Speaker 1: Hey, guys, it's Jack.
Speaker 2: I just wanted to talk to you today about a
Speaker 2: way that you can help support the podcast if you're
Speaker 2: not already to support the channel, is to become a
Speaker 2: Patreon member. So we have Patreon memberships that start at
Speaker 2: just five dollars a month, and when you sign up,
Speaker 2: you get access to all of our episodes add free.
Speaker 2: That's the big bonus for that. I mean, we also
Speaker 2: do some Patreon bonus episodes for our subscribers, but this
Speaker 2: is the biggest and best way that you can support
Speaker 2: the Teamhouse channel and podcast if you'd like to, and
Speaker 2: we really appreciate that, So go and check us out
Speaker 2: at patreon dot com, Slash The Teamhouse.
Speaker 3: Special Operations, Cobert Osspiona, The Teamhouse with Your Hopes, Jack
Speaker 3: Murphy and David Bark.
Speaker 2: Hey, everyone, this is episode three hundred and seven of
Speaker 2: The Teamhouse. I'm Jack Murphy here with Dave Park and
Speaker 2: our guest on tonight's show is Jack Barsky. He served
Speaker 2: as an illegal undercover KGB agent in the United States,
Speaker 2: originally from East Germany, now an American citizen, and he
Speaker 2: is the author of deep Cover, his memoir that I
Speaker 2: hope you guys will go and check out.
Speaker 1: We're going to get to Jack in one second.
Speaker 2: I just want to tell you guys about the sponsor
Speaker 2: of tonight's show, which is Fabric Life Insurance. So I
Speaker 2: have life insurance. I don't tell my daughter how much
Speaker 2: it is because I don't want to get knocked off,
Speaker 2: but I carry life insurance and you may want to
Speaker 2: as well. We think we're taking care of our kids
Speaker 2: buying rolling them in after school lessons, or buying them
Speaker 2: birthday presents or fancy trips, but another important way to
Speaker 2: take care of them is with term life insurance policy
Speaker 2: in case the unexpected happens and you're not around anymore.
Speaker 2: And that's where Fabric comes in. So if you have
Speaker 2: anyone relying on your income, then you should seriously consider
Speaker 2: having life insurance. It's as simple as that. A term
Speaker 2: life insurance policy from Fabric can help give you peace
Speaker 2: of mind that the people depending on you will have
Speaker 2: some financial support if something unexpected happens. So Fabric by
Speaker 2: Gerber Life is term life insurance. You can get it
Speaker 2: done right here, right now. You could be covered right
Speaker 2: from your couch in under ten minutes with no extra
Speaker 2: health exam required. So if you've got kids, and especially
Speaker 2: if they're young or you're young and healthy. The time
Speaker 2: to lock in low rates is right now. Even if
Speaker 2: you have life insurance through your employer, it may not
Speaker 2: offer enough protection for you and your family, and it
Speaker 2: may not follow you if you leave your job. Fabric
Speaker 2: has flexible, high quality policies that fit your family and
Speaker 2: your budget, like a million dollars in coverage for less
Speaker 2: than one dollar a day, and you can do it
Speaker 2: all online. So join thousands of parents who trust Fabric
Speaker 2: to help protect their family. Apply today in just minutes
Speaker 2: at meat at meetfabric dot com slash Teamhouse. That's Meetfabric
Speaker 2: dot com slash Teamhouse. Me e t fabric dot com
Speaker 2: Slash Teamhouse. Policies issued by Western Southern Life Insurance Company.
Speaker 2: Not available in certain states. Prices subject to underwriting and
Speaker 2: health questions. And the second thing I want to tell
Speaker 2: you guys about is my book We Defy the Lost
Speaker 2: Chapters of Special Forces History, coming out December ninth, and
Speaker 2: I will be doing an event in conjunction with Triple
Speaker 2: at Design, the clothing company that makes this shirt and
Speaker 2: a lot of this stuff you see me wearing on here.
Speaker 2: The event is going to be in Hackensack, ninety two
Speaker 2: Kennedy Street on November ninth. Start time is at eleven am.
Speaker 2: I hope to see many of you guys there. I'll
Speaker 2: be talking about the contents of the book, some really
Speaker 2: cool stuff, So I hope to see many of you there.
Speaker 1: So Jack back to you. Thank you for joining us tonight.
Speaker 4: Well telling you something. Three hundred episodes and I poked
Speaker 4: a little bit a bit around it what's available on YouTube.
Speaker 4: I'm very honored that you actually invited me. This is
Speaker 4: I think. I think it's going to be good. But
Speaker 4: based on what I know about you and uh So,
Speaker 4: I think we're going to get along fabulously.
Speaker 2: And I should point out that this is a very
Speaker 2: unique opportunity for us, that we very rarely have these
Speaker 2: opportunities to talk to somebody who came from the other side,
Speaker 2: so to speak. So that that's a very rare opportunity,
Speaker 2: and you know, we plan to take full advantage of it.
Speaker 1: We appreciate it. Yeah, we're coming.
Speaker 4: Here Friday night with us. Yeah, well, you know, so
Speaker 4: to speak. No, I did come from the other side.
Speaker 5: I came here to help destroy the country and bring
Speaker 5: communism uh into into world domination and then somehow, uh
Speaker 5: you know, the country, the United States has destroyed my communist.
Speaker 2: U s a U s ah. Well let's let's let's
Speaker 2: start at the beginning. Jack, your birth name is not
Speaker 2: Jack Barski. Tell us by how you were born, what
Speaker 2: your name was, where you grew up.
Speaker 4: Yeah, my name is I hate to say this in
Speaker 4: front of Americans because you guys can't pronounce it. By
Speaker 4: the way, my daughter, the older daughter, didn't like you
Speaker 4: know that that I'm operating under a stolen name, so
Speaker 4: she changed her last name to my German last name,
Speaker 4: which is Dittrich, and she can't say it. I was
Speaker 4: I was born as Dittrich. I never liked that name. So, uh,
Speaker 4: you know, Jack is okay. Barski is a little odd
Speaker 4: because in the cage there's there's some Jewish blood in there.
Speaker 4: And actually Jack Barski, who whose identity restole, was born
Speaker 4: to Jewish parents. Ye know, the father most likely was
Speaker 4: an Orthodox Jew because his first name was Elisha Lee.
Speaker 6: So was Jack Barski actually a name an identity that
Speaker 6: was given to you by as an alias.
Speaker 4: Not an alias? You know, I became I became a
Speaker 4: Jack Barski. So so this is how this happened. And
Speaker 4: That speaks to the phenomenal security hole that the United
Speaker 4: States had at the time. That's, by the way, that
Speaker 4: is how even the Russian intelligence operates today, stealing identities.
Speaker 4: It's not as easy as it used to be. But
Speaker 4: if this is what they do, they wander around in
Speaker 4: cemeteries and look for tombstones of somebody who passed away
Speaker 4: at a young age. Jack bart He passed away in
Speaker 4: nineteen forty four at the age of eleven, and some
Speaker 4: diplomat who operated out of Washington, d C. Found Barski's
Speaker 4: gravestone in a Jewish cemetery and somehow, and they never
Speaker 4: told me the mechanics, but I was just told the steps.
Speaker 4: He was able to acquire Barski's death certificate, and then somehow,
Speaker 4: just by paying by asking for it, writing, writing and
Speaker 4: writing out, filling out the form and paying the fee,
Speaker 4: got a bona fide copy of Jack Barski's birth certificate. Now,
Speaker 4: mind you, that was a that was a diplomat, a
Speaker 4: Russian diplomat. He spoke with an accent. So how in
Speaker 4: the world was what did nobody was nobody educated that
Speaker 4: you know, Hanging out these birth certificates to perfect strangers
Speaker 4: from another country is not a good idea.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, to back up a little bit, check tell
Speaker 2: us about growing up in East Germany and how you
Speaker 2: got recruited.
Speaker 4: All right, So I was born in nineteen forty nine,
Speaker 4: and that was four years after the end of World
Speaker 4: War Two, and I was born in the Furthest in
Speaker 4: the furthest eastern section of all of Germany, which brought
Speaker 4: us both on Poland and on Czechoslovakia, the Czech Republic
Speaker 4: now born, thank god. Well, I was born and raised.
Speaker 4: It was the countryside because these cities, the big cities
Speaker 4: were destroyed, were full of rubble. There was no living space.
Speaker 4: I mean, people just really really had a hard time
Speaker 4: making ends meat. There was no food at least I
Speaker 4: always had a roof over my head because the village
Speaker 4: that I grew up in was a small town that
Speaker 4: I lived there after the village, they were not destroyed
Speaker 4: at all. The Russian army just went through there and
Speaker 4: and there were peasants around, so there was always we
Speaker 4: could always eat, get potatoes to eat. I mean, I
Speaker 4: can't remember having been hungry, but we were malnourished. I
Speaker 4: got a picture of myself when I was eleven years old.
Speaker 4: I was thin as a rail. I also was my
Speaker 4: internal organs didn't grow, they didn't keep up with my
Speaker 4: my vertical growth. I was not allowed to play soccer
Speaker 4: for a while because my heart was weak. And the
Speaker 4: medical system was horrendous. You know. We I was always sick.
Speaker 4: You know, every month, every other month, I came down
Speaker 4: with something, and there there was no medication as a result,
Speaker 4: you know, this untreated strep throat. Eventually, the bacteria that
Speaker 4: do this to your throat, they settle on your heart
Speaker 4: valve and eventually, many many years later, that heartwell had
Speaker 4: to be replaced. So it was no fun. And and the doctor,
Speaker 4: I mean deep, this was tough love. The doctor hurt
Speaker 4: me three times as a child, very badly. One times
Speaker 4: when when once when he pierced my ear drum without
Speaker 4: telling me what's going to come. Secondly when uh he
Speaker 4: pulled my foreskin back, which that hurt like hell. And
Speaker 4: the third one was when I had a wound in
Speaker 4: my left foot, in the soul of my left foot.
Speaker 4: It was pretty deep. I had stepped into some some
Speaker 4: glass and he had this fat nurse sit on me
Speaker 4: so so that I couldn't move, and then he quaterized
Speaker 4: that wound with silver nitrate. You know how much that hurt?
Speaker 4: And then he told me walk home. That was that's
Speaker 4: I'm speaking of, telling me to walk when I came
Speaker 4: down with h appendicitis, which can be very painful, and
Speaker 4: mine was so I couldn't. I couldn't, I wasn't home
Speaker 4: and I couldn't stand straight anymore. And so my mother said, well,
Speaker 4: this doesn't look so good. You go to the doctor.
Speaker 4: So actually I had to walk to the bus stop,
Speaker 4: take the bus, and and and then uh, check myself
Speaker 4: into the hospital. This this was normal, and there wasn't
Speaker 4: Nobody thought that this was you know, child abuse. It was.
Speaker 4: It was pretty bad. But here's the thing. It also
Speaker 4: toughened me up and prepared me for what I what
Speaker 4: I did, uh when I when I did it? So
Speaker 4: to speak, So, uh, you know you you went very
Speaker 4: far into the future from that point on. Do you
Speaker 4: want me to talk about recruitment.
Speaker 1: Yeah, tell us a little bit about recruitment. And as
Speaker 1: you're getting older.
Speaker 2: Ish, you know, you're becoming a young man, did you
Speaker 2: have any sort of like political leanings at that time?
Speaker 2: And I'm just kind of curious about why they they
Speaker 2: reached out to you.
Speaker 4: Yes, I was a very good student when I started,
Speaker 4: you know, in elementary and middle school, I didn't study.
Speaker 4: I just did the homework and I ran about it
Speaker 4: B plus a minus average. But when when it really
Speaker 4: counted in high school, I studied and I aced everything.
Speaker 4: I graduated first in class. And and that's at the
Speaker 4: age of eighteen. I graduated, and I went to a
Speaker 4: top college and I graduated as valedictorian there. But here's
Speaker 4: the thing, and we were taught art, science the curriculum,
Speaker 4: and I have the curriculum of my my my last
Speaker 4: year in high school, half of it was math and
Speaker 4: science and there were no electives. So that was that
Speaker 4: was a pretty good part of the education. But with
Speaker 4: regard to history, with regard to literature, with regard to
Speaker 4: what's that called the Civics, it was nothing but brainwashing
Speaker 4: from A to Z. I mean, there was only one
Speaker 4: one opinion allowed. It was only Marxism Leninism that was taught.
Speaker 4: We we didn't even have an academic subject that would
Speaker 4: would have said something like the religions of the world.
Speaker 4: They generically they hammered Christianity, like you know that Marx
Speaker 4: called it the opium for the people. And I grew
Speaker 4: up knowing that Christians were all dumb people who used
Speaker 4: religion as a crutch. And if there were Christians, I
Speaker 4: didn't get to know them because they sort of didn't
Speaker 4: admit that there were Christians. Very rare. My mother once
Speaker 4: told me that she had to resign from she she
Speaker 4: grew up in a Christian household. I know this for
Speaker 4: a fact. Her parents have had three girls and they
Speaker 4: were named Eva, Rude and uh and Judith uh so.
Speaker 4: And then she told me that she u just after
Speaker 4: the Wars, she she joined the local church and she
Speaker 4: sang in the choir and she had to resign from
Speaker 4: the choir because my father was a party member and
Speaker 4: he wanted to have a career. Yeah. So interesting, Yeah
Speaker 4: and so so I I never got to know Christianity whatsoever,
Speaker 4: not at all. And I, you know, my I just
Speaker 4: knew that Marx Marxism was a science Marxism Leninism because
Speaker 4: we we we took a course in college was called
Speaker 4: scientific Marxism Leninism where we were taught at Marx and
Speaker 4: Angels particularly had discovered the natural laws that governed the
Speaker 4: the evolution the human of of the of the human race.
Speaker 4: Starting with uh, you know, hunters and gatherers and the
Speaker 4: Stone Age going on to the you know, the the empires,
Speaker 4: the Greek and the Roman empires, and feudalism, capitalism, socialism, communism.
Speaker 4: So that was a law if you, if you, if
Speaker 4: there's no contrary opinion available, and you believe in that stuff.
Speaker 4: And it was really well done from a from a
Speaker 4: delivery perspective. It because it started in kindergarten and and
Speaker 4: even though the little puppet on the TV were somewhat ideological,
Speaker 4: uh and and so the brain was started very early,
Speaker 4: and that that holds extremely well. I had another thought
Speaker 4: that I just see, oh yeah, and since I believe
Speaker 4: than this, and since I wanted to my father had
Speaker 4: a good career, I wanted to have a good career.
Speaker 4: In my first year of college, because I wasn't outstanding student,
Speaker 4: I was recruited by by one of the party members
Speaker 4: of the section chemistry, and I was flattered and I
Speaker 4: joined the party. And then I was also recruited to
Speaker 4: become a leader in the youth movement. Initially I was
Speaker 4: just leading a small group. Then I was leading uh
Speaker 4: the entire uh, the entire class of UH. When when
Speaker 4: whenever my class, which was about sixty people. Then I
Speaker 4: was promoted to leading the all the the is. The
Speaker 4: folks were called young. The organization was called Young Young
Speaker 4: Communist Youth, the entire Communist youth group of the Section Chemistry,
Speaker 4: which which was several hundred people. So and I thought
Speaker 4: I was known to be a very effective communist. I
Speaker 4: was an intellectual communist. I wasn't one of those stupid ones. Okay.
Speaker 4: So so I did some things that you shouldn't do,
Speaker 4: that you weren't really allowed to do. I gave you
Speaker 4: one example. You know, like everybody else, I I loved
Speaker 4: rock and roll, you know, started with Elvis and then
Speaker 4: went on with the Beatles. I taught myself guitar and
Speaker 4: in high school, and I listened to Western radio stations,
Speaker 4: which that that was a no no. Now. One time
Speaker 4: I was caught at the dorm that had very thin walls.
