Something happened where they forced my hand, and this is the only time that a Soviet agent

was anywhere near me on the territory of the United States.

So I'm waiting for the A train on a dark morning still in Queens, and there's this man in a

black trench coat comes up to me from my right, and he whispers into my ears, you gotta come

back or else you're dead.

The following is a conversation with Jack Barsky, a former KGB spy, author of Deep Undercover

and the subject of an excellent podcast series called The Agent.

There are very few people who have defected from the KGB and live to tell the story.

It is one of the most powerful intelligence organizations in history.

And this conversation gives a window into its operation, both from an ideological and

psychological perspective, but also it tells the story of a man who lived one heck of an

incredible life.

This is the Lex Friedman podcast, to support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's Jack Barsky.

Let's start with a big basic question.

What is the KGB?

Комитет Государственной Безопасности.

Right.

So that is the Committee of State Security.

Yeah.

There's an opossumist.

Opossumist is a threat, right?

Threat.

Okay.

And BS means...

Without.

Right.

And I guess that directly translates to security.

Without threat.

So, and don't exist anymore.

It was disbanded when the Soviet Union fell apart and the successor agencies are now the

SVR and the FSB, FSB supposedly the equivalent to the FBI and SVR, the CIA.

But the SVR is relatively weak and the FSB has taken on a lot of espionage and active

measures and they're much bigger and stronger.

But the most capable intelligence agency in Russia is the GRU, Military Intelligence.

That nobody knows very much about.

That's right.

When I was in the KGB, I had no idea that there was military intelligence.

Nobody ever mentioned anything like that.

And by the way, I recently had the pleasure to give a talk at the DIA.

When they reached out to me, I didn't know they existed either.

Interesting.

Yeah.

That's always the question.

If you want to be an intelligence agency, should the world know anything about you?

Because in some sense, you want to create the legend in order to attract great competent

individuals to work for you, but at the same time, you want it to be shrouded in complete

mystery.

If nobody knows you exist, you might be able to operate well as an intelligence agency.

That is fascinating.

But FSB is the thing that carries the flag of KGB, KGB being probably one of, if not

the most sort of infamous, famous, infamous, and powerful intelligence agencies in history

ever.

Absolutely.

100%.

It was founded in 1954 after the death of Stalin.

In writing your book, you've looked back at the predecessors of the history.

Is there some way in which the KGB is grounded in the culture, the spirit, the soul of the

KGB?

Its predecessors.

Oh, absolutely.

They just changed names and they changed personnel rather frequently, and that had something

to do with Stalin's paranoia.

From between 1923, and I don't remember what, I think it may have been the NKVD at that

time.

It started as the Chika, and then it became the GPU, the NKVD, but with those name changes,

you also had changes at the top.

Between 1923 and 1953, when Stalin died, that is 30 years, they had eight heads of intelligence,

and of those eight, six were executed when they were replaced.

So that's an indication that this was an organization that ate itself from the inside.

The Soviet Union was the only dictatorship in history that did not rest its powers on

the military.

They rested its powers on the intelligence apparatus, and that thing was unstable.

So you know where that leads.

Eventually, if you rest your power on something that is made out of bricks that don't hold

a lot of load, it will fall apart.

On sand.

Yeah.

Why was it unstable, would you say?

What of human nature makes it unstable?

It's the paranoia.

Stalin was always worried about the most powerful people coming after him.

So he proactively killed off heads of the KGB, and he had this great purge where he

got rid of a lot of his generals, really capable generals, and that cost him dearly when World

War II started, because he started off with a force that wasn't as capable as it could

have been.

Was it paranoia at all levels?

I believe so.

I believe so.

It comes from the top.

And so if the top doesn't trust you, you always have to worry about your peers snitching on

you.

And I think we have a very similar situation in Russia today, and in this kind of atmosphere,

the truth will never get to the top.

So no matter what moral rules the organization operates under, trust is fundamental to its

competence.

Oh, absolutely.

And I want to extend this to my own existence, and this is kind of strange.

It's almost dichotomous, because I was running around lying to everybody, and I couldn't

fundamentally be trusted.

But the relationship that I had with the KGB was based on trust.

If they don't trust me, they don't send me out.

And if I don't trust them, I'm not going.

And I eventually broke that trust, and they knew there was always that danger.

They knew that because something about you or just something about human beings that

can be broken.

There were hints about how long my assignment would be, so 10 to 12 years.

And you see, it makes sense.

I was becoming an American, and over time, I would become more and more American, and

there was always a chance that I liked it more here than there, that I was really successful

in what I was supposed to do.

And it sort of happened, but in my case, it happened because I fathered a child who I

didn't want to leave when they wanted me back.

Love always screws up your employment competence, yes.

You're absolutely right.

But they thought that I had an anchor at home because I had a wife and a son at home, which

you've got to worry about them if you defect.

Because in the past, the KGB would go after family ruthlessly.

Including perhaps violence?

Yeah.

This is a hard question about the KGB because it's one of the most ruthless organizations,

but in general, are there lines, KGB agents at every level of the hierarchy that they

would not cross, political, legal, ethical, or does anything goes to achieve the goal?

I was only in touch with two types of agents, the technical experts, the ones that taught

me tradecraft, and they were like engineers and they were in charge of the secret writing

and the Morse code, shortwave radio reception, decryption, encryption, and that kind of stuff.

Those were just doing their job.

And the others, the ones that trained me, that prepared me for life in the United States,

they were nice people.

They were elegant people.

I don't think they would not fit into the stereotype of the ruthless gun carrying agent.

Is it possible that you would not be aware of the parts of the KGB, I mean, it's very

modular.

Would you?

Yeah.

It's possible that you're not aware of the parts of the KGB that are the quote unquote

muscle.

Oh, I didn't know.

I would find out afterwards, after I retired and started doing some research, I had no

clue.

So you're kind of operating in a bubble.

Oh, very much so.

I mean, this is what the KGB did really, really well, compartmentalization, and that was based

on the communist movement while it was still underground.

The cells were very small, so that maybe there were three, four members in one cell that

knew one another, and then they had a liaison to another cell.

The bottom line is if you got one of those folks were caught, they could maybe betray

four people or three, something like that, and the KGB continued with that tradition.

I have reason to believe that my handler, the person in Moscow that sort of directed

me and made decisions what to do and where to go, never met me personally.

There's no reason to.

This actually was a big advantage over other intelligence services because you look at

what the CIA does.

Everybody blabs.

There's a lot of leaks coming out of American intelligence.

I don't think there's as many leaks coming out of the Mossad.

Strong words from Jack Barsky, by the way.

That is a question I want to ask a little more systematically.

Is there something unique about the KGB compared to the other intelligence agencies?

Let's talk British intelligence, MI6, Mossad, CIA.

Is there unique cultures, spirits, souls of the different organizations that maybe somehow

connect to the structures of government, connect maybe the values of the people, those kinds

of things?

I believe we were all pretty much strong believers in communism and the future of the world being...

In KGB?

Yes.

I think that unified us to a large degree, even the technicians.

It wasn't something like, yeah, yeah, the parents believe this thing, but we know the

truth.

You really believe the story of communism.

Absolutely did.

And you need to look at the timeframe.

The Soviet Union after World War II made quite a bit of progress in influencing the Third

World.

I still remember when I was in middle school, we had a map, the map of the world, and it

was color coded.

So red was communism, that was the Soviet Union and the Eastern states, and then blue

was capitalism.

And then we had green, which were the Third World countries, and the green slowly turned

pink because a lot of Third World governments, like I'm looking at Angola, I'm looking at

Vietnam, a lot of these countries were very sympathetic to the Soviet Union.

And so we sort of knew that this would go on like that, and eventually we would take

over and pretty much overtake, that was the myth, overtake the United States, not only

militarily but also in terms of industrial production and so forth.

That was a stupid pipe dream.

The military, it was a standoff, as we know.

A stupid pipe dream.

Hitler had a stupid pipe dream that he executed it exceptionally effectively and on, if not

for a handful of military mistakes, the world could look very different today.

Well, the biggest one being invading the Soviet Union, particularly at the time that he did

it because he ran into the same thing that Napoleon ran into General Winter.

Well within, so Operation Barbarossa, within that he could have made different decisions.

For example, attacking, skipping Kiev and attacking Moscow directly, overthrowing the

government.

So marching, I guess that would be learning lessons from Napoleon as opposed to a different

kind of distribution of forces and then getting bogged down in the winter.

But the point is these ambitions sometimes do, the ambitions of empires sometimes do

materialize in the growth and the building and the establishment of those empires and

those empires write the history books in such a way that we don't think of them as empires

or we certainly don't think of them as the bad guys.

