Transcript
00:00:00 Something happened where they forced my hand, and this is the only time that a Soviet agent
00:00:07 was anywhere near me on the territory of the United States.
00:00:12 So I’m waiting for the A train on a dark morning still in Queens, and there’s this man in a
00:00:20 black trench coat comes up to me from my right, and he whispers into my ears, you gotta come
00:00:27 back or else you’re dead.
00:00:32 The following is a conversation with Jack Barsky, a former KGB spy, author of Deep Undercover
00:00:38 and the subject of an excellent podcast series called The Agent.
00:00:43 There are very few people who have defected from the KGB and live to tell the story.
00:00:49 It is one of the most powerful intelligence organizations in history.
00:00:53 And this conversation gives a window into its operation, both from an ideological and
00:00:59 psychological perspective, but also it tells the story of a man who lived one heck of an
00:01:06 incredible life.
00:01:08 This is the Lex Friedman podcast, to support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
00:01:13 And now, dear friends, here’s Jack Barsky.
00:01:18 Let’s start with a big basic question.
00:01:20 What is the KGB?
00:01:21 Комитет Государственной Безопасности.
00:01:24 Right.
00:01:26 So that is the Committee of State Security.
00:01:29 Yeah.
00:01:30 There’s an opossumist.
00:01:31 Opossumist is a threat, right?
00:01:33 Threat.
00:01:34 Okay.
00:01:35 And BS means…
00:01:36 Without.
00:01:37 Right.
00:01:38 And I guess that directly translates to security.
00:01:39 Without threat.
00:01:40 So, and don’t exist anymore.
00:01:43 It was disbanded when the Soviet Union fell apart and the successor agencies are now the
00:01:49 SVR and the FSB, FSB supposedly the equivalent to the FBI and SVR, the CIA.
00:01:57 But the SVR is relatively weak and the FSB has taken on a lot of espionage and active
00:02:06 measures and they’re much bigger and stronger.
00:02:09 But the most capable intelligence agency in Russia is the GRU, Military Intelligence.
00:02:16 That nobody knows very much about.
00:02:18 That’s right.
00:02:19 When I was in the KGB, I had no idea that there was military intelligence.
00:02:23 Nobody ever mentioned anything like that.
00:02:25 And by the way, I recently had the pleasure to give a talk at the DIA.
00:02:31 When they reached out to me, I didn’t know they existed either.
00:02:35 Interesting.
00:02:36 Yeah.
00:02:37 That’s always the question.
00:02:38 If you want to be an intelligence agency, should the world know anything about you?
00:02:42 Because in some sense, you want to create the legend in order to attract great competent
00:02:48 individuals to work for you, but at the same time, you want it to be shrouded in complete
00:02:54 mystery.
00:02:55 If nobody knows you exist, you might be able to operate well as an intelligence agency.
00:03:01 That is fascinating.
00:03:03 But FSB is the thing that carries the flag of KGB, KGB being probably one of, if not
00:03:12 the most sort of infamous, famous, infamous, and powerful intelligence agencies in history
00:03:19 ever.
00:03:20 Absolutely.
00:03:21 100%.
00:03:22 It was founded in 1954 after the death of Stalin.
00:03:26 In writing your book, you’ve looked back at the predecessors of the history.
00:03:31 Is there some way in which the KGB is grounded in the culture, the spirit, the soul of the
00:03:42 KGB?
00:03:43 Its predecessors.
00:03:44 Oh, absolutely.
00:03:45 They just changed names and they changed personnel rather frequently, and that had something
00:03:51 to do with Stalin’s paranoia.
00:03:54 From between 1923, and I don’t remember what, I think it may have been the NKVD at that
00:04:00 time.
00:04:01 It started as the Chika, and then it became the GPU, the NKVD, but with those name changes,
00:04:11 you also had changes at the top.
00:04:14 Between 1923 and 1953, when Stalin died, that is 30 years, they had eight heads of intelligence,
00:04:24 and of those eight, six were executed when they were replaced.
00:04:29 So that’s an indication that this was an organization that ate itself from the inside.
00:04:38 The Soviet Union was the only dictatorship in history that did not rest its powers on
00:04:42 the military.
00:04:43 They rested its powers on the intelligence apparatus, and that thing was unstable.
00:04:49 So you know where that leads.
00:04:52 Eventually, if you rest your power on something that is made out of bricks that don’t hold
00:04:58 a lot of load, it will fall apart.
00:05:01 On sand.
00:05:02 Yeah.
00:05:03 Why was it unstable, would you say?
00:05:04 What of human nature makes it unstable?
00:05:07 It’s the paranoia.
00:05:09 Stalin was always worried about the most powerful people coming after him.
00:05:17 So he proactively killed off heads of the KGB, and he had this great purge where he
00:05:23 got rid of a lot of his generals, really capable generals, and that cost him dearly when World
00:05:31 War II started, because he started off with a force that wasn’t as capable as it could
00:05:39 have been.
00:05:41 Was it paranoia at all levels?
00:05:42 I believe so.
00:05:43 I believe so.
00:05:45 It comes from the top.
00:05:46 And so if the top doesn’t trust you, you always have to worry about your peers snitching on
00:05:55 you.
00:05:58 And I think we have a very similar situation in Russia today, and in this kind of atmosphere,
00:06:07 the truth will never get to the top.
00:06:10 So no matter what moral rules the organization operates under, trust is fundamental to its
00:06:17 competence.
00:06:18 Oh, absolutely.
00:06:19 And I want to extend this to my own existence, and this is kind of strange.
00:06:26 It’s almost dichotomous, because I was running around lying to everybody, and I couldn’t
00:06:34 fundamentally be trusted.
00:06:35 But the relationship that I had with the KGB was based on trust.
00:06:40 If they don’t trust me, they don’t send me out.
00:06:43 And if I don’t trust them, I’m not going.
00:06:45 And I eventually broke that trust, and they knew there was always that danger.
00:06:50 They knew that because something about you or just something about human beings that
00:06:56 can be broken.
00:06:57 There were hints about how long my assignment would be, so 10 to 12 years.
00:07:05 And you see, it makes sense.
00:07:07 I was becoming an American, and over time, I would become more and more American, and
00:07:13 there was always a chance that I liked it more here than there, that I was really successful
00:07:19 in what I was supposed to do.
00:07:22 And it sort of happened, but in my case, it happened because I fathered a child who I
00:07:28 didn’t want to leave when they wanted me back.
00:07:30 Love always screws up your employment competence, yes.
00:07:36 You’re absolutely right.
00:07:40 But they thought that I had an anchor at home because I had a wife and a son at home, which
00:07:48 you’ve got to worry about them if you defect.
00:07:53 Because in the past, the KGB would go after family ruthlessly.
00:08:01 Including perhaps violence?
00:08:03 Yeah.
00:08:04 This is a hard question about the KGB because it’s one of the most ruthless organizations,
00:08:08 but in general, are there lines, KGB agents at every level of the hierarchy that they
00:08:18 would not cross, political, legal, ethical, or does anything goes to achieve the goal?
00:08:25 I was only in touch with two types of agents, the technical experts, the ones that taught
00:08:35 me tradecraft, and they were like engineers and they were in charge of the secret writing
00:08:42 and the Morse code, shortwave radio reception, decryption, encryption, and that kind of stuff.
00:08:53 Those were just doing their job.
00:08:56 And the others, the ones that trained me, that prepared me for life in the United States,
00:09:03 they were nice people.
00:09:05 They were elegant people.
00:09:08 I don’t think they would not fit into the stereotype of the ruthless gun carrying agent.
00:09:19 Is it possible that you would not be aware of the parts of the KGB, I mean, it’s very
00:09:25 modular.
00:09:26 Would you?
00:09:27 Yeah.
00:09:28 It’s possible that you’re not aware of the parts of the KGB that are the quote unquote
00:09:30 muscle.
00:09:31 Oh, I didn’t know.
00:09:32 I would find out afterwards, after I retired and started doing some research, I had no
00:09:39 clue.
00:09:40 So you’re kind of operating in a bubble.
00:09:42 Oh, very much so.
00:09:43 I mean, this is what the KGB did really, really well, compartmentalization, and that was based
00:09:51 on the communist movement while it was still underground.
00:09:57 The cells were very small, so that maybe there were three, four members in one cell that
00:10:02 knew one another, and then they had a liaison to another cell.
00:10:07 The bottom line is if you got one of those folks were caught, they could maybe betray
00:10:13 four people or three, something like that, and the KGB continued with that tradition.
00:10:20 I have reason to believe that my handler, the person in Moscow that sort of directed
00:10:27 me and made decisions what to do and where to go, never met me personally.
00:10:33 There’s no reason to.
00:10:37 This actually was a big advantage over other intelligence services because you look at
00:10:45 what the CIA does.
00:10:46 Everybody blabs.
00:10:47 There’s a lot of leaks coming out of American intelligence.
00:10:50 I don’t think there’s as many leaks coming out of the Mossad.
00:10:54 Strong words from Jack Barsky, by the way.
00:10:57 That is a question I want to ask a little more systematically.
00:10:59 Is there something unique about the KGB compared to the other intelligence agencies?
00:11:05 Let’s talk British intelligence, MI6, Mossad, CIA.
00:11:11 Is there unique cultures, spirits, souls of the different organizations that maybe somehow
00:11:17 connect to the structures of government, connect maybe the values of the people, those kinds
00:11:22 of things?
00:11:23 I believe we were all pretty much strong believers in communism and the future of the world being…
00:11:31 In KGB?
00:11:32 Yes.
00:11:33 I think that unified us to a large degree, even the technicians.
00:11:38 It wasn’t something like, yeah, yeah, the parents believe this thing, but we know the
00:11:46 truth.
00:11:47 You really believe the story of communism.
00:11:49 Absolutely did.
00:11:50 And you need to look at the timeframe.
00:11:54 The Soviet Union after World War II made quite a bit of progress in influencing the Third
00:12:02 World.
00:12:03 I still remember when I was in middle school, we had a map, the map of the world, and it
00:12:09 was color coded.
00:12:11 So red was communism, that was the Soviet Union and the Eastern states, and then blue
00:12:16 was capitalism.
00:12:18 And then we had green, which were the Third World countries, and the green slowly turned
00:12:24 pink because a lot of Third World governments, like I’m looking at Angola, I’m looking at
00:12:30 Vietnam, a lot of these countries were very sympathetic to the Soviet Union.
00:12:40 And so we sort of knew that this would go on like that, and eventually we would take
00:12:45 over and pretty much overtake, that was the myth, overtake the United States, not only
00:12:55 militarily but also in terms of industrial production and so forth.
00:13:02 That was a stupid pipe dream.
00:13:03 The military, it was a standoff, as we know.
00:13:08 A stupid pipe dream.
00:13:13 Hitler had a stupid pipe dream that he executed it exceptionally effectively and on, if not
00:13:22 for a handful of military mistakes, the world could look very different today.
00:13:28 Well, the biggest one being invading the Soviet Union, particularly at the time that he did
00:13:34 it because he ran into the same thing that Napoleon ran into General Winter.
00:13:40 Well within, so Operation Barbarossa, within that he could have made different decisions.
00:13:49 For example, attacking, skipping Kiev and attacking Moscow directly, overthrowing the
00:13:56 government.
00:13:57 So marching, I guess that would be learning lessons from Napoleon as opposed to a different
00:14:03 kind of distribution of forces and then getting bogged down in the winter.
00:14:07 But the point is these ambitions sometimes do, the ambitions of empires sometimes do
00:14:14 materialize in the growth and the building and the establishment of those empires and
00:14:18 those empires write the history books in such a way that we don’t think of them as empires
00:14:25 or we certainly don’t think of them as the bad guys.
00:14:27 They write the history books, therefore they’re the good guys.
00:14:30 And right now America has effectively written the book about the good guys.
00:14:35 I happen to believe that book, but it’s, we should be humbled and open minded to realize
00:14:41 that that is in fact what is happening is effective empires write the history books
00:14:47 and tell us stories and tell us propaganda and tell us narratives that we believe because
00:14:51 we are human beings and we love to get together and believe ideas.
00:14:55 We love to dream of a beautiful world and try to build that beautiful world together
00:15:00 in the United States.
00:15:01 That’s a beautiful world.
00:15:02 The freedom of respect of human rights of all men are created equal pursuit of happiness.
00:15:11 You know, it always sounds good.
00:15:13 If you look at what the dream of communism is, it sure as heck in its words on the surface
00:15:19 sounds good.
00:15:20 Yes.
00:15:21 Respect for the workers.
00:15:22 Yes.
00:15:23 The working class, the lower classes that have been trodden on that have been stolen
00:15:27 from by the powerful, they deserve to have the money, the power, the respect that they
00:15:33 have earned through their hard work.
00:15:35 Sounds great.
00:15:36 And everybody gets along and we just have to, you know, uh, all men are wonderful people.
00:15:44 And if they, if they go bad, it has something to do with the fact that they have, they have
00:15:48 been oppressed, right?
00:15:51 And uh, that dream just never worked out.
00:15:54 And even, even it is when you think about it and I didn’t think about it when you’re
00:15:59 young, you know, you just emotionally, you accept it.
00:16:02 But when you think about it, somehow, uh, that new wonderful organization has to organize
00:16:09 itself even though Lenin predicted that the state eventually would go away.
00:16:14 Well, how does it, how does that work?
00:16:15 Then you have like anarchy, right?
00:16:17 You have to have an organization.
00:16:19 The only way to really organize a large number of people is with a hierarchy.
00:16:26 So and who gets to the top, the ones that are, that want to go to the top, the ones
00:16:32 that believe in themselves, the ones, the ones that know better than everybody else.
00:16:37 And once you have that hierarchy established, uh, there is no guarantee that it doesn’t
00:16:41 that it won’t go bad.
00:16:43 And actually when you look at history, every such hierarchy has gone bad.
00:16:48 You know, you look at Cuba, for instance, I believe Fidel Castro was a, an honest revolutionary.
00:16:55 I do believe that.
00:16:58 And so what did Cuba turn into?
00:17:00 Yeah.
00:17:01 There’s something about, and you speak about Vladimir Putin in this way, but let’s step
00:17:06 away from that for a second.
00:17:08 Is there something about being an honest revolutionary that wants to do good for their country and
00:17:15 you start to believe that, you know, better than everyone else how to do good on the country
00:17:20 and you very well might first, but then somehow that grows into a distortion field where,
00:17:30 you know, you keep believing, you know, what’s right.
00:17:33 And all the people who disagree with you, you stop seeing them as having a point.
00:17:38 You instead see them as like, um, um, evil manipulators of the truth that are actually
00:17:46 trying to hurt people for their own greed, for their own power.
00:17:49 And you will protect the people because you know, what’s good in the case of Stalin.
00:17:54 I, I mean, I don’t know, but it seems like he really believed that communism would bring
00:18:02 about a much better world.
00:18:04 I mean, there was a sense the, you have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet, this idea
00:18:12 that sacrifice is necessary to bring about a greater world.
00:18:18 And then the other aspect is sort of ruling by terror, creating terrorism, justified political
00:18:27 mechanism to achieve a better world.
00:18:30 But it wasn’t, I mean, perhaps he had to do that to be able to sleep at night with the
00:18:35 atrocities he’s committing.
00:18:37 He’s, I think he believed he will bring about a better world.
00:18:41 Yeah.
00:18:42 And by the way, the terror didn’t start with Stalin.
00:18:43 It started right after the Bolsheviks took over when Lenin told Mr. Dzerzhinsky, Commodore
00:18:52 Dzerzhinsky to build the Cheka and then execute the, this is what he called it, the red terror.
00:19:03 So at the birth of the Soviet Union, there was already terror and it was deliberate.
00:19:11 And it also was, it wasn’t just focused on the enemies, it was focused on whoever you
00:19:18 didn’t like.
00:19:19 There was no rule of law, there was no court cases, people were just pulled out of their
00:19:27 apartments and shot on sight.
00:19:31 And this was done by revolutionaries who were convinced that eventually, these sacrifices
00:19:40 had to be made and eventually that would lead to a much better planet.
00:19:44 And the populace believed this too, that those sacrifices in part.
00:19:48 I mean, this is such a dark thing about dictatorships is you believe it, but you’re also too afraid
00:19:59 to question your beliefs.
00:20:01 Like, you’re not directly afraid, but almost like, I don’t know what that is.
00:20:06 That’s almost like a subconscious fear.
00:20:08 Like don’t, there’s a dark room with a locked door, don’t look in that door.
00:20:13 Don’t check that door.
00:20:14 And there’s something about the United States that says, especially modern culture, it’s
00:20:19 like go to that door first and sort of question everything kind of, that’s the power of the
00:20:25 freedom of speech and the freedom of the press, but you can get almost become too critical
00:20:31 and too cynical of your own culture in that way.
00:20:33 So there’s a balance to strike, of course, but man, if communism is not a lesson of human
00:20:39 nature, I don’t know what is, but you believed, without thinking too much about it, you believed
00:20:44 in the story of, what did you see, just, you know, I came from the Soviet Union.
00:20:51 What did you maybe feel that’s right and good about communism, about the vision of communism?
00:21:01 Do you remember?
00:21:02 I think the biggest impetus in me believing in communism was that the communists, just
00:21:12 before Hitler took over, the communists were the only force in Germany that fought the
00:21:20 Nazis in the streets, and that’s a historic truth.
00:21:26 And communists were hunted down by the Nazis, killed, put in concentration camps.
00:21:34 And so what we knew, what we were taught, and I think that was a huge unforced error
00:21:41 by the Western countries, particularly the United States, that there were ex Nazis in
00:21:46 the government in West Germany.
00:21:49 And the most famous one was Reinhard Galen, who was in charge, was the general in charge
00:21:57 of the intelligence on the Eastern Front under Hitler.
00:22:05 And when the Allied won the war, it was decided that Galen was too important, his knowledge
00:22:15 and his organization was too important to not use.
00:22:21 So he was coopted by the CIA and eventually wound up being the head of the Bundesnachrichtendienst,
00:22:26 the CIA of West Germany.
00:22:29 That gave us, us, when I say us, the East German party, a huge propaganda victory.
00:22:36 I wanted to, because the emotional aspect of this was as follows.
00:22:42 When we were in, juniors in high school, and in those days, you were only allowed to go
00:22:54 to high school if you were in the top 10% of students, okay?
00:22:57 So this was going to be the next set of ruling elite in the country.
00:23:02 We were sent, we were required to visit a concentration camp.
00:23:09 And if you know what we as 17 year olds were made to look at, it was gut wrenching.
00:23:18 How can men do something like that to men, piles of corpses, lampshades made out of human
00:23:28 skin because that skin had tattoos on them, and shrunken heads like the size of my fist.
00:23:38 I mean, the girls all cried, and it made a huge impression.
00:23:42 And that was the Nazis, and the Communists defeated the Nazis.
00:23:48 They were the good guys.
00:23:49 Of course, in hindsight, if the Communists had come to power, it would have been just
00:23:53 the other way around, as we know, given the example of Stalin and Mao, right?
00:23:59 But we didn’t know that.
00:24:02 From the Russian and Soviet perspective, the Communist regime banded together to win the
00:24:10 Great Patriotic War.
00:24:12 And that was the second one, the big brother, the Soviet Union.
00:24:18 I mean, when I was approached by the KGB, that was like, oh, I felt so honored.
00:24:24 So we should say that we’re talking about East Germany, that you’re from East Germany.
00:24:31 Can you describe, you were born four years and what is it?
00:24:36 Yeah, four years.
00:24:37 10 days?
00:24:38 Yeah, sort of.
00:24:39 Very good.
00:24:40 After Germany’s unconditional surrender in World War II.
00:24:46 So what is East Germany?
00:24:47 What is West Germany?
00:24:48 What is East and West Germany?
00:24:51 What is that?
00:24:52 What’s the difference?
00:24:53 What’s the historical context here?
00:24:54 What is World War II again?
00:24:55 And then, let’s do it for some…
00:24:59 We don’t have to go to World War I, the result of which actually seeded World War II in some
00:25:05 respect.
00:25:06 Yes.
00:25:07 There’s a long history, yes.
00:25:09 But let’s start with World War II.
00:25:11 So when Hitler came to power, he and his leadership decided that the Germans needed more what
00:25:20 they call Lebensraum, that means room to live.
00:25:26 And they would start expanding and they went into France, they took Belgium, the Netherlands,
00:25:35 they annexed Austria and got a piece of Czechoslovakia.
00:25:44 And then they decided to march into the Soviet Union after they took Poland.
00:25:53 Cut up Poland together with the Soviet Union.
00:25:55 Yes.
00:25:56 They were friends.
00:25:57 Yes.
00:25:58 There was a nonaggression pact that was signed by Ribbentrop and Molotov, right?
00:26:03 I think both parties knew that eventually they would fall apart.
00:26:06 But at the time, it gave the Soviet Union a little more piece of Poland and a little
00:26:14 more time to prepare what they thought might happen down the road.
00:26:19 And the Germans had the time and the ability to pretty much conquer all of Western Europe.
00:26:29 Do you think Stalin really knew that it’s gonna fall apart?
00:26:33 Why would somebody like Stalin trust somebody like Hitler?
00:26:36 But why did he blunder so bad not to read the intelligence that was coming his way?
00:26:42 Oh, he doesn’t…
00:26:43 The troops are amassing on the border of the Soviet Union.
00:26:46 He didn’t trust his own intelligence apparatus.
00:26:48 Oh, boy.
00:26:49 Here’s one example.
00:26:52 There was a German communist who went underground when Hitler took over and he went to Japan
00:26:59 as a journalist.
00:27:00 His name is Richard Sorge.
00:27:03 Richard Sorge had really, really good intel about what the Japanese would do and not do.
00:27:11 I forgot exactly what it was, but it came to Moscow and Stalin totally ignored it.
00:27:18 And when Sorge was captured by the Japanese, the Soviet Union denied that he was one of
00:27:26 them there, so he was executed, the paranoia, again, does a lot of damage.
00:27:35 When you don’t believe your own intelligence apparatus, why bother having one?
00:27:41 Yeah, I mean, there…
00:27:44 But I’m sure there’s contradictory information coming in from the intelligence apparatus,
00:27:49 so it’s difficult.
00:27:50 I mean, first of all, nobody likes to be disagreed with, especially when you become more and
00:27:55 more powerful, and then the intelligence apparatus is probably giving information you don’t like.
00:28:00 It’s often negative information about, basically, information that says that the decisions you
00:28:09 made in the past are not great decisions, and that’s a difficult truth to deal with.
