back to indexJack Barsky: KGB Spy | Lex Fridman Podcast #301
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Something happened where they forced my hand, and this is the only time that a Soviet agent
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was anywhere near me on the territory of the United States.
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So I'm waiting for the A train on a dark morning still in Queens, and there's this man in a
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black trench coat comes up to me from my right, and he whispers into my ears, you gotta come
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back or else you're dead.
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The following is a conversation with Jack Barsky, a former KGB spy, author of Deep Undercover
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and the subject of an excellent podcast series called The Agent.
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There are very few people who have defected from the KGB and live to tell the story.
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It is one of the most powerful intelligence organizations in history.
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And this conversation gives a window into its operation, both from an ideological and
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psychological perspective, but also it tells the story of a man who lived one heck of an
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This is the Lex Friedman podcast, to support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now, dear friends, here's Jack Barsky.
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Let's start with a big basic question.
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Комитет Государственной Безопасности.
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So that is the Committee of State Security.
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There's an opossumist.
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Opossumist is a threat, right?
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And I guess that directly translates to security.
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So, and don't exist anymore.
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It was disbanded when the Soviet Union fell apart and the successor agencies are now the
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SVR and the FSB, FSB supposedly the equivalent to the FBI and SVR, the CIA.
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But the SVR is relatively weak and the FSB has taken on a lot of espionage and active
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measures and they're much bigger and stronger.
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But the most capable intelligence agency in Russia is the GRU, Military Intelligence.
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That nobody knows very much about.
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When I was in the KGB, I had no idea that there was military intelligence.
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Nobody ever mentioned anything like that.
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And by the way, I recently had the pleasure to give a talk at the DIA.
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When they reached out to me, I didn't know they existed either.
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That's always the question.
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If you want to be an intelligence agency, should the world know anything about you?
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Because in some sense, you want to create the legend in order to attract great competent
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individuals to work for you, but at the same time, you want it to be shrouded in complete
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If nobody knows you exist, you might be able to operate well as an intelligence agency.
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That is fascinating.
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But FSB is the thing that carries the flag of KGB, KGB being probably one of, if not
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the most sort of infamous, famous, infamous, and powerful intelligence agencies in history
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It was founded in 1954 after the death of Stalin.
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In writing your book, you've looked back at the predecessors of the history.
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Is there some way in which the KGB is grounded in the culture, the spirit, the soul of the
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They just changed names and they changed personnel rather frequently, and that had something
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to do with Stalin's paranoia.
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From between 1923, and I don't remember what, I think it may have been the NKVD at that
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It started as the Chika, and then it became the GPU, the NKVD, but with those name changes,
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you also had changes at the top.
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Between 1923 and 1953, when Stalin died, that is 30 years, they had eight heads of intelligence,
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and of those eight, six were executed when they were replaced.
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So that's an indication that this was an organization that ate itself from the inside.
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The Soviet Union was the only dictatorship in history that did not rest its powers on
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They rested its powers on the intelligence apparatus, and that thing was unstable.
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So you know where that leads.
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Eventually, if you rest your power on something that is made out of bricks that don't hold
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a lot of load, it will fall apart.
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Why was it unstable, would you say?
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What of human nature makes it unstable?
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It's the paranoia.
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Stalin was always worried about the most powerful people coming after him.
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So he proactively killed off heads of the KGB, and he had this great purge where he
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got rid of a lot of his generals, really capable generals, and that cost him dearly when World
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War II started, because he started off with a force that wasn't as capable as it could
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Was it paranoia at all levels?
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It comes from the top.
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And so if the top doesn't trust you, you always have to worry about your peers snitching on
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And I think we have a very similar situation in Russia today, and in this kind of atmosphere,
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the truth will never get to the top.
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So no matter what moral rules the organization operates under, trust is fundamental to its
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And I want to extend this to my own existence, and this is kind of strange.
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It's almost dichotomous, because I was running around lying to everybody, and I couldn't
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fundamentally be trusted.
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But the relationship that I had with the KGB was based on trust.
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If they don't trust me, they don't send me out.
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And if I don't trust them, I'm not going.
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And I eventually broke that trust, and they knew there was always that danger.
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They knew that because something about you or just something about human beings that
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There were hints about how long my assignment would be, so 10 to 12 years.
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And you see, it makes sense.
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I was becoming an American, and over time, I would become more and more American, and
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there was always a chance that I liked it more here than there, that I was really successful
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in what I was supposed to do.
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And it sort of happened, but in my case, it happened because I fathered a child who I
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didn't want to leave when they wanted me back.
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Love always screws up your employment competence, yes.
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You're absolutely right.
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But they thought that I had an anchor at home because I had a wife and a son at home, which
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you've got to worry about them if you defect.
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Because in the past, the KGB would go after family ruthlessly.
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Including perhaps violence?
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This is a hard question about the KGB because it's one of the most ruthless organizations,
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but in general, are there lines, KGB agents at every level of the hierarchy that they
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would not cross, political, legal, ethical, or does anything goes to achieve the goal?
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I was only in touch with two types of agents, the technical experts, the ones that taught
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me tradecraft, and they were like engineers and they were in charge of the secret writing
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and the Morse code, shortwave radio reception, decryption, encryption, and that kind of stuff.
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Those were just doing their job.
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And the others, the ones that trained me, that prepared me for life in the United States,
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they were nice people.
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They were elegant people.
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I don't think they would not fit into the stereotype of the ruthless gun carrying agent.
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Is it possible that you would not be aware of the parts of the KGB, I mean, it's very
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It's possible that you're not aware of the parts of the KGB that are the quote unquote
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Oh, I didn't know.
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I would find out afterwards, after I retired and started doing some research, I had no
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So you're kind of operating in a bubble.
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I mean, this is what the KGB did really, really well, compartmentalization, and that was based
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on the communist movement while it was still underground.
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The cells were very small, so that maybe there were three, four members in one cell that
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knew one another, and then they had a liaison to another cell.
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The bottom line is if you got one of those folks were caught, they could maybe betray
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four people or three, something like that, and the KGB continued with that tradition.
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I have reason to believe that my handler, the person in Moscow that sort of directed
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me and made decisions what to do and where to go, never met me personally.
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There's no reason to.
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This actually was a big advantage over other intelligence services because you look at
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what the CIA does.
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There's a lot of leaks coming out of American intelligence.
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I don't think there's as many leaks coming out of the Mossad.
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Strong words from Jack Barsky, by the way.
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That is a question I want to ask a little more systematically.
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Is there something unique about the KGB compared to the other intelligence agencies?
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Let's talk British intelligence, MI6, Mossad, CIA.
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Is there unique cultures, spirits, souls of the different organizations that maybe somehow
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connect to the structures of government, connect maybe the values of the people, those kinds
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I believe we were all pretty much strong believers in communism and the future of the world being...
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I think that unified us to a large degree, even the technicians.
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It wasn't something like, yeah, yeah, the parents believe this thing, but we know the
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You really believe the story of communism.
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And you need to look at the timeframe.
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The Soviet Union after World War II made quite a bit of progress in influencing the Third
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I still remember when I was in middle school, we had a map, the map of the world, and it
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So red was communism, that was the Soviet Union and the Eastern states, and then blue
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And then we had green, which were the Third World countries, and the green slowly turned
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pink because a lot of Third World governments, like I'm looking at Angola, I'm looking at
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Vietnam, a lot of these countries were very sympathetic to the Soviet Union.
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And so we sort of knew that this would go on like that, and eventually we would take
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over and pretty much overtake, that was the myth, overtake the United States, not only
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militarily but also in terms of industrial production and so forth.
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That was a stupid pipe dream.
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The military, it was a standoff, as we know.
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A stupid pipe dream.
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Hitler had a stupid pipe dream that he executed it exceptionally effectively and on, if not
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for a handful of military mistakes, the world could look very different today.
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Well, the biggest one being invading the Soviet Union, particularly at the time that he did
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it because he ran into the same thing that Napoleon ran into General Winter.
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Well within, so Operation Barbarossa, within that he could have made different decisions.
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For example, attacking, skipping Kiev and attacking Moscow directly, overthrowing the
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So marching, I guess that would be learning lessons from Napoleon as opposed to a different
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kind of distribution of forces and then getting bogged down in the winter.
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But the point is these ambitions sometimes do, the ambitions of empires sometimes do
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materialize in the growth and the building and the establishment of those empires and
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those empires write the history books in such a way that we don't think of them as empires
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or we certainly don't think of them as the bad guys.
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They write the history books, therefore they're the good guys.
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And right now America has effectively written the book about the good guys.
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I happen to believe that book, but it's, we should be humbled and open minded to realize
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that that is in fact what is happening is effective empires write the history books
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and tell us stories and tell us propaganda and tell us narratives that we believe because
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we are human beings and we love to get together and believe ideas.
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We love to dream of a beautiful world and try to build that beautiful world together
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in the United States.
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That's a beautiful world.
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The freedom of respect of human rights of all men are created equal pursuit of happiness.
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You know, it always sounds good.
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If you look at what the dream of communism is, it sure as heck in its words on the surface
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Respect for the workers.
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The working class, the lower classes that have been trodden on that have been stolen
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from by the powerful, they deserve to have the money, the power, the respect that they
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have earned through their hard work.
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And everybody gets along and we just have to, you know, uh, all men are wonderful people.
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And if they, if they go bad, it has something to do with the fact that they have, they have
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been oppressed, right?
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And uh, that dream just never worked out.
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And even, even it is when you think about it and I didn't think about it when you're
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young, you know, you just emotionally, you accept it.
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But when you think about it, somehow, uh, that new wonderful organization has to organize
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itself even though Lenin predicted that the state eventually would go away.
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Well, how does it, how does that work?
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Then you have like anarchy, right?
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You have to have an organization.
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The only way to really organize a large number of people is with a hierarchy.
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So and who gets to the top, the ones that are, that want to go to the top, the ones
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that believe in themselves, the ones, the ones that know better than everybody else.
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And once you have that hierarchy established, uh, there is no guarantee that it doesn't
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that it won't go bad.
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And actually when you look at history, every such hierarchy has gone bad.
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You know, you look at Cuba, for instance, I believe Fidel Castro was a, an honest revolutionary.
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I do believe that.
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And so what did Cuba turn into?
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There's something about, and you speak about Vladimir Putin in this way, but let's step
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away from that for a second.
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Is there something about being an honest revolutionary that wants to do good for their country and
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you start to believe that, you know, better than everyone else how to do good on the country
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and you very well might first, but then somehow that grows into a distortion field where,
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you know, you keep believing, you know, what's right.
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And all the people who disagree with you, you stop seeing them as having a point.
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You instead see them as like, um, um, evil manipulators of the truth that are actually
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trying to hurt people for their own greed, for their own power.
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And you will protect the people because you know, what's good in the case of Stalin.
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I, I mean, I don't know, but it seems like he really believed that communism would bring
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about a much better world.
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I mean, there was a sense the, you have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet, this idea
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that sacrifice is necessary to bring about a greater world.
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And then the other aspect is sort of ruling by terror, creating terrorism, justified political
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mechanism to achieve a better world.
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But it wasn't, I mean, perhaps he had to do that to be able to sleep at night with the
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atrocities he's committing.
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He's, I think he believed he will bring about a better world.
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And by the way, the terror didn't start with Stalin.
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It started right after the Bolsheviks took over when Lenin told Mr. Dzerzhinsky, Commodore
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Dzerzhinsky to build the Cheka and then execute the, this is what he called it, the red terror.
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So at the birth of the Soviet Union, there was already terror and it was deliberate.
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And it also was, it wasn't just focused on the enemies, it was focused on whoever you
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There was no rule of law, there was no court cases, people were just pulled out of their
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apartments and shot on sight.
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And this was done by revolutionaries who were convinced that eventually, these sacrifices
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had to be made and eventually that would lead to a much better planet.
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And the populace believed this too, that those sacrifices in part.
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I mean, this is such a dark thing about dictatorships is you believe it, but you're also too afraid
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to question your beliefs.
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Like, you're not directly afraid, but almost like, I don't know what that is.
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That's almost like a subconscious fear.
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Like don't, there's a dark room with a locked door, don't look in that door.
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Don't check that door.
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And there's something about the United States that says, especially modern culture, it's
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like go to that door first and sort of question everything kind of, that's the power of the
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freedom of speech and the freedom of the press, but you can get almost become too critical
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and too cynical of your own culture in that way.
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So there's a balance to strike, of course, but man, if communism is not a lesson of human
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nature, I don't know what is, but you believed, without thinking too much about it, you believed
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in the story of, what did you see, just, you know, I came from the Soviet Union.
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What did you maybe feel that's right and good about communism, about the vision of communism?
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I think the biggest impetus in me believing in communism was that the communists, just
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before Hitler took over, the communists were the only force in Germany that fought the
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Nazis in the streets, and that's a historic truth.
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And communists were hunted down by the Nazis, killed, put in concentration camps.
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And so what we knew, what we were taught, and I think that was a huge unforced error
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by the Western countries, particularly the United States, that there were ex Nazis in
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the government in West Germany.
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And the most famous one was Reinhard Galen, who was in charge, was the general in charge
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of the intelligence on the Eastern Front under Hitler.
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And when the Allied won the war, it was decided that Galen was too important, his knowledge
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and his organization was too important to not use.
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So he was coopted by the CIA and eventually wound up being the head of the Bundesnachrichtendienst,
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the CIA of West Germany.
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That gave us, us, when I say us, the East German party, a huge propaganda victory.
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I wanted to, because the emotional aspect of this was as follows.
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When we were in, juniors in high school, and in those days, you were only allowed to go
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to high school if you were in the top 10% of students, okay?
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So this was going to be the next set of ruling elite in the country.
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We were sent, we were required to visit a concentration camp.
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And if you know what we as 17 year olds were made to look at, it was gut wrenching.
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How can men do something like that to men, piles of corpses, lampshades made out of human
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skin because that skin had tattoos on them, and shrunken heads like the size of my fist.
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I mean, the girls all cried, and it made a huge impression.
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And that was the Nazis, and the Communists defeated the Nazis.
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They were the good guys.
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Of course, in hindsight, if the Communists had come to power, it would have been just
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the other way around, as we know, given the example of Stalin and Mao, right?
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But we didn't know that.
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From the Russian and Soviet perspective, the Communist regime banded together to win the
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Great Patriotic War.
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And that was the second one, the big brother, the Soviet Union.
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I mean, when I was approached by the KGB, that was like, oh, I felt so honored.
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So we should say that we're talking about East Germany, that you're from East Germany.
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Can you describe, you were born four years and what is it?
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After Germany's unconditional surrender in World War II.
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So what is East Germany?
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What is West Germany?
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What is East and West Germany?
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What's the difference?
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What's the historical context here?
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What is World War II again?
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And then, let's do it for some...
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We don't have to go to World War I, the result of which actually seeded World War II in some
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There's a long history, yes.
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But let's start with World War II.
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So when Hitler came to power, he and his leadership decided that the Germans needed more what
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they call Lebensraum, that means room to live.
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And they would start expanding and they went into France, they took Belgium, the Netherlands,
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they annexed Austria and got a piece of Czechoslovakia.
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And then they decided to march into the Soviet Union after they took Poland.
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Cut up Poland together with the Soviet Union.
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They were friends.
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There was a nonaggression pact that was signed by Ribbentrop and Molotov, right?
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I think both parties knew that eventually they would fall apart.
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But at the time, it gave the Soviet Union a little more piece of Poland and a little
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more time to prepare what they thought might happen down the road.
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And the Germans had the time and the ability to pretty much conquer all of Western Europe.
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Do you think Stalin really knew that it's gonna fall apart?
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Why would somebody like Stalin trust somebody like Hitler?
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But why did he blunder so bad not to read the intelligence that was coming his way?
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The troops are amassing on the border of the Soviet Union.
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He didn't trust his own intelligence apparatus.
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Here's one example.
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There was a German communist who went underground when Hitler took over and he went to Japan
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His name is Richard Sorge.
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Richard Sorge had really, really good intel about what the Japanese would do and not do.
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I forgot exactly what it was, but it came to Moscow and Stalin totally ignored it.
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And when Sorge was captured by the Japanese, the Soviet Union denied that he was one of
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them there, so he was executed, the paranoia, again, does a lot of damage.
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When you don't believe your own intelligence apparatus, why bother having one?
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Yeah, I mean, there...
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But I'm sure there's contradictory information coming in from the intelligence apparatus,
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so it's difficult.
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I mean, first of all, nobody likes to be disagreed with, especially when you become more and
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more powerful, and then the intelligence apparatus is probably giving information you don't like.
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It's often negative information about, basically, information that says that the decisions you
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made in the past are not great decisions, and that's a difficult truth to deal with.
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So in the modern times, if we hop around briefly, Vladimir Putin has been not happy with the
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intelligence of the FSB, thereby, at least if you read the news, choosing to put more
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priority to the GRU for the intelligence in Ukraine.
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But I guess I suppose the same story happens there, as it does throughout history, is paranoia.
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I give you an example that comes from a very reliable source, and that my best German friend
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worked as a chemist in the Stasi, East German intelligence.
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And he eventually, he rose to the rank of major and was in charge of the forgery department.
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It's very likely that he made passports that I use to travel.
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He was aware that there was intelligence that was collected.
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The Stasi was really good.
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They had about a thousand people in West Germany, undercover agents, some of them in government,
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and the central committee of the party, the decision makers ignored it because it didn't
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quite fit in their worldview, it didn't quite fit into their plans.