Speaker 4: I was listening to some Western music and my neighbor
Speaker 4: was one of those dumb communists. He denounced me, and
Speaker 4: I listened to this list. The party secretary of the
Speaker 4: Sex of the Section Chemistry called me into his office
Speaker 4: and he said close the door, and then he said,
Speaker 4: next time you turned the volume down. You know, what
Speaker 4: that meant.
Speaker 1: Yeah, see no evil, Yeah Jack exactly.
Speaker 4: You know, and this is the same guy when he
Speaker 4: and a colleague, both party members, had a business trip. Occasionally,
Speaker 4: those trips were allowed if you were at the right
Speaker 4: level and if you were a Communist Party member to London, England.
Speaker 4: And the first thing that they shared with everybody was
Speaker 4: that they attended a Rolling Stones concert. But there was
Speaker 4: some hypocrisy involved, but we all pretty much believed in
Speaker 4: the cause. When I signed up, I was a flaming Communist.
Speaker 4: I always thought, you know, our leadership, like at the
Speaker 4: very top wasn't very good and like my like these
Speaker 4: guys that I was just telling you about, the more
Speaker 4: intelligent people also were hoping for a a more intelligent
Speaker 4: leader because we had two leaders that you know, they
Speaker 4: couldn't talk. They may have been clever, but they weren't
Speaker 4: highly educated and they weren't really smart. But it doesn't matter.
Speaker 4: The cause was still the cause.
Speaker 6: Was there a culture of like purity test and snitching
Speaker 6: on somebody for not doing the right thing?
Speaker 7: Was that sort of ingrained in the culture.
Speaker 4: And I know this in hindsight, I was not aware
Speaker 4: that I snitched on nobody. I wasn't asked to snitch.
Speaker 4: These were different types of people that were running around
Speaker 4: and just watching the population, and typically they were not
Speaker 4: very likable. There's one guy in high school that I
Speaker 4: absolutely hated and I beat him up once because you know,
Speaker 4: he just misbehaved and he attacked me, so I beat
Speaker 4: him up. So so, uh, I just hated him. And
Speaker 4: he was one of those guys who volunteered and no,
Speaker 4: actually he became uh an employee of the Starzi, and
Speaker 4: he just spied on internally. You know, I lived in
Speaker 4: a bubble where people just didn't do that because the again,
Speaker 4: you know, the Starzi used the more intelligent people to
Speaker 4: do intelligence work, all right, and and the intelligence, the
Speaker 4: intelligence work that that they did in West Germany was outstanding.
Speaker 4: I mean they had they had several hundred Starzi agents
Speaker 4: in the West German government. Marcus Wolff, as you you
Speaker 4: probably heard his name, the man without a face. He
Speaker 4: he became legend. But he had an easy job. You know,
Speaker 4: you know, you take East Germany, can move him to
Speaker 4: West Germany. There's no cultural difference, no language difference, so
Speaker 4: it's much easier to to infiltrate that West Germany. Then
Speaker 4: it was to infiltrate for the Russians to infiltrate the
Speaker 4: United States. So I'm going to stop talking now.
Speaker 1: Tell us about how the KGV approached you.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so, first of all, and this is an educated guess,
Speaker 4: but I think in hindsight, I know this is how
Speaker 4: this transpired because I know how they were looking for
Speaker 4: people to operate as illegals. And I don't have to
Speaker 4: explain to you what illegals are, but I may want
Speaker 4: to explain that to the audience. So there are three
Speaker 4: types of agents there are. The first type is the
Speaker 4: safest job that you can have. You operate under diplomatic cover,
Speaker 4: and if you're caught, you're expelled from the country. That's
Speaker 4: all you get. You can't be arrested. You on the
Speaker 4: diplomatic immunity. The second one is called non official cover.
Speaker 4: There's people that use their own names and they used
Speaker 4: their whatever they do as cover. They could be businessmen,
Speaker 4: or they could be artists or exchange students, whatever. They
Speaker 4: are at risk of being caught and imprisoned, but they
Speaker 4: don't have to pretend to be somebody else. The pretension
Speaker 4: of being somebody else requires a certain set of character
Speaker 4: traits and I know, and I found that out after
Speaker 4: when I chanced upon interviews that were given by two
Speaker 4: different X heads of the director at s That was
Speaker 4: the illegals directory. So the third type is the illegals.
Speaker 4: And they actually in the interview, both of them said
Speaker 4: that they were combing through thousands of records to find
Speaker 4: people that a were ideologically sound and then approached them
Speaker 4: and then they were looking what they tested me for
Speaker 4: eighteen months after after they said hello to see if
Speaker 4: I fit the profile that they were looking for. I
Speaker 4: give you some some tidbits out of that profile. Very
Speaker 4: quick decision maker, never having a problem with change, changing circumstances, fearlessness,
Speaker 4: uh no, no problem with being alone lonely, and my
Speaker 4: favorite is a tendency to to force for well controlled adventure.
Speaker 4: And so after eighteen first this is how they introduced themselves,
Speaker 4: and I'm pretty sure they found me. And at the time,
Speaker 4: in my the di Stazi kept records of a lot
Speaker 4: of citizens and particularly the ones that eventually would you
Speaker 4: know with students and would you know have position at
Speaker 4: a higher level in the country, and my file said
Speaker 4: he has nothing but age. I had at the time
Speaker 4: received the second no, the highest scholarship in East Germany.
Speaker 4: There were two other students out of twenty thousand at
Speaker 4: that university who had that. I got it, and I
Speaker 4: was a youth leader. I was a Communist, so they
Speaker 4: had to talk to me, right. So, and one day
Speaker 4: I got a knock on the door on a Saturday.
Speaker 4: By the way, you know, in hindsight, I pieced all
Speaker 4: these things together. So our dorm rooms didn't have names
Speaker 4: on them. And how did the and I had a roommate,
Speaker 4: how did the guy who knocked on the door know
Speaker 4: that I was there by myself and I was behind
Speaker 4: that door. Well, in hindsight, we had a neighbor who
Speaker 4: was a Russian who studied at our university. He must
Speaker 4: have been KGB, right, so you know, I didn't have
Speaker 4: a clue. So it comes a German guy and he uh,
Speaker 4: he was. I mean, he was the the the biggest
Speaker 4: idiot that I have met amongst KTB folks. He was
Speaker 4: not a KGB employee. He was a collaborator and they
Speaker 4: sent to German. I don't know why yet that makes
Speaker 4: a lot of sense, but but he came came at
Speaker 4: me first. He asked me, are you always did I
Speaker 4: said yes? He said, okay, I'm from card Size. He
Speaker 4: know that is A was a factory and still is
Speaker 4: a very well known optics company that that even then
Speaker 4: made outstanding products that could be sold to the West.
Speaker 4: So this would have been a place where a graduate
Speaker 4: might find game call of employment. And he pretended to
Speaker 4: sort of recruit me, you know, for the future. And
Speaker 4: that the reason that I'm saying he was an idiot,
Speaker 4: and I can give you give that to you in writing.
Speaker 4: He didn't know how our own country worked. The companies
Speaker 4: did not recruit. You were either a sign or you
Speaker 4: had the chance, if you were near the top ten percent,
Speaker 4: to stay at the university to get a doctorate and
Speaker 4: maybe you know, get a get a career as a
Speaker 4: you know, with a doctorate at university teaching. So so
Speaker 4: that that was such a stupid lie. Immediately I knew,
Speaker 4: I thought, oh he's he's Starzy. It didn't bother me
Speaker 4: at all because I had no reason to be afraid
Speaker 4: of Starzi. You know, I wasn't excellent standing. So so
Speaker 4: I guess again that he probably was trying to recruit
Speaker 4: for the Starzi. And if it if it wasn't if
Speaker 4: it had been about you know, watching other Easterman citizens.
Speaker 4: I would have set flat out no, but I expected,
Speaker 4: you know, this would be interesting. So you know, I
Speaker 4: talked with him, and I talked with him a little
Speaker 4: small talk, and eventually.
Speaker 8: He changed his too, and he said, you know, I
Speaker 8: got to confess. I got to confess something here. I'm
Speaker 8: not really from cut size, you know, I'm from the government.
Speaker 8: So another stupid thing. I mean, he set himself up
Speaker 8: for me to ask what part of the government.
Speaker 4: But you know, I played along. I just wanted to
Speaker 4: find out what's going on. And so he asked this
Speaker 4: one question. He said, can you imagine it one day
Speaker 4: to work for the government, And I said, yeah, but
Speaker 4: not as a chemist. So he had answered to the
Speaker 4: question that he didn't dare ask, right, that's exactly what
Speaker 4: he wanted. So he invited me for luncheon, which, as
Speaker 4: you know in Germany is the big meal at the
Speaker 4: most expensive restaurant in town. A few days later, and
Speaker 4: as I show up there there's another man sitting at
Speaker 4: the table, and I was a little bit hesitant. But
Speaker 4: this guy, who by the way, never introduced himself by
Speaker 4: any kind of name, not even a cover name, he
Speaker 4: gets up and he says well, come on, come on
Speaker 4: over here. I want to introduce you to Herman. We're
Speaker 4: working with our Soviet comrades. And then he excused himself
Speaker 4: and said, you know, I gotta go so here. I'm
Speaker 4: with Herman, you know. And I knew that Herman was
Speaker 4: KGB obviously because he spoke with an accent. He wasn't Herman,
Speaker 4: he was actually and he got pissed off, and I
Speaker 4: asked him, once, is your real name, Geraman? That's the
Speaker 4: Russian version of Herman. He got very annoyed because we
Speaker 4: did not when we interacted, we used cover names and
Speaker 4: in very few names, very few people knew my real name.
Speaker 4: I am one hundred percent certain that when when I
Speaker 4: started working with the KGB, I became a state secret
Speaker 4: of the Soviet Union. Because illegals, as as I already indicated,
Speaker 4: were very hard to find, those types of people that
Speaker 4: fit the bill. They were also hard to recruit because
Speaker 4: not everybody was stupid enough for me to take on
Speaker 4: something that was with a pretty much but have me
Speaker 4: wind up in jail right and then then very difficult
Speaker 4: to expensive to train because all the training was one
Speaker 4: on one and expensive to maintain. So so you don't
Speaker 4: you don't want to put these individuals at risk. So
Speaker 4: I guarantee you the person who made decisions on my
Speaker 4: behalf in Moscow Center did not know my name. He
Speaker 4: didn't have to know it, so he couldn't give me away.
Speaker 4: You know, he knows you know, my you know, my
Speaker 4: coment name, and that was Deta. So Herman was Herman. Okay,
Speaker 4: but whatever, you know, I didn't I didn't really care
Speaker 4: about all of this, you know, I just I just
Speaker 4: wanted to do a good job, and I played along.
Speaker 4: You know. It was like I didn't even think it
Speaker 4: seriously that one day I'm actually going to be recruited.
Speaker 4: I was just like, you know, meeting with Herman every
Speaker 4: other week, and he became it like your father figured
Speaker 4: to me. My father had left the family and he
Speaker 4: was about ten years older. So we had nice talks
Speaker 4: about everything in life. I shared everything with him. He
Speaker 4: gave me some tasks that our work close to what
Speaker 4: people in intelligence do, such as knocking on a door
Speaker 4: and introducing yourself onto some kind of a pretext and
Speaker 4: then having a conversation and finding something out about a
Speaker 4: relative in the West. I hated that, but I did it,
Speaker 4: and you know, we had some you know, we did
Speaker 4: a little bit of you know, clandestine meetings, exercises and
Speaker 4: stuff like that, but not a whole lot. And so
Speaker 4: this is when the recruitment happened. It was eighty Oh.
Speaker 4: The one thing I think that impressed them tremendously and
Speaker 4: this we're talking about, you know, the the tendency to
Speaker 4: be adventurous. In my junior year in college, my friend
Speaker 4: and I hitch height all the way from East Germany
Speaker 4: through Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria to the Black Seat. Wow.
Speaker 4: Very few East Termans did that because you know, we
Speaker 4: had to go through countries where you didn't speak the
Speaker 4: language you had. You only had limited money available for
Speaker 4: each and limited time in the countries that you passed through.
Speaker 4: And you all we had was maps and you know,
Speaker 4: a train that took us from East Germany to to Czechoslovakia.
Speaker 4: And then it was just waving and see hope, hoping
Speaker 4: that you know, somebody would take you someplace where there
Speaker 4: is a structure where you can sleep. We slept in
Speaker 4: the fields several times. And and when when I told
Speaker 4: him that, I think he liked this a lot, right right,
Speaker 4: that was just like, never mind, you know he can
Speaker 4: do the shit, he can find his way and and
Speaker 4: you know, my first trip from Moscow to New York
Speaker 4: actually confirmed that they picked the right guy, because that
Speaker 4: trip was even harder. But anyway, let me.
Speaker 2: Let me toss it over to day for a minute
Speaker 2: to do this ad read and then we'll get right back.
Speaker 7: Yeah, we just want to say thanks to our second
Speaker 7: sponsor of the evening.
Speaker 6: And look, you don't have to be a sleeper agent
Speaker 6: to enjoy a good night to sleep.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 6: If you get a little hot when you're undercover, ghost
Speaker 6: Bed can help, as.
Speaker 7: The makers are the coolest beds in the world.
Speaker 6: Ghost Bed is your go to for cooling mattresses, cooling clothes,
Speaker 6: and even cooling betting. From their singing ghost Ice fabric
Speaker 6: to patent the technology that just with your body tempter,
Speaker 6: every ghost Sped mattress is designed with cooling in mind.
Speaker 6: So whether you want a plusure mattress that cushions your
Speaker 6: shoulders and hips or a firmer option with exceptional support,
Speaker 6: your ghost Sped will keep you cool.
Speaker 7: And comfortable all night long.
Speaker 6: When you purchase a ghost Sped mattress, your comfort is guaranteed.
Speaker 6: You can try out your mattress for one hundred one
Speaker 6: night's risk free. Make sure that it's the right fit
Speaker 6: for you. Plus, they offer free shipping and most items
Speaker 6: ship within twenty four hours. If you're not sure which
Speaker 6: ghost bed is for you, check out their mattress quiz.
Speaker 6: You'll answer a few questions and get your personalized recommendation.
Speaker 7: Or reach out to.
Speaker 6: Their friendly team of sleep experts for all the help
Speaker 6: you need. Even better, Team House listeners can get fifty
Speaker 6: percent site wide fifty percent off site wide for a
Speaker 6: limited time. Just visit gosped dot com slash house and
Speaker 6: use code house at checkout. Again, that's go spad dot
Speaker 6: com slash house with code house at checkout to say
Speaker 6: wopping fifty percent.
Speaker 7: Check out their pillows. Check out the covers. You too
Speaker 7: can can be a sleeper.
Speaker 1: Eat so Jack.
Speaker 2: One thing I mean, I want to I want to
Speaker 2: talk a little bit about your training and then that
Speaker 2: first trip to New York. But one thing to just
Speaker 2: kind of maybe shape that conversation a little bit. I
Speaker 2: think it's fascinating that they built your cover out of
Speaker 2: whole cloth, that this is this is my American mind
Speaker 2: thinking if I'm in director at s I'm gonna look
Speaker 2: for somebody who's a dual citizen, somebody who has one
Speaker 2: American parent, somebody who already speaks fluent English. You know,
Speaker 2: those are the types of attributes I would be looking for,
Speaker 2: you know, somebody who has a foot in the door already.
Speaker 1: But they really.
