412. True Stories From a Soviet Spy | Jack Barsky

[0] Hello, everyone.

[1] I had the privilege today to speak with one Jack Barski, a guy about my age, born in East Germany, raised in the depths of the communist catastrophe, swallowed the propaganda as a young man hookline and sinker, and was recruited as a while he was pursuing his degree in chemistry, recruited by the KGB, to act as a spy in the West.

[2] And he recounted his tale in a book called Deep Undercover, which was published in 2017, and shared all that with me today, his double life in the U .S., his eventual abandonment of the communist utopian intellectual project, his conversion, as it turns out, as a consequence of the love of his infant daughter, his work for the FBI and his current enterprise now serving as a mentor to the young people, to young people who might be attracted, say, by the utopian schemes of the intellectual ideologues.

[3] And so we walk through all of that, and that's very interesting.

[4] Welcome aboard.

[5] Mr. Parskey, I think what came to my mind as the first mystery when I went through your book was the conditions of your upbringing.

[6] One of the things that's very mysterious, thankfully, to people in the West, is how it was that young people in particular were enticed to swallow, hook, line, and sinker, the propaganda coming into Eastern Europe from Russia, especially because, and I don't know how much of this you knew when you were a child, but especially when there was such a stark difference between the material conditions in the West and compared to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and there was some knowledge of that.

[7] So why do you start by telling everyone what you experienced as a child and how you saw the world up to the point where you entered, say, entered university?

[8] First of all, the communism didn't originate in Russia, as you know.

[9] It was a German invention called Marx, right?

[10] And Lenin was the one who actually put this into practice.

[11] So there was still communist thinking, residual communist thinking in East Germany.

[12] And there were a lot of refugees when Hitler took over that went to the Soviet Union and then came back.

[13] and sort of took over rather quickly.

[14] So how did we buy what they were selling?

[15] There was nothing else on the market.

[16] There was no free market of ideas.

[17] It was a massive, massive brainwashing from kindergarten on.

[18] And, you know, I tell people then if you, if everybody you know that family, teachers, friends of friends, relatives, tell you that the moon is made out of cheese.

[19] That becomes like part of the foundational knowledge of how the world operates.

[20] There was no God.

[21] There was just the idea, the romantic idea, of communism becoming the force that will free all the suppressed nations in the world.

[22] And by the way, that is very easy to buy into.

[23] and I was 100 % by the time I left college I was still 100 % a communist and a lot of my generation too what the communists in East Germany did very well they focused on the next generation us and particularly they focused on the ones that had a reasonably high level of intellect because we were going to be the leaders the leaders of the future.

[24] And one more thing about the wealth of the West?

[25] Well, we weren't allowed to travel to the West.

[26] We sort of knew that, you know, they had a higher standard of living, but this was rationalized very quickly and easily is because, you know, the NATO countries, you know, imperialist countries were stealing the wealth from the third world, like the United States stole the bananas from Guaythamara and so on.

[27] Right.

[28] Okay.

[29] So let me ask you some more specific questions about that.

[30] One of the things that you alluded to was that the idea that you were working for freedom of the oppressed was actually a powerful motivator.

[31] And so I want to unpack that a little bit.

[32] I mean, it's obvious when we look at the world, wherever we sit, that some people are more favored than others.

[33] along any dimension of comparison you can possibly imagine.

[34] Now, Marx made the economic comparison primary, pointing out that, well, I suppose that the poor will be with us always, so to speak, but that—and it is definitely the case that that difference in economic security and opportunity exists and is somewhat painful to all observers.

[35] I mean, I suppose there are some successful people who pride themselves on the fact that they have plenty while others have none and are pleased at that status differential.

[36] But my experience with decent prosperous people is that even, and most particularly the decent prosperous people, are still unhappy that there is poverty and suffering anywhere in the world, that there is even relative privation.

[37] And I would say it's part of the moral striving that's part and parcel of the human psychological landscape to want to remediate that.

[38] And so if the communists are offering some future vision where suffering is a thing of the past, then in some ways they're capitalizing on that longing in the human soul for suffering as such to be dispensed with.

[39] And, you know, and so that makes it perfectly understandable.

[40] I've been writing about this a little bit.

[41] The pathological part of it is that it seems to me, and I want to know what you think about this, is that as soon as you make the assumption that anybody who is more talented or who owns more is more talented or owns more because that's, and that that can only occur as a consequence of injustice and oppression.

[42] and exploitation, then you're setting up a situation where anyone who has any success whatsoever can be hated and, and what would you say, persecuted with a good conscience.

[43] And so I'm wondering, you must have thought about this a fair bit.

[44] How do you think it's possible for people to separate their moral impulse to aid the oppressed from their immoral impulse to damn the successful?

[45] All right.

[46] So you raised a highly complex issue, and I can only address as much as I have lived through it, through the situation.

[47] First of all, I grew up in the country.

[48] We were all equally poor.

[49] So I didn't really understand the concept of poverty as a young child.

[50] And even when I went to high school, because there were no wealthy people around us.

[51] And with regard to wealth of the West, it was just, you know, it wasn't tangible.

[52] So there was nobody to hate, actually, at that point.

[53] We started hating all of us when the war in Vietnam got really bad.

[54] I mean, I would have signed up and fought on behalf of the Vietnamese.

[55] But yes, he's an interesting shift.

[56] So I did really, really well in high school.

[57] And I did so well in college that I received a national scholarship that was limited to 100 concurrent holders in the country.

[58] 100.

[59] I joined the elite.

[60] I got it.

[61] The scholarship paid me as much as my salary when I was an assistant professor.

[62] I was a rich student.

[63] And I was, you know, it's probably quite understandable that I was really full of myself.

[64] And then everybody admired me. And so I became intellectually the kind of a person who will help all the people who need help, the stupid people.

[65] You know, this is the condescending attitude that, you know, the elite has a lot.

[66] Let's put it this way.

[67] We have it in this country.

[68] We have it in Western Europe.

[69] You know, if we are up there, like we look down at the little people and I said, well, they can't take care of themselves.

[70] We've got to do it for them.

[71] And then it starts with goodwill and then very often degrades into not so good.

[72] Simply because the elite needs to stay where it is to fulfill its mission.

[73] There's a rationalization, okay?

[74] And we live better and we make more money and all this because we deserve it.

[75] So that's, I never had a chance to hate the capitalist with a vengeance because I didn't know him well enough.

[76] It was more theoretical of the exploitation of man. Well, I think your comments on that intellectual presumption are extremely interesting.

[77] I've been trying to work through that dynamic theoretically because there is an association between that intellectual pride and, utopian presumption.

[78] You know, when you just laid out a psychological dynamic, you said you were young, you were celebrated for your intellectual prowess.

[79] And you can see that intellectual prowess is valuable personally and socially.

[80] And so you can understand that it being valued is appropriate.

[81] But then you pointed to the fact that if it's celebrated inappropriately, it tends to produce a kind of intellectual pride and condescension, and then that works in sync.

[82] See, it works oddly in sync with the utopian presumptions of communism.

[83] Communism's a very intellectual system, and it was designed by someone who had very deep intellectual pretensions, Marx himself.

[84] And it's that unholy combination of intellectual pride and the proposition that you're acting in that pride on behalf of people who are too foolish or stupid or ignorant or blind or otherwise incapable of taking care of themselves, right?

[85] And then you could say, well, you're doing that for all the good reasons, but you pointed out right away that there was an element of overweening pride in that that was attractive to you because you were celebrated for your intellect when you were young.

[86] Absolutely.

[87] And one other thing, if your frame of reference is mankind, it's very difficult to not be full of pride, if you get to a point where you realize that there's this big universe that was created by some power, whatever you want to call it, then that arrogance shrinks very quickly.

[88] So do you think that it's possible to not suffer from that arrogance, especially if you're an intellectual or intelligent, if you don't have a reference point outside yourself or even outside of mankind as such.

[89] Because you can imagine someone trying to make a moral case that the appropriate level of analysis for a properly, morally oriented young person is the good of mankind as such.

