Something happened where they forced my hand and it's the only time that the 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 Barski, a former KGB spy, author of Deep Under

Cover 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 Lux Friedman podcast.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends, here's

Jack Barski.

Let's start with a big basic question.

What is the KGB?

It's the State Security Committee, this is a threat, and BS means without, and I guess

that directly translates to security without threat.

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.

Then nobody knows very much about it.

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 infamous, famous, infamous, and powerful intelligence agencies

ever.

In history, yes.

Ever.

Absolutely, 100%.

It was founded in 1954 after the death of Stalin.

You've, in writing your book, looked back at the predecessors of the history.

Right.

The history in which the KGB is grounded in the culture, the spirit, the soul of its predecessors.

Oh, absolutely.

They just changed names and they changed personnel rather frequently.

I 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 a chica and then it became the GPU, the NKVD, yes.

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, why was it unstable, would you say?

What if 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 paranoid at all levels?

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.

No, 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 of my father, the child who

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

Love always screws up.

Your employment competence, yes.

You 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.

Doing perhaps violence.

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, whether 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.

These 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?

It's very modular.

It's possible that you're not aware of the parts of the KGB that are the muscle?

I didn't know.

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

clue.

You're operating in a bubble?

Very much so.

This is what the KGB did really, really well, compartmentalization.

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 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 directed me and made

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

There's no reason to.

And 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 Barski, 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 in the future of the

world being.

In KGB.

Yes.

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

So even 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.

And 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.

Now that was a stupid pipe dream.

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

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

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

So marching, I guess that 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, you know, the ambitions of empire sometimes

do materialize in the growth and the building and the establishment, 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's sure as heck, in its words on the

surface sounds good, respect for the workers, 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 to their hard work.

Sounds great.

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

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

And that dream just never worked out.

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

When you're young, you just emotionally, you accept it.

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

itself.

Even though Lenin predicted that the state eventually would go away.

Well, how does it work?

Then you have like anarchy, right?

You have to have an organization.

And 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 want to go to the top, the ones that believe in themselves, the ones that

know better than everybody else.

And once you have that hierarchy established, there is no guarantee 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 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 in 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 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 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, 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.

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

atrocities he's committing.

I think he believed he will bring about a better world.

And by the way, the terror didn't start with Stalin, it started right after the Bolsheviks

took over when Lenin told Mr. Dzerzhinsky, Kamil Dzerzhinsky, to build the Chekha 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 site.

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, 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 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 of strike, of course, but man, if communists are 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 Gehlen, 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 Gehlen was too important with his knowledge

of his organization, was too important to not use.

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

the CIA of West Germany.

That gave 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, when 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 a shrunken head, so heads like the size

of my fist, I mean, the girls all cried, and it would have made a huge impression.

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

The communists were the Nazi fighters, 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?

So, but we didn't know that, right?

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

Great Patriotic War.

And that was the second one, you know, 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, four years?

Ten days?

Yeah, sort of, very good.

After World War II.

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 is the difference, what is the historical context here, what is World War II again,

and then...

Okay, well, let's do for some...

We don't have to go to World War I, which the result of which actually ceded World

War II, in some respects.

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.

So, and they would start expanding, and they went into France, they took Belgium to Netherlands,

they annexed Austria, and got a piece of Czechoslovakia, and then they decided to march into the

Soviet Union after they took Poland, yeah.

They cut up Poland together with the Soviet Union, and they were friends, they were...

There was a nonaggression pact between, 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, a 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 going to 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,

that the troops are amassing on the border of the Soviet Union?

He didn't trust his own intelligence apparatus.

Here's one example, there was a German Communist who went on the ground 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,

and 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

theirs, 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, 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 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, is 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 just 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 used 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 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.

Fascinating, but let's backtrack 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 occupied by the three Allies, the French,

the English and the Americans, and the Eastern part was occupied by the Soviet troops, and

the Soviet troops actually conquered Berlin.

And as 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 slash

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.

It's the other half.

The other half is Czech and Polish.

Nice.

And where I grew up, I could walk to the nicer 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 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 a 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 that 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.

He came after me initially, right?

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 in every A that I got, I dedicated to her sometimes

explicitly because I knew I was going to take care of her as I grow 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.

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 that 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...

There always is a competitor, isn't that how it works?

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.

Presence wins.

Yeah.

But you still had big dreams.

You wanted to be a 10 year professor.

Yes.

Yes.

So you still want to all do that guy.

Oh yeah.

And she eventually told me that he was not in a 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 drift a car.

Yeah.

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.

You know when that's a good thing that you could feel the pain that's still part of love.

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.

It'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 was 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 it's just like the life went out of me.

Just there alone and you have to experience this pain alone.

So but now you're deeply alone in this world.

Yes because I didn't have a 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.

But what I did was I wanted to go on.

And so I threw myself into the study of chemistry.

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

I just like I worked my ass off and since I was pretty smart too I just ace practically

everything.

And for the first two years in college and look we go to college they're all these pretty

girls and there's dances and everything.

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

I knew I was going to you want to have female companionship but love no more that hurts.

There's a song that goes love hurts.

Yeah and 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 entangled the allegiances as a KGB spy in

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

it's 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 those 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 joined 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

as a title of professor.

Easy now.

It's true.

Yes.

That's not a criticism.

100%.

I would clarify that tenured professor or not it is a very prestigious position throughout

history of Europe and 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 had about 100,000 people there and it's a wild guess but maybe 30 tenured

professors and they were part of the ruling elite.

I was trying to do it 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 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

are young to truly to excel and you sure as I 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 non entity 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 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 Stasi.

Oh that was East German secret police start security for the state.

There's that word security again.

And that they pretty much kept a record on everybody in the country and so when you 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.

So 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 you

know 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

right.

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 didn't wait it for 10 seconds and he didn't come in.

I knew that it was a stranger and said come on in and then came a person who spoke fluent

German so that was not a KGB guide it was a collaborator.

And so he started making a bunch of small talk he introduced himself as the as a representative

of Carl Zeiss Jena which was the optics company that made there was made really really good

optical instruments was one of the best in the world.

So it's like though you know there's the super prestigious company in that place.

And he said you know 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.

You when you were done if you were in the top 10 percent of the graduates you would

most likely pick to stay and get a doctorate right.

And the rest of them were assigned you know where 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 oh sure

you know I you know I started like feel out is this guy full of shit because yeah he's

a stranger showing up to your dormant.

I knew that at that point I knew he was 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 you know we had a series called the invisible visor when a

Stasi employee in East Germany 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 you know somewhat removed who was followed by the Stasi was you know put in

jail I had no clue that they did a lot of damage and that they were like 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 was 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 I had no other thoughts about that at that point.

So when when he was finally when he he went in 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 Zeiss Jena

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 we 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 Jena I still remember what I ate what was that rum steak with butter on

top and french fries 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 wouldn't enough tables and chairs and so forth.

So I didn't know if I could approach him but he 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 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 the Stazis as collaborators close collaborators

or just distant associates.

They were pretty close collaborators as I told you that you know they 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 and and I 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 have to want

to have their own.