They write the history books, therefore they're the good guys.

And right now America has effectively written the book about the good guys.

I happen to believe that book, but it's, we should be humbled and open minded to realize

that that is in fact what is happening is effective empires write the history books

and tell us stories and tell us propaganda and tell us narratives that we believe because

we are human beings and we love to get together and believe ideas.

We love to dream of a beautiful world and try to build that beautiful world together

in the United States.

That's a beautiful world.

The freedom of respect of human rights of all men are created equal pursuit of happiness.

You know, it always sounds good.

If you look at what the dream of communism is, it sure as heck in its words on the surface

sounds good.

Yes.

Respect for the workers.

Yes.

The working class, the lower classes that have been trodden on that have been stolen

from by the powerful, they deserve to have the money, the power, the respect that they

have earned through their hard work.

Sounds great.

And everybody gets along and we just have to, you know, uh, all men are wonderful people.

And if they, if they go bad, it has something to do with the fact that they have, they have

been oppressed, right?

And uh, that dream just never worked out.

And even, even it is when you think about it and I didn't think about it when you're

young, you know, you just emotionally, you accept it.

But when you think about it, somehow, uh, that new wonderful organization has to organize

itself even though Lenin predicted that the state eventually would go away.

Well, how does it, how does that work?

Then you have like anarchy, right?

You have to have an organization.

The only way to really organize a large number of people is with a hierarchy.

So and who gets to the top, the ones that are, that want to go to the top, the ones

that believe in themselves, the ones, the ones that know better than everybody else.

And once you have that hierarchy established, uh, there is no guarantee that it doesn't

that it won't go bad.

And actually when you look at history, every such hierarchy has gone bad.

You know, you look at Cuba, for instance, I believe Fidel Castro was a, an honest revolutionary.

I do believe that.

And so what did Cuba turn into?

Yeah.

There's something about, and you speak about Vladimir Putin in this way, but let's step

away from that for a second.

Is there something about being an honest revolutionary that wants to do good for their country and

you start to believe that, you know, better than everyone else how to do good on the country

and you very well might first, but then somehow that grows into a distortion field where,

you know, you keep believing, you know, what's right.

And all the people who disagree with you, you stop seeing them as having a point.

You instead see them as like, um, um, evil manipulators of the truth that are actually

trying to hurt people for their own greed, for their own power.

And you will protect the people because you know, what's good in the case of Stalin.

I, I mean, I don't know, but it seems like he really believed that communism would bring

about a much better world.

I mean, there was a sense the, you have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet, this idea

that sacrifice is necessary to bring about a greater world.

And then the other aspect is sort of ruling by terror, creating terrorism, justified political

mechanism to achieve a better world.

But it wasn't, I mean, perhaps he had to do that to be able to sleep at night with the

atrocities he's committing.

He's, I think he believed he will bring about a better world.

Yeah.

And by the way, the terror didn't start with Stalin.

It started right after the Bolsheviks took over when Lenin told Mr. Dzerzhinsky, Commodore

Dzerzhinsky to build the Cheka and then execute the, this is what he called it, the red terror.

So at the birth of the Soviet Union, there was already terror and it was deliberate.

And it also was, it wasn't just focused on the enemies, it was focused on whoever you

didn't like.

There was no rule of law, there was no court cases, people were just pulled out of their

apartments and shot on sight.

And this was done by revolutionaries who were convinced that eventually, these sacrifices

had to be made and eventually that would lead to a much better planet.

And the populace believed this too, that those sacrifices in part.

I mean, this is such a dark thing about dictatorships is you believe it, but you're also too afraid

to question your beliefs.

Like, you're not directly afraid, but almost like, I don't know what that is.

That's almost like a subconscious fear.

Like don't, there's a dark room with a locked door, don't look in that door.

Don't check that door.

And there's something about the United States that says, especially modern culture, it's

like go to that door first and sort of question everything kind of, that's the power of the

freedom of speech and the freedom of the press, but you can get almost become too critical

and too cynical of your own culture in that way.

So there's a balance to strike, of course, but man, if communism is not a lesson of human

nature, I don't know what is, but you believed, without thinking too much about it, you believed

in the story of, what did you see, just, you know, I came from the Soviet Union.

What did you maybe feel that's right and good about communism, about the vision of communism?

Do you remember?

I think the biggest impetus in me believing in communism was that the communists, just

before Hitler took over, the communists were the only force in Germany that fought the

Nazis in the streets, and that's a historic truth.

And communists were hunted down by the Nazis, killed, put in concentration camps.

And so what we knew, what we were taught, and I think that was a huge unforced error

by the Western countries, particularly the United States, that there were ex Nazis in

the government in West Germany.

And the most famous one was Reinhard Galen, who was in charge, was the general in charge

of the intelligence on the Eastern Front under Hitler.

And when the Allied won the war, it was decided that Galen was too important, his knowledge

and his organization was too important to not use.

So he was coopted by the CIA and eventually wound up being the head of the Bundesnachrichtendienst,

the CIA of West Germany.

That gave us, us, when I say us, the East German party, a huge propaganda victory.

I wanted to, because the emotional aspect of this was as follows.

When we were in, juniors in high school, and in those days, you were only allowed to go

to high school if you were in the top 10% of students, okay?

So this was going to be the next set of ruling elite in the country.

We were sent, we were required to visit a concentration camp.

And if you know what we as 17 year olds were made to look at, it was gut wrenching.

How can men do something like that to men, piles of corpses, lampshades made out of human

skin because that skin had tattoos on them, and shrunken heads like the size of my fist.

I mean, the girls all cried, and it made a huge impression.

And that was the Nazis, and the Communists defeated the Nazis.

They were the good guys.

Of course, in hindsight, if the Communists had come to power, it would have been just

the other way around, as we know, given the example of Stalin and Mao, right?

But we didn't know that.

From the Russian and Soviet perspective, the Communist regime banded together to win the

Great Patriotic War.

And that was the second one, the big brother, the Soviet Union.

I mean, when I was approached by the KGB, that was like, oh, I felt so honored.

So we should say that we're talking about East Germany, that you're from East Germany.

Can you describe, you were born four years and what is it?

Yeah, four years.

10 days?

Yeah, sort of.

Very good.

After Germany's unconditional surrender in World War II.

So what is East Germany?

What is West Germany?

What is East and West Germany?

What is that?

What's the difference?

What's the historical context here?

What is World War II again?

And then, let's do it for some...

We don't have to go to World War I, the result of which actually seeded World War II in some

respect.

Yes.

There's a long history, yes.

But let's start with World War II.

So when Hitler came to power, he and his leadership decided that the Germans needed more what

they call Lebensraum, that means room to live.

And they would start expanding and they went into France, they took Belgium, the Netherlands,

they annexed Austria and got a piece of Czechoslovakia.

And then they decided to march into the Soviet Union after they took Poland.

Cut up Poland together with the Soviet Union.

Yes.

They were friends.

Yes.

There was a nonaggression pact that was signed by Ribbentrop and Molotov, right?

I think both parties knew that eventually they would fall apart.

But at the time, it gave the Soviet Union a little more piece of Poland and a little

more time to prepare what they thought might happen down the road.

And the Germans had the time and the ability to pretty much conquer all of Western Europe.

Do you think Stalin really knew that it's gonna fall apart?

Why would somebody like Stalin trust somebody like Hitler?

But why did he blunder so bad not to read the intelligence that was coming his way?

Oh, he doesn't...

The troops are amassing on the border of the Soviet Union.

He didn't trust his own intelligence apparatus.

Oh, boy.

Here's one example.

There was a German communist who went underground when Hitler took over and he went to Japan

as a journalist.

His name is Richard Sorge.

Richard Sorge had really, really good intel about what the Japanese would do and not do.

I forgot exactly what it was, but it came to Moscow and Stalin totally ignored it.

And when Sorge was captured by the Japanese, the Soviet Union denied that he was one of

them there, so he was executed, the paranoia, again, does a lot of damage.

When you don't believe your own intelligence apparatus, why bother having one?

Yeah, I mean, there...

But I'm sure there's contradictory information coming in from the intelligence apparatus,

so it's difficult.

I mean, first of all, nobody likes to be disagreed with, especially when you become more and

more powerful, and then the intelligence apparatus is probably giving information you don't like.

It's often negative information about, basically, information that says that the decisions you

made in the past are not great decisions, and that's a difficult truth to deal with.

So in the modern times, if we hop around briefly, Vladimir Putin has been not happy with the

intelligence of the FSB, thereby, at least if you read the news, choosing to put more

priority to the GRU for the intelligence in Ukraine.