[90] But you could counter that by saying, well, look, what the hell do you know when you're 18?

[91] And, you know, maybe you should take care of your own local concerns like someone who's properly humble, instead of attributing to yourself the ability at such a young age to understand everything that needs to be understood about all the economic and social systems of the world and to bring about with your own efforts and to your own credit this hypothetical utopia.

[92] Yes, but here's the thing I want to just contribute to this.

[93] I'm not necessarily chiming in with what you're.

[94] you just brought up, when you are, as well -meaning as you are, to help the downtrodden and the less gifted, you become a member of the elite, and some people will kiss up to you, and then you rationalize.

[95] I remember the CEO of a company that I worked for, he had a chauffeur chauffefering around all the time.

[96] And the rationalization was his time is too valuable.

[97] That is why Elite also needs to have private airplanes, right?

[98] Because, you know, and this, you get used to this.

[99] You get used to being adored and being celebrated.

[100] And it's fundamentally impossible.

[101] Do not become full of yourself.

[102] I bet you there are some people who are, humble by nature, but the majority of us are not.

[103] Yeah, okay, so the pathway there is that as soon as you have pretensions to operating on behalf of something approximating universal salvation brought into being in consequence of your own intellectual efforts and your beliefs is that the probability that you're going to suffer from inflation of ego is virtually certain at that point.

[104] I am 100 % certain of that.

[105] It's not just because I went through that, you know, there's a lot of my colleagues and other gifted people that, you know, joined the cause, the party, the government.

[106] And in East Germany, the government, the party was the elite.

[107] And, you know, the way communism is constructed, you know, the working class is supposed to rule, but the working class needs a spokesperson person.

[108] an organization that speaks on its behalf, and those people weren't working class.

[109] They were the intellectual elite.

[110] Some of them were pretty dumb, but a lot of them were at least clever.

[111] Right.

[112] So one of the things, you're pointing to two things there, too.

[113] You're also making the case, I would say, that even in a society that purports to hope to eradicate the economic elite, elites are likely to arise regardless.

[114] And in the country that you grew up in in East Germany, the economic elites were rapidly replaced by the intellectually pretentious elites, let's say.

[115] And then that's like a codicil of the argument you're making.

[116] But there's something else that's interesting there too, because you opened up your argument by, in two ways.

[117] You pointed out that the Soviet propaganda was the water, communist propaganda, was the water in which you swam when you were young.

[118] and it was everywhere, and that there was really no escaping it.

[119] But then you made a secondary argument, which was, yeah, but at the same time, swallowing that propaganda and then operating successfully within that system was something that appealed to your pride, and so that you had a reason, a personal reason for buying into it.

[120] It reminds me, no, I've been thinking about the doctrines of power, like the communist and the postmodern doctrines.

[121] I've been thinking them in relationship, to the story of Cain and Abel, because in the story of Cain and Abel, you have Cain, who's at least regards himself as downtrodden and unfairly oppressed by Abel and by God.

[122] He goes to complain to God, and he attributes his failure to the injustice of the world.

[123] And God says in response to him that his failure is actually at his feet, and that the thing that's tempting and possessing him, making him bitter and resentful, sat on his door and tempted him, but he invited it in.

[124] That's a crucial thing, is that so there's a, there's a, what would you say?

[125] There's a metaphorical equivalence there that I'm trying to tease out.

[126] On the one hand, you said you were fed a non -stop diet of propaganda.

[127] And, you know, I think increasingly that's the case for young people in the West.

[128] But on the other hand, you said, Well, that also redounded to your advantage, right?

[129] Because it put you in a position of elite status and appealed to your pride.

[130] So would you say, is it reasonable to say that it was the combination of those two things?

[131] Absolutely.

[132] Allow me to illustrate, when I was asked by the KGB, after like 18 months of them checking me out, they asked me, so are you going to join us?

[133] And I was really torn because, you know, I knew I was going to have to take some inordinate wrist.

[134] I knew I would have to say goodbye to my life that I was very comfortable with.

[135] And on and on and on.

[136] I knew that I would have to stop playing basketball.

[137] It was a passion of mine.

[138] But the combination of knowing that I was going to be a hero for the cause and that I would be able to partake of the wealth in the West, okay?

[139] I would be able to travel and I knew I would have a good life.

[140] As a matter of fact, they sold me this way.

[141] So when you're going to live in, you're going to live in big houses and drive fancy cars?

[142] My God, that combination would, that actually made me say yes.

[143] Okay, so now you're bringing an additional element into the equation.

[144] So, you know, I was just rereading Gertes Faust the other day, and Faust is intellectually pretentious and also, and sick of life.

[145] And Mephistophles, the bargain, Mephistophles offers him, is a combination of worldly pleasure and intellectual dominance.

[146] Right?

[147] And so that's why he makes a deal with the devil, so to speak.

[148] And so it's interesting that you also bring up the fact that you were being offered the fruit that was forbidden under communism, which was that pathway to an elevated, an elevated, what would you say, material life in the West.

[149] And okay, so when, so this speaks to you're being recruited as a university student.

[150] Okay, so you're swimming in propaganda.

[151] May I interrupt you?

[152] I want to take it one step further because it gets bizarre.

[153] In my eighth year of being in the United States as an illegal, I was awarded the Order of the Red Banner, the second highest decoration of the Soviet Union that had to be approved by the Central Committee of the Party.

[154] And, you know, with that came a monetary award of 10 ,000, Not rubles, but dollars.

[155] So there was an intellectual discrepancy there.

[156] I was being given an award in the currency of the country that we were trying to destroy.

[157] So the entire KGB was sort of infused with that dichotomy.

[158] Well, I wanted to ask you about moral conundrums, but let's walk through your recruitment.

[159] Okay, so you're a young guy, you're smart.

[160] Now you're actually being an offered a pretty interesting combination of adventures, eh?

[161] So you get the material luxury and the excitement of traveling to the West.

[162] You get the excitement of acting as a double agent.

[163] You can tell yourself and you're being told that you're acting only on behalf of the world's oppressed, right?

[164] And you get to join the elite on the intellectual.

[165] side, right?

[166] That's a pretty heady offer.

[167] You know, one of the things I do think about in relationship to what young people are being offered in the West is, and this is something the radical leftists are really good at, is that they have this vision of adventure as one of their offerings.

[168] You know, the conservatives tend to push back against the utopian presumptions of the left, but they don't offer, they don't offer as well -developed a vision of, let's say, adventure.

[169] And so I think they let the young people languish.

[170] Well, you know, you're making the case that you were all being offered something that was pretty heady, right?

[171] I mean, you got to leave your country, you got to be an adventurer, you got to work for the poor.

[172] At least you got to tell yourself that.

[173] And that all redounded to your intellectual advantage and to your status.

[174] When you were, let's walk through the stages of your recruitment when you were in college and university.

[175] And I'm also interested, were you racked with moral conundrums while you were making the decision to work for the KGB?

[176] You know, you just told me what they put on offer.

[177] Now, had you bought the propagandistic line completely, there wouldn't have been any moral conundrum, because of course you would have been working for nothing but the good.

[178] But you already told me that you, I don't know if you became aware of this later or at the time, that your motives were contaminated by your own pride and also by your own say, consumeristic desires.

[179] So what did you have to wrestle with morally when you were being recruited?

[180] Nothing.

[181] And I tell you, had I had a girlfriend, a steady girlfriend or a wife at the time, that would have been something to really wrestle with.

[182] I did not wrestle with lying to my mother because my mother was a very domineering, disciplinarian, and I did not grow up in a loving family.

[183] The words, the German words, I never heard as a child spoken at one adult to another or one adult to me. So it was all very tough discipline.

[184] So I had no emotional tie to my mother, and that would have been the only moral quandary I would have stepped into.

[185] So everything were just friendships and relationships.

[186] So, and that was, that was easy to, to deal with.

[187] Okay, so why, why was that easy to deal with?

[188] Why were you willing, was the offer that was on, at hand, clearly attractive and enough so that the price you paid in terms of friendships and so forth, leaving your, your interest in basketball, that all paled in comparison to this potential adventure?