00:28:15 So in the modern times, if we hop around briefly, Vladimir Putin has been not happy with the
00:28:26 intelligence of the FSB, thereby, at least if you read the news, choosing to put more
00:28:34 priority to the GRU for the intelligence in Ukraine.
00:28:39 But I guess I suppose the same story happens there, as it does throughout history, is paranoia.
00:28:46 I give you an example that comes from a very reliable source, and that my best German friend
00:28:59 worked as a chemist in the Stasi, East German intelligence.
00:29:04 And he eventually, he rose to the rank of major and was in charge of the forgery department.
00:29:15 It’s very likely that he made passports that I use to travel.
00:29:20 He was aware that there was intelligence that was collected.
00:29:24 The Stasi was really good.
00:29:26 They had about a thousand people in West Germany, undercover agents, some of them in government,
00:29:32 and the central committee of the party, the decision makers ignored it because it didn’t
00:29:37 quite fit in their worldview, it didn’t quite fit into their plans.
00:29:43 So and one delicious thing that I just want to add on to this, when Gorbachev wrote his
00:29:53 book about Perestroika and Glasnost, the East German rulers did not like it.
00:30:01 They were much, much more orthodox.
00:30:03 So they had to print the books in translation, guess where they wound up.
00:30:09 They were piled up in the hallways of the Stasi.
00:30:13 They bought the entire print run.
00:30:16 It’s fascinating.
00:30:19 So but let’s backtrack.
00:30:20 So Operation Barbarossa, invasion of Hitler to the Soviet Union, and then hopefully that
00:30:26 leads us all the way to East Germany, West Germany after the end of the war.
00:30:30 So what happened was the Soviet Union rolled into the eastern part of Germany and the Western
00:30:36 allies took a larger chunk, which was eventually, it was occupied by the three allies, the French,
00:30:49 the English and the Americans, and the eastern part was occupied by Soviet troops.
00:30:55 And the Soviet troops actually conquered Berlin.
00:31:01 But in a contract, they decided that Berlin would be ruled by the four allies and they
00:31:09 all had free access to that city.
00:31:15 I was born in the East German part, which very quickly became ruled by communists, socialists,
00:31:25 the Communist Party and the Socialist Party United, but the leaders of that new party
00:31:31 were all communists.
00:31:32 It’s nevertheless called democratic.
00:31:34 Yes, German Democratic Republic, which was formed a couple of months after I was born.
00:31:42 I was born into a remote southeastern corner of East Germany.
00:31:49 And interestingly enough, genetically, I’m only half German.
00:31:54 The other half is Czech and Polish.
00:31:58 Because where I grew up, I could walk to the Nysa River, which was the border with Poland,
00:32:07 and it was only about an hour by bus to get to the Czech border.
00:32:11 So that’s why I’m a mix.
00:32:14 So okay, so East Germany after the war was communist, socialist, and then the West Germany
00:32:20 was representing the Western world with democracy.
00:32:25 And what the United States did, this was really, really very forward looking, very strategic,
00:32:35 the Marshall Plan to rebuild the economy in the West as compared to what the Soviet Union
00:32:41 did.
00:32:42 Whatever they hadn’t destroyed on the way in, they took with them on the way out for
00:32:48 reparations because they had every right to do that.
00:32:52 But it was not a good idea because East Germany was always behind in economic development
00:32:59 to their Western counterpart.
00:33:01 So when you were young, as today, but when you were young, you were clearly an exceptional
00:33:08 student.
00:33:09 Yeah.
00:33:10 You’re a brilliant academic superstar.
00:33:12 Let’s go to your childhood.
00:33:14 What’s the fond memory from childhood that you have in being woken up to the beauty of
00:33:21 this world and sort of being curious about all the mysteries around you that I think
00:33:27 ultimately lead to academic success?
00:33:33 Or was it…
00:33:35 The fondest memory that comes to mind is my first kiss.
00:33:38 How’s that?
00:33:39 Do you want to go to the details of that?
00:33:44 What did you make of that kiss?
00:33:47 What did that teach you about yourself and human nature and all that?
00:33:51 It taught me only in hindsight.
00:33:53 At the time, I was just like, my God, I was head over heels in love.
00:33:57 I was 16 years old.
00:34:00 And I knew in those days, I admired girls.
00:34:05 I knew the girls were like sort of magical beings.
00:34:10 They were not capable of doing evil things.
00:34:13 They were beautiful and they had to be adored.
00:34:16 And one of them actually loved me too.
00:34:20 She came after me initially.
00:34:23 And that too was magical for you.
00:34:25 Oh my God, yeah.
00:34:28 And literally, I dedicated…
00:34:33 That’s when I started studying.
00:34:34 Up until that point, I just did whatever I had to do to be in A minus students.
00:34:39 And that’s when I started studying.
00:34:41 And every A that I got, I dedicated to her, sometimes explicitly, because I knew I was
00:34:48 going to take care of her as I grew up.
00:34:50 So you’re going to have to work hard in this world to be somebody that could be adored
00:34:54 by those you love.
00:34:55 Yes, you’re right.
00:34:57 You know that kiss, the next day, I was running around in school with a grin on my face.
00:35:05 And maybe that in some way, that grin never fades.
00:35:09 So what about the heartbreak that followed?
00:35:15 But just to expand on this a little more, because that passion that I had was an indication
00:35:27 that eventually love would play a big role in my life.
00:35:30 I wasn’t aware of it.
00:35:31 I was just directed at this one girl.
00:35:34 But you understood that that feeling that taught you something, like that you’re somebody
00:35:39 that can feel those things.
00:35:41 And that’s a strong part of who you are.
00:35:46 And therefore, it will also be a part of directing your life trajectory.
00:35:50 Yeah.
00:35:51 So we were an item for two years.
00:35:55 I lost my virginity.
00:35:57 She was not a virgin at the time.
00:36:01 My competitor was, he studied medicine in college already.
00:36:09 In which ways was he better than you?
00:36:11 He wasn’t.
00:36:12 He was older, and he was more experienced.
00:36:14 And he was going to be a doctor.
00:36:18 But I was there, and he was not.
00:36:21 The presence wins.
00:36:24 But you still had big dreams.
00:36:25 You wanted to be a tenured professor.
00:36:28 Yes, yes.
00:36:29 So you still want to outdo that guy.
00:36:32 Oh, yeah.
00:36:33 And she eventually told me that he was not in the picture anymore.
00:36:39 So it was back and forth, back and forth.
00:36:41 And our senior year, we were an item, and I was just dreaming of the future.
00:36:48 But we didn’t figure out that in those days, if she went to college in Berlin and I went
00:36:55 to college in Jena, and the distance between the two cities was too much for a weekend
00:37:06 visit, public transportation was very slow, and nobody had cars.
00:37:13 So the circumstance of life, you drifted apart.
00:37:18 And so we interacted with a couple of letters, and then I got the goodbye letter.
00:37:23 Oh, my God.
00:37:24 That hurt?
00:37:26 I can still feel it.
00:37:30 That’s a good thing.
00:37:31 You could feel the pain.
00:37:33 That’s still part of love.
00:37:36 It’s that the pain of loss is still part of love.
00:37:39 And then you kind of change that.
00:37:41 You shape it, and you give that love in deeper, more profound ways to future people.
00:37:46 That’s very well put.
00:37:47 But at the time, it emptied me out.
00:37:51 If I had a tendency to have suicidal thoughts, I might have killed myself.
00:38:00 Would you say that was one of the darker moments of your life?
00:38:04 Let me see.
00:38:07 As a single moment, yes.
00:38:09 So I still remember we had a mail slot in the front door, and I wasn’t expecting a letter
00:38:19 any day, and there was the letter.
00:38:20 I go upstairs into my bedroom, and I open it, and I read it, and just like the life
00:38:29 went out of me.
00:38:30 You’re just there alone, and you have to experience this pain alone.
00:38:33 And now you’re deeply alone in this world.
00:38:37 Yes, because there was no emotional relationship with my parents.
00:38:46 I literally had nobody.
00:38:47 So this love you have in you had no place to go.
00:38:51 It was choked off, all right?
00:38:55 But what I did was I wanted to go on, right?
00:39:02 And so I threw myself into the study of chemistry.
00:39:07 I outworked all of my fellow students in a big way.
00:39:13 I worked my ass off, and since I was pretty smart, too, I just aced practically everything.
00:39:20 And for the first two years in college, and look, we go to college, there are all these
00:39:24 pretty girls, and there’s dances and everything.
00:39:26 We had this great student club where I didn’t look at any girls.
00:39:32 Eventually I knew I was going to, you know, want to have female companionship, but love?
00:39:38 Uh uh.
00:39:39 No more.
00:39:40 That hurts.
00:39:41 There’s a song that goes, love hurts.
00:39:43 Yeah, I know that one.
00:39:44 That’s true.
00:39:45 There’s actually many songs that have a similar message, yes.
00:39:50 So during that time, during your excellence, just being an exceptional student of chemistry,
00:39:58 let’s go to your story.
00:39:59 So in your book, Deep Undercover, My Secret Life and Tangled Allegiances as a KGB Spy
00:40:06 in America, and in the really, really excellent podcast series that I’ve been listening to,
00:40:12 people should definitely listen to, it’s called The Agent.
00:40:15 You document your time as a KGB spy before, during, and after.
00:40:19 Can you tell the story of when you first were contacted by the KGB, how you were invited,
00:40:28 the offer to join was made?
00:40:30 Well, it was a big surprise, and I never thought of myself as a potential agent.
00:40:36 You know, I was going to be a tenured professor and join the ruling elite, because in Europe,
00:40:42 tenured professors are few.
00:40:44 It’s not like in the United States, you know, anybody who teaches at colleges has a title
00:40:48 of professor.
00:40:49 Easy now.
00:40:50 It’s true.
00:40:51 That’s not a criticism.
00:40:52 That’s 100%.
00:40:53 So we should also clarify that, tenured professor or not, it is a very prestigious position
00:41:00 throughout history of Europe.
00:41:03 I would say, especially communists, I don’t actually know the full landscape of the respect,
00:41:09 but at least in the Soviet Union where I grew up, it’s a prestigious position.
00:41:13 Absolutely was.
00:41:14 And the town of Yanuk had about 100,000 people live there, and I would, it’s a wild guess,
00:41:22 but maybe 30 tenured professors, and they were part of the ruling elite.
00:41:26 I was trying to do as much as I can to live the good life, right?
00:41:32 You know, have access to things that are nice.
00:41:35 Yeah, but I think the powerful thing about being a professor in that context of East
00:41:41 Germany is the prestige.
00:41:44 And the feeling of superiority.
00:41:47 You know, I was full of myself.
00:41:49 You know, when you are the best of the best, and in my third year I received a scholarship,
00:41:57 the Karl Marx Scholarship, that was limited to 100 concurrent recipients in the country.
00:42:05 So my God, you know, I was full of myself.
00:42:08 I believed in myself, hook, line, and sinker.
00:42:11 And I was also, I got a lot of accolades from teachers and fellow students.
00:42:22 They were feeding the ego, the old, I mean, you have to believe in yourself often when
00:42:29 you’re young to truly, to excel.
00:42:32 And you sure as heck did.
00:42:34 But you know, as a balance, you need a mentor, somebody who puts things in perspective, and
00:42:39 I didn’t have one.
00:42:41 My father was a nonentity and nobody else.
00:42:44 They all looked up to me.
00:42:46 I was an up and coming guy, right?
00:42:47 So there’s no father figure that put you in your place.
00:42:50 Not at all.
00:42:51 And I give you one extreme example.
00:42:53 It was down the road when I fathered a child out of wedlock.
00:43:00 That was in my fifth year, I believe.
00:43:03 The Communist Party in East Germany was very moralistic.
00:43:07 If you did that, they would have a talk with you and give you whatever, a severe reprimand.
00:43:13 Nobody even mentioned a word about this.
00:43:16 So yeah, so this is how this ego gets nurtured.
00:43:20 But anyway, getting back to how the KGB came in contact.
00:43:25 So they most likely got knowledge of me by, you know, looking at Stasi records.
00:43:34 What’s Stasi?
00:43:35 That was East German secret police, Staatssicherheit, security for the state.
00:43:42 There’s that word security again.
00:43:45 And they pretty much kept a record on everybody in the country.
00:43:50 And so when you look through this, and this is what the KGB was looking for.
00:43:55 They were looking for candidates, particularly for this kind of job that they had in mind
00:44:00 for me, for candidates who were not, you know, in their mid 20s, who were not fully developed
00:44:09 yet, but mature enough to get there and still young enough, right?
00:44:17 Because at that level of maturity, you can test whether they can handle this kind of
00:44:20 job.
00:44:21 Yes.
00:44:22 Absolutely right.
00:44:23 And one day I got a knock on my door and my dorm room door was on a Saturday.
00:44:32 And they knew that I was by myself.
00:44:37 How did they know it?
00:44:39 We had a, I pieced this together.
00:44:43 We had an exchange student from the Soviet Union, and he was next door to me.
00:44:51 And he befriended me.
00:44:54 So he got to know me a little bit.
00:44:57 And the pattern was that my roommate would always go home for the weekend.
00:45:02 And of course they also knew which door to knock on, even though there were no nameplates.
00:45:08 Somebody knocks.
00:45:11 And I knew it was a stranger because if it had been a student, the pattern was that we
00:45:17 would knock on the door and then go in.
00:45:18 We wouldn’t wait for somebody to let us in.
00:45:22 So I waited for 10 seconds and he didn’t come in.
00:45:26 I knew that it was a stranger.
00:45:28 I said, come on in.
00:45:30 And in came a person who spoke fluent German.
00:45:34 So that was not a KGB guy.
00:45:36 That was a collaborator.
00:45:40 And so he started making a bunch of small talk.
00:45:42 He introduced himself as a representative of Carl Zeiss Jena, which was the optics company
00:45:52 that made really, really good optical instruments, was one of the best in the world.
00:45:58 So it’s like the super prestigious company in that place.
00:46:05 And he said that he was a representative of that company and he would just want to find
00:46:11 out what my plans were after graduating from college.
00:46:16 And at that point I knew he wasn’t from Carl Zeiss Jena because in those days there was
00:46:22 no recruitment.
00:46:25 When you were done, if you were in the top 10% of the graduates, you would most likely
00:46:34 pick to stay and get a doctorate.
00:46:37 And the rest of them were assigned.
00:46:40 You had no choice.
00:46:43 So that guy was an idiot.
00:46:48 He didn’t know the basics about…
00:46:50 You interviewed him a little bit to understand, like feel out, is this guy full of shit?
00:46:57 Because yeah, he’s a stranger showing up to your dorm room.
00:47:00 I knew that at that point, I knew he was a Stasi, which is wrong, but it doesn’t matter
00:47:06 because he was German and I had no idea that the KGB would be involved.
00:47:10 So sorry to pause briefly, did you have a sense, did people know that there’s a Stasi
00:47:17 type of organization, that there is a large number of people doing this kind of work in
00:47:23 East Germany in order for you to make that guess?
00:47:27 Yeah, we knew that the Stasi existed.
00:47:31 We even had our James Bond, we had a series called the Invisible Visor where a Stasi employee
00:47:40 in East German would go into West Germany and hunt down Nazis.
00:47:45 So yes, the Stasi was known to be there.
00:47:47 And admired in part or feared or both?
00:47:51 I thought they were necessary and I admired them.
00:47:55 James Bond.
00:47:56 Yes, the reason I did so because I had no information to the contrary.
00:48:01 I never knew anybody personally or even somewhat removed who was followed by the Stasi, was
00:48:16 put in jail.
00:48:17 I had no clue.
00:48:19 I had no clue that they did a lot of damage and that they were doing a lot of surveillance
00:48:24 of the East German population the same way the KGB did for the Soviet Union.
00:48:30 So for me to be talking to somebody from the Stasi, it raised my interest.
00:48:38 I was curious what comes next because I sort of knew something interesting would be coming
00:48:44 at me and I had no other thoughts about that at that point.
00:48:49 So when he was finally, when he went for the kill by reversing himself, he said, you know,
00:48:56 I got to tell you that I really, I really am not from Karl Stasi, you know, I’m from
00:49:00 the government.
00:49:01 Okay.
00:49:02 Thank you for pointing that out.
00:49:05 And then he asked this question, he says, can you imagine to one day work for the government?
00:49:11 And so I gave a pretty clever answer.
00:49:14 I said, yes, but not as a chemist.
00:49:17 So I answered the question that he didn’t ask.
00:49:21 I helped him out.
00:49:23 So we made an arrangement to meet for lunch, which in Germany is the main meal at the number
00:49:31 one restaurant in Vienna, you know, I still remember what I ate.
00:49:35 What was that?
00:49:36 Rump steak with butter on top and French fries, it was my favorite.
00:49:43 Anyway, so when I get to the restaurant, I saw this fellow sitting in the back there
00:49:48 at the table and there was another person at the table.
00:49:52 So I was a little bit hesitant because in those days it was not unusual for perfect
00:49:58 strangers to share a table because there wasn’t enough tables and chairs and so forth.
00:50:04 So I didn’t know if I could approach him, but he got up and came to me and he took me
00:50:09 to the table and he said, I want to introduce Herman.
00:50:15 We work with our Soviet comrades.
00:50:18 Aha, KGB.
00:50:21 And then he disappeared.
00:50:22 He says, I got something else to do.
00:50:24 I never knew his name.
00:50:26 He just handed me over to the KGB.
00:50:29 What was the relationship between the KGB and Astazies as collaborators, close collaborators
00:50:35 or just distant associates?
00:50:37 They were pretty close collaborators as I told you that they bought forged documents
00:50:43 that the Germans made because the Germans were better at forgery.
00:50:47 They also exchanged information, but they didn’t trust each other 100% and I tell you
00:50:54 why I know that.
00:50:56 So they recruited me to send me to West Germany.
00:51:01 As I already said, East Germany had a thousand agents over there.
00:51:04 Why would they want to have their own?
00:51:06 Yeah.
00:51:07 Yeah.
00:51:08 Okay.
00:51:09 This is a fascinating internal and external dynamic of distrust.
00:51:13 Yeah.
00:51:14 Okay.
00:51:15 So there you are welcomed by the KGB.
00:51:19 When did the offer, the invite come?
00:51:21 Well, that took a while.
00:51:22 So Herman and I had an unofficial relationship for about a year and a half.
00:51:29 I would meet him once a week, once every two weeks, initially in his car, but then he took
00:51:39 me to a conspirational flat that was an apartment that was occupied by a party member, a lady,
00:51:49 single lady.
00:51:50 When we came in, she would leave, she left us tea and cookies and then we could freely
00:51:55 talk.
00:51:56 He also at that time gave me some West German literature magazines to read, which was of
00:52:03 course forbidden.
00:52:04 So I’m starting to feel somewhat special and as we were talking about what they had in
00:52:11 mind for me in general, I knew that I was going to be even more special because I would
00:52:17 be above the law.
00:52:20 I would operate outside the law of the countries I would go to as well as East Germany because
00:52:27 the magazines and eventually when I joined up, they told me I had better watch West German
00:52:35 television, which was also not explicitly prohibited, but it was something that could
00:52:43 get you in trouble.
00:52:44 So on many levels, you’re super special, you’re the James Bond.
00:52:48 Yes.
00:52:49 Yes.
00:52:50 What was that recruitment testing process like?
00:52:55 Testing whether you have what it takes to be a KGB agent?
00:53:01 First of all, we had very in depth talks, Herman and I, about life and I still am very
00:53:16 honest in sharing my feelings.
00:53:19 Philosophical or personal?
00:53:21 Personal.
00:53:22 I even told him that I was shy around the girls.
00:53:26 He was giving you relationship advice or what?
00:53:29 How old was he?
00:53:30 So what was the dynamic?
00:53:31 Can you tell me, was it a father, son?
00:53:33 No, older brother.
00:53:34 Older brother.
00:53:35 Older brother.
00:53:36 Yeah, he was maybe in his early to mid 30s and I was maybe 10 years younger.
00:53:42 And what languages did he speak?
00:53:43 He spoke German pretty well.
00:53:46 But he’s originally from Russia?
00:53:48 Yeah, with a Russian accent.
00:53:50 So I got in trouble one time with him when I asked him, is your real name German?
00:53:57 He didn’t like that.
00:53:58 He didn’t like it.
00:53:59 Was he good with girls?
00:54:00 No, no.
00:54:01 I remember what he told me, he says, you’ve got to understand one thing, they’re looking
00:54:07 for guys too.
00:54:10 That’s all.
00:54:11 Oh, girls are looking for guys too?
00:54:13 Yeah.
00:54:14 Absolutely.
00:54:15 It’s a competitive game.
00:54:16 Yeah.
00:54:17 Yeah.
00:54:18 So that little flame of love that we talked about and all the shapes that it takes in
00:54:23 our life, did he talk to you about that, that that could be taken advantage of, that that
00:54:29 could be used or was it implied?
00:54:32 Yeah, but not in, it was not very focused, not in great detail.
00:54:36 So let’s, so we talked about personal stuff and you know, like, dislikes, he gave me tasks.
00:54:43 For instance, when my friend and I hitchhiked from East Germany all the way down to Bulgaria,
00:54:50 he told me to write a report about it, what I saw.
00:54:53 So fundamentally he wanted to see how well I can write and how well I can report, how
00:55:01 well I observe.
00:55:04 He also asked me to write some profiles about fellow students.
00:55:08 I don’t believe that was for them to give him to the Stasi, it was just like, how well
00:55:12 do I characterize people?
00:55:14 That’s important when you’re talking about, when I was in the US, active in the US I operated
00:55:21 as a spotter.
00:55:22 So I did exactly that.
00:55:23 I wrote profiles about people.
00:55:26 He also gave me some tasks to do that were rather unpleasant.
00:55:36 He would give me an address and a name of the people who lived at the address and he
00:55:42 told me to go there, ring the doorbell and find out something about a relative who lived
00:55:49 in West Germany.
00:55:52 That is undercover exploration, right?
00:55:55 So you go, you make up a story and somehow win the confidence of your target to tell
00:56:01 you something that you want to know.
00:56:04 Was that, did that come naturally to you?
00:56:06 No, no, I hated it.
00:56:07 The charisma involved, which part did you hate?
00:56:09 Charisma, I think, I didn’t know that I had it.
00:56:13 It took you some time to discover.
00:56:15 You know, I was, I always was and I still am to some degree a bit shy.
00:56:21 I lost a lot of the shyness after moving to the South because, here in the United States,
00:56:26 because you don’t have to be shy, you know.
00:56:31 You can let your love shine.
