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Dec. 31, 2024 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
01:00:12
20241231_jack-barsky-on-lies-sex-and-spying-real-kgb-agent
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Kindergarten Brainwashing 00:03:43
I was being brainwashed from pretty much from kindergarten on.
I felt flattered that this mighty organization would be interested in me.
That's how I wound up having a relationship with the KGB.
If I had known there was an existing family, I would have told the KGB, that's high risk, I'm not going to do that.
In those days, the KGB didn't have a clue how America functions.
Our weapon was the brain.
My hand, even today, as I'm sitting here, has never touched a pistol or weapon.
In 1978, a Canadian man named William Dyson stepped off a plane at Chicago International Airport and headed for immigration.
Two days later, he didn't exist.
William Dyson was a KGB forgery used to smuggle a young, ambitious East German agent into the United States at the height of the Cold War.
And it worked.
The spy's new identity was Jack Barski, who spied on the U.S. as a sleeper agent from 1978 to 1988, only exposed as the Cold War ended.
Well, Barski changed sides and became an asset for U.S. counterintelligence agencies, which eventually secured his citizenship.
His autobiography, Deep Undercover, was published in 2017.
I'm pleased to say that Jack Barski joins me now on Uncensored.
Thank you very much indeed for joining me.
Yeah, so I'm absolutely delighted to be on with you.
Jack, let me just start by, for viewers who don't know anything about your story, because I found it quite extraordinary to immerse myself in your remarkable life.
Let's go back to when you were born.
You were born in East Germany.
What kind of early life did you have?
Well, in hindsight, and I had to, upon reflection, I watch a lot of historic videos, and some of that is also what it was like to be in East Germany when I was born.
It was five years after the end of World War II.
And we were all poor, but I wasn't as poor as most everybody else because my parents were both teachers.
And teachers were well compensated and well taken care of.
For instance, I grew up in two houses that were associated, attached to the schools where my father eventually became the principal.
But there were some things that I shared with everybody else.
There was no good medical care.
I was sick all the time.
I was malnourished.
And it took me until maybe past puberty that I finally was healthy and I didn't have migraines anymore.
I didn't have all these viruses that would attack my body.
So it was no fun.
But again, we were poor, we were all poor, and we didn't know that we were poor.
So I wasn't really unhappy.
It's just in hindsight, I was being brainwashed from pretty much from kindergarten on and developed a whole lot of sets of wrong beliefs a lot of my contemporary never were able to get rid of.
Yeah, let's talk about that because you've talked very openly about being brainwashed.
In what way did that brainwashing manifest itself?
What views were you encouraged to have?
Well, it started out in kindergarten, literally, and it was very well done.
You know, we had these little magazines.
There was a cartoon that we all liked, just one cartoon, and it was all about the oppressed rising up against the oppressors.
Operating Within the Stasi 00:07:53
Initially, it was generic, but then it became socialism versus capitalism, the working class versus the capitalists, and then it became scientific, mind you, scientific Marxism, Leninism.
You know, we were taught, there was a course in college that was called Scientific Marxism-Leninism, and we were taught that Marx had discovered the law that governs the development of human society from slavery to whatever, the Middle Ages and on capitalism, and eventually communism all over the planet.
And, you know, we just bought it.
There was no other opinion available.
There was no, you know, back and forth, no argumentation.
It was what it was.
We were told the truth.
And before you were tapped up by the KGB, what did you know about the KGB?
Were you aware of them?
Were they something that you'd been told about?
Yes, we were aware of them because they were considered at the forefront of the worldwide revolution.
There were some heroes, particularly a German by the name of Richard Zorge, who worked for the KGB in Japan and eventually was executed in Japan.
So there were stories featured in certain magazines about these heroes.
We did not have our clue that the majority of the KGB employees were actually busy with the oppression of dissidents in the Soviet Union.
We didn't know that the Gulags existed.
We only knew about the espionage.
And so when I was initially contacted, I felt flattered that this mighty organization that was going to help build the communist paradise on earth would be interested in me.
And how did they make contact?
What was the first point of contact?
Well, the very first one was I was on a Saturday, I was in my dorm room doing some homework and there was a knock on the door.
And interestingly enough, in hindsight, I put it all together.
When there was a knock on the door in our dorm, that meant the student was saying, I'm coming in.
There were no name plates on our doors.
So I was waiting for the door to open.
It didn't.
So I said to come in.
And there was a stranger, obviously.