[189] Well, it didn't pale, but, you know, when we were talking about a moral quantity, I didn't betray anybody.

[190] I mean, had they known where I'm going, they would have cheered me on.

[191] So I betrayed somebody down the road, but at that point, that came not into play.

[192] Okay, so tell me what did you study when you were in university, and I believe it was in university when you joined, you decided to join the Communist Party.

[193] And it was partly because you also knew at that time, like everyone knew, that if you didn't, become a member of the Communist Party, your career ambitions were going to be severely truncated.

[194] So walk us through that and then also through your training.

[195] Not severely truncated, but limited.

[196] And I did join the party because that, you know, that was like the right thing to do, you know, pretty much all the smart, ambitious individuals joined the party.

[197] By the way, the party at university wasn't as dumb as, you know, the front page of the Communist Party newspaper.

[198] You know, we were pretty open with one another.

[199] And there were people complaining about that our leaders really weren't the right leaders.

[200] So there was some openness and some camaraderie that wasn't so bad.

[201] And there was some tolerance of things that were forbidden, such as listening to Western radio stations.

[202] So the party was not a bad thing.

[203] But the funny thing is, you know, I studied.

[204] chemistry, but here's another piece of irony.

[205] We had one course in philosophy, it was called scientific Marxism -Leninism.

[206] And so the thing is, we bought into this idea that Marxism Leninism was a science, just like on par with physics, because Marx discovered the laws that govern the evolution of human society.

[207] And we were just like helping out to bring about the end state, which is the communist paradise on earth.

[208] So, you know, this was all very consistent.

[209] And I had no reason to question because, again, because of the elite status I had, why would I want to just like question the system that really treated me very well?

[210] Okay, so you joined the party when you were in college and you were studying sciences and you accepted the rationale that Marxism was a scientific discipline and that its outcome in some ways was not only desirable but inevitable.

[211] You were speeding that along.

[212] You had your moral rationales for that.

[213] Lots of people believed that that was the case and certainly everyone, almost everyone, at least made that claim in public.

[214] How did it come that you started to work specifically for the KGB?

[215] How did they find their potential partners and allies in Eastern Germany?

[216] For the life of me, I cannot trace back who actually suggested to the KGB or what suggested to the KGB to get in touch with me. My guess is that they had access to the files that Dischagic kept on every adult in the country.

[217] and if they and they did the same thing that the CIA has been doing for a long time they recruited students at you know that were at universities quality universities so you know that's a targeted search and they come up to my record and say wow you know not only is he academically outstanding He also is a party member.

[218] He plays basketball, and he's a student leader who leads the groups of students playing the guitar.

[219] So there was something there.

[220] I said, we've got to take a look at this guy.

[221] And so one day they knocked on the door.

[222] You could not apply, by the way, to...

[223] I wouldn't even know where the case.

[224] was situated.

[225] There was no phone number.

[226] There was no address.

[227] So they saw it out who they would want to talk to.

[228] And one day that happened that somebody came to visit me in a dorm room, I don't want to make the story too long.

[229] It was a German and I thought it was Stasi.

[230] But it was not because, you know, after some talk, some he asked me just like one question.

[231] whether I would be, would imagine, could imagine that one day after I graduate I would work for the government.

[232] And I said, and I read between the lines and I gave him the answer he was looking for.

[233] I said, yeah, absolutely, but not as a chemist.

[234] So, so then he invited me to have lunch or, you know, that's a big meal in Germany, at the number one restaurant in town.

[235] and as I see him sitting there, I walk into the restaurant, there's another person at the table, and I was a little bit hesitant, but my first contact came up to me, and led me to the table, and he said, oh, by the way, I would like to introduce Herman.

[236] We are cooperating with our Soviet comrades, and then he said goodbye.

[237] And that's how I landed with the KGB, because Herman was a Russian.

[238] So do you want to tell everybody who's watching and listening, the difference between and the similarities between the Stasi and the KGB, and also why you ended up working specifically for the KGB rather than the Stasi?

[239] Well, I think the KGB got first dibs on candidates that they really wanted.

[240] KGB and Stasi were like a big brother and little brother.

[241] They operated the same way.

[242] The KGB was more radical with regard to how they dealt with dissidents.

[243] I mean, you know, the gulags, there were millions in gulags.

[244] There were thousands and maybe a couple hundred thousand dissidents in East German jails.

[245] But it wasn't quite as oppressive.

[246] And obviously, the KGB was much, much, much bigger in terms of numbers, raw numbers.

[247] The Stasi was pretty big, you know, as far as when you take into consideration how many people were full -time employees and how many people actually cooperated.

[248] And you're familiar with the lives of other that movie?

[249] Yes.

[250] You know, where family members spite them on other family members.

[251] It was a rotten system, and it was a rotten society, and I never had a hint.

[252] It didn't happen in my family, and I never had a friend who would talk about something like this.

[253] So I had no reason to question that.

[254] Well, I was actually curious about that, because I was wondering, we know now that about one in three people in East Germany were informing for the Stasi.

[255] And they were often informing on family members and friends.

[256] And my sense is, I can't see how that could possibly be the case without corrupting the culture to a massive degree.

[257] You mentioned earlier that you had a rather cold relationship with your mother.

[258] And so I was wondering, you know, to what degree were family relationships?

[259] in East Germany, in general, fragmented.

[260] How much of that had to do with the culture of informing?

[261] And were you unaware of the fact that this culture of informing was so deep and had a corrupting influence on the culture at large?

[262] I was totally unaware.

[263] I lived in a bubble.

[264] How do you think it was that you had been protected from that?

[265] Well, I wasn't the only one, my best friend, who I still have a relationship with, he lived in the same bubble.

[266] Somehow, see, but now something comes to mind.

[267] We had, amongst the student population, there were about 80 of us, we had a couple of guys that didn't fit in.

[268] And they weren't academically that great, but they were like, they were just like, a pain in the neck and they were eventually eliminated and nobody would have had a problem reporting on those because they were in the way and they could become enemies, right?

[269] So there's a rationalization going on so there was I actually had some exposure to particularly the fate of this one fellow who was expelled from university but I tell you the opposite I had a roommate a dorm roommate who was one of the few people that openly confessed that he was a believing Catholic and he was a good student.

[270] And I was a leader of the Communist, the section of the Communist Party for the section chemistry.

[271] And when it came to a point where the decision was made who would go on for a doctorate, thought he was a good guy, he was a smart guy, and ask him one question.

[272] I said, if you had to take up arms to defend the East German Democratic Republic, would you do it?

[273] And he said, yes, he has a doctorate.

[274] So there were some things, you know, that you could move in the right direction.

[275] You have to be in the right environment.

[276] and university was not as stiff and not as, you know, dogmatic with regard to communism.

[277] So once you had this interview at the cafe and you, first of all, what was offered to you at the cafe and then how did you start working with the KGB?

[278] Oh, no, no, no. Sorry.

[279] Nothing was offered to me other than let's meet.

[280] So then I would meet I would meet Herman for like at least six months just in his vehicle and we would just talk a little bit and he you know he opened the curtain a little wider a little wider and I understand that now that I have some, you know, in hindsight he would go back after a meeting and he would take notes because there was a KGB archivist who's saw the files on me. There were, like, several binders, big binders.

[281] So after six months, he must have decided that I was worth pursuing further.

[282] And so we then met in an apartment, okay?

[283] And that's where he gave me some Western literature to read.

[284] And that's where we talked a little more about what it would be like to go to West Germany as an illegal.

[285] Oh, one thing that was very important for him to find out, and my situation in life really made that possible, he became an Arsat's father.

[286] He was about 10 years older than me, and my dad was a weakling.

[287] He was six years younger than my mother.

[288] she was the domineering the smart one and you know he couldn't play with me he had polio and we never had a father -son talk and eventually he got out of that marriage and disappeared for my life so I was grateful that I could talk to an older person and older man and I shared everything with them I still remember you know what I said I'm so shy amongst the girls and I don't know No, I just can't talk to the girls.