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So and one delicious thing that I just want to add on to this, when Gorbachev wrote his
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book about Perestroika and Glasnost, the East German rulers did not like it.
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They were much, much more orthodox.
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So they had to print the books in translation, guess where they wound up.
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They were piled up in the hallways of the Stasi.
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They bought the entire print run.
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So but let's backtrack.
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So Operation Barbarossa, invasion of Hitler to the Soviet Union, and then hopefully that
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leads us all the way to East Germany, West Germany after the end of the war.
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So what happened was the Soviet Union rolled into the eastern part of Germany and the Western
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allies took a larger chunk, which was eventually, it was occupied by the three allies, the French,
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the English and the Americans, and the eastern part was occupied by Soviet troops.
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And the Soviet troops actually conquered Berlin.
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But in a contract, they decided that Berlin would be ruled by the four allies and they
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all had free access to that city.
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I was born in the East German part, which very quickly became ruled by communists, socialists,
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the Communist Party and the Socialist Party United, but the leaders of that new party
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were all communists.
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It's nevertheless called democratic.
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Yes, German Democratic Republic, which was formed a couple of months after I was born.
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I was born into a remote southeastern corner of East Germany.
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And interestingly enough, genetically, I'm only half German.
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The other half is Czech and Polish.
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Because where I grew up, I could walk to the Nysa River, which was the border with Poland,
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and it was only about an hour by bus to get to the Czech border.
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So that's why I'm a mix.
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So okay, so East Germany after the war was communist, socialist, and then the West Germany
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was representing the Western world with democracy.
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And what the United States did, this was really, really very forward looking, very strategic,
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the Marshall Plan to rebuild the economy in the West as compared to what the Soviet Union
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Whatever they hadn't destroyed on the way in, they took with them on the way out for
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reparations because they had every right to do that.
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But it was not a good idea because East Germany was always behind in economic development
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to their Western counterpart.
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So when you were young, as today, but when you were young, you were clearly an exceptional
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You're a brilliant academic superstar.
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Let's go to your childhood.
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What's the fond memory from childhood that you have in being woken up to the beauty of
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this world and sort of being curious about all the mysteries around you that I think
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ultimately lead to academic success?
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The fondest memory that comes to mind is my first kiss.
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Do you want to go to the details of that?
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What did you make of that kiss?
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What did that teach you about yourself and human nature and all that?
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It taught me only in hindsight.
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At the time, I was just like, my God, I was head over heels in love.
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I was 16 years old.
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And I knew in those days, I admired girls.
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I knew the girls were like sort of magical beings.
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They were not capable of doing evil things.
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They were beautiful and they had to be adored.
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And one of them actually loved me too.
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She came after me initially.
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And that too was magical for you.
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And literally, I dedicated...
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That's when I started studying.
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Up until that point, I just did whatever I had to do to be in A minus students.
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And that's when I started studying.
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And every A that I got, I dedicated to her, sometimes explicitly, because I knew I was
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going to take care of her as I grew up.
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So you're going to have to work hard in this world to be somebody that could be adored
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by those you love.
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Yes, you're right.
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You know that kiss, the next day, I was running around in school with a grin on my face.
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And maybe that in some way, that grin never fades.
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So what about the heartbreak that followed?
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But just to expand on this a little more, because that passion that I had was an indication
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that eventually love would play a big role in my life.
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I wasn't aware of it.
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I was just directed at this one girl.
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But you understood that that feeling that taught you something, like that you're somebody
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that can feel those things.
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And that's a strong part of who you are.
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And therefore, it will also be a part of directing your life trajectory.
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So we were an item for two years.
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I lost my virginity.
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She was not a virgin at the time.
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My competitor was, he studied medicine in college already.
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In which ways was he better than you?
link |
He was older, and he was more experienced.
link |
And he was going to be a doctor.
link |
But I was there, and he was not.
link |
The presence wins.
link |
But you still had big dreams.
link |
You wanted to be a tenured professor.
link |
So you still want to outdo that guy.
link |
And she eventually told me that he was not in the picture anymore.
link |
So it was back and forth, back and forth.
link |
And our senior year, we were an item, and I was just dreaming of the future.
link |
But we didn't figure out that in those days, if she went to college in Berlin and I went
link |
to college in Jena, and the distance between the two cities was too much for a weekend
link |
visit, public transportation was very slow, and nobody had cars.
link |
So the circumstance of life, you drifted apart.
link |
And so we interacted with a couple of letters, and then I got the goodbye letter.
link |
I can still feel it.
link |
That's a good thing.
link |
You could feel the pain.
link |
That's still part of love.
link |
It's that the pain of loss is still part of love.
link |
And then you kind of change that.
link |
You shape it, and you give that love in deeper, more profound ways to future people.
link |
That's very well put.
link |
But at the time, it emptied me out.
link |
If I had a tendency to have suicidal thoughts, I might have killed myself.
link |
Would you say that was one of the darker moments of your life?
link |
As a single moment, yes.
link |
So I still remember we had a mail slot in the front door, and I wasn't expecting a letter
link |
any day, and there was the letter.
link |
I go upstairs into my bedroom, and I open it, and I read it, and just like the life
link |
You're just there alone, and you have to experience this pain alone.
link |
And now you're deeply alone in this world.
link |
Yes, because there was no emotional relationship with my parents.
link |
I literally had nobody.
link |
So this love you have in you had no place to go.
link |
It was choked off, all right?
link |
But what I did was I wanted to go on, right?
link |
And so I threw myself into the study of chemistry.
link |
I outworked all of my fellow students in a big way.
link |
I worked my ass off, and since I was pretty smart, too, I just aced practically everything.
link |
And for the first two years in college, and look, we go to college, there are all these
link |
pretty girls, and there's dances and everything.
link |
We had this great student club where I didn't look at any girls.
link |
Eventually I knew I was going to, you know, want to have female companionship, but love?
link |
There's a song that goes, love hurts.
link |
Yeah, I know that one.
link |
There's actually many songs that have a similar message, yes.
link |
So during that time, during your excellence, just being an exceptional student of chemistry,
link |
let's go to your story.
link |
So in your book, Deep Undercover, My Secret Life and Tangled Allegiances as a KGB Spy
link |
in America, and in the really, really excellent podcast series that I've been listening to,
link |
people should definitely listen to, it's called The Agent.
link |
You document your time as a KGB spy before, during, and after.
link |
Can you tell the story of when you first were contacted by the KGB, how you were invited,
link |
the offer to join was made?
link |
Well, it was a big surprise, and I never thought of myself as a potential agent.
link |
You know, I was going to be a tenured professor and join the ruling elite, because in Europe,
link |
tenured professors are few.
link |
It's not like in the United States, you know, anybody who teaches at colleges has a title
link |
That's not a criticism.
link |
So we should also clarify that, tenured professor or not, it is a very prestigious position
link |
throughout history of Europe.
link |
I would say, especially communists, I don't actually know the full landscape of the respect,
link |
but at least in the Soviet Union where I grew up, it's a prestigious position.
link |
And the town of Yanuk had about 100,000 people live there, and I would, it's a wild guess,
link |
but maybe 30 tenured professors, and they were part of the ruling elite.
link |
I was trying to do as much as I can to live the good life, right?
link |
You know, have access to things that are nice.
link |
Yeah, but I think the powerful thing about being a professor in that context of East
link |
Germany is the prestige.
link |
And the feeling of superiority.
link |
You know, I was full of myself.
link |
You know, when you are the best of the best, and in my third year I received a scholarship,
link |
the Karl Marx Scholarship, that was limited to 100 concurrent recipients in the country.
link |
So my God, you know, I was full of myself.
link |
I believed in myself, hook, line, and sinker.
link |
And I was also, I got a lot of accolades from teachers and fellow students.
link |
They were feeding the ego, the old, I mean, you have to believe in yourself often when
link |
you're young to truly, to excel.
link |
And you sure as heck did.
link |
But you know, as a balance, you need a mentor, somebody who puts things in perspective, and
link |
I didn't have one.
link |
My father was a nonentity and nobody else.
link |
They all looked up to me.
link |
I was an up and coming guy, right?
link |
So there's no father figure that put you in your place.
link |
And I give you one extreme example.
link |
It was down the road when I fathered a child out of wedlock.
link |
That was in my fifth year, I believe.
link |
The Communist Party in East Germany was very moralistic.
link |
If you did that, they would have a talk with you and give you whatever, a severe reprimand.
link |
Nobody even mentioned a word about this.
link |
So yeah, so this is how this ego gets nurtured.
link |
But anyway, getting back to how the KGB came in contact.
link |
So they most likely got knowledge of me by, you know, looking at Stasi records.
link |
That was East German secret police, Staatssicherheit, security for the state.
link |
There's that word security again.
link |
And they pretty much kept a record on everybody in the country.
link |
And so when you look through this, and this is what the KGB was looking for.
link |
They were looking for candidates, particularly for this kind of job that they had in mind
link |
for me, for candidates who were not, you know, in their mid 20s, who were not fully developed
link |
yet, but mature enough to get there and still young enough, right?
link |
Because at that level of maturity, you can test whether they can handle this kind of
link |
And one day I got a knock on my door and my dorm room door was on a Saturday.
link |
And they knew that I was by myself.
link |
How did they know it?
link |
We had a, I pieced this together.
link |
We had an exchange student from the Soviet Union, and he was next door to me.
link |
And he befriended me.
link |
So he got to know me a little bit.
link |
And the pattern was that my roommate would always go home for the weekend.
link |
And of course they also knew which door to knock on, even though there were no nameplates.
link |
And I knew it was a stranger because if it had been a student, the pattern was that we
link |
would knock on the door and then go in.
link |
We wouldn't wait for somebody to let us in.
link |
So I waited for 10 seconds and he didn't come in.
link |
I knew that it was a stranger.
link |
I said, come on in.
link |
And in came a person who spoke fluent German.
link |
So that was not a KGB guy.
link |
That was a collaborator.
link |
And so he started making a bunch of small talk.
link |
He introduced himself as a representative of Carl Zeiss Jena, which was the optics company
link |
that made really, really good optical instruments, was one of the best in the world.
link |
So it's like the super prestigious company in that place.
link |
And he said that he was a representative of that company and he would just want to find
link |
out what my plans were after graduating from college.
link |
And at that point I knew he wasn't from Carl Zeiss Jena because in those days there was
link |
When you were done, if you were in the top 10% of the graduates, you would most likely
link |
pick to stay and get a doctorate.
link |
And the rest of them were assigned.
link |
You had no choice.
link |
So that guy was an idiot.
link |
He didn't know the basics about...
link |
You interviewed him a little bit to understand, like feel out, is this guy full of shit?
link |
Because yeah, he's a stranger showing up to your dorm room.
link |
I knew that at that point, I knew he was a Stasi, which is wrong, but it doesn't matter
link |
because he was German and I had no idea that the KGB would be involved.
link |
So sorry to pause briefly, did you have a sense, did people know that there's a Stasi
link |
type of organization, that there is a large number of people doing this kind of work in
link |
East Germany in order for you to make that guess?
link |
Yeah, we knew that the Stasi existed.
link |
We even had our James Bond, we had a series called the Invisible Visor where a Stasi employee
link |
in East German would go into West Germany and hunt down Nazis.
link |
So yes, the Stasi was known to be there.
link |
And admired in part or feared or both?
link |
I thought they were necessary and I admired them.
link |
Yes, the reason I did so because I had no information to the contrary.
link |
I never knew anybody personally or even somewhat removed who was followed by the Stasi, was
link |
I had no clue that they did a lot of damage and that they were doing a lot of surveillance
link |
of the East German population the same way the KGB did for the Soviet Union.
link |
So for me to be talking to somebody from the Stasi, it raised my interest.
link |
I was curious what comes next because I sort of knew something interesting would be coming
link |
at me and I had no other thoughts about that at that point.
link |
So when he was finally, when he went for the kill by reversing himself, he said, you know,
link |
I got to tell you that I really, I really am not from Karl Stasi, you know, I'm from
link |
Thank you for pointing that out.
link |
And then he asked this question, he says, can you imagine to one day work for the government?
link |
And so I gave a pretty clever answer.
link |
I said, yes, but not as a chemist.
link |
So I answered the question that he didn't ask.
link |
So we made an arrangement to meet for lunch, which in Germany is the main meal at the number
link |
one restaurant in Vienna, you know, I still remember what I ate.
link |
Rump steak with butter on top and French fries, it was my favorite.
link |
Anyway, so when I get to the restaurant, I saw this fellow sitting in the back there
link |
at the table and there was another person at the table.
link |
So I was a little bit hesitant because in those days it was not unusual for perfect
link |
strangers to share a table because there wasn't enough tables and chairs and so forth.
link |
So I didn't know if I could approach him, but he got up and came to me and he took me
link |
to the table and he said, I want to introduce Herman.
link |
We work with our Soviet comrades.
link |
And then he disappeared.
link |
He says, I got something else to do.
link |
I never knew his name.
link |
He just handed me over to the KGB.
link |
What was the relationship between the KGB and Astazies as collaborators, close collaborators
link |
or just distant associates?
link |
They were pretty close collaborators as I told you that they bought forged documents
link |
that the Germans made because the Germans were better at forgery.
link |
They also exchanged information, but they didn't trust each other 100% and I tell you
link |
So they recruited me to send me to West Germany.
link |
As I already said, East Germany had a thousand agents over there.
link |
Why would they want to have their own?
link |
This is a fascinating internal and external dynamic of distrust.
link |
So there you are welcomed by the KGB.
link |
When did the offer, the invite come?
link |
Well, that took a while.
link |
So Herman and I had an unofficial relationship for about a year and a half.
link |
I would meet him once a week, once every two weeks, initially in his car, but then he took
link |
me to a conspirational flat that was an apartment that was occupied by a party member, a lady,
link |
When we came in, she would leave, she left us tea and cookies and then we could freely
link |
He also at that time gave me some West German literature magazines to read, which was of
link |
So I'm starting to feel somewhat special and as we were talking about what they had in
link |
mind for me in general, I knew that I was going to be even more special because I would
link |
I would operate outside the law of the countries I would go to as well as East Germany because
link |
the magazines and eventually when I joined up, they told me I had better watch West German
link |
television, which was also not explicitly prohibited, but it was something that could
link |
get you in trouble.
link |
So on many levels, you're super special, you're the James Bond.
link |
What was that recruitment testing process like?
link |
Testing whether you have what it takes to be a KGB agent?
link |
First of all, we had very in depth talks, Herman and I, about life and I still am very
link |
honest in sharing my feelings.
link |
Philosophical or personal?
link |
I even told him that I was shy around the girls.
link |
He was giving you relationship advice or what?
link |
So what was the dynamic?
link |
Can you tell me, was it a father, son?
link |
No, older brother.
link |
Yeah, he was maybe in his early to mid 30s and I was maybe 10 years younger.
link |
And what languages did he speak?
link |
He spoke German pretty well.
link |
But he's originally from Russia?
link |
Yeah, with a Russian accent.
link |
So I got in trouble one time with him when I asked him, is your real name German?
link |
He didn't like that.
link |
He didn't like it.
link |
Was he good with girls?
link |
I remember what he told me, he says, you've got to understand one thing, they're looking
link |
Oh, girls are looking for guys too?
link |
It's a competitive game.
link |
So that little flame of love that we talked about and all the shapes that it takes in
link |
our life, did he talk to you about that, that that could be taken advantage of, that that
link |
could be used or was it implied?
link |
Yeah, but not in, it was not very focused, not in great detail.
link |
So let's, so we talked about personal stuff and you know, like, dislikes, he gave me tasks.
link |
For instance, when my friend and I hitchhiked from East Germany all the way down to Bulgaria,
link |
he told me to write a report about it, what I saw.
link |
So fundamentally he wanted to see how well I can write and how well I can report, how
link |
He also asked me to write some profiles about fellow students.
link |
I don't believe that was for them to give him to the Stasi, it was just like, how well
link |
do I characterize people?
link |
That's important when you're talking about, when I was in the US, active in the US I operated
link |
So I did exactly that.
link |
I wrote profiles about people.
link |
He also gave me some tasks to do that were rather unpleasant.
link |
He would give me an address and a name of the people who lived at the address and he
link |
told me to go there, ring the doorbell and find out something about a relative who lived
link |
That is undercover exploration, right?
link |
So you go, you make up a story and somehow win the confidence of your target to tell
link |
you something that you want to know.
link |
Was that, did that come naturally to you?
link |
No, no, I hated it.
link |
The charisma involved, which part did you hate?
link |
Charisma, I think, I didn't know that I had it.
link |
It took you some time to discover.
link |
You know, I was, I always was and I still am to some degree a bit shy.
link |
I lost a lot of the shyness after moving to the South because, here in the United States,
link |
because you don't have to be shy, you know.
link |
You can let your love shine.
link |
That's exactly right.
link |
So, but anyway, I hated doing that, but I did it well.
link |
So I, in those days, I had a beard and I rang the bell and...
link |
Tall, handsome fella.
link |
And I looked the part, I said, I'm a sociology student and I'm doing a survey and I asked
link |
a whole bunch of questions, would you like to answer the questions?
link |
And then I directed the conversation to the lady's private life and she actually gave
link |
She volunteered information that I wanted to know.
link |
And the other one that I didn't like, but I also did well with, when Herman drove me
link |
around the city and showed me a building and he said, find out what organization is in
link |
there, what they do.
link |
We get to know some people and I did that pretty well also.
link |
You know, you have to be inventive, you know, to come up with a cover story and I've always
link |
been quite inventive, you know, I'm a storyteller at heart and that, I didn't know it then,
link |
but you know, I...