Yeah yeah okay this is 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 already 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 you know 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 jazz bond yes yes so what was that recruitment testing process like testing

whether you are you have what it takes to be a KGB agent first of all we had very in

depth talks me Herman and I about life and I was I still am very honest and sharing my

feelings philosophical or personal personal I even I even told him that I was shy around

the girls he was giving you a relationship advice or what was the dynamic can you tell

me was it a father son brother 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 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 when I asked him is your real name German he didn't like that

he didn't like it what was he good with girls was was no no you know I remember what he

told me he says you know you got to understand one thing they're looking for guys too that's

that's all no girls are looking at yeah it's a competitive game yeah yeah don't don't

don't worry about it you know don't be so shy so that little flame of love that we talked

about yeah in all the shapes that it takes in our life did he talk to you about 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 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 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 what's it that's important when you're talking about when I

was in the u.s. active in the u.s. 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 quite

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 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 hear charisma I think I didn't know that I had it it took you some time

to discover because you know I was I always was and I still am to some degree a bit shy

I lost a lot of the shyness of 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 hate it doing that but I did it well I still remember so I and those

days I had a I had a beard and I and I rang the bell and all handsome fella yeah and 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 get would you like to answer the questions there's no problem

and then I directed the conversation to the ladies private life and 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 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 maybe get to know some people and I did that pretty well also you

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

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

it then but that you know but there was still something unpleasant about it yes yes which

part was the shyness and then you know you know I wasn't very comfortable lying I became

comfortable down the road but you know I was prudely honest and never never hit anything

of me but you know over time you lose that that uncomfortable feeling and you rationalize

that you 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 year and a half and then how did that progress

yes so he said 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 as was the first time when

I had a like a conspiracy conspiratorial meeting where I would I had an address in a time and

a code phrase and I met another agent his name was Boris these names meet were meaningless

they were all like cover names right so what was the code in the mean what was then what

can you give a little more that code I don't remember no but not the code but like what

do you mean by code so I tell you my the the code we use when I when I met while I was

active I would approach the other person who I thought maybe the person I want to meet we

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

so and I would I would ask him the following questions excuse me or I'm looking for Susan

Green and he and he would answer yes you must be David stupid if if I if I ask a stranger

and they would look at me well how could I help you so yeah no it's the wrong guy yeah

it's just a low probability that the right thing would be absolutely and it seems like

a safe statement yes it's not the right person exactly right just come off you sir or crazy

or whatever you would have you would have made a good secret agent you know you know

I'm not this is this is we'll discuss this dress like one actually yeah where there's

any dress code no just fit in fit in no matter what and then be creative yeah figure out ways

to write so anyways he give me some tasks and we and he since I had rented a room in a house

he gave me a 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 and 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 and then appeared in West Berlin no no Americans

no Brits no French knew that I had entered for his documents or not no no this was a

an East German passport it was real okay okay so and the first trip all they wanted me to

do is just walk around you know smell the air you know 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 some place and talk to some people and that worked very well is 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 college like this is why I might not make a good agent is when I first came to the

United States and supermarket like bananas as many bananas as I want to eat that I think

how that I think that would break me it's just it's a shock to be to have access to Western

culture you're getting very close to the reason they actually made me do this these two practice

trips the at when I first emerged on West Berlin territory I felt highly uncomfortable

that was at the enemy right yeah and I saw the cops everywhere and even those 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 yeah on my forehead you are paranoid that they would

know they would see I was scared but I overcame that so that's oh 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 have 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 or the cameras watching the people watching me they all know

that kind of stuff so you have to over oh you have to be somehow rugged and robust to that kind

of feeling it all 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 the yes that paranoia now this guy's career was over he had a he had an he had an

engineering degree he was a pretty smart guy he he was just for the rest of his life and he's still

alive I believe floating around and you know trading in model railroads and stuff like that

you mean do you think that experience broke him or they wouldn't let him back in oh I see they

yeah so this is a test that if you fail you pay the price I had no idea that that you know

no something bad would happen if I fail that test but I didn't yeah I didn't fail so and this led

then to the offer all right after you know Boris was happy with me and he told his boss who was

most likely the 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 uh just like little and not unimpressive nice a lot of paraphernalia like you know had a

bust of Zhazinsky on on on his desk and and some some paintings Lenin and so forth but when the

guy opened his mouth he was like whoa huge psychological energy he spoke only Russian

now and initially he would you know start to 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 what I when when I

didn't understand I asked Boris to translate and then then he sprung it on me and I was not prepared

he he said so what are you in or not I was no I'm gonna 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 was he got really annoyed and he said don't worry about it

we'll train you yeah but I gotta tell you we need people who are decisive so I 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 gonna have a huge career a good career

I would I was on my way because you know this I was already employed by the university as an

assistant professor so that career would be to become a professor become a ten year professor

be a world class yes Yena had become my hometown I really loved the place it was my oyster

and and my family was my basketball team I was you love playing basketball absolutely you mean

yeah so this is home this is home this is where your love is this is home did you understand

that the choice involved leaving yes home behind yes and 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 my friend

Gunther 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 would have helped me would 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 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

tenure professor or James Bond yes and and that as funny as that sounds that was probably a difficult

decision it was a difficult decision but fundamentally it wasn't it and it wasn't my zeal

to to help the revolution it was my 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 and the love of women yeah I was

yes but I gotta 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 and I got the girl too three times yeah I mean

there that's and that's adventure yeah and and 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 I had fallen in love with the Honore Balzac who

wrote a phenomenal set of novels that I just ate up and so I when I eventually did go to Paris I

knew all the places already because he described them all but anyway so that one it was a it was

51 49 but eventually it 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 say 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 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 the game yeah 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 loved 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 the four position you know what's that

forward oh the forward position forward position but anyway so that that that was the hardest

for me to give up 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 he made a comment yeah we probably won't

hear much about you but we know that you're going to do something very important so he sort of had

an had an inkling that I'm going I'm going to go someplace on the cover or something like that

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

with my my new handler Nicolai so and here here came another test that that would have been quite

easy to fail so I had lived in Vienna for six years in a dorm even when I became an employee

of the university they didn't they didn't have apartments I was still living in a dorm and

and he won in a single room with a bed a chair and a table and toilet down the down the hallway

so I figured you know Berlin KGB I'm gonna get a nice apartment right and so Nicolai

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 heart dropped like down to into my pants I I knew this was

nearly impossible because there was a severe shortage of housing and in everywhere in Germany

East Germany and all the apartments and homes were controlled by by the government you you know

there were long waiting lists and I know I knew couples that were promised maybe to get an apartment

five years down the road so and then they would postpone the decision to have a child anyway this

was impossible oh well you know but this was a test okay and so because I had to be inventive now

I had to figure out how to get out of an impossible situation I didn't realize it then at all I just

went with a flow you know what do I do so what I did I went I took the the train the city train

to the very last stop a little town called Akna 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 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 that where you might

be able to stay it was an outbuilding I don't know what it what it served it was not a garage

it was concrete and it had a bed and a chair a running cold water and a stove a cold stove

that was my was going to be pretty basic pretty basic that's your basis 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 right you're right you had to run the uh the special the James Bond had to run a

special operation out of the yes outhouse to to to my credit and I think that that uh

that established part of my reputation I didn't complain at all to Nicolai that was part of the

test problem 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 did some operational stuff

operational training I went to the library did a lot of reading in the library and then I found

the basketball team that I could join so at least I could take a shower twice a week and

and apparently I took about six months that I was still on probation because after six

months Nicolai one day we were still meeting in his car he said he handed me a key he said