Speaker 2: Found it, founded German and grew an American out of
Speaker 2: you from the ground up.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm going to chime in with this, but I
Speaker 4: got to tell you how I was recruited. Yeah, that
Speaker 4: that after eighteen months h Herman decided that he already
Speaker 4: I guarantee you, he reported his findings back to Berlin,
Speaker 4: where the headquarters were for the KGB in in East Germany.
Speaker 4: So and they decided to invite me to Berlin under
Speaker 4: the pretext that I needed to get some more training.
Speaker 4: So I was there for three weeks and I got
Speaker 4: some some better training than than I got in in
Speaker 4: the university town where I lived. And on the next
Speaker 4: to last day of that visit to Berlin, I was
Speaker 4: taken to headquarters, and I guarantee you the person who
Speaker 4: talked to me was the head of the KGB and
Speaker 4: in East Germany. Because that his office was phenomenal, I mean,
Speaker 4: it was very rich, expensive furniture and like decorated very nicely.
Speaker 4: And when he started, he spoke only Russian, and I
Speaker 4: understood some of it and some of it was translated.
Speaker 4: It was a bunch of BS small talk, and and
Speaker 4: without warning he asked the question, so what are you
Speaker 4: in or not? I was not prepared for that. Okay,
Speaker 4: this is another one of you know, when they were
Speaker 4: talking about making decisions rather quickly, so I stoleed and
Speaker 4: I think that was maybe it was okay. I said, well,
Speaker 4: I don't I can't make a decision. I don't know
Speaker 4: if I'm qualified, and I don't have any training yet.
Speaker 4: And he said, don't worry about it. We're going to
Speaker 4: train you and we know that you're qualified, so I
Speaker 4: expect your answer by tomorrow noon. You know, that makes
Speaker 4: for a sleepless night, speaking of sleeping, you know, because
Speaker 4: now I now I was faced with reality that I
Speaker 4: had never really considered. So, you know, I knew that
Speaker 4: I had a phenomenal career ahead of me. I was
Speaker 4: was on path to become a tenured professor, like a
Speaker 4: member of the quote unquote ruling class, or maybe joined
Speaker 4: the government, so you know, the legit government, not not espionage,
Speaker 4: and and then here was the adventure and the flattery
Speaker 4: that the mighty kg Me was after me, my god,
Speaker 4: and and and what what really moved the needle? It
Speaker 4: was very close. But what moved because the other thing
Speaker 4: that that helped me back in the East Germany was
Speaker 4: my basketball team. I was I was, I mean, I
Speaker 4: was married to my basketball Bowl team. I didn't have
Speaker 4: a steady girlfriend at the time. Basketball was was my
Speaker 4: life was more important than anything else. So but what
Speaker 4: moved the needle was I was going to be able
Speaker 4: to to move to to travel to the West, you
Speaker 4: know uh and you know, visit countries that otherwise were
Speaker 4: not accessible, and to have the good life of an
Speaker 4: Easterman James Bond, because we had our own James Bond,
Speaker 4: and that guy was hunting down Nazis, but he had
Speaker 4: the good life. He had the fancy cars, they lived
Speaker 4: in nice homes, and he had several girlfriends in a row.
Speaker 4: So so what is that? H is it?
Speaker 1: Seventeen Moments in Spring?
Speaker 4: No? No, this is the the Invisible Advisor in translations. Okay,
Speaker 4: it was a series with an actor. The only East
Speaker 4: German actor who made it in Hollywood is by the
Speaker 4: name of Army and Miller style. He's still alive, he's
Speaker 4: in his life late eighties.
Speaker 7: Fascinating.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I never met him, but yet this is what
Speaker 4: I knew about They didn't, you know. They actually sort
Speaker 4: of hinted at the start when when they were telling me, well,
Speaker 4: you got to think big, you got to think you know,
Speaker 4: you're going to be in big you know, a big car.
Speaker 4: And none of this, None of this happened until after
Speaker 4: I quit the KGB and had a career in corporate right,
Speaker 4: That's that's when it happened. I mean, there was a
Speaker 4: there was a lot of sacrifice that I did for
Speaker 4: the cause. But anyway, so I had to share that
Speaker 4: with you because there's there's so many ironic aspects to
Speaker 4: my life. But he says, my god, this is ridiculous.
Speaker 4: And the irony also is that as a sleeper, I'm
Speaker 4: not I'm not sleeping very well these days.
Speaker 7: So ghost that as your solution.
Speaker 2: Now, tell us about the training and the building of
Speaker 2: your cover to get you prepared for this mission.
Speaker 4: Yeah, okay, Now, first I was I was trained to
Speaker 4: to be deployed in West Germany. But as part of
Speaker 4: the training, uh, they told me to pick a language,
Speaker 4: learn another foreign language. So I picked English because I
Speaker 4: English was really easy for me in high school and
Speaker 4: in college. And so I got a tutor and I
Speaker 4: started studying English from scratch. Studying English from scratch, and
Speaker 4: I as when I want to do something, I do
Speaker 4: it one hundred and ten. So I threw as much
Speaker 4: into the studying of English as I could. I started
Speaker 4: reading materials, initially just newspapers. Every word that I didn't know,
Speaker 4: I wrote down and learned every single word. I read novels.
Speaker 4: Eventually I raced through the high school program in about
Speaker 4: a month, and then I got myself another tutor with
Speaker 4: whom I had conversations. And then after a year of training,
Speaker 4: I had a visitor from Moscow and we were meeting
Speaker 4: in my apartment and he asked, like just one of
Speaker 4: the things, he asked, so, how's your English going? And
Speaker 4: I said, I pulled a book out of my shelf,
Speaker 4: and I said, I can read that without a dictionary.
Speaker 4: He's a hat. So a week later, I my my
Speaker 4: my handle in Berlin gave me a The German word
Speaker 4: popped into my head and that usually very often blocks
Speaker 4: my English. A recorder, a tape recorder, and they told
Speaker 4: me just tape something, say something. Well, there's one thing
Speaker 4: I knew. I was pretty damn good speaking with less
Speaker 4: of an at speaking with less of an accent, and
Speaker 4: all the other people that were learning English, you know,
Speaker 4: my contemporaries I had. I have a talent to imitate languages.
Speaker 4: I can also do a very pretty good English an
Speaker 4: Indian accent. You know, so sorry the comedian and mean, no,
Speaker 4: that's great. But anyway, So and a week later I
Speaker 4: was on a plane to Moscow because somebody had this idea, Man,
Speaker 4: perhaps this guy can be trained to learn English so
Speaker 4: well that we could put him into the United States
Speaker 4: as a born American. You know why this is so
Speaker 4: so inviting. It's because if I'm born in the United States,
Speaker 4: there's no red flag associated with my existence. There's no
Speaker 4: other nationality involved. I didn't come through another country. I
Speaker 4: was just like, hey was born in New Jersey, right.
Speaker 4: So they had this dream. And so when I when
Speaker 4: I appeared in Moscow, they had me talk with two
Speaker 4: English speaking individuals. One was a Russian English teacher that
Speaker 4: was a cover story. She she taught English at Moscow University,
Speaker 4: but she was KGB and then a born American a
Speaker 4: woman who had married a KGB agent and emigrated. That
Speaker 4: poor thing made a real bad decisions because of decision
Speaker 4: because I worked with over two years. She was as
Speaker 4: miserable as can be. But so and then when when
Speaker 4: the women were done talking, they gave feedback to the
Speaker 4: decision makers, and the American said, I can work with him.
Speaker 4: I think he can do it. The Russian was a
Speaker 4: little bit concerned, but you know, wishful thinking took over.
Speaker 4: And that's how I wound up in Moscow working on
Speaker 4: my primarily working on my English, but also being taught
Speaker 4: phenomenal trade craft the Berlin. The Berlin teaching wasn't that good.
Speaker 4: I was trained in Moscow. I was trained one on one.
Speaker 4: And what also happened in addition to interacting, you know,
Speaker 4: with my tutor, my the American woman once twice every week,
Speaker 4: I also UH had the opportunity for about six months
Speaker 4: to work with a fellow whose name you may know,
Speaker 4: Marris Cohen. Mars Cohen was a member of the rosenbergspiring him,
Speaker 4: him and his wife Lana Uh. They managed to not
Speaker 4: get caught. They were born Americans, and and so what
Speaker 4: was good about this? At this point I could interact
Speaker 4: with a male voice and imitate the male voice rather
Speaker 4: than just a female And and Morris and uh and
Speaker 4: uh Lana were actually redeployed after they wound up initially
Speaker 4: in Poland and the Soviet Union, redeployed in the UK,
Speaker 4: spent some time in jail and were incarcerated. They were
Speaker 4: caught in the UK, but were exchanged and wound up
Speaker 4: living the rest of their life very very highly regarded
Speaker 4: and very well kept in Moscow. And they died believing
Speaker 4: in communism.
Speaker 7: Jack out of curiosity.
Speaker 6: And I know that the whole program, like you probably
Speaker 6: don't have insight because of the compartment compartmentalization. But ever since,
Speaker 6: you know, like the seventies or eighties, there's been that media,
Speaker 6: the Hollywood idea that Russia trains at sleeper agents by
Speaker 6: having them live in small communities, raising kids, learning English
Speaker 6: things like that. Was that something that you were aware
Speaker 6: of or did it seem more like taking on people
Speaker 6: like you who just had a knack for it.
Speaker 4: That is total bs okay. And I tell you to
Speaker 4: first of all, you don't recruit children. You don't you
Speaker 4: don't know what you have, what they what they were after.
Speaker 4: And the CIA is doing the same thing. They were
Speaker 4: recruiting primarily in uh in colleges. They were looking for
Speaker 4: people mature enough when you know what you're dealing with,
Speaker 4: what kind of a personality you're dealing with, but not
Speaker 4: old enough to have ties strong ties back home and
Speaker 4: so like like the Americans where they were they were
Speaker 4: supposedly recruiting young kids. It doesn't work. Uh and and
Speaker 4: I was never aware that there was anything like a
Speaker 4: potempting type village where we were learning how to.
Speaker 1: Uh mow the lawn and out the front watching.
Speaker 4: I tell you what I was the illegals, particularly somebody
Speaker 4: like me who were smuggled in as a born American.
Speaker 4: We were the elite of the elite. And my my
Speaker 4: liaison once told me how how he envied me, because
Speaker 4: you know, they they admired us. We were at the top.
Speaker 4: I got in two years before I resigned from the KGB.
Speaker 4: I got the second highest declaration of the Soviet Union.
Speaker 4: That will tell you something. You think they would have
Speaker 4: thrown everything that they have in training me, You think,
Speaker 4: so right, yeah, nothing? What what the the folks that
Speaker 4: trained me with regard to not language language? What good
Speaker 4: was good in freight craft was good. Everything else was
Speaker 4: was substandard. The folks that tried to tell me what
Speaker 4: it was like to live as an American didn't know what.
Speaker 4: They didn't know. They they had lived in the United
Speaker 4: States as diplomats, and they all lived there in Upstate
Speaker 4: and in the northern part of Manhattan, you know where
Speaker 4: that is where they had a Soviet compound. And they
Speaker 4: when they were done with their day job and maybe
Speaker 4: some spying, they went home and lived with their families.
Speaker 4: They didn't know what it was like to live like
Speaker 4: an American, to have a job. Yeah, I mean nothing.
Speaker 4: They gave me advice that didn't work right.
Speaker 6: So I don't want to I don't want to like
Speaker 6: skip too far ahead in your story, but just in
Speaker 6: a general sense, when you did come to the US,
Speaker 6: were those cultural gaps of saying you grew up here
Speaker 6: but not growing up here?
Speaker 7: Did those cause issues for you? Like general cultural references
Speaker 7: and things like that.
Speaker 4: And I was smart enough to know what I that
Speaker 4: I didn't know, So I I and and I tell
Speaker 4: you why. And this is one thing that they did
Speaker 4: something good. They had me go on a practice trip
Speaker 4: to Canada for three months with a German identity. So
Speaker 4: I mingled with Canadians that we all thought were very
Speaker 4: much like Americans. Well yeah, sort of, but not really.
Speaker 4: They say a a lot a so anyway, but I
Speaker 4: realized that, you know, this, this would this would be
Speaker 4: a task that I have to be very careful with. Now.
Speaker 4: One thing I did and during that trip, just to
Speaker 4: check if my language, my ability to speak English with
Speaker 4: a sort of an American accent, was working with Canadians.
Speaker 4: I was once sitting next to a bar in Windsor, Ontario,
Speaker 4: which is right on the other side of Detroit, and
Speaker 4: my neighbor was an American, and I spoke with him
Speaker 4: about them, the Canadians, as if you know, implicit that
Speaker 4: I was an American, and he had no problem with that.
Speaker 4: I was very proud of that, but I did know
Speaker 4: that there were a lot of things I had to
Speaker 4: learn by observing so and I got really lucky in
Speaker 4: one sense because my first job was as a bike
Speaker 4: messner in Manhattan, and you know, I spent quite a
Speaker 4: bit of time waiting for deliveries in an office and
Speaker 4: I was able to just listen to what the other
Speaker 4: messenger talked about, how they behaved, watched them. They didn't
Speaker 4: care about me these were all transients. But I was
Speaker 4: able to absorb, you know, things about you know, who's
Speaker 4: on the Yankees, Who do we hate you? We hate
Speaker 4: the Boston Red Sox and so forth. I watched a
Speaker 4: lot of television and I managed. I was very careful
Speaker 4: getting very close to individuals, in particular women, because I
Speaker 4: was concerned that, you know, because women are more intuitive
Speaker 4: and instinctively. I knew this. So my first steady girlfriend
Speaker 4: was an alien. She was from South America. With her,
Speaker 4: I could be more intimate. She couldn't figure it out.
Speaker 4: So it took me about six seven years to know.
Speaker 4: But yeah, six seven years to become comfortable. I went
Speaker 4: when I after three years of my messenger of work,
Speaker 4: I went to college in the US and it was
Speaker 4: in New York City. It was Beru College. In those days,
Speaker 4: it was like the United Nations. So I felt really
Speaker 4: comfortable interacting with everybody. And when I had my first job,
Speaker 4: I felt too comfortable and I get and this is
Speaker 4: this is where a Cuban national helped me out. This
Speaker 4: is what happened. So one day we were good friends.
Speaker 4: He was very smart. We worked together on the same team.
Speaker 4: We got along phenomenally well and one day he gave
Speaker 4: me some advice. He took me into a room and
Speaker 4: he said, hey, Jack, you know, I like you a lot.
Speaker 4: You you're a great guy, you're smart, you're good to
Speaker 4: work with. But there's one problem. Everybody thinks you're an asshole.
Speaker 4: And and and then and I asked him pot really,
Speaker 4: and then he told me you were so aggressive, you're
Speaker 4: you're so negative, you're rude man. And I realized, my god,
Speaker 4: I got to change that. And and then then I
Speaker 4: paid attention to how everybody else communicated. And Americans typically,
Speaker 4: unless you know their aggressive New Yorkers, maybe, but most
Speaker 4: Americans really are not super critical and particularly critical and
Speaker 4: saying critical things without being asked for an opinion. Right.
Speaker 4: So that's when I when I mellowed and I changed,
Speaker 4: and I paid more attention how others, you know, communicate
Speaker 4: and interact with one another. And by the time, by
Speaker 4: the time the FBI caught up with me, which was
Speaker 4: at that point maybe like twelve or thirteen years later,
Speaker 4: I was very much Americanized. Even though there's still some
Speaker 4: residue where I can get very blunt, but I keep
Speaker 4: that to a minimum and only when it calends.
Speaker 6: Jack, what's you know, you mentioned you were a byte
Speaker 6: messenger for a number of years and you went to college.
Speaker 6: What is the point of in illegal what is you know,
Speaker 6: the sleeper ages, like, what is the point if they
Speaker 6: don't have access?
Speaker 7: Because that's normally what we think about.