How the heck did he know that I was in that particular room?
Well, there was next door, there was a Russian exchange student.
DA, okay.
So somehow somebody figured out it would be a good idea to talk to me.
And this guy was a German.
And he was the dumbest KGB agent that I ever dealt with because his backstory meant that he didn't even know how East Germany was working.
He told me that he was an employee of Kazejiena, which was that famous optics company that had a division in East Germany.
And he wanted to talk to me about what my plans are after I'm done studying chemistry.
Didn't he know that in East Germany nobody recruited students?
We were assigned upon graduation.
So anyway, so I knew right away, in my mind, I thought, oh, that's probably Stasi.
And so I played along.
And I could have asked him, no, wait a minute.
I played along.
We did some small talk.
And eventually he changed his tune and he said, oh, by the way, I got to come clean.
I'm really not from Karlsaisena.
I'm from the government.
And I could have asked him maliciously what part of the government, but I said to myself, let's just see what happens, because I'm curious.
And I knew if he was Stasi, there was nothing for me to fear.
So he then asked, could you envision yourself one day to work for the government?
And I answered, yes, but not as a chemist.
And so we communicated between the lines.
He had my answer, and I told him that I might be interested in operating within the Stasi.
And the only thing that I would have considered would be being an agent, being one of those superheroes, East Germans, that were in West Germany that were hunting down Nazis and having the good life at the same time.
So I just wanted to see what's going on.
And yeah.
And we made an appointment.
We met for lunch a couple of days later.
And there was a man at the table that he introduced me to.
And he said, oh, by the way, Ms. Herr Dittrich, that's how I was named in those days.
I would like to introduce you to Conrad Herman.
We work with our Soviet friends.
And then he excused himself.
So that's how I wound up having a relationship with the KGB.
Herman was obviously KGB local, similar to Vladimir Putin.
He was one of those local individuals who were part bureaucrat, part spy, and they did recruiting and maintaining relationships with would-be recruits.
Because at that point, I was not in at all.
It took him 18 months to figure out that I was worthy of actually recruiting.
But really interesting that you saw this as a glamorous job, a bit like most, I guess, young people would see spying as being glamorous.
But it really was.
For someone of your background in East Germany at the time, this was seen as a heroic thing to do.
Absolutely, 100%, because I knew I was on the right side of history.
Because here's the thing.
West Germany, in West Germany, there were some ex-Nazis, high-level in the government, particularly the head of the Bundesnachtienst, who was a general in Hitler's army, who was in charge of intelligence on the Eastern Front, Reinhard von Galen.
And Koltger Kiesinger, who was the Chancellor at one point, had been a member of the Nazi Party.
So we already had proof, ample proof, that there were a lot of Nazis in West Germany, and it was our responsibility to make sure that they wouldn't invade East Germany and take over.
So that was part of my mission.
And on top of it, I did know that the standard of living was a lot higher, so I couldn't wait to go over there and drive fancy cars to fit in and date beautiful girls and all that.
It was all false ideas.
But that is what eventually got me to say yes.
Becoming Jack Barski 00:04:20
And at what point did you change your name?
You were born Albrecht Dittrick in East Germany.
What point did you abandon your actual name?
That was in the fall of 1978 when I, as you said in the early introduction, when I entered the United States with a false Canadian passport.
And after I passed through customs and immigration, I went to a hotel and destroyed the passport and took out a bona fide birth certificate by the name of Jack Barski.
The birth certificate had been obtained by a KGB agent who was under diplomatic cover.
And so that's when I became Jack Barski.
In those days, you could operate in the U.S. without any other documentation.
You could get on a plane, you could rent a hotel room.
Nowadays, that wouldn't be possible.
Yeah, and interestingly, you've always kept the name, Jack Barski.
Have you never been tempted to go back to your original name?
When I cooperated with the FBI and we started talking about getting a green card and eventually obtaining citizenship, we also thought about whether I should change the name back to the name I was born with and it was considered too problematic.
Let's put it this way.
I was so Americanized.
I had so many connections, financial jobs, resume, my children.
So we decided for me to keep the name.
The only thing I had to change is the birth date because Jack Barski was born in 1944 and I was born in 1949.
If I had kept the 44, I would have been able to collect Social Security five years prior to when I was actually turning 65.
What the FBI did, by the way, they went to Jack Barski's parents who were still alive and asked them for permission.
And given the right background, they agreed.
So I...