But I guess I suppose the same story happens there, as it does throughout history, is paranoia.

I give you an example that comes from a very reliable source, and that my best German friend

worked as a chemist in the Stasi, East German intelligence.

And he eventually, he rose to the rank of major and was in charge of the forgery department.

It's very likely that he made passports that I use to travel.

He was aware that there was intelligence that was collected.

The Stasi was really good.

They had about a thousand people in West Germany, undercover agents, some of them in government,

and the central committee of the party, the decision makers ignored it because it didn't

quite fit in their worldview, it didn't quite fit into their plans.

So and one delicious thing that I just want to add on to this, when Gorbachev wrote his

book about Perestroika and Glasnost, the East German rulers did not like it.

They were much, much more orthodox.

So they had to print the books in translation, guess where they wound up.

They were piled up in the hallways of the Stasi.

They bought the entire print run.

It's fascinating.

So but let's backtrack.

So Operation Barbarossa, invasion of Hitler to the Soviet Union, and then hopefully that

leads us all the way to East Germany, West Germany after the end of the war.

So what happened was the Soviet Union rolled into the eastern part of Germany and the Western

allies took a larger chunk, which was eventually, it was occupied by the three allies, the French,

the English and the Americans, and the eastern part was occupied by Soviet troops.

And the Soviet troops actually conquered Berlin.

But in a contract, they decided that Berlin would be ruled by the four allies and they

all had free access to that city.

I was born in the East German part, which very quickly became ruled by communists, socialists,

the Communist Party and the Socialist Party United, but the leaders of that new party

were all communists.

It's nevertheless called democratic.

Yes, German Democratic Republic, which was formed a couple of months after I was born.

I was born into a remote southeastern corner of East Germany.

And interestingly enough, genetically, I'm only half German.

The other half is Czech and Polish.

Because where I grew up, I could walk to the Nysa River, which was the border with Poland,

and it was only about an hour by bus to get to the Czech border.

So that's why I'm a mix.

So okay, so East Germany after the war was communist, socialist, and then the West Germany

was representing the Western world with democracy.

And what the United States did, this was really, really very forward looking, very strategic,

the Marshall Plan to rebuild the economy in the West as compared to what the Soviet Union

did.

Whatever they hadn't destroyed on the way in, they took with them on the way out for

reparations because they had every right to do that.

But it was not a good idea because East Germany was always behind in economic development

to their Western counterpart.

So when you were young, as today, but when you were young, you were clearly an exceptional

student.

Yeah.

You're a brilliant academic superstar.

Let's go to your childhood.

What's the fond memory from childhood that you have in being woken up to the beauty of

this world and sort of being curious about all the mysteries around you that I think

ultimately lead to academic success?

Or was it...

The fondest memory that comes to mind is my first kiss.

How's that?

Do you want to go to the details of that?

What did you make of that kiss?

What did that teach you about yourself and human nature and all that?

It taught me only in hindsight.

At the time, I was just like, my God, I was head over heels in love.

I was 16 years old.

And I knew in those days, I admired girls.

I knew the girls were like sort of magical beings.

They were not capable of doing evil things.

They were beautiful and they had to be adored.

And one of them actually loved me too.

She came after me initially.

And that too was magical for you.

Oh my God, yeah.

And literally, I dedicated...

That's when I started studying.

Up until that point, I just did whatever I had to do to be in A minus students.

And that's when I started studying.

And every A that I got, I dedicated to her, sometimes explicitly, because I knew I was

going to take care of her as I grew up.

So you're going to have to work hard in this world to be somebody that could be adored

by those you love.

Yes, you're right.

You know that kiss, the next day, I was running around in school with a grin on my face.

And maybe that in some way, that grin never fades.

So what about the heartbreak that followed?

But just to expand on this a little more, because that passion that I had was an indication

that eventually love would play a big role in my life.

I wasn't aware of it.

I was just directed at this one girl.

But you understood that that feeling that taught you something, like that you're somebody

that can feel those things.

And that's a strong part of who you are.

And therefore, it will also be a part of directing your life trajectory.

Yeah.

So we were an item for two years.

I lost my virginity.

She was not a virgin at the time.

My competitor was, he studied medicine in college already.

In which ways was he better than you?

He wasn't.

He was older, and he was more experienced.

And he was going to be a doctor.

But I was there, and he was not.

The presence wins.

But you still had big dreams.

You wanted to be a tenured professor.

Yes, yes.

So you still want to outdo that guy.

Oh, yeah.

And she eventually told me that he was not in the picture anymore.

So it was back and forth, back and forth.

And our senior year, we were an item, and I was just dreaming of the future.

But we didn't figure out that in those days, if she went to college in Berlin and I went

to college in Jena, and the distance between the two cities was too much for a weekend

visit, public transportation was very slow, and nobody had cars.

So the circumstance of life, you drifted apart.

And so we interacted with a couple of letters, and then I got the goodbye letter.

Oh, my God.

That hurt?

I can still feel it.

That's a good thing.

You could feel the pain.

That's still part of love.

It's that the pain of loss is still part of love.

And then you kind of change that.

You shape it, and you give that love in deeper, more profound ways to future people.

That's very well put.

But at the time, it emptied me out.

If I had a tendency to have suicidal thoughts, I might have killed myself.

Would you say that was one of the darker moments of your life?

Let me see.

As a single moment, yes.

So I still remember we had a mail slot in the front door, and I wasn't expecting a letter

any day, and there was the letter.

I go upstairs into my bedroom, and I open it, and I read it, and just like the life

went out of me.

You're just there alone, and you have to experience this pain alone.

And now you're deeply alone in this world.

Yes, because there was no emotional relationship with my parents.

I literally had nobody.

So this love you have in you had no place to go.

It was choked off, all right?

But what I did was I wanted to go on, right?

And so I threw myself into the study of chemistry.

I outworked all of my fellow students in a big way.

I worked my ass off, and since I was pretty smart, too, I just aced practically everything.

And for the first two years in college, and look, we go to college, there are all these

pretty girls, and there's dances and everything.

We had this great student club where I didn't look at any girls.

Eventually I knew I was going to, you know, want to have female companionship, but love?

Uh uh.

No more.

That hurts.

There's a song that goes, love hurts.

Yeah, I know that one.

That's true.

There's actually many songs that have a similar message, yes.

So during that time, during your excellence, just being an exceptional student of chemistry,

let's go to your story.

So in your book, Deep Undercover, My Secret Life and Tangled Allegiances as a KGB Spy

in America, and in the really, really excellent podcast series that I've been listening to,

people should definitely listen to, it's called The Agent.

You document your time as a KGB spy before, during, and after.

Can you tell the story of when you first were contacted by the KGB, how you were invited,

the offer to join was made?

Well, it was a big surprise, and I never thought of myself as a potential agent.

You know, I was going to be a tenured professor and join the ruling elite, because in Europe,

tenured professors are few.

It's not like in the United States, you know, anybody who teaches at colleges has a title

of professor.

Easy now.

It's true.

That's not a criticism.

That's 100%.

So we should also clarify that, tenured professor or not, it is a very prestigious position

throughout history of Europe.

I would say, especially communists, I don't actually know the full landscape of the respect,

but at least in the Soviet Union where I grew up, it's a prestigious position.

Absolutely was.

And the town of Yanuk had about 100,000 people live there, and I would, it's a wild guess,

but maybe 30 tenured professors, and they were part of the ruling elite.

I was trying to do as much as I can to live the good life, right?

You know, have access to things that are nice.

Yeah, but I think the powerful thing about being a professor in that context of East

Germany is the prestige.

And the feeling of superiority.

You know, I was full of myself.

You know, when you are the best of the best, and in my third year I received a scholarship,

the Karl Marx Scholarship, that was limited to 100 concurrent recipients in the country.

So my God, you know, I was full of myself.

I believed in myself, hook, line, and sinker.

And I was also, I got a lot of accolades from teachers and fellow students.

They were feeding the ego, the old, I mean, you have to believe in yourself often when

you're young to truly, to excel.

And you sure as heck did.

But you know, as a balance, you need a mentor, somebody who puts things in perspective, and

I didn't have one.

My father was a nonentity and nobody else.

They all looked up to me.

I was an up and coming guy, right?

So there's no father figure that put you in your place.

Not at all.

And I give you one extreme example.

It was down the road when I fathered a child out of wedlock.

That was in my fifth year, I believe.

The Communist Party in East Germany was very moralistic.

If you did that, they would have a talk with you and give you whatever, a severe reprimand.

Nobody even mentioned a word about this.

So yeah, so this is how this ego gets nurtured.

But anyway, getting back to how the KGB came in contact.

So they most likely got knowledge of me by, you know, looking at Stasi records.