00:56:33 That’s exactly right.
00:56:34 So, but anyway, I hated doing that, but I did it well.
00:56:38 I still remember.
00:56:39 So I, in those days, I had a beard and I rang the bell and…
00:56:46 Tall, handsome fella.
00:56:47 Yeah.
00:56:48 And I looked the part, I said, I’m a sociology student and I’m doing a survey and I asked
00:56:54 a whole bunch of questions, would you like to answer the questions?
00:56:58 No problem.
00:57:00 And then I directed the conversation to the lady’s private life and she actually gave
00:57:09 me information.
00:57:10 She volunteered information that I wanted to know.
00:57:13 Beautiful.
00:57:14 I did well.
00:57:15 And the other one that I didn’t like, but I also did well with, when Herman drove me
00:57:22 around the city and showed me a building and he said, find out what organization is in
00:57:27 there, what they do.
00:57:29 We get to know some people and I did that pretty well also.
00:57:33 You know, you have to be inventive, you know, to come up with a cover story and I’ve always
00:57:40 been quite inventive, you know, I’m a storyteller at heart and that, I didn’t know it then,
00:57:48 but you know, I…
00:57:49 But there was still something unpleasant about it.
00:57:52 Yes.
00:57:53 Yes.
00:57:54 Which part was unpleasant?
00:57:55 Well, the shyness and then, you know, I wasn’t very comfortable lying.
00:57:59 I became comfortable down the road, but you know, I was brutally honest and never hid
00:58:08 anything of me.
00:58:12 But you know, over time you lose that uncomfortable feeling and you rationalize that you’ve got
00:58:21 to do it.
00:58:22 There’s only one way, right?
00:58:23 And you’re serving a good cause.
00:58:25 So you were talking to Herman for a year and a half?
00:58:28 A year and a half.
00:58:29 And then how did that progress?
00:58:31 Yes.
00:58:32 So he finally, I guess he sent a report to headquarters in Berlin and then he sent me
00:58:40 on a three week, quote unquote, practice trip to Berlin.
00:58:45 This was the first time when I had like a conspiratorial meeting where I had an address
00:58:53 and a time and a code phrase and I met another agent.
00:58:59 His name was Boris.
00:59:01 These names were meaningless.
00:59:02 They were all like cover names, right?
00:59:04 So what was the code and the meaning?
00:59:06 What was then?
00:59:07 Can you give a little more detail?
00:59:08 That code I don’t remember.
00:59:10 Not the code, but like, what do you mean by code?
00:59:13 So what was…
00:59:14 I tell you, the code we used when I met while I was active, I would approach the other person
00:59:22 who I thought may be the person I want to meet.
00:59:25 We both had something with us or on us to make us more likely to be the right person.
00:59:36 And I would ask him the following questions, excuse me, I’m looking for Susan Green.
00:59:45 And he would answer, yes, you must be David.
00:59:48 Stupid.
00:59:50 If I ask a stranger, they would look at me, well, how could I help you?
00:59:56 So I know it’s the wrong guy.
00:59:58 It’s just a low probability that the right thing would be said, so it’s a nice entry.
01:00:03 And it seems like a safe statement if it’s not the right person, it would just come off
01:00:08 absurd or crazy or whatever.
01:00:10 You would have made a good secret agent.
01:00:12 You know exactly…
01:00:13 How do you know I’m not?
01:00:15 This is…
01:00:16 We’ll discuss this further.
01:00:19 I’m dressed like one.
01:00:21 Actually, yeah, were there any dress code?
01:00:24 No, just fit in.
01:00:26 Fit in.
01:00:27 No matter what.
01:00:28 And then be creative.
01:00:29 Yeah.
01:00:30 Figure out ways to fit.
01:00:31 Right.
01:00:32 So anyways, he gave me some tasks and since I had rented a room in a house, he gave me
01:00:40 Western literature to read and we spent time together and there was a practice run to West
01:00:54 Germany.
01:00:55 Actually, there were two and that was very important.
01:00:58 In hindsight, I figured that out.
01:01:01 So I traveled to West Germany, no, not to West Berlin, with an East German passport
01:01:08 that was stamped that that individual was allowed to go to the West.
01:01:13 And there was a part of the border that was only guarded by Soviet troops and that’s where
01:01:24 they smuggled me into West Germany.
01:01:26 I got on the subway and then appeared in West Berlin.
01:01:33 No Americans, no Brits, no French knew that I had entered.
01:01:38 Irish documents?
01:01:39 No, no, this was an East German passport.
01:01:41 It was real.
01:01:42 Okay.
01:01:43 Okay.
01:01:44 So and the first trip, all they wanted me to do is just walk around, smell the air,
01:01:52 have a beer or whatever and eat a sausage and then come back.
01:01:57 The second trip, I had a task very similar to the one that I had back in Jena to ring
01:02:04 the doorbell someplace and talk to some people and that worked very well also.
01:02:11 I should mention that you talk about that, you know, eat a sausage, drink some beer.
01:02:17 I suppose that’s a good test too to see how you behave under Western, like when first
01:02:24 introduced to the Western culture.
01:02:25 Like this is why I might not make a good agent is when I first came to the United States
01:02:33 in the supermarket, like bananas, as many bananas as I want to eat.
01:02:40 That I think that would break me.
01:02:43 It’s a shock.
01:02:45 It’s a shock to have access to Western culture.
01:02:49 You’re getting very close to the reason they actually made me do these two practice trips.
01:02:57 When I first emerged on West Berlin territory, I felt highly uncomfortable.
01:03:04 That was at the enemy, right?
01:03:06 And I saw the cops everywhere and even though those cops had like light blue uniforms, nothing,
01:03:12 they weren’t standouts.
01:03:13 So I was wondering, you know, if they knew that, you know, I had like KGB on my forehead.
01:03:18 So you were paranoid that they would know, they would see.
01:03:20 I was scared, but I overcame that.
01:03:24 So that’s, can we just linger on that because I suppose that’s a natural, like if I give
01:03:29 anybody on the street the mission to do the mission you had to do is they would be paranoid.
01:03:35 That’s a natural human feeling is am I being watched?
01:03:39 Do they know?
01:03:41 Like if you try to steal something from a store, there’s going to be a feeling like,
01:03:47 are they watching me?
01:03:48 Are the cameras watching?
01:03:49 Are the people watching me?
01:03:50 They all know that kind of stuff.
01:03:51 So you have to over, or you have to be somehow rugged and robust to that kind of feeling
01:03:56 and overcome it.
01:03:57 Yes, exactly.
01:03:58 So and something very interesting happened while I was being trained in Berlin, I met
01:04:04 a classmate of mine from high school and he confided to me that he was recruited by the
01:04:11 Stasi to become a spy, go as a spy to West Germany.
01:04:16 And he also had this practice trip and he peed in his pants.
01:04:20 He went back and told him, I can’t do that.
01:04:23 Just from the terror, that paranoia.
01:04:27 Now this guy’s career was over.
01:04:30 He had an engineering degree, he was a pretty smart guy, he was just for the rest of his
01:04:39 life and he’s still alive I believe, floating around and trading in model railroads and
01:04:45 stuff like that.
01:04:46 You mean do you think that experience broke him?
01:04:49 They wouldn’t let him back in.
01:04:51 Oh, I see.
01:04:52 They, oh.
01:04:53 Yeah.
01:04:54 So this is a test that if you fail, you pay the price.
01:04:56 I had no idea that, you know, something bad would happen if I failed that test, but I
01:05:03 didn’t.
01:05:04 Yeah.
01:05:05 I didn’t fail.
01:05:06 So, and this led then to the offer, all right, and after, you know, Boris was happy with
01:05:13 me and he told his boss who was most likely the head of the KGB in East Berlin and I had
01:05:21 an appointment to meet.
01:05:22 In East Germany.
01:05:23 Yes.
01:05:24 In East Germany.
01:05:25 Yeah.
01:05:26 All of East Germany.
01:05:27 Yes.
01:05:28 That’s right.
01:05:29 An appointment to meet with him and as we walk into the room, there was this huge desk
01:05:35 and a little guy sitting behind it, very, very, just like little and unimpressive, right?
01:05:45 A lot of paraphernalia, like, you know, had a bust of Dzerzhinsky on his desk and some
01:05:53 paintings of Lenin and so forth, but when the guy opened his mouth, he went like, whoa.
01:06:03 Huge psychological energy.
01:06:06 He spoke only Russian now and initially, he would, you know, start the bet with five minutes
01:06:12 worth of propaganda, why we’re doing what we’re doing, I didn’t need that, I understood
01:06:17 most of it, but when I didn’t understand, I’d ask Boris to translate and then he sprung
01:06:25 it on me and I was not prepared.
01:06:27 He said, so what, are you in or not?
01:06:30 And I was, no, I hadn’t made up my mind.
01:06:34 I wasn’t expecting that would come and so I said to him, I’m not really trained, you
01:06:43 know, there’s a lot of things I need to learn and I came up with a couple of really stupid
01:06:46 things, one not so stupid, but the other one was, I don’t know why I said that, I said,
01:06:51 for instance, I need to learn how to drive a car and to type with a typewriter and he
01:06:58 got really annoyed and he said, don’t worry about it, we’ll train you.
01:07:03 But I got to tell you, we need people who are decisive.
01:07:06 So you got until tomorrow noon to give Boris your decision.
01:07:12 That made for a sleepless night.
01:07:15 So what was going through your mind?
01:07:17 Well I had, this was almost 50, 50, I knew I was going to have a huge career, a good
01:07:26 career.
01:07:27 It was on my way because I was already employed by the university as an assistant professor.
01:07:35 So that career would be to become a professor, become a 10 year professor, be a world class.
01:07:40 Yes.
01:07:41 Jena had become my hometown.
01:07:43 I really loved the place.
01:07:45 It was my oyster and my family was my basketball team.
01:07:54 You love playing basketball.
01:07:55 Oh absolutely.
01:07:56 Yeah.
01:07:57 So this is home.
01:07:58 This is home.
01:07:59 This is where your love is.
01:08:00 This was home.
01:08:01 Did you understand that the choice involved leaving the home behind?
01:08:05 Yes.
01:08:06 And the one thing I didn’t have, the two things I didn’t have, an emotional relationship
01:08:11 with my mother and I didn’t have a steady girlfriend at the time.
01:08:16 I think Freud would have a lot to say about that, but yeah, go ahead.
01:08:20 But the connection between those two, but yeah, I’m sure.
01:08:24 By the way, my friend Günther, the one who worked for the Stasi, was also, the Stasi
01:08:29 tried to recruit him as an agent, but he had a love relationship at the time and he said
01:08:36 politely, no, I won’t.
01:08:37 I can’t.
01:08:38 So you didn’t have, that’s the one thing that really could have held you to this place
01:08:44 is love.
01:08:45 So you got the career on the one hand, my basketball team, the town that I would be
01:08:49 part of the ruling elite of, and then we had this great adventure and the ability to contribute
01:08:57 to the victory, the worldwide victory of communism and stick it to the Nazis and of course the
01:09:04 feeling that you’re really special.
01:09:07 Yeah.
01:09:08 James Bond.
01:09:09 Yeah.
01:09:10 What’s, the question, do I want to be a tenured professor or James Bond?
01:09:15 Yes.
01:09:16 And as funny as that sounds, that was probably a difficult decision.
01:09:19 It was a difficult decision, but fundamentally it wasn’t, and it wasn’t my zeal to help the
01:09:27 revolution.
01:09:28 It was my, what they called, what the Stasi was looking for, the KGB was looking for in
01:09:37 a character that they would send over a well controlled inclination to adventure.
01:09:42 Okay.
01:09:43 Yeah.
01:09:44 Yeah.
01:09:45 James Bond.
01:09:46 What do you say?
01:09:49 In the love of women.
01:09:50 Yeah.
01:09:51 I was, yes, I got to put this in right here because I’m telling people I have two things
01:09:58 in common with James Bond.
01:10:01 These are my initials, JB, and I got the girl too, three times.
01:10:07 Yeah.
01:10:08 I mean that’s, and that’s adventure.
01:10:11 Yeah.
01:10:12 And the ability to travel to the West because the West was closed off to us, we could go
01:10:18 to foreign countries, but they all had to be communist countries.
01:10:21 You know, I wanted to see Paris because I had fallen in love with the Honore Balzac
01:10:29 who wrote a phenomenal set of novels that I just ate up.
01:10:35 And so when I eventually did go to Paris, I knew all the places already because he described
01:10:40 them all.
01:10:41 Okay, so that one, it was a, it was 5149, but eventually it, and you know, when you,
01:10:49 when you do the side by side intellectual comparison, that doesn’t work.
01:10:55 It becomes a tie.
01:10:56 And then, you know, you just go with your gut and I said, Hey, I’m in.
01:11:00 So now that you successfully passed the test and you were sitting with this unimpressive
01:11:06 man and had the invite and had to sleep on it and have made the decision to join.
01:11:13 Yeah.
01:11:14 What was next?
01:11:15 I was just told, you know, that I was being recruited by the state department of East
01:11:20 Germany.
01:11:21 I was going to become a diplomat.
01:11:24 I must have had some paper, but I forgot because just by saying so, then that would, that wouldn’t
01:11:30 have worked.
01:11:31 There’s some kind of document that says that, and that was the only entanglement you had
01:11:35 to that, to that place.
01:11:37 No love.
01:11:38 No basketball, basketball, giving up basketball was huge for me.
01:11:43 I love playing that game.
01:11:44 I started playing basketball when I was 18.
01:11:48 That’s a little late.
01:11:49 Are you better offensive, defensive?
01:11:51 What do you like more?
01:11:52 Do you like to shoot from a distance?
01:11:54 Do you like, I was a runner.
01:11:56 I was very, very quick on my feet and I was a good jumper too.
01:12:01 I typically played the, uh, the, the four position, you know, what’s that, uh, forward
01:12:09 or the forward position, forward position.
01:12:11 But anyway, um, so that, that, that was the hardest, uh, uh, for me to give up.
01:12:16 Um, but indeed the other thing that I remember I had to do to hand in my party document to
01:12:22 the party secretary of the university.
01:12:25 And uh, he made a comment.
01:12:27 Yeah.
01:12:28 We probably won’t hear much about you, but, uh, we know that you’re going to do something
01:12:32 very important.
01:12:33 So he sort of had an inkling that, uh, I’m going, I’m going to go someplace, uh, undercover
01:12:39 or something like that.
01:12:40 And then I packed my bags and got on a train, uh, to Berlin for another one of those secret
01:12:47 meetings with, uh, my, my new handler, Nikolai.
01:12:53 So and here, here came another test that, that would have been quite easy to fail.
01:13:01 So I, I had lived, uh, in Yena for six years in a dorm, even when I became a, an employee
01:13:09 of the university, they didn’t, they didn’t have apartments.
01:13:12 I was still living in a dorm and, and they won in a single room with a bed, a chair and
01:13:17 a table and a toilet down the, down the hallway.
01:13:21 So I figured, you know, Berlin KGB, I’m going to get a nice apartment, right?
01:13:26 And so, uh, uh, Nikolai took me into his car.
01:13:31 We started talking a little bit and then he said, I have a task for you already.
01:13:35 Your first task is to find yourself a place to live.
01:13:40 I mean, I don’t think I showed it in my face, but you know, my heart, my, my, my, my heart
01:13:46 dropped like down to into my pants.
01:13:48 I, I knew this was nearly impossible because it was a severe shortage of, uh, of housing
01:13:54 and in, in, in everywhere in Germany, East Germany and all the apartments and homes were
01:14:01 controlled by, by the government.
01:14:03 You know, there were long waiting lists.
01:14:05 Uh, I know, I knew couples that, uh, were promised maybe to get an apartment, uh, five
01:14:12 years down the road.
01:14:13 So then they would postpone the decision to have a child.
01:14:18 Anyway, this was impossible.
01:14:20 Uh, well, yeah, but this was a test, you know, because I had to be inventive.
01:14:26 Now I had to figure out, uh, how to get out of an impossible situation.
01:14:30 I didn’t realize it then at all.
01:14:33 I just went with the flow, you know, what do I do?
01:14:37 So what I did, I went, I took the train, the city train, uh, to the very last stop, a little
01:14:47 town called Ackner.
01:14:49 And I wandered around in that town and knocked on doors and asked people if they knew where
01:14:54 somebody might have a place to live.
01:14:56 And after a couple of hours, somebody said, there’s this lady that, and she gave, and
01:15:00 they gave me the address and I talked to the lady and she said, I happen to have a place
01:15:05 that you might, uh, that where you might be able to stay.
01:15:08 It was an outbuilding.
01:15:10 Uh, I don’t know what it was, what it served.
01:15:13 It was not a garage.
01:15:14 It was concrete.
01:15:16 And it had, um, a bed and a chair, uh, running cold water and a stove, a cold stove.
01:15:25 That was my, was going to be my…
01:15:28 Pretty basic.
01:15:29 Pretty basic.
01:15:30 That’s your…
01:15:31 Pretty basic?
01:15:32 Are you kidding me?
01:15:33 That’s the, uh…
01:15:34 Toilet across the yard, of course.
01:15:35 Yeah.
01:15:36 Well, all the essentials.
01:15:37 What are you complaining about?
01:15:38 So you were, you had to run the, uh, the special, James Bond had to run a special operation
01:15:45 out of the house.
01:15:46 To, to, to my credit, and I think that, that, uh, that established part of my reputation.
01:15:54 I didn’t complain at all to Nikolai.
01:15:56 That was part of the test probably.
01:15:58 Yeah.
01:15:59 I just told him, you know, I found something.
01:16:01 And so, uh, for six months I would get up in the morning, get on the train and walk
01:16:08 around in the city, you know, uh, did some operational stuff, uh, operational training.
01:16:13 I went to the library, did a lot of reading in the library.
01:16:18 And then I found a basketball team that I could join.
01:16:20 So at least I could take a shower twice a week.
01:16:24 Um, and, uh, and apparently it took about six months that I was still on probation because
01:16:34 after six months, Nikolai, one day we were still meeting in his car, he said, he handed
01:16:40 me a key and he said, I’m going to take you to your new apartment.
01:16:46 Now I, and I didn’t know this, you know, that now I was really in.
01:16:50 Okay.
01:16:51 Imagine the hurdles you have to jump over and how many times you can fail, but you know.
01:16:57 But not complaining, not asking questions.
01:17:00 Yes.
01:17:01 I mean, that was something you’ve written about.
01:17:03 Um, I think you wrote that bosses do not like to hear complaints or problems.
01:17:07 They prefer solutions.
01:17:08 That’s right.
01:17:09 So what was your interaction like with the bosses?
01:17:12 Is that essentially, um, represents the way he went forward as well?
01:17:19 I, no complaints, no arguments, no, no, I know this better.
01:17:25 I was taking it all in now that the, the, the technical guys, you know, they taught
01:17:30 me something I didn’t know that made sense.
01:17:32 Um, what Nikolai, some of the stuff that he taught me was somewhat questionable.
01:17:40 He was a generalist and there’s some things he didn’t know really well.
01:17:44 So I could have like asked, probed a little bit, but I didn’t.
01:17:48 So I just played along.
01:17:50 So this new apartment was, uh, uh, it was a studio at, at, at, at a kitchen with running
01:17:57 cold water and the bathroom was just one flight down the toilet, not a bathroom, uh, one flight
01:18:04 down the stairs, uh, it was a big upgrade.
01:18:09 And he gave me, uh, I think he gave me a thousand mark to buy, buy furniture.
01:18:14 And in that place, I actually, I also bought a TV and started watching West German television.
01:18:20 So I finally had a decent place to stay.
01:18:25 Um, and the, the, my training in Berlin took about two years.
01:18:30 What was the training?
01:18:31 What were the interesting aspects to the training?
01:18:35 What were sort of, if you do an overview systematic of what was the training process, what was
01:18:39 difficult, what are some insights that generalize to the training process of what it takes to
01:18:45 be a KGB spy?
01:18:47 Right.
01:18:48 So, uh, let me start with the trade craft.
01:18:51 So I was taught Morse code that took a while, uh, I, I, I was, uh, instructed in how to,
01:18:59 you know, use a shortwave radio and to receive, uh, the, the shortwave, uh, transmissions
01:19:06 with Morse code.
01:19:08 I was taught, uh, uh, and a encryption and decryption algorithm, manual algorithm, you,
01:19:17 you might be interested that eventually I figured out, uh, at least one of the patterns,
01:19:22 uh, the, the algorithm was such that the, and this was all about digits, like, uh, and
01:19:30 the algorithm was such that in the end, the, uh, the digits that were used to decipher
01:19:37 other digits that were handed, uh, that were sent to me by a shortwave radio, there were,
01:19:43 let’s say if there were a hundred digits, there were an equal number of ones, twos,
01:19:48 threes, fours, fives, six, and seven, and up until zero.
01:19:52 And I was told that, uh, these, um, uh, algorithms, these manual algorithms were, were good for
01:19:58 about 300 uses.
01:20:00 After that, they could still be deciphered.
01:20:03 I’m assuming nowadays that, uh, wouldn’t take as much.
01:20:06 Yeah.
01:20:07 With, with computers for sure.
01:20:09 But there’s probably, they’re probably designed in a way that you can manually sort of, uh,
01:20:15 it’s efficient and convenient to use them manually, it’s not to optimize cryptographic
01:20:22 security, it’s to optimize, it’s like to balance security and like humans being able to actually.
01:20:27 Yeah.
01:20:28 No, I got to disagree.
01:20:29 It was neither efficient nor convenient.
01:20:30 Okay.
01:20:31 It took a long time.
01:20:32 So it wasn’t decipherable.
01:20:33 When, what was, what was significantly easier to do, uh, but, uh, that would require you
01:20:39 to have spied paraphernalia with you.
01:20:42 This is what’s called a one time pad.
01:20:44 So you have the set of numbers on, on a sheet of paper, uh, that had to be developed.
01:20:51 I had to use iodine to make those numbers visible.
01:20:55 Those are known to be unbreakable unless they are used multiple times, the same, the same
01:21:01 sheet of paper, because, you know, the person who encrypts has the same set of numbers as
01:21:06 the person who decrypts and one, one time use, you cannot figure out what the message
01:21:14 is.
01:21:15 Oh, interesting.
01:21:16 But this is a quick way to communicate from one person to another one time, one time.
01:21:20 One time, but I had a pad with multiple, uh, sheets of paper, right?
01:21:24 And, uh, the reason that they gave me a manual one is because I literally, I had only when
01:21:31 I, when I wound up in the United States, I had only one thing with me that, uh, only
01:21:38 a spy can have.