For those who don't know Jack, I never liked my...
Who was the original Jack Barski?
Whose name did you take?
The original Jack Barski was...
Yes, he was a young boy born in Orange, New Jersey, to Jewish parents, by the way.
His father's name was Elisha Lee Barski.
That sounds like Orthodox Jew.
His mother's name was Beatrice's maiden name, Schwartz.
That is most likely Jewish.
It has a German tone to it.
But he passed away at the age of 11.
As a matter of fact, I visited his tombstone.
He's buried in Maryland.
And it's like it was a really touching moment to be next to the grave of the individual that was responsible in death for me being here and being able to talk to you.
I mean, quite extraordinary moments for you.
How did you come to get the name?
What's the process for that?
Well, the process, as I told you, I came here with that birth certificate and then my first task was to acquire documentation that would allow me to live and work like an American in the U.S.
And it was a driver's license and a social security card.
In those days, it was possible to get a social security number As an adult, because there were two populations that were exempt from the social security law, employees of religious organizations and farm workers.
Bike Messenger in Manhattan 00:15:07
So in my back story, I worked on a farm for a long time before I decided to move to New York City.
That all worked well, but it took a little bit of doing and a lot of creativity for me to be able to get that done.
It took me about a year.
And then when I had the two documents, I got my first job.
And guess what that was?
Bike messenger in Manhattan.
Really?
Yeah.
Well, I couldn't take my resume with me.
I had a master's degree in chemistry.
I had no work history.
And I sort of figured out that when you apply for a messenger job, nobody really cares about your background because, you know, most messengers, most messengers made minimum wage and nobody really cared, but they were transients anyway.
But I was lucky enough to get a job as bike messenger, which meant that I was on commission and I got 50% of what the company charged for the deliveries, which made me immediately independent from KGB money.
I didn't have to get any infusion of KGB money to exist.
But I'm still just fascinated about what I called the process.
But you have this boy who's 11, he's called Jack Baskin.
He dies.
How do you end up with his name?
Yay, Mike Baker here, host of the President's Daily Brief podcast.
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Well, we just claimed it.
Okay?
Okay, so here's, this is a typical MO for the KGB and even nowadays for the Russian intelligence.
They're looking for individuals who either have passed away at an early age or moved out of the country and died when they were older.
Let's say an American who moved to Spain and passed away there, and there is no record that this person died.
And at least in those days, it was possible to get a birth certificate by just paying the money.
You didn't have to justify why you would be eligible to get that birth certificate.
They were just giving it out.
I don't know what it's like today.
Nowadays, I think most when it comes to bringing illegals into another country, the Russian intelligence, KGB used to do that.
They go through third countries, such as Canada, but preferably nowadays Brazil.
It's pretty easy.
And I have that from, you know, I spoke with some Brazilian individuals.
They told me it's pretty easy to get Brazilian citizenship.
And then you come here by illegal immigration.
But, you know, I was not tainted that way.
I was born here, okay?
And that's why I was a really high-priced asset.
But that moment, Jack, when you meet the real Jack Barski's family, how did that come about?
And what was it like that moment?
I didn't meet them.
No, I did not meet them.
I didn't know they existed for crying out loud.
I didn't know that there was a brother and a sister alive.
That came out when my story aired on 60 Minutes.
And the parents had died.
Oh, I see.
If I had known there was an existing family, I would have told the KGB, that's high risk.
I'm not going to do that.
Right.
But I thought you said the family had approved.
Was that later, the remaining members?
No, they had approved when, yes, they had approved once the FBI was about to make me legal in the state and help me with legalization.
And I'm a citizen.
I've been a citizen now for the last seven years.
Because it's just a fascinating human story, isn't it?
You've got this boy dying who was 11 years old.
And then effectively, you're living his life as Jack Barski.
And as you say, that moment then when you go to the tombstone and you're standing there and you see the grave of this boy.
And like you said, it must have been a very emotional moment for you.
It was.
And I have a picture, and this does not go on social media because it is easy to misinterpret that.
It was very spiritual.
Let's talk about what happened when you go to Moscow for training.
You're now a KGB agent.
You have to learn this six-page legend, which is your backstory.
And you've talked about some of that.
But you studied English, Morse code, shortwave radio, encryption, decryption, secret writing, photography, self-defense, surveillance detection.
You practiced dead drops to secretly hand over U.S. intelligence to KGB operatives in the US.
