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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EPISODE LINKS:
Jack's Twitter: https://twitter.com/deepcoverbarsky
Jack's Website: https://jackbarsky.com
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The Agent (podcast): https://cumuluspodcastnetwork.com/pods/the-agent

PODCAST INFO:
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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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If it's not the right person, it would just come off absurd or crazy or whatever.

Actually, yeah, were there any dress code?

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 there was a practice run to West Germany.

So I traveled to West Germany, no not to West Berlin with an East German passport that was stamped that that individual was allowed to go to the West.

And there was a part of the border that was only guarded by Soviet troops and that's where they smuggled me into West Germany, I got on the subway and then appeared in West Berlin.

No Americans, no Brits, no French knew that I had entered.

Okay, so And the first trip, all they wanted me to do was just walk around, smell the air, have a beer or whatever, and eat a sausage, and then come back.

The second trip, I had a task, very similar to the 1 that I had back in Jena, to ring the doorbell someplace and talk to some people.

I should mention that you talk about that, you know, eat a sausage, drink some beer, I suppose that's a good test too, to see how you behave under Western, like when first introduced to the Western culture.

Like this is why I might not make a good agent, is when I first came to the United States in the supermarket I like bananas, as many bananas as I wanna eat.

Just, It's a shock to have access to Western culture.

You're getting very close to the reason they actually made me do these 2 practice trips.

When I first emerged on West Berlin territory, I felt highly uncomfortable.

And I saw the cops everywhere, and even those cops had light blue uniforms, they weren't standouts.

So I was wondering if they knew that I had KGB on my forehead.

paranoid that they would know, that would see.

Because I suppose that's a natural, like if I give anybody on the street the mission to do the mission you had to do is they would be paranoid.

That's a natural human feeling is, am I being watched?

Like if you try to steal something from a store, there's going to be a feeling like, are they watching me, are the cameras watching, are the people watching me, they all know, that kind of stuff.

So you have to overcome, or you have to be somehow rugged and robust to that kind of feeling in order to overcome it.

So, and Something very interesting happened while I was being trained in Berlin, I met a classmate of mine from high school.

And he confided to me that he was recruited by the Stasi to become a spy, go as a spy to West Germany.

And he also had this practice trip and he peed in his pants.

He went back and told him, I can't do that.

He had an engineering degree, He was a pretty smart guy.

He was just for the rest of his life and he's still alive I believe, floating around and trading in model railroads and stuff like that.

You mean, do you think that experience broke them?

So this is a test that if you fail, you pay the price.

I had no idea that, you know, something bad would happen if I failed that test, but I didn't.

So, and this led then to the offer, all right?

You know, Boris was happy with me, and he told his boss, who was most likely the head of the KGB in East Berlin.

Yes, in East Germany, yeah, all of East Germany.

And as we walk into the room, there was this huge desk and a little guy sitting behind it.

Very, very, just like little and unimpressive.

A lot of paraphernalia, like you know, had a bust of Jashinsky on his desk and some paintings, Lenin and so forth.

But when the guy opened his mouth, he went like, whoa.

Now, and initially he would start to bat with 5 minutes worth of propaganda, why we're doing what we're doing.

I understood most of it, but when I didn't understand, I'd ask Boris to translate.

And then he sprung it on me and I was not prepared.

So I said to him, I'm not really trained.

You know, there's a lot of things I need to learn.

And I came up with a couple of really stupid things.

1 not so stupid, but the other 1 was, I don't know why I said that.

I said, for instance, I need to learn how to drive a car and to type with a typewriter.

And he got really annoyed and he said, Don't worry about it, we'll train you.

But I gotta tell you, we need people who are decisive.

So you got until tomorrow noon to give Boris your decision.

I knew I was gonna have a huge career, a good career.

I was on my way because I was already employed by the university as an assistant professor.

So that career would be to become a professor, become a tenure professor, be a world-class.

This is home, this is where your love is.

Did you understand that the choice involved leaving

Yes, and the 1 thing I didn't have, the 2 things I didn't have, an emotional relationship with my mother, and I didn't have a steady girlfriend at the time.

I think Freud would have a lot to say about that, but yeah, go ahead.

But the connection between those 2, but yeah.

By the way, my friend Guntan, the 1 who worked for the Stasi, was also, the Stasi tried to recruit him as an agent, but he had a love relationship at the time and he said politely, no, I won't, I can't.

So you didn't have, that's the 1 thing that really could-

So you got the career on the 1 hand, my basketball team, the town that I would be part of the ruling elite of, and then we had this great adventure and the ability to contribute to the victory, the worldwide victory of communism and stick it to the Nazis.

And of course the feeling that you're really special.

What's, the question, do I want to be a 10 year professor or James Bond?

And as funny as that sounds, that was probably a difficult decision.

It was a difficult decision, but fundamentally it wasn't, and it wasn't my zeal to help the revolution.

It was my, what they called, what the Stasi was looking for, the KGB was looking for in a character that they would send over a well-controlled inclination to adventure, okay?

I was, yes, I gotta put this in right here because I'm telling people I have 2 things in common with James Bond.

These are my initials, JB, and I got the girl too, 3 times.

Yeah, and the ability to travel to the West, because the West was closed off to us.

We could go to foreign countries, but they all had to be communist countries.

You know, I wanted to see Paris because I had fallen in love with Honoré Balzac who wrote a phenomenal set of novels that I just ate up.

And so when I eventually did go to Paris, I knew all the places already because he described them all.

but eventually, when you do the side-by-side intellectual comparison, that doesn't work.

It becomes a tie, and then you just go with your gut, and I say, hey, I'm in.

So now that you successfully passed the test and you were sitting with this unimpressive man and had the invite and had to sleep on it and have made the decision to join, what was next?

