds great.

And everybody gets along, we just have to, all men are wonderful people, and If they go bad, it has something to do with the fact that they have been oppressed, right?

And even it is when you think about it, and I didn't think about it.

When you're young, you just emotionally, you accept it.

But when you think about it, somehow that new wonderful organization has to organize itself.

Even though Lenin predicted that the state eventually would go away.

And the only way to really organize a large number of people is with a hierarchy.

The ones that want to go to the top, the ones that believe in themselves, the ones that know better than everybody else.

And once you have that hierarchy established, there is no guarantee that it won't go bad.

And actually, when you look at history, every such hierarchy has gone bad.

You know, you look at Cuba for instance, I believe Fidel Castro was an honest revolutionary.

Yeah, there's something about, and you speak about Vladimir Putin in this way, but let's step away from that for a second.

Is there something about being an honest revolutionary that wants to do good for their country, and you start to believe that you know better than everyone else how to do good in the country, and you very well might first, but then somehow that grows into a distortion field where you keep believing you know what's right, and all the people who disagree with you, you stop seeing them as having a point, you instead see them as like evil manipulators of the truth that are actually trying to hurt people for their own greed, for their own power, and you will protect the people because you know what's good.

In the case of Stalin, I mean, I don't know, but it seems like he really believed that communism would bring about a much better world.

I mean, there was a sense, you have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet.

This idea that sacrifice is necessary to bring about a greater world.

And then the other aspect is sort of ruling by terror, creating terrors that justify political mechanism to achieve a better world.

So it wasn't, I mean, perhaps he had to do that to be able to sleep at night with the atrocities he's committing.

I think he believed he will bring a better world.

And by the way, the terror didn't start with Stalin.

It started right after the Bolsheviks took over, when Lenin told Mr.

Dzerzhinsky, Comrade Dzerzhinsky to build the Cheka and then execute the, this is what he called it, the Red Terror.

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.

People were just pulled out of their apartments and shot on sight.

And this was done by revolutionaries who were convinced that eventually, you know, that these sacrifices had to be made and eventually that would lead to a much better planet.

And the populace believed this too, that those sacrifices, in part, I mean, this is such a dark thing about dictatorships is you believe it, but you're also too afraid to question your beliefs.

Like, you're not directly afraid, but almost like a, I don't know what that is, that's almost like a subconscious fear.

Like don't, there's a dark room with a locked door, don't look in that door, don't check that door.

And There's something about the United States that says, especially modern culture, it's like go to that door first and sort of question everything kind of, that's the power of the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press, but you can get, almost become too critical and too cynical of your own culture in that way.

So there's a balance to strike, of course, but man, if communism is not a lesson of human nature, I don't know what is, but you believed, without thinking too much about it, you believed in

What did you see, just, you know, I came from the Soviet Union, what did you maybe feel that's right and good about communism, about the vision of communism?

I think the biggest impetus in me believing in communism was that the communists, just before Hitler took over, the communists were the only force in Germany that fought the Nazis in the streets.

And communists were hunted down by the Nazis, killed, put in concentration camps.

And so what we knew, when 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.

And the most famous 1 was Reinhard Galen, who was in charge, was the general in charge of the intelligence on the Eastern Front under Hitler.

And when the Allied won the war, it was decided that Gehlen was too important with his knowledge of his and his organization was too important to not use.

So he was co-opted by the CIA and eventually wound up being the head of the Bundesnachrichtendienst, the CIA of West Germany.

That gave us, us, when I say us, you know, the East German party, a huge propaganda victory.

I wanted to, because the emotional aspect of this was as follows.

When we were in, Juniors in high school, and in those days, when you, you were only allowed to go to high school if you were in the top 10% of students, okay?

So this was going to be the next set of ruling elite in the country.

We were sent, we were required to visit a concentration camp.

And if you know what we as 17 year olds were made to look at, it was gut-wrenching.

How can men do something like that to men?