Speaker 4: No, yes, good question, and I'm going to answer this.
Speaker 4: The Plan A was brilliant. Plan A was for me.
Speaker 4: You know, first of all, I had to acquire documents
Speaker 4: that made me an American. You know, the birth certificate
Speaker 4: wasn't good enough. If I had to get a Social
Speaker 4: Security card and a driver's license in those days, that
Speaker 4: wasn't enough. And then Plan A said, so, once you've
Speaker 4: got your your your driver's license, your social Security card,
Speaker 4: you have a job, you have an apartment with an
Speaker 4: address rather than living in a hotel, and you have
Speaker 4: you know, you have a real job. Then you apply
Speaker 4: for a passport. And the idea was, once you have
Speaker 4: that passport, you're gonna emigrate. You You you go as
Speaker 4: an American to Switzerland or Austria, and then you start
Speaker 4: a company there and then we put money into that company,
Speaker 4: and two years later you go back to the United
Speaker 4: States and repatriate all that money. And you don't have
Speaker 4: to tell anybody how you made that money, you says,
Speaker 4: I learn. You know, I was a bookseller or whatever,
Speaker 4: or I consulted, and nobody will dig any deeper. So
Speaker 4: at that point, immediately you know I could have mingled
Speaker 4: with people of interest. That's like maybe join a country
Speaker 4: club near the Pentagon fascinating. The plant was brilliant. However,
Speaker 4: I made a big mistake. So we we actually practiced,
Speaker 4: and I think they made a mistake too, by the way,
Speaker 4: but we practiced a fill filling out the form. So
Speaker 4: I was very familiar with the application form, and they
Speaker 4: told me to apply in person, not by mail. Okay.
Speaker 4: So I took the form, and I took the documentation
Speaker 4: that I needed. I took it to Rockefeller Center. I
Speaker 4: don't know if they still have it, A and the
Speaker 4: section of the State Department where you can get a
Speaker 4: passport in person. I don't know, m And you know,
Speaker 4: I lined up and handed in my documentation and my application,
Speaker 4: and the guy behind the counter told me, well, if
Speaker 4: you could step aside, I'm just gonna check your stuff
Speaker 4: and then I'll call you. When he called me, oh Joe,
Speaker 4: Now I tell you what the mistake I made. I
Speaker 4: I filled out everything honestly. So when I when I
Speaker 4: filled out the what the job you have to your profession,
Speaker 4: I wrote messenger. I should have written contractor it didn't
Speaker 4: occur to me. I was a messenger. I didn't say
Speaker 4: I didn't even ride bike messenger. So that was a
Speaker 4: mistake number one. Mistake Number two was there were two
Speaker 4: fields that were that were not mandatory. When are you
Speaker 4: planning to travel and where you're planning to go? I
Speaker 4: left those blank. So I go back to the counter
Speaker 4: and the guy says, you know, mister Barski, there are
Speaker 4: some doubts about your identity. Would you please fill out
Speaker 4: this auxiliary auxiliary questionnaire. He gave me the questionnaire and
Speaker 4: I was still confident, you know, I'm going to fill
Speaker 4: this out. And the first question was where did you
Speaker 4: go to high school? And at this point I was
Speaker 4: busted because there was no record of Jack Barski having
Speaker 4: attended high school. I knew that Jack Barski was a
Speaker 4: very rare name, so there's no way that another, you know,
Speaker 4: like a Jack Smith attended high school or something like that.
Speaker 4: So the high school in my backstory was Peter Stuyvesant, which,
Speaker 4: by the way, was also a mistake. Because there was
Speaker 4: a school for the gifted, and my backstory had me
Speaker 4: grow up in the country, so I wasn't ring that
Speaker 4: mat Yeah, so anyway, so uh, my my ability to
Speaker 4: make a quick decision saved me from from true truly
Speaker 4: being busted. I I just walked back to This was instinct.
Speaker 4: I walked back to that window, and I was cursing
Speaker 4: him out and said, well, who needs all that bs
Speaker 4: And I grabbed the documentation and my application that was
Speaker 4: sitting in front of him and walked out and another
Speaker 4: security hold. The guy sort of remembered my name and
Speaker 4: reported me didn't but that busted by an A. So
Speaker 4: I and I felt like a total failure in a sense.
Speaker 4: I was you know, I hadn't thought this true. You
Speaker 4: know whatever. As smart as I am, I'm I'm I'm
Speaker 4: still pretty smart, and I still make a lot of
Speaker 4: dumb mistakes, though that one, that one was very costly
Speaker 4: and and I'm really glad I made this because I
Speaker 4: could have done a lot of damage to this country
Speaker 4: and I could have run up in jail as well.
Speaker 4: So never mind, but you know, I'm very glad that
Speaker 4: this failed. So well. Now plan B. You know, I'm
Speaker 4: back in Moscow, and I told him this is what happened.
Speaker 4: And at that point they had to keep me because
Speaker 4: I had proven I had done something that was very difficult.
Speaker 4: They were so impressed with me, like finding when I
Speaker 4: told them how I had to work hard to get
Speaker 4: around the obstacles to get the documentation to get the
Speaker 4: driver's license and the Social Security card, and how I
Speaker 4: had to improvise because their instructions didn't work. And then
Speaker 4: then I got a job where I could actually finance myself.
Speaker 4: I didn't need any money from the KGB to exist
Speaker 4: once I had the job. I mean, they knew they
Speaker 4: had a good guy and they wanted to figure out
Speaker 4: how can we continue using him? And is one other
Speaker 4: thing that I found out that nobody ever told me.
Speaker 4: That became clear to me in one of those interviews
Speaker 4: where the head of the Director of the S stated
Speaker 4: quite clearly that the most value that it ascribed to
Speaker 4: US illegals in the US was out us being in
Speaker 4: the United States. And you put two and two together.
Speaker 4: We're talking about the late eighties who were the most
Speaker 4: the most dangerous and most damaging spies for the KGB
Speaker 4: in the United States. And you know those names, Aldo
Speaker 4: James and Robert Hansen, and who did they interact with
Speaker 4: the diplomats? So and there was an Andropook was very
Speaker 4: much concerned that diplomatic relations could be broken because there
Speaker 4: was this CIA versus KGB war going on in a
Speaker 4: lot of kicking out, you kick out out my spies,
Speaker 4: did not kick out your spies. And he was worried
Speaker 4: that no more diplomatic relations. There were no nonofficial cover
Speaker 4: people there to the extent I know US illegals would
Speaker 4: be left over to communicate, to keep that the chain
Speaker 4: of communication going. So they wanted me back there. And
Speaker 4: then they said, well, now, okay, you know when Plan
Speaker 4: B this is the long game. They didn't tell me
Speaker 4: about what I just told you. They kept that a secret. No,
Speaker 4: no instructions, nothing. I had no idea. This is compartmentalization
Speaker 4: to an extreme. And that was bad because you know,
Speaker 4: for me to make good decisions all by myself, and
Speaker 4: I needed to have some background for crying out loud.
Speaker 4: So anyway, so I went to college and graduated in
Speaker 4: three years. That's valedictorian. That was another mistake. There was
Speaker 4: the last vestige of cultural ignorance when the when the
Speaker 4: team called me into this office and asked me what
Speaker 4: my topic, what the graduation speech might be. And I said,
Speaker 4: what what graduation speech? Well, you're the valedictorian, has it,
Speaker 4: and you know, he talked me into it. I didn't
Speaker 4: want to do it, but whatever, I got lucky. Again,
Speaker 4: I could have been busted there. So but you know,
Speaker 4: and then and they asked me to, uh, you know,
Speaker 4: study economics and maybe get a job on Wall Street
Speaker 4: to be be rich. But I really liked information technology
Speaker 4: and I changed my major and I told him that
Speaker 4: and they were okay with that because they knew that
Speaker 4: that would make me pretty valuable down the road.
Speaker 2: Jack, I'd like to ask you, you know, you talked
Speaker 2: about building up your cover. First off, what was your
Speaker 2: cove com plan with KGB, Like, how did you get
Speaker 2: in touch with them and communicate with them.
Speaker 1: From the United States?
Speaker 2: And if we can start to talk about some of
Speaker 2: the operational taskings that they had for you.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so let's start with the operational cryptinal taskings. What
Speaker 4: I was told initially, I was prepped to befriend people
Speaker 4: in government who are in charge of foreign policy, for
Speaker 4: at least people in think tanks that influence foreign policy,
Speaker 4: such as the Hudson Institute and a few others, and
Speaker 4: that's all I knew. And of course there was always
Speaker 4: as many contexts as you can make to you know,
Speaker 4: I was to operate as a spotter. Okay, there were
Speaker 4: no other specific that that I was given until the
Speaker 4: last two years. They also asked me if I could
Speaker 4: get a hold of some information technology that was on
Speaker 4: the do not import list. So so the only success
Speaker 4: I might have had is that they may have recruited
Speaker 4: some people, particularly students who who I fingered as being
Speaker 4: good targets for for recruitment, possibly because they were pretty smart.
Speaker 4: But they they had, they had they were in those days,
Speaker 4: we recruited based on ideology primarily, and you know, the
Speaker 4: myce acronym the the I was still number one, and
Speaker 4: but ideology not necessarily communist ideology, just like radical right
Speaker 4: or even you know, fanatical supporters of of Israel. To
Speaker 4: record on a false flat and so of course, so
Speaker 4: I don't They never told me. They never once told
Speaker 4: me good job, not even in general. They just didn't
Speaker 4: let me know. They just gave me that decoration that
Speaker 4: indicated that I was doing a good job. So that's
Speaker 4: all I can tell you it's very surprising when people
Speaker 4: asked me, so, so, what did you really do? I
Speaker 4: never touched any document that had secrets. One thing and
Speaker 4: this is this is another educated guest. But I believe
Speaker 4: that they were considering me as a go between between
Speaker 4: either Aims or Hansen, because in nineteen eighty six, that
Speaker 4: was my last wizard to Moscow. They gave me a
Speaker 4: task to find a spot for a drop operation. Drop
Speaker 4: in yes, drop operation in New Hampshire place and in
Speaker 4: the wilderness. And they told me that would have to
Speaker 4: be a spot where you can deposit something that has
Speaker 4: size like a small suitcase. And I found the spot
Speaker 4: and and oh and they asked me if I was
Speaker 4: willing And this was the only time they asked me
Speaker 4: if I was willing to do a do a job
Speaker 4: that that is more that would increase the danger to
Speaker 4: my existence in the United States. Well, guess what courier
Speaker 4: and handing and getting stuff from Aims or or or
Speaker 4: hands and and then interacting with diplomats because at this
Speaker 4: point I was very good at some ins detection. I
Speaker 4: knew I was never followed, okay, and they knew that
Speaker 4: I was good at this because I had a lot
Speaker 4: very very good training. So so that was they were
Speaker 4: considering it, and they pulled it back for some reason.
Speaker 6: So, you know, it's interesting to me that you know,
Speaker 6: you mentioned like the issues with the passport as your failure,
Speaker 6: but really that feels like a failure of the KGB
Speaker 6: because they know espionage, right, they know that that covers
Speaker 6: need to be backstopped, right, that they that they things
Speaker 6: need to happen. And I can't believe for a second
Speaker 6: that they didn't have low level assets in the State
Speaker 6: Department that could have rubber stamped things like that.
Speaker 4: There was no backstop. I had to do it all
Speaker 4: on my own.
Speaker 7: That's that's crazy too.
Speaker 4: What did what they did do? They did research for
Speaker 4: my cover story. So they found the school where I
Speaker 4: went to, uh, where I went to elementary school and
Speaker 4: middle school. They picked the high school that they didn't know,
Speaker 4: what's the wrong high school, Peter Stuyvesant, I believe, uh Uh.
Speaker 4: Then then they did something really good. They had me
Speaker 4: uh quit high school because of migraines. They also had
Speaker 4: my father die because my mother my mother's maiden name
Speaker 4: was Schwartz, and so I grew up bi lingual. So
Speaker 4: this way I could somebody asked me about the touch
Speaker 4: of an accent that I still have. I said, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: I grew up at lingual in New York. That that's
Speaker 4: the end of that and that question. So uh, and
Speaker 4: then they had me with I my father died, I
Speaker 4: grew up with my mother. They had me quit high
Speaker 4: my mom actually the dad I died from a heart
Speaker 4: attack and my mom died pretty young in a traffic accident.
Speaker 4: And I was like grief stricken and quit high school.
Speaker 4: I was at Migraines and I started working in a
Speaker 4: chemical factory. Uh, George Luterson Company, I still remember. And
Speaker 4: George Ludison Company had exploded so it didn't exist anymore.
Speaker 4: And then they had me go to an upstate farm
Speaker 4: in New York City. That one wasn't backstopped, but you know,
Speaker 4: so I and when I came to the United States,
Speaker 4: you know, I was a country boy who was going
Speaker 4: to try to make it in New York. And then
Speaker 4: it was okay, but it wasn't backstopped at all.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and then the communication with the KGD.
Speaker 4: Communication was the hardest part of it all. So every
Speaker 4: Thursday night I got a radiogram Morse code shortwave double
Speaker 4: encrypted every Thursday. For ten years at nineteen forty five,
Speaker 4: I had to dial my frequency and listen to the radiogram,
Speaker 4: and sometimes it was pretty long, and then I had
Speaker 4: to sit down on and decipher. And for most of
Speaker 4: my uh my years, I had to use a manual
Speaker 4: algorithm no no one time pad, so that took quite
Speaker 4: a while, and you have to you had to really
Speaker 4: double up on the on developing the the second set
Speaker 4: of numbers to make sure that you didn't make a
Speaker 4: mistake right. So so very often, you know, on Thursdays,
Speaker 4: I was not available socially and complained about that because
Speaker 4: that's a pattern. You don't want to have a pattern
Speaker 4: as an agent. You know, what's what's wrong with this guy?
Speaker 4: What is he doing on Thursday? And and they said
Speaker 4: there's nothing we can do about it. My conclusion is
Speaker 4: that they went a time out of Cuba because initially,
Speaker 4: when when I first went to the US, they told
Speaker 4: me to to go to a hotel that has southern exposure,
Speaker 4: so Bingo. So anyway, sometimes it took me until about
Speaker 4: three in the morning to decipher the radiogram, and I
Speaker 4: got really pissed off when I got Sometimes they started
Speaker 4: with something congratulations comrade theater on May first, the international
Speaker 4: holiday for the for the workers. What the heck are
Speaker 4: you giving me?
Speaker 2: That kind of pis And it takes you like an
Speaker 2: hour to decipher all of that exactly, So.
Speaker 4: You know that, you know that I call as clever
Speaker 4: as some of these people were, but I call the
Speaker 4: KGB as I experienced the Keystone cops of espionage. Okay.
Speaker 4: The the other thing that the way I communicated back
Speaker 4: to them, it was wise of them for me not
Speaker 4: to use Morse code because you know where it comes from.
Speaker 4: You don't you don't know where it goes through it wave,
Speaker 4: but you know where it comes from. So I had
Speaker 4: to do secret writing. And I had two uh addresses
Speaker 4: someplace in the Western world. One one was initially in Berlin,
Speaker 4: then uh Then one was in uh In in Austria.
Speaker 4: When I was a bike messenger and I couldn't socialize
Speaker 4: and I couldn't watch TV all night, I taught myself
Speaker 4: Spanish and so eventually they found an address someplace in
Speaker 4: in South South America. I was limited to two pages
Speaker 4: per letter and one letter per month to each one
Speaker 4: of the addresses. No more so two pages. You can't
Speaker 4: fit a whole lot of information onto two pages and
Speaker 4: so uh. And on top of it, I had so
Speaker 4: and this this. This was a lengthy operation. It took
Speaker 4: pretty much almost all of my of my saturday when
Speaker 4: I I did this on I did this on a Saturday. Uh.