What's Stasi?

That was East German secret police, Staatssicherheit, security for the state.

There's that word security again.

And they pretty much kept a record on everybody in the country.

And so when you look through this, and this is what the KGB was looking for.

They were looking for candidates, particularly for this kind of job that they had in mind

for me, for candidates who were not, you know, in their mid 20s, who were not fully developed

yet, but mature enough to get there and still young enough, right?

Because at that level of maturity, you can test whether they can handle this kind of

job.

Yes.

Absolutely right.

And one day I got a knock on my door and my dorm room door was on a Saturday.

And they knew that I was by myself.

How did they know it?

We had a, I pieced this together.

We had an exchange student from the Soviet Union, and he was next door to me.

And he befriended me.

So he got to know me a little bit.

And the pattern was that my roommate would always go home for the weekend.

And of course they also knew which door to knock on, even though there were no nameplates.

Somebody knocks.

And I knew it was a stranger because if it had been a student, the pattern was that we

would knock on the door and then go in.

We wouldn't wait for somebody to let us in.

So I waited for 10 seconds and he didn't come in.

I knew that it was a stranger.

I said, come on in.

And in came a person who spoke fluent German.

So that was not a KGB guy.

That was a collaborator.

And so he started making a bunch of small talk.

He introduced himself as a representative of Carl Zeiss Jena, which was the optics company

that made really, really good optical instruments, was one of the best in the world.

So it's like the super prestigious company in that place.

And he said that he was a representative of that company and he would just want to find

out what my plans were after graduating from college.

And at that point I knew he wasn't from Carl Zeiss Jena because in those days there was

no recruitment.

When you were done, if you were in the top 10% of the graduates, you would most likely

pick to stay and get a doctorate.

And the rest of them were assigned.

You had no choice.

So that guy was an idiot.

He didn't know the basics about...

You interviewed him a little bit to understand, like feel out, is this guy full of shit?

Because yeah, he's a stranger showing up to your dorm room.

I knew that at that point, I knew he was a Stasi, which is wrong, but it doesn't matter

because he was German and I had no idea that the KGB would be involved.

So sorry to pause briefly, did you have a sense, did people know that there's a Stasi

type of organization, that there is a large number of people doing this kind of work in

East Germany in order for you to make that guess?

Yeah, we knew that the Stasi existed.

We even had our James Bond, we had a series called the Invisible Visor where a Stasi employee

in East German would go into West Germany and hunt down Nazis.

So yes, the Stasi was known to be there.

And admired in part or feared or both?

I thought they were necessary and I admired them.

James Bond.

Yes, the reason I did so because I had no information to the contrary.

I never knew anybody personally or even somewhat removed who was followed by the Stasi, was

put in jail.

I had no clue.

I had no clue that they did a lot of damage and that they were doing a lot of surveillance

of the East German population the same way the KGB did for the Soviet Union.

So for me to be talking to somebody from the Stasi, it raised my interest.

I was curious what comes next because I sort of knew something interesting would be coming

at me and I had no other thoughts about that at that point.

So when he was finally, when he went for the kill by reversing himself, he said, you know,

I got to tell you that I really, I really am not from Karl Stasi, you know, I'm from

the government.

Okay.

Thank you for pointing that out.

And then he asked this question, he says, can you imagine to one day work for the government?

And so I gave a pretty clever answer.

I said, yes, but not as a chemist.

So I answered the question that he didn't ask.

I helped him out.

So we made an arrangement to meet for lunch, which in Germany is the main meal at the number

one restaurant in Vienna, you know, I still remember what I ate.

What was that?

Rump steak with butter on top and French fries, it was my favorite.

Anyway, so when I get to the restaurant, I saw this fellow sitting in the back there

at the table and there was another person at the table.

So I was a little bit hesitant because in those days it was not unusual for perfect

strangers to share a table because there wasn't enough tables and chairs and so forth.

So I didn't know if I could approach him, but he got up and came to me and he took me

to the table and he said, I want to introduce Herman.

We work with our Soviet comrades.

Aha, KGB.

And then he disappeared.

He says, I got something else to do.

I never knew his name.

He just handed me over to the KGB.

What was the relationship between the KGB and Astazies as collaborators, close collaborators

or just distant associates?

They were pretty close collaborators as I told you that they bought forged documents

that the Germans made because the Germans were better at forgery.

They also exchanged information, but they didn't trust each other 100% and I tell you

why I know that.

So they recruited me to send me to West Germany.

As I already said, East Germany had a thousand agents over there.

Why would they want to have their own?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

This is a fascinating internal and external dynamic of distrust.

Yeah.

Okay.

So there you are welcomed by the KGB.

When did the offer, the invite come?

Well, that took a while.

So Herman and I had an unofficial relationship for about a year and a half.

I would meet him once a week, once every two weeks, initially in his car, but then he took

me to a conspirational flat that was an apartment that was occupied by a party member, a lady,

single lady.

When we came in, she would leave, she left us tea and cookies and then we could freely

talk.

He also at that time gave me some West German literature magazines to read, which was of

course forbidden.

So I'm starting to feel somewhat special and as we were talking about what they had in

mind for me in general, I knew that I was going to be even more special because I would

be above the law.

I would operate outside the law of the countries I would go to as well as East Germany because

the magazines and eventually when I joined up, they told me I had better watch West German

television, which was also not explicitly prohibited, but it was something that could

get you in trouble.

So on many levels, you're super special, you're the James Bond.

Yes.

Yes.

What was that recruitment testing process like?

Testing whether you have what it takes to be a KGB agent?

First of all, we had very in depth talks, Herman and I, about life and I still am very

honest in sharing my feelings.

Philosophical or personal?

Personal.

I even told him that I was shy around the girls.

He was giving you relationship advice or what?

How old was he?

So what was the dynamic?

Can you tell me, was it a father, son?

No, older brother.

Older brother.

Older brother.

Yeah, he was maybe in his early to mid 30s and I was maybe 10 years younger.

And what languages did he speak?

He spoke German pretty well.

But he's originally from Russia?

Yeah, with a Russian accent.

So I got in trouble one time with him when I asked him, is your real name German?

He didn't like that.

He didn't like it.

Was he good with girls?

No, no.

I remember what he told me, he says, you've got to understand one thing, they're looking

for guys too.

That's all.

Oh, girls are looking for guys too?

Yeah.

Absolutely.

It's a competitive game.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So that little flame of love that we talked about and all the shapes that it takes in

our life, did he talk to you about that, that that could be taken advantage of, that that

could be used or was it implied?

Yeah, but not in, it was not very focused, not in great detail.

So let's, so we talked about personal stuff and you know, like, dislikes, he gave me tasks.

For instance, when my friend and I hitchhiked from East Germany all the way down to Bulgaria,

he told me to write a report about it, what I saw.

So fundamentally he wanted to see how well I can write and how well I can report, how

well I observe.

He also asked me to write some profiles about fellow students.

I don't believe that was for them to give him to the Stasi, it was just like, how well

do I characterize people?

That's important when you're talking about, when I was in the US, active in the US I operated

as a spotter.

So I did exactly that.

I wrote profiles about people.

He also gave me some tasks to do that were rather unpleasant.

He would give me an address and a name of the people who lived at the address and he

told me to go there, ring the doorbell and find out something about a relative who lived

in West Germany.

That is undercover exploration, right?

So you go, you make up a story and somehow win the confidence of your target to tell

you something that you want to know.

Was that, did that come naturally to you?

No, no, I hated it.

The charisma involved, which part did you hate?

Charisma, I think, I didn't know that I had it.

It took you some time to discover.

You know, I was, I always was and I still am to some degree a bit shy.

I lost a lot of the shyness after moving to the South because, here in the United States,

because you don't have to be shy, you know.

You can let your love shine.

That's exactly right.

So, but anyway, I hated doing that, but I did it well.

I still remember.

So I, in those days, I had a beard and I rang the bell and...

Tall, handsome fella.

Yeah.

And I looked the part, I said, I'm a sociology student and I'm doing a survey and I asked

a whole bunch of questions, would you like to answer the questions?

No problem.

And then I directed the conversation to the lady's private life and she actually gave

me information.

She volunteered information that I wanted to know.

Beautiful.

I did well.

And the other one that I didn't like, but I also did well with, when Herman drove me

around the city and showed me a building and he said, find out what organization is in

there, what they do.

We get to know some people and I did that pretty well also.

You know, you have to be inventive, you know, to come up with a cover story and I've always

been quite inventive, you know, I'm a storyteller at heart and that, I didn't know it then,

but you know, I...

But there was still something unpleasant about it.

Yes.

Yes.