I was just told that I was being recruited by the State Department of East Germany.

I must have had some paper, but I forgot because just by saying so, that wouldn't have worked.

There's some kind of document that says that came up.

was the only entanglement you had to that place.

Basketball, giving up basketball was huge for me.

I started playing basketball when I was 18.

But anyway, so that was the hardest for me to give up.

But the other thing that I remember I had to do to hand in my party document to the party secretary of the university.

And he made a comment, yeah, we probably won't hear much about you, but we know that you're gonna do something very important.

So he sort of had an inkling that I'm gonna go someplace undercover or something like that.

And then I packed my bags and got on a train to Berlin for another 1 of those secret meetings with my new handler, Nikolai.

And here came another test that would have been quite easy to fail.

So, all right, I had lived in Vienna for 6 years in a dorm, even when I became an employee of the university, they didn't have apartments.

I was still living in a dorm in a single room with a bed, a chair and a table and a toilet down the hallway.

So I figured, you know, Berlin KGB, I'm gonna get a nice apartment, right?

And so Nikolai took me into his car, we started talking a little bit and then he said, I have a task for you already.

Your first task is to find yourself a place to live.

I mean, I don't think I showed it in my face, but you know, my heart dropped like down into my pants.

I knew this was nearly impossible because there was a severe shortage of housing in everywhere in Germany, East Germany.

And all the apartments and homes were controlled by the government.

I knew couples that were promised maybe to get an apartment 5 years down the road.

So, and then they would postpone the decision to have a child.

Because I had to be inventive now, I had to figure out how to get out of an impossible situation.

I just went with the flow, you know, what do I do?

So what I did, I went, I took the train, the city train to the very last stop, a little town called Acna, and I wandered around in that town and knocked on doors and asked people if they knew where somebody might have a place to live.

And after a couple of hours, somebody said, there's this lady that, and they gave me the address.

And I talked to the lady and she said, I happen to have a place that you might, where you might be able to stay.

And it had a bed and a chair, running cold water and a stove, a cold stove.

That was my, was going to be my- Pretty basic, pretty basic.

James Bond had to run a special operation out of the outhouse.

To my credit, and I think that established part of my reputation, I didn't complain at all to Nikolai.

Yeah, I just told him, you know, I found something.

And so for 6 months, I would get up in the morning, get on the train and walk around in the city, you know, did some operational stuff and operational training.

I went to the library, did a lot of reading in the library.

And then I found a basketball team that I could join, so at least I could take a shower twice a week.

apparently, It took about 6 months that I was still on probation because after 6 months, Nikolai, 1 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.

Now, and I didn't know this, now I was really in.

Okay, imagine the hurdles you have to jump over and how many times you can fail, but you know.

But not complaining, not asking questions.

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.

So what was your interaction like with the bosses?

Does that essentially represent the way it went forward?

No complaints, no arguments, no, I know this better.

Now the technical guys, you know, they taught me something I didn't know that made sense.

What Nikolai, some of the stuff that he taught me was somewhat questionable.

He was a generalist and there's some things he didn't know really well.

So I could have like asked, probed a little bit, but I didn't.

So this new apartment was, it was a studio, it had a kitchen with running cold water.

And the bathroom was just 1 flight down the toilet, not a bathroom, 1 flight down the stairs.

And he gave me, I think he gave me a thousand mark to buy furniture.

And in that place, I actually also bought a TV and started watching West German television, so I finally had a decent place to stay, and my training in Berlin took about 2 years.

What was the training, what were the interesting aspects to the training?

do an overview systematic of what was the training process, what was difficult, what are some insights that generalize to the training process of what it takes to be a KGB spy?

Right, So let me start with the tradecraft.

I was instructed in how to use a shortwave radio and to receive the shortwave transmissions with Morse code.

I was taught an encryption and decryption algorithm, manual algorithm.

You might be interested that eventually I figured out at least 1 of the patterns.

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 by a shortwave radio, 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 0.

And I was told that these algorithms, these manual algorithms were good for about 300 uses.

After that, they could still be deciphered.

I'm assuming nowadays that wouldn't take as much.

But there's probably, they're probably designed in a way that you can manually, sort of, it's efficient and convenient to use them manually.

It's not to optimize cryptographic security, it's to optimize, it's like to balance security and like humans being able to actually.

Yeah, no I gotta disagree, it was neither efficient nor convenient.

What was significantly easier to do, but that would require you to have spy paraphernalia with you.

So you have the set of numbers on a sheet of paper that had to be developed.

I had to use iodine to make those numbers visible.

Those are known to be unbreakable unless they are used multiple times, the same sheet of paper.

Because the person who encrypts has the same set of numbers as the person who decrypts.

And 1 time use, you cannot figure out what the message is.

Oh, interesting, but this is a quick way to communicate from 1 person to another 1 time.

Well 1 time I had a pad with multiple sheets of paper.

And the reason that they gave me a manual 1 is because I literally, I had only, when I wound up in the United States, I had only 1 thing with me that only a spy can have and that was a writing pad where the first 10 pages or so were impregnated with a trace of a chemical that was used for secret writing.

But you really would have to know what you're looking for to, you know, you see this pad that was bought at Walmart and.

Can you explain a little further, what is the chemical here that, What are we talking about?

So how, I don't understand how it's possible to have a physical pad that does the encryption without any computing.

All right, so no, no, it doesn't do any work.

So, And the communication, the encrypted communication was a set of groups of 5, 5 digits and then another 5 and there's always a gap in between.

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.

The resulting set of digits then had a 1 to 1 correlation to letters.

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Jack Barsky: KGB Spy | Lex Fridman Podcast #301