I'm going to take you to your new apartment

and now 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 it went forward as well

I no complaints get 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 Nicolai 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 and probed a little bit but I didn't so I just played along so this new

apartment was uh it was a studio it had a kitchen with running cold water and the bathroom was just

one flight down the toilet not a bathroom one flight down the the stairs an upgrade it was a

big upgrade and he gave me uh I think he gave me a thousand mark to buy by furniture and in that

place I actually I also bought a tv and started watching west german television so so it 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 a tradecraft so I was taught morse code that took a while uh I I was 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 an encryption and decryption algorithm manual algorithm yep 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 that were sent to me

via shortwave radio there were let's say if there were a hundred digits there were an equal number

of ones twos threes fours five six and seven and up until zero and I was told that uh these

algorithms these manual algorithms were were good for about 300 uses after that they could still be

deciphered I'm assuming nowadays that 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 it's efficient and convenient to use them manually well 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 gotta disagree it was neither efficient nor convenient it would took a long time so

when what was what was significantly easier to do uh but uh that would require you to have

spy paraphernalia with you this is what's called a one time pad so you have the 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 uh 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 the quick way to communicate from one person to another one time one time well one

time when 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

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 you know Walmart and can you explain a little little further what

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 I how does it incorporate

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 a set of 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 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 well that's cool that's uh

and you're saying the algorithm was not efficient it was not oh the manual that took a long time

and and you can't make an error right uh would you know where can you it's easy to debug no you

no you do it twice you do it twice and that's how you check if it's identical then you know

well like if it's not if it's not then then one is right and the other is wrong you gotta

make mistakes no that's right and I really didn't but anyway um 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 they gave

them 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 wasn't no brainer because I I was a straight A to A student in English without studying

and I like it came so easily to me yeah so that's why I chose it right so that was that then

I was taught the basics of counter surveillance you know some trickery and and 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 that will illustrate that as my my favorite spot when when when I was in Moscow I did a lot

of that also uh and if my favorite spot was I was 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 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 it was natural so yeah I could see if somebody would come walking after

me you know these kinds of things or you would uh you know use 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 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 would be uh would have a competition

with the folks that were coming that 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 yeah inside your mind and if uh you see multiple times a single face that's

that's a bad sign and and they they could they could uh you use uh different clothes yeah uh

but they didn't have was face masks yeah the CIA does nowadays they can give you a different

face with within seconds yeah so how I mean again you talk about paranoia uh

um is that part of the is that a big part of the job uh counter surveillance like being constant

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 nobody it sort of becomes a routine

I was told to do it uh while in the US 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 uh post box so this is one of the

tools in your toolbox so there's morse code there's yes the decryption and the encryption there's the

counter surveillance photography and making making micro dots you know what a micro dot is

well that's uh that's uh you use you take a photograph and you use a microscope in reverse

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

that can be used to to hide under a postage stamp

um and reality I knew how to make them but in reality they they never asked me to to make

use of that technique so it's a sort of an encryption mechanism for photographs

yeah so what we do nowadays and 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 yes algorithmically is there other things oh yeah you bet uh interestingly enough the

I was um the first book I was given to read was the history of this uh these communist party of the

soviet union oh so understand yeah that's interesting because you said you had to read western

literature yeah that too how much how much reading so history how much history of politics

geopolitics not culture but they made me read that document uh other than that I wasn't supposed to

study the soviet union I wasn't supposed and that 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 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 um that helps you get an understanding of the culture because

if you have to do any kind of uh interaction yes kind of spying then you have to be in be able

to effectively integrate well you you also have to know like 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 over time anyway uh and the the last thing I want to mention

is uh they 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 checkmarks 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 uh 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 for the opera as you become

yes cultured 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 I I was I was uh when I came to the U.S. after about two years roughly I was cultured enough to

not uh make a bad impression at a diplomatic soaray 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

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 I went 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 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 so you take your index

card and you have five categories there's a really good way to learn wrote by wrote uh so you got

category one that's the new ones and you got category five so you start with uh with five five

you already had to write four times if you have it right again it goes up great it goes into the

archive oh like long term cold archive yeah four if you get it right it goes to five if you get

wrong it gets relegated to three so and so you go through this and 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 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 uh and one synonym is

usually the preferable one and and I uh when I first interacted with people I very often used

the one that wasn't as good and people found that I you know I have an interesting way of talking

they didn't know what that meant but yeah what so it builds a good foundation for a language it's

getting a large vocabulary yes it's a 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 requires a computer to keep track of the

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 maybe I would go to like I don't know pile five perhaps is probably the

right place to put it because because you have to go to 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 fact yeah and and you pretty much when you're done 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 where you're talking about exactly right there there's a charm I mean maybe it's not good

for spy craft 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 uh you know if instead of saying I'm cold

saying I'm chilled yeah something like using off beat words can actually be part of the charms

that's interesting if you can learn how to use that correctly because I have no 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 uh non sequiturs by the way

by the way just one one thing um you 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 one

because you were a world class programmer for a time you're a very good programmer

when when did the first PC was probably 1984 1984 when did you fall in love with programming

when I went to college in the U.S. 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

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

uh 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

it's incredible it's incredible it's so powerful it's uh you're creating you're creating a little

helper yes helps you understand the world to help you analyze the world and so on uh we'll

return to that because it's interesting okay so you have so many interesting aspects to your life

but Moscow so yeah no let me let me know 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 so 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 I'm we're gonna 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 yeah I also spoke English so that the British variety of

English with not a strong German accent because I've always had the ability to imitate others

and sounds there wasn't an innate ability I would uh you know when when when we were in a lab

and as students I would very often do uh monologues uh imitating East German comedians

you know I just impressions yes yes I'm not good enough to to make a living out of it but

that raised some interest and so when they sent me to Moscow there was a first time on a plane

by the way um and uh I had a conversation with two ladies who spoke English one was a Russian

a professor at Lomonosov University she was obviously KGB there was a cover and the other one

was an American born lady oh by the way she was an actual professor 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 no and one is like you legit are doing the

thing but also yeah as a couple anyway that's that's an interesting 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 an American

and uh and so we talked for maybe a couple of hours and then they withdrew and I was left alone

eventually my my liaison he came back in and he said it was close but the American things you can

actually uh become you get close enough to become becoming a native speaker of American English

and he said the Russian was very doubtful and so I think wishful 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 and how long were you in Moscow two years and what was the task there

is a training or is it espionage no it was training it was so it was I 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 I read more English books so a lot of that was about the language and the culture of