Which part was unpleasant?

Well, the shyness and then, you know, I wasn't very comfortable lying.

I became comfortable down the road, but you know, I was brutally honest and never hid

anything of me.

But you know, over time you lose that uncomfortable feeling and you rationalize that you've got

to do it.

There's only one way, right?

And you're serving a good cause.

So you were talking to Herman for a year and a half?

A year and a half.

And then how did that progress?

Yes.

So he finally, I guess he sent a report to headquarters in Berlin and then he sent me

on a three week, quote unquote, practice trip to Berlin.

This was the first time when I had like a conspiratorial meeting where I had an address

and a time and a code phrase and I met another agent.

His name was Boris.

These names were meaningless.

They were all like cover names, right?

So what was the code and the meaning?

What was then?

Can you give a little more detail?

That code I don't remember.

Not the code, but like, what do you mean by code?

So what was...

I tell you, the code we used when I met while I was active, I would approach the other person

who I thought may be the person I want to meet.

We both had something with us or on us to make us more likely to be the right person.

And I would ask him the following questions, excuse me, I'm looking for Susan Green.

And he would answer, yes, you must be David.

Stupid.

If I ask a stranger, they would look at me, well, how could I help you?

So I know it's the wrong guy.

It's just a low probability that the right thing would be said, so it's a nice entry.

And it seems like a safe statement if it's not the right person, it would just come off

absurd or crazy or whatever.

You would have made a good secret agent.

You know exactly...

How do you know I'm not?

This is...

We'll discuss this further.

I'm dressed like one.

Actually, yeah, were there any dress code?

No, just fit in.

Fit in.

No matter what.

And then be creative.

Yeah.

Figure out ways to fit.

Right.

So anyways, he gave me some tasks and since I had rented a room in a house, he gave me

Western literature to read and we spent time together and there was a practice run to West

Germany.

Actually, there were two and that was very important.

In hindsight, I figured that out.

So I traveled to West Germany, no, not to West Berlin, with an East German passport

that was stamped that that individual was allowed to go to the West.

And there was a part of the border that was only guarded by Soviet troops and that's where

they smuggled me into West Germany.

I got on the subway and then appeared in West Berlin.

No Americans, no Brits, no French knew that I had entered.

Irish documents?

No, no, this was an East German passport.

It was real.

Okay.

Okay.

So and the first trip, all they wanted me to do is just walk around, smell the air,

have a beer or whatever and eat a sausage and then come back.

The second trip, I had a task very similar to the one that I had back in Jena to ring

the doorbell someplace and talk to some people and that worked very well also.

I should mention that you talk about that, you know, eat a sausage, drink some beer.

I suppose that's a good test too to see how you behave under Western, like when first

introduced to the Western culture.

Like this is why I might not make a good agent is when I first came to the United States

in the supermarket, like bananas, as many bananas as I want to eat.

That I think that would break me.

It's a shock.

It's a shock to have access to Western culture.

You're getting very close to the reason they actually made me do these two practice trips.

When I first emerged on West Berlin territory, I felt highly uncomfortable.

That was at the enemy, right?

And I saw the cops everywhere and even though those cops had like light blue uniforms, nothing,

they weren't standouts.

So I was wondering, you know, if they knew that, you know, I had like KGB on my forehead.

So you were paranoid that they would know, they would see.

I was scared, but I overcame that.

So that's, can we just linger on that because I suppose that's a natural, like if I give

anybody on the street the mission to do the mission you had to do is they would be paranoid.

That's a natural human feeling is am I being watched?

Do they know?

Like if you try to steal something from a store, there's going to be a feeling like,

are they watching me?

Are the cameras watching?

Are the people watching me?

They all know that kind of stuff.

So you have to over, or you have to be somehow rugged and robust to that kind of feeling

and overcome it.

Yes, exactly.

So and something very interesting happened while I was being trained in Berlin, I met

a classmate of mine from high school and he confided to me that he was recruited by the

Stasi to become a spy, go as a spy to West Germany.

And he also had this practice trip and he peed in his pants.

He went back and told him, I can't do that.

Just from the terror, that paranoia.

Now this guy's career was over.

He had an engineering degree, he was a pretty smart guy, he was just for the rest of his

life and he's still alive I believe, floating around and trading in model railroads and

stuff like that.

You mean do you think that experience broke him?

They wouldn't let him back in.

Oh, I see.

They, oh.

Yeah.

So this is a test that if you fail, you pay the price.

I had no idea that, you know, something bad would happen if I failed that test, but I

didn't.

Yeah.

I didn't fail.

So, and this led then to the offer, all right, and after, you know, Boris was happy with

me and he told his boss who was most likely the head of the KGB in East Berlin and I had

an appointment to meet.

In East Germany.

Yes.

In East Germany.

Yeah.

All of East Germany.

Yes.

That's right.

An appointment to meet with him and as we walk into the room, there was this huge desk

and a little guy sitting behind it, very, very, just like little and unimpressive, right?

A lot of paraphernalia, like, you know, had a bust of Dzerzhinsky on his desk and some

paintings of Lenin and so forth, but when the guy opened his mouth, he went like, whoa.

Huge psychological energy.

He spoke only Russian now and initially, he would, you know, start the bet with five minutes

worth of propaganda, why we're doing what we're doing, I didn't need that, I understood

most of it, but when I didn't understand, I'd ask Boris to translate and then he sprung

it on me and I was not prepared.

He said, so what, are you in or not?

And I was, no, I hadn't made up my mind.

I wasn't expecting that would come and so I said to him, I'm not really trained, you

know, there's a lot of things I need to learn and I came up with a couple of really stupid

things, one not so stupid, but the other one was, I don't know why I said that, I said,

for instance, I need to learn how to drive a car and to type with a typewriter and he

got really annoyed and he said, don't worry about it, we'll train you.

But I got to tell you, we need people who are decisive.

So you got until tomorrow noon to give Boris your decision.

That made for a sleepless night.

So what was going through your mind?

Well I had, this was almost 50, 50, I knew I was going to have a huge career, a good

career.

It was on my way because I was already employed by the university as an assistant professor.

So that career would be to become a professor, become a 10 year professor, be a world class.

Yes.

Jena had become my hometown.

I really loved the place.

It was my oyster and my family was my basketball team.

You love playing basketball.

Oh absolutely.

Yeah.

So this is home.

This is home.

This is where your love is.

This was home.

Did you understand that the choice involved leaving the home behind?

Yes.

And the one thing I didn't have, the two things I didn't have, an emotional relationship

with my mother and I didn't have a steady girlfriend at the time.

I think Freud would have a lot to say about that, but yeah, go ahead.

But the connection between those two, but yeah, I'm sure.

By the way, my friend Günther, the one who worked for the Stasi, was also, the Stasi

tried to recruit him as an agent, but he had a love relationship at the time and he said

politely, no, I won't.

I can't.

So you didn't have, that's the one thing that really could have held you to this place

is love.

So you got the career on the one hand, my basketball team, the town that I would be

part of the ruling elite of, and then we had this great adventure and the ability to contribute

to the victory, the worldwide victory of communism and stick it to the Nazis and of course the

feeling that you're really special.

Yeah.

James Bond.

Yeah.

What's, the question, do I want to be a tenured professor or James Bond?

Yes.

And as funny as that sounds, that was probably a difficult decision.

It was a difficult decision, but fundamentally it wasn't, and it wasn't my zeal to help the

revolution.

It was my, what they called, what the Stasi was looking for, the KGB was looking for in

a character that they would send over a well controlled inclination to adventure.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

James Bond.

What do you say?

In the love of women.

Yeah.

I was, yes, I got to put this in right here because I'm telling people I have two things

in common with James Bond.

These are my initials, JB, and I got the girl too, three times.

Yeah.

I mean that's, and that's adventure.

Yeah.

And the ability to travel to the West because the West was closed off to us, we could go

to foreign countries, but they all had to be communist countries.

You know, I wanted to see Paris because I had fallen in love with the Honore Balzac

who wrote a phenomenal set of novels that I just ate up.

And so when I eventually did go to Paris, I knew all the places already because he described

them all.

Okay, so that one, it was a, it was 5149, but eventually it, and you know, when you,

when you do the side by side intellectual comparison, that doesn't work.

It becomes a tie.

And then, you know, you just go with your gut and I said, Hey, I'm in.

So now that you successfully passed the test and you were sitting with this unimpressive

man and had the invite and had to sleep on it and have made the decision to join.

Yeah.

What was next?

I was just told, you know, that I was being recruited by the state department of East

Germany.

I was going to become a diplomat.

I must have had some paper, but I forgot because just by saying so, then that would, that wouldn't

have worked.