Now, they even sent you to Canada for three months to learn more about North American culture and an opportunity to practice English.
You ate ham and eggs in diners.
You watched the Price is Right game show.
Come on down and so on.
I mean, they're really trying to convert you from this communist East German boy into an all-American guy, right?
Young adult.
Yeah, that was a very good summary, sir.
And, you know, there was a...
Listen, in those days, the KGB didn't have a clue how America functions.
They didn't even understand that Canada, while close enough, was not a really good preparation for me to understand how America functions.
You know, the Canadians speak differently and it's a different culture.
But I was able to, you know, yeah, watch the Price is Right and a few other American TV shows and practice my English talking with Americans.
But it really didn't prepare me for just living the life as an American.
When I came to the US about six, seven months later, I immediately realized that I had to be very, very careful with regard to getting close to Americans.
And so being a bike messenger really helped me a lot to get an understanding of the culture, an understanding what people are watching, what the Monday morning talk is about football, the baseball, and all this cultural stuff, including the way Americans communicate with body language and facial gestures and so forth.
It took me two years to be comfortable actually to go for a girlfriend.
Really?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that was the right thing to do because females would have immediately figured out that something is off about this guy.
Talk to me about the actual work you did for the KGB.
Because obviously in the West, all we've heard are kind of horror stories that the KGB were a bunch of ruthless, steely-eyed assassins.
What was the reality like of being a KGB agent in America?
Okay, so I was managed by the Directorate S, that's the illegals directorate.
And the folks that I interacted with were all gentlemen.
No women I can remember that would have trained me.
Our weapon was the brain, okay?
So I had self-defense training, but my hand, even today as I'm sitting here, has never touched a pistol, a weapon.
I have never fired a gun.
I have had a lot of people.
Were you trained to potentially...
Were you trained to kill people if you had to?
Absolutely not.
Not even a thought.
No.
And the self-defense training was not to fight the FBI.
That would have been really stupid.
And also think about it as an illegal.
If you start shooting at the FBI, you know, that makes no sense.
And I was not trained to do physical harm, period.
But I twice had to investigate the whereabouts of somebody who had defected from the KGB and was under a death sentence in the United States.
I found that out by accident.
But no violence, not even, I didn't get any training how to run away with a car.
None of that.
Whatever you see in the media, including the Americans, which is about an illegal couple in the United States, it's all fiction.
So now I'm going to answer the question, what I did for the KGB.
And quite frankly, I hate that question because the first answer I have to give you is my hands never touched anything secret, a secret document.
I had two main tasks, one of which I never knew about until after the wall came down and I was able to read stuff about interviews given by ex-heads of the Department S.
I tell you, the one task I knew was to operate as a spotter.
That means profile people that either already have access to secrets or could have access to secrets in the future.
And when I went back to college in the U.S., I profiled quite a few students.
The KGB never told me what they did with that information.
Not once, not even like a good job.
The other task is surprising to me that they didn't tell me, but I pieced it all together.
So there was an interview given by Vadim Kirpichenko, who was at one point the head of the Directorate S, and he stated clearly that the most important thing about me being in the United States was me being in the United States.
Now think about it.
It was towards the end of the Cold War.
There was a battle, CIA versus KGB, and fundamentally all the agents, almost all the agents in the other country were under diplomatic cover.
And so in the late 80s, you know, there was a lot of agents that were being expelled because they were found to do something that wasn't diplomatic.
And it went both ways.
Then there was retaliation.
At one point, there was three KGB agents kicked out of the U.S. and they retaliated with three kicked out the other way.
So now imagine, and this is documented, that Andropov, who was head of the KGB at the time, was afraid that diplomatic relations would be broken up altogether.
And at that time, the most productive agents for the KGB in the United States were one Aldrich Ames, he was a CIA employee, and Robert Hansen.
If all the diplomat agents are gone, who's going to have contact with these two guys?
And that is what they never told me.
I was never prepared.
There were never any instructions given what if.
So, you know, this is one of the weaknesses that the KGB had.
They didn't give me a good point of reference with regard to why I'm there and what I'm supposed to do.
One of the other things that I understand you had to do.
You had to sort of immerse yourself around potential power brokers in America, one of whom turned out to be President Carter's national security advisor.
I mean, how does a KGB spy get anywhere near that?
That's a good question.
And that became an urban legend.
I think I mentioned Brzezinski in my 60 Minutes interview.
And they were fantasizing, it would be great if you could like, you know, Brzezinski is he teaches at Columbia University.