01:21:39 And that was a, uh, a writing pad with, uh, uh, where the first 10 pages or so were impregnated
01:21:46 with a trace of a chemical that was used for secret writing.
01:21:49 Uh, but you really would have to know what you’re looking for to, you know, you see this
01:21:53 pad it was bought at, uh, you know, Walmart and.
01:21:56 Can you explain a little, a little further?
01:21:58 What is the chemical here that, what are we talking about?
01:22:01 So how, I don’t understand how it’s possible to have a physical pad that does the encryption
01:22:07 without any computing.
01:22:09 How does it encode?
01:22:10 All right.
01:22:11 So, so no, no, it doesn’t, it doesn’t do any work, you know, so, and the, uh, the communication
01:22:18 that the encrypted communication was, uh, was, uh, a set of, uh, uh, groups of five,
01:22:26 five digits and then another five and there’s always a gap in between, um, and, uh, so let’s
01:22:32 say if I get this radio transmission, I write them all down and then I, then I use my, uh,
01:22:38 develop my algorithm and then I do mathematics, either addition or subtraction.
01:22:42 The resulting set of digits had then had a one to one correlation to letters.
01:22:48 And this is an easy way to then do the correlation.
01:22:51 Yes.
01:22:52 Yes.
01:22:53 Well, that’s cool.
01:22:54 So you’re saying the algorithm was not efficient.
01:22:56 It was not.
01:22:57 Oh, the manual took a long time and, and you can’t make an error.
01:23:02 Right.
01:23:03 Uh, would you know where, can you, is it easy to debug?
01:23:06 No, no, you do it twice.
01:23:09 You do it twice and that’s how you check.
01:23:10 If it’s identical, then you know, but like, if it’s not, then one is right and the other
01:23:15 is wrong.
01:23:16 You gotta do it again.
01:23:17 Don’t make mistakes.
01:23:18 No, that’s right.
01:23:19 And I really didn’t.
01:23:20 So I was, I was learning that, uh, I was also, uh, told that I was required to become proficient
01:23:30 in another language and they gave me a choice and I picked English.
01:23:36 That’s what was the other one.
01:23:37 Oh no, pick one friend, you know, whatever is spoken in the West.
01:23:41 Got it.
01:23:42 Uh, what was, what was, what would be second to you?
01:23:44 Would you, would you think French because of Paris?
01:23:46 What would you, what, why English?
01:23:49 English was a no brainer because I, I was a straight age to a student in English without
01:23:54 studying.
01:23:55 I like it came so easily to me.
01:23:58 So that’s why I chose it, right?
01:24:02 So that was that, uh, then, uh, um, I, uh, I w I was taught the basics of, um, uh, counter
01:24:09 surveillance, you know, some trickery and, and, and, uh, um, uh, surveillance detection
01:24:15 routes where you wander around in the city for three hours and determine whether you’re
01:24:24 being followed or not.
01:24:26 That requires you to plan the route very well.
01:24:29 I give you one example that, uh, that will illustrate that as my, my favorite spot.
01:24:35 When, when, when I was in Moscow, I did a lot of that also.
01:24:39 And if my favorite spot was, I wasn’t a not well traveled, uh, uh, road.
01:24:47 It went down the hill and, and curved.
01:24:50 And at the bottom of the hill, there was a telephone booth.
01:24:55 And when you open the door and pick up the telephone, you have to look back.
01:25:00 So it wasn’t like this, right?
01:25:01 It wasn’t a giveaway.
01:25:02 This was normal.
01:25:03 That was natural.
01:25:04 So I could see if somebody would come walking after me, you know, these kinds of things.
01:25:09 Or you would, uh, uh, you know, use, um, public transportation, uh, big buildings, uh, where
01:25:19 you needed to use an elevator and see who’s because surveillance, the, the object of
01:25:26 surveillance is to never lose sight of the individual who you’re surveilling because
01:25:31 at that point you may miss the window where he does something that you’re looking for.
01:25:36 So somebody always has to come close, right?
01:25:40 Did you have to also study surveillance?
01:25:44 No, only counter surveillance.
01:25:47 And what helped me in, in, in all my training, uh, you know, I, I would be, uh, would have
01:25:54 a competition with, uh, uh, folks that were coming, they were following me and me.
01:26:00 And I beat them every time, uh, they were at a disadvantage because one of them always
01:26:05 had to be close and, and if you saw the same face twice, you know that you were being followed.
01:26:11 And I had a very, very good, uh, memory for, for faces.
01:26:15 So basically figure out a fixed route and then a fixed route that allows you to, uh,
01:26:23 survey the area and then record the faces you’ve seen inside your mind.
01:26:28 And if, uh, you see multiple times a single face, that’s, that’s a bad sign.
01:26:33 And then they could, they could, uh, you use, uh, different clothes, uh, but they didn’t
01:26:38 have was face masks.
01:26:41 The CIA does nowadays.
01:26:44 They can give you a different face within seconds.
01:26:47 Yeah.
01:26:48 So how big, I mean, again, you talk about paranoia, um, is that part of the, is that
01:27:00 a big part of the job, uh, counter surveillance, like being constantly paranoid that you’re
01:27:06 being watched?
01:27:07 Yeah.
01:27:08 I was supposed to.
01:27:09 Isn’t that quite stressful.
01:27:10 So is that, is that one of the, is that actually an effective way to operate?
01:27:14 Uh, nobody, it sort of becomes a routine.
01:27:16 Uh, I was told to do it, uh, while in the U S once a month and, uh, okay.
01:27:23 It’s like a cleaning out.
01:27:24 Oh, not, not every day.
01:27:25 No, no, no, no, no.
01:27:26 Once a month or before I would say, mail a letter with secret writing.
01:27:31 So I was sure that, you know, nobody saw me put an envelope into a postbox.
01:27:38 So this is one of the tools in your toolbox is Morse code.
01:27:41 There’s the decryption and encryption.
01:27:43 There’s the car surveillance, photography, um, making, making microdots, you know, what
01:27:50 a microdot is?
01:27:51 What’s a microdot?
01:27:52 It’s, uh, you use, you, you take a photograph and you use a microscope in reverse and, uh,
01:28:03 make that photograph really small, so small that it’s like the head of a pin that can
01:28:12 be used to, uh, hide under a postage stamp.
01:28:17 Uh, in reality, I knew how to make them, but in reality, they, they never asked me to make
01:28:24 use of that technique.
01:28:25 So it’s a, it’s a sort of an encryption mechanism for photographs.
01:28:29 Yeah.
01:28:30 So what we do nowadays, embed, uh, code in, in, uh, PDFs and stuff like that.
01:28:35 Right?
01:28:36 Yeah.
01:28:37 Beautiful.
01:28:38 Okay.
01:28:39 All right.
01:28:40 So that, that was a learning, a training process, both in the physical space and sort
01:28:43 of, um, algorithmically.
01:28:46 Is there other things?
01:28:47 Yeah.
01:28:48 You bet.
01:28:49 Uh, interestingly enough, the, uh, I was, um, the first book I was given to read was
01:28:55 the history of this, uh, these, uh, communist party of the Soviet union.
01:28:59 Oh, so understand.
01:29:02 That’s interesting.
01:29:03 Cause you said you had to read Western literature.
01:29:04 Yeah, that too.
01:29:05 How much, how much reading, so history, how much history of politics, geopolitics, culture.
01:29:11 Not much more, but they made me read that document.
01:29:15 Other than that, I wasn’t supposed to study the Soviet union.
01:29:19 I wasn’t supposed and that was not, and I didn’t, when they sent me to Moscow, it wasn’t
01:29:23 to learn Russia, Russian, right?
01:29:25 It was to learn English.
01:29:26 Um, the, the second document they gave me was the, the constitution of West Germany.
01:29:32 And then I got lots of magazines and stuff like that.
01:29:35 Uh, as I told you, I was, uh, also told to, uh, uh, watch West German television, which
01:29:42 I, which I, uh, embraced with a vengeance because it was better than East German.
01:29:49 So I would get up in the morning and have a little breakfast and watch the German version
01:29:54 of Sesame street.
01:29:56 And that, that, that helps you, uh, that helps you get an understanding of the culture.
01:30:01 You have to do any kind of, uh, interaction, kind of spying that you have to be, be able
01:30:08 to effectively integrate.
01:30:09 Well, you, you also have to know, like, and, and that would have been easier, uh, if I,
01:30:15 they had sent me to West Germany, you know, all the soccer teams, you know, stuff that
01:30:18 everybody knows when I came to the U S I knew very little stuff that everybody knows.
01:30:23 That’s why I had to be very cautious and, you know, take it in all the time anyway.
01:30:28 Uh, and the, the last thing I want to mention is, uh, they, uh, I was strongly encouraged
01:30:34 to, uh, expand my, my cultural education.
01:30:40 In other words, go to visit museums, uh, go to the theater, uh, not so much movies, uh,
01:30:48 opera, read, read books from all kinds of authors.
01:30:53 Uh, that was important to them.
01:30:55 And once a month I had to write a report what I did, but the interesting thing, there was
01:31:00 not a, there was no curriculum, there was no agenda, there were no check marks.
01:31:05 It was all ad hoc.
01:31:06 You know, now you do this and then you do that.
01:31:08 Uh, and, uh, and a lot of this also, they relied on my initiative.
01:31:14 Again,
01:31:15 I mean, that’s part of the evaluation too.
01:31:17 You bet.
01:31:18 Um, are you able to have creative, it’s interesting that they’re like developing a James Bond
01:31:23 type of character here, which is what, what’s the reason to go to the opera as you become
01:31:28 Yes.
01:31:29 In a certain kind of way where perhaps that makes you, uh, more charming, more charismatic
01:31:35 in terms of your ability to integrate yourself in different situations.
01:31:38 You absolutely right.
01:31:39 Uh, uh, I, I was, I was, um, uh, uh, when I came to the US after about, uh, two years
01:31:49 roughly, um, I was cultured enough to, uh, not, uh, make a bad impression at a, at a
01:31:59 diplomatic soiree in Washington, DC.
01:32:02 I mingled freely.
01:32:03 Yes.
01:32:04 All right.
01:32:05 And, and, and so the whole idea was for me to sort of reach into the upper, uh, realms
01:32:11 of society where the targets would be juicier than, you know, the worker bees.
01:32:19 And how did you end up in Moscow?
01:32:21 Why?
01:32:22 Yeah.
01:32:23 What is that journey?
01:32:24 Well, so I, uh, I told you, and I started studying English, so I started back from scratch,
01:32:30 you know, they paid for a tutor and I went from like English 101 and then I went through
01:32:37 that in a couple of months then.
01:32:39 And then I got another guy with whom we, I expanded this.
01:32:43 We had conversations rather than working from a textbook and I, and I worked like a maniac.
01:32:48 I threw myself into the study of, of, of, uh, uh, English.
01:32:54 Like you wouldn’t believe.
01:32:55 Um, and, and my inspiration came from Vladimir Lenin.
01:33:00 I had read somewhere in a book that when Lenin was in exile, he studied German and he learned
01:33:07 100 German words every day, new German words.
01:33:11 So I started reading newspapers and every word that I didn’t know, I wrote down on an
01:33:15 index card, uh, German, English, and, uh, and I piled them up.
01:33:21 And so I really learned 100 new English words every day.
01:33:25 I know this because I counted them and I had a system how to do this.
01:33:30 Uh, uh, so you take your index card and you have five categories is a really good way
01:33:35 to learn wrote by wrote.
01:33:38 Uh, so you’ve got category one, that’s the new ones and you’ve got category five.
01:33:43 So you start with, uh, with five, five, you already had right four times.
01:33:50 If you have it right again, it goes to the archive.
01:33:53 Oh, in like longterm cold archive.
01:33:57 Yeah.
01:33:58 Four.
01:33:59 If you get it right, it goes to five.
01:34:01 If you get it wrong, it gets relegated to three or so.
01:34:05 And so you go through this and, uh, um, and occasionally I would throw the archive things
01:34:13 back into one.
01:34:15 So I really, I really acquired a phenomenal vocabulary.
01:34:20 When I was done with my English, my vocabulary was significantly higher than the average
01:34:23 American because I, I, I didn’t discriminate whatever word I didn’t know I learned, which
01:34:29 is not necessarily the best way because you know, English has a lot of synonyms, right?
01:34:35 Yeah.
01:34:36 And one synonym is usually the, the preferable one and, and I, um, when I first interacted
01:34:43 with people, I very often used the one that wasn’t as good.
01:34:48 And people have found that I, you know, I have an interesting way of talking.
01:34:52 They didn’t know what that meant, but yeah.
01:34:54 So it builds a good foundation for a language is getting a large vocabulary.
01:34:58 Yes.
01:34:59 It’s really interesting.
01:35:00 There’s something I do, which is called space repetition, which is a programmatic way of
01:35:03 doing this kind of system that you’ve developed yourself, which is if you successfully remember
01:35:09 a thing, it’s going to be a longer time before it brings it up to you again.
01:35:14 Yeah.
01:35:15 Now that’s requires a computer to keep track of information.
01:35:20 If you have cars, that’s a really interesting pile system.
01:35:22 One, two, three, four, five, you upgrade it one, two, three, four, five.
01:35:26 Maybe I wouldn’t go to the archive and go to them to, to pile one right away.
01:35:31 I would go to like, I don’t know, pile five, perhaps is probably the right place to put
01:35:37 it.
01:35:38 Cause, cause you have to go through that full step again, but that is a really powerful
01:35:41 way to learn definitely language, but also facts.
01:35:45 Like people that go to medical school.
01:35:47 Disconnected facts.
01:35:48 Yeah.
01:35:49 And, and you pretty much, when you’re done, you, you know what you know.
01:35:53 Yeah.
01:35:54 You don’t have to.
01:35:55 Then again, to use it, to integrate it into the music of language.
01:35:57 That’s more difficult.
01:35:58 That’s what you’re talking about.
01:35:59 Yeah.
01:36:00 There’s a charm.
01:36:01 I mean, maybe it’s not good for Spycraft, but there’s a charm to this kind of, to having
01:36:06 an accent and using words incorrectly, but confidently there’s a, because language isn’t
01:36:14 a simple formula.
01:36:16 Language is the play of words.
01:36:17 So actually using the incorrect synonym, you know, as it, you know, if, instead of saying
01:36:25 I’m cold saying I’m chilled or something.
01:36:28 Like using off beat words can actually be part of the charm.
01:36:33 So it’s interesting if you can learn how to use that correctly.
01:36:35 Cause I’ve known a bunch of people with the Russian accent and I feel like they get, get
01:36:40 away with saying a lot of ridiculous shit because they’re able to sort of leverage the
01:36:45 charm of the non sequiturs.
01:36:47 And by the way, by the way, just one, one thing that we talked about using a computer.
01:36:53 When I had my first personal computer, I actually wrote a program that does that.
01:36:59 It does that.
01:37:00 By the way, when was that?
01:37:01 When, cause you were a world class programmer for a time.
01:37:06 Yeah.
01:37:07 You were a very good programmer.
01:37:08 When, when did the birth?
01:37:09 First PC was probably 1984.
01:37:10 1984.
01:37:11 When did you fall in love with programming?
01:37:13 When I went to college in the US and part of the core curriculum was that you were required
01:37:19 to take a course in computer and it was mostly just, you know, talk, but we also had to learn
01:37:26 a language.
01:37:27 Uh, we had to write some programs and Fortran, which was what five at the time, it was a,
01:37:35 it was a dumbed down Fortran, but listen, so I, I see the ability, I see what, what
01:37:43 you can do with this, I programmed a sine curve and then I divided the, the sine curve
01:37:50 into really, really small rectangles and then ran the program and it came up with the right
01:37:55 area.
01:37:56 Wow.
01:37:57 This is great.
01:37:58 That’s incredible.
01:37:59 It’s incredible.
01:38:00 That’s so powerful.
01:38:01 It’s, uh, you’re creating, you’re creating a little helper helps you understand the world
01:38:08 to help you analyze the world and so on.
01:38:10 Uh, we’ll, we’ll return to that cause it’s interesting.
01:38:13 So you have so many interesting aspects to your life, but Moscow.
01:38:16 So
01:38:17 Yeah, no, let me, let, no, let me, how I was sent to Moscow.
01:38:20 Okay.
01:38:21 So one day I had a visitor from Moscow, uh, and he came to visit me in my apartment, uh,
01:38:27 together with, uh, Nikolai and he, you know, we talked and then he said, how’s your English?
01:38:33 I said, I pulled a book from the shelf and says, I can read that without the help of
01:38:37 a dictionary.
01:38:38 Oh, that’s interesting.
01:38:41 And he said, you know what, we’re going to send you a tape recorder and you just talk,
01:38:48 say something, you know, for 20 minutes, whatever you want to talk about.
01:38:52 Uh, they sent this thing and two weeks later I was on a plane to Moscow because I also
01:39:00 spoke English, sort of the British variety of English with not a strong German accent
01:39:07 because I’ve always had the ability to imitate others and sounds that was an innate ability.
01:39:15 I would, uh, you know, when, when, when we were in a lab and, uh, as students, I would
01:39:21 very often do, uh, monologues, uh, imitating East German comedians.
01:39:27 You know, I just, yes, yes.
01:39:30 I’m not good enough to make a living out of it, but, uh, that raised some interest.
01:39:37 And so when they sent me to Moscow, that was the first time on a plane, by the way, um,
01:39:43 and, uh, I had a conversation with two ladies who spoke English.
01:39:47 One was a, a Russian, a professor at, uh, Lomonosov University.
01:39:52 She was obviously KGB, that was her cover.
01:39:55 And the other one was an American born lady.
01:39:58 Oh, by the way, she was an actual professor and using that as the cover or is it just
01:40:02 a story?
01:40:03 No, I, she said she was a professor.
01:40:06 She may have taught there too.
01:40:08 That’s an interesting distinction.
01:40:09 Yeah.
01:40:10 One is like a story you tell people and one is like you legit are doing the thing, but
01:40:14 are also as a cover.
01:40:16 Anyway, that’s, that’s an interesting aspect of how to be a good liar.
01:40:22 You might, you might as well live the lie.
01:40:25 Yeah, exactly right.
01:40:26 Uh, so, uh, and the other one was a middle aged, the, the Russian was pretty young.
01:40:31 The other one was middle aged and American and, uh, and so we talked for maybe a couple
01:40:37 of hours and then they withdrew and I was left alone.
01:40:42 Eventually my liaison, he came back in and he said, it was close, but the American thinks
01:40:49 you can actually, uh, become, uh, you get close enough to become, becoming a native
01:40:56 speaker of American English.
01:40:59 And he said, the Russian was very doubtful.
01:41:02 So I think wishful, it was, it was a tie, literally wishful thinking prevailed.
01:41:08 So, uh, within a couple of weeks I was moving to Moscow.
01:41:15 And what, what was the task in Moscow and what, how long were you in Moscow?
01:41:21 Two years.
01:41:22 And what was the task there?
01:41:24 Is it training or is it espionage?
01:41:26 No, it was training.
01:41:27 It was, uh, so it was, uh, I, uh, the, the American born became my tutor.
01:41:33 I met with her twice a week.
01:41:35 Uh, I, uh, I also listened to a lot of BBC, shortwave BBC worldwide, uh, I read, uh, more
01:41:45 English books.
01:41:46 So a lot of that was about the language and the culture of English, uh, American.
01:41:51 And, and I did phonetics exercises every night.
01:41:57 I had a tape that was about a half hour long and they would say a word and I would repeat
01:42:05 the word, say a word, repeat the word.
01:42:07 And it was mostly about the vowels, by the way, most of the accent and, uh, uh, particularly
01:42:13 because let’s say coming from German into, into English, but also Russian.
01:42:18 It’s the vowels.
01:42:19 You’re talking about the, so you would have a single word, a word, apple, and you would
01:42:23 just say apple.
01:42:24 Yes.
01:42:25 And American English or British English?
01:42:28 No, American English.
01:42:29 And, and I give you one, uh, example that almost nobody gets right.
01:42:34 The difference between hot and hut, you know, and in German speakers, it’s very tough.
01:42:43 You know, which one, uh, for everyone is different.
01:42:46 For example, uh, I could say this on a podcast, something that my brother struggles with,
01:42:51 I struggled with too, when I first came to this country to learn English is there’s differences.
01:42:56 There’s embarrassing differences, uh, like beach and bitch, right?
01:43:02 And you get so, as a young kid, also you get so nervous of, I don’t want to say the wrong
01:43:06 thing.
01:43:07 I, um, I can also say that this is almost as a jokey thing, but, uh, there’s a, there’s
01:43:12 a famous philosopher, uh, Immanuel Kant, and you can, uh, guess which other word is very
01:43:18 similar to that.
01:43:19 So there’s a, there’s a nervousness about the, what is that?
01:43:24 That’s interesting.
01:43:25 I mean, and Germans probably have a different, uh, tension of like what is hard to learn
01:43:31 the difference between the pronunciation of the vowels or the control of the vowels.
01:43:35 Yeah.
01:43:36 It’s interesting.
01:43:37 So you had to really master this daily exercise and, you know, and this, this was my discipline.
01:43:41 I did this every night, routine, boring as hell.
01:43:45 Uh, so English was the focus.
01:43:47 And I also had interaction with some, uh, agents who had operated in the United States
01:43:53 as diplomats on the, on the diplomatic cover.
01:43:56 They would come and talk to me a little bit and tell me and sort of prepare me what was
01:44:02 ahead of me.
01:44:03 And then I did a whole lot of operational training, particularly surveillance detection.
01:44:07 That was big.
01:44:08 They also, they also taught me how to drive a car in Moscow.
01:44:11 Finally, the one skill you needed.
01:44:14 What’s a surveillance detection?
01:44:15 Okay.
01:44:16 So this is what, when, when you find out whether you’re being followed.
01:44:19 Ah, got it, got it, got it.
01:44:21 So it’s the, yeah, got you.
01:44:22 The abbreviation that’s used in, uh, in, in, in, uh, yes, uh, in, uh, intelligence circles
01:44:30 is SDR, surveillance detection route, you know, when they say that, you know what that
01:44:34 is.
01:44:35 Uh, and, and that was it.
01:44:37 Uh, and a, and a few other things, you know, one offs, for instance, uh, I was once, uh,
01:44:44 taught, uh, to read silhouettes of ships.
01:44:49 When you see a ship from a distance, what kind of a ship it might be.
01:44:54 They, they thought this would come in handy.