[289] He said, you keep one thing in mind.

[290] I still remember that they are looking for men the same way you're looking for a woman.

[291] It didn't help much at the time.

[292] But, you know, we had this relationship, and eventually he got to a point after 18 months that he had discussed, interviewed me enough and studied me enough, that he suggested to headquarters to make me an offer.

[293] That's when it happened.

[294] It took 18 months.

[295] And one other thing, you being a psychologist, you'd be surprised that I never met a psychologist or somebody who studied people who worked for the KGB.

[296] The only thing with regard to people's skills and understanding people that was handed to me one day was the book by Dale Carnegie, how to make friends and influence people.

[297] ironic, isn't it?

[298] Yeah, yeah, that's for sure.

[299] Yeah, so do you think that your relationship with him, to what degree was your relationship with him a genuine relationship of caring and mentorship?

[300] Yes, it was, absolutely.

[301] If I met only one individual that I interacted with in the KGB, who I absolutely didn't like.

[302] He was an agent in Moscow, and he became my liaison for a while.

[303] If that person was Herman, or, you know, played the role of Herman, I may have thought about the whole situation twice.

[304] This guy was a really wonderful guy.

[305] Were you excited about the fact that you were having these clandestine meetings in, first of all, a car, and why in a car, and then later in the apartment?

[306] Like, was that part of the adventure and intrigue that was an attractive element of what was unfolding?

[307] No, that part wasn't that exciting.

[308] You know, what was really good for me that I had a secret.

[309] So I had a, I was even elevated higher than everybody else knew.

[310] So the pride increases, right?

[311] But what he gave, Herman gave me some things to do and they were not necessarily, things that I comfortably did, such as, you know, reaching a, ringing a doorbell and under some pretense, talked with the person who answers the bell to find out something about a relative of this in West Germany.

[312] That was hard, but my ambition didn't allow me to fail.

[313] I pulled it off.

[314] So, but that was unpleasant.

[315] It became much more interesting.

[316] The first time I had the ability to go to West Berlin and look around.

[317] You know, the Germans have something in their DNA.

[318] It's called Wanderlust, the desire to travel.

[319] And that was a big desire.

[320] I wanted to see, you know, Rome and Paris.

[321] I had read about these cities.

[322] And, you know, West Berlin, that was my first adventure.

[323] and then my second adventure was in Canada, believe it or not.

[324] It was a test trip to where I spend a lot of time in Montreal.

[325] All right, so what happened at 18 months?

[326] What kind of offer were you made?

[327] And how was that transformed into this trip to West Berlin?

[328] Yeah, so that was very interesting.

[329] Herman sent me to Berlin.

[330] He didn't tell me, by the way, the KGB almost never.

[331] never gave me any background why they make a decision, this, that, or the other.

[332] There was nothing, there was no schedule, no planning, nothing they shared with me. It was ad hoc.

[333] They probably knew what they were doing.

[334] I didn't.

[335] So he sent me to Berlin for some additional training.

[336] So that's when I had my first clandestine meeting.

[337] When you go, that was a little bit of an adventure.

[338] When you go to a certain spot, meet somebody who you don't know.

[339] you don't know what they look like and you have you exchange keywords so you know you're talking to the right person and so he gave me some things to do he gave me uh western magazine west german magazines to read and the the day before my departure back to where i studied he took me to the soviet headquarters and the Soviet Army headquarters in East Berlin, which was also the KGB headquarters.

[340] And he took me to an office, and there was this small man sitting behind the desk, very unimpressive.

[341] The moment he opened his mouth, and he spoke only Russian, there was a phenomenal amount of psychological energy coming at me. He did a little bit of small talk about, you know, how we need to do our best to defeat the evil capitalist and Nazis and so forth.

[342] And then he, 180, out of the blue, asked me the question.

[343] So are you in or not?

[344] I didn't expect that.

[345] And I think this was deliberately arranged that way.

[346] So I said, well, I don't know if I qualify you and, you know, I don't have any training.

[347] I didn't want to give an answer.

[348] I wasn't ready.

[349] I hadn't thought about it.

[350] And he said, you qualify, and we will train you.

[351] But there's one thing.

[352] There's one requirement that we only work with people who can make big decisions very quickly.

[353] You have until tomorrow and noon to give me an answer.

[354] Uh -huh.

[355] That made for an interesting sleepless night.

[356] Right.

[357] Well, that's also an appeal to pride, Abe.

[358] because he's giving you the opportunity to demonstrate that you're one of those decisive people.

[359] Yeah, the good, good point.

[360] But, you know, decision or not, I was an academic, and I was, I learned how to operate with logic, and I tried the logical arguments of this and that, and it came out 50 -50.

[361] So this is when it started that in my life, my subconscious, my gut made the decision.

[362] And I said, yeah, there was no forcing argument that says, I got to go.

[363] Because there was so much good development ahead of me in staying in East Germany.

[364] Unfortunately, I would have wound up in the government.

[365] and I would have eventually become a miserable old communist.

[366] So I'm very glad I made that decision.

[367] And that's when I became officially not an employee, but sort of a cooperating agent, so to speak, because the employees had to have Soviet citizenship.

[368] So how long after they took you on board did you go to West Berlin?

[369] And what did they have you do there, apart from these clandestine meetings?

[370] And what did you think when you got to West Berlin?

[371] Yeah, let me tell you something, first of all.

[372] When I thought I was in, so, you know, I packed my backs and wound up in Berlin, I wasn't in yet.

[373] They were still testing me. So I meet my new handler, a different guy.

[374] And I'm in his car, and I expected that I'm going to have a really, really nice apartment And because it was the KGB, you know, I had lived in a dorm for the previous seven years.

[375] And we sit down and Nikolai was his name.

[376] He turned to me and says, I already have a task for you.

[377] I said, what?

[378] Really?

[379] And then he said, you've got to find a place to live.

[380] That is in a place where there was a shortage of living space.

[381] and all living space was controlled by the government.

[382] There was an impossible task.

[383] All right.

[384] So that was a test.

[385] I didn't know it was a test.

[386] But, you know, I responded the right way.

[387] I didn't make a face.

[388] I didn't make the argument that this is impossible.

[389] I just went about and found something.

[390] I found the worst place I've ever lived in is like a one room in a concrete structure that had running cold water, a chair, and a bed.

[391] And I didn't tell this guy.

[392] And I think that impressed him greatly.

[393] So if I fail this, I'm out.

[394] At that point, if you're out, your career is over too.

[395] I couldn't have gone back to the university.

[396] So I had no idea that I was an endangered species.

[397] And West Berlin was the final test.

[398] and so they had me go there twice within East German Passport and the first time they just said you know just walk around you know have a beer take the, you know, look at the stores like just get a feel for the place and so as I show up and you know I emerged from the subway and I look around and the first impression was oh I tell people nowadays To make it clear What the difference was between the East and the West The West was a movie that was made in color In the East it was all black and white Because almost our buildings or brown or gray It was ugly And there were a couple of nice buildings But generally it was ugly So that was very interesting and I looked at through the display windows of the department stores.

[399] The beer was better, the sausage was better.

[400] But, you know, this all, yeah, on the one hand, you rationalize it away.

[401] On the other hand, it says, hey, that's going to be a good life, right?

[402] So the second visit, I had to pass yet another test.

[403] I had to ring the doorbell in an apartment building and make friends out of the people that answered the door and I did good and the reason I knew for sure that was another test and that if I failed that test I would have my career would have been at an end before it started I met accidentally a classmate of mine from high school who was going to be an illegal for the Stasi and he had to pass the same test and he pooped in his pants and he came back and told him I can't do this and guess what?

[404] He had a degree in engineering.

[405] He never worked as an engineer for the rest of his life.

[406] So endangered species, indeed, I had no idea.

[407] More endangered than the entire time I operates in the U .S. So why do you think you were wise or canny enough to accept the task of finding an apartment under impossible circumstances and then to accept the apartment you did accept without complaint and with good grace.

[408] Okay, triple answer.