English American and and I did phonetics exercises nice 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 it's mostly about the vowels by the way most of the accent and uh particularly

let's say coming from German into into English but also Russian it's the vowels we'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 hot you know yeah you know

hot and hot yeah and in German speakers it's very you know which one uh for everyone is different

for example uh I could say this on the podcast something that my brother struggles with I struggle

with too when I first came to this country learning 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

that I don't want to say the wrong thing I um I can also say that this is almost as a jokey thing but

there's a there's a famous philosopher Emmanuel Kant and you can guess which other word is very

similar to that so there's there's a nervousness about the what is that that's interesting I mean

in 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 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 agents who had operated in the United States as diplomats on on a diplomatic cover

they would come and talk to me a little bit and tell me and 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 I also they also taught me how to drive a car in Moscow finally one skill you need

what's all 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 end to serve the the the abbreviation that's used in

yes in intelligent circles as str surveillance detection route you know when they say that you

know what that is and and that was it 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 started a campaign was uh now I forget the name operation

something something where everybody who was in the west was supposed to look for signs that the

west was getting ready for a war and I had an everybody had an object to uh to pay attention to

I had a harbor and military harbor in in New Jersey near red bank it was called Earl weapon

station and this code name for that was early so they asked me to just wonder 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 on 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 train you love the answer you will love the answer uh

I was uh I was given tickets to two performances by americans uh there was a theater troop that

played our town uh and then there was this I forget the name of the guy but uh you may not

be old enough have you ever watched he ha uh maybe uh there was a it was a country music show real

kitschy but uh the star of he ha uh was giving a concert in Moscow and I guarantee you at least

half the audience were kgb oh man and at the other end the uh um the the the opposite of uh of a

highlight was my visit to the uh to to my to the mausoleum where linen 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 not not there

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 is that around that was still

pretty strong what I did notice that the standard of living in in in Moscow was significantly lower

than in East Germany the uh uh in the supermarkets uh you could you could expect uh with reliability

that you can find uh canned fish and uh mineral water everything else was whatever and if you saw

a line and at a store you just line up you don't even ask what they have because if you don't like

it somebody else will it was it was uh not poverty but it was close to poverty there were a lot of

drunken men in the streets and uh this is the 80s no this is the late 70s late 70s mid to late 70s

and uh and also the they had these high rise apartment buildings that looked pretty good

from the front but you went into the backyard ouch you know yeah you're describing my childhood here

okay okay sorry uh but it's interesting even even with the professor even with everything else um

it's interesting because I think the standard of living was much lower you're right even in Moscow

yeah absolutely was though the one thing that they always had at least in my days was in those two

years there was always fresh bread and the bullets now yes yeah always yeah that's probably one of

the memories I have of childhood is well you're hungry a lot but when you eat is bread yeah and

the bread was good it was good I mean I don't I I actually wonder I wonder how good it was but I

remember it being incredibly good to me it was really good and and you know you had it from

white to very dark and and all the varieties the other thing that was good was um if you knew where

to get it Stalichnaya was four rubles not only is a good vodka but it's a cheap vodka I like it

yeah but you had to know where the you know this would be like holes in the walls someplace

well I think a lot of the way they operate I don't I wonder if he's germany's this way but a lot of

the ways that Moscow operates is you kind of you had to know yes like there's a very kind of

if you make the right friends if you give money to the right guy the guy the friend of the friend

of the friend is going to hook you up and this there's a culture that this is how you work around

a very big bureaucracy underground economy yeah underground economy yeah you have to which is a

boy such a stark contrast between between that and the United States the capitalist system

yeah that was a very big culture shock to me to understand the different way the different

fundamentally different way of life but the interesting thing is

human nature pervades both systems and there's something about the Russian system

that reveals human nature more intensely because of the underground nature of it

because you get to deal with greed and trust and all those kinds of things in the United States

there is much more power to the rule of law so there's rules and people follow those rules

they get to break the rules nonstop well in in East Germany and Russia I believe

theft if you could get away with it was part of your economic activity yeah

yeah I have a friend you know who I went to school with up until my fourth year and

we reconnected and he told me how he survived you know he would you know he would just steal

stuff and then sell it and or trade it yeah theft I mean it's a relative concept you know

you are taking stuff bribery all those kinds of things people you know corruption you know

it's a relative I'm just kidding I mean it is you have to work around the giant bureaucracy

about the the giant corruption corruption builds on top of corruption and it just becomes this

giant system that's unstable as you talked about one last word yes the two years in Moscow

taught me how to be alone I had no social interaction not with friends not with women

no I was the only interaction I had was with the folks that trained me so I was alone there was a

lonely two years for a person who who loves love yes but that prepared me for my first

year and first and second year in the United States because I could not interact socially

without giving away that something was wrong with me I had to learn how to be an American

they didn't teach me in Moscow they couldn't so if the first two years in in America you had to

kind of listen more than tell you you bet the very first year I couldn't even work because I had to

acquire the docking documents and social security card and a driver's license to get a job and then

when I had the job I worked as a bike messenger that gave me a good opportunity to listen as

as you know because these people they they weren't really very curious about me what was your name

in East Germany what was your name in Moscow what was your name in America okay so my the name I

was given at birth is Albrecht Dietrich nobody so sexy when you speak in German accent I hated that

name the Albrecht I didn't like it it was it was very rarely used my mother named me after a

famous German painter Albrecht Dürer my cover name in Moscow was known as Dieter and in the

United States I became Jack Barsky in between I used a whole bunch of other names that were

associated with false passports that I used one of the names and I remember is William Dyson

because that is the name that was on the Canadian passport I used to enter the United States

so how did you enter the United States can we take the journey from Moscow to the United States

what was the assignment what was the what was that leap what was like what just one one one thing

in between I had a three months practice trip to to Canada that was that was a good idea and I got

to tell you this this one thing that happened there okay so because you know the one one thing

that I like to tell people nowadays is the one of the secrets to happiness is the ability to make

fun of the worst situations that you're in yes you see the humor yes okay so here's come here

comes something quite humorous in hindsight at least one of my the task that I had in in Canada

was to acquire a birth certificate but the name the name was Henry Van Randall who was born some

place in California and I was supposed to you know write a little letter saying I'm Henry Van Randall

please send me a copy of my birth certificate the fee is enclosed and and and I lived in a small

hotel so the return address it wasn't visible there was a hotel that was important so and it took

like three weeks and I get nothing four weeks I get nothing eventually I got annoyed and I

mustered the courage to call them up from itself from a payphone I called up the office

registrar whatever they were called in this in this town in California and I and I yelled at them

I said you got my money where's my birth certificate well a couple of weeks later it came so I see

the envelope this is the Henry Van Randall yes I had prepared the caretakers of the of the hotel to

that I'm expecting a letter from my friend so I went up to my room I opened it and I was like

yes yes this is success and and I opened this thing and it was it was a copy of a birth certificate

but it was stamped with big letters across and read deceased now think about it so here's a

debt people who's asking for that person who's asking for a birth certificate I had the presence

of mine to to leave okay I went to a couple of other cities I should have left the country

but I know that the Royal Mounted Police was following me and I was given that information

by the FBI later on and they were you were able to oh you were able to at least suspect that

at the time I would through the the the I knew that I knew that there was trouble so

my counter surveillance route SDR yes didn't discover anything so I kept on going I had to

supposed to I was supposed to visit two more cities and they were always one step behind

what what what is interesting to me is that they didn't catch me on the way out you have to show

your passport to the airline I mean I was I was known by name I would then the path because I had

to give that to the hotel right and I escaped with that so how did they do yeah they would have to

keep you on a list right yeah yeah that's interesting but that requires like a good computerized

updated yeah and this was Swiss air so well you got lucky yeah part of life is luck you bet so so

and and other than that the the trip to Canada was a big success because it it gave me the culture

shock that that I needed to not be blown out of out of the water and when I get get to the United