01:44:57 Actually they, they, uh, there was in, in 1982, Andropov, uh, started, uh, a campaign
01:45:03 that was, uh, now I forget the name, Operation something, something where everybody who was
01:45:09 in the West was supposed to, uh, look for science that, uh, the West was, uh, uh, getting
01:45:15 ready for war.
01:45:16 And I had an, everybody had an object to, uh, to pay attention to.
01:45:21 I had a, uh, uh, a harbor, a military harbor in, um, um, in, in New Jersey, uh, near Red
01:45:31 Bank that was called Earl Weapon Station.
01:45:35 And the code name for that was early.
01:45:37 So they asked me to just wander by there to see if there was something unusual going on
01:45:44 because the Soviet Union were at that point, it was Ronald Reagan were really afraid that
01:45:49 Reagan was going to start a war.
01:45:51 They were absolutely 100% afraid of him.
01:45:54 Is there something memorable to you on a personal level and a philosophical level about your
01:46:00 time in Moscow?
01:46:02 Something that kind of stays with you outside of the training stuff, maybe like the details
01:46:07 of the training.
01:46:08 You love the answer.
01:46:09 You will love the answer.
01:46:10 Uh, I was, uh, I was given tickets to two, uh, performances by Americans.
01:46:19 Uh, there was a theater troupe that, uh, played Our Town.
01:46:23 Uh, and then there was this, I forgot the name of the guy, but, uh, uh, you may not
01:46:29 be old enough.
01:46:30 Have you ever watched Hee Haw?
01:46:32 Uh, maybe, uh, there was a, it was a country music show, real kitschy, but, uh, the star
01:46:40 of Hee Haw, uh, was giving a concert in Moscow and I guarantee you at least half the audience
01:46:47 were KGB and at the other end, the, uh, uh, um, the, the, the opposite of, uh, of a, of
01:46:59 a highlight was my visit to the, uh, to, to my, to the mausoleum where Lenin, uh, is still,
01:47:09 still today.
01:47:10 There, there was so, there was a nothing, you know, he was, he was my hero, but he,
01:47:18 he looked like a wax figure and, and, and you walk by there, there was nothing inspirational
01:47:24 and not, not, it was not a religious experience, nothing, it was, it was a big old nothing.
01:47:30 Is that, did, did your faith and belief in communism start to crumble at some point here?
01:47:36 No.
01:47:37 Is that around, that was still pretty strong.
01:47:39 What I did notice that, uh, the standard of living in, in, in Moscow was significantly
01:47:44 lower than in East Germany.
01:47:47 The, uh, uh, in the supermarkets, uh, you could, you could expect, uh, with reliability
01:47:54 that you can find, uh, canned fish and, uh, mineral water.
01:47:58 Everything else was whatever.
01:48:00 And if you saw a line and at a store, you just line up.
01:48:04 You don’t even ask what they have because if you don’t like it, somebody else will.
01:48:08 It was, it, it was, uh, not poverty, but it was close to poverty.
01:48:14 There were a lot of drunken men in the streets.
01:48:18 And uh…
01:48:19 This is the eighties?
01:48:20 No, this is the late seventies, mid to late seventies.
01:48:24 And uh, and also the, they had these high rise apartment buildings that looked pretty
01:48:29 good from the front, but you went into the backyard, ouch.
01:48:34 You know.
01:48:35 Yeah.
01:48:36 You’re describing my childhood here.
01:48:37 Okay.
01:48:38 Sorry.
01:48:39 Uh, but it’s interesting even, even with the professor, even with everything else, um,
01:48:45 it’s interesting because I think the standard of living was much lower.
01:48:49 You’re right.
01:48:50 Even in Moscow.
01:48:51 Yeah.
01:48:52 Absolutely was.
01:48:53 The one thing that they always had, at least in my days, was in those two years, there
01:48:56 was always fresh bread in the Bulatnoyars.
01:48:58 Yeah.
01:48:59 Always.
01:49:00 Yeah.
01:49:01 That’s probably one of the memories I have of childhood is, well you’re hungry a lot,
01:49:07 but when you eat is bread and the bread was good.
01:49:11 It was good.
01:49:12 I mean, I don’t, I actually wonder, I wonder how good it was, but I remember it being incredibly
01:49:18 good.
01:49:19 To me it was really good.
01:49:21 And, and you know, you had it from white to very dark and all the varieties.
01:49:26 The other thing that was good was, um, if you knew where to get it, Stolichnaya was
01:49:32 four rubles.
01:49:36 Not only is it good vodka, but it’s a cheap vodka.
01:49:39 I like it.
01:49:40 Yeah.
01:49:41 But you had to know where, you know, this would be like holes in the wall someplace.
01:49:45 Well, I think a lot of the way they operate, I don’t, I wonder if East Germany is this
01:49:48 way, but a lot of the ways that Moscow operate is you kind of, you had to know.
01:49:53 Yes.
01:49:54 Like there’s a very kind of, um, if you make the right friends, if you give money to the
01:50:01 right guy, the guy, the friend of the friend of the friend is going to hook you up and
01:50:05 that’s, there’s a culture that this is how you work around a very big bureaucracy.
01:50:11 Underground economy.
01:50:12 Yeah.
01:50:13 Underground economy.
01:50:14 Yeah.
01:50:15 You have to know, which is, uh, boy, um, such a stark contrast between, between that and
01:50:23 the United States, the capitalist system.
01:50:26 Um, yeah, that was a very big culture shock to me to understand the different, the different
01:50:35 fundamentally different way of life.
01:50:36 But the interesting thing is, um, human nature pervades both systems and there is something
01:50:44 about the Russian system that reveals human nature more intensely because of the underground
01:50:49 nature of it.
01:50:51 Because you get to deal with greed and trust and all those kinds of things in the United
01:50:55 States, there is much more power to the rule of law.
01:50:59 So there’s rules and people follow those rules, they had to break the rules nonstop.
01:51:05 Well, in East Germany and Russia, I believe, uh, theft, if you could get away with it was
01:51:11 part of your economic activity.
01:51:13 Yeah.
01:51:14 I have a friend, uh, you know, who, who I went to school with, uh, up until my fourth
01:51:20 year and, uh, we reconnected and he told me how he survived, you know, he would, you know,
01:51:25 he would just steal stuff and then sell it and trade it.
01:51:28 Yeah.
01:51:29 Thefts.
01:51:30 I mean, it’s a relative concept.
01:51:32 You are taking stuff.
01:51:34 Uh, bribery, all those kinds of things, people, you know, um, corruption, you know, it’s a
01:51:41 relative term.
01:51:42 No, I’m just kidding.
01:51:43 I mean, it is, you have to work around the giant bureaucracy about the giant corruption.
01:51:48 Corruption builds on top of corruption and then it just becomes this giant system that’s
01:51:53 unstable as you talked about.
01:51:55 One last word.
01:51:56 Yes.
01:51:57 The two years in Moscow taught me how to be alone.
01:52:05 I had no social interaction.
01:52:08 Not with friends, not with women, not.
01:52:11 No.
01:52:12 I was, the only interaction I had was with the folks that trained me.
01:52:16 So I was alone.
01:52:17 It was a lonely two years.
01:52:20 For a person who, who loves love.
01:52:22 Yes.
01:52:23 Is that difficult?
01:52:24 It was for my first year and first and second year in the United States because I could
01:52:30 not interact socially without giving away that something was wrong with me.
01:52:35 I had to learn how to be an American.
01:52:37 They didn’t teach me in Moscow.
01:52:39 They couldn’t.
01:52:40 So the first two years in, uh, in America, you had to kind of listen more than talk.
01:52:46 Oh, you bet.
01:52:47 The very first year I couldn’t even work because I had to acquire the documents, the social
01:52:51 security card and a driver’s license, uh, to get a job.
01:52:56 And then when I had the job, uh, I worked as a bike messenger, uh, that gave me a good
01:53:03 opportunity to listen as, as, you know, because these people, they weren’t very curious about
01:53:10 me.
01:53:11 What was your name in East Germany, what was your name in Moscow, what was your name in
01:53:16 America?
01:53:17 Okay.
01:53:18 So my, the name I was given at birth is Albrecht Dittrich.
01:53:21 It’s so sexy when you speak in German with a German accent.
01:53:25 I hate, I hated that name, the Albrecht.
01:53:27 I didn’t like it.
01:53:28 It was, it was very rarely used.
01:53:30 Uh, my mother named me after a famous German painter, Albrecht Dittrich.
01:53:36 My cover name in Moscow was known as Dieter and, and, and in the United States I became
01:53:42 Jack Barsky.
01:53:44 In between I used a whole bunch of other names that were associated with, uh, false passports
01:53:50 that, uh, uh, I used.
01:53:53 One of the names I remember is William Dyson because that is the name that was on the Canadian
01:53:59 passport I used to enter the United States.
01:54:02 So how did you enter the United States?
01:54:03 Can we take the journey from Moscow to the United States?
01:54:06 Yeah.
01:54:07 What was the assignment?
01:54:08 What was the, what was that leap?
01:54:12 What was like, what, uh.
01:54:13 Just one, one, one thing in between, I had a three months practice trip to, to, uh, Canada.
01:54:20 That was, that was a good idea and I got to tell you this, this one thing that happened
01:54:25 there.
01:54:26 Yes, please.
01:54:27 Okay.
01:54:28 So, because, you know, the one, one thing that I like to tell people nowadays is the,
01:54:33 one of the secrets to happiness is the ability to make fun of the worst situations that you’re
01:54:37 in.
01:54:38 Yes, absolutely.
01:54:39 You see the humor.
01:54:40 Yes.
01:54:41 Okay.
01:54:42 In hindsight, at least, uh, one of my, uh, the tasks that I had in, in, in Canada was
01:54:47 to acquire a birth certificate, uh, with the name, uh, the name was Henry Van Randall,
01:54:54 who was born someplace in California.
01:54:56 And I was supposed to, uh, you know, write a little letter saying, I’m Henry Van Randall.
01:55:02 Please send me a copy of my birth certificate.
01:55:04 The fee is enclosed and, uh, and, and I, uh, I lived in a small hotel.
01:55:11 So the return address, it wasn’t visible that it was a hotel.
01:55:15 That was important.
01:55:16 So, and it took like three weeks and I get nothing, four weeks, I get nothing.
01:55:23 Eventually I got annoyed and I, I, I, I mustered the courage to call them up from a pay phone.
01:55:34 I called up the office registrar, whatever they were called in this, in this town in
01:55:39 California and I, and I yelled at them, I said, you got my money, where’s my birth certificate?
01:55:44 Well, a couple of weeks later it came.
01:55:47 So I see the envelope and it says Henry Van Randall.
01:55:50 Yes.
01:55:51 I had prepared the caretakers of the, um, of the hotel to, that I’m expecting a letter
01:55:58 from my friend.
01:55:59 So I went up to my room, I opened it and I was like, yes, yes, this is success.
01:56:04 And then, and then I opened this thing and it was, it was a copy of a birth certificate,
01:56:09 but it was stamped with big letters across in red deceased.
01:56:13 Now think about it.
01:56:15 So here’s a dead people who was asking for that person who was asking for a birth certificate.
01:56:22 I had the presence of mind to, to leave.
01:56:25 Okay.
01:56:26 I went to a couple of other cities.
01:56:27 I should have left the country.
01:56:30 But I know that the Royal Mounted Police was following me and I was given that information
01:56:36 by the FBI later on.
01:56:38 And they were,
01:56:39 You were able to, oh, you were able to at least suspect that at the time through the,
01:56:44 the, the,
01:56:45 I knew that, I knew that there was trouble.
01:56:48 So I, my counter surveillance route, yes, didn’t discover anything.
01:56:57 So I kept on going, I had to, supposed to, I was supposed to visit two more cities and
01:57:04 they were always one step behind.
01:57:06 What, what, what is interesting to me is that they didn’t catch me on the way out.
01:57:11 You have to show your passport to the airline.
01:57:14 I mean, I, I, I was known by name.
01:57:18 I would then, the path, because I had to give that to the hotel, right.
01:57:23 And I, and I escaped with, by a hair.
01:57:26 Yeah.
01:57:27 They, they would have to keep you on a list, right?
01:57:30 Yeah.
01:57:31 Yeah, that’s interesting.
01:57:33 But that requires like a good computerized updated system to track all that stuff.
01:57:38 This was Swiss air, so.
01:57:40 Well, you got lucky.
01:57:42 Yeah.
01:57:43 Part of life is luck.
01:57:44 You bet.
01:57:45 So, so, and, and other than that, the, the trip to Canada was a big success because it,
01:57:54 it gave me the culture shock that, that I needed to not be blown out of, out of the
01:58:03 water.
01:58:04 And when I get, get to the United States.
01:58:06 So you hopped a few places in Canada and then Swiss air.
01:58:10 I even had a, I even had a relationship with a young lady.
01:58:14 A Canadian, French Canadian, regular Canadian.
01:58:18 French Canadian, and she, she gave me a book, Winnie the Pooh, because we went to see the
01:58:25 movie and then she wrote the dedication, she says, to the nicest German I’ve ever met.
01:58:30 Was she lying?
01:58:32 No.
01:58:33 Or you don’t know, maybe.
01:58:37 Speaking of Spycraft, and that, that led to heartbreak too?
01:58:41 No.
01:58:42 That was sexual.
01:58:47 I was not at that point.
01:58:49 Ready for love?
01:58:50 No.
01:58:51 Ready to return to that old.
01:58:52 Well, and I was, I was already married in Germany.
01:58:56 Okay.
01:58:57 That woman I loved.
01:58:58 We should return to this.
01:59:00 Yeah.
01:59:01 So Swiss air, where did you land in the United States?
01:59:06 Oh, when I came, where did I land?
01:59:08 I, I, American Airlines, a flight from Mexico City to Toronto, but they made me deplane
01:59:17 in Chicago.
01:59:19 I have no idea.
01:59:20 I think this was overengineering.
01:59:21 That didn’t make any sense to me.
01:59:24 You know, why can’t a Canadian just take a, take a flight from Mexico City?
01:59:29 With this stopover, this kind of nonsense.
01:59:31 Yeah, but, okay.
01:59:32 But nevertheless, that was it, and then you landed in Chicago.
01:59:36 Right.
01:59:37 And tell me the story in America.
01:59:39 What was the day to day life?
01:59:40 Now this is, now you’re a spy.
01:59:43 No, no, no, no.
01:59:44 I got to tell you another funny story.
01:59:47 Yes.
01:59:48 So it’s another, there’s two things that happened that could have ended my career as a spy right
01:59:55 then and there.
01:59:56 So I’m, so I’m, I’m arriving in, in Chicago in the evening.
02:00:03 It’s already dark.
02:00:05 I had no idea what kind of a hotel to take, you know, I picked one out of a, out of yellow
02:00:13 pages and got a taxi.
02:00:15 When I gave him the address, he looked at me like a little funny, you know, whatever,
02:00:20 what do I know?
02:00:21 You know, it was keep on going.
02:00:22 I need to get, I need to get sleep because I was extremely tense, you know, having gone
02:00:29 through customs and border control.
02:00:32 So and we were going in the Southern direction and I noticed that the neighborhoods became
02:00:39 less and less inviting.
02:00:41 Didn’t know what that meant either.
02:00:43 I get, I enter the hotel, it was a five story brownstone and something else looked funny.
02:00:50 So the reception desk was protected by plexiglass.
02:00:55 Not having enough background, I didn’t know that this was unusual because all I knew that
02:01:02 there was a lot of crime in the United States.
02:01:04 So I thought maybe every hotel was like that.
02:01:07 So I go up into my room and drink a half a bottle of, uh, Johnny Walker red because I,
02:01:12 as one does, yeah, because I was so damn tense.
02:01:16 I just wanted to sleep.
02:01:17 I wanted to get into a coma, which I did.
02:01:21 And then the next day I woke up with a head that was twice as big as felt twice as big.
02:01:26 But you know, I was prepared.
02:01:28 I had aspirin with me, so I killed the headache and went outside to see if I can get something
02:01:33 to eat.
02:01:34 And, uh, so I was right smack in the middle of the South side of Chicago.
02:01:39 I didn’t know that the South side of Chicago existed.
02:01:41 I found later, I found out where I was.
02:01:44 So it was time to go very quickly, uh, go up there.
02:01:50 And at that point I decided I would, uh, uh, I would register, uh, at the next hotel on
02:01:57 the Jack Barsky.
02:01:59 So I went to the bathroom and I tried to kill, kill off, uh, uh, Mr. Dyson by burning his
02:02:06 passport.
02:02:07 Um, unfortunately I was not trained in how to train passport, uh, how to, how to destroy
02:02:13 passports was, uh, so I tried to burn it and these things are flame retardant.
02:02:20 And, uh, it created a cloud of smoke and I’m looking up there and there’s a smoke detector.
02:02:26 Yeah.
02:02:27 Oh no.
02:02:28 Okay.
02:02:29 So presence of mind, I threw this thing in the toilet and then, then took out a pair
02:02:33 of scissors and cut it into small pieces and flushed it down.
02:02:36 If that smoke alarm goes off, I’m busted.
02:02:40 Right.
02:02:41 If somebody, if, if some, some criminal steals, I had $6,000 on me in cash, uh, steals either
02:02:46 my passport or my, or my money or both.
02:02:51 I don’t know what to do.
02:02:52 Yeah.
02:02:53 You can’t go to the authorities.
02:02:54 You can’t do anything.
02:02:55 There weren’t, there weren’t any Russian, the Soviets in Chicago.
02:02:56 Do you have any contacts?
02:02:58 No.
02:02:59 There was no, there was no, um, there was no plan B for Chicago at all.
02:03:06 That’s an oversight.
02:03:07 I shouldn’t, I shouldn’t have gone to Chicago.
02:03:09 They, they could have shipped me into, uh, um, uh, San Francisco or Washington DC because
02:03:15 both of them had Soviets.
02:03:17 My end goal was, uh, was to go to, to, to New York.
02:03:22 Fine.
02:03:23 Uh, you know, I would have been a really, really, uh, dangerous agent if I had gone
02:03:27 back and worked with the KGB because I could have told them all the things, how to do it
02:03:32 right.
02:03:33 Right.
02:03:34 So in that sense, there is some, given the scale of the KGB, there is, uh, some incompetence
02:03:40 in this.
02:03:41 Some.
02:03:42 A lot of incompetence.
02:03:43 Uh, to preparing me to be an American was almost total incompetence.
02:03:47 And that, do you think that’s representative of the way they operate is, uh, there’s an
02:03:52 incompetence like to the, uh, logistics, to the strategies involved, all that kind of
02:04:00 stuff.
02:04:01 Yeah.
02:04:02 None of these guys had operated as illegals.
02:04:03 They, they were outsiders to American society.
02:04:06 They had interaction with Americans and, uh, but they all lived in, you know, in New York,
02:04:12 they lived in a compound, uh, and in Northern Manhattan where they all lived together with
02:04:16 their families.
02:04:17 And, and they, most of the time they spent, uh, interacting with, with themselves, with
02:04:22 their own people at work.
02:04:24 So they really didn’t integrate well.
02:04:26 They did not know what it’s like to be an American, to have a job, to, to, you know,
02:04:32 live like an American.
02:04:33 They didn’t know it.
02:04:34 It’s interesting that KGB didn’t put a high value to that kind of integration.
02:04:39 They didn’t know what they didn’t know.
02:04:40 Yeah.
02:04:41 And by the way, this was mutual.
02:04:42 Do you think the CIA had, had, uh, good knowledge of the Russian culture?
02:04:47 Uh, same thing.
02:04:49 And so, um, there was a lot of lack of understanding because good, good intelligence could have,
02:04:54 uh, possibly avoided some of the, uh, high tension that, uh, situations that we had when,
02:05:00 when in the eighties, we got close to nuclear war.
02:05:03 So good intelligence would be integrating yourself in society.
02:05:07 Yes.
02:05:08 Much, much deeper.
02:05:09 And that Ronald Reagan was not a warmonger, but he was talking about the end times because
02:05:14 he was a Christian.
02:05:16 But then that kind of integration can be dangerous because you start to question the propaganda,
02:05:21 the narratives that, on which the KGB is built, on which the CIA is built.
02:05:26 And then they have, they always have had the option of ignoring the intelligence that they’re
02:05:31 getting, right?
02:05:32 Yeah.
02:05:33 Well, let me ask you this question sort of to jump around.
02:05:37 There’s a lot of conspiracy theories in this, um, in this current climate, I mean, throughout
02:05:42 history, but now especially, and some of the conspiracy theories put a lot of power in
02:05:50 the hands of the intelligence agencies like CIA, FSB, Mossad, uh, MI6, they’re basically
02:05:59 the conspiracy theories go that they control the powerful people in this world.
02:06:06 And are able to thereby manipulate those powerful people and manipulate the populace in order
02:06:13 to deliver different kinds of messages and so on.
02:06:16 Given your experience with this kind of tension between competence and malevolence, would
02:06:23 you say there’s some truth to those conspiracy theories?
02:06:27 Not one way.
02:06:28 I think, I think there is, there’s collusion, there’s collaboration, but I would think that,
02:06:33 uh, like for instance, uh, uh, some folks in the CIA and the FBI, uh, are being used
02:06:39 by the ones that are really in power.
02:06:42 Power is money.
02:06:43 Power is wealth.
02:06:44 I know power is not the other, it can go both directions.
02:06:49 You can acquire wealth first, which leads you to power, or you can acquire power first.
02:06:55 Yeah.
02:06:56 Power is also knowledge, I understand, and, and, uh, and a position in the society, in
02:07:02 the military or in intelligence, but I don’t think it’s a straight one way that all the
02:07:05 intelligence agencies control the powerful people in their country.
02:07:09 You see what’s happening in Russia.
02:07:11 I mean, Putin dominates his intelligence agencies, right?
02:07:17 Well, uh, so the question is which way the direction goes, but you’re saying that there
02:07:22 is, um, it’s not one way flow of power.
02:07:25 I would think so.
02:07:27 It, and, and I also believe it exists, but it’s not as prevalent as, you know, not every
02:07:32 conspiracy theory, uh, pans out and most of them don’t, they’re just damn rumors, but
02:07:38 that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
02:07:39 I guarantee you that they exist.
02:07:41 There’s collusion, there’s people getting together and, uh, not necessarily, uh, preparing
02:07:47 a specific action, but more sort of a plan to go forward and maintain the position or
02:07:53 even, you know, uh, uh, strengthen the position that they already have.
02:07:58 So KGB, but we can generalize this, FSB, CIA, do you think a KGB agent would kill someone
02:08:05 against international law if they were ordered to do so?