There's some kind of document that says that, and that was the only entanglement you had

to that, to that place.

No love.

No basketball, basketball, giving up basketball was huge for me.

I love playing that game.

I started playing basketball when I was 18.

That's a little late.

Are you better offensive, defensive?

What do you like more?

Do you like to shoot from a distance?

Do you like, I was a runner.

I was very, very quick on my feet and I was a good jumper too.

I typically played the, uh, the, the four position, you know, what's that, uh, forward

or the forward position, forward position.

But anyway, um, so that, that, that was the hardest, uh, uh, for me to give up.

Um, but indeed the other thing that I remember I had to do to hand in my party document to

the party secretary of the university.

And uh, he made a comment.

Yeah.

We probably won't hear much about you, but, uh, we know that you're going to do something

very important.

So he sort of had an inkling that, uh, I'm going, I'm going to go someplace, uh, undercover

or something like that.

And then I packed my bags and got on a train, uh, to Berlin for another one of those secret

meetings with, uh, my, my new handler, Nikolai.

So and here, here came another test that, that would have been quite easy to fail.

So I, I had lived, uh, in Yena for six years in a dorm, even when I became a, an employee

of the university, they didn't, they didn't have apartments.

I was still living in a dorm and, and they won in a single room with a bed, a chair and

a table and a toilet down the, down the hallway.

So I figured, you know, Berlin KGB, I'm going to get a nice apartment, right?

And so, uh, uh, Nikolai took me into his car.

We started talking a little bit and then he said, I have a task for you already.

Your first task is to find yourself a place to live.

I mean, I don't think I showed it in my face, but you know, my heart, my, my, my, my heart

dropped like down to into my pants.

I, I knew this was nearly impossible because it was a severe shortage of, uh, of housing

and in, in, in everywhere in Germany, East Germany and all the apartments and homes were

controlled by, by the government.

You know, there were long waiting lists.

Uh, I know, I knew couples that, uh, were promised maybe to get an apartment, uh, five

years down the road.

So then they would postpone the decision to have a child.

Anyway, this was impossible.

Uh, well, yeah, but this was a test, you know, because I had to be inventive.

Now I had to figure out, uh, how to get out of an impossible situation.

I didn't realize it then at all.

I just went with the flow, you know, what do I do?

So what I did, I went, I took the train, the city train, uh, to the very last stop, a little

town called Ackner.

And I wandered around in that town and knocked on doors and asked people if they knew where

somebody might have a place to live.

And after a couple of hours, somebody said, there's this lady that, and she gave, and

they gave me the address and I talked to the lady and she said, I happen to have a place

that you might, uh, that where you might be able to stay.

It was an outbuilding.

Uh, I don't know what it was, what it served.

It was not a garage.

It was concrete.

And it had, um, a bed and a chair, uh, running cold water and a stove, a cold stove.

That was my, was going to be my...

Pretty basic.

Pretty basic.

That's your...

Pretty basic?

Are you kidding me?

That's the, uh...

Toilet across the yard, of course.

Yeah.

Well, all the essentials.

What are you complaining about?

So you were, you had to run the, uh, the special, James Bond had to run a special operation

out of the house.

To, to, to my credit, and I think that, that, uh, that established part of my reputation.

I didn't complain at all to Nikolai.

That was part of the test probably.

Yeah.

I just told him, you know, I found something.

And so, uh, for six months I would get up in the morning, get on the train and walk

around in the city, you know, uh, did some operational stuff, uh, operational training.

I went to the library, did a lot of reading in the library.

And then I found a basketball team that I could join.

So at least I could take a shower twice a week.

Um, and, uh, and apparently it took about six months that I was still on probation because

after six months, Nikolai, one day we were still meeting in his car, he said, he handed

me a key and he said, I'm going to take you to your new apartment.

Now I, and I didn't know this, you know, that now I was really in.

Okay.

Imagine the hurdles you have to jump over and how many times you can fail, but you know.

But not complaining, not asking questions.

Yes.

I mean, that was something you've written about.

Um, I think you wrote that bosses do not like to hear complaints or problems.

They prefer solutions.

That's right.

So what was your interaction like with the bosses?

Is that essentially, um, represents the way he went forward as well?

I, no complaints, no arguments, no, no, I know this better.

I was taking it all in now that the, the, the technical guys, you know, they taught

me something I didn't know that made sense.

Um, what Nikolai, some of the stuff that he taught me was somewhat questionable.

He was a generalist and there's some things he didn't know really well.

So I could have like asked, probed a little bit, but I didn't.

So I just played along.

So this new apartment was, uh, uh, it was a studio at, at, at, at a kitchen with running

cold water and the bathroom was just one flight down the toilet, not a bathroom, uh, one flight

down the stairs, uh, it was a big upgrade.

And he gave me, uh, I think he gave me a thousand mark to buy, buy furniture.

And in that place, I actually, I also bought a TV and started watching West German television.

So I finally had a decent place to stay.

Um, and the, the, my training in Berlin took about two years.

What was the training?

What were the interesting aspects to the training?

What were sort of, if you do an overview systematic of what was the training process, what was

difficult, what are some insights that generalize to the training process of what it takes to

be a KGB spy?

Right.

So, uh, let me start with the trade craft.

So I was taught Morse code that took a while, uh, I, I, I was, uh, instructed in how to,

you know, use a shortwave radio and to receive, uh, the, the shortwave, uh, transmissions

with Morse code.

I was taught, uh, uh, and a encryption and decryption algorithm, manual algorithm, you,

you might be interested that eventually I figured out, uh, at least one of the patterns,

uh, the, the algorithm was such that the, and this was all about digits, like, uh, and

the algorithm was such that in the end, the, uh, the digits that were used to decipher

other digits that were handed, uh, that were sent to me by a shortwave radio, there were,

let's say if there were a hundred digits, there were an equal number of ones, twos,

threes, fours, fives, six, and seven, and up until zero.

And I was told that, uh, these, um, uh, algorithms, these manual algorithms were, were good for

about 300 uses.

After that, they could still be deciphered.

I'm assuming nowadays that, uh, wouldn't take as much.

Yeah.

With, with computers for sure.

But there's probably, they're probably designed in a way that you can manually sort of, uh,

it's efficient and convenient to use them manually, it's not to optimize cryptographic

security, it's to optimize, it's like to balance security and like humans being able to actually.

Yeah.

No, I got to disagree.

It was neither efficient nor convenient.

Okay.

It took a long time.

So it wasn't decipherable.

When, what was, what was significantly easier to do, uh, but, uh, that would require you

to have spied paraphernalia with you.

This is what's called a one time pad.

So you have the set of numbers on, on a sheet of paper, uh, that had to be developed.

I had to use iodine to make those numbers visible.

Those are known to be unbreakable unless they are used multiple times, the same, the same

sheet of paper, because, you know, the person who encrypts has the same set of numbers as

the person who decrypts and one, one time use, you cannot figure out what the message

is.

Oh, interesting.

But this is a quick way to communicate from one person to another one time, one time.

One time, but I had a pad with multiple, uh, sheets of paper, right?

And, uh, the reason that they gave me a manual one is because I literally, I had only when

I, when I wound up in the United States, I had only one thing with me that, uh, only

a spy can have.

And that was a, uh, a writing pad with, uh, uh, where the first 10 pages or so were impregnated

with a trace of a chemical that was used for secret writing.

Uh, but you really would have to know what you're looking for to, you know, you see this

pad it was bought at, uh, you know, Walmart and.

Can you explain a little, a little further?

What is the chemical here that, what are we talking about?

So how, I don't understand how it's possible to have a physical pad that does the encryption

without any computing.

How does it encode?

All right.

So, so no, no, it doesn't, it doesn't do any work, you know, so, and the, uh, the communication

that the encrypted communication was, uh, was, uh, a set of, uh, uh, groups of five,

five digits and then another five and there's always a gap in between, um, and, uh, so let's

say if I get this radio transmission, I write them all down and then I, then I use my, uh,

develop my algorithm and then I do mathematics, either addition or subtraction.

The resulting set of digits had then had a one to one correlation to letters.

And this is an easy way to then do the correlation.

Yes.

Yes.

Well, that's cool.

So you're saying the algorithm was not efficient.

It was not.

Oh, the manual took a long time and, and you can't make an error.

Right.

Uh, would you know where, can you, is it easy to debug?

No, no, you do it twice.

You do it twice and that's how you check.

If it's identical, then you know, but like, if it's not, then one is right and the other

is wrong.

You gotta do it again.

Don't make mistakes.

No, that's right.

And I really didn't.

So I was, I was learning that, uh, I was also, uh, told that I was required to become proficient

in another language and they gave me a choice and I picked English.