[409] First of all, failure was not an option because of the way my mother raised me. You know, I would come home with a B and I would tell her that it was the best grade in the entire class she would answer, well, did they have A's available?

[410] Failure was not an option, number one.

[411] Number two, it was instinct.

[412] You know, I found out many years later when I came to, when I was confronted with that concept, I'm wired to be very stoic.

[413] So I didn't show any emotions when he made that ridiculous order, so to speak.

[414] And thirdly, I accepted this because I was used to having lived in miserable conditions.

[415] not too good, you know.

[416] The college dorms were pretty crummy.

[417] There was no privacy.

[418] And so it was worse than the dorm, but it wasn't something I couldn't handle, okay?

[419] So, and, you know, and again, this was an authority figure, even though I was anti -authoritarian, but I had learned to play with the authority or else because at one time when my anti -authoritarian, The authoritarian self ran away with me in high school.

[420] I got very close to being kicked out of high school.

[421] Severe reprimand in front of the student body.

[422] And I realized you've got to play ball and you keep your feelings to yourself.

[423] Right.

[424] Okay.

[425] Okay.

[426] So how long after that did you end up in Montreal and how did you establish yourself in North America?

[427] And oh, yeah, that and also I'm curious about, you know, You mentioned that you did observe that life in West Berlin was in color and of a higher quality.

[428] But did you depend on that rationalization that all that had been accomplished through oppression and theft, essentially?

[429] Or did you just, how did you deal with that?

[430] The rationalization became part of what I call foundational knowledge about the world.

[431] I didn't think about this repeatedly.

[432] I took it in and I owned it.

[433] Okay, so there was no, so with regard to the other thing, the other question, you know, I was supposed to go to West Germany make sense, right, and no cultural differences, like no language differences and so forth.

[434] But I also was required to study another language, and they told me everybody asked to, and I picked English, and I was really good at it.

[435] And one day I had a visitor from Moscow at this point.

[436] I had an apartment.

[437] already.

[438] But when I got a key to the apartment, I was actually officially in.

[439] Finally, it took about six months.

[440] So, and he just wanted to know how I'm doing with English.

[441] And I showed him a book on a shelf and said, I can read that without the help of a dictionary.

[442] And then light bulb went on.

[443] And within a week, I had a tape recorder and I was asked to say something in English.

[444] whatever.

[445] And once they had to tape within a week later, I was on a plane to Moscow where I was interviewed by a college professor who taught English or Russian and an American citizen who had wound up, she fell in love with the Russian somehow and wound up living in Moscow.

[446] And they were asked specifically, is he good enough?

[447] Can we teach him English so well that he can pretend to have been born in the United States.

[448] The Russians said, no, the American said, yeah, I can teach him.

[449] You know, American optimism.

[450] And so I spent two years in Moscow, where I worked with her, did a lot of phonetic exercises.

[451] I worked like a maniac.

[452] Yeah, well, you're remarkably accent -free.

[453] I hear my own accent when I listen to tapes.

[454] Certainly, I don't talk like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

[455] Right, right, right.

[456] So, you know, I had this rare talent to acquire another language without a strong accent in my adulthood.

[457] Okay, so, and at one point it was determined that I was ready to go, and that's when they sent me to Canada to do two things, you know, just figure out what it's like to live in the United States.

[458] We thought, you know, Canada was like a mini version of the U .S. Not quite true, but they didn't know any better.

[459] And I was supposed to get a birth certificate of an individual of a young man who passed away at an early age in the U .S. And that was an interesting situation.

[460] You know, I can talk all day, and I want to be careful not to go too far because I want to make sure that we cover all the topics that that are important to you so bottom line is I failed to get that birth certificate and interestingly enough you know here's a he is a dead person who is asking through the mail to get his birth certificate I should have been captured right then and there I got lucky and so after close to a year and a diplomat a KGB diplomat in in in Washington, D .C., found the gravestone of Jack Barski, who died at an early age at the age of 11, and he was able to procure the birth certificate.

[461] At that point, I was ready to go, and that was in 1978.

[462] 1978.

[463] Okay, so I was in Montreal not long after that.

[464] I moved there in 1984.

[465] It was a wonderful place to live, I thought.

[466] I really enjoyed Montreal.

[467] What was it like for you in Canada, there in Montreal, and how did you set up your North American life?

[468] You got your ID, obviously, that was necessary.

[469] And what did the KGB have you do at this point?

[470] I mean, they were setting you up so you had a life in North America, and that was working successfully.

[471] Well, just to answer to what it was like in Canada, you know, mostly I was a tourist, and I had a bar that I visited a lot.

[472] lot so I could talk with people.

[473] And I made some friends, a couple of friends.

[474] I had a French -Canadian girlfriend.

[475] And one thing I got to tell you, I was at the forum when Gila Fleur broke the record of most goals scored in a home game at the forum in one season.

[476] And the forum broke out in spontaneous applause.

[477] There was like 15 minutes.

[478] There was no game anymore.

[479] So that was great, and especially since I had learned to appreciate ice hockey while I lived in Moscow.

[480] But anyway, I came to the United States in the fall of 78, and my primary task was to take that birth certificate that I had and parley that into bona fide American documentation, primarily at a driver's license and social security card so you could live and work like a born American.

[481] I had a backstory that was yay long that had me live on a farm for a long time and then eventually come to New York.

[482] It took close to a year for me to get these documents because the instructions that I got from the KGB did not work.

[483] They didn't have a clue how to do this.

[484] But the reason that they picked somebody like me, I was creative.

[485] I was able to improvise.

[486] Don't want to get too much into details.

[487] because it gets too long.

[488] And then since I couldn't take my resume with me and my backstory had me, like, grow up, you know, work on a farm for many years, the best job I could find was bike messenger.

[489] I spent four years riding a bike and carrying packages in Manhattan.

[490] Well, that must have been exciting.

[491] You know, it wasn't that bad.

[492] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[493] Well, by biking in Manhattan, not snow, That's no trivial operation.

[494] I'm sure you got to know the city real well.

[495] I got to know the city like the palm of my hand.

[496] And I also became a street urchin.

[497] You know, I knocked ice cream cones out of pedestrians that were in my way.

[498] And, you know, I interacted with a lot of, like, very ordinary Americans that gave me an opportunity to actually become an American because theoretically learning the language and talking to somebody who had lived, in the United States doesn't make you an American.

[499] You have to watch them.

[500] You have to, you know, what they talk about, what's important, and facial expressions and, you know, body language and all that.

[501] Without that messenger job, I probably would have been busted too.

[502] It was lucky.

[503] It was not by, it was by accident.

[504] And interestingly enough, I made enough money because I was not an employee.

[505] I didn't get minimum wage as a bike messenger.

[506] I got commissioned.

[507] And I made enough money to go get an apartment and hang out with people and so forth.

[508] And then without getting into detail, I was supposed to get a passport and then go back to Europe and establish a company.

[509] And the KGB was going to, and she knew how they knew how to do this, move money.

[510] into that company, so that within two or three years I would go back to the United States with a few million dollars and repatriated money and immediately become upper -middle class and then become a really, really dangerous agent.

[511] Okay, so what were they that, well, so there's a lot of investment of time that you're putting into this.

[512] I mean, obviously, and the KGB is actually showing possibly a certain degree of patience.

[513] what exactly were they setting you up to accomplish?

[514] You said they were going to put you in an upper middle class position now that you'd established yourself as American.

[515] What were they hoping that you could do for the Soviet Union?

[516] They told me that finally my task was to operate in the realm of foreign policy, getting to know people who make foreign policy or at least influence foreign policy.

[517] that was only the partial truth I found out much later because there were the heads of the illegals two of them after the KGB was disbanded and gave interviews and the number one value that the KGB iscribed to my being in the U .S. was my being in the U .S. And I tell you why that makes sense towards the end of the Cold War there was this battle between the CIA and the KGB and all the agents were, except for us, the illegals, were diplomats.

[518] So, and diplomats were expelled, and then there was retaliation, and they were worried that at one point diplomatic relations would be completely interrupted.