States so you hopped a few places in Canada and then Swiss I even had a I even had a relationship

with a young lady Canadian French Canadian regular Canadian French Canadian and she she gave me a book

Winnie the Pooh because we went to see the movie and then she wrote the dedication she says to the

nicest German I've ever met was she lying no or you don't know speaking of spy craft and that

that led to heartbreak too no that was sexual I was not at that point ready for love no ready to

return to that old well I was I was already already married in Germany okay that woman I loved we

should return to this yeah so Swiss air where did you land in the United States oh when I came

where did I land I American Airlines and a flight from Mexico City to Toronto but they made me

deep plane in Chicago I have no idea I think this was over engineering that didn't make any sense to

me you know why can't the Canadian just take a take a flight from Mexico City with this stop over

there's kind of nonsense yeah but okay but nevertheless that was it and then you landed in

Chicago right and tell me the story in America what was the day to day life now this is now

your spy your no no no I got to tell you another funny story yes so this is another there's two

things that happened that could have ended my career as a spy right then and there so I'm

so I'm arriving in in the Chicago in the evening it's already dark I had no idea what kind of

hotel to take you know I picked one out of out of yellow pages and then got a taxi when I gave him

the address he looked at me like a little funny whatever what do I know you know just keep on

going I need to get I need to get sleep because I was extremely tense you know having gone through

customs and border control so and we were going in the southern direction and I noticed that the

neighborhoods were became less and less inviting didn't didn't know what that meant either I get

into the hotel it was a five story brownstone and something else looked funny so the reception desk

was protected by plexiglass not having enough background I didn't know that this was unusual

because all I knew that there was a lot of crime in the United States so I thought maybe

every hotel was like that so I go up into my room and drink a half a bottle of Johnny Walker red

because as one does yeah because I was so damn tense I just wanted to sleep I wanted to get into

a coma which I did and and the next day I woke up with a head it was twice as big as felt twice

as big but you know I was prepared I had aspirin with me so I killed the headache and went outside

to see if I can get something to eat and so I was right smack in the middle of the south side

of Chicago I didn't know that the south side of Chicago existed I found later I found out where I

was so it was time to go very quickly go up there and at that point I decided I would I would register

at the next hotel on the Jack Barsky so I went to the bathroom and I tried to kill

kill off Mr. Dyson by burning his passport unfortunately I was not trained in how to

train passport how to how to destroy passports it was so I tried to burn it and these things

or flame retardant and it created a cloud of smoke and I'm looking up there and there's a

smoke detector yeah oh no okay so presence of mind I threw this thing in the toilet

and then then took out a pair of scissors and cut it into small pieces and flushed it down

if that smoke alarm goes off I'm busted right if somebody if if some some criminal steals

I had $6,000 on me and cash steals either my passport or my or my money or both

I don't know what to do yeah you can't go to authorities you can't do there weren't there

weren't any Russian dudes Soviets in Chicago do you have any contacts no there was no there

was no there was no plan B for Chicago at all that's an oversight I shouldn't I shouldn't

have gone to Chicago they they could have shipped me into San Francisco or Washington DC because

both of them had Soviets my end goal was was to go to to New York fine you know I would have been

a really really dangerous agent if I had gone back and worked with a KGB because I could have told

him all the things how to do it right so in that sense there is some given the scale of the KGB

there is some incompetence in this some a lot of with regard to preparing me to be an American

as it was almost total incompetent and that do you think that's representative of the way they

operate is there's an incompetence like to the logistics to the strategies involved all that

kind of stuff yeah they none of these guys had operated as illegals they they were outsiders

to American society they had interaction with Americans and but they all lived in you know

in New York they lived in their compound in northern Manhattan where they all lived together

with their families and and they most of the time they spent interacting with with themselves

with their own people at work so they really didn't integrate well they did not know what

it's like to be an American to have a job to to you know live like an American they didn't know it

it's interesting that KGB didn't put a high value to that kind of integration they didn't know what

they didn't know yeah and and by the way this was mutual do you think the CIA had had good

knowledge of the Russian culture uh same thing and so there was a lot of lack of understanding

because good good intelligence could have possibly avoided some of the high tension that

situations that we had when when in the 80s we got close to nuclear war so good intelligence

would be integrating yourself in society yes much much and understanding that Ronald Reagan

was not a warmonger but he was talking about the end times because he was a a Christian

but then that kind of integration can be dangerous because you start to question the

propaganda the narratives that on which the KGB is built oh yeah the CIA is built and and then

they they have always have had the options of ignoring the intelligence that they're getting

right yeah well let me ask you this question sort of to jump around there is a lot of conspiracy

theories in this in this current climate I mean throughout history but now especially

and some of the conspiracy theories put a lot of power in the hands of the intelligence agencies

like CIA, FSB, Mossad, MI6 they're basically the conspiracy theories go that they control

the powerful people in this world and they're able to thereby manipulate those powerful people

and manipulate the populace in order to deliver different kinds of messages and so on given your

experience with this kind of tension between competence and malevolence would you say there's

some truth to those conspiracy theories? Not one way I think I think there is there's

collusion there's collaboration but I would think that like for instance some folks in

the CIA and the FBI are being used by the ones that are really in power power's money power's wealth

I know power's not it can go both directions you can acquire wealth first which leads you to power

or you can acquire power first yeah power is also knowledge I understand and in a position in the

society in the military or in intelligence but I don't think it's a straight one way that all

the intelligence agencies control the powerful people in their country you see what's happening

in Russia I mean Putin dominates his intelligence agencies right? Well so the question is which

way the direction goes be you're saying that there is it's not one way flow of power I would

think so and I also believe it exists but it's not as prevalent as you know not every conspiracy

theory pans out and most of them don't they're just damn rumors but it doesn't mean they don't

exist I guarantee you that they exist there's collusion there's people getting together

and not necessarily preparing a specific action but more sort of a plan to go forward

and maintain the position or even you know strengthen the position that they already have

so KGB Buchen generalizes FSB CIA do you think a KGB agent would kill someone against international

law if they were ordered to do so so we talked about they did they did and there's a there's a

famous case of one but I think it's Vasily Kuklov who defected he was a killer he was a train killer

and he had had done assassinations in other countries he was sent to west Germany to kill a

defector a KGB defector and he decided not to do it he talked to the guy and he said I'm supposed

to kill you I'm not and then then he eventually wound up in the United States I have a connection

to this fellow because the KGB once asked me to go to California and see if the guy still lives and

works there and we I found him and we looked at each other so it was an active KGB agent

looking at a man that he didn't know was the KGB defector looking at each other neither one knew

who the other one was I found out later but he was able to survive yes and you know there

there have been assassinations not not a lot and you know that that we know of the good point

this is very difficult the the the question is how many lines are intelligence agencies

willing to cross to attain to achieve the goal I I think none of these agency

you sees have the ultimate line I think eventually they the last line will be crossed if they believe

it's necessary well I think you can justify a lot of things especially in this modern world

with nuclear weapons that you can justify that you're saving the world actually let me ask

a few difficult questions and we'll jump back to your time in America but

Vladimir Putin has been accused of ordering the poisoning and assassination of several people

including Alexander the Vdenenko early on all the way to Alexei Navalny do you think these

accusations are crowded in truth and we will return to a couple more questions maybe above