Speaker 4: First of all, you have to prepare the surface. You
Speaker 4: have to clean everything very well. You have to put
Speaker 4: gloves on you you you have to you use either
Speaker 4: a mirror or a glass, a sheet of glass to
Speaker 4: operate on. That had to be cleaned up. Then you
Speaker 4: clean up the paper you're using with with you gotta
Speaker 4: wash your hands and you clean that up before before
Speaker 4: you put the gloves on. Then you devise the open text.
Speaker 4: You write this down someplace else, and then you copy
Speaker 4: this in the in uh you know, in in not
Speaker 4: in handwriting. What's the other one? You look? You I
Speaker 4: forgot the word yeah? Uh? And and then you take
Speaker 4: your contact paper out, which it was a sheet that
Speaker 4: was in a in a in a notebook that was
Speaker 4: it had a trace of a chemical on it and
Speaker 4: with the first ten pages of a notebook. They bought
Speaker 4: this at a Walmart and then pregnated this with some
Speaker 4: chemical that you can't you can't find unless you know
Speaker 4: what you're looking for. So and then then I did this,
Speaker 4: you know, the with the help of that that that page,
Speaker 4: I put the secret writing on the letter the paper
Speaker 4: that went into the letter, and then I, uh put
Speaker 4: a hair dryer. I used the hair dryer to smooth
Speaker 4: out and everything so you don't see any imprint, right nothing.
Speaker 4: I had to also use you know, be be used.
Speaker 4: I had to. I practiced this in Moscow to make
Speaker 4: sure that I don't leave too much garbage and the
Speaker 4: imprint is not too strong. So so this was this
Speaker 4: was that this training was really good. And then I
Speaker 4: was required to go on surveillance on a surveillance detection
Speaker 4: route for three hours before mailing this thing in you know,
Speaker 4: putting it in a mailbox. So that took care for
Speaker 4: most of my Saturday every other Saturday, so again I
Speaker 4: was not available to socialize on Saturdays. It was horrible.
Speaker 4: And here comes here comes my biggest complaint that I
Speaker 4: never that I never voiced. But I've heard the FBI
Speaker 4: complaining about bureaucracy, and this was entirely bureaucratic. Once a quarter,
Speaker 4: I had to use a valuable real estate for secret
Speaker 4: riting to issue a finance report. Okay, how much money
Speaker 4: I spent because they paid for my the the rent
Speaker 4: for my apartment, They took care of my medical expenses,
Speaker 4: and they paid for half of when I had a vehicle,
Speaker 4: for half of my car expenses. So I just they
Speaker 4: didn't give me the money, so but I had to
Speaker 4: write down what it was to send it in. That
Speaker 4: was idiotic. They spent so much money on training me,
Speaker 4: so much money on maintaining me, and and and they
Speaker 4: they had me account for a few hundred dollars every quarter. Yeah,
Speaker 4: so you know, again, you know, there's nothing but complaints,
Speaker 4: but that one I didn't. I didn't complain about simply
Speaker 4: because they promised me that this money that they didn't
Speaker 4: have to send me was they that was saved up
Speaker 4: for me and my family. And they did save save
Speaker 4: some at least I don't know if they saved everything.
Speaker 4: But they gave my my German family some of the
Speaker 4: money that I asked them to hand over. I asked
Speaker 4: them to give give them everything. I don't know if
Speaker 4: they did so, but I'm getting ahead of myself. So
Speaker 4: this was the communication. One other means of communication was
Speaker 4: dead drops. So for instance, when I got a passport,
Speaker 4: I always traveled. When I went back to Moscow, and
Speaker 4: I went back to Moscow four times every other every
Speaker 4: other year, I went back with a forts passport. I
Speaker 4: think they were mostly German, and they were not They
Speaker 4: were not not American. They may have been Canadian, but
Speaker 4: but not American. They the rule was not ever to
Speaker 4: use a passport, a forged passport in the country where
Speaker 4: you operate off that country, you know. So so for
Speaker 4: for traveling back, they had to give me some money,
Speaker 4: some travel money and a passport, and that was done
Speaker 4: via dead drop operations. And occasionally, when I had too
Speaker 4: much information that you know, lengthy report, occasionally they asked
Speaker 4: me to write down, you know, what Americans think about
Speaker 4: certain occurrences in in in the world, such as the
Speaker 4: shooting down of the South Korean airline. And so at
Speaker 4: that point, I, you know, I put my foreign policy
Speaker 4: hat on and I wrote something that was too long
Speaker 4: to put in a letter, so that I photographed and
Speaker 4: put in a a container and asked for a dead
Speaker 4: drop operation. And that happened about three or two or
Speaker 4: three times, by the way, just yeah, to to add
Speaker 4: something interesting in that particular report, I hammered them. I
Speaker 4: told him what the heck were you doing this? This
Speaker 4: raised raised the level of anti Americanism tremendously, has put
Speaker 4: a lot of strain and and it's in danger. During
Speaker 4: the negotiations that Gorbachev already had with with with Reagan,
Speaker 4: I hope they listened, Jack.
Speaker 6: How is your ideology holding up? You know, like, you know,
Speaker 6: you grew up with one idea of the West. Then
Speaker 6: you moved there your bike messenger for seven years. You know,
Speaker 6: you're you go to college. Were you were you still
Speaker 6: kind of vaccinated against it? Or it was like living
Speaker 6: in the land of the big p X sort of
Speaker 6: like or you know, the walmarts? Was that starting to
Speaker 6: infiltrate your your thinking?
Speaker 4: Good question, the vaccine held up for a while. First
Speaker 4: of all, I already expected after I had this practice
Speaker 4: troke to Canada that and I know even West Germany,
Speaker 4: that would be wealth. And we are rationalizing the wealth
Speaker 4: that that the NATO state states had one word imperialism,
Speaker 4: that they stole all the the stuff, that the good
Speaker 4: stuff from from the third world. Some of it is true,
Speaker 4: but clearly, once I had a job in corporate I
Speaker 4: realized that a lot of that wealth was generated by
Speaker 4: hard work, by comparison. You know, in East Germany, you
Speaker 4: didn't have to work hard if you didn't want to.
Speaker 4: Everybody got paid the same. There was no pay for performance.
Speaker 4: And maybe maybe collectives occasionally would get an award if
Speaker 4: they did a good job, but but that was not
Speaker 4: the rule. So UH and I and UH, I was
Speaker 4: also looking for the evil capitalists. You know. My first
Speaker 4: job was with a with an insurance company, and in
Speaker 4: those days they were extremely paternalistic and it felt like
Speaker 4: going home. It's like working working in you know, for
Speaker 4: a big company in East Germany. You know, you you
Speaker 4: you get tired, and they promised you a job for life.
Speaker 4: We had free life lunch and you know, and my
Speaker 4: bosses were all nice. So I couldn't find the evil capitalists,
Speaker 4: you know, I was looking for them, but they weren't
Speaker 4: They weren't very visible. So so here here's how I
Speaker 4: morphed from from communism into what what happened to other
Speaker 4: people as well. And it's called the conversion UH theory.
Speaker 4: So that that that that was actually developed by socialist
Speaker 4: parties in Western countries and NATO countries, so that the
Speaker 4: good parts of capitalism and social socialism will be joined
Speaker 4: to create some kind of a welfare state. I thought
Speaker 4: it was a good idea. And guess what the fellow
Speaker 4: that picked me up in Macco and with with with
Speaker 4: a limousine, the KGB agent who picked me up a
Speaker 4: volunteered he talked about without me even saying anything. He
Speaker 4: talked about convergence theory. And this guy was not a
Speaker 4: very bright guy. So if he said that he heard
Speaker 4: it from from from the top, I think it may
Speaker 4: it may have had taken vote within the KGB itself.
Speaker 4: I'm pretty sure it did. So I wasn't a communist anymore,
Speaker 4: but you know, convergence theory seemed to be a good idea.
Speaker 4: But this is when my world fell apart. So I
Speaker 4: resigned from the KGB in nineteen eighty eight. In nineteen
Speaker 4: eighty nine, the wall, the wall came down, and I
Speaker 4: was sitting in my apartment in Queens and I watched
Speaker 4: it on TV and I said, that can't be because
Speaker 4: nobody expected that, not the KGB, not the CIA, not
Speaker 4: the stars. He was clearly not I thought, you know,
Speaker 4: East Germany was still on path to overtake the western
Speaker 4: part and like create a great economy. Blah blah blah,
Speaker 4: blah blah, and all of a sudden it fell apart.
Speaker 4: So now I had to find out what what what
Speaker 4: happened there, And because of the availability of the Internet,
Speaker 4: I could find out rather quickly that I had been
Speaker 4: lied to and in spades from from day one, but
Speaker 4: including also the mark the scientific uh, scientific Marxism Leninism thing.
Speaker 4: And I got my hands on the original writings of
Speaker 4: Vladimir Lenin, who was my hero because he implemented the
Speaker 4: Marxist theory. In reality he created the Communist Russia and
Speaker 4: then created the Soviet Union, and he was a hero
Speaker 4: because he gave his life for it. And he you'll know,
Speaker 4: he died as a result of the weakening, after having
Speaker 4: been having been subject to it and attempted assassination. So
Speaker 4: in my hero, I knew that Stalin was bad. But
Speaker 4: my hero turned out to be just as merciless a
Speaker 4: killer than Stalin was, because there were passages in his writing,
Speaker 4: unredacted writing where it stated uh, And I forgot what
Speaker 4: the title of the book was. It may have been
Speaker 4: one step forward and two steps back, but it doesn't matter.
Speaker 4: He gave instructions to to Feelings Jasinski, and in the
Speaker 4: Cohorts of the chi Ka that was the forerunner of
Speaker 4: the KGB. To uh you got to hang some some culos,
Speaker 4: the rich rich peasants by the by the road, hanging
Speaker 4: from trees so they're visible. That to give people an
Speaker 4: idea that you know, having great wealth is not very uh,
Speaker 4: it's it's not a very good thing for your for
Speaker 4: your for your health might actually wind up in death.
Speaker 4: That is what Lennon said. That's it man. Uh. Now
Speaker 4: I now became secretly an anti communist. Now now I'm
Speaker 4: opening an anti communist because I also had the opportunity
Speaker 4: to to learn about the United States and how how
Speaker 4: it was formed by the founders. I took an online
Speaker 4: course uh and several years ago and uh and and
Speaker 4: in seven eleven made me emotionally an Americans. So so
Speaker 4: there's there's nothing left. But it was a very very
Speaker 4: long transition. You know, when when I resigned from the
Speaker 4: KGB and I just got I stepped out of you know,
Speaker 4: political thinking, policy thinking. I just dedicated myself to my family,
Speaker 4: and you know, I became you know, I wasn't into
Speaker 4: consumer rism, you know, great by big houses and I
Speaker 4: could at one point two cars for the family, My
Speaker 4: two wives that I had, my two wives that I
Speaker 4: had in my entire life. In American wives never had
Speaker 4: to work one hour in their life. So I became
Speaker 4: a consumer and that was my focus. But you know,
Speaker 4: seven eleven and eleven made me emotional an American, and
Speaker 4: then I became intellectual an American truly, because when when
Speaker 4: I took that course on uh on the American Constitution,
Speaker 4: I said, yeah, that's the only way to deal with
Speaker 4: the evil that we have experienced throughout history and it's
Speaker 4: still in existence. So this, this is, this was my journey.
Speaker 4: If I'm add to this, my friends who I studied with,
Speaker 4: and particularly the ones that became party members and were
Speaker 4: active in the youth movements, such as my best friend
Speaker 4: who actually wound up in the Starzi, but he was
Speaker 4: as a chemist. He actually wound up heading the forgery
Speaker 4: department of the Starzi. So and those when when the
Speaker 4: wall came down there that was just as surprising for them,
Speaker 4: and all of a sudden it hit it hit them hard.
Speaker 4: It hit them hard because now you cannot absolutely believe
Speaker 4: that you that you served the wrong cause. So they
Speaker 4: were all miserable and when I when I met them,
Speaker 4: they were complaining you know we had the wrong leadership.
Speaker 4: You know, the communism is still a good cause, and
Speaker 4: you know we were not wrong. But they also had
Speaker 4: their pensions that caught in have and and just like
Speaker 4: they were full of complaints and were miserable. So again
Speaker 4: I got lucky to decontaminate very slowly, because I don't
Speaker 4: know what it would what it would have happened to
Speaker 4: me had I, let's say, had I followed the KGB
Speaker 4: uh when they told me, when I had listened to
Speaker 4: them and they told me to go back because we
Speaker 4: may want to come to that yet, and I would
Speaker 4: have wound up living my life out in Russia after
Speaker 4: the wall came down. I would be miserable, as ol.
Speaker 2: Can Can you tell us a little bit more about
Speaker 2: like the unraveling about how you were exposed as a
Speaker 2: KGB officer in America? And I have to imagine that
Speaker 2: the FBI was all over you for many many years.
Speaker 4: Actually not true. I got to tell you that I
Speaker 4: first resigned before the FBI found me.
Speaker 6: Yeah, what led to your resignation? And did were you
Speaker 6: afraid that they were going to kill you?
Speaker 4: Yes? I was concerned. Okay, what was led to my resignation?
Speaker 4: Was four letter word l O V E. I. Unbeknownst
Speaker 4: to them, I was married to this this young lady
Speaker 4: who who was originally from South America, and she became
Speaker 4: pregnant on purpose because she I just wanted to date her.
Speaker 4: I didn't want to marry her, and I told her
Speaker 4: I'm not going to get married to you. But then
Speaker 4: she said to me, you know I'm illegal, can you
Speaker 4: help me get married? And so I could get a
Speaker 4: green card, And I said, I did some research and
Speaker 4: I figured yeah, that that will work. And and so
Speaker 4: he has an illegal, make making another illegal legal. She
Speaker 4: became a citizen because she was married to me, and
Speaker 4: at that point I was still illegal. Bizarre. So uh.
Speaker 4: And she became pregnant on parma is because that's something
Speaker 4: that women who came from other countries did when they
Speaker 4: found a real good man. So and I didn't fall
Speaker 4: in love with her. I liked her a lot. She
Speaker 4: was good company, very beautiful. But I loved the little
Speaker 4: girl that grew up in eighteen months. And you know
Speaker 4: when this is I don't know if you have children
Speaker 4: or particularly girls, most men can relate to that. I
Speaker 4: watched this baby grow up and unbeknownst to me, I
Speaker 4: had an attack of unconditional love. It was so strong
Speaker 4: and was much stronger than any feeling I had, and
Speaker 4: to towards a woman it was it had no desire
Speaker 4: of getting anything back. The only desire was to serve
Speaker 4: this girl and help her and just just be there
Speaker 4: for her and love her to pieces. So it was
Speaker 4: in late fall of nineteen eighty eight when the KGB
Speaker 4: somehow got spooked when somebody must have whispered something into
Speaker 4: somebody's ears where they had some reason to believe that
Speaker 4: I might be in danger. And the last thing they
Speaker 4: wanted me to be in jail. And I tell you
Speaker 4: most people don't understand this, but you do. They want
Speaker 4: to worried about me. They were worried about me being
Speaker 4: in jail because they would cause them headaches, because if
Speaker 4: I wind up in jail, they have to get me
Speaker 4: out otherwise they can't recruit somebody else, okay. And I
Speaker 4: knew they would get me out, That's what they told me.