So I was trying to figure out a way as a bike messenger and then as a college student to weasel my way into Colombia and find a good reason to be there.
And it just didn't work.
And I was not positioned in society, as you pretty much hinted at, to make these kinds of contacts.
Now, had I spent more time in the U.S., 10 years later, when I had a real good job and I made good money, I would have been in a different position.
At one point, I had a high-level executive-level job in a company that co-owns, today still co-owns a nuclear plant.
And I was able to visit the nuclear plant.
So long term, I could have been quite effective, but I was more effective becoming an American and eventually saying goodbye to the KGB.
Do you think were you a good spy then, or not really, do you think?
I leave that up to the ones that sent me here.
They awarded me eight years into my operation in the U.S., they awarded me with the second highest decoration of the Soviet Union, the Order of the Red Banner.
And that decoration had to be approved by the highest level of the Soviet government, not just the KGB.
So apparently, they had reason to believe that I was doing a really good job.
And I don't know, they sent, and this is documented, they sent 10 of us in the 80s to the U.S.
A Dangerous Relationship 00:13:33
I don't know what happened to the other.
I know one person who just had one task to just live here.
I met him.
He was a German too.
I don't know about the other eight.
They may as well have aborted their mission because I tell you, I was in danger of at least half a dozen times of failure, and I got lucky.
So this was a high-risk job that was bound to fail.
So they thought I was doing a good job.
You know, I'm glad that I didn't manage to do real damage to the United States because I feel really guilty now.
What is really fascinating about what went on in that 10 years when you're in the KGB in the estates is what was going on with your private life because you ended up getting married, but I believe I'm right in saying it was to a Guyanese lady who was having visa issues, wanted to stay in the country.
And it was a kind of marriage of convenience.
Is that right?
Yes, so that was when I first started looking for girlfriends.
And since I was now in a country where I found a lot of ladies with a natural tan, let's put it this way.
I put an ad in a newspaper asking for a dark-skinned lady, and we had a blind date.
And she was very pretty.
And also, she was safe because she wasn't American.
But I didn't know she was illegal.
At one point, then we had a dating relationship.
And at one point, she asked me if I was really weird.
She asked me, by the way, if I get married to another man, could we still see each other?
That was a passive-aggressive way of asking me to marry her.
And so she told me the story that she was married already once, and the guy didn't follow through.
She didn't get a green card.
And I felt so sorry for her.
I did some research, and I realized that I had the documentation.
I had my birth certificate and I had the driver's license that I could apply for her citizenship.
So we did.
And then she did something.
So we got married first, obviously.
And then she did something that absolutely changed my life.
She got pregnant on purpose.
And we never talked about, you know, I told her, look, I'm going to marry you, but I'm not the marrying kind.
Eventually, once you get your green card, we're going to get a divorce because I also was married in Germany to a woman I really loved.
But she just, Penelope made the decision to get pregnant.
I didn't know that was a way of particularly people in poorer countries when they came to the US to tie up their man, so to speak, to secure their man.
And so a girl was born, and that changed my life 180 degrees.
Without that girl being in my life, I would not be talking to you today.
And we'll come to that.
Really, there's a girl called Chelsea, and then you had a son called Jesse, also with Penelope.
But at the time, as you say, you were still married to this woman back in East Germany with whom you'd had a son, Matthias.
So effectively, by law, both in Germany and in America, you would have been committing the illegal act of bigamy, I guess.
Yes, sir.
But it depends on the jurisdiction, though.
It's bizarre.
Yes, I admit I was a bigamist.
But I had this split personality that I can prove to myself today that the German...
I became American.
I became Jack Barski.
I started dreaming in English.
I was integrated in US society.
The German and the English were separated in my brain.
It got to a point that if I was talking with somebody socially at a restaurant and I hear a German word from another table, that my English stopped abruptly because there was no communication between the German and the United States.
But what happened to the other?
Jack, what happened to Gerlinde and Matthias, who were the wife and son that you'd left back in East Germany?
When I fell in love with Gerlinde while I was being in training in Berlin, but when they moved me to Moscow, I said goodbye to her.
I said, that's it.
We're not going to see each other anymore.
But somehow I wound up in East Berlin again, and she found me.
And the day she showed up, after two years in Moscow, being celibate, no contact with any girls, she shows up and she says, do you still love me?
What do you think the answer would be for somebody in my situation?