02:08:08 So we talked about…
02:08:09 They did.
02:08:10 They did.
02:08:11 Uh, and there’s, uh, there’s a famous, uh, case of, uh, one, uh, uh, I think it’s Vasily
02:08:21 Kuklov who defected.
02:08:24 He was a killer.
02:08:25 He was a trained killer and he had, had, uh, done assassinations in other countries.
02:08:31 He was sent to West Germany to kill a defector, a KGB defector, and he decided not to do it.
02:08:37 He, he talked to the guy and he said, I’m supposed to kill you.
02:08:40 I’m not.
02:08:41 And then, and he eventually wound up in the United States.
02:08:44 I have a connection to this fellow because the KGB once asked me to go to California
02:08:50 and see if the guy still lives and works there.
02:08:53 And, uh, we, uh, I found him and we looked at each other.
02:09:03 So there was an active KGB agent looking at a man that he didn’t know was the KGB defector,
02:09:10 looking at each other.
02:09:11 Neither one knew who the other one was.
02:09:13 I found out later.
02:09:15 But he was able to survive.
02:09:18 Yes.
02:09:19 And, you know, there, there have been assassinations, not, not a lot.
02:09:24 And, uh, you know, that, that we know of, a good point.
02:09:29 This is very difficult, uh, the, the, the, the, the question is how many lines are intelligence
02:09:36 agencies able, willing to cross to attain, to achieve the goal?
02:09:42 I, I think none of these agencies have the ultimate line.
02:09:48 I think eventually they, the last line will be crossed if they believe it’s necessary.
02:09:55 Well, I think you can justify a lot of things, especially in this modern world with nuclear
02:10:00 weapons that you can justify that you’re saving the world actually.
02:10:04 Let me ask a few difficult questions and we’ll jump back to your time in America.
02:10:08 But Vladimir Putin has been accused of ordering the poisoning and assassination of several
02:10:17 people, including Alexander Levinenko early on all the way to Alexei Navalny.
02:10:23 Do you think these accusations are grounded in truth?
02:10:27 And we will return to a couple more questions maybe about Vladimir Putin’s early days in
02:10:34 the KGB, which would be interesting.
02:10:36 Yeah.
02:10:37 There, there’s a, there’s a phrase that I like to, uh, say in the response is called
02:10:40 plausible deniability.
02:10:43 I don’t think Putin gave a direct command as they do that.
02:10:46 He would just maybe muse.
02:10:48 It would be nice if something were to happen and then somebody picks it up and does it.
02:10:54 Is there, can you steel man the case that, uh, Putin did not have direct or indirect
02:11:01 involvement with this?
02:11:02 Who, who, who would know, who would know?
02:11:04 You know, just the, the international, the reputation perhaps, um, perhaps catalyzed
02:11:14 by Putin himself is that he is the kind of person that would directly or indirectly make
02:11:20 those orders.
02:11:22 Perhaps the case there is he’s somebody to be feared and thereby you want that person
02:11:27 out there.
02:11:28 Uh, but the act itself, uh, the, the, the poisoning of, uh, Litvinenko and, uh, Oh,
02:11:37 and then the assassination of the Bulgarian, uh, Markov and with a, with the umbrella
02:11:43 and, and they all directly traced back to Russian, uh, Soviet intelligence.
02:11:49 Uh, and so that’s enough to be feared, right?
02:11:54 Um, my answer that I gave you is an educated guess, you know, I can’t pretend to know this
02:12:01 for sure, but
02:12:02 It’s frustrating to me because there’s a lot of people listening to this would say,
02:12:07 but even, uh, sort of would chuckle at the naive nature of the question.
02:12:15 But if you actually keep an open mind, you have to understand what is the way that intelligence
02:12:20 agencies function?
02:12:21 Is it possible to the head of an intelligence agency not to make direct orders of that kind
02:12:29 where there’s a distributed
02:12:30 No, the head of the intelligence agency would most likely give the order.
02:12:34 Even though it’s compartmentalized.
02:12:36 Yeah, but, but, uh, but not the head of state.
02:12:39 Not maybe not the head of state, although, uh, in the case, this is the case in the United
02:12:46 States as well, but certainly is the case in Russia.
02:12:50 There are close relationships between the head of the FSB and the GRU and personal relationships,
02:12:55 not just even
02:12:56 The head of the FSB who is now in jail.
02:13:02 There’s a interesting details, especially, uh, coming out recently around the war in
02:13:08 Ukraine.
02:13:09 So let me actually ask about the war in Ukraine.
02:13:14 What is your analysis of the war in Ukraine from 2014 to the full on invasion of Ukraine
02:13:21 by Russia in 2022 in February, 2022?
02:13:27 But um, there’s many questions we could ask.
02:13:33 One is, what are the sins of the governments involved?
02:13:37 What are the sins of Russia, Ukraine, America, China?
02:13:45 Are those sins comparable?
02:13:48 Who are the good guys and the bad guys?
02:13:49 That was more than one question.
02:13:52 Let me just, uh, uh, give you my, the basics about this savvy observers saw this coming.
02:14:01 There were very small minority, uh, because Vladimir Putin was pretty open about what
02:14:09 he told the world his mission was, was the reestablishment of a strong Russia, the reestablishment
02:14:15 of something like the, the Russian empire to unite all the Russian speaking, uh, uh,
02:14:22 people, uh, in, under one country and, uh, the world ignored him.
02:14:27 I mean, he was open, uh, what was, was at a, at a conference in, in, in, in France,
02:14:32 I believe when we, we set this out, out in the open, uh, and then what we had, uh, in
02:14:38 the United States, we had wishful, wishful thinking, you know, Obama had this reset with
02:14:44 Russia, you know, we all get friendly.
02:14:48 And then when, when, uh, uh, Putin invaded, uh, Crimea, we did nothing.
02:14:54 So and it, and it just escalated slowly, but surely it was pretty clear.
02:15:03 And then they said, uh, it was, I think two years ago, there was an essay published by,
02:15:08 uh, Putin, whether he wrote it or not, it doesn’t matter, but that was also out in public
02:15:12 where he was, again, quite clear what he was going to do.
02:15:15 Now how do you do this with force?
02:15:20 And, uh, and the, the sins committed by the American government was that we ignored it.
02:15:26 We weren’t engaged in wishful thinking and we didn’t stop it with sanctions before the
02:15:32 shooting started.
02:15:34 To push back, I don’t think you’re fully describing, you are describing the sins of the Russian
02:15:40 government and Putin.
02:15:42 I don’t think you’re fully describing the sins of the American government here because
02:15:46 not only didn’t, you’re doing, you’re describing the miscalculation.
02:15:51 So not only did they not pressure correctly with sanctions and so on and, and, and clearly
02:15:58 respond to the actual statements and the essays and the words spoken.
02:16:02 I know where you’re going, but keep on speaking.
02:16:04 Yes.
02:16:05 But they also, at the same time, pressured, pressured Russia and they also, as, as Putin
02:16:13 himself said, sort of, there’s a rat and they pushed the rat towards the corner by expanding
02:16:19 NATO and, uh, and arming Ukraine and the military industrial complex is a machine that, uh,
02:16:31 that led us, um, and I think a lot of younger people, I mean, when I came to this country
02:16:39 and this is the country I love, I lived through 9 11, I lived through the full roller coaster
02:16:48 of emotion.
02:16:49 Yeah.
02:16:50 I’m a, at that time, before that and after was a proud American.
02:16:55 I went through the whole roller coaster of, uh, being sold, uh, I would say a lie about
02:17:02 the reason to invade Iraq and even Afghanistan.
02:17:07 And I’ve got to live through understanding of this military industrial complex that leads
02:17:14 to the expansion of vampires, of the delusion that we have in the populace, in, in the government
02:17:22 that convinces us that we are the good guys and somehow with military force, we can instill
02:17:31 our values, instill happiness, the pursuit of happiness that all men are created equal
02:17:36 these ideas in, into other lands and we can do so with drones and we can do so with weapons
02:17:43 and we could do so without significant cost to our own, from our own pockets.
02:17:49 And so this idea, this machine doesn’t just apply to Afghanistan and Iraq, it doesn’t
02:17:55 just apply to Yemen and Syria, it doesn’t just apply to China, it also applies to Ukraine.
02:18:00 It also applies to Russia.
02:18:01 Agreed.
02:18:02 Two thoughts, if I may, uh, first of all, when does not hear the term military industrial
02:18:09 complex in the public discourse these days, Eisenhower warned about it, Eisenhower was
02:18:16 a capitalist, he was the president of the United States.
02:18:20 So it exists and it is very powerful.
02:18:24 The more weapons you can sell, the more you have to replace them or send over, you have
02:18:29 to replace them.
02:18:30 So yes, the other thing is there’s also a messianic streak that powers American foreign
02:18:41 policy.
02:18:42 We want to make the world just like us.
02:18:45 Why don’t they get it?
02:18:47 Because they don’t want to.
02:18:48 It’s almost like it’s not communism, but it’s a, it’s a very similar romantic idea that
02:18:53 we can make the world then fashion the world the way we are.
02:18:58 And that’s the romantic side and the sort of honest side, but it doesn’t work.
02:19:04 It failed every time, right?
02:19:05 You know, Afghanistan is a Royal mess and was, would never become a functioning democracy.
02:19:11 I don’t know if, if Ukraine can become a functioning democracy.
02:19:16 So well, I don’t know if American weapons can help Ukraine become a functional democracy.
02:19:23 I yeah, but there’s a huge amount of interest in seeing the world in black and white and
02:19:31 selling the story of the world is black and white that Ukraine is the symbol of democracy
02:19:39 in this East Eastern European world.
02:19:42 And Russia is the symbol of authoritarian dictatorship.
02:19:47 And the story is not so simple as, as, as many indices show, Ukraine and Russia are
02:19:54 the number one and the number two most corrupt countries in Europe.
02:19:57 There are two P’s in a pod.
02:19:59 One is bigger and one is in this case, the aggressor.
02:20:03 Now, you know, two P’s, the aggressor is still ultimately responsible.
02:20:10 And the person that throws the first punch.
02:20:13 Now there’s a lot of people going to disagree where the punch came from, but there is, there
02:20:19 is magnitude and the struggle by Ukraine for its sovereignty stretches back to the beginning
02:20:28 of the 20th century.
02:20:29 It stretches back even further than that.
02:20:31 But there’s been the Ukrainian people are proud people and they’ve been in many cases
02:20:38 tortured by those that sit in the Kremlin throughout the 20th century, the, the, the
02:20:44 famine in the, in the early thirties.
02:20:46 And it’s always, it’s never the middle class and upper class that suffer.
02:20:51 So is the lower classes, the peasants in that time that this history stretches back far.
02:20:59 And this is yet another manifestation of that.
02:21:02 And there’s a lot of interests at play.
02:21:05 China watches closely, Russia, America watches closely.
02:21:12 And there’s an extra caveat here that there’s nuclear weapons at play as well.
02:21:17 Exactly.
02:21:18 And it’s what this is the situation is as dangerous as I have lived through in my entire
02:21:26 life, I believe.
02:21:28 And because it’s not necessarily at the highest point of escalation, but it will be in my
02:21:33 view, a protracted crisis.
02:21:36 And the longer that crisis lasts, the more of a chance there is of an accident.
02:21:42 Yeah.
02:21:43 One rocket.
02:21:44 Yeah.
02:21:45 There’s seems to be a strong incentive to prolong, to do siege tactics, to prolong this
02:21:51 conflict over perhaps many years, which is terrifying to think about.
02:21:57 And over that, a single rocket can lead to, given that there’s leaders that might be losing
02:22:05 their mind and Ukraine is not part of NATO, the thing I’m really afraid of is that somebody
02:22:14 might think it’s a good idea for Russia.
02:22:19 So Putin might think it’s a good idea for Russia to send a message by launching a nuke
02:22:25 against Ukraine because they’re not part of NATO.
02:22:28 So surely the West is not going to respond.
02:22:31 What is the West going to do if Russia nukes Ukraine to send a message?
02:22:39 I don’t know if anyone knows the answer to that question, but it’s a terrifying question.
02:22:44 And I don’t know the exact protocol that needs to be followed to launch a nuclear strike
02:22:53 on NATO’s end because we have several countries in NATO that have nuclear weapons.
02:22:59 So let’s say for France to fire a nuke, does the United States have to agree?
02:23:04 I don’t know how that works.
02:23:05 I don’t know if anyone knows how that works.
02:23:10 I worry, now we have different, very kind of anecdotal perspectives on these things,
02:23:17 but the people I’ve interacted with in the DOD, Department of Defense, in the military,
02:23:23 there is a compartmentalization, there is a bureaucracy, and within that giant bureaucracy,
02:23:28 there’s incompetence.
02:23:29 We’d like to think that there is like really well organized for really important things.
02:23:37 There’s going to be the best of the best in the world that’s going to execute on the correct
02:23:42 decisions both geopolitically, militarily, all that kind of stuff.
02:23:46 And I’ve seen enough to know that competence at any level of government, at any level in
02:23:53 the military is not guaranteed.
02:23:54 Let’s go back to the law of hierarchy.
02:23:57 The government is the biggest hierarchy there is.
02:24:01 And so invariably, politicians find their way to the top.
02:24:06 And once you have politics dictating substantive decisions, they’re going to be weak or wrong.
02:24:17 I don’t know how this could work any other way.
02:24:20 Right now we have some functional idiots in the central United States government.
02:24:26 Well, let me, because you said that, I think elsewhere you said that Putin was not a good
02:24:33 KGB agent.
02:24:34 That’s right.
02:24:35 A mediocre one, but is an excellent politician.
02:24:39 Yeah.
02:24:40 And a good organizer.
02:24:41 He was known as a really, really good organizer.
02:24:43 When Yeltsin hired him as prime minister, he cleaned up the mess because under Yeltsin,
02:24:56 Russia deteriorated tremendously and it became sort of a mix of an oligarchy and a criminal
02:25:03 enterprise and chaotic.
02:25:06 So he had skills that made him a good executive.
02:25:09 Absolutely.
02:25:10 Now let’s go back to him as a KGB agent.
02:25:12 He was a KGB agent.
02:25:14 I mean, according to him, once a KGB agent, always a KGB agent.
02:25:20 But 16 years, let’s say, something like this.
02:25:25 What do you think about, from your experience, now you’re maybe the same age as him, approximately
02:25:33 the same age as him.
02:25:34 He’s a little younger.
02:25:35 A little younger.
02:25:36 Yeah.
02:25:37 So what do you think about the KGB experience he had made him the man he is?
02:25:44 What aspect of that, from your own experience, how much does that define you, who you are,
02:25:51 how you think about the world, how you analyze the geopolitics of the world, how you analyze
02:25:56 human nature?
02:25:58 Now I got to tell you one thing.
02:26:00 He had a different type of training than I did.
02:26:01 Mine was one on one and he went to school, so to speak.
02:26:06 So…
02:26:07 Classroom training.
02:26:08 Right.
02:26:09 But fundamentally, he was not a top agent.
02:26:18 This is very simple to… There’s only one thing you need to know.
02:26:21 He knows German pretty well.
02:26:24 So where was he deployed?
02:26:27 In East Germany.
02:26:28 Not in West Germany, not in Switzerland, not in Austria.
02:26:31 That’s where they sent the best, right, one would think, generally.
02:26:35 We’re learning here.
02:26:37 So this is your classification of where they send the best.
02:26:41 People classify all kinds of stuff, like what is the best university in the world?
02:26:45 What is the best football team in the world?
02:26:47 You start to get a sense, the good guys get sent, the best athletes get sent to… Well,
02:26:53 we disagree on this, but the football team is… But you have a sense and you’re saying
02:26:58 that the best agents would have been sent to West Germany.
02:27:00 One would think so.
02:27:01 So this is not a forcing argument, but I also have it from a word from the horse’s mouth.
02:27:08 Which horse?
02:27:10 I mean, what kind of horse?
02:27:13 What’s the breed of the horse?
02:27:14 Oleg Kalugin.
02:27:15 You know who Oleg Kalugin is.
02:27:17 He’s still alive.
02:27:18 He was, at one point, the head of counterintelligence for the first directorate, espionage, right?
02:27:25 And Putin was in the first directorate and reported to Kalugin for a while.
02:27:31 And Oleg told me, to my face, that Oleg was not an impressive agent trainee or agent.
02:27:39 That Vladimir Putin was not impressive.
02:27:41 Not impressive at all.
02:27:42 Now he’s biased, given this current situation.
02:27:47 Well yeah, he could still make it up because he had this big ruckus when he was in parliament
02:27:53 and called Putin a war criminal about the war in Serbia.
02:27:58 Not only could he make it up, I wouldn’t trust his analysis.
02:28:03 I mean, I have to, you know, when people, I’ve been working very hard even before this
02:28:08 war to try to understand objective analysis of all the parties involved.
02:28:12 You have to really keep an open mind here to see clearly, to understand if you are to
02:28:17 try to help in some way make a better world.
02:28:24 In this case, stop this war or have all the countries involved flourish, bring out the
02:28:32 best of the people, remove the corruption and the greed and the destructive aspects
02:28:36 of the governments and let the people flourish.
02:28:39 For all of that, you have to put all the biases aside, all the political bickering, all the,
02:28:48 I don’t know, all the biased analysis.
02:28:53 And there’s a lot of propaganda that says that, in fact, Putin was a good agent.
02:29:02 How else would he rise through the ranks, right?
02:29:05 Because he was a good politician and he made a lot of good connections within the KGB.
02:29:14 Allow me to say something here.
02:29:16 You just taught me a lesson and the lesson I should have figured out myself because I
02:29:23 keep on telling people that in the intelligence world, you never know the truth 100%.
02:29:30 So when you said, oh, I could make that up, of course you could have.
02:29:34 But you get to a point where you’re forced to make a decision or have an opinion and
02:29:39 then you use your best educated guess.
02:29:43 So I’m gonna take the certainty of the statement that I made back because it’s quite possible
02:29:49 that you’re right.
02:29:50 Well, what I’ve noticed about Vladimir Putin, and this is true about, for example, Donald
02:29:55 Trump and all those kinds of divisive figures, that for some reason people’s opinion on the
02:30:02 details of those people are very sticky.
02:30:05 Once you decide this is a bad guy, there’s like a black hole and people are not able
02:30:12 to think one act at a time.
02:30:15 You don’t have to, that doesn’t somehow justify this, this somehow doesn’t remove all the
02:30:23 evil things that are done, but you can analyze clearly each of the actions.
02:30:27 And to me, it is interesting to see how did this man rise through the ranks.
02:30:33 Now you’re saying that to be a KGB agent, there’s a lot of skills involved.
02:30:40 Perhaps raw technical skill of spycraft is perhaps not related to the skill of rising
02:30:51 through the ranks.
02:30:53 And you’re saying as a politician, he was good at rising through the ranks.
02:30:56 Lying and influencing, that is something that is significant as a significant talent and
02:31:05 ability that an agent must have, that helps you as a politician.
02:31:11 Continuing the kind of thread of the role of KGB in defining the heart, soul, and mind
02:31:20 of Vladimir Putin, let me return to Yuri Bismenov, who was a Soviet KGB agent that wrote a four
02:31:27 step framework for ideological subversion on a national scale as practiced by the Soviet
02:31:33 Union.
02:31:34 And the four steps are demoralization, destabilization, crisis, and normalization.
02:31:40 He had a lot of other kind of systematic ways of describing this kind of stuff.
02:31:46 So can you speak to some of these ideas about the systematic large scale ideological subversion
02:31:55 goals of the KGB?
02:31:56 Is there truth to that kind of those ideas?
02:32:00 Yes, but I think I already sort of mentioned that I think Bismenov was a fraud.
02:32:08 And I have, again, good arguments, let’s put it this way.
02:32:15 First of all, we know that the KGB was involved in active measures, which is…
02:32:24 You can call it fake news.
02:32:29 Putting fake news into the countries that are your adversaries.
02:32:36 And the Russians have been doing this lately by meddling in our election and focusing
02:32:42 on the left and the right fringe and influencing them to become more left and more right.
02:32:48 And Vasily Mitrokhin has in one of his books, he has a whole chapter about active measures.
02:32:57 Okay, so what he has to say about the department, and I forgot what department that was, was
02:33:03 the one department that was the least desirable for KGB agents.
02:33:07 Because these were desk jobs for people who had to come up with fake stories in countries
02:33:15 where they didn’t quite know too much about the country.
02:33:20 Now there were some successes, like one of the two most famous successes that I’m aware
02:33:27 of is that the AIDS virus was concocted in a CIA lab, and a lot of people around the
02:33:37 world believe that.
02:33:39 And the other one was that J. Edgar Hoover was a secret cross dresser.
02:33:47 That is still known by a lot of Americans who are of a certain age that this was the
02:33:52 truth.
02:33:53 But Mitrokhin actually traces it back to a story that was placed in a sort of left wing
02:33:59 but close to mainstream French magazine, and it was then taken up by larger newspapers
02:34:10 and well established papers.
02:34:13 So they had some successes, but this kind of a massive, well thought out campaign to
02:34:23 destabilize the United States, I don’t believe the KGB was capable of doing that.
02:34:31 Mitrokhin seems to agree with me.
02:34:33 I was trained, I would think, I was one of the crown jewels of their agents.
02:34:40 One would think that they used the best that they had to help me how to become an American,
02:34:47 and they didn’t have a clue.
02:34:50 If you don’t know how a country operates, how do you come up with this kind of a very
02:34:55 detailed long term plan that’s also timed, two years this and one year that and all that?
02:35:02 Yeah, so we should actually just clarify.
02:35:06 He has this whole idea that there’s 15 to 20 years needed for demoralization where you’re
02:35:18 basically infiltrating a country or people from a young age, manipulating their mind.
02:35:23 You’re destabilizing them, that’s the second step that takes two to five years.
02:35:27 You target the country’s foreign relations, defense and economy.
02:35:31 You create a crisis artificially and then you normalize it as if it always was this
02:35:36 way.
02:35:37 So it’s basically saying that the KGB is capable of, at scale, over many years, manipulate
02:35:48 an entire population of people.
02:35:52 And this is kind of, there’s a lot of people that believe in conspiracy theories that are
02:35:59 amenable to this kind of idea.
02:36:01 Now, my own experience is that there is, in fact, just a giant amount of incompetence
02:36:08 and that this is something that’s actually very difficult to pull off because it’s incredibly
02:36:19 difficult to achieve this kind of manipulation.
02:36:21 I think it would require, first of all, not much bureaucracy, not much slowing down.