Speaker 4: And they got the coins out and I had evidence
Speaker 4: that they would keep their word. So they wanted to
Speaker 4: avoid that headache, so they called me back and so
Speaker 4: they we had a and an emergency procedure that they
Speaker 4: activated with with a graphic signal, a red dot on
Speaker 4: my way to work. They knew I had to tell
Speaker 4: them which way I was going to work, so so
Speaker 4: there could be some There was a graphic signal spot
Speaker 4: that I could should check every day, graphic signal. And
Speaker 4: now I had a problem because I hadn't figured I
Speaker 4: wanted to figure out how how could I support this
Speaker 4: girl and her mother remotely? I had no idea. And
Speaker 4: after some some uh, you know, I stalled initially because
Speaker 4: maybe I was sick. There was there was a there
Speaker 4: was a situation where I was sick and I could
Speaker 4: not I was not operational for a month I had
Speaker 4: as a bike messenger. I had busted my right shoulder
Speaker 4: and I couldn't do anything. So uh, and they knew
Speaker 4: about that, and so I could have been sick and
Speaker 4: my radio could have not functioned and so forth. So
Speaker 4: I bought myself a couple of week weeks, maybe three weeks.
Speaker 4: But three weeks later they did something that was unusual.
Speaker 4: They wanted to figure out am I still around, and
Speaker 4: so they sent one of their diplomats to check on me,
Speaker 4: and he found me when I was waiting for the
Speaker 4: a train going from Queens into Manhattan. He found me
Speaker 4: waiting for that train and was still dark, and he
Speaker 4: came to me from my right. I can remember this
Speaker 4: like it was yesterday. A short guy in a dark coat,
Speaker 4: and he came really close to me and whispered into
Speaker 4: my right ear, you gotta come home. It's dead. And
Speaker 4: that was stated with a very strong Russian accent. All right,
Speaker 4: you have to take that seriously. Yeah. On the one hand,
Speaker 4: because he spoke us bad English, I thought he may
Speaker 4: have just, uh, you know, used the wrong word. Maybe
Speaker 4: maybe he wanted to say you you busted, and he
Speaker 4: didn't have the vocabulary. That threat had to be taken seriously.
Speaker 4: So the one the only thing that I could think
Speaker 4: of is changing my daily routine, going to work at
Speaker 4: a different time, taking different routes, taking different trains, making
Speaker 4: sure that I'm not reliable in the same spot at
Speaker 4: the same time. Now, in the long run, that wouldn't
Speaker 4: have worked. I am now certain that they they bought
Speaker 4: the light that I fed him, so they weren't after me.
Speaker 4: But I didn't know that, right. That's a pretty brave
Speaker 4: things to do, and that's why I'm saying nowadays, love
Speaker 4: conquers all I just I could not leave this kid.
Speaker 4: And then I took you know, I went on you know,
Speaker 4: Surveillius detection routes and mailed myself a letter to determine
Speaker 4: as to whether you know the letter was opened. There's
Speaker 4: the technique that I was taught. And uh, and and
Speaker 4: and also what was the other thing I did? Oh?
Speaker 4: I had in my in my apartment, I had two
Speaker 4: spots that where I absolutely knew if somebody actually went
Speaker 4: through my apartment, I would know. And I tell you
Speaker 4: one was my favorite. I had a chest of drawers
Speaker 4: where the one of the drawers had an overhang, so
Speaker 4: when you look at the drawer front, you did not
Speaker 4: see that that the door closed. Actually more ah, that
Speaker 4: when you closed the door it was further in than
Speaker 4: the way I left it. Every night when I went home,
Speaker 4: I checked that this this gap was eight millimeters. This
Speaker 4: I was pretty certain about. And because there's one time
Speaker 4: when uh, when when I was burglarized, that gap was gone.
Speaker 4: The people opened the thing and then it closed it again.
Speaker 4: It doesn't matter what nobody will go down. I mean,
Speaker 4: you know, it's maybe some really really good people, but
Speaker 4: they don't have that much time to go lie down
Speaker 4: on the floor and look at everything from the bottom right.
Speaker 4: So I was pretty certain that this was okay. So eventually,
Speaker 4: I uh, I resigned from the KGB. And the people
Speaker 4: always ask, how do you resign from the KGB. There's
Speaker 4: a famous line in James Bond movie that says nobody
Speaker 4: resigns from the KGB. Well, I did, and I the
Speaker 4: reason I got away with it. I sent in my
Speaker 4: last letter and secret writing. I told him I well
Speaker 4: aware that I'm in danger and I'm that that I
Speaker 4: might be arrested. I would love to come home, but
Speaker 4: I really can't. I have HIV AIDS, and in those
Speaker 4: days that was a death sentence. And I knew because
Speaker 4: I had conversations in Moscow with a couple of my
Speaker 4: handless how they were so glad about AIDS having invaded
Speaker 4: the United States as punishment for the for that that lifestyle,
Speaker 4: that that sinful lifestyle that was ramped rampant in the US,
Speaker 4: and they didn't want that deadly disease back in their country.
Speaker 4: So they absolutely had They had no reason not to
Speaker 4: believe me that they had absolutely no reason. Had they
Speaker 4: known that I have a child, that would have been
Speaker 4: a different story right, But none of that became known
Speaker 4: to me until I reconnected with my German family. And
Speaker 4: when I went back to Germany after I became a
Speaker 4: US citizen, they did give my German family a portion
Speaker 4: of my dollar savings and told him that I was dead.
Speaker 4: And even today the German registry that keeps track of
Speaker 4: births and marriages and divorces as Abrich Dietrich as passing
Speaker 4: away in nineteen eighty eight. So I didn't know any
Speaker 4: of that until I was able to go back to Germany.
Speaker 4: And so the FBI didn't know for me about me
Speaker 4: until about seven years after my resignation, and that was
Speaker 4: because of a betrayal. There was a fellow, and you
Speaker 4: must have heard about this fellow by the name of
Speaker 4: Vasili Mitrocanu.
Speaker 7: The name does not ring a bell to me.
Speaker 4: Mister mitrocan was an archivist. He was actually at one
Speaker 4: point the chief archivist in the in the the the library,
Speaker 4: in the archive of the first Director at Espionage. So
Speaker 4: he oversaw the move from uh the Lubyanka where the
Speaker 4: original headquarters of the KGB was tu Yasinogo, the more
Speaker 4: modern place outside of Moscow. And I believe the reason
Speaker 4: that he started hating the Soviet system. He his son
Speaker 4: was was very ill and the only place where he
Speaker 4: could get treatment was someplace in the west, and they
Speaker 4: don't they didn't allow him to go to the west,
Speaker 4: to the west. And so he started thinking of how
Speaker 4: he could damage that that hated organization, and he started
Speaker 4: re this stuff, and then his hatred became was extended
Speaker 4: to hating the entire system. And so what he did
Speaker 4: over the years he smuggled out in small pieces, on
Speaker 4: small pieces of hand handwritten notes with some bits and
Speaker 4: pieces of information, and then he transcribed the stuff with
Speaker 4: a typewriter and buried whatever the resulting pages in his
Speaker 4: doctor and I don't know exactly what he started this,
Speaker 4: Uh you you you can probably read up on this.
Speaker 4: He co wrote a book with a British author called
Speaker 4: The Sword in This then The Shield and the Shield.
Speaker 4: I'm sorry, this is uh this is the bible for
Speaker 4: anybody who wants to know what the espionage that the
Speaker 4: KGB did, and that includes also active measures. So he
Speaker 4: and when the Soviet Union finally fell apart, he felt
Speaker 4: it was time to to ah reach out initially to
Speaker 4: the American embassy uh and and and tell him what
Speaker 4: but he had and the CIA officer who he talked
Speaker 4: with told him, we're not interested because he thought, you know,
Speaker 4: it was old stuff and radiat danglemo. That was a
Speaker 4: career changing or ending move by that officer. So then
Speaker 4: so the fellow went then to to uh the British
Speaker 4: embassy and m I six was very welcoming, welcoming, and
Speaker 4: that they managed to a get the stuff, the several
Speaker 4: boxes of material out of this guy's datcha and get
Speaker 4: it over to England where they eventually changed some of
Speaker 4: the information that was irrelevant with the CIA. And that
Speaker 4: is how the FBI was notified about my existence. And
Speaker 4: all they knew was that there's a Jack Barski who
Speaker 4: is an illegal who went to the US at a
Speaker 4: certain time and he lives in the Northeast. Now that
Speaker 4: all the FBI had to do is look for Jack Barski.
Speaker 4: There are not so many and the one that the
Speaker 4: social Security card at the age of I was in
Speaker 4: my mid thirties must have been it. And then they
Speaker 4: spent two and a half years watching me because they
Speaker 4: knew that I was highly trained, because I survived like
Speaker 4: all together seventeen years up to that point without being detected,
Speaker 4: So they were afraid that I might be running a
Speaker 4: moll or two. And and also they were afraid to
Speaker 4: get too close because as a highly trained agent, they
Speaker 4: they would have endangered that their their secrecy. You know,
Speaker 4: I could have found out that that they're watching me.
Speaker 6: You mean that the woman with the stroller and the
Speaker 6: guy with the newspaper on the bench and the street
Speaker 6: sweeper all putting their finger to their ear would have
Speaker 6: given them away.
Speaker 4: You bet. And again they they this was instinctively the
Speaker 4: right thing to do because again, you know, because I
Speaker 4: survived that long. And they may have caught others, and
Speaker 4: they may may have been other illegals who were busted,
Speaker 4: and none of them I'm aware of that, but there
Speaker 4: may have been some that managed to flee or whatever,
Speaker 4: or they were busted. I'm sorry they were busted and
Speaker 4: wound up in and uh what is said when when
Speaker 4: when they put criminals in the witness protection program? Right,
Speaker 4: I'm getting a little tired. I'm talking too much. So
Speaker 4: they did the right thing. And literally there's two things.
Speaker 4: They bought the house next door. I had a house
Speaker 4: in the country. And when the house next door, there
Speaker 4: was only one house next door was available, they bought it,
Speaker 4: and they put a couple of agents there to watch me,
Speaker 4: and there was no indication that I was active. And
Speaker 4: then they had another guy. The lead agent actually was
Speaker 4: across the street on a hill and he pretended to
Speaker 4: be a birdwatcher and he just watched me interact with
Speaker 4: my children and he came to the conclusion that I
Speaker 4: would cooperate and his judgment was correct, and that is
Speaker 4: when they decided to say helone.
Speaker 7: So how did that encounter go?
Speaker 4: That was very well orchestrated, and it was a big
Speaker 4: surprise for me. They he knew that I was commuting.
Speaker 4: They had people, you know, watching me, but not following me,
Speaker 4: so so they sort of knew, uh that I worked
Speaker 4: in New New Jersey and I was commuting back and
Speaker 4: forth between Pennsylvania New Jersey. So they rented themselves a
Speaker 4: state trooper and he positioned himself at the at the
Speaker 4: bridge over the Delaware and there's a there's a there's
Speaker 4: a toll. This is a toll bridge where you in
Speaker 4: those days you had to put a corner and to
Speaker 4: get through that means you had to slow down. And
Speaker 4: the police officer positioned himself and in uniform in front
Speaker 4: of me, and he told me, told me, this is
Speaker 4: a routine traffic stop. Would your police pull over? And
Speaker 4: then he did something that should have like made me suspicions,
Speaker 4: because routine traffic stops typically don't tell you to step
Speaker 4: out of the vehicle. But I was like so unprepared,
Speaker 4: and I was so not watchful anymore. I had forgotten
Speaker 4: that I was once a spy. Okay, you know, like
Speaker 4: so many years, you know, I had compartmentalized this away.
Speaker 4: I didn't want to think about it, so stepping, I
Speaker 4: stepped out of the vehicle, not thinking anything. And then
Speaker 4: this again, for my right, comes another guy and he
Speaker 4: was in civilian clothes, and before I could even think,
Speaker 4: what's this, he slipped open an idea and that without
Speaker 4: even looking at it, I knew this is a big problem.
Speaker 4: And the agent, his name is Joe Riley. Everybody knows
Speaker 4: about him because he wrote the afterword in my book.
Speaker 4: So and we became really good friends. So the agent
Speaker 4: told me much later that at that moment, my face
Speaker 4: went white as the driven snow. It was all the
Speaker 4: bloody exited my head. But it didn't take me very
Speaker 4: long to recover. And that's also confirmed by him. So
Speaker 4: he had me step into the car that his car,
Speaker 4: that was parked at a place where I couldn't see
Speaker 4: it coming coming into the bridge, and there was a
Speaker 4: partner of his sitting in the back seat, and he
Speaker 4: had a gun strapped to his ankle, very conspicuously. I
Speaker 4: think there was a message. And man, I I knew
Speaker 4: that I was in deep shit, and and I knew
Speaker 4: that there was a good chance I would wind up
Speaker 4: in jail, that my family, uh would be would be
Speaker 4: moved out of the house, my ex wife would be deported,
Speaker 4: and my kids would become wards of the state. What
Speaker 4: a horrible outcome. And this is the instinct that I
Speaker 4: didn't think about this, but I sort of instinctively knew
Speaker 4: that I had to make these people like me, and
Speaker 4: so I did a I told it a very very
Speaker 4: innocent joke, and I asked him, so, what took you
Speaker 4: so long? And you know that one of the guys
Speaker 4: whose face I could see, couldn't suppress the smile. So
Speaker 4: then they took me oh, And then I asked another question.
Speaker 4: I asked Then I asked a question. I asked them,
Speaker 4: am I under arrest? And they said no. And then
Speaker 4: Joe Riley, the lead turned around and told me, this
Speaker 4: may not be the worst day of your life, all right.
Speaker 4: That gave me some hope, and that triggered me volunteering.
Speaker 4: Once they took me to a motel where they had
Speaker 4: it was extremely well guarded. They had rented one entire
Speaker 4: uh the ground floor of an L shaped motel and
Speaker 4: at both ends they had an armed guard. And they
Speaker 4: put me in the middle of the floor, the ground floor,
Speaker 4: and so probably that nobody could could listen in at
Speaker 4: one end, who knows. And they did something that I
Speaker 4: I realized right away was trickery. They had some some
Speaker 4: items and on the walls where there were there was
Speaker 4: there was written. There was written some information that like,
Speaker 4: for instance, my my cover name, one of the convenience
Speaker 4: of dress is that I used, and some other stuff.
Speaker 4: And I realized all of that was from my very
Speaker 4: early years, so that wouldn't have worked. But I just
Speaker 4: started saying, listen here. I am fully aware that the
Speaker 4: only way for me and my family, by the way,
Speaker 4: come away with this from this with the least amount
Speaker 4: of damage is if I cooperate fully, and I have
Speaker 4: every intention to do so. So what could have been
Speaker 4: an interrogation was more of a talk. You know. We
Speaker 4: spent two hours, you know, back and forth talking and
Speaker 4: I know that nowadays, I know that I come across
Speaker 4: very authentic, even when I'm lying, though I still could
Speaker 4: have lied, but I told him and it was very
Speaker 4: believable and credible. You know. I want to say my
Speaker 4: favor for crying out loud. And so they allowed me
Speaker 4: to call my wife, who wasn't home because they told
Speaker 4: me to tell her I'm delayed because of work. And
Speaker 4: then they allowed me to go home, not without introducing
Speaker 4: me to the head of the team that took care
Speaker 4: of security, and he told me, if you think you
Speaker 4: can run, you can't. We got every intersection covered. There's
Speaker 4: no way out. You got to go home. And I said,
Speaker 4: you know, okay, I didn't you know I had no
Speaker 4: place to go. They didn't know that yet. And then
Speaker 4: we spent about six or eight weeks debriefing, where I
Speaker 4: met Joe Riley once or twice a week, and he
Speaker 4: got to know me as well as anybody. He asked
Speaker 4: me everything that could be found out about my life
Speaker 4: from from like birth, like childhood, everything, everything, everything, because
Speaker 4: they wanted to know. And I think in hindsight, it
Speaker 4: was very very very important information for the for the
Speaker 4: FBI to have, uh, to figure out, you know, other illegals.