So at that point, I was a highly trained agent ready to be launched to the United States.
So I was in a position to ask my handler in East Germany whether it would be okay to have a relationship with that young lady.
And they approved and they thought maybe they could send us as a couple.
Turns out she wasn't qualified.
She was emotionally not stable enough.
So they allowed me to get married.
You know, this is the, I think the KGB was rationalizing I would have an anchor back in East Germany because, you know, there's a shelf life to illegals.
If they're very successful, they get so used to the new life that they have that they become a risk to the organization that sent them.
So they figured, you know, have this anchor in Germany.
And so we got married.
I told Gerlinde what I was going to do.
She was in agreement.
She told me she had tried dating other men and it was a total disaster.
She was going to wait for me for about 10, 12 years.
Wow.
And then we, yeah, she was.
Eyes wide open and she was fully on board with my communist ideals.
And she said she would even move to the Soviet Union with me.
And then, you know, a child was born.
And I got the news when I was in the United States.
When I got the news via shortwave radio, I did a somersault in the hallway because it made me very happy.
And every two years, I was going back to Moscow for some debriefing and more instructions.
And I could spend time with my German family.
Never got to really watch my son grow up.
I couldn't really bond with him.
And it was one time I showed up and I had brought a teddy bear or something and gave it to him.
And he turned to his mother and says, look what the uncle just gave me.
And that almost broke my heart.
He didn't know I was the dad.
Incredibly difficult emotional scenario that you're going through here as a KGB agent.
And then, as you say, you meet this woman in America, Plinypee, you marry her, even though you're still married to Galinda.
You have two more children.
So you have three kids and two wives and no divorces.
And then you have this extraordinary day after 10 years when suddenly you get a message.
And that message is you have to drop everything and leave.
How was that message communicated to you?
We had a signal system.
There was a signal spot that I would pass by every morning when going to work.
There were supposed to be graphic signals on a support beam for the elevated subway, the A-line.
And the signals were very basic, such as give us information as to whether you received the most recent radio transmission or the other one would have been an invitation for a dead drop.
I don't want to get into explanation what a dead drop is.
And the one signal that was the most important one was danger.
Everything else was in white chalk.
The danger signal was a red dot, almost fist size.
And so one morning I go to work and habitually I'm looking at the spot and I see the red dot.
And I said, and I'm not going to use the S word in an interview, but I used the S word loud in my thoughts.
Oh my God, I'm not ready to.
That meant, what that meant was that get out of the country right away.
And where did that mean you had to go?
To Moscow or to East Germany?
No, make a B-line to Canada and ring the bell at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, who would then give me a passport which would allow me to travel.
And what did you think, Jack?
When you saw that danger word, what did you think that meant?
That your life was in imminent danger?
No, I chose to not think that.
See, the entire time I was operational, I never thought of the worst thing.
Because if you live in fear, you will make mistakes and the fear will actually become reality.
So I was always optimistic and I chose to not immediately believe it, okay?
And because I wasn't ready, and the other thing is I wasn't ready because I had fallen deeply in love with my 18-month-old daughter, Chelsea, not her mother, this girl.
And it was something that I wasn't prepared for.
I didn't know that I was capable of unconditionally loving another human being.
And I didn't know how to take care of her because mom had only four years of schooling.
If I am not there, if I can't support her financially, she would grow up in poverty.
And so I just chose to ignore it.
I mean, I went to work and I was totally not functional because I like, in my mind, I tried to figure out what to do now because this red dot was an order and I was about to not follow the order.
But I had some time because there was a period of time when I could not communicate with them because I was disabled.
I had injured my right shoulder and I couldn't work and I couldn't write letters in secret writing and so forth.
But that was on a Monday.
On a Thursday, I got a radiogram where they told me, okay, you need to follow the emergency procedure and get to Canada because we have reason to believe that the FBI is about to arrest you.
Right.
So, well, I still didn't know whether that was true because I had some measures that would have allowed me to know whether I'm being investigated.
And you know, I did a lot of surveillance detection training, and I also had some things in my apartment where I would find out whether somebody was going through my apartment.
And I was told I was one of the best trainees in surveillance detection, and I had found no sign that they were right.
So what I did do was I increased my surveillance detection to see whether I'm truly in danger of being arrested.
And I figured that they might be wrong.
And then they did something that forced me to make a decision.
One morning, a couple of weeks later, I'm waiting for the subway.