[519] And the only ones left behind enemy lines would have been us illegals.

[520] And guess what?

[521] Who would have run Alder to Ames?

[522] and I forgot his first name Hansen, the most dangerous molds in the history of the United States and the most successful spies for the KGB.

[523] So they never told me any of that.

[524] So I knew it like I was going to get to know a member of the conservative think tanks and the trilateral commission.

[525] I don't know why they were so obsessed.

[526] with the Trailhead of the Commission.

[527] And they were very much obsessed with Zvignis Baczynski and Columbia Institute for Foreign Relations or whatever this is called.

[528] As a bike messenger and student and junior computer programmer, I had no ability to befriend people like that.

[529] But I would have had that ability if I had been able to rise into the upper middle class very quickly.

[530] Right.

[531] And so they were willing to spend the time and put in the energy to give you that very well -developed backstory in the hope that you would be positioned maybe in a decade or something.

[532] It was a long -term game.

[533] Yeah, they were not impatient.

[534] They actually were very, very appreciative of the fact that I improvised a lot and overcame obstacles.

[535] And, you know, you don't get the order of the red banner if you weren't doing really well.

[536] Right, right.

[537] So they, okay, so they were regarding all.

[538] you're maneuvering and your problem -solving in North America as exactly what you should be doing.

[539] Now, you said, thank God that those plans didn't materialize.

[540] Now, so how did your career develop after that?

[541] And why are you pleased that the goal that was in mind for you didn't make itself manifest?

[542] Because I'm able to talk to one Dr. Jordan Peterson today.

[543] my life changed so radically for the best God forbid I'm a successful KGBB agent the war comes down I'm saying well what's going on here and then the Soviet Union falls apart now I'm stuck I would not have notified the FBI of my existence I would have gone back to Russia and I would now live a very miserable life in Russia because I'd never served Russia.

[544] I served not even the Soviet Union.

[545] I served the communist cause.

[546] So, and, you know, and I learned the truth.

[547] And as they say, the truth shall set you free.

[548] I'm a free citizen to the extent you still have all the freedoms that we're supposed to have.

[549] Right, right.

[550] Okay, so let's, let's, now let's jump ahead.

[551] Now, you start working as a coder, if I remember correctly.

[552] Yes, sir, I did.

[553] Okay, and at some point you come to the attention of the FBI.

[554] How do you start that new career, and how do you come to the attention of the FBI?

[555] Well, I came to the attention of the FBI because of a betrayal, and this is in another situation where if the person was still alive, I would thank him on my knees for his betrayal.

[556] he was an archivist by his name of Vasili Mitroken he was an archivist in the KGB and he had access to all the records because he managed the records and he started reading those records and he found out like what an evil organization the KGB was so he developed a severe hatred of the Soviet system and the KGB and he figured out the only way to do damages to copy some information.

[557] And over many years, he took handwritten small pieces of paper with handwritten notes on them in his underwear and his shoes and his socks and then transcribed them and piled it all up and buried the material in the Dacha.

[558] In 1992, he wound up in Estonia at one of the British embassy, at the British embassy.

[559] and told MI6 what he had.

[560] And they were able to dig this stuff up and took it to England and eventually shared some of the information.

[561] It took a while with the FBI.

[562] And amongst that enormous amount of data, there was a couple of sentences.

[563] There's a fellow named Jack Barski who is in illegal KGB undercover agent.

[564] in the northeast of the United States.

[565] And it didn't take the FBI very long to find me because, you know, they looked at social security data and there was only one Jack Barski they found who got his social security card at the age of like 35 or something.

[566] Right.

[567] Okay.

[568] So when did you, what year did you move to Manhattan?

[569] I arrived in New York in 78, and I was in Manhattan in 78.

[570] I stayed one year in a hotel.

[571] Okay, so you were, you were, you were, successfully undercover for at least 15 years, and so you spent a bunch of...

[572] Oh, successfully undercover, not detected, was 19 years.

[573] Nineteen years, okay.

[574] In the service of the KGB, only 10 years.

[575] I resigned after 10 years.

[576] Oh, okay, so how, okay, so how did the resignation come about and why?

[577] So, and you will, you will understand that But I'm given to understand that you have a great relationship with your daughter.

[578] So this is what happened.

[579] I had a girlfriend in the U .S. who I married, without getting again too much into detail, and she decided to become pregnant.

[580] And I watched this little girl grow up.

[581] And when she turned 18 months, I knew I was in love with this girl.

[582] And I was so much in love with her that I could not imagine leaving her.

[583] And I tell people this is when the arrogant adventurer joined the human race.

[584] Oh, yes.

[585] Because this was an attack of unconditional love.

[586] And at that time, the KGB got spooked, And they thought I was about to be arrested by the FBI.

[587] And we had an emergency procedure.

[588] There was, we both knew what to do if there's an emergency.

[589] And they activated that procedure with a signal at a signal spot.

[590] And I walk by that spot every day.

[591] And all of a sudden one day I see this red dot.

[592] And that said, danger, get out of here.

[593] immediately and I'm sorry for that bad word but the only I have to say it because this is what popped into my head oh shit what do I do now I want to take care I had no idea how to how to take care of this child and I knew that if I leave her she would grow up in poverty because her mother had only four years of schooling okay and so I went back and forth back and forth I I played for time, but it got to a point where they were checking on me, say, what's going on?

[594] And they found me, and a man came up to me. I was waiting for a subway train, and he sidled up to me, and he whispered with a clear Russian accent, he said, you've got to come home or else you're dead.

[595] Now, the point was that they knew that I knew, that they knew, because before that, they I could have been in a hospital.

[596] My radio could have been broken.

[597] A lot of things could have been happening to me, and I was not able to comply.

[598] Well, so now I had to make a decision.

[599] Do you know what a dead drop operation is?

[600] No. It's an operation where you hand over, not information, but something that has weight and dimensions, such as a passport, money, and so forth.

[601] Okay.

[602] And you put it in a container, and you drop it someplace where somebody else would pick it up.

[603] So they, through shortwave radio, they told me to go to a dead drop operation this one day.

[604] And at that point, I went because I knew there would be money and a passport.

[605] So at minimum, I would just pocket the money, right?

[606] I had not made a decision.

[607] And it was really interesting because when I went, A debt drop operation has a couple of signals involved.

[608] So the first signal is the person who deposits the container says, I go and get it.

[609] Okay, I put it there.

[610] So I saw the signal, and I went to the place, and that place was impossible to miss because I had found it myself.

[611] It was a tree with a hollow bottom, and there was no container.

[612] There was no crushed oil can, And I just did a double take.

[613] I walked around, walked around, wasn't there.

[614] I walked out of the park.

[615] And my subconscious, again, made a decision, and it said, I'm staying.

[616] That was an irrational decision, because everything I knew at the time that was good for me, was over there in the East.

[617] I would have gone back as a conquering hero.

[618] I was married in Germany too and even if I managed to stay in the FBI doesn't arrest me if they do arrest me I'm no good for this child either so I should have rationalized and I got to go I have no choice my subconscious overrode any of that logical thinking and obviously it was a tremendous risk but I had no choice it was the power of unconditional love Yeah, well, that's a very interesting issue.

[619] So it sounds to me, and correct me if I'm wrong, that what you're relating is that the love that you developed for your daughter, so I would hazard a guess that that was perhaps the first genuine love that you had in your life, and that that was enough to break the grip of your intellectual hubris.

[620] It's something like that.

[621] Is that correct?

[622] 100 % correct because there was a point when this girl she was about five years old and she wasn't admitted to kindergarten because she was behind in her ability to speak and I told my colleagues I said I think my daughter's a little dummy but I love her anyway so intellect to me was not important anymore So you're right about that.

[623] And, yeah, the other times I was in love, it was passion and there was obviously sex involved.

[624] There's no sex involved.

[625] And unconditional means you can't get anything back but a smile.

[626] So how did you actually manage to get out?

[627] I mean, that must have been with its...

[628] I mean, I can't understand why they let you out.

[629] And then, well, and then let's discuss how you ended up working for the FBI.