Speaker 4: In some way it was to me, I concluded it
Speaker 4: was important because Riley got the accommendation from Louis Free,
Speaker 4: the head of the FBI in those days, for a
Speaker 4: job well done. And I couldn't give away any any
Speaker 4: secrets other than what I did, Okay, Yeah. And the
Speaker 4: other thing that was probably valuable that the knowledge that
Speaker 4: I wasn't running an undercover agent and in you know,
Speaker 4: a mod and in the US government, there's always good
Speaker 4: to know, ah, you know, to find out something something
Speaker 4: that you can't prove when you want to prove a
Speaker 4: next if you can. So that was a little bit
Speaker 4: of relief in that way. So and one other thing
Speaker 4: I got to tell with you because you you are
Speaker 4: familiar with all of this stuff before. And at one
Speaker 4: point I was told there is a way that eventually
Speaker 4: I'm going to get a green card and possibly even citizenship.
Speaker 4: But that took several weeks, and during those several weeks,
Speaker 4: I was still I was still very stressed. I was
Speaker 4: still thinking, oh my god, oh my god, I don't know.
Speaker 4: I don't know. But when when they eventually told me yes,
Speaker 4: they but yes you will be able to get a
Speaker 4: green card, but you must pass a polygraph. So and
Speaker 4: I think you know that most people don't know this,
Speaker 4: but you know in the movies polygraph tests or aggressive
Speaker 4: questions and answers where you have a face ENLiGHT in
Speaker 4: your face. No. The polygrapher who I was told was
Speaker 4: the best in the Pennsylvania area. Uh, he was sitting
Speaker 4: behind me and we the questions were told me ahead
Speaker 4: of time, so I I we actually practiced this. We
Speaker 4: practiced without the devices, the device connected to me. He
Speaker 4: sits behind me and whispers the questions and I had
Speaker 4: to whisper back yes or no. Nothing else was allowed.
Speaker 4: So and then he wired me up and we did
Speaker 4: the real one.
Speaker 2: So it was it was just a formality. The FBI
Speaker 2: already had the answers they wanted.
Speaker 4: Uh No. And I tell you why it was not
Speaker 4: a formality because when when he was done, he withdrew
Speaker 4: into his uh his office, and we reviewed the results
Speaker 4: and he showed me that the print out and he said,
Speaker 4: there's something here where you didn't tell the truth that
Speaker 4: I don't know, Maybe you didn't tell the truth, but
Speaker 4: he's he's a spike, and you should that shouldn't be so.
Speaker 4: And so I asked him what was the question? And
Speaker 4: he told me the question I forgot because I forgot
Speaker 4: what the question was. And I am thinking, I answered
Speaker 4: the question honestly, you said, but it spiked. I cannot
Speaker 4: I cannot certify that you told the truth. Period. And
Speaker 4: then it occurred to me this question was phrased as
Speaker 4: a negative, a double negative. And I said to him,
Speaker 4: so maybe it's because of double negative, and it made
Speaker 4: me think. He said, I don't know, let's let's just
Speaker 4: do it again. I had to read take that question once.
Speaker 4: And you know I I spoke at a convention of
Speaker 4: poligraphy and I I told them, a couple of them.
Speaker 4: I said, this was probably a control question for him.
Speaker 4: I had to fail that test for all the answers
Speaker 4: to be valid. I mean, I told me that's correct.
Speaker 4: So so he already knew I I I told the truth,
Speaker 4: but he had to prove it. Okay, you had to
Speaker 4: you had to do it by the book. So and
Speaker 4: that's uh. I I started my way on real citizenship,
Speaker 4: operated with illegally and acquired documents for a number of years,
Speaker 4: which really still put me in danger of of being
Speaker 4: fired from the job by by you know, operating with
Speaker 4: post documents, particularly because I I worked for a company
Speaker 4: that owned the nuclear plant. Another another lack of UH
Speaker 4: security when when listen this, this is just the really
Speaker 4: bizarre and it's and I'm very annoyed. American security is
Speaker 4: even today so full of holds. It bothers the heck
Speaker 4: out of me. And nowadays it's all CyberSecure, or mostly cybersecurity.
Speaker 4: So this is what happened. UH. They allowed me, the
Speaker 4: FBI allowed me to retain the Jack Barski identity simply
Speaker 4: because changing it would have would have been really really
Speaker 4: tough on the family. We would have had to move
Speaker 4: out of the area, mostly like witness protection program, and
Speaker 4: I was already so well established in the US. They
Speaker 4: figured to keep the idea. They asked the Jack Barsky's
Speaker 4: mom and dad if that was okay with them. They
Speaker 4: were still alive, and they said it's okay. The one
Speaker 4: thing I had to do is change my birth year,
Speaker 4: not my birth date at first, because if I had
Speaker 4: kept the forty four birth date, I would have been
Speaker 4: able to get Social Security before it was my time,
Speaker 4: which would have had had the FBI helped me commit
Speaker 4: a crime. Right.
Speaker 2: I think that almost the most interesting part about this
Speaker 2: whole story is that Jack Barsky starts off as your
Speaker 2: cover identity, but then you have literally become that person
Speaker 2: and that's your name.
Speaker 4: Now. Yeah. So so now now what we came up with.
Speaker 4: You know, if I if I changed the year, I
Speaker 4: have to I have to quit my job because you know,
Speaker 4: to get Social Security I had you know, I had
Speaker 4: to have a record on file, right so to get
Speaker 4: whatever for employment purposes. So they told we decided, let's
Speaker 4: just change the year. So all right, this made me
Speaker 4: really nervous because I had to go to tell HR
Speaker 4: to change my birth year. I had to change it, right,
Speaker 4: I was, I'm committing fraud, so she I said. I
Speaker 4: said to her, I said, I need to talk to you.
Speaker 4: I think there's something wrong with in my file. I
Speaker 4: think my birthdate is wrong. Now, this is an h
Speaker 4: operas who operates HR in a company that co owns
Speaker 4: a nuclear plant, and she didn't realize that this is
Speaker 4: a really interesting situation after having worked in that company
Speaker 4: for a year. To figure out something wrong in the
Speaker 4: files and it's my birthdate, you must be suspicious at
Speaker 4: that point. All right, No, she wasn't. She pulled out
Speaker 4: the file and she said, well does she seeing here?
Speaker 4: I said, this is your birthday? I said, well, you
Speaker 4: know here this is my driver's license. So how did
Speaker 4: you do you sign this thing? And said, I don't
Speaker 4: know what I was thinking. You know, I wasn't. I
Speaker 4: wasn't clearheaded. I made a mistake. Sorry. So she went
Speaker 4: and corrected to hear to nineteen forty nine without reporting
Speaker 4: that incident. Wow, pretty bad to actually visited. I visited
Speaker 4: that nuke. Okay, yeah, while I was still operating with
Speaker 4: that with a false ID.
Speaker 6: We do, Jack, We have some viewer questions, but real
Speaker 6: quick before we get to those, because you had mentioned
Speaker 6: before the show that you wanted to talk a little
Speaker 6: bit about like what's going on in the US and
Speaker 6: the world right now. As somebody who came from a
Speaker 6: from from communist from the Soviet Union, can you can
Speaker 6: you sort of opine and give us your your opinions.
Speaker 4: Well, it looks like the entire world is not going
Speaker 4: necessarily towards communism because even China is not a full
Speaker 4: fledged communist country, because communism requires that the state owns
Speaker 4: all the means of production, and that has been proven
Speaker 4: to not really work very well. So it looks like
Speaker 4: the entire world is going at different at a different
Speaker 4: pace towards oligard key. I mean, we have we have
Speaker 4: all the guards in this country. I mean with just
Speaker 4: these are people who have so much power because they
Speaker 4: have so much money, you know, particularly the folks who
Speaker 4: are in an information technology they can they can hold
Speaker 4: on to their power and they can influence what's going
Speaker 4: on in the country. Some do and some don't. But
Speaker 4: it's there's a danger there. But we have an oldi
Speaker 4: functioning oligarchy in Russia, for sure. It's not when you know,
Speaker 4: when I have a problem. When otherwise credible right wing
Speaker 4: commentators talk about that there's communism coming in the United States,
Speaker 4: this is an exaggeration. Just tell the truth that the
Speaker 4: danger is really And I don't I don't like collectivism,
Speaker 4: and I don't like elitism, and this is all associated
Speaker 4: with an oligarchy. I can't stand it. I'm I've always
Speaker 4: been an anti authoritarian. I've had to suppress that while
Speaker 4: growing up and under communism. My my children are like that,
Speaker 4: they wouldn't do very well. And you know, and and
Speaker 4: if you if you if we don't get a get
Speaker 4: a grip on AI, we we might wind up being
Speaker 4: pets to artificial creative personas. So so all of this
Speaker 4: is is a specter. I am. I am hopeful that
Speaker 4: this can be reversed. I am hopeful that I am
Speaker 4: personally surrounded with a lot of a lot of good,
Speaker 4: good uh people who still know how to think and
Speaker 4: who who still have common sense in them. And I
Speaker 4: think what needs to happen is we need to uh
Speaker 4: make some changes in our education system. And there there
Speaker 4: are some some people who have influence who actually think that,
Speaker 4: for instance, AI could make a difference and and so
Speaker 4: we could help our students to learn how to think. Again,
Speaker 4: having also said that, I'm currently working on a on
Speaker 4: a on a project with gen Z and you know,
Speaker 4: those those people still know how to think. Not not
Speaker 4: all of gen z is like Lordie, don play play
Speaker 4: with their cell phone all day. So so never give up, hope.
Speaker 4: I don't you know, I think the doomstate is not
Speaker 4: just around the honor if if in the United States
Speaker 4: or in the in the Western world, you know, I
Speaker 4: have knowledge in that in Germany the direction is very similar.
Speaker 4: And but you know, if if if we give up hope,
Speaker 4: then you know, then it's over. And and I think,
Speaker 4: I think, if if this happens, it's not going to
Speaker 4: happen in my lifetime of but it may happen while
Speaker 4: my children are still alive. And I'm praying that this this,
Speaker 4: this is, this is can be uh, it can be
Speaker 4: I don't know, prevented. And and there have been prices
Speaker 4: in the in the United States, particularly the Civil War,
Speaker 4: that looked like that they're meant to be the end
Speaker 4: of the world. And there was a time when communism
Speaker 4: was quite popular and and the communistie did a lot
Speaker 4: of damage. So so we are a country of survivors.
Speaker 4: And I believe that the the the spirit of the
Speaker 4: the folks that came to the United States, the adventure
Speaker 4: of spirit is still alive, even even among illegal immigrants.
Speaker 4: A lot of them come here because they want to
Speaker 4: do something with their life. So I think if we
Speaker 4: can tap into that spirit, we can prevent becoming pets
Speaker 4: to artificially creative persons.
Speaker 6: The out of curiosity, you know, like the fall of
Speaker 6: the Soviet Union. Nobody saw that come, right, You mentioned
Speaker 6: the you know that that happened. I think, yeah, I
Speaker 6: in large, you know, for economic reasons, political reasons, but
Speaker 6: also by the will of the people.
Speaker 7: You know, if we look and I don't want to
Speaker 7: get political, but.
Speaker 6: If we look at like Trump his brand of author
Speaker 6: attorneysm but also on the left we have more were
Speaker 6: not individual authortare and moral authoritaism, forces the government and corporatism.
Speaker 6: How do the people just like who, how do the
Speaker 6: people ensure their future?
Speaker 7: So it's not an individual or the government, but the people.
Speaker 4: Well, I wish I had that recipe. Uh, you know,
Speaker 4: it's it's it's a it's got to be a grassroots based,
Speaker 4: grassroots based movement supported by ah people like Elon Musk
Speaker 4: and and also people like uh. And he's a politician,
Speaker 4: but he he's doing something that will appeal and that
Speaker 4: he may be doing something if Trump gets elected, that
Speaker 4: may appeal to people of all political stripes and and
Speaker 4: and may bring health back into the country. Our country
Speaker 4: is slowly dying from from bad nutrition and ill managed
Speaker 4: medical services. And that's not that's not in question anymore.
Speaker 4: I mean, you you know the data, we're the we're
Speaker 4: the fattest country on the planet. You know, being fat
Speaker 4: is not good to to to your health and not
Speaker 4: not good for your life. The most most people that
Speaker 4: died from COVID were overweight. So that's there are things.
Speaker 4: And also the the the trend, the the forced uh
Speaker 4: you know, mutilation of children without parental consent is another
Speaker 4: thing that pretty much unites the country. The majority of people,
Speaker 4: no matter what political party they belong to or whether
Speaker 4: they're there are independent such as I am can't stand this.
Speaker 4: So so there are still things that unite us that
Speaker 4: that that that provide some of the glue that that
Speaker 4: some commentators things I think has disappeared. And I I'm
Speaker 4: not I'm not one of those doomsayers. That's just my opinion.
Speaker 7: Now, I think that you probably have better insight than.
Speaker 6: You know, ninety nine percent of the people in the
Speaker 6: US in terms of seeing that kind of system because
Speaker 6: even like you mentioned, like the KGB agent that picked
Speaker 6: you up in the limousine, like the idea of communism
Speaker 6: or the idea of the everything always being equal, like
Speaker 6: it doesn't exist, it never exists.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, well you know, yes, but what it's worth.
Speaker 4: But you know, don't ever call me an expert in this,
Speaker 4: because once you take on the expert label, you have
Speaker 4: to make things up because experts are supposed to have
Speaker 4: an opinion about everything. And I have no problem saying
Speaker 4: answering a question, but I don't know you have not
Speaker 4: answered a question like that yet.
Speaker 7: Yeah, so, Chief Justice Keith, thank you very much. We
Speaker 7: appreciate it.
Speaker 6: Mister Barski, what was the most memorable and or funny
Speaker 6: time while going through KGB schooling? Whether that will be
Speaker 6: operational or going through training? Also an honest take on
Speaker 6: Russian stereotypes?
Speaker 4: The most funny time? Well, you know, funny in a
Speaker 4: sense when when I messed up, Well, that's in hindsight
Speaker 4: a funny. I can't really recall funny. This is all
Speaker 4: when I look back and say, my god, I can
Speaker 4: now relate all the mistakes that they made, and I
Speaker 4: made that that you know, can be looked at as
Speaker 4: a joke, but funny while it was operational. Let me
Speaker 4: thank you. Now you asked me a question I can't answer.
Speaker 1: It's okay.
Speaker 6: Yeah, well we'll move on and then if something comes
Speaker 6: to you while we're talking about other stuff, just chime in.
Speaker 7: Taylor, thank you very much.
Speaker 6: What's your thoughts on George uh, Kissa Walter and the
Speaker 6: recruitment at pop Off?
Speaker 4: So now you ask me another question that I don't
Speaker 4: care to answer. Who's pop up?
Speaker 7: I don't know.
Speaker 6: Yeah, uh m Corbyn, thank you very much. Uh in
Speaker 6: what ways were the KGB's training better than this the
Speaker 6: Stazzi's also, any thoughts on the tally your chinkos returned
Speaker 6: to Russia?
Speaker 4: Uh? Yu Chenko is an interesting situation. Uh this is
Speaker 4: this has not been resolved. And you know he's the
Speaker 4: one who escaped his uh two C I A guards right,
Speaker 4: I don't, I can't. Yes, yes he is. And I
Speaker 4: know I actually am friends with a guy who who
Speaker 4: was working for and n C I s in in Italy,
Speaker 4: who was the first Westerners that Uchenko actually walked with.
Speaker 4: I I would guess that he was most likely a dangle.