link |
But there was still something unpleasant about it.
link |
Which part was unpleasant?
link |
Well, the shyness and then, you know, I wasn't very comfortable lying.
link |
I became comfortable down the road, but you know, I was brutally honest and never hid
link |
But you know, over time you lose that uncomfortable feeling and you rationalize that you've got
link |
There's only one way, right?
link |
And you're serving a good cause.
link |
So you were talking to Herman for a year and a half?
link |
A year and a half.
link |
And then how did that progress?
link |
So he finally, I guess he sent a report to headquarters in Berlin and then he sent me
link |
on a three week, quote unquote, practice trip to Berlin.
link |
This was the first time when I had like a conspiratorial meeting where I had an address
link |
and a time and a code phrase and I met another agent.
link |
His name was Boris.
link |
These names were meaningless.
link |
They were all like cover names, right?
link |
So what was the code and the meaning?
link |
Can you give a little more detail?
link |
That code I don't remember.
link |
Not the code, but like, what do you mean by code?
link |
I tell you, the code we used when I met while I was active, I would approach the other person
link |
who I thought may be the person I want to meet.
link |
We both had something with us or on us to make us more likely to be the right person.
link |
And I would ask him the following questions, excuse me, I'm looking for Susan Green.
link |
And he would answer, yes, you must be David.
link |
If I ask a stranger, they would look at me, well, how could I help you?
link |
So I know it's the wrong guy.
link |
It's just a low probability that the right thing would be said, so it's a nice entry.
link |
And it seems like a safe statement if it's not the right person, it would just come off
link |
absurd or crazy or whatever.
link |
You would have made a good secret agent.
link |
You know exactly...
link |
How do you know I'm not?
link |
We'll discuss this further.
link |
I'm dressed like one.
link |
Actually, yeah, were there any dress code?
link |
And then be creative.
link |
Figure out ways to fit.
link |
So anyways, he gave me some tasks and since I had rented a room in a house, he gave me
link |
Western literature to read and we spent time together and there was a practice run to West
link |
Actually, there were two and that was very important.
link |
In hindsight, I figured that out.
link |
So I traveled to West Germany, no, not to West Berlin, with an East German passport
link |
that was stamped that that individual was allowed to go to the West.
link |
And there was a part of the border that was only guarded by Soviet troops and that's where
link |
they smuggled me into West Germany.
link |
I got on the subway and then appeared in West Berlin.
link |
No Americans, no Brits, no French knew that I had entered.
link |
No, no, this was an East German passport.
link |
So and the first trip, all they wanted me to do is just walk around, smell the air,
link |
have a beer or whatever and eat a sausage and then come back.
link |
The second trip, I had a task very similar to the one that I had back in Jena to ring
link |
the doorbell someplace and talk to some people and that worked very well also.
link |
I should mention that you talk about that, you know, eat a sausage, drink some beer.
link |
I suppose that's a good test too to see how you behave under Western, like when first
link |
introduced to the Western culture.
link |
Like this is why I might not make a good agent is when I first came to the United States
link |
in the supermarket, like bananas, as many bananas as I want to eat.
link |
That I think that would break me.
link |
It's a shock to have access to Western culture.
link |
You're getting very close to the reason they actually made me do these two practice trips.
link |
When I first emerged on West Berlin territory, I felt highly uncomfortable.
link |
That was at the enemy, right?
link |
And I saw the cops everywhere and even though those cops had like light blue uniforms, nothing,
link |
they weren't standouts.
link |
So I was wondering, you know, if they knew that, you know, I had like KGB on my forehead.
link |
So you were paranoid that they would know, they would see.
link |
I was scared, but I overcame that.
link |
So that's, can we just linger on that because I suppose that's a natural, like if I give
link |
anybody on the street the mission to do the mission you had to do is they would be paranoid.
link |
That's a natural human feeling is am I being watched?
link |
Like if you try to steal something from a store, there's going to be a feeling like,
link |
are they watching me?
link |
Are the cameras watching?
link |
Are the people watching me?
link |
They all know that kind of stuff.
link |
So you have to over, or you have to be somehow rugged and robust to that kind of feeling
link |
So and something very interesting happened while I was being trained in Berlin, I met
link |
a classmate of mine from high school and he confided to me that he was recruited by the
link |
Stasi to become a spy, go as a spy to West Germany.
link |
And he also had this practice trip and he peed in his pants.
link |
He went back and told him, I can't do that.
link |
Just from the terror, that paranoia.
link |
Now this guy's career was over.
link |
He had an engineering degree, he was a pretty smart guy, he was just for the rest of his
link |
life and he's still alive I believe, floating around and trading in model railroads and
link |
You mean do you think that experience broke him?
link |
They wouldn't let him back in.
link |
So this is a test that if you fail, you pay the price.
link |
I had no idea that, you know, something bad would happen if I failed that test, but I
link |
So, and this led then to the offer, all right, and after, you know, Boris was happy with
link |
me and he told his boss who was most likely the head of the KGB in East Berlin and I had
link |
an appointment to meet.
link |
All of East Germany.
link |
An appointment to meet with him and as we walk into the room, there was this huge desk
link |
and a little guy sitting behind it, very, very, just like little and unimpressive, right?
link |
A lot of paraphernalia, like, you know, had a bust of Dzerzhinsky on his desk and some
link |
paintings of Lenin and so forth, but when the guy opened his mouth, he went like, whoa.
link |
Huge psychological energy.
link |
He spoke only Russian now and initially, he would, you know, start the bet with five minutes
link |
worth of propaganda, why we're doing what we're doing, I didn't need that, I understood
link |
most of it, but when I didn't understand, I'd ask Boris to translate and then he sprung
link |
it on me and I was not prepared.
link |
He said, so what, are you in or not?
link |
And I was, no, I hadn't made up my mind.
link |
I wasn't expecting that would come and so I said to him, I'm not really trained, you
link |
know, there's a lot of things I need to learn and I came up with a couple of really stupid
link |
things, one not so stupid, but the other one was, I don't know why I said that, I said,
link |
for instance, I need to learn how to drive a car and to type with a typewriter and he
link |
got really annoyed and he said, don't worry about it, we'll train you.
link |
But I got to tell you, we need people who are decisive.
link |
So you got until tomorrow noon to give Boris your decision.
link |
That made for a sleepless night.
link |
So what was going through your mind?
link |
Well I had, this was almost 50, 50, I knew I was going to have a huge career, a good
link |
It was on my way because I was already employed by the university as an assistant professor.
link |
So that career would be to become a professor, become a 10 year professor, be a world class.
link |
Jena had become my hometown.
link |
I really loved the place.
link |
It was my oyster and my family was my basketball team.
link |
You love playing basketball.
link |
This is where your love is.
link |
Did you understand that the choice involved leaving the home behind?
link |
And the one thing I didn't have, the two things I didn't have, an emotional relationship
link |
with my mother and I didn't have a steady girlfriend at the time.
link |
I think Freud would have a lot to say about that, but yeah, go ahead.
link |
But the connection between those two, but yeah, I'm sure.
link |
By the way, my friend Günther, the one who worked for the Stasi, was also, the Stasi
link |
tried to recruit him as an agent, but he had a love relationship at the time and he said
link |
politely, no, I won't.
link |
So you didn't have, that's the one thing that really could have held you to this place
link |
So you got the career on the one hand, my basketball team, the town that I would be
link |
part of the ruling elite of, and then we had this great adventure and the ability to contribute
link |
to the victory, the worldwide victory of communism and stick it to the Nazis and of course the
link |
feeling that you're really special.
link |
What's, the question, do I want to be a tenured professor or James Bond?
link |
And as funny as that sounds, that was probably a difficult decision.
link |
It was a difficult decision, but fundamentally it wasn't, and it wasn't my zeal to help the
link |
It was my, what they called, what the Stasi was looking for, the KGB was looking for in
link |
a character that they would send over a well controlled inclination to adventure.
link |
In the love of women.
link |
I was, yes, I got to put this in right here because I'm telling people I have two things
link |
in common with James Bond.
link |
These are my initials, JB, and I got the girl too, three times.
link |
I mean that's, and that's adventure.
link |
And the ability to travel to the West because the West was closed off to us, we could go
link |
to foreign countries, but they all had to be communist countries.
link |
You know, I wanted to see Paris because I had fallen in love with the Honore Balzac
link |
who wrote a phenomenal set of novels that I just ate up.
link |
And so when I eventually did go to Paris, I knew all the places already because he described
link |
Okay, so that one, it was a, it was 5149, but eventually it, and you know, when you,
link |
when you do the side by side intellectual comparison, that doesn't work.
link |
And then, you know, you just go with your gut and I said, Hey, I'm in.
link |
So now that you successfully passed the test and you were sitting with this unimpressive
link |
man and had the invite and had to sleep on it and have made the decision to join.
link |
I was just told, you know, that I was being recruited by the state department of East
link |
I was going to become a diplomat.
link |
I must have had some paper, but I forgot because just by saying so, then that would, that wouldn't
link |
There's some kind of document that says that, and that was the only entanglement you had
link |
to that, to that place.
link |
No basketball, basketball, giving up basketball was huge for me.
link |
I love playing that game.
link |
I started playing basketball when I was 18.
link |
That's a little late.
link |
Are you better offensive, defensive?
link |
What do you like more?
link |
Do you like to shoot from a distance?
link |
Do you like, I was a runner.
link |
I was very, very quick on my feet and I was a good jumper too.
link |
I typically played the, uh, the, the four position, you know, what's that, uh, forward
link |
or the forward position, forward position.
link |
But anyway, um, so that, that, that was the hardest, uh, uh, for me to give up.
link |
Um, but indeed the other thing that I remember I had to do to hand in my party document to
link |
the party secretary of the university.
link |
And uh, he made a comment.
link |
We probably won't hear much about you, but, uh, we know that you're going to do something
link |
So he sort of had an inkling that, uh, I'm going, I'm going to go someplace, uh, undercover
link |
or something like that.
link |
And then I packed my bags and got on a train, uh, to Berlin for another one of those secret
link |
meetings with, uh, my, my new handler, Nikolai.
link |
So and here, here came another test that, that would have been quite easy to fail.
link |
So I, I had lived, uh, in Yena for six years in a dorm, even when I became a, an employee
link |
of the university, they didn't, they didn't have apartments.
link |
I was still living in a dorm and, and they won in a single room with a bed, a chair and
link |
a table and a toilet down the, down the hallway.
link |
So I figured, you know, Berlin KGB, I'm going to get a nice apartment, right?
link |
And so, uh, uh, Nikolai took me into his car.
link |
We started talking a little bit and then he said, I have a task for you already.
link |
Your first task is to find yourself a place to live.
link |
I mean, I don't think I showed it in my face, but you know, my heart, my, my, my, my heart
link |
dropped like down to into my pants.
link |
I, I knew this was nearly impossible because it was a severe shortage of, uh, of housing
link |
and in, in, in everywhere in Germany, East Germany and all the apartments and homes were
link |
controlled by, by the government.
link |
You know, there were long waiting lists.
link |
Uh, I know, I knew couples that, uh, were promised maybe to get an apartment, uh, five
link |
years down the road.
link |
So then they would postpone the decision to have a child.
link |
Anyway, this was impossible.
link |
Uh, well, yeah, but this was a test, you know, because I had to be inventive.
link |
Now I had to figure out, uh, how to get out of an impossible situation.
link |
I didn't realize it then at all.
link |
I just went with the flow, you know, what do I do?
link |
So what I did, I went, I took the train, the city train, uh, to the very last stop, a little
link |
town called Ackner.
link |
And I wandered around in that town and knocked on doors and asked people if they knew where
link |
somebody might have a place to live.
link |
And after a couple of hours, somebody said, there's this lady that, and she gave, and
link |
they gave me the address and I talked to the lady and she said, I happen to have a place
link |
that you might, uh, that where you might be able to stay.
link |
It was an outbuilding.
link |
Uh, I don't know what it was, what it served.
link |
It was not a garage.
link |
And it had, um, a bed and a chair, uh, running cold water and a stove, a cold stove.
link |
That was my, was going to be my...
link |
Are you kidding me?
link |
Toilet across the yard, of course.
link |
Well, all the essentials.
link |
What are you complaining about?
link |
So you were, you had to run the, uh, the special, James Bond had to run a special operation
link |
To, to, to my credit, and I think that, that, uh, that established part of my reputation.
link |
I didn't complain at all to Nikolai.
link |
That was part of the test probably.
link |
I just told him, you know, I found something.
link |
And so, uh, for six months I would get up in the morning, get on the train and walk
link |
around in the city, you know, uh, did some operational stuff, uh, operational training.
link |
I went to the library, did a lot of reading in the library.
link |
And then I found a basketball team that I could join.
link |
So at least I could take a shower twice a week.
link |
Um, and, uh, and apparently it took about six months that I was still on probation because
link |
after six months, Nikolai, one day we were still meeting in his car, he said, he handed
link |
me a key and he said, I'm going to take you to your new apartment.
link |
Now I, and I didn't know this, you know, that now I was really in.
link |
Imagine the hurdles you have to jump over and how many times you can fail, but you know.
link |
But not complaining, not asking questions.
link |
I mean, that was something you've written about.
link |
Um, I think you wrote that bosses do not like to hear complaints or problems.
link |
They prefer solutions.
link |
So what was your interaction like with the bosses?
link |
Is that essentially, um, represents the way he went forward as well?
link |
I, no complaints, no arguments, no, no, I know this better.
link |
I was taking it all in now that the, the, the technical guys, you know, they taught
link |
me something I didn't know that made sense.
link |
Um, what Nikolai, some of the stuff that he taught me was somewhat questionable.
link |
He was a generalist and there's some things he didn't know really well.
link |
So I could have like asked, probed a little bit, but I didn't.
link |
So I just played along.
link |
So this new apartment was, uh, uh, it was a studio at, at, at, at a kitchen with running
link |
cold water and the bathroom was just one flight down the toilet, not a bathroom, uh, one flight
link |
down the stairs, uh, it was a big upgrade.
link |
And he gave me, uh, I think he gave me a thousand mark to buy, buy furniture.
link |
And in that place, I actually, I also bought a TV and started watching West German television.
link |
So I finally had a decent place to stay.
link |
Um, and the, the, my training in Berlin took about two years.
link |
What was the training?
link |
What were the interesting aspects to the training?
link |
What were sort of, if you do an overview systematic of what was the training process, what was
link |
difficult, what are some insights that generalize to the training process of what it takes to
link |
So, uh, let me start with the trade craft.
link |
So I was taught Morse code that took a while, uh, I, I, I was, uh, instructed in how to,
link |
you know, use a shortwave radio and to receive, uh, the, the shortwave, uh, transmissions
link |
I was taught, uh, uh, and a encryption and decryption algorithm, manual algorithm, you,
link |
you might be interested that eventually I figured out, uh, at least one of the patterns,
link |
uh, the, the algorithm was such that the, and this was all about digits, like, uh, and
link |
the algorithm was such that in the end, the, uh, the digits that were used to decipher
link |
other digits that were handed, uh, that were sent to me by a shortwave radio, there were,
link |
let's say if there were a hundred digits, there were an equal number of ones, twos,
link |
threes, fours, fives, six, and seven, and up until zero.
link |
And I was told that, uh, these, um, uh, algorithms, these manual algorithms were, were good for
link |
After that, they could still be deciphered.
link |
I'm assuming nowadays that, uh, wouldn't take as much.
link |
With, with computers for sure.
link |
But there's probably, they're probably designed in a way that you can manually sort of, uh,
link |
it's efficient and convenient to use them manually, it's not to optimize cryptographic
link |
security, it's to optimize, it's like to balance security and like humans being able to actually.
link |
No, I got to disagree.
link |
It was neither efficient nor convenient.
link |
It took a long time.
link |
So it wasn't decipherable.
link |
When, what was, what was significantly easier to do, uh, but, uh, that would require you
link |
to have spied paraphernalia with you.
link |
This is what's called a one time pad.
link |
So you have the set of numbers on, on a sheet of paper, uh, that had to be developed.
link |
I had to use iodine to make those numbers visible.
link |
Those are known to be unbreakable unless they are used multiple times, the same, the same
link |
sheet of paper, because, you know, the person who encrypts has the same set of numbers as
link |
the person who decrypts and one, one time use, you cannot figure out what the message
link |
But this is a quick way to communicate from one person to another one time, one time.
link |
One time, but I had a pad with multiple, uh, sheets of paper, right?
link |
And, uh, the reason that they gave me a manual one is because I literally, I had only when
link |
I, when I wound up in the United States, I had only one thing with me that, uh, only
link |
And that was a, uh, a writing pad with, uh, uh, where the first 10 pages or so were impregnated
link |
with a trace of a chemical that was used for secret writing.
link |
Uh, but you really would have to know what you're looking for to, you know, you see this
link |
pad it was bought at, uh, you know, Walmart and.
link |
Can you explain a little, a little further?
link |
What is the chemical here that, what are we talking about?
link |
So how, I don't understand how it's possible to have a physical pad that does the encryption
link |
without any computing.
link |
How does it encode?
link |
So, so no, no, it doesn't, it doesn't do any work, you know, so, and the, uh, the communication
link |
that the encrypted communication was, uh, was, uh, a set of, uh, uh, groups of five,
link |
five digits and then another five and there's always a gap in between, um, and, uh, so let's
link |
say if I get this radio transmission, I write them all down and then I, then I use my, uh,
link |
develop my algorithm and then I do mathematics, either addition or subtraction.