There's a man in a black trench coat coming up to me from the side and whispering in my ears with a Russian accent, you got to come home or else you're dead.
The Whispered Ultimatum 00:09:40
Wow.
Okay.
So you had to sort of take that seriously because if they had interpreted my not going back home as a defection, I would have been in danger.
But that's when I came up with this gorgeous lie that was pretty brilliant.
But I didn't come up with this until a specific moment.
Well, until you thought your life might be in danger, because they may have thought you were defecting.
You pretended you had HIV AIDS and it required medical attention in the U.S.
That was the way you covered yourself with the KGB.
Yes, and they had no reason to not believe that simply because they knew, all they knew is that everything that was good about me, my family, $500,000 worth of dollar savings, they promised me a house and I would have lived the privileged life of a KGB agent who occasionally has some minor task in the West.
They knew that there's no way that I could pass up on that.
They didn't know about my girl.
So when I told them I have HIV AIDS, they actually believed it.
I didn't know that they believed it, but I found out many years later.
So they went to my family and told my German wife that I had passed away from AIDS.
Wow.
They told you you died.
Yes, they made me dead already.
Because in those days it was a death sentence.
There was no cure.
And what about your parents?
Were they still alive?
Did they get told the same thing?
My father had distanced himself from our family.
He divorced mom and at the age of 16, that was the last time I met him in person.
He then paid child support and we had no contact.
He passed away not having a clue that I even left East Germany to do some space research in Kazakhstan.
That was my cover story.
My mother never knew what my fate period.
She passed away not knowing what happened to me when I withdrew, when I broke up contact with the KGB.
She was still alive, and then the wall came down.
And she even wrote a letter to President Gorbachev, trying to get his help to find what happened to me, because we had some prearranged communications.
There were letters that I pre-wrote that occasionally were sent to her, and it was the semblance of communication, and that stopped altogether.
And the letters that she wrote were returned.
So this is the one thing I deeply regret these days.
That and having betrayed my German wife.
I can't get out of it and even rationalizing it because, you know, I did not betray them for another woman.
I betrayed them for this child that I loved so deeply and I still love.
And she is.
It's quite extraordinary.
And then effectively, you then move to Pennsylvania, the FBI move in next door and bug your home.
And as a result, as a result, you end up agreeing to effectively be a double agent now where you're going to be...
Excuse me.
You effectively agree to be.
Well, a single agent, but working for the other side.
I couldn't be doubled, though, because you stopped working for the KGB.
But I gave what I believe, and I was told that.
I gave a lot of valuable information to the FBI.
I mean, I was interviewed about every single detail of my life over a period of six weeks.
The lead agent who did the interviewing wound up knowing more about my life than I could remember.
And he's now a good friend of mine, by the way.
I played a lot of golf with him, and he is the godfather of my last child who has a different mother.
So you got married for a third time.
Yes, sir.
This is to Shauna, and you have a daughter, Trinity.
That is Seana.
And the FBI agent who debriefed you ends up being your great mate, golfing partner, and godfather to Trinity.
Yeah.
Yes, and he wrote the afterword for my book.
And this is the one sentence that really, really made my heart skip a few beats.
He stated we could use more people like Jack Barski in our country.
Amazing.
How did that make you feel?
I said, the moment I read that sentence, I said, oh my God, I have arrived.
And I am intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually 100% American.
If you gave me a choice to move back to Germany, all things equal, or even better financial circumstances, I would politely decline.
Do you have any contact with Galinda and Matthias?
Matthias and I, he calls me dad, no problem.
When he first visited the United States, because Chelsea invited him, he and I had a heart-to-heart talk, and he, at least intellectually, but probably also emotionally, understood why I chose Chelsea over him.
Because he was part of a functioning family structure.
He had good family support.
There was no danger of him growing up in poverty.
As a matter of fact, he has a doctorate in chemistry.
And Chelsea was the one that needed my support.
So at least intellectually, he understood that.
So we have a good relationship.
He has one daughter.
You know, I'm a granddad, but it's unfortunately that the girl is far away.
And what about Galinda?
Do you have any concern with her, his mother?
I had one phone call with her when I was back in Germany, and that phone call started out for about half hour, her cursing me out.
And I would have sat there for the whole day, because she was entitled.
But then she changed her tone, and she said, when I told her, I still have some issues like, you know, uniting the two personalities and becoming whole, so to speak.
And she said, maybe I can help you.
But then she changed her mind and she doesn't want to communicate with me at all.