Speaker 4: And and you know the fact that that he now
Speaker 4: there's some speculation he wanted to go to the United
Speaker 4: States because he wanted to connect with his old flame.
Speaker 4: That is not proven, you know, And when he found
Speaker 4: out that the flame didn't want to have anything to
Speaker 4: do with him, he just he just disappeared. I don't know.
Speaker 4: I don't know how he could have disappeared like that
Speaker 4: and wound wound up back in Moscow. He had to
Speaker 4: have somebody help him.
Speaker 7: Uh, and corporn, thank you very much.
Speaker 6: How many high ranking officials used the Illegals program to stealer,
Speaker 6: longer money?
Speaker 4: How many high ranking officials? Say that again? Because I
Speaker 4: wasn't aware that that you that you're actually taking. That's
Speaker 4: why I asked you questions back that you're taking questions
Speaker 4: from the from the listeners.
Speaker 6: So say say it again, please, how many high ranking
Speaker 6: officials I assume it means like Russian officials use the
Speaker 6: Illegals to program to steal or launder money.
Speaker 4: That's a very good question because it's very easy to
Speaker 4: do so, like for instance, you know when I when
Speaker 4: they when when some guy because in espionage, cash is king, right,
Speaker 4: So when when you have a death drop operation and
Speaker 4: you and they never told me how much money I
Speaker 4: was getting. I got enough money to travel to Moscow.
Speaker 4: So maybe there was ten thousand dollars and I found
Speaker 4: only five thousand. Okay, there's no somebody could have taken
Speaker 4: that money. The guy who made the container obviously. Uh.
Speaker 4: And you know when when I told them to hand
Speaker 4: my savings to my family, I guarantee you the courier
Speaker 4: took some of that money because my family didn't have
Speaker 4: a clue how much think Yeah, now can you do
Speaker 4: a lot of stealing that way? You know illegal the
Speaker 4: way I know illegal existence didn't handle a lot of money.
Speaker 4: So now if they, like, for instance, if I had
Speaker 4: to this is going to be now interesting. If I
Speaker 4: had to interact with Aims or the other fellow and
Speaker 4: give them money, I could have stolen some or the
Speaker 4: person who handed it to me could have stolen some.
Speaker 4: But you know it's it's it's massive money laundering is
Speaker 4: not possible that way. It's too awkward and not enough
Speaker 4: money involved.
Speaker 6: Or thank you very much, Spaciba Rgi, thank you, mister Barcy.
Speaker 6: What do you think about communism today? And why do
Speaker 6: so many young people nowadays favor this ideology? And he
Speaker 6: puts some stuff in German in there that I'm not
Speaker 6: even going to attempt to say, but that is one
Speaker 6: of the things we see that in common with like
Speaker 6: kid with not super common, but with kids today it's
Speaker 6: like communism works, it just hasn't been done right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I've heard this over and over again. So
Speaker 4: he's the thing. I'm glad you asked that question because
Speaker 4: I'm perfectly prepared to answer that question. In the history
Speaker 4: the world, there have been twenty seven communists last socialist revolutions.
Speaker 4: Some of them started out honest, with honest leaders. I
Speaker 4: believe that Fidel Castro was an honest communist. Guess what,
Speaker 4: every one of them wound out in a dictatorship. Because
Speaker 4: a revolution means you have to use violent means you
Speaker 4: can't you can't get to power in a democratic way.
Speaker 4: So once you start with violence, how do you protect
Speaker 4: the power that you have gained? And you still do
Speaker 4: this with with good intention, you need to stay in power.
Speaker 4: Like the revolution in October revolution in Russia was followed
Speaker 4: by the Red This was violence. So you you build
Speaker 4: up a structure that needs to be maintained violence, which
Speaker 4: is a dictatorship. Every communist state that started has become
Speaker 4: has become some kind of a dictatorship. Now, second part
Speaker 4: of the question, so why is communism still so attractive
Speaker 4: Because there's this romantic notion that all men are good,
Speaker 4: All men and women were all born and it's innocent
Speaker 4: little babies. And the only reason that we go bad
Speaker 4: is because we're we are growing up in in bad circumstances,
Speaker 4: in poverty and and and being exploited, and all this stuff.
Speaker 4: So that's that turns some of us bad. Well, that's
Speaker 4: a romantic notion. There there are people who are born bad.
Speaker 4: A sociopath doesn't evolve out of there's there's bad genetics,
Speaker 4: and there's people who turn bad. If you look at
Speaker 4: the history of mankind, there was not a single century
Speaker 4: whether when men didn't do evil things to other men.
Speaker 4: So and and.
Speaker 2: So even in classless societies, you know, interestingly enough.
Speaker 4: Yes, and and so that romantic notion it is is
Speaker 4: what it is, is very attractive. Can't we all get
Speaker 4: a law for crying out loud? All we have to
Speaker 4: do is, like you know, make make the outcome equal. Well,
Speaker 4: that doesn't work, but because there will be some people
Speaker 4: who will take advantage of that opportunity. Because there's always
Speaker 4: evil around, you cannot And this is what the the
Speaker 4: the Constitution is is the most brilliant document with regard
Speaker 4: to government that that I've ever been exposed to. You
Speaker 4: cannot eradicate evil. You can manage it, but you cannot
Speaker 4: get rid of it. And so that is that is
Speaker 4: why communism is is a non starter. It won't work.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's just you made me think of animal farm
Speaker 6: and the idea that all animals equal, but some are
Speaker 6: more equal than others like that will always happen.
Speaker 4: Right exactly. I forgot that once read that book. Yeah,
Speaker 4: it was very it was very much anticipating the kind
Speaker 4: of stuff that we're that we're seeing now and that
Speaker 4: we're talking about.
Speaker 7: And Corbyn, thanks you very much.
Speaker 6: Uh would you say that kryptocratic oligarchys are a trend?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think I already stated that it is a trend.
Speaker 4: It is a trend because it's sort of combined some
Speaker 4: features of capitalism. Uh, there's some competition, there's you know,
Speaker 4: you you you need to perform to to do something
Speaker 4: pretty well and get paid well. And yet the the
Speaker 4: decision makers are a couple of dozen maybe you have
Speaker 4: plus a handful and maybe one guy at the top,
Speaker 4: like like in China and in Russia and also in Iran. Absolutely. Uh,
Speaker 4: you know, any any state where everything is hierarchical doesn't
Speaker 4: function very well. So you need to have some uh
Speaker 4: some cooperation of the very wealthy knowing that they need
Speaker 4: to get along to some degree or else there's going
Speaker 4: to be just one ruler and all them damn things
Speaker 4: will fall apart.
Speaker 6: Outside of outside of AI what do you and other
Speaker 6: tech trends, what do you think of things like Google
Speaker 6: where they basically control the information or tell people where
Speaker 6: the information is that they're looking for, and based on
Speaker 6: whatever their political leanings are or whatever, they can decide
Speaker 6: what information people have had access to.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I already said early on when I've talked
Speaker 4: about oligarchs in the US, you know the folks that
Speaker 4: that aren't that the running the big information technology companies, uh,
Speaker 4: you know micro so to Google, Oracle and Facebook. So
Speaker 4: far they have tremendous power and the only the only
Speaker 4: way that this I don't even know how you can
Speaker 4: like supervise them, because they have all the means to
Speaker 4: evade that supervision in some way. Uh. This is where
Speaker 4: X the X Twitter comes along, where there is no
Speaker 4: censoring and where you can actually go in and and
Speaker 4: and engage in free speech and not be silenced.
Speaker 2: But but you know they are censoring. Like if Pakistan
Speaker 2: comes to them and says we don't like this content,
Speaker 2: take it off your website, they're doing it.
Speaker 4: Oh okay, sure, yeah, well this this is a game,
Speaker 4: and there's this you know, there's a well meaning elitism
Speaker 4: sometimes underneath you know, I know better than you guys,
Speaker 4: And I know how how how this country should go
Speaker 4: forward for everybody to do well. I'm not thinking they're
Speaker 4: all evil, not at all, right, they just know better,
Speaker 4: right and and and that's uh, it's very annoying. I'm
Speaker 4: a pretty smart guy and I don't know better. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, anything else for Jack?
Speaker 7: That's it from chat? Did we?
Speaker 4: Oh? And uh?
Speaker 6: Samy said that the message was just Samy said that
Speaker 6: the message was well wishes from Germany. D. Was there
Speaker 6: anything on Patreon?
Speaker 1: Jack?
Speaker 2: Anything else before we get going for tonight? Is there
Speaker 2: anything else you want to tell people about anything that
Speaker 2: you have to promote or anything that we failed to
Speaker 2: ask that you regular.
Speaker 4: Giving me that opportunity. First of all, I was wondering
Speaker 4: if I could get you know, I'm I'm a sleeper
Speaker 4: who doesn't sleep well. If I could could get a
Speaker 4: free mattress from from that ghost bet if I, uh,
Speaker 4: you know, do use my social media to make some
Speaker 4: propaganda for them?
Speaker 1: Yeah, send it out man, We might be able to
Speaker 1: make that connection.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah, D will reach out to them for you.
Speaker 4: I'm honestly, I'm not exaggerating. I don't have the money
Speaker 4: right now to buy a mattress, and I need one desperately,
Speaker 4: and I know that when I'm I'm in pain, uh
Speaker 4: only in the morning. During the day, I'm not because
Speaker 4: because I'm gonna love your mattress, that's no more.
Speaker 1: The sleeper rangent needs to sleep.
Speaker 6: I think you like more firm mattresses or softermatter because
Speaker 6: software mattresses actually make put me in more pain. I
Speaker 6: think because they don't support like my arthritis and stuff
Speaker 6: like like my joints and.
Speaker 4: Things like that. I would say moderately firm, not like
Speaker 4: not like a board.
Speaker 6: Yeah yeah, not like a Japanese to Tommy.
Speaker 2: Matter or anything like that, anything else so that they
Speaker 2: go sped jack.
Speaker 4: Yeah. And so some of the answers that I gave
Speaker 4: you have something to do with I had. I had
Speaker 4: thought about all of these issues for quite a while.
Speaker 4: I'm just in the process of of editing my master class,
Speaker 4: which is uh that goes under the name Practical Spycology
Speaker 4: Get its Psychology.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that's awesome.
Speaker 4: And this master class is going to be given away
Speaker 4: as part of a Spychology project, which which involves gathering
Speaker 4: a community and working with that community under the heading
Speaker 4: of let's figure out how how we can live our
Speaker 4: best lives. Uh. And I will be the facilitator on
Speaker 4: the head of the community. And there's going to be
Speaker 4: a whole lot of things happening over time as we
Speaker 4: grow the community. But but I won't be the teacher.
Speaker 4: I won't be the professor. I won't lecture people because
Speaker 4: I'm still my My most important instruments are my eyes
Speaker 4: and my ears, which is taking in information and and
Speaker 4: But but based on my background, I I will I
Speaker 4: would make a really good facilitator. And you know this
Speaker 4: is this is the reason I get up in the
Speaker 4: morning these days. This is my purpose. I want to
Speaker 4: I have mentoring and tutoring in my blood. My parents
Speaker 4: were both teachers. I was going to be a professor
Speaker 4: I have. I have mentored graduate students in the US
Speaker 4: and and I see if I can make a difference
Speaker 4: with as many people as possible and and help my
Speaker 4: fourteen year old daughter too to get a good start
Speaker 4: in life.
Speaker 1: Yes, where where can people go to find this class?
Speaker 1: When it's when it's.
Speaker 4: Released, it's it will it will be on social media.
Speaker 4: We we will run an ad campaign.
Speaker 2: But tell tell our tell the folk out here listening, like,
Speaker 2: is there a website or site, and and.
Speaker 7: What are your social media handles?
Speaker 4: No, it's it's we're gonna advertise on social media. Okay,
Speaker 4: it's gonna social media. You find me on LinkedIn, okay,
Speaker 4: find that. We will be on Facebook, we will be
Speaker 4: on Instagram, we will be on TikTok, not on X.
Speaker 4: That's the decision that my team has made. They have
Speaker 4: experience and I don't know why, and I didn't answer,
Speaker 4: but we're we're going to be on old social media. Uh.
Speaker 4: And the announcement will and all you have to be
Speaker 4: on is on social media. There's will be paid advertisements
Speaker 4: as well. You can also if you search for me,
Speaker 4: you're gonna Google my name and something in Google will
Speaker 4: show up because on a daily basis, Google sends me
Speaker 4: information about yep, for instance, me being on your show, yeah,
Speaker 4: and and that kind of stuff. So it's jack.
Speaker 6: When you guys launch it, let us know what what
Speaker 6: all the handles are and we'll plug them on the
Speaker 6: show for you.
Speaker 4: Oh that's awesome.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I also want to remind our listeners about your memoir
Speaker 2: deep Cover, which is available now. People can go out
Speaker 2: and find it and find out lots more about you
Speaker 2: and your experiences.
Speaker 4: And there's something else out there that gives you a shortcut.
Speaker 4: By the way, there's my first interview in the US
Speaker 4: was done by seeing a sixty minutes that can be
Speaker 4: found on on on YouTube by just typing in sixty
Speaker 4: minutes and barski, okay, and you get to that. But
Speaker 4: there's also a I call it audio drama. It's a
Speaker 4: it's like a like nonfiction, a documentary without without pictures
Speaker 4: that's out there on streaming media, Spotify, Apple Music, whatever.
Speaker 4: It's called The Agent.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 4: If you look for the Agent, you need you need
Speaker 4: to add entertainment. No, I hold it, not entertainment you
Speaker 4: need you just need to add my name to it, okay,
Speaker 4: because otherwise you find too many things that are that
Speaker 4: have agents in their name. But The Agent is a
Speaker 4: thirteen episodes production that was extremely well made cool. Its
Speaker 4: value is that it has not just interviews with me,
Speaker 4: but it also has interviews with the lead agent who
Speaker 4: investigated me, with an FBI agent who tells me, who
Speaker 4: tells folks what it was like to be on the op.
Speaker 7: Fascinating. That sounds that sounds really good.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, it's it's excellent. And you know it also
Speaker 4: has an interview with a love interest that my publisher
Speaker 4: told me to write down because there were too many women.
Speaker 4: But she, but she tells, he tells everybody who listens
Speaker 4: that we we've fell instantly in love with each other.
Speaker 4: And that's the reason I learned Spanish, by the way.
Speaker 7: That's fantastic.
Speaker 2: So folks out there, next Friday will have Hugh on
Speaker 2: the show. He was a British para paratrooper. Excited to
Speaker 2: have him on the show. And please subscribe to eyes On.
Speaker 2: There'll be some links down the description our sister podcast
Speaker 2: with Andy Milburn and Jason Lyons. And also subscribe to
Speaker 2: our Patreon if you haven't already. And when you do,
Speaker 2: you get access to all of these episodes, both eyes
Speaker 2: On and the teamhouse totally ad free. And we really
Speaker 2: appreciate your guys' support out there. Thank you and Jack,
Speaker 2: thank you again for joining us tonight.
Speaker 4: Yeah, let me tell you something. I got exactly what
Speaker 4: I expected. So this was the first interview that was
Speaker 4: primarily focused on espionage, all angles of it and and
Speaker 4: uh and it. It was quite demanding, you know, for
Speaker 4: I was very intense. I made a good decision to
Speaker 4: go for a run first. I deteriorated a little bit
Speaker 4: towards the end, but you know, I was stumbling a
Speaker 4: little bit. Now, I know, I know, I know you were.
Speaker 4: You were a great chat in the beginning. I was
Speaker 4: pretty good.
Speaker 1: So guys, we will. We'll see you next Friday. Take
Speaker 1: care out there.
Speaker 7: Thank you, Okay, thank you, thank you Jack, thank you
Speaker 7: so much.
Speaker 4: I absolutely adore you. Guys.