link |
The resulting set of digits had then had a one to one correlation to letters.
link |
And this is an easy way to then do the correlation.
link |
Well, that's cool.
link |
So you're saying the algorithm was not efficient.
link |
Oh, the manual took a long time and, and you can't make an error.
link |
Uh, would you know where, can you, is it easy to debug?
link |
No, no, you do it twice.
link |
You do it twice and that's how you check.
link |
If it's identical, then you know, but like, if it's not, then one is right and the other
link |
You gotta do it again.
link |
Don't make mistakes.
link |
And I really didn't.
link |
So I was, I was learning that, uh, I was also, uh, told that I was required to become proficient
link |
in another language and they gave me a choice and I picked English.
link |
That's what was the other one.
link |
Oh no, pick one friend, you know, whatever is spoken in the West.
link |
Uh, what was, what was, what would be second to you?
link |
Would you, would you think French because of Paris?
link |
What would you, what, why English?
link |
English was a no brainer because I, I was a straight age to a student in English without
link |
I like it came so easily to me.
link |
So that's why I chose it, right?
link |
So that was that, uh, then, uh, um, I, uh, I w I was taught the basics of, um, uh, counter
link |
surveillance, you know, some trickery and, and, and, uh, um, uh, surveillance detection
link |
routes where you wander around in the city for three hours and determine whether you're
link |
being followed or not.
link |
That requires you to plan the route very well.
link |
I give you one example that, uh, that will illustrate that as my, my favorite spot.
link |
When, when, when I was in Moscow, I did a lot of that also.
link |
And if my favorite spot was, I wasn't a not well traveled, uh, uh, road.
link |
It went down the hill and, and curved.
link |
And at the bottom of the hill, there was a telephone booth.
link |
And when you open the door and pick up the telephone, you have to look back.
link |
So it wasn't like this, right?
link |
It wasn't a giveaway.
link |
So I could see if somebody would come walking after me, you know, these kinds of things.
link |
Or you would, uh, uh, you know, use, um, public transportation, uh, big buildings, uh, where
link |
you needed to use an elevator and see who's because surveillance, the, the object of
link |
surveillance is to never lose sight of the individual who you're surveilling because
link |
at that point you may miss the window where he does something that you're looking for.
link |
So somebody always has to come close, right?
link |
Did you have to also study surveillance?
link |
No, only counter surveillance.
link |
And what helped me in, in, in all my training, uh, you know, I, I would be, uh, would have
link |
a competition with, uh, uh, folks that were coming, they were following me and me.
link |
And I beat them every time, uh, they were at a disadvantage because one of them always
link |
had to be close and, and if you saw the same face twice, you know that you were being followed.
link |
And I had a very, very good, uh, memory for, for faces.
link |
So basically figure out a fixed route and then a fixed route that allows you to, uh,
link |
survey the area and then record the faces you've seen inside your mind.
link |
And if, uh, you see multiple times a single face, that's, that's a bad sign.
link |
And then they could, they could, uh, you use, uh, different clothes, uh, but they didn't
link |
have was face masks.
link |
The CIA does nowadays.
link |
They can give you a different face within seconds.
link |
So how big, I mean, again, you talk about paranoia, um, is that part of the, is that
link |
a big part of the job, uh, counter surveillance, like being constantly paranoid that you're
link |
I was supposed to.
link |
Isn't that quite stressful.
link |
So is that, is that one of the, is that actually an effective way to operate?
link |
Uh, nobody, it sort of becomes a routine.
link |
Uh, I was told to do it, uh, while in the U S once a month and, uh, okay.
link |
It's like a cleaning out.
link |
Oh, not, not every day.
link |
No, no, no, no, no.
link |
Once a month or before I would say, mail a letter with secret writing.
link |
So I was sure that, you know, nobody saw me put an envelope into a postbox.
link |
So this is one of the tools in your toolbox is Morse code.
link |
There's the decryption and encryption.
link |
There's the car surveillance, photography, um, making, making microdots, you know, what
link |
What's a microdot?
link |
It's, uh, you use, you, you take a photograph and you use a microscope in reverse and, uh,
link |
make that photograph really small, so small that it's like the head of a pin that can
link |
be used to, uh, hide under a postage stamp.
link |
Uh, in reality, I knew how to make them, but in reality, they, they never asked me to make
link |
use of that technique.
link |
So it's a, it's a sort of an encryption mechanism for photographs.
link |
So what we do nowadays, embed, uh, code in, in, uh, PDFs and stuff like that.
link |
So that, that was a learning, a training process, both in the physical space and sort
link |
of, um, algorithmically.
link |
Is there other things?
link |
Uh, interestingly enough, the, uh, I was, um, the first book I was given to read was
link |
the history of this, uh, these, uh, communist party of the Soviet union.
link |
Oh, so understand.
link |
That's interesting.
link |
Cause you said you had to read Western literature.
link |
How much, how much reading, so history, how much history of politics, geopolitics, culture.
link |
Not much more, but they made me read that document.
link |
Other than that, I wasn't supposed to study the Soviet union.
link |
I wasn't supposed and that was not, and I didn't, when they sent me to Moscow, it wasn't
link |
to learn Russia, Russian, right?
link |
It was to learn English.
link |
Um, the, the second document they gave me was the, the constitution of West Germany.
link |
And then I got lots of magazines and stuff like that.
link |
Uh, as I told you, I was, uh, also told to, uh, uh, watch West German television, which
link |
I, which I, uh, embraced with a vengeance because it was better than East German.
link |
So I would get up in the morning and have a little breakfast and watch the German version
link |
And that, that, that helps you, uh, that helps you get an understanding of the culture.
link |
You have to do any kind of, uh, interaction, kind of spying that you have to be, be able
link |
to effectively integrate.
link |
Well, you, you also have to know, like, and, and that would have been easier, uh, if I,
link |
they had sent me to West Germany, you know, all the soccer teams, you know, stuff that
link |
everybody knows when I came to the U S I knew very little stuff that everybody knows.
link |
That's why I had to be very cautious and, you know, take it in all the time anyway.
link |
Uh, and the, the last thing I want to mention is, uh, they, uh, I was strongly encouraged
link |
to, uh, expand my, my cultural education.
link |
In other words, go to visit museums, uh, go to the theater, uh, not so much movies, uh,
link |
opera, read, read books from all kinds of authors.
link |
Uh, that was important to them.
link |
And once a month I had to write a report what I did, but the interesting thing, there was
link |
not a, there was no curriculum, there was no agenda, there were no check marks.
link |
It was all ad hoc.
link |
You know, now you do this and then you do that.
link |
Uh, and, uh, and a lot of this also, they relied on my initiative.
link |
I mean, that's part of the evaluation too.
link |
Um, are you able to have creative, it's interesting that they're like developing a James Bond
link |
type of character here, which is what, what's the reason to go to the opera as you become
link |
In a certain kind of way where perhaps that makes you, uh, more charming, more charismatic
link |
in terms of your ability to integrate yourself in different situations.
link |
You absolutely right.
link |
Uh, uh, I, I was, I was, um, uh, uh, when I came to the US after about, uh, two years
link |
roughly, um, I was cultured enough to, uh, not, uh, make a bad impression at a, at a
link |
diplomatic soiree in Washington, DC.
link |
And, and, and so the whole idea was for me to sort of reach into the upper, uh, realms
link |
of society where the targets would be juicier than, you know, the worker bees.
link |
And how did you end up in Moscow?
link |
What is that journey?
link |
Well, so I, uh, I told you, and I started studying English, so I started back from scratch,
link |
you know, they paid for a tutor and I went from like English 101 and then I went through
link |
that in a couple of months then.
link |
And then I got another guy with whom we, I expanded this.
link |
We had conversations rather than working from a textbook and I, and I worked like a maniac.
link |
I threw myself into the study of, of, of, uh, uh, English.
link |
Like you wouldn't believe.
link |
Um, and, and my inspiration came from Vladimir Lenin.
link |
I had read somewhere in a book that when Lenin was in exile, he studied German and he learned
link |
100 German words every day, new German words.
link |
So I started reading newspapers and every word that I didn't know, I wrote down on an
link |
index card, uh, German, English, and, uh, and I piled them up.
link |
And so I really learned 100 new English words every day.
link |
I know this because I counted them and I had a system how to do this.
link |
Uh, uh, so you take your index card and you have five categories is a really good way
link |
to learn wrote by wrote.
link |
Uh, so you've got category one, that's the new ones and you've got category five.
link |
So you start with, uh, with five, five, you already had right four times.
link |
If you have it right again, it goes to the archive.
link |
Oh, in like longterm cold archive.
link |
If you get it right, it goes to five.
link |
If you get it wrong, it gets relegated to three or so.
link |
And so you go through this and, uh, um, and occasionally I would throw the archive things
link |
So I really, I really acquired a phenomenal vocabulary.
link |
When I was done with my English, my vocabulary was significantly higher than the average
link |
American because I, I, I didn't discriminate whatever word I didn't know I learned, which
link |
is not necessarily the best way because you know, English has a lot of synonyms, right?
link |
And one synonym is usually the, the preferable one and, and I, um, when I first interacted
link |
with people, I very often used the one that wasn't as good.
link |
And people have found that I, you know, I have an interesting way of talking.
link |
They didn't know what that meant, but yeah.
link |
So it builds a good foundation for a language is getting a large vocabulary.
link |
It's really interesting.
link |
There's something I do, which is called space repetition, which is a programmatic way of
link |
doing this kind of system that you've developed yourself, which is if you successfully remember
link |
a thing, it's going to be a longer time before it brings it up to you again.
link |
Now that's requires a computer to keep track of information.
link |
If you have cars, that's a really interesting pile system.
link |
One, two, three, four, five, you upgrade it one, two, three, four, five.
link |
Maybe I wouldn't go to the archive and go to them to, to pile one right away.
link |
I would go to like, I don't know, pile five, perhaps is probably the right place to put
link |
Cause, cause you have to go through that full step again, but that is a really powerful
link |
way to learn definitely language, but also facts.
link |
Like people that go to medical school.
link |
Disconnected facts.
link |
And, and you pretty much, when you're done, you, you know what you know.
link |
You don't have to.
link |
Then again, to use it, to integrate it into the music of language.
link |
That's more difficult.
link |
That's what you're talking about.
link |
I mean, maybe it's not good for Spycraft, but there's a charm to this kind of, to having
link |
an accent and using words incorrectly, but confidently there's a, because language isn't
link |
Language is the play of words.
link |
So actually using the incorrect synonym, you know, as it, you know, if, instead of saying
link |
I'm cold saying I'm chilled or something.
link |
Like using off beat words can actually be part of the charm.
link |
So it's interesting if you can learn how to use that correctly.
link |
Cause I've known a bunch of people with the Russian accent and I feel like they get, get
link |
away with saying a lot of ridiculous shit because they're able to sort of leverage the
link |
charm of the non sequiturs.
link |
And by the way, by the way, just one, one thing that we talked about using a computer.
link |
When I had my first personal computer, I actually wrote a program that does that.
link |
By the way, when was that?
link |
When, cause you were a world class programmer for a time.
link |
You were a very good programmer.
link |
When, when did the birth?
link |
First PC was probably 1984.
link |
When did you fall in love with programming?
link |
When I went to college in the US and part of the core curriculum was that you were required
link |
to take a course in computer and it was mostly just, you know, talk, but we also had to learn
link |
Uh, we had to write some programs and Fortran, which was what five at the time, it was a,
link |
it was a dumbed down Fortran, but listen, so I, I see the ability, I see what, what
link |
you can do with this, I programmed a sine curve and then I divided the, the sine curve
link |
into really, really small rectangles and then ran the program and it came up with the right
link |
That's incredible.
link |
That's so powerful.
link |
It's, uh, you're creating, you're creating a little helper helps you understand the world
link |
to help you analyze the world and so on.
link |
Uh, we'll, we'll return to that cause it's interesting.
link |
So you have so many interesting aspects to your life, but Moscow.
link |
Yeah, no, let me, let, no, let me, how I was sent to Moscow.
link |
So one day I had a visitor from Moscow, uh, and he came to visit me in my apartment, uh,
link |
together with, uh, Nikolai and he, you know, we talked and then he said, how's your English?
link |
I said, I pulled a book from the shelf and says, I can read that without the help of
link |
Oh, that's interesting.
link |
And he said, you know what, we're going to send you a tape recorder and you just talk,
link |
say something, you know, for 20 minutes, whatever you want to talk about.
link |
Uh, they sent this thing and two weeks later I was on a plane to Moscow because I also
link |
spoke English, sort of the British variety of English with not a strong German accent
link |
because I've always had the ability to imitate others and sounds that was an innate ability.
link |
I would, uh, you know, when, when, when we were in a lab and, uh, as students, I would
link |
very often do, uh, monologues, uh, imitating East German comedians.
link |
You know, I just, yes, yes.
link |
I'm not good enough to make a living out of it, but, uh, that raised some interest.
link |
And so when they sent me to Moscow, that was the first time on a plane, by the way, um,
link |
and, uh, I had a conversation with two ladies who spoke English.
link |
One was a, a Russian, a professor at, uh, Lomonosov University.
link |
She was obviously KGB, that was her cover.
link |
And the other one was an American born lady.
link |
Oh, by the way, she was an actual professor and using that as the cover or is it just
link |
No, I, she said she was a professor.
link |
She may have taught there too.
link |
That's an interesting distinction.
link |
One is like a story you tell people and one is like you legit are doing the thing, but
link |
are also as a cover.
link |
Anyway, that's, that's an interesting aspect of how to be a good liar.
link |
You might, you might as well live the lie.
link |
Yeah, exactly right.
link |
Uh, so, uh, and the other one was a middle aged, the, the Russian was pretty young.
link |
The other one was middle aged and American and, uh, and so we talked for maybe a couple
link |
of hours and then they withdrew and I was left alone.
link |
Eventually my liaison, he came back in and he said, it was close, but the American thinks
link |
you can actually, uh, become, uh, you get close enough to become, becoming a native
link |
speaker of American English.
link |
And he said, the Russian was very doubtful.
link |
So I think wishful, it was, it was a tie, literally wishful thinking prevailed.
link |
So, uh, within a couple of weeks I was moving to Moscow.
link |
And what, what was the task in Moscow and what, how long were you in Moscow?
link |
And what was the task there?
link |
Is it training or is it espionage?
link |
No, it was training.
link |
It was, uh, so it was, uh, I, uh, the, the American born became my tutor.
link |
I met with her twice a week.
link |
Uh, I, uh, I also listened to a lot of BBC, shortwave BBC worldwide, uh, I read, uh, more
link |
So a lot of that was about the language and the culture of English, uh, American.
link |
And, and I did phonetics exercises every night.
link |
I had a tape that was about a half hour long and they would say a word and I would repeat
link |
the word, say a word, repeat the word.
link |
And it was mostly about the vowels, by the way, most of the accent and, uh, uh, particularly
link |
because let's say coming from German into, into English, but also Russian.
link |
You're talking about the, so you would have a single word, a word, apple, and you would
link |
And American English or British English?
link |
No, American English.
link |
And, and I give you one, uh, example that almost nobody gets right.
link |
The difference between hot and hut, you know, and in German speakers, it's very tough.
link |
You know, which one, uh, for everyone is different.
link |
For example, uh, I could say this on a podcast, something that my brother struggles with,
link |
I struggled with too, when I first came to this country to learn English is there's differences.
link |
There's embarrassing differences, uh, like beach and bitch, right?
link |
And you get so, as a young kid, also you get so nervous of, I don't want to say the wrong
link |
I, um, I can also say that this is almost as a jokey thing, but, uh, there's a, there's
link |
a famous philosopher, uh, Immanuel Kant, and you can, uh, guess which other word is very
link |
So there's a, there's a nervousness about the, what is that?
link |
That's interesting.
link |
I mean, and Germans probably have a different, uh, tension of like what is hard to learn
link |
the difference between the pronunciation of the vowels or the control of the vowels.
link |
So you had to really master this daily exercise and, you know, and this, this was my discipline.
link |
I did this every night, routine, boring as hell.
link |
Uh, so English was the focus.
link |
And I also had interaction with some, uh, agents who had operated in the United States
link |
as diplomats on the, on the diplomatic cover.
link |
They would come and talk to me a little bit and tell me and sort of prepare me what was
link |
And then I did a whole lot of operational training, particularly surveillance detection.
link |
They also, they also taught me how to drive a car in Moscow.
link |
Finally, the one skill you needed.
link |
What's a surveillance detection?
link |
So this is what, when, when you find out whether you're being followed.
link |
Ah, got it, got it, got it.
link |
So it's the, yeah, got you.
link |
The abbreviation that's used in, uh, in, in, in, uh, yes, uh, in, uh, intelligence circles
link |
is SDR, surveillance detection route, you know, when they say that, you know what that
link |
Uh, and, and that was it.
link |
Uh, and a, and a few other things, you know, one offs, for instance, uh, I was once, uh,
link |
taught, uh, to read silhouettes of ships.
link |
When you see a ship from a distance, what kind of a ship it might be.
link |
They, they thought this would come in handy.
link |
Actually they, they, uh, there was in, in 1982, Andropov, uh, started, uh, a campaign
link |
that was, uh, now I forget the name, Operation something, something where everybody who was
link |
in the West was supposed to, uh, look for science that, uh, the West was, uh, uh, getting
link |
And I had an, everybody had an object to, uh, to pay attention to.
link |
I had a, uh, uh, a harbor, a military harbor in, um, um, in, in New Jersey, uh, near Red
link |
Bank that was called Earl Weapon Station.