That's what was the other one.

Oh no, pick one friend, you know, whatever is spoken in the West.

Got it.

Uh, what was, what was, what would be second to you?

Would you, would you think French because of Paris?

What would you, what, why English?

English was a no brainer because I, I was a straight age to a student in English without

studying.

I like it came so easily to me.

So that's why I chose it, right?

So that was that, uh, then, uh, um, I, uh, I w I was taught the basics of, um, uh, counter

surveillance, you know, some trickery and, and, and, uh, um, uh, surveillance detection

routes where you wander around in the city for three hours and determine whether you're

being followed or not.

That requires you to plan the route very well.

I give you one example that, uh, that will illustrate that as my, my favorite spot.

When, when, when I was in Moscow, I did a lot of that also.

And if my favorite spot was, I wasn't a not well traveled, uh, uh, road.

It went down the hill and, and curved.

And at the bottom of the hill, there was a telephone booth.

And when you open the door and pick up the telephone, you have to look back.

So it wasn't like this, right?

It wasn't a giveaway.

This was normal.

That was natural.

So I could see if somebody would come walking after me, you know, these kinds of things.

Or you would, uh, uh, you know, use, um, public transportation, uh, big buildings, uh, where

you needed to use an elevator and see who's because surveillance, the, the object of

surveillance is to never lose sight of the individual who you're surveilling because

at that point you may miss the window where he does something that you're looking for.

So somebody always has to come close, right?

Did you have to also study surveillance?

No, only counter surveillance.

And what helped me in, in, in all my training, uh, you know, I, I would be, uh, would have

a competition with, uh, uh, folks that were coming, they were following me and me.

And I beat them every time, uh, they were at a disadvantage because one of them always

had to be close and, and if you saw the same face twice, you know that you were being followed.

And I had a very, very good, uh, memory for, for faces.

So basically figure out a fixed route and then a fixed route that allows you to, uh,

survey the area and then record the faces you've seen inside your mind.

And if, uh, you see multiple times a single face, that's, that's a bad sign.

And then they could, they could, uh, you use, uh, different clothes, uh, but they didn't

have was face masks.

The CIA does nowadays.

They can give you a different face within seconds.

Yeah.

So how big, I mean, again, you talk about paranoia, um, is that part of the, is that

a big part of the job, uh, counter surveillance, like being constantly paranoid that you're

being watched?

Yeah.

I was supposed to.

Isn't that quite stressful.

So is that, is that one of the, is that actually an effective way to operate?

Uh, nobody, it sort of becomes a routine.

Uh, I was told to do it, uh, while in the U S once a month and, uh, okay.

It's like a cleaning out.

Oh, not, not every day.

No, no, no, no, no.

Once a month or before I would say, mail a letter with secret writing.

So I was sure that, you know, nobody saw me put an envelope into a postbox.

So this is one of the tools in your toolbox is Morse code.

There's the decryption and encryption.

There's the car surveillance, photography, um, making, making microdots, you know, what

a microdot is?

What's a microdot?

It's, uh, you use, you, you take a photograph and you use a microscope in reverse and, uh,

make that photograph really small, so small that it's like the head of a pin that can

be used to, uh, hide under a postage stamp.

Uh, in reality, I knew how to make them, but in reality, they, they never asked me to make

use of that technique.

So it's a, it's a sort of an encryption mechanism for photographs.

Yeah.

So what we do nowadays, embed, uh, code in, in, uh, PDFs and stuff like that.

Right?

Yeah.

Beautiful.

Okay.

All right.

So that, that was a learning, a training process, both in the physical space and sort

of, um, algorithmically.

Is there other things?

Yeah.

You bet.

Uh, interestingly enough, the, uh, I was, um, the first book I was given to read was

the history of this, uh, these, uh, communist party of the Soviet union.

Oh, so understand.

That's interesting.

Cause you said you had to read Western literature.

Yeah, that too.

How much, how much reading, so history, how much history of politics, geopolitics, culture.

Not much more, but they made me read that document.

Other than that, I wasn't supposed to study the Soviet union.

I wasn't supposed and that was not, and I didn't, when they sent me to Moscow, it wasn't

to learn Russia, Russian, right?

It was to learn English.

Um, the, the second document they gave me was the, the constitution of West Germany.

And then I got lots of magazines and stuff like that.

Uh, as I told you, I was, uh, also told to, uh, uh, watch West German television, which

I, which I, uh, embraced with a vengeance because it was better than East German.

So I would get up in the morning and have a little breakfast and watch the German version

of Sesame street.

And that, that, that helps you, uh, that helps you get an understanding of the culture.

You have to do any kind of, uh, interaction, kind of spying that you have to be, be able

to effectively integrate.

Well, you, you also have to know, like, and, and that would have been easier, uh, if I,

they had sent me to West Germany, you know, all the soccer teams, you know, stuff that

everybody knows when I came to the U S I knew very little stuff that everybody knows.

That's why I had to be very cautious and, you know, take it in all the time anyway.

Uh, and the, the last thing I want to mention is, uh, they, uh, I was strongly encouraged

to, uh, expand my, my cultural education.

In other words, go to visit museums, uh, go to the theater, uh, not so much movies, uh,

opera, read, read books from all kinds of authors.

Uh, that was important to them.

And once a month I had to write a report what I did, but the interesting thing, there was

not a, there was no curriculum, there was no agenda, there were no check marks.

It was all ad hoc.

You know, now you do this and then you do that.

Uh, and, uh, and a lot of this also, they relied on my initiative.

Again,

I mean, that's part of the evaluation too.

You bet.

Um, are you able to have creative, it's interesting that they're like developing a James Bond

type of character here, which is what, what's the reason to go to the opera as you become

Yes.

In a certain kind of way where perhaps that makes you, uh, more charming, more charismatic

in terms of your ability to integrate yourself in different situations.

You absolutely right.

Uh, uh, I, I was, I was, um, uh, uh, when I came to the US after about, uh, two years

roughly, um, I was cultured enough to, uh, not, uh, make a bad impression at a, at a

diplomatic soiree in Washington, DC.

I mingled freely.

Yes.

All right.

And, and, and so the whole idea was for me to sort of reach into the upper, uh, realms

of society where the targets would be juicier than, you know, the worker bees.

And how did you end up in Moscow?

Why?

Yeah.

What is that journey?

Well, so I, uh, I told you, and I started studying English, so I started back from scratch,

you know, they paid for a tutor and I went from like English 101 and then I went through

that in a couple of months then.

And then I got another guy with whom we, I expanded this.

We had conversations rather than working from a textbook and I, and I worked like a maniac.

I threw myself into the study of, of, of, uh, uh, English.

Like you wouldn't believe.

Um, and, and my inspiration came from Vladimir Lenin.

I had read somewhere in a book that when Lenin was in exile, he studied German and he learned

100 German words every day, new German words.

So I started reading newspapers and every word that I didn't know, I wrote down on an

index card, uh, German, English, and, uh, and I piled them up.

And so I really learned 100 new English words every day.

I know this because I counted them and I had a system how to do this.

Uh, uh, so you take your index card and you have five categories is a really good way

to learn wrote by wrote.

Uh, so you've got category one, that's the new ones and you've got category five.

So you start with, uh, with five, five, you already had right four times.

If you have it right again, it goes to the archive.

Oh, in like longterm cold archive.

Yeah.

Four.

If you get it right, it goes to five.

If you get it wrong, it gets relegated to three or so.

And so you go through this and, uh, um, and occasionally I would throw the archive things

back into one.

So I really, I really acquired a phenomenal vocabulary.

When I was done with my English, my vocabulary was significantly higher than the average

American because I, I, I didn't discriminate whatever word I didn't know I learned, which

is not necessarily the best way because you know, English has a lot of synonyms, right?

Yeah.

And one synonym is usually the, the preferable one and, and I, um, when I first interacted

with people, I very often used the one that wasn't as good.

And people have found that I, you know, I have an interesting way of talking.

They didn't know what that meant, but yeah.

So it builds a good foundation for a language is getting a large vocabulary.

Yes.

It's really interesting.

There's something I do, which is called space repetition, which is a programmatic way of

doing this kind of system that you've developed yourself, which is if you successfully remember

a thing, it's going to be a longer time before it brings it up to you again.

Yeah.

Now that's requires a computer to keep track of information.

If you have cars, that's a really interesting pile system.

One, two, three, four, five, you upgrade it one, two, three, four, five.

Maybe I wouldn't go to the archive and go to them to, to pile one right away.

I would go to like, I don't know, pile five, perhaps is probably the right place to put

it.