Vladimir Putin's early days in the KGB which would be interesting yeah there's a there's a

phrase that I like to say in responses called plausible deniability I don't think Putin gave

a direct command as they do that he would just maybe muse it would be nice if something would

happen and then somebody picks it up and does it is there can you steal man the case

that Putin did not have direct or indirect involvement with who would know who would know

you know just well the international the reputation perhaps

perhaps catalyzed by Putin himself is that he is the kind of person that would directly or

indirectly make those orders perhaps the case there is he's somebody to be feared and thereby you

yeah yeah sure but the act itself the the the poisoning of Litvinenko and oh and then the

the assassination of the Bulgarian Markov and with a with the umbrella and and they all

directly traced back to Russian Soviet intelligence and so that's enough to be feared right um my

answer that I gave you is an educated guess you know like I can't pretend to know this for sure

but it's frustrating to me because there's a lot of people listening to this would say

they would even sort of would chuckle at the naive nature of the question but if you actually

keep an open mind you have to understand what is the way that intelligence agencies function

is it possible to the head of an intelligent intelligence agency not to make direct orders

of that kind where there's a distributed now the head of the intelligence agency would

most likely give the order even though it's compartmentalized yeah but but but but not the

the head of state not maybe not the head of state although uh in the case this is the case in the

United States as well but certainly is the case in Russia there are close relationships between the

head of the FSB and the GRU and personal relationships not just even the head of the FSB

who is known jail there's interesting details especially uh coming out recently around the

war in Ukraine so let me actually ask about the war in Ukraine all right what is your analysis of

the war in Ukraine from 2014 to the full on invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022 in February 2022

what there's many questions we could ask one is what are the sins of the governments involved

what are the sins of Russia Ukraine America China are those sins comparable

core the good guys and the bad guys I was more than one question let me just uh give you my

the basics about this savvy observers saw this coming they were very small minority

because Vladimir Putin was pretty open about what he told the world his mission was was the

reestablishment of a strong Russia the reestablishment of something like the the Russian Empire to

unite all the Russian speaking people in under one country and the world ignored him I mean he

was open what was there was at a conference in France I believe when it we he set this out in

the open and then what we had in the United States we had wishful wishful thinking you know

Obama had this reset with Russia you know we all get friendly and then when when uh Putin invaded

Crimea we did nothing so and it and it just escalated slowly but surely

it was pretty clear and then they said uh it was I think two years ago there was an essay

published by uh Putin whether he wrote it or not doesn't matter but that was also out in public

where he was again quite clear what he was going to do now how do you do this with force and uh

and the the sins committed by the American government was that we ignored it we were in

gauge and wishful thinking and we didn't stop it with sanctions before the shooting started

to push back I don't think you're fully describing you are describing the sins of the Russian

government and Putin I don't think you're fully describing the sins of the American government

here because not only didn't you're doing you're describing miscalculation so not only did they

not pressure correctly with sanctions and so on and and and clearly respond to the actual

statements and the essays and the words spoken I know where you're going but keep on yes but

they also at the same time pressured pressured Russia and they also as as Putin himself said

sort of there's a rat and they pushed the rat towards the corner by expanding NATO and uh and

arming Ukraine and well the military industrial complex is a machine that uh that led us um and

I think a lot of younger people I mean when I came to this country and this is the country I love

of I lived through 9 11 I lived through the full roller coaster of emotion yeah I'm a

at that time before that and after it was a proud American I went through the whole roller coaster

of uh being sold a I would say a lie about the reason to invade Iraq and even Afghanistan

and I've got to live through understanding of this military industrial complex that leads to the

expansion of empires of the delusion that we have in the populace in in the government

that convinces us that we are the good guys and somehow with military force we can instill our

values and still happiness the pursuit of happiness that all men are created equal these ideas

in into other lands and we can do so with drones and we can do so with weapons and we can do so

without significant cost or our own from our own pockets and so this idea this machine doesn't

just apply to Afghanistan and rock it doesn't just apply to Yemen and Syria it doesn't just apply

to China it also applies to Ukraine it also applies to Russia agreed and two thoughts if I make

first of all one does not hear the term military industrial complex in the public discourse these

days Eisenhower warned about it Eisenhower was a capitalist he was the president of the United States

so it exists and it is very powerful the more weapons you can sell the more you have to replace

them or send over you have to replace them so yes the the other thing is there's also a messianic streak

that powers American foreign policy we want to make the world just like us why don't they get it

because they don't want to it's almost like it's not communism but it's a very similar

romantic idea that we can make the world then fashion the world the way we are and and and

that's the romantic side and the sort of honest side but it doesn't work it should it failed every

time right you know Afghanistan is a royal mess and would never become a functioning democracy

I don't know if if Ukraine can become a functioning democracy so well I don't know if American weapons

can help Ukraine become a functional democracy I yeah absolutely right but there's a huge amount

of interest in seeing the world in black and white and selling the story of the world is black

and white that Ukraine is the symbol of democracy in this east eastern European world and Russia is

the symbol of authoritarian dictatorship and the story is not so simple as as as many indices show

Ukraine and Russia are the number one and the number two most corrupt countries in Europe

they're two peas in a pod one is bigger and and and one is in this case the aggressor now

you know two peas the aggressor is still ultimately responsible and the person that

throws the first punch now there's a lot of people going to disagree where the punch came from yeah

but there is there is magnitude yes and and the struggle by Ukraine for sovereignty stretches back

to the beginning of the 20th century stretches back even further than that but there's been

the Ukrainian people or proud people and they've been in many cases tortured by those that sit in

the Kremlin throughout the 20th century the the famine in the early 30s and it's always it's never

the middle class in the upper class that suffer it's always the lower classes the peasants right

in that time that this history stretches back far and this is yet another manifestation of that

and there's a lot of interest to play China watches closely Russia America watches closely

and there's an extra caveat here that there's nuclear weapons at play as well exactly

and it's what this is the situation is as dangerous as I have lived through in my entire

life I believe and because it's not necessarily at the highest point of escalation but it will be

in my view a protracted crisis and the longer that crisis lasts the more of a chance there is

of an accident yeah one rocket yep there seems to be a strong incentive to prolong to do siege

tactics to prolong this conflict over perhaps many years which is terrifying to think about yeah

and over that one a single rocket can lead to given that there's leaders that might not that

might be losing their mind yeah and Ukraine is not part of NATO the thing I'm really afraid of

of is that somebody might think it's a good idea but for Russia so Putin might think it's a good

idea for Russia to send a message by launching a nuke against Ukraine because they're not part

of NATO so surely the West is not going to respond what is the West going to do yeah if

if Russian nukes Ukraine to send a message I don't know if anyone knows the answer to that

question but it's a terrifying question and and I don't know the exact protocol that needs to be

followed to to launch a nuclear strike from from NATO's end because we have several countries in