link |
And the code name for that was early.
link |
So they asked me to just wander by there to see if there was something unusual going on
link |
because the Soviet Union were at that point, it was Ronald Reagan were really afraid that
link |
Reagan was going to start a war.
link |
They were absolutely 100% afraid of him.
link |
Is there something memorable to you on a personal level and a philosophical level about your
link |
Something that kind of stays with you outside of the training stuff, maybe like the details
link |
You love the answer.
link |
You will love the answer.
link |
Uh, I was, uh, I was given tickets to two, uh, performances by Americans.
link |
Uh, there was a theater troupe that, uh, played Our Town.
link |
Uh, and then there was this, I forgot the name of the guy, but, uh, uh, you may not
link |
Have you ever watched Hee Haw?
link |
Uh, maybe, uh, there was a, it was a country music show, real kitschy, but, uh, the star
link |
of Hee Haw, uh, was giving a concert in Moscow and I guarantee you at least half the audience
link |
were KGB and at the other end, the, uh, uh, um, the, the, the opposite of, uh, of a, of
link |
a highlight was my visit to the, uh, to, to my, to the mausoleum where Lenin, uh, is still,
link |
There, there was so, there was a nothing, you know, he was, he was my hero, but he,
link |
he looked like a wax figure and, and, and you walk by there, there was nothing inspirational
link |
and not, not, it was not a religious experience, nothing, it was, it was a big old nothing.
link |
Is that, did, did your faith and belief in communism start to crumble at some point here?
link |
Is that around, that was still pretty strong.
link |
What I did notice that, uh, the standard of living in, in, in Moscow was significantly
link |
lower than in East Germany.
link |
The, uh, uh, in the supermarkets, uh, you could, you could expect, uh, with reliability
link |
that you can find, uh, canned fish and, uh, mineral water.
link |
Everything else was whatever.
link |
And if you saw a line and at a store, you just line up.
link |
You don't even ask what they have because if you don't like it, somebody else will.
link |
It was, it, it was, uh, not poverty, but it was close to poverty.
link |
There were a lot of drunken men in the streets.
link |
This is the eighties?
link |
No, this is the late seventies, mid to late seventies.
link |
And uh, and also the, they had these high rise apartment buildings that looked pretty
link |
good from the front, but you went into the backyard, ouch.
link |
You're describing my childhood here.
link |
Uh, but it's interesting even, even with the professor, even with everything else, um,
link |
it's interesting because I think the standard of living was much lower.
link |
The one thing that they always had, at least in my days, was in those two years, there
link |
was always fresh bread in the Bulatnoyars.
link |
That's probably one of the memories I have of childhood is, well you're hungry a lot,
link |
but when you eat is bread and the bread was good.
link |
I mean, I don't, I actually wonder, I wonder how good it was, but I remember it being incredibly
link |
To me it was really good.
link |
And, and you know, you had it from white to very dark and all the varieties.
link |
The other thing that was good was, um, if you knew where to get it, Stolichnaya was
link |
Not only is it good vodka, but it's a cheap vodka.
link |
But you had to know where, you know, this would be like holes in the wall someplace.
link |
Well, I think a lot of the way they operate, I don't, I wonder if East Germany is this
link |
way, but a lot of the ways that Moscow operate is you kind of, you had to know.
link |
Like there's a very kind of, um, if you make the right friends, if you give money to the
link |
right guy, the guy, the friend of the friend of the friend is going to hook you up and
link |
that's, there's a culture that this is how you work around a very big bureaucracy.
link |
Underground economy.
link |
Underground economy.
link |
You have to know, which is, uh, boy, um, such a stark contrast between, between that and
link |
the United States, the capitalist system.
link |
Um, yeah, that was a very big culture shock to me to understand the different, the different
link |
fundamentally different way of life.
link |
But the interesting thing is, um, human nature pervades both systems and there is something
link |
about the Russian system that reveals human nature more intensely because of the underground
link |
Because you get to deal with greed and trust and all those kinds of things in the United
link |
States, there is much more power to the rule of law.
link |
So there's rules and people follow those rules, they had to break the rules nonstop.
link |
Well, in East Germany and Russia, I believe, uh, theft, if you could get away with it was
link |
part of your economic activity.
link |
I have a friend, uh, you know, who, who I went to school with, uh, up until my fourth
link |
year and, uh, we reconnected and he told me how he survived, you know, he would, you know,
link |
he would just steal stuff and then sell it and trade it.
link |
I mean, it's a relative concept.
link |
You are taking stuff.
link |
Uh, bribery, all those kinds of things, people, you know, um, corruption, you know, it's a
link |
No, I'm just kidding.
link |
I mean, it is, you have to work around the giant bureaucracy about the giant corruption.
link |
Corruption builds on top of corruption and then it just becomes this giant system that's
link |
unstable as you talked about.
link |
The two years in Moscow taught me how to be alone.
link |
I had no social interaction.
link |
Not with friends, not with women, not.
link |
I was, the only interaction I had was with the folks that trained me.
link |
It was a lonely two years.
link |
For a person who, who loves love.
link |
Is that difficult?
link |
It was for my first year and first and second year in the United States because I could
link |
not interact socially without giving away that something was wrong with me.
link |
I had to learn how to be an American.
link |
They didn't teach me in Moscow.
link |
So the first two years in, uh, in America, you had to kind of listen more than talk.
link |
The very first year I couldn't even work because I had to acquire the documents, the social
link |
security card and a driver's license, uh, to get a job.
link |
And then when I had the job, uh, I worked as a bike messenger, uh, that gave me a good
link |
opportunity to listen as, as, you know, because these people, they weren't very curious about
link |
What was your name in East Germany, what was your name in Moscow, what was your name in
link |
So my, the name I was given at birth is Albrecht Dittrich.
link |
It's so sexy when you speak in German with a German accent.
link |
I hate, I hated that name, the Albrecht.
link |
It was, it was very rarely used.
link |
Uh, my mother named me after a famous German painter, Albrecht Dittrich.
link |
My cover name in Moscow was known as Dieter and, and, and in the United States I became
link |
In between I used a whole bunch of other names that were associated with, uh, false passports
link |
that, uh, uh, I used.
link |
One of the names I remember is William Dyson because that is the name that was on the Canadian
link |
passport I used to enter the United States.
link |
So how did you enter the United States?
link |
Can we take the journey from Moscow to the United States?
link |
What was the assignment?
link |
What was the, what was that leap?
link |
What was like, what, uh.
link |
Just one, one, one thing in between, I had a three months practice trip to, to, uh, Canada.
link |
That was, that was a good idea and I got to tell you this, this one thing that happened
link |
So, because, you know, the one, one thing that I like to tell people nowadays is the,
link |
one of the secrets to happiness is the ability to make fun of the worst situations that you're
link |
You see the humor.
link |
In hindsight, at least, uh, one of my, uh, the tasks that I had in, in, in Canada was
link |
to acquire a birth certificate, uh, with the name, uh, the name was Henry Van Randall,
link |
who was born someplace in California.
link |
And I was supposed to, uh, you know, write a little letter saying, I'm Henry Van Randall.
link |
Please send me a copy of my birth certificate.
link |
The fee is enclosed and, uh, and, and I, uh, I lived in a small hotel.
link |
So the return address, it wasn't visible that it was a hotel.
link |
That was important.
link |
So, and it took like three weeks and I get nothing, four weeks, I get nothing.
link |
Eventually I got annoyed and I, I, I, I mustered the courage to call them up from a pay phone.
link |
I called up the office registrar, whatever they were called in this, in this town in
link |
California and I, and I yelled at them, I said, you got my money, where's my birth certificate?
link |
Well, a couple of weeks later it came.
link |
So I see the envelope and it says Henry Van Randall.
link |
I had prepared the caretakers of the, um, of the hotel to, that I'm expecting a letter
link |
So I went up to my room, I opened it and I was like, yes, yes, this is success.
link |
And then, and then I opened this thing and it was, it was a copy of a birth certificate,
link |
but it was stamped with big letters across in red deceased.
link |
Now think about it.
link |
So here's a dead people who was asking for that person who was asking for a birth certificate.
link |
I had the presence of mind to, to leave.
link |
I went to a couple of other cities.
link |
I should have left the country.
link |
But I know that the Royal Mounted Police was following me and I was given that information
link |
by the FBI later on.
link |
You were able to, oh, you were able to at least suspect that at the time through the,
link |
I knew that, I knew that there was trouble.
link |
So I, my counter surveillance route, yes, didn't discover anything.
link |
So I kept on going, I had to, supposed to, I was supposed to visit two more cities and
link |
they were always one step behind.
link |
What, what, what is interesting to me is that they didn't catch me on the way out.
link |
You have to show your passport to the airline.
link |
I mean, I, I, I was known by name.
link |
I would then, the path, because I had to give that to the hotel, right.
link |
And I, and I escaped with, by a hair.
link |
They, they would have to keep you on a list, right?
link |
Yeah, that's interesting.
link |
But that requires like a good computerized updated system to track all that stuff.
link |
This was Swiss air, so.
link |
Well, you got lucky.
link |
Part of life is luck.
link |
So, so, and, and other than that, the, the trip to Canada was a big success because it,
link |
it gave me the culture shock that, that I needed to not be blown out of, out of the
link |
And when I get, get to the United States.
link |
So you hopped a few places in Canada and then Swiss air.
link |
I even had a, I even had a relationship with a young lady.
link |
A Canadian, French Canadian, regular Canadian.
link |
French Canadian, and she, she gave me a book, Winnie the Pooh, because we went to see the
link |
movie and then she wrote the dedication, she says, to the nicest German I've ever met.
link |
Or you don't know, maybe.
link |
Speaking of Spycraft, and that, that led to heartbreak too?
link |
I was not at that point.
link |
Ready to return to that old.
link |
Well, and I was, I was already married in Germany.
link |
That woman I loved.
link |
We should return to this.
link |
So Swiss air, where did you land in the United States?
link |
Oh, when I came, where did I land?
link |
I, I, American Airlines, a flight from Mexico City to Toronto, but they made me deplane
link |
I think this was overengineering.
link |
That didn't make any sense to me.
link |
You know, why can't a Canadian just take a, take a flight from Mexico City?
link |
With this stopover, this kind of nonsense.
link |
But nevertheless, that was it, and then you landed in Chicago.
link |
And tell me the story in America.
link |
What was the day to day life?
link |
Now this is, now you're a spy.
link |
I got to tell you another funny story.
link |
So it's another, there's two things that happened that could have ended my career as a spy right
link |
So I'm, so I'm, I'm arriving in, in Chicago in the evening.
link |
It's already dark.
link |
I had no idea what kind of a hotel to take, you know, I picked one out of a, out of yellow
link |
pages and got a taxi.
link |
When I gave him the address, he looked at me like a little funny, you know, whatever,
link |
You know, it was keep on going.
link |
I need to get, I need to get sleep because I was extremely tense, you know, having gone
link |
through customs and border control.
link |
So and we were going in the Southern direction and I noticed that the neighborhoods became
link |
less and less inviting.
link |
Didn't know what that meant either.
link |
I get, I enter the hotel, it was a five story brownstone and something else looked funny.
link |
So the reception desk was protected by plexiglass.
link |
Not having enough background, I didn't know that this was unusual because all I knew that
link |
there was a lot of crime in the United States.
link |
So I thought maybe every hotel was like that.
link |
So I go up into my room and drink a half a bottle of, uh, Johnny Walker red because I,
link |
as one does, yeah, because I was so damn tense.
link |
I just wanted to sleep.
link |
I wanted to get into a coma, which I did.
link |
And then the next day I woke up with a head that was twice as big as felt twice as big.
link |
But you know, I was prepared.
link |
I had aspirin with me, so I killed the headache and went outside to see if I can get something
link |
And, uh, so I was right smack in the middle of the South side of Chicago.
link |
I didn't know that the South side of Chicago existed.
link |
I found later, I found out where I was.
link |
So it was time to go very quickly, uh, go up there.
link |
And at that point I decided I would, uh, uh, I would register, uh, at the next hotel on
link |
So I went to the bathroom and I tried to kill, kill off, uh, uh, Mr. Dyson by burning his
link |
Um, unfortunately I was not trained in how to train passport, uh, how to, how to destroy
link |
passports was, uh, so I tried to burn it and these things are flame retardant.
link |
And, uh, it created a cloud of smoke and I'm looking up there and there's a smoke detector.
link |
So presence of mind, I threw this thing in the toilet and then, then took out a pair
link |
of scissors and cut it into small pieces and flushed it down.
link |
If that smoke alarm goes off, I'm busted.
link |
If somebody, if, if some, some criminal steals, I had $6,000 on me in cash, uh, steals either
link |
my passport or my, or my money or both.
link |
I don't know what to do.
link |
You can't go to the authorities.
link |
You can't do anything.
link |
There weren't, there weren't any Russian, the Soviets in Chicago.
link |
Do you have any contacts?
link |
There was no, there was no, um, there was no plan B for Chicago at all.
link |
That's an oversight.
link |
I shouldn't, I shouldn't have gone to Chicago.
link |
They, they could have shipped me into, uh, um, uh, San Francisco or Washington DC because
link |
both of them had Soviets.
link |
My end goal was, uh, was to go to, to, to New York.
link |
Uh, you know, I would have been a really, really, uh, dangerous agent if I had gone
link |
back and worked with the KGB because I could have told them all the things, how to do it
link |
So in that sense, there is some, given the scale of the KGB, there is, uh, some incompetence
link |
A lot of incompetence.
link |
Uh, to preparing me to be an American was almost total incompetence.
link |
And that, do you think that's representative of the way they operate is, uh, there's an
link |
incompetence like to the, uh, logistics, to the strategies involved, all that kind of
link |
None of these guys had operated as illegals.
link |
They, they were outsiders to American society.
link |
They had interaction with Americans and, uh, but they all lived in, you know, in New York,
link |
they lived in a compound, uh, and in Northern Manhattan where they all lived together with
link |
And, and they, most of the time they spent, uh, interacting with, with themselves, with
link |
their own people at work.
link |
So they really didn't integrate well.
link |
They did not know what it's like to be an American, to have a job, to, to, you know,
link |
live like an American.
link |
They didn't know it.
link |
It's interesting that KGB didn't put a high value to that kind of integration.
link |
They didn't know what they didn't know.
link |
And by the way, this was mutual.
link |
Do you think the CIA had, had, uh, good knowledge of the Russian culture?
link |
And so, um, there was a lot of lack of understanding because good, good intelligence could have,
link |
uh, possibly avoided some of the, uh, high tension that, uh, situations that we had when,
link |
when in the eighties, we got close to nuclear war.
link |
So good intelligence would be integrating yourself in society.
link |
Much, much deeper.
link |
And that Ronald Reagan was not a warmonger, but he was talking about the end times because
link |
he was a Christian.
link |
But then that kind of integration can be dangerous because you start to question the propaganda,
link |
the narratives that, on which the KGB is built, on which the CIA is built.
link |
And then they have, they always have had the option of ignoring the intelligence that they're
link |
Well, let me ask you this question sort of to jump around.
link |
There's a lot of conspiracy theories in this, um, in this current climate, I mean, throughout
link |
history, but now especially, and some of the conspiracy theories put a lot of power in
link |
the hands of the intelligence agencies like CIA, FSB, Mossad, uh, MI6, they're basically
link |
the conspiracy theories go that they control the powerful people in this world.
link |
And are able to thereby manipulate those powerful people and manipulate the populace in order
link |
to deliver different kinds of messages and so on.
link |
Given your experience with this kind of tension between competence and malevolence, would
link |
you say there's some truth to those conspiracy theories?
link |
I think, I think there is, there's collusion, there's collaboration, but I would think that,
link |
uh, like for instance, uh, uh, some folks in the CIA and the FBI, uh, are being used
link |
by the ones that are really in power.
link |
I know power is not the other, it can go both directions.
link |
You can acquire wealth first, which leads you to power, or you can acquire power first.
link |
Power is also knowledge, I understand, and, and, uh, and a position in the society, in
link |
the military or in intelligence, but I don't think it's a straight one way that all the
link |
intelligence agencies control the powerful people in their country.
link |
You see what's happening in Russia.
link |
I mean, Putin dominates his intelligence agencies, right?
link |
Well, uh, so the question is which way the direction goes, but you're saying that there
link |
is, um, it's not one way flow of power.
link |
It, and, and I also believe it exists, but it's not as prevalent as, you know, not every
link |
conspiracy theory, uh, pans out and most of them don't, they're just damn rumors, but
link |
that doesn't mean they don't exist.
link |
I guarantee you that they exist.
link |
There's collusion, there's people getting together and, uh, not necessarily, uh, preparing
link |
a specific action, but more sort of a plan to go forward and maintain the position or
link |
even, you know, uh, uh, strengthen the position that they already have.
link |
So KGB, but we can generalize this, FSB, CIA, do you think a KGB agent would kill someone
link |
against international law if they were ordered to do so?
link |
So we talked about...
link |
Uh, and there's, uh, there's a famous, uh, case of, uh, one, uh, uh, I think it's Vasily
link |
Kuklov who defected.
link |
He was a trained killer and he had, had, uh, done assassinations in other countries.
link |
He was sent to West Germany to kill a defector, a KGB defector, and he decided not to do it.
link |
He, he talked to the guy and he said, I'm supposed to kill you.
link |
And then, and he eventually wound up in the United States.
link |
I have a connection to this fellow because the KGB once asked me to go to California
link |
and see if the guy still lives and works there.