Cause, cause you have to go through that full step again, but that is a really powerful

way to learn definitely language, but also facts.

Like people that go to medical school.

Disconnected facts.

Yeah.

And, and you pretty much, when you're done, you, you know what you know.

Yeah.

You don't have to.

Then again, to use it, to integrate it into the music of language.

That's more difficult.

That's what you're talking about.

Yeah.

There's a charm.

I mean, maybe it's not good for Spycraft, but there's a charm to this kind of, to having

an accent and using words incorrectly, but confidently there's a, because language isn't

a simple formula.

Language is the play of words.

So actually using the incorrect synonym, you know, as it, you know, if, instead of saying

I'm cold saying I'm chilled or something.

Like using off beat words can actually be part of the charm.

So it's interesting if you can learn how to use that correctly.

Cause I've known a bunch of people with the Russian accent and I feel like they get, get

away with saying a lot of ridiculous shit because they're able to sort of leverage the

charm of the non sequiturs.

And by the way, by the way, just one, one thing that we talked about using a computer.

When I had my first personal computer, I actually wrote a program that does that.

It does that.

By the way, when was that?

When, cause you were a world class programmer for a time.

Yeah.

You were a very good programmer.

When, when did the birth?

First PC was probably 1984.

1984.

When did you fall in love with programming?

When I went to college in the US and part of the core curriculum was that you were required

to take a course in computer and it was mostly just, you know, talk, but we also had to learn

a language.

Uh, we had to write some programs and Fortran, which was what five at the time, it was a,

it was a dumbed down Fortran, but listen, so I, I see the ability, I see what, what

you can do with this, I programmed a sine curve and then I divided the, the sine curve

into really, really small rectangles and then ran the program and it came up with the right

area.

Wow.

This is great.

That's incredible.

It's incredible.

That's so powerful.

It's, uh, you're creating, you're creating a little helper helps you understand the world

to help you analyze the world and so on.

Uh, we'll, we'll return to that cause it's interesting.

So you have so many interesting aspects to your life, but Moscow.

So

Yeah, no, let me, let, no, let me, how I was sent to Moscow.

Okay.

So one day I had a visitor from Moscow, uh, and he came to visit me in my apartment, uh,

together with, uh, Nikolai and he, you know, we talked and then he said, how's your English?

I said, I pulled a book from the shelf and says, I can read that without the help of

a dictionary.

Oh, that's interesting.

And he said, you know what, we're going to send you a tape recorder and you just talk,

say something, you know, for 20 minutes, whatever you want to talk about.

Uh, they sent this thing and two weeks later I was on a plane to Moscow because I also

spoke English, sort of the British variety of English with not a strong German accent

because I've always had the ability to imitate others and sounds that was an innate ability.

I would, uh, you know, when, when, when we were in a lab and, uh, as students, I would

very often do, uh, monologues, uh, imitating East German comedians.

You know, I just, yes, yes.

I'm not good enough to make a living out of it, but, uh, that raised some interest.

And so when they sent me to Moscow, that was the first time on a plane, by the way, um,

and, uh, I had a conversation with two ladies who spoke English.

One was a, a Russian, a professor at, uh, Lomonosov University.

She was obviously KGB, that was her cover.

And the other one was an American born lady.

Oh, by the way, she was an actual professor and using that as the cover or is it just

a story?

No, I, she said she was a professor.

She may have taught there too.

That's an interesting distinction.

Yeah.

One is like a story you tell people and one is like you legit are doing the thing, but

are also as a cover.

Anyway, that's, that's an interesting aspect of how to be a good liar.

You might, you might as well live the lie.

Yeah, exactly right.

Uh, so, uh, and the other one was a middle aged, the, the Russian was pretty young.

The other one was middle aged and American and, uh, and so we talked for maybe a couple

of hours and then they withdrew and I was left alone.

Eventually my liaison, he came back in and he said, it was close, but the American thinks

you can actually, uh, become, uh, you get close enough to become, becoming a native

speaker of American English.

And he said, the Russian was very doubtful.

So I think wishful, it was, it was a tie, literally wishful thinking prevailed.

So, uh, within a couple of weeks I was moving to Moscow.

And what, what was the task in Moscow and what, how long were you in Moscow?

Two years.

And what was the task there?

Is it training or is it espionage?

No, it was training.

It was, uh, so it was, uh, I, uh, the, the American born became my tutor.

I met with her twice a week.

Uh, I, uh, I also listened to a lot of BBC, shortwave BBC worldwide, uh, I read, uh, more

English books.

So a lot of that was about the language and the culture of English, uh, American.

And, and I did phonetics exercises every night.

I had a tape that was about a half hour long and they would say a word and I would repeat

the word, say a word, repeat the word.

And it was mostly about the vowels, by the way, most of the accent and, uh, uh, particularly

because let's say coming from German into, into English, but also Russian.

It's the vowels.

You're talking about the, so you would have a single word, a word, apple, and you would

just say apple.

Yes.

And American English or British English?

No, American English.

And, and I give you one, uh, example that almost nobody gets right.

The difference between hot and hut, you know, and in German speakers, it's very tough.

You know, which one, uh, for everyone is different.

For example, uh, I could say this on a podcast, something that my brother struggles with,

I struggled with too, when I first came to this country to learn English is there's differences.

There's embarrassing differences, uh, like beach and bitch, right?

And you get so, as a young kid, also you get so nervous of, I don't want to say the wrong

thing.

I, um, I can also say that this is almost as a jokey thing, but, uh, there's a, there's

a famous philosopher, uh, Immanuel Kant, and you can, uh, guess which other word is very

similar to that.

So there's a, there's a nervousness about the, what is that?

That's interesting.

I mean, and Germans probably have a different, uh, tension of like what is hard to learn

the difference between the pronunciation of the vowels or the control of the vowels.

Yeah.

It's interesting.

So you had to really master this daily exercise and, you know, and this, this was my discipline.

I did this every night, routine, boring as hell.

Uh, so English was the focus.

And I also had interaction with some, uh, agents who had operated in the United States

as diplomats on the, on the diplomatic cover.

They would come and talk to me a little bit and tell me and sort of prepare me what was

ahead of me.

And then I did a whole lot of operational training, particularly surveillance detection.

That was big.

They also, they also taught me how to drive a car in Moscow.

Finally, the one skill you needed.

What's a surveillance detection?

Okay.

So this is what, when, when you find out whether you're being followed.

Ah, got it, got it, got it.

So it's the, yeah, got you.

The abbreviation that's used in, uh, in, in, in, uh, yes, uh, in, uh, intelligence circles

is SDR, surveillance detection route, you know, when they say that, you know what that

is.

Uh, and, and that was it.

Uh, and a, and a few other things, you know, one offs, for instance, uh, I was once, uh,

taught, uh, to read silhouettes of ships.

When you see a ship from a distance, what kind of a ship it might be.

They, they thought this would come in handy.

Actually they, they, uh, there was in, in 1982, Andropov, uh, started, uh, a campaign

that was, uh, now I forget the name, Operation something, something where everybody who was

in the West was supposed to, uh, look for science that, uh, the West was, uh, uh, getting

ready for war.

And I had an, everybody had an object to, uh, to pay attention to.

I had a, uh, uh, a harbor, a military harbor in, um, um, in, in New Jersey, uh, near Red

Bank that was called Earl Weapon Station.

And the code name for that was early.

So they asked me to just wander by there to see if there was something unusual going on

because the Soviet Union were at that point, it was Ronald Reagan were really afraid that

Reagan was going to start a war.

They were absolutely 100% afraid of him.

Is there something memorable to you on a personal level and a philosophical level about your

time in Moscow?

Something that kind of stays with you outside of the training stuff, maybe like the details

of the training.

You love the answer.

You will love the answer.

Uh, I was, uh, I was given tickets to two, uh, performances by Americans.

Uh, there was a theater troupe that, uh, played Our Town.

Uh, and then there was this, I forgot the name of the guy, but, uh, uh, you may not

be old enough.

Have you ever watched Hee Haw?

Uh, maybe, uh, there was a, it was a country music show, real kitschy, but, uh, the star

of Hee Haw, uh, was giving a concert in Moscow and I guarantee you at least half the audience

were KGB and at the other end, the, uh, uh, um, the, the, the opposite of, uh, of a, of

a highlight was my visit to the, uh, to, to my, to the mausoleum where Lenin, uh, is still,

still today.

There, there was so, there was a nothing, you know, he was, he was my hero, but he,

he looked like a wax figure and, and, and you walk by there, there was nothing inspirational

and not, not, it was not a religious experience, nothing, it was, it was a big old nothing.

Is that, did, did your faith and belief in communism start to crumble at some point here?

No.