NATO that have nuclear weapons so for let's say for France to fire a nuke does the United States

have to agree or how does I don't know how that works I don't know if anyone knows how that works

yeah I worry now we have different very kind of anecdotal perspectives on these things but

if the people have interacted with in the DOD Department of Defense in the military

there is a compartmentalization there is a bureaucracy and within that giant bureaucracy

there's incompetence we'd like to think that there is like really well organized for really

important things there's going to be the best of the best in the world that's going to execute

on the correct decisions both geopolitically militarily all that kind of stuff and I've seen

enough to know that competence at any level of government at any level in the military is not

guaranteed let's go back to the law of hierarchy the the government is is the biggest hierarchy

there is and so invariably politicians find their way to the top and once you have politics and

dictating substantive decisions they're they're going to be weak or wrong it's I don't I don't

know how how this could work any other way there well right now we have some functional idiots

in the central United States government well let me because you did you said that I think

elsewhere you said that Putin was not a good KGB agent that's right mediocre one but

is an excellent politician yeah and a good organizer he was known as a really really

good organizer when when Yeltsin hired him as a prime minister he he cleaned up the mess to

because Yeltsin was under Yeltsin Russia deteriorated tremendously and it became sort of a mix of an

oligarchy and a criminal enterprise and chaotic so he had skills that made him a good executive

absolutely now let's go back to him as a KGB agent he was a KGB agent I mean you know according to

him once a KGB agent always a KGB agent but 16 years let's say something like this

what do you think about from your experience now you're maybe a same age as him approximately the

same age as him he's a little younger a little younger yeah what do you think about the KGB

experience he had made him the man he is what aspect of that from your own experience yeah well

how much that does that define you who you are how you think about the world how you analyze

the geopolitics of the world how you analyze human nature now I gotta tell you one thing he's he

had a different type of training than I did mine was one on one and he went to school to so to speak

so right so but but fundamentally he was not a top agent then this is very simple to there's

only one one thing you need to know he knows German pretty well so he was where was he deployed

in East Germany not in West Germany not in Switzerland not in Austria that's where they

sent the best right when we think generally we're learning here right so this is your

classification of where they send the best you know there's people classify all kinds of stuff like

what is the best university in the world what is the best football team in the world

you start to get a sense the good guys get sent the the best athletes get sent to

well we disagree on this but the football team is but you have a sense and you're saying that the

best agents would have been sent one would think so now this is not a forcing argument but

I also have it from from a word from the horse's mouth which horse I mean what kind of horse what's

the breed of the horse you know who Oleg Kalugin is and he's still he's still alive he was at one

point the head of counter intelligence for the first directorate espionage right and Putin was in

the first directorate and reported to Kalugin for a while and Oleg told me to my face that Oleg was

not an impressive that agent trainee or agent what that Vladimir Putin was not impressive not

impressive at all now he's biased given this current situation and well yeah you know he could

still make it up because he had this big ruckus when when he was in parliament and called called

Putin the war criminal about the war in Serbia not only could he make it up I wouldn't trust his

analysis I mean I have to you know what when people I've been working very hard even before

this war to try to understand objective analysis of all the parties involved you have to really

keep an open mind here to see clearly to understand if you are to try to help in some way make a better

world in this case stop this war yeah or have all the countries involved flourish bring out the

best the people remove the corruption and the greed and the destructive aspects of the governments

and let the people flourish for all that you have to put all the biases aside all the political

bickering all the I don't know all the biased analysis and there's there's a lot of propaganda

that says that in fact Putin was it was a good agent how else would he rise to the ranks right

because he was a good politician and he had made a lot of good connections and with with

in the KGB allow me to say something you just you just taught me a lesson and and and the lesson

I should have figured out myself because I keep on telling people that in the intelligence world

you never know the truth 100% so when you said oh I could make that up of course you could have

but you get to a point where you're forced to make a decision or have an opinion and then

you use your best educated guess yes so I'm I'm going to take the certainty of the statement that

I made back yes because you it's quite possible that you're right well what I've noticed about

Vladimir Putin and this is true about for example Donald Trump and all those kinds of

divisive figures that some for some reason people's opinion on the details of those people are very

sticky once you decide this is a bad guy yeah there's like like a black hole and people are not

able to think like one act at a time you don't have to like that doesn't somehow justify this

this somehow doesn't uh remove all the evil things that are done but you can analyze clearly

each of the actions and to me it is interesting to see how did this man rise through the ranks

now you're saying that to be a KGB agent there's a lot of skills involved and perhaps raw

technical skill of spycraft is perhaps not related to the skill of raising rising through

the ranks right and you're saying as a politician he was good at rising lying and influencing

uh that is something that that is significant as a significant talent and ability that an

agent must have that helps you as a politician continuing the kind of thread of the role of

KGB in defining the the heart soul and mind of latimer putin let me return to Yuri bismetov who

was a soviet kGB agent that wrote a four step framework for ideological subversion on a national

scale as practiced by the soviet union so the the four steps are demoralization destabilization

crisis and normalization he had a lot of other kind of systematic ways of describing this kind of

stuff so can you speak to some of these ideas about the systematic large scale ideological

subversion goals of the kGB is there truth to that kind of those ideas yes but i i think i

already sort of mentioned that i think besmanov was a fraud and i have i have again can you

elaborate good good arguments let's put it this way first of all we we know that the kGB was

involved in active measures which is you know you can call it fake news yeah seating fake news into

advert in the countries that are your adversaries and and the russians have been doing this lately

by meddling in our election and and focusing on the left and the right fringe and influencing

them to become more left and no more right so that and uh in vasili mertrocan uh has and has

an in one of his books uh he has a whole chapter about active measures okay so what he has to say

about the department and i forgot what department that was was the one department that was the least

desirable for kGB agents because these were desk jobs for people who had to come up with uh fake

stories that uh in countries where they didn't quite know too much about the country now there

were some successes like one of them the two uh most famous successes uh that i'm aware of is that

the canard that the AIDS virus was concocted in a cia lab and there's a lot of people around

the world believe that and the other one was that uh jad kahoover was a secret cross dressers

cross dresser that that was that that is still known by a lot of americans who over a certain age

that this was the truth but uh mertrocan actually traces it back to a story that was placed in a

sort of left wing but close to mainstream uh french magazine and it was then taken taken up by

uh more uh you know larger newspapers and and well established papers so so they had some

successes but this kind of a uh massive well thought out campaign to destabilize the united

states i don't believe the kGB was capable of doing that mertrocan seems to agree with me

me i was trained i would think you know i was one of the crown jewels of their agents

one would think that they used the best that they had to to help me how to become an american

and they didn't have a clue so how do they if you don't know how a country operates how do you come

up with with this this this kind of a very detailed uh long term plan that's that's also

timed you know two years this and when you're that and all that yeah so we should we should