link |
And, uh, we, uh, I found him and we looked at each other.
link |
So there was an active KGB agent looking at a man that he didn't know was the KGB defector,
link |
looking at each other.
link |
Neither one knew who the other one was.
link |
I found out later.
link |
But he was able to survive.
link |
And, you know, there, there have been assassinations, not, not a lot.
link |
And, uh, you know, that, that we know of, a good point.
link |
This is very difficult, uh, the, the, the, the, the question is how many lines are intelligence
link |
agencies able, willing to cross to attain, to achieve the goal?
link |
I, I think none of these agencies have the ultimate line.
link |
I think eventually they, the last line will be crossed if they believe it's necessary.
link |
Well, I think you can justify a lot of things, especially in this modern world with nuclear
link |
weapons that you can justify that you're saving the world actually.
link |
Let me ask a few difficult questions and we'll jump back to your time in America.
link |
But Vladimir Putin has been accused of ordering the poisoning and assassination of several
link |
people, including Alexander Levinenko early on all the way to Alexei Navalny.
link |
Do you think these accusations are grounded in truth?
link |
And we will return to a couple more questions maybe about Vladimir Putin's early days in
link |
the KGB, which would be interesting.
link |
There, there's a, there's a phrase that I like to, uh, say in the response is called
link |
plausible deniability.
link |
I don't think Putin gave a direct command as they do that.
link |
He would just maybe muse.
link |
It would be nice if something were to happen and then somebody picks it up and does it.
link |
Is there, can you steel man the case that, uh, Putin did not have direct or indirect
link |
involvement with this?
link |
Who, who, who would know, who would know?
link |
You know, just the, the international, the reputation perhaps, um, perhaps catalyzed
link |
by Putin himself is that he is the kind of person that would directly or indirectly make
link |
Perhaps the case there is he's somebody to be feared and thereby you want that person
link |
Uh, but the act itself, uh, the, the, the poisoning of, uh, Litvinenko and, uh, Oh,
link |
and then the assassination of the Bulgarian, uh, Markov and with a, with the umbrella
link |
and, and they all directly traced back to Russian, uh, Soviet intelligence.
link |
Uh, and so that's enough to be feared, right?
link |
Um, my answer that I gave you is an educated guess, you know, I can't pretend to know this
link |
It's frustrating to me because there's a lot of people listening to this would say,
link |
but even, uh, sort of would chuckle at the naive nature of the question.
link |
But if you actually keep an open mind, you have to understand what is the way that intelligence
link |
agencies function?
link |
Is it possible to the head of an intelligence agency not to make direct orders of that kind
link |
where there's a distributed
link |
No, the head of the intelligence agency would most likely give the order.
link |
Even though it's compartmentalized.
link |
Yeah, but, but, uh, but not the head of state.
link |
Not maybe not the head of state, although, uh, in the case, this is the case in the United
link |
States as well, but certainly is the case in Russia.
link |
There are close relationships between the head of the FSB and the GRU and personal relationships,
link |
The head of the FSB who is now in jail.
link |
There's a interesting details, especially, uh, coming out recently around the war in
link |
So let me actually ask about the war in Ukraine.
link |
What is your analysis of the war in Ukraine from 2014 to the full on invasion of Ukraine
link |
by Russia in 2022 in February, 2022?
link |
But um, there's many questions we could ask.
link |
One is, what are the sins of the governments involved?
link |
What are the sins of Russia, Ukraine, America, China?
link |
Are those sins comparable?
link |
Who are the good guys and the bad guys?
link |
That was more than one question.
link |
Let me just, uh, uh, give you my, the basics about this savvy observers saw this coming.
link |
There were very small minority, uh, because Vladimir Putin was pretty open about what
link |
he told the world his mission was, was the reestablishment of a strong Russia, the reestablishment
link |
of something like the, the Russian empire to unite all the Russian speaking, uh, uh,
link |
people, uh, in, under one country and, uh, the world ignored him.
link |
I mean, he was open, uh, what was, was at a, at a conference in, in, in, in France,
link |
I believe when we, we set this out, out in the open, uh, and then what we had, uh, in
link |
the United States, we had wishful, wishful thinking, you know, Obama had this reset with
link |
Russia, you know, we all get friendly.
link |
And then when, when, uh, uh, Putin invaded, uh, Crimea, we did nothing.
link |
So and it, and it just escalated slowly, but surely it was pretty clear.
link |
And then they said, uh, it was, I think two years ago, there was an essay published by,
link |
uh, Putin, whether he wrote it or not, it doesn't matter, but that was also out in public
link |
where he was, again, quite clear what he was going to do.
link |
Now how do you do this with force?
link |
And, uh, and the, the sins committed by the American government was that we ignored it.
link |
We weren't engaged in wishful thinking and we didn't stop it with sanctions before the
link |
To push back, I don't think you're fully describing, you are describing the sins of the Russian
link |
government and Putin.
link |
I don't think you're fully describing the sins of the American government here because
link |
not only didn't, you're doing, you're describing the miscalculation.
link |
So not only did they not pressure correctly with sanctions and so on and, and, and clearly
link |
respond to the actual statements and the essays and the words spoken.
link |
I know where you're going, but keep on speaking.
link |
But they also, at the same time, pressured, pressured Russia and they also, as, as Putin
link |
himself said, sort of, there's a rat and they pushed the rat towards the corner by expanding
link |
NATO and, uh, and arming Ukraine and the military industrial complex is a machine that, uh,
link |
that led us, um, and I think a lot of younger people, I mean, when I came to this country
link |
and this is the country I love, I lived through 9 11, I lived through the full roller coaster
link |
I'm a, at that time, before that and after was a proud American.
link |
I went through the whole roller coaster of, uh, being sold, uh, I would say a lie about
link |
the reason to invade Iraq and even Afghanistan.
link |
And I've got to live through understanding of this military industrial complex that leads
link |
to the expansion of vampires, of the delusion that we have in the populace, in, in the government
link |
that convinces us that we are the good guys and somehow with military force, we can instill
link |
our values, instill happiness, the pursuit of happiness that all men are created equal
link |
these ideas in, into other lands and we can do so with drones and we can do so with weapons
link |
and we could do so without significant cost to our own, from our own pockets.
link |
And so this idea, this machine doesn't just apply to Afghanistan and Iraq, it doesn't
link |
just apply to Yemen and Syria, it doesn't just apply to China, it also applies to Ukraine.
link |
It also applies to Russia.
link |
Two thoughts, if I may, uh, first of all, when does not hear the term military industrial
link |
complex in the public discourse these days, Eisenhower warned about it, Eisenhower was
link |
a capitalist, he was the president of the United States.
link |
So it exists and it is very powerful.
link |
The more weapons you can sell, the more you have to replace them or send over, you have
link |
So yes, the other thing is there's also a messianic streak that powers American foreign
link |
We want to make the world just like us.
link |
Why don't they get it?
link |
Because they don't want to.
link |
It's almost like it's not communism, but it's a, it's a very similar romantic idea that
link |
we can make the world then fashion the world the way we are.
link |
And that's the romantic side and the sort of honest side, but it doesn't work.
link |
It failed every time, right?
link |
You know, Afghanistan is a Royal mess and was, would never become a functioning democracy.
link |
I don't know if, if Ukraine can become a functioning democracy.
link |
So well, I don't know if American weapons can help Ukraine become a functional democracy.
link |
I yeah, but there's a huge amount of interest in seeing the world in black and white and
link |
selling the story of the world is black and white that Ukraine is the symbol of democracy
link |
in this East Eastern European world.
link |
And Russia is the symbol of authoritarian dictatorship.
link |
And the story is not so simple as, as, as many indices show, Ukraine and Russia are
link |
the number one and the number two most corrupt countries in Europe.
link |
There are two P's in a pod.
link |
One is bigger and one is in this case, the aggressor.
link |
Now, you know, two P's, the aggressor is still ultimately responsible.
link |
And the person that throws the first punch.
link |
Now there's a lot of people going to disagree where the punch came from, but there is, there
link |
is magnitude and the struggle by Ukraine for its sovereignty stretches back to the beginning
link |
of the 20th century.
link |
It stretches back even further than that.
link |
But there's been the Ukrainian people are proud people and they've been in many cases
link |
tortured by those that sit in the Kremlin throughout the 20th century, the, the, the
link |
famine in the, in the early thirties.
link |
And it's always, it's never the middle class and upper class that suffer.
link |
So is the lower classes, the peasants in that time that this history stretches back far.
link |
And this is yet another manifestation of that.
link |
And there's a lot of interests at play.
link |
China watches closely, Russia, America watches closely.
link |
And there's an extra caveat here that there's nuclear weapons at play as well.
link |
And it's what this is the situation is as dangerous as I have lived through in my entire
link |
And because it's not necessarily at the highest point of escalation, but it will be in my
link |
view, a protracted crisis.
link |
And the longer that crisis lasts, the more of a chance there is of an accident.
link |
There's seems to be a strong incentive to prolong, to do siege tactics, to prolong this
link |
conflict over perhaps many years, which is terrifying to think about.
link |
And over that, a single rocket can lead to, given that there's leaders that might be losing
link |
their mind and Ukraine is not part of NATO, the thing I'm really afraid of is that somebody
link |
might think it's a good idea for Russia.
link |
So Putin might think it's a good idea for Russia to send a message by launching a nuke
link |
against Ukraine because they're not part of NATO.
link |
So surely the West is not going to respond.
link |
What is the West going to do if Russia nukes Ukraine to send a message?
link |
I don't know if anyone knows the answer to that question, but it's a terrifying question.
link |
And I don't know the exact protocol that needs to be followed to launch a nuclear strike
link |
on NATO's end because we have several countries in NATO that have nuclear weapons.
link |
So let's say for France to fire a nuke, does the United States have to agree?
link |
I don't know how that works.
link |
I don't know if anyone knows how that works.
link |
I worry, now we have different, very kind of anecdotal perspectives on these things,
link |
but the people I've interacted with in the DOD, Department of Defense, in the military,
link |
there is a compartmentalization, there is a bureaucracy, and within that giant bureaucracy,
link |
there's incompetence.
link |
We'd like to think that there is like really well organized for really important things.
link |
There's going to be the best of the best in the world that's going to execute on the correct
link |
decisions both geopolitically, militarily, all that kind of stuff.
link |
And I've seen enough to know that competence at any level of government, at any level in
link |
the military is not guaranteed.
link |
Let's go back to the law of hierarchy.
link |
The government is the biggest hierarchy there is.
link |
And so invariably, politicians find their way to the top.
link |
And once you have politics dictating substantive decisions, they're going to be weak or wrong.
link |
I don't know how this could work any other way.
link |
Right now we have some functional idiots in the central United States government.
link |
Well, let me, because you said that, I think elsewhere you said that Putin was not a good
link |
A mediocre one, but is an excellent politician.
link |
And a good organizer.
link |
He was known as a really, really good organizer.
link |
When Yeltsin hired him as prime minister, he cleaned up the mess because under Yeltsin,
link |
Russia deteriorated tremendously and it became sort of a mix of an oligarchy and a criminal
link |
enterprise and chaotic.
link |
So he had skills that made him a good executive.
link |
Now let's go back to him as a KGB agent.
link |
He was a KGB agent.
link |
I mean, according to him, once a KGB agent, always a KGB agent.
link |
But 16 years, let's say, something like this.
link |
What do you think about, from your experience, now you're maybe the same age as him, approximately
link |
the same age as him.
link |
He's a little younger.
link |
So what do you think about the KGB experience he had made him the man he is?
link |
What aspect of that, from your own experience, how much does that define you, who you are,
link |
how you think about the world, how you analyze the geopolitics of the world, how you analyze
link |
Now I got to tell you one thing.
link |
He had a different type of training than I did.
link |
Mine was one on one and he went to school, so to speak.
link |
Classroom training.
link |
But fundamentally, he was not a top agent.
link |
This is very simple to... There's only one thing you need to know.
link |
He knows German pretty well.
link |
So where was he deployed?
link |
Not in West Germany, not in Switzerland, not in Austria.
link |
That's where they sent the best, right, one would think, generally.
link |
We're learning here.
link |
So this is your classification of where they send the best.
link |
People classify all kinds of stuff, like what is the best university in the world?
link |
What is the best football team in the world?
link |
You start to get a sense, the good guys get sent, the best athletes get sent to... Well,
link |
we disagree on this, but the football team is... But you have a sense and you're saying
link |
that the best agents would have been sent to West Germany.
link |
One would think so.
link |
So this is not a forcing argument, but I also have it from a word from the horse's mouth.
link |
I mean, what kind of horse?
link |
What's the breed of the horse?
link |
You know who Oleg Kalugin is.
link |
He was, at one point, the head of counterintelligence for the first directorate, espionage, right?
link |
And Putin was in the first directorate and reported to Kalugin for a while.
link |
And Oleg told me, to my face, that Oleg was not an impressive agent trainee or agent.
link |
That Vladimir Putin was not impressive.
link |
Not impressive at all.
link |
Now he's biased, given this current situation.
link |
Well yeah, he could still make it up because he had this big ruckus when he was in parliament
link |
and called Putin a war criminal about the war in Serbia.
link |
Not only could he make it up, I wouldn't trust his analysis.
link |
I mean, I have to, you know, when people, I've been working very hard even before this
link |
war to try to understand objective analysis of all the parties involved.
link |
You have to really keep an open mind here to see clearly, to understand if you are to
link |
try to help in some way make a better world.
link |
In this case, stop this war or have all the countries involved flourish, bring out the
link |
best of the people, remove the corruption and the greed and the destructive aspects
link |
of the governments and let the people flourish.
link |
For all of that, you have to put all the biases aside, all the political bickering, all the,
link |
I don't know, all the biased analysis.
link |
And there's a lot of propaganda that says that, in fact, Putin was a good agent.
link |
How else would he rise through the ranks, right?
link |
Because he was a good politician and he made a lot of good connections within the KGB.
link |
Allow me to say something here.
link |
You just taught me a lesson and the lesson I should have figured out myself because I
link |
keep on telling people that in the intelligence world, you never know the truth 100%.
link |
So when you said, oh, I could make that up, of course you could have.
link |
But you get to a point where you're forced to make a decision or have an opinion and
link |
then you use your best educated guess.
link |
So I'm gonna take the certainty of the statement that I made back because it's quite possible
link |
that you're right.
link |
Well, what I've noticed about Vladimir Putin, and this is true about, for example, Donald
link |
Trump and all those kinds of divisive figures, that for some reason people's opinion on the
link |
details of those people are very sticky.
link |
Once you decide this is a bad guy, there's like a black hole and people are not able
link |
to think one act at a time.
link |
You don't have to, that doesn't somehow justify this, this somehow doesn't remove all the
link |
evil things that are done, but you can analyze clearly each of the actions.
link |
And to me, it is interesting to see how did this man rise through the ranks.
link |
Now you're saying that to be a KGB agent, there's a lot of skills involved.
link |
Perhaps raw technical skill of spycraft is perhaps not related to the skill of rising
link |
through the ranks.
link |
And you're saying as a politician, he was good at rising through the ranks.
link |
Lying and influencing, that is something that is significant as a significant talent and
link |
ability that an agent must have, that helps you as a politician.
link |
Continuing the kind of thread of the role of KGB in defining the heart, soul, and mind
link |
of Vladimir Putin, let me return to Yuri Bismenov, who was a Soviet KGB agent that wrote a four
link |
step framework for ideological subversion on a national scale as practiced by the Soviet
link |
And the four steps are demoralization, destabilization, crisis, and normalization.
link |
He had a lot of other kind of systematic ways of describing this kind of stuff.
link |
So can you speak to some of these ideas about the systematic large scale ideological subversion
link |
Is there truth to that kind of those ideas?
link |
Yes, but I think I already sort of mentioned that I think Bismenov was a fraud.
link |
And I have, again, good arguments, let's put it this way.
link |
First of all, we know that the KGB was involved in active measures, which is...
link |
You can call it fake news.
link |
Putting fake news into the countries that are your adversaries.
link |
And the Russians have been doing this lately by meddling in our election and focusing
link |
on the left and the right fringe and influencing them to become more left and more right.
link |
And Vasily Mitrokhin has in one of his books, he has a whole chapter about active measures.
link |
Okay, so what he has to say about the department, and I forgot what department that was, was
link |
the one department that was the least desirable for KGB agents.
link |
Because these were desk jobs for people who had to come up with fake stories in countries
link |
where they didn't quite know too much about the country.
link |
Now there were some successes, like one of the two most famous successes that I'm aware
link |
of is that the AIDS virus was concocted in a CIA lab, and a lot of people around the
link |
world believe that.
link |
And the other one was that J. Edgar Hoover was a secret cross dresser.
link |
That is still known by a lot of Americans who are of a certain age that this was the
link |
But Mitrokhin actually traces it back to a story that was placed in a sort of left wing
link |
but close to mainstream French magazine, and it was then taken up by larger newspapers
link |
and well established papers.
link |
So they had some successes, but this kind of a massive, well thought out campaign to
link |
destabilize the United States, I don't believe the KGB was capable of doing that.
link |
Mitrokhin seems to agree with me.
link |
I was trained, I would think, I was one of the crown jewels of their agents.
link |
One would think that they used the best that they had to help me how to become an American,
link |
and they didn't have a clue.
link |
If you don't know how a country operates, how do you come up with this kind of a very
link |
detailed long term plan that's also timed, two years this and one year that and all that?
link |
Yeah, so we should actually just clarify.
link |
He has this whole idea that there's 15 to 20 years needed for demoralization where you're
link |
basically infiltrating a country or people from a young age, manipulating their mind.