[630] So, yeah, they hired themselves a brilliant guy with a brilliant subconscious, and it popped into my head and said, oh, wait a minute, I'll just tell him I can't come because I have HIV -AIDS.

[631] And since I knew to have been brutally honest with everything, and since they didn't know that I had a child, I was certain of that, they couldn't think of a reason why I was.

[632] was lying to them.

[633] It worked.

[634] Okay, okay.

[635] And so how did you come to the eventual attention of the FBI, and what did it mean that you worked for them?

[636] Okay, so, you know, first of all, I spent another nine years working on my version of the American dream.

[637] You know, I moved to the suburbs.

[638] We had another child.

[639] I moved to another the house and eventually wound up in a McMansion.

[640] So, yeah, I had checked out of the political thinking, philosophical thinking.

[641] I was more into consumerism and doing good things for the family.

[642] And that was disrupted when one day an FBI agent showed up.

[643] And again, I'm shortening this and told them, you know, FBI, we want to, I would chat with you.

[644] I had forgotten at that point.

[645] I had put this in the way back in memory, never to be accessed again, that once was an agent.

[646] So that came right back.

[647] Bam!

[648] So you had fallen right into life as an American at that point into this new identity.

[649] Oh, yeah, absolutely, yeah.

[650] And I knew I would never see Germany again.

[651] I would never apply for a passport again.

[652] I didn't want to risk that.

[653] So I would, you know, live a decent life, have a great career.

[654] I was making more and more money and retire, play golf.

[655] Right.

[656] So you joined the upper middle class in any case?

[657] Yes, I did.

[658] And so the FBI, how did the FBI find you?

[659] And then what did they want from you?

[660] Well, what they wanted for me, it wasn't quite clear initially.

[661] But they knew that they couldn't, wait a minute, Did they know that I was already declared dead?

[662] I can't.

[663] But in our first interview, I told them that I don't exist in Germany anymore.

[664] So they couldn't turn me, okay?

[665] That would have been a great, but, and they also, no, now I remember, they found out after observing me for two years that I wasn't active anymore.

[666] So I was not a target to be turned, but I was a target to be debriefed in the greatest the detail.

[667] I spent hours and hours talking with the agent who interviewed me about every single detail in my life.

[668] And apparently that is very useful because even, you know, the successors of the KGB, you know, who were they trained by, KGB agent?

[669] You know, there's a DNA that, organizational DNA that's handed down.

[670] It was, the information that I gave them was considered very, very useful.

[671] And one other thing, at the time when they caught up with me, Hansen and Ames were still operational.

[672] No, they had been caught, I'm sorry.

[673] But there were concerns that there were other molds and that I might be running one of them.

[674] So sometimes finding out a negative is actually a really good thing.

[675] The fact of the matter, the FBI leadership was so impressed with what, the FBI team did, that by the lead agent got a commendation by the FBI, by the head of the FBI.

[676] So it is what it is, you know, I'm not making that up.

[677] You ask them, they will tell you it was, there was really good information that I was able to give them.

[678] So what do you think it was that you provided to them that they found so useful?

[679] What makes for an illegal?

[680] what kinds of people the KGB was recruiting.

[681] Turns out that CIA is recruiting the same type of people.

[682] Right, right.

[683] Well, that makes sense.

[684] I have friends in the CIA, and it's almost identical.

[685] You know, there's a list of character traits that, you know, things that you're born with rather than you acquire, not skills, that the KGB was looking for.

[686] And I shared that list with a retired CIA agent, and he said, well, that's, that, we have to.

[687] same list.

[688] But, you know, this confirmationism is important for counterintelligence.

[689] And to what extent, you know, that is specifically useful, you know, as far as the psychology is concerned, I don't know.

[690] I don't, I don't, I don't know the details.

[691] I was also given a test by two eminent psychologists on a contract with the FBI that gave me two days of test and I the lady who gave me the war shark test her claim to fame was that she also analyzed the unabomber and when she was done she said when she was done she said I have never interviewed somebody who had that many stories to tell about these damn ink plots right so it's creativity right I had to be creative to be successful.

[692] When you look back over your career, I've got two questions for you.

[693] I want to know when you look back over the course of your life, what do you regret and what are you thankful for?

[694] And I'm also interested, now you had immersed yourself in this value and belief system that characterized communism.

[695] You obviously abandoned your allegiance to that in favor of.

[696] of, at least in part, in favor of the relationship with your daughter, but you also make allusions in your book to starting to study other philosophical matters and religious matters.

[697] And so, first question is, when you look back on your life and your career, how do you evaluate what you did and where you ended up ethically and morally?

[698] And second, how did you, when you abandoned your allegiance to the utopian vision of the communists, and you started in inquiring philosophically and theologically into other domains, what did you conclude?

[699] No, very good question.

[700] The one thing I regret is that the woman I loved in Germany, when I decided not to go back to my German family, it was because of the love for a child, but I abandoned that woman.

[701] And I loved her, and I broke my promise.

[702] That can't be undone, and that's really the most regret I have.

[703] I don't regret anything that I did as an illegal agent simply because I was never told whether, let's say, some of the people that I've pointed to for possible recruits were recruited, what happened to them.

[704] I have no knowledge of what I should regret if there was something else.

[705] So there's no specific guilt that you carry for the things that you Partly because you don't know what the consequences of them were Yes, they never once congratulated me on a tip that I gave them I never got any feedback, period, okay?

[706] That's one of the weaknesses of the KGB, by the way, because if you have to make decisions on your own all the time And you don't have a proper frame of reference, you wind up making bad decisions.

[707] Right, right, right.

[708] Without the broader, yeah, well, that's the problem with not informing people, right?

[709] Is you have no context to guide you when you're making decisions.

[710] Yeah, and that secrecy was rooted in the revolutionary background of the KGB, you know, the cell structure.

[711] You know, okay?

[712] So what I'm grateful for, first of all, I'm grateful for living in the great.

[713] greatest country that ever existed on this earth, particularly the country as it was constructed by the founders, simply because I'm a student of history, and I am convinced that one of the biggest flaws that left -wing thinking has is the idea that man is fundamentally good, and all we have to do is, and that communism was the same thing, we have to take the shackles away from them.

[714] It's the circumstances.

[715] And I know for a fact, when you look at history and there's so much anecdotal evidence that, man, we all have the seed of evil in us.

[716] Many of us, and the majority of us, deal with it very well.

[717] But it turns out in history, the ruling people were mostly evil.

[718] you know and so and so the constitution is constructed in such a way to to manage that evil not eradicate it managed it by you know the separation of powers and and the whole idea that all men created are created evil and have these inalienable inalienable rights that appeals to me to my appeals to my anti -authorianism and my absolute disgust with collectivism.

[719] We are not getting the rights from the buff.

[720] We are not getting the rights from the law.

[721] The law actually can take rights away from us.

[722] Some of them are necessary to be taken away, such as, you know, to get the funds to defend the country and so forth.

[723] But most of the laws that we have in this country of taking rights away from us.

[724] So it is what it is.

[725] How did you come to the conclusion or what convinced you of the validity and utility of the doctrine of inalienable rights?

[726] That's certainly not a hypothesis associated with communist utopianism, for example.

[727] Why did you come to that conclusion?

[728] That's a good leading question because I became a Christian.

[729] And it was a, pretty slow progress, I became a deist first.

[730] Because after I started thinking about and getting exposed to thinkers like Thiers Lewis, I realized when my atheism was an idiotic belief system.

[731] You know, to just believe that the universe just exploded out of nothing and then ordered itself in a way that we have all this complex.

[732] that makes perfectly no sense.

[733] And let's assume, even it was already there, you know, it violates the third law of thermodynamics when a closed system, which the universe is ultimately a closed system, will tend towards disorder.

[734] So where does the order come from?

[735] So there was a logic behind me becoming a deist.

[736] And then the love word came into play again.

[737] I was evangelized by a woman that I hired, but I didn't become a Christian because I wanted to marry her.

[738] She opened my eyes to the Bible.