Piles of corpses, lampshades made out of human skin because that skin had tattoos on them and a shrunken head, so heads like the size of my fist.

I mean, the girls all cried and it made a huge impression.

I mean, it was the Nazi fighters, they were the good guys.

Of course, 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?

From the Russian and Soviet perspective, the communist regime banded together to win the great patriotic war.

And that was the second 1, you know, the big brother, the Soviet Union.

I mean, when I was approached by the KGB, that was like, oh, I felt so honored.

So we should say that we're talking about East Germany, that you're from East Germany.

Can you describe, you were born 4 years in, what is it?

After Germany's unconditional surrender in World War II.

We don't have to go to World War I, which the result of which actually seeded World War II in some respect.

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.

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.

And then they decided to march into the Soviet Union after they took Poland.

And cut up Poland together with the Soviet Union.

It was a non-aggression pact between, that was signed by Ribbentrop and Molotov, right?

I think both parties knew that eventually that would fall apart, but at the time, it gave the Soviet Union a little more, a piece of Poland, and a little more time to prepare what they thought might happen down the road.

And the Germans had the time and the ability to pretty much conquer all of Western Europe.

Do you think Stalin really knew that it's gonna fall apart?

Why would somebody like Stalin trust somebody like Hitler?

But why did he blunder so bad not to read the intelligence that was coming his way?

He didn't trust his own intelligence apparatus.

There was a German communist who went underground when Hitler took over and he went to Japan as a journalist.

Richard Sorge had really, really good intel about what the Japanese would do and not do.

I forgot exactly what it was, but it came to Moscow and Stalin totally ignored it.

And when Sorge was captured by the Japanese, the Soviet Union denied that he was 1 of theirs so he was executed.

The paranoia, again, does a lot of damage.

When you don't believe your own intelligence apparatus, why bother having 1?

Yeah, I mean, there, but I'm sure there's contradictory information coming in from the intelligence apparatus, so it's difficult.

I mean, first of all, nobody likes to be disagreed with, especially when you get, become more and more powerful, and then the intelligence apparatus is probably giving you information you don't like.

It's often 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.

So in the modern times, if we hop around briefly, is Vladimir Putin has been not happy with the intelligence of the FSB, thereby, at least if you read the news, choosing to put more priority to the GRU for the intelligence in Ukraine.

But I guess I suppose the same story happens there as throughout history is paranoia.

I give you an example that comes from a very reliable source.

And that my best German friend worked as a chemist in the Stasi, East German intelligence.

And he eventually, he rose to the rank of major and was in charge of the forgery department.

It's very likely that he made passports that I used to travel.

He was aware that there was intelligence that was collected.

They had about a thousand people in West Germany, undercover agents, some of them in government.

And the central committee of the party, the decision makers ignored it because it didn't quite fit in their worldview, it didn't quite fit into their plans.

So, and 1 delicious thing that I just wanna add on to this, when Gorbachev wrote his book about Perestroika and Glasnost, the East German rulers did not like it, they were much more orthodox.

So they had to print the books in translation.

They were piled up in the hallways of the Stasi.

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.

So what happened was the Soviet Union rolled into the eastern part of Germany and the Western Allies took a larger chunk, which was eventually, it was occupied by the 3 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 in a contract, they decided that Berlin would be ruled by the 4 allies and they all had free access to that city.

I was born in the East German part, which very quickly became ruled by communists slash socialists.

The Communist Party and the Socialist Party united, but the leaders of that new party were all communists.

Yes, German Democratic Republic, which was formed a couple of months after I was born.

I was born into a remote southeastern corner of East Germany, And interestingly enough, genetically I'm only half German.

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, so that's why I'm a mix.

So, okay, So East Germany after the war was communist, socialist, and

the West Germany was representing the Western world with democracy.

And what the United States did, this was really, really very forward-looking, very strategic, the Marshall Plan to rebuild the economy in the West as compared to what the Soviet Union did.

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Jack Barsky: KGB Spy | Lex Fridman Podcast #301