And what about that?
What about Penelope and your other child with her?
Penelope is a sad story.
She had a very, very bad childhood.
She was the second of 13 children when her father left the family.
So deep down inside in her amphibian brain, she knew that men will leave you.
And she became incredibly jealous of me when there was no reason.
I was not unfaithful to her.
But she became dangerous to live with at one point.
I don't want to get into detail.
And so that ended up in divorce.
And we're not in contact.
I mean, it's all very, I've got to say, Jake, I mean, it's an extraordinary story.
The reality of the emotional upheaval involved in being a KGB agent.
You know, to be taken away from your German wife and son and to then be reconciled with the son many years later, to go to America, marry a woman for convenience, but fall madly in love with his daughter that you have together and now be living in the same place in Texas with that, near that daughter anyway, to be with her.
And then to have another wife and daughter in Atlanta.
And I'm guessing that there may be, I mean, you can tell me, but it just seems to me that being a KGB agent probably is not the best way to hold down any long-term, emotionally deep relationship.
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Serving a Dictatorship 00:05:53
I occasionally get people asking me a question as to whether I recommend them joining the CIA.
And I tell them, well, if it's a desktop, no problem.
But if you are going to be operational, be prepared that you're going to have to do something that may go against your moral principles.
And be prepared that when you're done, you wind up being somewhat damaged emotionally.
Joe Riley also put that into his afterword to the book that he actually admired me, that I came out sort of almost whole when many ex-agents, no matter who they were serving in this clandestine kind of fashion, wind up drug addicts, alcoholics, and even commit suicide.
If I were to advise my younger self today, I would tell him, Don't even think about it.
No matter how noble your motives are, you will damage others as well as yourself.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You mentioned earlier another KGB agent at the time in East Germany when he first got recruited was Vladimir Putin.
He's now just been sworn in for his fifth presidential term, obviously, as president in Russia.
What is your view of the current state of Russia and of Vladimir Putin?
Well, I'm not telling you anything new that Russia is a dictatorship, it's an oligarchy, it's a kind of dictatorship that requires some other people to play with the dictator.
But the same thing happened with Stalin, except the oligarchs that we have now are more capable of functioning in the economy.
But, you know, God forbid, if you even give a hint that you're not playing along with Vladimir again, watch out.
Don't get too close to a window.
Right.
I mean, how dangerous do you think he is?
To the folks that he has surrounded himself with.
Very similar, not that he's not quite as paranoid as Stalin, but God forbid you cross him.
You know what happened to Progozhin, right?
You cannot be a member of his inner circle and sharing power to the extent he allows him to share power and openly disagree with him.
That's not allowed.
And what about people...
Do you have a worry?
He exacts revenge on anyone he sees as a traitor to Russia.
Do you have a worry for your own security as someone who defected effectively from the KGB to the Americans and gave them secrets about the Soviet Union?
Not really, because I'm sticking to the Western world with regard to international travel.
And the fact of the matter is that assassinating somebody in another country requires a very highly qualified team.
And even the GRU, which is the most capable intelligence service of Russia, doesn't have that many good teams.
And even their cracked team that went to the UK to try to poison this fellow, I forgot.
I forgot his name for the time being.
They couldn't leave the country without being discovered as having been there.
So if there's a list of enemies that Vladimir keeps or somebody on his behalf keeps, I'm way at the bottom and I'm not worthy to risk the services of a cracked team.
I certainly wouldn't ever be caught in Russia, even if you promised me $10 million.
And I certainly wouldn't be caught in countries where the legal system is, where it's just not really very safe to be.
Jack, if I could take you back in time, before you get recruited by the KGB, and you could go back to being Albrecht Dietrich and lead a very different life, obviously, would you take that offer?
Knowing what I knew then, yes.
Knowing what I know now, are you kidding me?
No way.
No way.
And even let's just for argument's sake.
I'm still not discovered by the FBI.
I have a good job in the United States.
I live a private life.
And a KGB comes to me and says, hey, we found out that you're still alive.
How about if we pay you really well?
I would have said no.
You know, I matured.
I mean, you know, when I said yes, I was extremely immature, full of myself, knowing that, you know, I was my own God.
And I was so flattered by that invitation to join the KGB and also the idea of living that good life.
I mean, I was going to have it all.
I now found out having it all is almost impossible, even if you're Vladimir Putin.
Jab Barski, fascinating to talk to you.
Thank you very much indeed for joining
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