[739] And I started, the first time she quoted me something out of the Bible, I said, wait a minute and this is the most i knew that the most widely read book in the history of mankind with no close second and i don't know anything about it so we did some bible study and then she invited me to church and at that time the love word came came back into play i was in a really really bad divorce with the the woman that i had married and that had the daughter that i was in with.

[740] She went mentally ill and it was a lengthy divorce and I was the only time in my life I was actually depressed.

[741] And this young lady who I secretly courted, I was in love with her.

[742] She didn't know that.

[743] She invited me to the church.

[744] And as it happened so often, when you go to church and you listen to the pastor, you know he was talking to you because he was talking about the love of God.

[745] So why do you think, okay, so what do you make of love then?

[746] You know, you said that the first time it really transformed you was a consequence of whatever manifested itself to you and your daughter.

[747] And the effect of love on your life was, what would you say?

[748] It was outside of the domain of mere rationality.

[749] And so what do you make of the transforming power of that love?

[750] And how does that fit into your intellectual apprehension?

[751] Love, to me, is the strongest emotion that humans can have, and we are ultimately emotional beings.

[752] So when they say love conquers all, I have proof.

[753] And as I embraced the faith and as I realized what God did for us, I become a real loving person.

[754] loving even the ones that you don't like because the love is something that says something about yourself.

[755] If you can love the unlikable, that makes you whole, so to speak.

[756] And, you know, the love of the life of Jesus is so, so phenomenal the way I would like to be living and be seen.

[757] At least I'm trying to get to that point, and I think I've traveled a long way.

[758] And one of the things that made a huge difference in my life, the last year coming to Texas, and being around a lot of loving, wonderful people, and great churches that are not afraid to talk about what's going on in society these days, not cowardly like many others that I've visited.

[759] So let me, let me, I'm going to talk for everybody watching and listening.

[760] I'm going to talk for another half an hour with Jack on the Daily Wire side, and I think we'll probably go deeper into this issue of faith because we've covered a fair bit of his autobiography, which is what I often do.

[761] And so maybe we'll close with this.

[762] I mean, as you know, the power of left -wing utopianism has made itself manifest once again in the West.

[763] I mean, I spent a lot of time traveling in Eastern Europe in the last few years, and one of the questions that I was constantly bombarded with in Eastern Europe was, how is it that the West could come under the sway of the ideas that were so destructive to us for so long?

[764] and what could we do about it?

[765] What I would like to ask you is, for the people who are watching and listening, you outlined in some detail what you found attractive about the utopianism that was being offered to you as a purpose for life.

[766] What message would you have to young people who were now attracted by that vision of helping the world's oppressed and poor?

[767] identifying the oppressors and having the adventure that goes along with that pathway to redemption.

[768] I mean, that was offered to you.

[769] You followed it for a long time.

[770] You eventually rejected it.

[771] You found a religious calling instead.

[772] But you understand why that vision was so attractive.

[773] So what can you say that might be of some utility to young people who are attracted by those utopian ideas?

[774] Well, I would say if you respect yourself, you don't want to be a fool, do you?

[775] I'm talking to a young person now.

[776] You don't want to be a fool.

[777] So you're being fooled all the time.

[778] I'll tell you that.

[779] You need to go check out the truth and not just take it in as it's being presented to you the same way I took it in.

[780] But the difference is we didn't have a marketplace of opportunities.

[781] there is a marketplace of opportunities.

[782] You can find out the undeniable truth.

[783] You're being lied to all the time.

[784] And that makes you a puppet.

[785] And that takes the individuality out of who you are.

[786] You think that's going to make for a happy, fulfilled life?

[787] You're meant to be an individual and not a member of a crowd.

[788] So what is it that you, how old are you now?

[789] First, let's start with that.

[790] How?

[791] I'm 73.

[792] And what do you occupy your time with now?

[793] Oh, you know, I am so lucky that I don't have to use the phrase, thank God it's Friday anymore.

[794] I get to create.

[795] I write.

[796] I do public speaking.

[797] And I just developed a master class that I called Applied SpyCock.

[798] that is primarily going to be talking to young people, mostly men, I think.

[799] And I think, you know, another voice like that is sort of side by side next to you is probably not competition.

[800] I think it's a good thing to have.

[801] And with regard to that, I am all.

[802] offering the audience something extra.

[803] I'm assuming there's going to be questions.

[804] And we developed a website where people can get to the website and ask the questions, and I will answer every one of them personally.

[805] The website is called KGBspicology .com.

[806] And we'll have a little bonus.

[807] There's a document that I can share as a freebie that points out how the KGB operated in the realm of persuasion.

[808] That is not necessarily evil, right?

[809] Because when you look at what Dale Carnegie taught, it can be used for good and for evil.

[810] So that's where I'm at.

[811] And this is my, I have a dual mission in life.

[812] Mission number one is taking care of my 13 -year -old.

[813] I have a young daughter.

[814] And mission number two is to do what I'm planning to do, is work with whoever wants to listen to me, but primarily young people, to help them evade a destiny that when they become useful, idiots, the useful idiots will be thrown away, as you know.

[815] Yeah, yes, I'm aware of that.

[816] Yeah, yeah.

[817] So what do you think that the people that you're trying to reach will learn as a consequence of taking your course?

[818] And you're making allusions to psychology.

[819] What are you trying to persuade them of, convince them of, teach them about?

[820] Yeah, so this is going to be more or less infatainment.

[821] You know, I'm going to share some things.

[822] that are not necessarily in the book that had to do with my operating as a spy and then draw some conclusions where I say, well, this is what helped me get out of this mess.

[823] And by the way, you can acquire some of these skills yourself such as, for instance, like develop your subconscious.

[824] You know, I studied people all my life.

[825] I can read people like this right now.

[826] And it's coming from my subconscious.

[827] I'm not, you know, and there's a few other things.

[828] And also, you know, I wasn't taught people's skills, but I acquired them.

[829] And again, I can talk about those.

[830] And coming from me with the background I have and the fact that I'm still talking to you, and I managed to get through all this nonsense that I was in, I think it may add value.

[831] You know, I absolutely respect you as an academic mission.

[832] I have admired you since I found you.

[833] You, you know, having a scientific background, it's great to, you know, have almost synergy with, you know, with what I'm coming up with instinctively, with what you come up with through science.

[834] Yeah, well, it sounds to me like you're trying to offer, at least to the degree that that can be done in a virtual environment, some of the mentorship even that you found, you know, when you were.

[835] Yeah, well, young people, you need, you need, you know, you even refer to this with regards to the first contact you had at the KGB, the fact that he offered himself as a mentor filled a void in your life.

[836] And that is absolutely necessary as people need an apprenticeship and a mentor, definitely.

[837] Especially if they don't have it at home.

[838] And the other thing that they need is accountability partners.

[839] If they want to make changes happen, they need to have an accountability partner.

[840] Right, right, right, right.

[841] Yeah, yeah.

[842] All right.

[843] Well, good.

[844] Is there anything else that you'd like to bring to the attention of this audience in particular, this more general audience before we go to the other interview?

[845] Just let me just tell you one thing.

[846] and I'm going out on a limb here.

[847] When I got the email from your producer, I got emotional.

[848] I'm not going to go any further.

[849] This was so important to me to be able to talk to you, and I'm so glad that it happened.

[850] Well, thank you very much, sir.

[851] I appreciate also the opportunity to have heard your story and to have the privilege, too, of bringing it to the attention of all the people that'll be watching and listening.

[852] I'm going to talk to Jack Barski for another half an hour on the Daily Wire Side.

[853] I think we'll delve into the philosophical and theological in some more detail in that half an hour.

[854] And I'd like thank you, sir, very much for your forthright comments today and for walking us through the strange transformations of your life and for shedding some light on, well, how one person was pulled into the, this terrible ideological battle that's been going on for, well, the greater part of the last century.

[855] And I'd like to thank everybody watching and listening for their time and attention and for the Daily Wire Plus folks for making this conversation possible.

[856] Thank you very much, sir.

[857] You're most welcome.

[858] Thank you.