02:36:29 You have to have incredible, in the modern world, digital systems that are able to do
02:36:33 surveillance, manipulation.
02:36:36 There has to be a strategy that is carried out in secrecy across a huge number of people
02:36:42 effectively that also requires you hire the best people in the world.
02:36:48 And I think it’s difficult to execute on this kind of thing if you compartmentalize because
02:36:57 there has to be great collaboration.
02:36:59 There has to be a great, where there’s a unified vision and coordination across multiple groups.
02:37:07 There has to be, I mean, it’s very difficult to do.
02:37:11 Now, nevertheless, especially with technology, this becomes easier and easier.
02:37:15 So the bar goes lower and lower.
02:37:17 To achieve mass surveillance becomes easier and easier and easier.
02:37:22 Mass manipulation through platforms, because we’re now digitally connected, you can now
02:37:28 do that kind of manipulation.
02:37:29 So it becomes more and more realistic that you could do this kind of thing.
02:37:32 But you’re saying that, no, intelligence, first of all, intelligence is hard.
02:37:39 And to do it at scale and to do it well and to do it in a way that it’s also not just
02:37:47 collecting information about the populace, but manipulating the populace is very, very
02:37:51 difficult.
02:37:52 Now, let me give you another argument why I think that Besminov was a fraud.
02:37:57 I mean, I already have, I have Matrokin on my side and my personal observation of the
02:38:05 incompetence that I witnessed.
02:38:08 I mean, they really, really didn’t know what they didn’t know.
02:38:12 So now Besminov was KGB, where was he stationed?
02:38:17 In India.
02:38:19 He was a low level agent in India.
02:38:25 And I told you it was the one thing that the KGB was really good at was compartmentalization.
02:38:30 How does Besminov in India find out about this massive plan that should have been super
02:38:36 secret, right?
02:38:38 He made it up, sorry.
02:38:40 And you know why he got away with it?
02:38:42 Because Americans eat that up, because it’s not our fault.
02:38:45 It’s the damn Russians that doing all that bad stuff.
02:38:49 Speaking of the damn Russians doing all that bad stuff, you know about the Internet Research
02:38:54 Agency.
02:38:55 They have been doing quite a bit of damage and I’m now familiar with the world of enhanced
02:39:04 artificial persons.
02:39:06 These are the avatars on Facebook and Twitter and so forth that look like real people.
02:39:15 And there are quite a few of them.
02:39:18 And I have a good friend who operates in that realm and he uses, for instance, facial recognition
02:39:26 when he thinks that there’s a suspicious character, say, on LinkedIn or on Facebook.
02:39:36 And very often he finds out, yeah, that that person exists, but it’s not the person who
02:39:42 it pretends to be.
02:39:44 So basically detecting the artificial, the enhanced artificial person.
02:39:48 But he can also make them.
02:39:50 You think the United States doesn’t do it?
02:39:53 We do it too.
02:39:54 Well, this is to push back against your pushback, right?
02:39:57 Yeah, Bezmenov might be a fraud, but is it possible, especially in the modern age, that
02:40:04 there is these kind of large scale systematic operatives?
02:40:08 Wouldn’t you, as a government that’s investing billions of dollars into military equipment,
02:40:22 in a world that’s more and more clearly going to be defined by cyber war versus hot war,
02:40:31 wouldn’t you start to have serious meetings, large amounts of hires that are working at
02:40:37 how do we manipulate the information flow, how do we manipulate the minds of the populace,
02:40:44 how do we sell them a narrative?
02:40:46 So even though he might have been making up a story because people eat it up, could it
02:40:52 speak to some deep truth that’s actually different than the truth you came up in as a KGB agent?
02:40:59 I agree with you 100%.
02:41:00 It’s much easier when all you need is an army of nerds who also know.
02:41:08 No offense to nerds.
02:41:09 That’s a term of endearment I use.
02:41:11 Yes, I love nerds.
02:41:14 I used to be one myself, but anyway.
02:41:16 Once a nerd, always a nerd.
02:41:21 So what I was going to say here is.
02:41:23 All you need is an army of nerds.
02:41:25 And what also experts in the culture of the target country.
02:41:32 Okay.
02:41:33 And nowadays the world is different.
02:41:35 There’s a whole lot more fluidity.
02:41:37 There’s a whole lot of more people that like say Russians, for instance, study in the United
02:41:40 States, Chinese, an army of Chinese studying in the United States, they have a lot more
02:41:46 knowledge of how we function than the KGB did and it’s vice versa.
02:41:52 Not as many Americans in Russia, but we have some, but the Chinese and the Russians have
02:41:58 an advantage here.
02:41:59 Can I ask you a question based on your experience?
02:42:02 So I have been talking to a lot of powerful people and some of which have very close connections
02:42:13 to in this particular conflict, Ukraine and Russia, but in other places as well.
02:42:19 I don’t believe I’ve ever been contacted by or interacted with an intelligence agency.
02:42:24 CIA, FSB, MI6, Mossad, I don’t think I had, well, let me say explicitly, I haven’t had
02:42:34 an official conversation, which is what I assume I would have because I have nothing
02:42:38 to hide.
02:42:39 Right?
02:42:40 So I think there’s no reason for people to be secretive.
02:42:43 But would I, why is that, would I know, am I interesting at all, how are people determined
02:42:52 if they’re a person of interest or not?
02:42:54 And I guess the question, I mean, some of it I ask in a bit of a humorous way, but also
02:43:00 perhaps there’s truth in some of the humors.
02:43:02 Would I know if I have ever interacted with a intelligence agency spy?
02:43:10 Well, you don’t know that you haven’t been contacted, but certainly not, I think you
02:43:20 never had a conversation that related to intelligence in any way, shape, or form, right?
02:43:24 Right.
02:43:25 Like where a person, another person introduced themselves.
02:43:27 Yeah.
02:43:28 Introduced themselves or becomes, sort of wants to be your friend and then talks about
02:43:34 these types of topics, right?
02:43:37 Yeah.
02:43:38 I, there’s people because of who I’m interacting with, they’re, I mean, even with just, even
02:43:48 with Elon Musk, like if you think about Elon Musk, there’s a lot of people that are, that
02:43:57 are part of the conversations that happen.
02:43:59 How do I know they’re all trustworthy?
02:44:01 They all present themselves as trustworthy.
02:44:03 Now, again, I have nothing, so this is, this is for the intelligence agencies.
02:44:07 I have nothing to hide.
02:44:08 I am the same person privately as publicly, well intentioned, real, no, no controlled,
02:44:16 no weird sexual stuff where you can manipulate me.
02:44:20 What else?
02:44:21 No drug use.
02:44:22 No drug use, no, no skeletons in the closet, none of that kind of stuff.
02:44:28 But you know, I don’t, I don’t know, I mean, just even having these conversations, you
02:44:33 know, I tend to trust people as a default.
02:44:36 Yeah, me too.
02:44:38 And you start when you think, well, especially with some of the people I’ve been talking
02:44:45 with and some of the traveling I’m doing, I’m realizing there’s a, you know, there’s
02:44:52 hard men in this world, there’s military, there’s serious suffering and there’s war
02:45:01 and there’s serious people that are doing serious harm and so you have to be careful
02:45:06 of thinking who to trust.
02:45:09 The person approaches you with a smile and asks you a question.
02:45:14 My natural inclination is that person is a cool person, I’ll answer the question, become
02:45:20 a friend.
02:45:21 But it becomes difficult when you realize that there’s things like intelligence agencies
02:45:26 with thousands of employees.
02:45:28 There’s people that are doing major military actions that involve tens of thousands, hundreds
02:45:33 of thousands of soldiers.
02:45:35 This is serious stuff and so how do I, how do you know how to operate in this world?
02:45:39 The folks that you’re interacting with have a responsibility not to tell you what they
02:45:47 shouldn’t tell you, right?
02:45:49 So and most of them probably won’t and I’m guessing occasionally they will say, well,
02:45:54 I can’t go there, right?
02:45:57 So what you are aware of is sort of public and what you’re doing is you’re collecting
02:46:08 it and you’re editing it to some extent, you’re not changing the verbage, you just repeat
02:46:21 what they say, so from that angle you’re not privy to any real secrets.
02:46:27 What you have possibly that could be of use is you learn to get to know the person.
02:46:36 So I’m thinking there’s a good possibility if you get the interviews in the East that
02:46:43 somebody may actually approach you and ask you what’s your opinion.
02:46:47 I just hope they approach me and introduce themselves properly.
02:46:51 I just, there’s a kind of, I mean, would you know, like how many Russian spies are there
02:46:59 in the United States?
02:47:00 How many American spies are there in Russia?
02:47:02 Do you have a sense?
02:47:03 Is it just like with the GRU?
02:47:06 No idea.
02:47:07 Is it possible there’s like tens of thousands and we’re not, or like thousands?
02:47:13 Not thousands like I used to operate.
02:47:16 We are too hard to train and we weren’t that successful to begin with, but particularly
02:47:22 Russians and Chinese, both governments know who is going abroad and I guarantee you there’s
02:47:34 a lot of amateur spies, they’re being asked to help us out, do something for the motherland.
02:47:40 And crowdsource spying.
02:47:42 Yeah, sort of.
02:47:43 Not serious training, but yeah.
02:47:46 For instance, this lady, I forgot her first name, Butina, she was a rank amateur.
02:47:52 She used social media to communicate with Moscow.
02:47:57 She had no training, but she was reasonably successful.
02:48:01 I mean, and the difference between, let’s say, the current Russian intelligence and
02:48:11 the KGB, Vladimir Putin and his henchmen are okay with people being caught because, and
02:48:22 every time I go and talk and give a talk someplace, I’m always asked this question, how many Russian
02:48:28 spies do you think we have here?
02:48:31 Because that scares the people, right?
02:48:33 And Putin likes to scare people.
02:48:35 The KGB was very solicitous of their agents.
02:48:40 They didn’t want any one of them caught, all right?
02:48:43 So that’s a big difference.
02:48:47 So for the FSB, getting caught sends a strong signal to the world that there’s agents everywhere.
02:48:52 Yeah, there could be many more.
02:48:53 And there probably are, but because also the world, again, there’s a whole lot more travel
02:49:03 going on, a whole lot more interaction, studying abroad, doing business.
02:49:09 And there will be attempted espionage probably every minute in this country.
02:49:16 That doesn’t mean they will be successful, no.
02:49:20 But there is a cottage industry now that is doing quite well that teaches companies how
02:49:27 to fortify themselves against industrial espionage or also foreign actors spying.
02:49:37 It’s all over the place.
02:49:38 Yeah.
02:49:39 As it becomes easier and easier with digital, with cyber, that becomes a serious, very serious
02:49:44 threat.
02:49:45 We might wind up in a world where nobody knows anymore what’s up and what’s down.
02:49:51 If I was to have a conversation with Vladimir Putin and or Vladimir Zelensky, is there something
02:49:59 you would ask about the time in the KGB and the time in his past?
02:50:10 All of us, men and women, are creations of the experiences we have in our life, early
02:50:16 on in life and through the formative experiences, successes and failures.
02:50:22 So…
02:50:23 Yeah, you just said the key words.
02:50:25 I would ask, without giving away anything, just being high level, your biggest success
02:50:31 and your biggest failure.
02:50:33 As a politician or as a KGB agent?
02:50:35 No, we’re talking in the realm of KGB.
02:50:40 When the wall came down, and he was in an office, a KGB office in the city of Dresden,
02:50:48 and East Germans were besieging Stasi offices, and they also dropped by the KGB office, and
02:51:01 they were…
02:51:02 It was pretty threatening.
02:51:03 It looked like they would actually storm the office and get, you know, the documents and
02:51:09 stuff like that.
02:51:11 And initially, the first demonstration was told that if they come any closer, weapons
02:51:23 would be used.
02:51:24 So, they disappeared, and then they came back, and I don’t know, somebody in that office
02:51:31 called Berlin and said, what are we gonna do?
02:51:35 Are we allowed to use force?
02:51:37 And the answer came back that Gorbachev said, absolutely not.
02:51:41 And so, this is where Putin, all of a sudden, you know, he was at one point a member of
02:51:46 the greatest, the most powerful intelligence organization in the world, and all of a sudden,
02:51:51 he was powerless, and he had to watch how, you know, this was a defeat, big one.
02:51:59 It’s supposedly a powerful intelligence agency cowering, sort of crawling back into a position
02:52:09 of weakness.
02:52:10 And he probably promised himself, never again, Russia needs to be great again.
02:52:15 The KGB, FSB, Russia, the Russian Empire needs to rise again, and that there’s a feeling
02:52:23 for him that that’s, as he talks about the collapse of the Soviet Union being a great
02:52:28 tragedy, there’s a feeling like that was, like, never again.
02:52:38 Yeah, and I believe that he has a strong conviction that, I don’t know if he’s religious, he
02:52:49 carries the cross now, but I don’t know what that means, but somehow, but that it’s the
02:52:55 destiny of the Russian nation to be great, and that is sort of, whether it’s determined
02:53:03 by God or some higher power, that is very important for him.
02:53:08 Of course, that nationalist idea is one that Americans share as well, and it could help
02:53:17 a nation flourish, so by itself, it’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s how it manifests
02:53:22 itself is the question.
02:53:25 One other thing, if I were to get a chat with the Ukrainian president, I would ask him,
02:53:36 how many lives, what is the equation between giving up some land and how many lives are
02:53:46 worth this land?
02:53:50 And that’s a good way to phrase the question, of course, that question gets you killed in
02:53:54 Ukraine, but because there’s another part of that equation, which is it’s not just land
02:54:01 versus lives, it’s the sovereignty, the knowledge that you’re free and you’re self determined,
02:54:10 and it’s not about fighting for the particular land, it’s saying we are messed up, corrupt,
02:54:21 we have problems, it’s a messy world, but it’s our world.
02:54:27 I think Stephen Crane has a poem about a man eating his own heart, and he was asked how
02:54:35 does it taste, and he said it’s bitter, but I like it because it is bitter and because
02:54:39 it is my heart, and that there’s a sense of I want, this is not just about land, this
02:54:46 is our nation.
02:54:47 The same love of nation that Putin has for Russia, the greater Russia, this vision of
02:54:53 this great empire, I believe Ukraine does as well.
02:54:58 Not every nation, there’s levels to this game, and Ukrainian people are some of the proudest
02:55:04 people throughout the history of the 20th century, throughout the history of Earth.
02:55:10 The Polish people are proud people.
02:55:12 You can just see in World War II, the people who said fuck you, you’re not having this,
02:55:20 we will die to the last man.
02:55:23 There’s different cultures that kind of really hold their ground, and Ukrainian people are
02:55:28 that.
02:55:29 You know, I have to admit, in that respect, I’m a bit of a coward.
02:55:33 I could not do what Zelensky has been doing.
02:55:40 I would sort of try to find a way to carve out something that I can live with, however,
02:55:53 if that force, that evil force gets to my family.
02:55:58 Right.
02:55:59 There’s lines.
02:56:00 Yes.
02:56:01 That’s right.
02:56:02 You become the world’s bravest man if somebody crosses that line.
02:56:09 You mentioned something about you’ve not been to Moscow back, and that it might not be safe
02:56:16 for you to travel there.
02:56:18 Yes.
02:56:19 Can you speak to the nature of that?
02:56:24 As somebody that successfully got out of the KGB, how are you still alive?
02:56:33 A number of reasons.
02:56:36 First of all, when my story became public, it was six years ago, I was pretty old, right?
02:56:44 And so the folks that may have a personal interest or may have had a personal interest
02:56:51 in doing me harm, most of them don’t live anymore, all right?
02:56:55 That’s number one.
02:56:56 Number two, I did not, I wasn’t, I hired hand, a German.
02:57:02 I did not betray the motherland.
02:57:04 That’s a crime that is punished by death.
02:57:09 You betray the motherland.
02:57:17 And the other thing is, you know that these kinds of operations to assassination in another
02:57:27 country are very difficult to plan and implement, and if there’s a list of people that they
02:57:33 don’t like, I may not be at the very top.
02:57:36 Having said that, you know, if I wind up, say, in Moscow or even in countries like Turkey
02:57:41 where there’s a lot of lawlessness, you know, accidents can easily be arranged, and that’s
02:57:49 just sending another message, you know, just like, you know, we can do a lot of things.
02:57:57 Powerful.
02:57:58 Yes.
02:57:59 Do you think it’s safe for me to travel in Russia and Ukraine?
02:58:02 I think you know very well how to communicate in both countries.
02:58:11 You know, you’ve shown this in this interaction that you have a lot of empathy for the people
02:58:18 you’ll be talking with, and empathy means good understanding where they’re coming from,
02:58:22 and that there are lines that you can’t cross.
02:58:25 Like the question that I was going to ask Zelensky, you’re not going to ask.
02:58:29 Good for you.
02:58:30 Yeah, isn’t that the funny thing about this world?
02:58:33 There’s lines.
02:58:34 There’s lines everywhere.
02:58:35 Even in love, even in personal relationships, there’s lines you should not cross.
02:58:38 Yeah.
02:58:39 How did you finally get caught?
02:58:42 I resigned in 1988, so…
02:58:45 Let’s actually talk about that.
02:58:46 There was a…
02:58:47 Okay, yeah.
02:58:48 Resigned.
02:58:49 There’s warning signs.
02:58:50 Yeah, yeah, okay.
02:58:51 There’s yet another choice.
02:58:52 Yet another crossroads.
02:58:53 Yes, okay.
02:58:54 What was the calculation?
02:58:55 What was the choice to be made?
02:58:57 To give a little background, it was 1988, and I thought they would…
02:59:08 My time in the US would soon end because I thought 10 to 12 years, it was already past
02:59:15 10 years.
02:59:16 There was no indication that they indicated, that they said, you’re done.
02:59:23 But in December of 1988, I got this one thing that I never wanted to see.
02:59:30 So we had a system of signals that either one of those diplomat agents could set at
02:59:39 a spot that I pass by every day, or I could set where they would pass by, like on their
02:59:47 way from where they live to the United Nations, for instance, who would just drive.
02:59:52 So the signal spot for me was on a support beam for the elevated atrium in Queens.
03:00:03 And it was morning in December that I walked by there and routinely look at it, and I never
03:00:10 expected anything.
03:00:11 And there was this red dot, it was about the size of my fist with a red paint.
03:00:17 And since you have done it already, I think I can curse in this moment, because it’s the
03:00:24 only way I can really indicate how I felt, I said, oh shit, because that was the danger
03:00:30 signal.
03:00:31 It was like, you are in severe danger, and you need to get out of the country as soon
03:00:37 as possible.
03:00:38 There was a protocol that I was supposed to follow, I wasn’t even supposed to go home,
03:00:44 I just needed to, was supposed to get my reserve documents that I had hidden in a park in the
03:00:53 Bronx and make a beeline to the Canadian border.
03:00:57 I wasn’t ready.
03:00:59 So I just ignored this thing, I mean, I couldn’t ignore it, but I went on to work, got on the
03:01:05 A train, went to work, and then went to my cubicle and stared at the computer screen
03:01:11 all day because I couldn’t think.
03:01:12 I could think only about what to do, what to do, what to do.
03:01:15 The reason for this indecisiveness was that I was a father at the time.
03:01:24 My little girl by the name of Chelsea was 18 months old, and I was there when she was
03:01:32 born, I took her to her home, I watched her grow up, I watched her take the first steps,
03:01:45 and always look at me with these big eyes, lovingly look at me, and that is when I started
03:01:52 my reentry into the human race, because I just fell in love with this girl.
03:02:01 That’s when love came back, and it was completely unexpected, and there’s a lot of fathers who
03:02:08 understand, particularly fathers of girls who understand what happened there.
03:02:15 I still thought I need to go back because there was probably some danger, but I hadn’t
03:02:23 figured out how to take care of the girl, leave her, but maybe she needs to have a good
03:02:29 life and grow up and have a chance, and her mother, she was from South America, she had
03:02:35 a fourth grade education.
03:02:38 That would have not worked very well.
03:02:41 So I played for time.
03:02:45 Obviously I could be sick, I could be in a hospital, there was a precedent where I was
03:02:51 sick where I couldn’t communicate for about three weeks, so I just did nothing.
03:03:00 That was on a Monday, on a Thursday was my regular shortwave transmission, I listened,
03:03:07 and they explained a little in a few sentences.
03:03:11 We have reason to believe that the FBI is on your case.
03:03:15 You need to execute the emergency procedure, come home right away.
03:03:22 I still had some time because the radio could be broken or the transmission was bad, or
03:03:28 I still could be in a hospital, right?
03:03:30 So I gave myself some more time, and then something happened where they forced my hand.
03:03:42 And this is the only time that a Soviet agent was anywhere near me on the territory of the
03:03:48 United States.
03:03:50 So I’m waiting for the A train on a dark morning still in Queens, and there’s this man, the
03:04:02 short man in a black trench coat comes up to me from my right, and he whispers into
03:04:08 my ears, you got to come back or else you’re dead.
03:04:13 I can’t imitate the Russian accent, it was a Russian accent.
03:04:18 And it was a pretty strong accent.
03:04:20 The you’re dead phrase can have two meanings, and an American would have said, or else you’re
03:04:28 busted or else you get arrested or else you’re dead is very strong.
03:04:34 So now you have to take it seriously to some degree because I knew that they had a history
03:04:42 of assassinating or at least trying to assassinate defectors.
03:04:46 So that obviously raised the stakes a little bit.
03:04:51 But I just talked myself into believing this was just a bad phrasing.
03:04:59 But at this point, I knew and they knew that we both knew, right?
03:05:03 So there was no more guessing.
03:05:05 He found me, he talked to me, I know.
03:05:07 So now I had to act.
03:05:09 So in the next radiogram, I was asked to execute a dead drop operation where they would give
03:05:18 me money and a passport.
03:05:23 And that was in a park on Staten Island, it was a location that I found and I described.
03:05:32 And I was always praised for my ability to describe spots that are easy to find.
03:05:41 So that was a given.
03:05:44 And the only thing that was different for this operation, they scheduled it for the
03:05:49 dark.
03:05:50 All right.
03:05:51 But it was still no problem because it was in a park and a couple of, about a hundred
03:05:58 yards in by next to a fallen tree would be hard to miss.
03:06:06 So I go to Staten Island and I read the signal that said, I put the container in the drop.
03:06:15 That was the protocol.
03:06:16 There’s a signal that the person who hands over something puts at a spot not too far
03:06:25 from the spot itself.
03:06:27 That means I would go in and just pick it up.
03:06:30 The reason I actually went to pick up this container, because there was money in it.