link |
You're destabilizing them, that's the second step that takes two to five years.
link |
You target the country's foreign relations, defense and economy.
link |
You create a crisis artificially and then you normalize it as if it always was this
link |
So it's basically saying that the KGB is capable of, at scale, over many years, manipulate
link |
an entire population of people.
link |
And this is kind of, there's a lot of people that believe in conspiracy theories that are
link |
amenable to this kind of idea.
link |
Now, my own experience is that there is, in fact, just a giant amount of incompetence
link |
and that this is something that's actually very difficult to pull off because it's incredibly
link |
difficult to achieve this kind of manipulation.
link |
I think it would require, first of all, not much bureaucracy, not much slowing down.
link |
You have to have incredible, in the modern world, digital systems that are able to do
link |
surveillance, manipulation.
link |
There has to be a strategy that is carried out in secrecy across a huge number of people
link |
effectively that also requires you hire the best people in the world.
link |
And I think it's difficult to execute on this kind of thing if you compartmentalize because
link |
there has to be great collaboration.
link |
There has to be a great, where there's a unified vision and coordination across multiple groups.
link |
There has to be, I mean, it's very difficult to do.
link |
Now, nevertheless, especially with technology, this becomes easier and easier.
link |
So the bar goes lower and lower.
link |
To achieve mass surveillance becomes easier and easier and easier.
link |
Mass manipulation through platforms, because we're now digitally connected, you can now
link |
do that kind of manipulation.
link |
So it becomes more and more realistic that you could do this kind of thing.
link |
But you're saying that, no, intelligence, first of all, intelligence is hard.
link |
And to do it at scale and to do it well and to do it in a way that it's also not just
link |
collecting information about the populace, but manipulating the populace is very, very
link |
Now, let me give you another argument why I think that Besminov was a fraud.
link |
I mean, I already have, I have Matrokin on my side and my personal observation of the
link |
incompetence that I witnessed.
link |
I mean, they really, really didn't know what they didn't know.
link |
So now Besminov was KGB, where was he stationed?
link |
He was a low level agent in India.
link |
And I told you it was the one thing that the KGB was really good at was compartmentalization.
link |
How does Besminov in India find out about this massive plan that should have been super
link |
He made it up, sorry.
link |
And you know why he got away with it?
link |
Because Americans eat that up, because it's not our fault.
link |
It's the damn Russians that doing all that bad stuff.
link |
Speaking of the damn Russians doing all that bad stuff, you know about the Internet Research
link |
They have been doing quite a bit of damage and I'm now familiar with the world of enhanced
link |
artificial persons.
link |
These are the avatars on Facebook and Twitter and so forth that look like real people.
link |
And there are quite a few of them.
link |
And I have a good friend who operates in that realm and he uses, for instance, facial recognition
link |
when he thinks that there's a suspicious character, say, on LinkedIn or on Facebook.
link |
And very often he finds out, yeah, that that person exists, but it's not the person who
link |
it pretends to be.
link |
So basically detecting the artificial, the enhanced artificial person.
link |
But he can also make them.
link |
You think the United States doesn't do it?
link |
Well, this is to push back against your pushback, right?
link |
Yeah, Bezmenov might be a fraud, but is it possible, especially in the modern age, that
link |
there is these kind of large scale systematic operatives?
link |
Wouldn't you, as a government that's investing billions of dollars into military equipment,
link |
in a world that's more and more clearly going to be defined by cyber war versus hot war,
link |
wouldn't you start to have serious meetings, large amounts of hires that are working at
link |
how do we manipulate the information flow, how do we manipulate the minds of the populace,
link |
how do we sell them a narrative?
link |
So even though he might have been making up a story because people eat it up, could it
link |
speak to some deep truth that's actually different than the truth you came up in as a KGB agent?
link |
I agree with you 100%.
link |
It's much easier when all you need is an army of nerds who also know.
link |
No offense to nerds.
link |
That's a term of endearment I use.
link |
Yes, I love nerds.
link |
I used to be one myself, but anyway.
link |
Once a nerd, always a nerd.
link |
So what I was going to say here is.
link |
All you need is an army of nerds.
link |
And what also experts in the culture of the target country.
link |
And nowadays the world is different.
link |
There's a whole lot more fluidity.
link |
There's a whole lot of more people that like say Russians, for instance, study in the United
link |
States, Chinese, an army of Chinese studying in the United States, they have a lot more
link |
knowledge of how we function than the KGB did and it's vice versa.
link |
Not as many Americans in Russia, but we have some, but the Chinese and the Russians have
link |
an advantage here.
link |
Can I ask you a question based on your experience?
link |
So I have been talking to a lot of powerful people and some of which have very close connections
link |
to in this particular conflict, Ukraine and Russia, but in other places as well.
link |
I don't believe I've ever been contacted by or interacted with an intelligence agency.
link |
CIA, FSB, MI6, Mossad, I don't think I had, well, let me say explicitly, I haven't had
link |
an official conversation, which is what I assume I would have because I have nothing
link |
So I think there's no reason for people to be secretive.
link |
But would I, why is that, would I know, am I interesting at all, how are people determined
link |
if they're a person of interest or not?
link |
And I guess the question, I mean, some of it I ask in a bit of a humorous way, but also
link |
perhaps there's truth in some of the humors.
link |
Would I know if I have ever interacted with a intelligence agency spy?
link |
Well, you don't know that you haven't been contacted, but certainly not, I think you
link |
never had a conversation that related to intelligence in any way, shape, or form, right?
link |
Like where a person, another person introduced themselves.
link |
Introduced themselves or becomes, sort of wants to be your friend and then talks about
link |
these types of topics, right?
link |
I, there's people because of who I'm interacting with, they're, I mean, even with just, even
link |
with Elon Musk, like if you think about Elon Musk, there's a lot of people that are, that
link |
are part of the conversations that happen.
link |
How do I know they're all trustworthy?
link |
They all present themselves as trustworthy.
link |
Now, again, I have nothing, so this is, this is for the intelligence agencies.
link |
I have nothing to hide.
link |
I am the same person privately as publicly, well intentioned, real, no, no controlled,
link |
no weird sexual stuff where you can manipulate me.
link |
No drug use, no, no skeletons in the closet, none of that kind of stuff.
link |
But you know, I don't, I don't know, I mean, just even having these conversations, you
link |
know, I tend to trust people as a default.
link |
And you start when you think, well, especially with some of the people I've been talking
link |
with and some of the traveling I'm doing, I'm realizing there's a, you know, there's
link |
hard men in this world, there's military, there's serious suffering and there's war
link |
and there's serious people that are doing serious harm and so you have to be careful
link |
of thinking who to trust.
link |
The person approaches you with a smile and asks you a question.
link |
My natural inclination is that person is a cool person, I'll answer the question, become
link |
But it becomes difficult when you realize that there's things like intelligence agencies
link |
with thousands of employees.
link |
There's people that are doing major military actions that involve tens of thousands, hundreds
link |
of thousands of soldiers.
link |
This is serious stuff and so how do I, how do you know how to operate in this world?
link |
The folks that you're interacting with have a responsibility not to tell you what they
link |
shouldn't tell you, right?
link |
So and most of them probably won't and I'm guessing occasionally they will say, well,
link |
I can't go there, right?
link |
So what you are aware of is sort of public and what you're doing is you're collecting
link |
it and you're editing it to some extent, you're not changing the verbage, you just repeat
link |
what they say, so from that angle you're not privy to any real secrets.
link |
What you have possibly that could be of use is you learn to get to know the person.
link |
So I'm thinking there's a good possibility if you get the interviews in the East that
link |
somebody may actually approach you and ask you what's your opinion.
link |
I just hope they approach me and introduce themselves properly.
link |
I just, there's a kind of, I mean, would you know, like how many Russian spies are there
link |
in the United States?
link |
How many American spies are there in Russia?
link |
Do you have a sense?
link |
Is it just like with the GRU?
link |
Is it possible there's like tens of thousands and we're not, or like thousands?
link |
Not thousands like I used to operate.
link |
We are too hard to train and we weren't that successful to begin with, but particularly
link |
Russians and Chinese, both governments know who is going abroad and I guarantee you there's
link |
a lot of amateur spies, they're being asked to help us out, do something for the motherland.
link |
And crowdsource spying.
link |
Not serious training, but yeah.
link |
For instance, this lady, I forgot her first name, Butina, she was a rank amateur.
link |
She used social media to communicate with Moscow.
link |
She had no training, but she was reasonably successful.
link |
I mean, and the difference between, let's say, the current Russian intelligence and
link |
the KGB, Vladimir Putin and his henchmen are okay with people being caught because, and
link |
every time I go and talk and give a talk someplace, I'm always asked this question, how many Russian
link |
spies do you think we have here?
link |
Because that scares the people, right?
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And Putin likes to scare people.
link |
The KGB was very solicitous of their agents.
link |
They didn't want any one of them caught, all right?
link |
So that's a big difference.
link |
So for the FSB, getting caught sends a strong signal to the world that there's agents everywhere.
link |
Yeah, there could be many more.
link |
And there probably are, but because also the world, again, there's a whole lot more travel
link |
going on, a whole lot more interaction, studying abroad, doing business.
link |
And there will be attempted espionage probably every minute in this country.
link |
That doesn't mean they will be successful, no.
link |
But there is a cottage industry now that is doing quite well that teaches companies how
link |
to fortify themselves against industrial espionage or also foreign actors spying.
link |
It's all over the place.
link |
As it becomes easier and easier with digital, with cyber, that becomes a serious, very serious
link |
We might wind up in a world where nobody knows anymore what's up and what's down.
link |
If I was to have a conversation with Vladimir Putin and or Vladimir Zelensky, is there something
link |
you would ask about the time in the KGB and the time in his past?
link |
All of us, men and women, are creations of the experiences we have in our life, early
link |
on in life and through the formative experiences, successes and failures.
link |
Yeah, you just said the key words.
link |
I would ask, without giving away anything, just being high level, your biggest success
link |
and your biggest failure.
link |
As a politician or as a KGB agent?
link |
No, we're talking in the realm of KGB.
link |
When the wall came down, and he was in an office, a KGB office in the city of Dresden,
link |
and East Germans were besieging Stasi offices, and they also dropped by the KGB office, and
link |
It was pretty threatening.
link |
It looked like they would actually storm the office and get, you know, the documents and
link |
And initially, the first demonstration was told that if they come any closer, weapons
link |
So, they disappeared, and then they came back, and I don't know, somebody in that office
link |
called Berlin and said, what are we gonna do?
link |
Are we allowed to use force?
link |
And the answer came back that Gorbachev said, absolutely not.
link |
And so, this is where Putin, all of a sudden, you know, he was at one point a member of
link |
the greatest, the most powerful intelligence organization in the world, and all of a sudden,
link |
he was powerless, and he had to watch how, you know, this was a defeat, big one.
link |
It's supposedly a powerful intelligence agency cowering, sort of crawling back into a position
link |
And he probably promised himself, never again, Russia needs to be great again.
link |
The KGB, FSB, Russia, the Russian Empire needs to rise again, and that there's a feeling
link |
for him that that's, as he talks about the collapse of the Soviet Union being a great
link |
tragedy, there's a feeling like that was, like, never again.
link |
Yeah, and I believe that he has a strong conviction that, I don't know if he's religious, he
link |
carries the cross now, but I don't know what that means, but somehow, but that it's the
link |
destiny of the Russian nation to be great, and that is sort of, whether it's determined
link |
by God or some higher power, that is very important for him.
link |
Of course, that nationalist idea is one that Americans share as well, and it could help
link |
a nation flourish, so by itself, it's not necessarily a bad thing, it's how it manifests
link |
itself is the question.
link |
One other thing, if I were to get a chat with the Ukrainian president, I would ask him,
link |
how many lives, what is the equation between giving up some land and how many lives are
link |
And that's a good way to phrase the question, of course, that question gets you killed in
link |
Ukraine, but because there's another part of that equation, which is it's not just land
link |
versus lives, it's the sovereignty, the knowledge that you're free and you're self determined,
link |
and it's not about fighting for the particular land, it's saying we are messed up, corrupt,
link |
we have problems, it's a messy world, but it's our world.
link |
I think Stephen Crane has a poem about a man eating his own heart, and he was asked how
link |
does it taste, and he said it's bitter, but I like it because it is bitter and because
link |
it is my heart, and that there's a sense of I want, this is not just about land, this
link |
The same love of nation that Putin has for Russia, the greater Russia, this vision of
link |
this great empire, I believe Ukraine does as well.
link |
Not every nation, there's levels to this game, and Ukrainian people are some of the proudest
link |
people throughout the history of the 20th century, throughout the history of Earth.
link |
The Polish people are proud people.
link |
You can just see in World War II, the people who said fuck you, you're not having this,
link |
we will die to the last man.
link |
There's different cultures that kind of really hold their ground, and Ukrainian people are
link |
You know, I have to admit, in that respect, I'm a bit of a coward.
link |
I could not do what Zelensky has been doing.
link |
I would sort of try to find a way to carve out something that I can live with, however,
link |
if that force, that evil force gets to my family.
link |
You become the world's bravest man if somebody crosses that line.
link |
You mentioned something about you've not been to Moscow back, and that it might not be safe
link |
for you to travel there.
link |
Can you speak to the nature of that?
link |
As somebody that successfully got out of the KGB, how are you still alive?
link |
A number of reasons.
link |
First of all, when my story became public, it was six years ago, I was pretty old, right?
link |
And so the folks that may have a personal interest or may have had a personal interest
link |
in doing me harm, most of them don't live anymore, all right?
link |
That's number one.
link |
Number two, I did not, I wasn't, I hired hand, a German.
link |
I did not betray the motherland.
link |
That's a crime that is punished by death.
link |
You betray the motherland.
link |
And the other thing is, you know that these kinds of operations to assassination in another
link |
country are very difficult to plan and implement, and if there's a list of people that they
link |
don't like, I may not be at the very top.
link |
Having said that, you know, if I wind up, say, in Moscow or even in countries like Turkey
link |
where there's a lot of lawlessness, you know, accidents can easily be arranged, and that's
link |
just sending another message, you know, just like, you know, we can do a lot of things.
link |
Do you think it's safe for me to travel in Russia and Ukraine?
link |
I think you know very well how to communicate in both countries.
link |
You know, you've shown this in this interaction that you have a lot of empathy for the people
link |
you'll be talking with, and empathy means good understanding where they're coming from,
link |
and that there are lines that you can't cross.
link |
Like the question that I was going to ask Zelensky, you're not going to ask.
link |
Yeah, isn't that the funny thing about this world?
link |
There's lines everywhere.
link |
Even in love, even in personal relationships, there's lines you should not cross.
link |
How did you finally get caught?
link |
I resigned in 1988, so...
link |
Let's actually talk about that.
link |
There's warning signs.
link |
There's yet another choice.
link |
Yet another crossroads.
link |
What was the calculation?
link |
What was the choice to be made?
link |
To give a little background, it was 1988, and I thought they would...
link |
My time in the US would soon end because I thought 10 to 12 years, it was already past
link |
There was no indication that they indicated, that they said, you're done.
link |
But in December of 1988, I got this one thing that I never wanted to see.
link |
So we had a system of signals that either one of those diplomat agents could set at
link |
a spot that I pass by every day, or I could set where they would pass by, like on their
link |
way from where they live to the United Nations, for instance, who would just drive.
link |
So the signal spot for me was on a support beam for the elevated atrium in Queens.
link |
And it was morning in December that I walked by there and routinely look at it, and I never
link |
expected anything.
link |
And there was this red dot, it was about the size of my fist with a red paint.
link |
And since you have done it already, I think I can curse in this moment, because it's the
link |
only way I can really indicate how I felt, I said, oh shit, because that was the danger
link |
It was like, you are in severe danger, and you need to get out of the country as soon
link |
There was a protocol that I was supposed to follow, I wasn't even supposed to go home,
link |
I just needed to, was supposed to get my reserve documents that I had hidden in a park in the
link |
Bronx and make a beeline to the Canadian border.
link |
So I just ignored this thing, I mean, I couldn't ignore it, but I went on to work, got on the
link |
A train, went to work, and then went to my cubicle and stared at the computer screen
link |
all day because I couldn't think.
link |
I could think only about what to do, what to do, what to do.
link |
The reason for this indecisiveness was that I was a father at the time.
link |
My little girl by the name of Chelsea was 18 months old, and I was there when she was
link |
born, I took her to her home, I watched her grow up, I watched her take the first steps,
link |
and always look at me with these big eyes, lovingly look at me, and that is when I started
link |
my reentry into the human race, because I just fell in love with this girl.
link |
That's when love came back, and it was completely unexpected, and there's a lot of fathers who
link |
understand, particularly fathers of girls who understand what happened there.
link |
I still thought I need to go back because there was probably some danger, but I hadn't
link |
figured out how to take care of the girl, leave her, but maybe she needs to have a good
link |
life and grow up and have a chance, and her mother, she was from South America, she had
link |
a fourth grade education.
link |
That would have not worked very well.
link |
So I played for time.
link |
Obviously I could be sick, I could be in a hospital, there was a precedent where I was
link |
sick where I couldn't communicate for about three weeks, so I just did nothing.
link |
That was on a Monday, on a Thursday was my regular shortwave transmission, I listened,
link |
and they explained a little in a few sentences.
link |
We have reason to believe that the FBI is on your case.
link |
You need to execute the emergency procedure, come home right away.
link |
I still had some time because the radio could be broken or the transmission was bad, or
link |
I still could be in a hospital, right?