actually just clarify so he he has this whole idea that there is a 15 to 20 years i needed for

demoralization yeah um where you're um you're basically infiltrating a country from a young

or people from a young age manipulating their mind you're destabilizing then that's the second

step that takes two to five years you uh target the country's foreign relations defense and economy

you create a crisis artificially and then you normalize it as as if it always was this way

so it's basically saying that the kGB is capable of at scale uh over many years

manipulate an entire population of people right and this is kind of um

um there's a lot of people that believe in conspiracy theories that are amenable to this

kind of idea now my own experience is that there is in fact just a giant amount of incompetence

and then this is something that's actually very difficult to pull off because yes it's incredibly

um incredibly difficult to achieve this kind of manipulation i think it would it would require

first of all not much bureaucracy not much slowing down you have to have incredible

in modern world digital systems that are able to do surveillance manipulation there has to

be a strategy that is carried out in secrecy across a huge number of people effectively

that also requires you hire the best people in the world and i think it's difficult to execute on

this kind of thing with if you compartmentalize because there has to be great collaboration

there has to be a great where there's a unified vision coordination and coordination across

multiple groups there has to be i mean there it's very difficult to do now nevertheless

especially with technology this becomes easier and easier so the bar becomes lower and lower to

achieve mass surveillance becomes easier and easier and easier mass manipulation through

platforms because we're now digitally connected you can now do that kind of manipulation so it

becomes more and more realistic that you could do this kind of thing but you're saying that no

intelligence first of all intelligence is hard and to do it at scale and to do it well and to do it

in a way that it's also not just collecting information about the populace but manipulating

the populace is very very difficult right now let me now give you another argument where i think

that besmanov was a fraud uh i mean i already have i have uh matroken on my side and and my

personal observation of the incompetence that i witnessed i mean they really really didn't know

what they didn't know so now besmanov was kgb where was he stationed in india

he he was a low level agent in india and i told you was the one thing that the kgb was really

good was at was compartmentalization how does besmanov in india find out about this massive

plan that should have been super secret right he made it up sorry yeah and and you know why he got

away with it because americans eat that up because it's not our fault it's like the damn russians

that doing doing all that that bad stuff speaking of the damn russians doing all that bad stuff

if you know about the internet research agency they have been doing quite a bit of damage and

i i'm now familiar with the world of enhanced artificial persons these are the avatars

on facebook and twitter and you know so forth that look like real people and and and and there are

quite a few of them and and i have a good friend who operates in in that realm and you know he he

uses for instance facial recognition when he thinks that there's a suspicious character say on

linkedin or or on facebook and very often he finds out yeah that that person exists but it's not the

person who it pretends to be so basically detecting the artificial yes enhanced artificial yes but

but he can also make them you think the united states hand in hand yeah united states doesn't do

it we do it too but uh well this is to push back against your pushback right yeah besmanov might

be a fraud uh huh but is it possible especially in the modern age that there is these kind of

of large scale systematic opera wouldn't you as a government more so uh that's investing

billions of dollars into military equipment uh in in a world that's more and more clearly going

to be defined by uh cyber war versus hot war but wouldn't you start to have serious meetings

as large amounts of hires yeah that are working at how do we manipulate the information flow

how do we manipulate the minds of the populace how do we sell them a narrative um so even though

he might have been making up a story because people eat it up could it speak to some deep

truth that's actually different than the the truth you came up in as a kgb agent i agree with you 100

percent is much easier when uh you know all you need is is an army of nerds who also know no feds

no feds nerds that's a term of endearment i love i love nerds i used to be one myself

but anyway once a nerd always a nerd so you know uh so what i was gonna say here is all you need is

an army of nerds and and what but also uh experts in the culture of the target country okay and and

nowadays the world is different there's a whole lot more fluidity there's a whole lot of more people

that like say russians for instance study in the united states chinese an army of chinese study in

the united states they they have a lot more knowledge of how we function than the kgb did

and it's vice versa uh not as many americans in in russia but we have some but the chinese and the

russians have an advantage here can i ask you a question based on your experience so i have been

talking to a lot of powerful people and some of which have very close connections to in this

particular conflict uh ukraine and russia but in other places as well i don't believe i've

ever been contacted by or interacted with an intelligent agency cia fsb mi6 massage i don't

think i had well let me say explicitly i haven't had an official conversation which is what i

assume i would have because i have nothing to hide right so i think there's no reason for people to

be secretive but would i why why is that would i know am i interesting at all how how are people

determined if they're in person of interest or not and i guess the question i mean some of it i asked

in a bit of a humorous way but also perhaps there's truth in some of the humor is what i know if i

have ever interacted with a intelligence agency spy well you you don't know that you haven't

been contacted uh but but certainly not uh you i think you you never had a conversation that

related to intelligence in any way shape or form right right like where a person another person

introduced yeah the decisions themselves or you know becomes sort of wants to be your friend and

then uh talks about these types of topics right yeah but i um there's people because because of

who i'm interacting with they're i mean even we just even with elon musk like if you think about

elon musk there's a lot of people that are um that are part of the conversations that happen

how do i know they're all trustworthy they all present themselves as trustworthy now again i

have nothing so this is this is for the intelligence agencies have nothing to hide i'm the same person

privately it's publicly um well intentioned uh real no no controlled no weird sexual stuff where

you can manipulate me um what else no drug use no drug use no no skeletons in the closet

um none of that kind of stuff but you know i don't i don't know i mean just even having

these conversations you know i tend to trust people as a default like me too and you start

when you think well especially with some of the people i've been talking with

and some of the traveling i'm doing i'm realizing there's a you know there's hard men in this world

there's military there's serious suffering and there's war and there's serious people

that are doing serious harm and so you have to be careful of thinking who to trust was with

the person approaches you with a smile and asks you a question um my my natural inclination is

that person is a cool person i'll answer the question i'll become a friend but it becomes

difficult when you realize that there's um there's things like intelligence agencies

with thousands of employees there's people that are doing major military actions that involve

tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of soldiers this is serious stuff and so how do i

how do you know how to operate in this world the folks that you're interacting with uh

have a responsibility not to tell you what they shouldn't tell you right right so and most of

them probably won't and and i'm guessing occasionally they will say well i can't go there right yeah so

so what what what you are aware of is sort of public and what you're doing is you you uh

you're collecting it and you um you editing it to some extent you're not you're not

changing the word the verbage yes you you just uh repeat what they say so from that

angle you're not you know you're not privy to any real secrets what you uh have possibly

that could be of use is you learn to get to know the person so i'm thinking as a good possibility

if you get the interviews uh in the east that somebody may actually approach you and ask you

what's what's your opinion i just hope they approach me and introduce themselves properly

i just yeah there's a kind of i mean would you know like how many russian spies are there in

the united states how many american spies are there in russia do you do you have a sense is it

no i just like with the gru no idea is it is it possible there's like tens of thousands and we're

not we're like thousands not not thousands like i used to operate we were too hard to train and we

weren't that successful to begin with but um particularly russians and chinese um you know

you know both uh governments know who is going abroad and i guarantee you there's a lot of amateur

spies they're they're being asked to you know help us out you know do something for the motherland