03:06:38 So I didn’t have to make a decision yet.
03:06:41 Okay.
03:06:42 I could throw away the passport.
03:06:44 It was like I was still trying to figure out what to do, what to do, what to do.
03:06:48 So I get to the spot, I get to the tree and I had a flashlight with me that the park,
03:06:53 there was no way in the park.
03:06:56 Even during the day though, this park was not, it was more, almost like a little forest.
03:07:02 And I don’t see the container.
03:07:05 It wasn’t supposed to be a crushed oil can, pretty sizable, hard to miss.
03:07:13 And I do a double take and I look again and I look around and look around a little more,
03:07:18 see if they misplaced it, can’t find it.
03:07:22 That’s the only one that one of those operations failed.
03:07:29 And that just doesn’t make a lot of sense.
03:07:33 So when, as I’m walking away from this, like sort of numb emotionally, I said to myself,
03:07:41 I’m staying.
03:07:42 Yeah.
03:07:43 That decision.
03:07:44 That kind of signal, some kind of a muse just spoke to you.
03:07:50 That decision was made for me.
03:07:53 Now, you know that I’m a Christian now and I think that was like, God told me this, you
03:07:58 know.
03:07:59 But it was certain there.
03:08:01 It was right there.
03:08:02 That was it.
03:08:03 That was it.
03:08:04 That was it.
03:08:05 And so what I did to, well, first of all, divine intervention helped me to find a good
03:08:15 explanation.
03:08:16 I sent them my last letter with secret writing, I communicated to them, I said, I wish I could
03:08:25 come but I can’t because I have contracted HIV AIDS.
03:08:31 That was the best lie ever because nobody wanted to have AIDS in their country.
03:08:37 Those days it was a death sentence, right?
03:08:39 And I knew, we had conversations when I was back in Moscow, how they were snickering about
03:08:46 what’s going on in the United States, that depraved culture and you see, they’re killing
03:08:51 each other.
03:08:52 And the depraved culture took over your being and how you’re sitting.
03:08:57 And I was convincing enough, I even traced it back to a girlfriend I had once that I
03:09:04 actually reported on that she, I interacted with this lady who had a boyfriend at one
03:09:11 point who was a drug addict and she was infected and she infected me.
03:09:16 So they believed it, they sent and I asked them to give my dollar savings to my German
03:09:24 family.
03:09:26 They gave them some but they told my family that I already passed away, that I’m dead.
03:09:33 They believed it, 100%.
03:09:35 And I guess the agent who took the money took half of it for himself.
03:09:42 So that was it.
03:09:43 And the next three months I made sure that I wasn’t reliably at the same spot and the
03:09:52 same timeframe.
03:09:53 So I went to work in different paths at different times just to, you know, just as a safety
03:10:01 measure so to speak and not huge but, you know, it kept me, allowed me to keep my sanity.
03:10:14 And obviously after I sent the letter I threw the shortwave radio in the Hudson River, destroyed
03:10:21 the one time paths that I still had.
03:10:23 So I was now ready to for a new life and live out my life as an American undiscovered but,
03:10:36 you know, starting to work on my version of the American dream.
03:10:42 And the first action was, I was telling my wife, the mother of this child, you know,
03:10:51 she always wanted to have a house and said, you know what, we should buy a house.
03:10:58 And a year later we moved into the suburbs and then I said, we should have another child
03:11:02 and we had another child.
03:11:04 So and I had a career where I did pretty well.
03:11:09 I moved a couple of times, wound up in a McMansion.
03:11:14 But before that my second house was actually in Pennsylvania, in rural Pennsylvania.
03:11:19 And this is where I was discovered by the FBI.
03:11:25 And how did they know about me?
03:11:28 If it hadn’t been for this defector, Vasily Mitrokhin, who was an archivist in the KGB
03:11:36 archives, he was actually pretty high level.
03:11:38 He was in charge of the relocation of the archive from Lubyanka to Yasenov.
03:11:48 And he really hated, he had reason to believe he hated the Soviet system.
03:11:56 I think I remember that his son was quite ill and he could have gotten treatment in
03:12:01 England and he was not allowed to travel to England with his son.
03:12:05 So his hatred, he tried to figure out what to do and how to do damage to that system.
03:12:12 So he started copying notes, little slips of paper, handwritten that he smuggled out
03:12:19 in his underwear and his socks over the years.
03:12:23 And then he transcribed them with a typewriter and then put the pieces of paper into some
03:12:32 kind of a container and buried this in his stash.
03:12:37 It was, I believe in 1992 when he showed up, that was already the Soviet Union was gone.
03:12:45 So he showed up at the US embassy in Moscow and told him what he had and it was on a weekend
03:12:51 and apparently there was a junior person in charge and he said, you know what, what you
03:12:55 got, we are not interested and it’s really old.
03:13:00 It’s a career limiting move, right, because Vasily Mitrokhin then made his way to one
03:13:07 of the Baltic republics and contacted MI6 and they said, come on in, old fellow, have
03:13:17 a cup of tea.
03:13:19 And so they managed to get this stuff out of the Dacha and get it to England and eventually
03:13:25 MI6 shared it with the FBI and there wasn’t a whole lot of information about me, it was
03:13:32 very, very little.
03:13:33 It was like, there’s a person by the name of Jack Barsky who is an illegal operating
03:13:40 in the northeast of the United States.
03:13:42 Now if it was Jim Miller, they wouldn’t have found me, Jack Barsky was easy to find.
03:13:47 So they checked social security and Jack Barsky had gotten his social security card at the
03:13:55 age of 33, bingo, okay.
03:14:00 All they knew though was that I wasn’t illegal, that I was still living there, they didn’t
03:14:04 know whether I was active, inactive and the other thing that they knew that I was a really,
03:14:10 really well trained agent because I was still there, right.
03:14:15 So they took, I think, almost three years to investigate me, watch me from a distance
03:14:22 because if I was still active, I would have found out that somebody is investigating me.
03:14:30 So you started being less and less active in terms of…
03:14:33 Oh, I stopped completely.
03:14:34 What I mean is…
03:14:35 Oh, surveillance detection.
03:14:36 Yes, surveillance detection.
03:14:37 After three months, I stopped altogether.
03:14:40 Okay.
03:14:41 Yeah, good point.
03:14:42 And FBI is still very careful.
03:14:44 They were very careful.
03:14:45 They pretty much watched me and at one point, I had a house in the country with one neighbor,
03:14:51 at one point that house was for sale, so the FBI bought it and they put a couple of agents
03:14:57 there and just didn’t keep a closer eye on me.
03:15:01 There was no indication that I was still active, but they were still cautious but at one point,
03:15:12 they were able to plant a bug in my kitchen, a listening device and my wife and I didn’t
03:15:23 get along very well.
03:15:24 There was a lot of friction and she was constantly complaining about things and I got sick and
03:15:29 tired of it and one day we had an argument in the kitchen and I chose to deploy the nuclear
03:15:39 option and that is telling her what I sacrificed to be with her so she would understand that
03:15:48 I am there on her side.
03:15:51 I’m supporting her.
03:15:52 If something doesn’t quite fit, it is not because I don’t love the both of them, Chelsea
03:15:57 and Penelope.
03:15:59 So when I said that, the listening device was active, so the FBI was hearing my confession.
03:16:08 I was once a KGB agent, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and I quit and then stayed here
03:16:17 because of you and Chelsea and that also made it clear to the FBI that I wasn’t active
03:16:25 anymore.
03:16:26 They had both of that.
03:16:27 So now they knew an attempt to turn me would have been useless because you turned somebody
03:16:36 who was active, but they figured there was enough reason to treat me nicely because they
03:16:46 figured I had a lot of information that was as aged as it was, but it was still important
03:16:53 for the FBI to get to know.
03:16:56 And so one day, it was a Friday evening, I’m driving back home from the office and I’m
03:17:06 being stopped by a state police.
03:17:16 As I’m going through the toll, it’s a bridge over the Hudson and they had to pay a toll
03:17:22 and he waved me, he got me right where I stopped and he said, could you please move over here?
03:17:29 It’s a routine traffic stop and I thought nothing of it.
03:17:32 I had forgotten at that point that I once was a spy, it was gone.
03:17:39 And then he said, could you please step out of the car?
03:17:42 That should have aroused my suspicion.
03:17:45 That’s unusual, right?
03:17:46 Routine traffic stop.
03:17:47 Yeah, I did it, no problem.
03:17:49 And then again, somebody came from the right, came into my view and he flipped his ID and
03:17:57 he said, FBI, we would like to have a talk with you.
03:18:02 This is my now friend, Joe Riley, who actually is the, he’s the godfather of Trinity and
03:18:10 my last child.
03:18:11 Anyway, he told me later that when I heard that phrase, all the blood left my face, I
03:18:20 became totally white.
03:18:24 But I recovered very quickly and he said it himself, so they took me to a vehicle and
03:18:32 there was another agent in the vehicle and he had a gun strapped to his ankle, so it
03:18:39 was pretty real.
03:18:42 First question I had, so am I under arrest?
03:18:44 And the answer was no.
03:18:47 And then my instinct kicked in and my ability to operate very well under high pressure situations.
03:18:57 And I asked him, so what took you so long?
03:19:01 You know, the intent of that was to defuse any kind of tension.
03:19:12 And I saw a smile.
03:19:15 Instant friends.
03:19:16 Yeah, I knew that I had to make them like me and I’m, I think by now I know I’m a pretty
03:19:26 likable person.
03:19:31 And I, when they took me to a motel, which they had rented, there was two wings at a
03:19:40 right angle, they bought all the rooms in one wing and they had a guard at each end
03:19:47 of that wing and they took me in the middle and there were some props there, some binders
03:19:55 with labels and I immediately thought, this is pretty silly because what I noticed that
03:20:03 the labels all referred back to my early years.
03:20:07 I knew that they didn’t know much else.
03:20:10 So I told Joe that afterwards and that was not a great idea, but anyway.
03:20:19 But I volunteered.
03:20:20 I made the following statement before we even started the interview.
03:20:24 I said, I know there’s only one way for me to, and my family, to have a chance to get
03:20:30 through here without much damages if I’m completely 100% cooperative and it’s my intent to do
03:20:38 exactly that.
03:20:39 All right.
03:20:40 So we spent about two hours in the interview.
03:20:43 They allowed me to call my wife, tell her that I’m going to be late.
03:20:48 That indicated to me already that they would let me go.
03:20:51 And after two hours they let me go.
03:20:55 But they had the area covered with a whole bunch of people.
03:21:00 And the head of that team talked to me and he said, if you think of running, we got every
03:21:07 intersection in this area covered.
03:21:09 You can’t.
03:21:10 I didn’t say anything, but you know, I had no thought of running.
03:21:16 So and that was the beginning of another phase of my life where I was cooperating with the
03:21:24 FBI for quite a while and living still undercover for several years until I had real good documentation
03:21:30 and became an American citizen seven years ago.
03:21:33 From today, seven years ago.
03:21:36 So recently.
03:21:37 Yeah.
03:21:38 Wow.
03:21:39 Quite recent.
03:21:40 The hypocrisy took a long time to figure out how to make me real and also not put me in
03:21:49 these witness protection program, you know, to keep my name and then just, you know, make
03:21:55 everything like official.
03:21:57 So for instance, I had to change my birth year simply because if I, Jack Barsky was
03:22:03 born in 1944, if I kept 1944, the FBI would have helped me commit a crime because I would
03:22:09 have collected social security four years sooner.
03:22:15 So anyway, yes, it took quite a while.
03:22:20 And when I finally got the call from the office of Homeland Security, the lady says, this
03:22:29 is agent so and so from Homeland Security, can you come into the office tomorrow?
03:22:37 And I said, let me look at my calendar.
03:22:42 And then I said, wait a minute, what am I talking about?
03:22:45 What time do you want me to be there?
03:22:47 Because I had waited for that moment for a long time.
03:22:49 And I was sworn in right then and there.
03:22:52 It was a good feeling to walk out of there because I had a country again, you know, and
03:22:58 I love this country just as much as you said you love it with all its warts and its problems
03:23:03 that we’re going through right now.
03:23:06 And then the last thing that changed my life again, and I don’t want to get into details
03:23:12 because it’s a little complicated story, I never wanted to be a public person.
03:23:18 And then I was discovered through a number of dots that were unlikely to be connected.
03:23:26 It had to do with a relative, with a half brother of my wife who lives in Germany, was
03:23:33 taken to Germany by his mother who came to visit somebody, not us, but that somebody
03:23:41 that he came to visit lived 50 miles from our house and that my wife and this half brother
03:23:49 never met in person before.
03:23:52 They knew about each other through social media.
03:23:54 And when he found out my background, he was a conductor of the German railroad at the
03:24:01 time, he said, oh, this is a big story and that’s going to be big, big, big, okay.
03:24:07 Well he happened to know this one person who happened to know one of the star reporters
03:24:14 of Der Spiegel and after she did some research and determined that I was real, she was on
03:24:23 my case.
03:24:24 And she happened to know Steve Croft, the guy from 60 Minutes, you see all these connections?
03:24:29 I had nothing to do with it.
03:24:30 That’s how life works, dots get connected somehow, sometimes, for most of us it doesn’t.
03:24:35 Stuff happens.
03:24:36 You get lucky.
03:24:37 You don’t know what’s happening.
03:24:38 You’ve gotten lucky a few times in your life.
03:24:40 Yeah, I think I must be part Irish too.
03:24:44 Yeah, so it’s been an interesting ride.
03:24:53 I’m just still shaking my head about all the stuff that happened.
03:24:57 It’s been a fun one.
03:24:58 But you wrote, because I’m allowed to leave behind a documented legacy of my unusual life,
03:25:06 I’m praying that the legacy will be described by a single word, love.
03:25:12 So let us return to the thing we started the conversation with, which is love.
03:25:17 What role does love play in this human condition, in your life and in our life here together?
03:25:24 I give you an answer by telling you what happened one day.
03:25:31 I gave a presentation at Microsoft headquarters.
03:25:37 That’s a strange beginning of a love story, but yes.
03:25:40 No, that’s not a love story.
03:25:41 And so there’s this beautiful young lady sitting in the back, and she’s paying a lot of attention.
03:25:49 Turned out later that her job at Microsoft, her job title was storyteller.
03:25:56 It’s soft marketing, right?
03:25:58 Yeah, you could say that.
03:26:01 But if you can’t afford somebody like that, that’s good.
03:26:06 Anyway, question and answer, she raised her hand and she asked me, so all the things that
03:26:15 you have done and you have experienced, what’s the number one lesson you’ve taken away from
03:26:21 your life?
03:26:22 That was a new question for me.
03:26:25 I’ve never been asked that question.
03:26:27 And I thought about it for 20 seconds, and then I came up with this phrase that we all
03:26:35 know, love conquers all, because in my life it did, in the end.
03:26:42 And it’s the strongest human emotion, and that is what makes us human, really.
03:26:50 And you spoke about the, I mean, offline as I’ve spoken with you, it’s clear to me how
03:26:57 transformative, how powerful the life of your children are, your daughters in your life,
03:27:04 and who you are, and why you think life is beautiful, and why you think this country
03:27:09 is beautiful.
03:27:10 Now that I’m pretty mature, to put it mildly, I’m also more loving towards many more people.
03:27:23 These things like random acts of kindness for strangers, I do them, I’m looking for
03:27:28 them now.
03:27:29 And you know what?
03:27:30 It’s good for me.
03:27:31 Well, welcome to Texas, because this random acts of kindness to strangers seems to be
03:27:38 a way of life, which is one of the reasons I love it here.
03:27:44 It just reminds me why I love human beings, is that there’s just this warmth, this connection.
03:27:50 Yeah, and Georgia is the same thing.
03:27:52 Yeah.
03:27:53 Amen.
03:27:54 Do you have any regrets?
03:27:58 Looking back at life, do you wish you’d done something different?
03:28:02 I could have, but then I would have a different regret.
03:28:08 I betrayed the wife, the German wife that I loved.
03:28:12 I really did love her, and I betrayed her.
03:28:16 But if I don’t betray her, then I betray the child.
03:28:24 That is a source of so much love for you now.
03:28:27 So maybe life is a kind of, you get to choose your regrets.
03:28:34 You don’t get to avoid them.
03:28:35 Yeah, it’s a little bit of a strange way of putting it, but there’s no other choice.
03:28:43 I tell you what I don’t regret, and that may be, you probably understand it now because
03:28:50 you have enough background about me, I don’t regret having lied to my mother.
03:28:55 Because I had no really strong emotional relationship with her.
03:29:00 She took care of me, she was proud of me, but we didn’t hug, we didn’t interact emotionally
03:29:09 whatsoever.
03:29:10 So you don’t feel like you betrayed that love that—
03:29:15 Well I did, I know that she was looking for me until the day she died.
03:29:23 She wrote a letter to President Gorbachev asking him for help to locate me.
03:29:30 She checked with Astazi, she just was hell bent on finding me and couldn’t find me,
03:29:40 so she passed away without knowing what happened to me.
03:29:45 Now there was this rumor that was flying around, and she possibly may have bought into that
03:29:52 rumor because my cover for when I went to the United States was that I changed careers
03:30:01 again and I joined an institution in Kazakhstan that did space research, intercosmos something
03:30:11 something, and I had a piece of paper that invited me to start there, and it was a forgery.
03:30:21 It never existed, but people knew that in Kazakhstan there were super secret facilities.
03:30:32 One of my classmates, old classmates from high school started the rumor that I died
03:30:38 in a rocket accident, and everybody knew that.
03:30:43 So when I came back to Germany, I found the telephone number of this girl that had dumped
03:30:52 me.
03:30:53 I called her, and I said, so guess who this is?
03:30:59 Maybe you hold on to your chair, she says yes, I said, this is Albrecht.
03:31:04 It’s a good payback.
03:31:09 No, we actually met.
03:31:12 So there’s two elderly people in their 60s who meet each other after so many years, and
03:31:21 the one that ended the relationship started the conversation by saying, you know what,
03:31:28 I made a really bad mistake, and the tears came down her cheeks.
03:31:33 I wasn’t asking for that.
03:31:34 I wasn’t happy about it, but it did feel good.
03:31:39 Now a while later, I knew why she said she made a mistake.
03:31:46 I met her husband.
03:31:47 Yeah, I mean, there’s a, Tom Waits has a song called Martha, where an older gentleman calls
03:31:59 somebody he used to love, and they have a conversation.
03:32:01 They’re both married now, and sometimes you can meet people from your past, and it gives
03:32:07 you a glimpse of a possible different life you could have had.
03:32:11 Oh yeah, and you know, I was actually, when she said I made a mistake, and I was thinking
03:32:15 to myself, no, you didn’t.
03:32:19 There was none.
03:32:20 There was nothing left.
03:32:21 There was nothing left.
03:32:24 Also the person that she became, personality wise, wasn’t as attractive as I remembered
03:32:33 her.
03:32:34 You know, it’s puppy love.
03:32:35 But it’s still love, and it still happened.
03:32:37 Yeah, it was.
03:32:38 It was passionate love for sure, and I would have thrown myself under the bus if I could
03:32:46 save her.
03:32:47 It was that strong, and it’s just as strong as the love for my two girls.
03:32:54 Life is full of moments and periods like that of love, and that’s what makes life so freaking
03:33:00 awesome.
03:33:01 But it does come to an end.
03:33:03 And so does this conversation, I guess.
03:33:07 This goes on for many more hours, but yes, do you think about your own death?
03:33:11 Huh?
03:33:12 Do you think about death?
03:33:13 Do you think about your own death?
03:33:14 Yes.
03:33:15 Are you afraid of it?
03:33:17 Yes.
03:33:18 Even though I’m a Christian.
03:33:23 As a Christian, do you have a sense what’s coming after, or is it full of uncertainty?
03:33:28 I have a hope.
03:33:30 I have a hope.
03:33:32 You know, there’s a lot of Christianity which is quite logical, a lot of Christianity which
03:33:40 is also the life of Christ, there’s a lot of proof.
03:33:46 But I became a Christian starting with a head, and I was already quite old.
03:34:08 When you don’t get this faith very early, it’s tougher to buy into everything.
03:34:17 You know, there are some things that are difficult for me to understand and believe, but there’s
03:34:25 many, many other things that I can’t explain only with the existence of a God, but whether
03:34:29 He lets us go again for an eternity, I just hope.
03:34:37 I won’t convince somebody else at this point, which doesn’t make me a really, really good
03:34:42 Christian because I’m supposed to evangelize.
03:34:46 But there’s still a fear.
03:34:47 Yeah.
03:34:48 There’s a fear and a hope.
03:34:51 On the other hand, I know that, you see, this is how I approach the last years of my life.
03:35:03 I will not mentally or physically get decrepit.
03:35:08 I will do everything I can do to be alert and fit.
03:35:14 I still run.
03:35:16 I run four or five times a week, and I’m going to start lifting weights again.
03:35:21 Good.
03:35:22 You stay physically and mentally sharp.
03:35:25 Yes.
03:35:26 Go out with guns blazing.
03:35:28 I once read a book written by a medical doctor, he said, most people, when they’re becoming
03:35:38 mature, the rest of their life is a slow downward move.
03:35:46 Not for you.
03:35:47 No.
03:35:48 The last years are pretty bad.
03:35:52 He said, you got to do this, boom.
03:35:55 That’s pretty good advice from a doctor.
03:35:59 If nothing else from Christianity, whichever parts you take on, one of the big ones is
03:36:06 love.
03:36:07 That’s something you’ve lived from the very beginning before God was part of your life,
03:36:12 before anything was part of your life.
03:36:14 It seemed that love was part of your life and has been a consistent thread throughout.
03:36:18 Yes, sir.
03:36:19 There’s a short sentence in the Bible that says, God is love.
03:36:27 The other thing I want to say, the Christian morality is, I can sign that with my blood.
03:36:37 God is love.
03:36:38 Amen.
03:36:39 Jack, you’re an incredible person, lived an incredible life.
03:36:45 Thank you for talking today.
03:36:46 Thank you for telling your story.
03:36:48 Thank you for being who you are, and thank you for being all about love.
03:36:53 This is a beautiful conversation, it was an honor.
03:36:56 Thank you for talking today.
03:36:57 Yeah, and I appreciate the tough questions that you asked.
03:37:00 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jack Barsky.
03:37:03 To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
03:37:07 And now, let me leave you with some words from Edward Snowden.
03:37:11 You can’t come up against the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept
03:37:15 the risk.
03:37:16 If they want to get you, over time, they will.
03:37:22 Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.