link |
So I gave myself some more time, and then something happened where they forced my hand.
link |
And this is the only time that a Soviet agent was anywhere near me on the territory of the
link |
So I'm waiting for the A train on a dark morning still in Queens, and there's this man, the
link |
short man in a black trench coat comes up to me from my right, and he whispers into
link |
my ears, you got to come back or else you're dead.
link |
I can't imitate the Russian accent, it was a Russian accent.
link |
And it was a pretty strong accent.
link |
The you're dead phrase can have two meanings, and an American would have said, or else you're
link |
busted or else you get arrested or else you're dead is very strong.
link |
So now you have to take it seriously to some degree because I knew that they had a history
link |
of assassinating or at least trying to assassinate defectors.
link |
So that obviously raised the stakes a little bit.
link |
But I just talked myself into believing this was just a bad phrasing.
link |
But at this point, I knew and they knew that we both knew, right?
link |
So there was no more guessing.
link |
He found me, he talked to me, I know.
link |
So now I had to act.
link |
So in the next radiogram, I was asked to execute a dead drop operation where they would give
link |
me money and a passport.
link |
And that was in a park on Staten Island, it was a location that I found and I described.
link |
And I was always praised for my ability to describe spots that are easy to find.
link |
So that was a given.
link |
And the only thing that was different for this operation, they scheduled it for the
link |
But it was still no problem because it was in a park and a couple of, about a hundred
link |
yards in by next to a fallen tree would be hard to miss.
link |
So I go to Staten Island and I read the signal that said, I put the container in the drop.
link |
That was the protocol.
link |
There's a signal that the person who hands over something puts at a spot not too far
link |
from the spot itself.
link |
That means I would go in and just pick it up.
link |
The reason I actually went to pick up this container, because there was money in it.
link |
So I didn't have to make a decision yet.
link |
I could throw away the passport.
link |
It was like I was still trying to figure out what to do, what to do, what to do.
link |
So I get to the spot, I get to the tree and I had a flashlight with me that the park,
link |
there was no way in the park.
link |
Even during the day though, this park was not, it was more, almost like a little forest.
link |
And I don't see the container.
link |
It wasn't supposed to be a crushed oil can, pretty sizable, hard to miss.
link |
And I do a double take and I look again and I look around and look around a little more,
link |
see if they misplaced it, can't find it.
link |
That's the only one that one of those operations failed.
link |
And that just doesn't make a lot of sense.
link |
So when, as I'm walking away from this, like sort of numb emotionally, I said to myself,
link |
That kind of signal, some kind of a muse just spoke to you.
link |
That decision was made for me.
link |
Now, you know that I'm a Christian now and I think that was like, God told me this, you
link |
But it was certain there.
link |
It was right there.
link |
And so what I did to, well, first of all, divine intervention helped me to find a good
link |
I sent them my last letter with secret writing, I communicated to them, I said, I wish I could
link |
come but I can't because I have contracted HIV AIDS.
link |
That was the best lie ever because nobody wanted to have AIDS in their country.
link |
Those days it was a death sentence, right?
link |
And I knew, we had conversations when I was back in Moscow, how they were snickering about
link |
what's going on in the United States, that depraved culture and you see, they're killing
link |
And the depraved culture took over your being and how you're sitting.
link |
And I was convincing enough, I even traced it back to a girlfriend I had once that I
link |
actually reported on that she, I interacted with this lady who had a boyfriend at one
link |
point who was a drug addict and she was infected and she infected me.
link |
So they believed it, they sent and I asked them to give my dollar savings to my German
link |
They gave them some but they told my family that I already passed away, that I'm dead.
link |
They believed it, 100%.
link |
And I guess the agent who took the money took half of it for himself.
link |
And the next three months I made sure that I wasn't reliably at the same spot and the
link |
So I went to work in different paths at different times just to, you know, just as a safety
link |
measure so to speak and not huge but, you know, it kept me, allowed me to keep my sanity.
link |
And obviously after I sent the letter I threw the shortwave radio in the Hudson River, destroyed
link |
the one time paths that I still had.
link |
So I was now ready to for a new life and live out my life as an American undiscovered but,
link |
you know, starting to work on my version of the American dream.
link |
And the first action was, I was telling my wife, the mother of this child, you know,
link |
she always wanted to have a house and said, you know what, we should buy a house.
link |
And a year later we moved into the suburbs and then I said, we should have another child
link |
and we had another child.
link |
So and I had a career where I did pretty well.
link |
I moved a couple of times, wound up in a McMansion.
link |
But before that my second house was actually in Pennsylvania, in rural Pennsylvania.
link |
And this is where I was discovered by the FBI.
link |
And how did they know about me?
link |
If it hadn't been for this defector, Vasily Mitrokhin, who was an archivist in the KGB
link |
archives, he was actually pretty high level.
link |
He was in charge of the relocation of the archive from Lubyanka to Yasenov.
link |
And he really hated, he had reason to believe he hated the Soviet system.
link |
I think I remember that his son was quite ill and he could have gotten treatment in
link |
England and he was not allowed to travel to England with his son.
link |
So his hatred, he tried to figure out what to do and how to do damage to that system.
link |
So he started copying notes, little slips of paper, handwritten that he smuggled out
link |
in his underwear and his socks over the years.
link |
And then he transcribed them with a typewriter and then put the pieces of paper into some
link |
kind of a container and buried this in his stash.
link |
It was, I believe in 1992 when he showed up, that was already the Soviet Union was gone.
link |
So he showed up at the US embassy in Moscow and told him what he had and it was on a weekend
link |
and apparently there was a junior person in charge and he said, you know what, what you
link |
got, we are not interested and it's really old.
link |
It's a career limiting move, right, because Vasily Mitrokhin then made his way to one
link |
of the Baltic republics and contacted MI6 and they said, come on in, old fellow, have
link |
And so they managed to get this stuff out of the Dacha and get it to England and eventually
link |
MI6 shared it with the FBI and there wasn't a whole lot of information about me, it was
link |
very, very little.
link |
It was like, there's a person by the name of Jack Barsky who is an illegal operating
link |
in the northeast of the United States.
link |
Now if it was Jim Miller, they wouldn't have found me, Jack Barsky was easy to find.
link |
So they checked social security and Jack Barsky had gotten his social security card at the
link |
age of 33, bingo, okay.
link |
All they knew though was that I wasn't illegal, that I was still living there, they didn't
link |
know whether I was active, inactive and the other thing that they knew that I was a really,
link |
really well trained agent because I was still there, right.
link |
So they took, I think, almost three years to investigate me, watch me from a distance
link |
because if I was still active, I would have found out that somebody is investigating me.
link |
So you started being less and less active in terms of...
link |
Oh, I stopped completely.
link |
Oh, surveillance detection.
link |
Yes, surveillance detection.
link |
After three months, I stopped altogether.
link |
And FBI is still very careful.
link |
They were very careful.
link |
They pretty much watched me and at one point, I had a house in the country with one neighbor,
link |
at one point that house was for sale, so the FBI bought it and they put a couple of agents
link |
there and just didn't keep a closer eye on me.
link |
There was no indication that I was still active, but they were still cautious but at one point,
link |
they were able to plant a bug in my kitchen, a listening device and my wife and I didn't
link |
get along very well.
link |
There was a lot of friction and she was constantly complaining about things and I got sick and
link |
tired of it and one day we had an argument in the kitchen and I chose to deploy the nuclear
link |
option and that is telling her what I sacrificed to be with her so she would understand that
link |
I am there on her side.
link |
I'm supporting her.
link |
If something doesn't quite fit, it is not because I don't love the both of them, Chelsea
link |
So when I said that, the listening device was active, so the FBI was hearing my confession.
link |
I was once a KGB agent, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and I quit and then stayed here
link |
because of you and Chelsea and that also made it clear to the FBI that I wasn't active
link |
They had both of that.
link |
So now they knew an attempt to turn me would have been useless because you turned somebody
link |
who was active, but they figured there was enough reason to treat me nicely because they
link |
figured I had a lot of information that was as aged as it was, but it was still important
link |
for the FBI to get to know.
link |
And so one day, it was a Friday evening, I'm driving back home from the office and I'm
link |
being stopped by a state police.
link |
As I'm going through the toll, it's a bridge over the Hudson and they had to pay a toll
link |
and he waved me, he got me right where I stopped and he said, could you please move over here?
link |
It's a routine traffic stop and I thought nothing of it.
link |
I had forgotten at that point that I once was a spy, it was gone.
link |
And then he said, could you please step out of the car?
link |
That should have aroused my suspicion.
link |
That's unusual, right?
link |
Routine traffic stop.
link |
Yeah, I did it, no problem.
link |
And then again, somebody came from the right, came into my view and he flipped his ID and
link |
he said, FBI, we would like to have a talk with you.
link |
This is my now friend, Joe Riley, who actually is the, he's the godfather of Trinity and
link |
Anyway, he told me later that when I heard that phrase, all the blood left my face, I
link |
became totally white.
link |
But I recovered very quickly and he said it himself, so they took me to a vehicle and
link |
there was another agent in the vehicle and he had a gun strapped to his ankle, so it
link |
First question I had, so am I under arrest?
link |
And the answer was no.
link |
And then my instinct kicked in and my ability to operate very well under high pressure situations.
link |
And I asked him, so what took you so long?
link |
You know, the intent of that was to defuse any kind of tension.
link |
And I saw a smile.
link |
Yeah, I knew that I had to make them like me and I'm, I think by now I know I'm a pretty
link |
And I, when they took me to a motel, which they had rented, there was two wings at a
link |
right angle, they bought all the rooms in one wing and they had a guard at each end
link |
of that wing and they took me in the middle and there were some props there, some binders
link |
with labels and I immediately thought, this is pretty silly because what I noticed that
link |
the labels all referred back to my early years.
link |
I knew that they didn't know much else.
link |
So I told Joe that afterwards and that was not a great idea, but anyway.
link |
But I volunteered.
link |
I made the following statement before we even started the interview.
link |
I said, I know there's only one way for me to, and my family, to have a chance to get
link |
through here without much damages if I'm completely 100% cooperative and it's my intent to do
link |
So we spent about two hours in the interview.
link |
They allowed me to call my wife, tell her that I'm going to be late.
link |
That indicated to me already that they would let me go.
link |
And after two hours they let me go.
link |
But they had the area covered with a whole bunch of people.
link |
And the head of that team talked to me and he said, if you think of running, we got every
link |
intersection in this area covered.
link |
I didn't say anything, but you know, I had no thought of running.
link |
So and that was the beginning of another phase of my life where I was cooperating with the
link |
FBI for quite a while and living still undercover for several years until I had real good documentation
link |
and became an American citizen seven years ago.
link |
From today, seven years ago.
link |
The hypocrisy took a long time to figure out how to make me real and also not put me in
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these witness protection program, you know, to keep my name and then just, you know, make
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everything like official.
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So for instance, I had to change my birth year simply because if I, Jack Barsky was
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born in 1944, if I kept 1944, the FBI would have helped me commit a crime because I would
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have collected social security four years sooner.
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So anyway, yes, it took quite a while.
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And when I finally got the call from the office of Homeland Security, the lady says, this
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is agent so and so from Homeland Security, can you come into the office tomorrow?
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And I said, let me look at my calendar.
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And then I said, wait a minute, what am I talking about?
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What time do you want me to be there?
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Because I had waited for that moment for a long time.
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And I was sworn in right then and there.
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It was a good feeling to walk out of there because I had a country again, you know, and
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I love this country just as much as you said you love it with all its warts and its problems
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that we're going through right now.
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And then the last thing that changed my life again, and I don't want to get into details
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because it's a little complicated story, I never wanted to be a public person.
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And then I was discovered through a number of dots that were unlikely to be connected.
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It had to do with a relative, with a half brother of my wife who lives in Germany, was
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taken to Germany by his mother who came to visit somebody, not us, but that somebody
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that he came to visit lived 50 miles from our house and that my wife and this half brother
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never met in person before.
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They knew about each other through social media.
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And when he found out my background, he was a conductor of the German railroad at the
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time, he said, oh, this is a big story and that's going to be big, big, big, okay.
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Well he happened to know this one person who happened to know one of the star reporters
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of Der Spiegel and after she did some research and determined that I was real, she was on
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And she happened to know Steve Croft, the guy from 60 Minutes, you see all these connections?
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I had nothing to do with it.
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That's how life works, dots get connected somehow, sometimes, for most of us it doesn't.
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You don't know what's happening.
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You've gotten lucky a few times in your life.
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Yeah, I think I must be part Irish too.
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Yeah, so it's been an interesting ride.
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I'm just still shaking my head about all the stuff that happened.
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It's been a fun one.
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But you wrote, because I'm allowed to leave behind a documented legacy of my unusual life,
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I'm praying that the legacy will be described by a single word, love.
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So let us return to the thing we started the conversation with, which is love.
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What role does love play in this human condition, in your life and in our life here together?
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I give you an answer by telling you what happened one day.
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I gave a presentation at Microsoft headquarters.
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That's a strange beginning of a love story, but yes.
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No, that's not a love story.
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And so there's this beautiful young lady sitting in the back, and she's paying a lot of attention.
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Turned out later that her job at Microsoft, her job title was storyteller.
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It's soft marketing, right?
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Yeah, you could say that.
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But if you can't afford somebody like that, that's good.
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Anyway, question and answer, she raised her hand and she asked me, so all the things that
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you have done and you have experienced, what's the number one lesson you've taken away from
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That was a new question for me.
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I've never been asked that question.
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And I thought about it for 20 seconds, and then I came up with this phrase that we all
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know, love conquers all, because in my life it did, in the end.
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And it's the strongest human emotion, and that is what makes us human, really.
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And you spoke about the, I mean, offline as I've spoken with you, it's clear to me how
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transformative, how powerful the life of your children are, your daughters in your life,
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and who you are, and why you think life is beautiful, and why you think this country
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Now that I'm pretty mature, to put it mildly, I'm also more loving towards many more people.
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These things like random acts of kindness for strangers, I do them, I'm looking for
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And you know what?
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Well, welcome to Texas, because this random acts of kindness to strangers seems to be
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a way of life, which is one of the reasons I love it here.
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It just reminds me why I love human beings, is that there's just this warmth, this connection.
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Yeah, and Georgia is the same thing.
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Do you have any regrets?
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Looking back at life, do you wish you'd done something different?
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I could have, but then I would have a different regret.
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I betrayed the wife, the German wife that I loved.
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I really did love her, and I betrayed her.
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But if I don't betray her, then I betray the child.
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That is a source of so much love for you now.
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So maybe life is a kind of, you get to choose your regrets.
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You don't get to avoid them.
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Yeah, it's a little bit of a strange way of putting it, but there's no other choice.
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I tell you what I don't regret, and that may be, you probably understand it now because
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you have enough background about me, I don't regret having lied to my mother.
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Because I had no really strong emotional relationship with her.
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She took care of me, she was proud of me, but we didn't hug, we didn't interact emotionally
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So you don't feel like you betrayed that love that—
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Well I did, I know that she was looking for me until the day she died.
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She wrote a letter to President Gorbachev asking him for help to locate me.
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She checked with Astazi, she just was hell bent on finding me and couldn't find me,
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so she passed away without knowing what happened to me.
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Now there was this rumor that was flying around, and she possibly may have bought into that
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rumor because my cover for when I went to the United States was that I changed careers
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again and I joined an institution in Kazakhstan that did space research, intercosmos something
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something, and I had a piece of paper that invited me to start there, and it was a forgery.
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It never existed, but people knew that in Kazakhstan there were super secret facilities.
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One of my classmates, old classmates from high school started the rumor that I died
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in a rocket accident, and everybody knew that.
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So when I came back to Germany, I found the telephone number of this girl that had dumped
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I called her, and I said, so guess who this is?
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Maybe you hold on to your chair, she says yes, I said, this is Albrecht.
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It's a good payback.
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No, we actually met.
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So there's two elderly people in their 60s who meet each other after so many years, and
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the one that ended the relationship started the conversation by saying, you know what,
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I made a really bad mistake, and the tears came down her cheeks.
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I wasn't asking for that.
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I wasn't happy about it, but it did feel good.
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Now a while later, I knew why she said she made a mistake.
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I met her husband.
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Yeah, I mean, there's a, Tom Waits has a song called Martha, where an older gentleman calls
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somebody he used to love, and they have a conversation.
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They're both married now, and sometimes you can meet people from your past, and it gives
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you a glimpse of a possible different life you could have had.
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Oh yeah, and you know, I was actually, when she said I made a mistake, and I was thinking
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to myself, no, you didn't.
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There was nothing left.
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There was nothing left.
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Also the person that she became, personality wise, wasn't as attractive as I remembered
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You know, it's puppy love.
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But it's still love, and it still happened.
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It was passionate love for sure, and I would have thrown myself under the bus if I could
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It was that strong, and it's just as strong as the love for my two girls.
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Life is full of moments and periods like that of love, and that's what makes life so freaking
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But it does come to an end.
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And so does this conversation, I guess.
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This goes on for many more hours, but yes, do you think about your own death?
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Do you think about death?
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Do you think about your own death?
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Are you afraid of it?
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Even though I'm a Christian.
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As a Christian, do you have a sense what's coming after, or is it full of uncertainty?
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You know, there's a lot of Christianity which is quite logical, a lot of Christianity which
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is also the life of Christ, there's a lot of proof.
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But I became a Christian starting with a head, and I was already quite old.
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When you don't get this faith very early, it's tougher to buy into everything.