"something happened where they forced my hand 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 ..."

"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 committee right so that is the committee of uh..."

"the is the gru military intelligence then nobody knows very much that's right i when i was in the kgb i had no idea that there was military intelligence nobody ever mentioned anything like that and by..."

"in um the culture the spirit the soul of its predecessors oh absolutely they just changed names and they changed uh personnel rather frequently and that had had something to do with uh stalin's parano..."

"on sand yeah why was it unstable would you say what what of human nature or what does that mean it's the paranoia it's a you know stalin was always worried about uh you know what the the most powerful..."

"there were there were hints about uh you know how long my assignment would be so 10 to 12 years and you see it makes sense all right i was becoming an american and over time i would become more and mo..."

"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 uh that they would not cross political legal..."

"what the kgb did really really well compartmentalization uh and and that was based on you know the communist movement while it was still underground you know the the cells were very small and the so t..."

"compared to the other intelligence agencies let's let's talk uh british intelligence mi6 mossad cia is there unique cultures spirits souls of the different organizations that maybe somehow connect to ..."

"not only militarily but also in terms of industrial production and and so forth that was a stupid pipe dream the military it was a standoff as we know well uh stupid pipe dream um hitler had a stupid ..."

"opposed to um 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 sometim..."

"the united states that's a beautiful world the freedom of respect of human rights of all men are created equal yes pursuit of happiness you know it always sounds good if you look at what the the dream..."

"the top the ones that believe in themselves the ones the ones that know better than everybody else and once you have that hierarchy established there is no guarantee that it doesn't that that it won't..."

"bring about a much better world i mean there is a sense the you have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet right this idea that um sacrifice is necessary to bring about a greater world and then the ot..."

"and the this was done by con revolutionaries who were convinced that eventually you know that these sacrifices had to be made and eventually that would lead to a much better planet and the populists b..."

"man is if that's if communism is not a lesson of human nature i don't know what it is but you believed without thinking too much about it you believe right in the story of khan what did you see just y..."

"that was a huge unforced era by the western countries particularly the united states that there were ex-nazis in the government in west germany yeah and the most famous one was uh reinhard galen who w..."

"we were sent we were required to visit a concentration camp and if you know what what we as as 17 year olds were made to look at it was gut wrenching how can men do something like that to men piles of..."

"right from the russian soviet perspective uh the communist regime banded together to win the the great patriotic war and that was the the second one you know the big brother the the soviet union uh i ..."

"uh when hitler came to power he he and his uh his uh leadership decided that uh uh the germans needed more what they call laban's rom that means room to live so uh and they would you know they would s..."

"fall apart why would somebody like stalin trust somebody like hitler but why did he blunder so bad not to um read the intelligence that was coming his way oh his troops are amassing on the border of t..."

"yeah i mean there but i'm sure there's contradictory information coming in from the intelligence apparatus so it's difficult i mean first of all nobody likes to be disagreed with especially when you g..."

"eventually uh he 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 th..."

"backtrack so operation barbarossa invasion a hit right to the soviet union and then hopefully that leads us all the way to east germany west germany right after the end of the war so what happened was..."

"genetically i'm only half german the the other half the other half is czech and polish nice because uh where i grew up you know we i could walk to the nicer river which was the uh border with poland a..."

"so when you're 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 ..."

"i i knew in those days i admired girls i i knew that girls were like uh sort of um uh magical beings they were not capable of doing evil things they were beautiful and they had to be adored and one of..."

"yeah so we we were an item for two years uh i lost my virginity congratulations she was not a virgin at the time she see my my my competitor was uh there always is a competitor isn't that how it works..."

"change that you shape it and you give that love in deeper more profound ways to future people very well put but at the time it emptied me out yeah if if i had uh a tendency uh to you know to have suic..."

"since i was pretty smart too i just aced practically everything and for the first two years in college and look we go to college there all these pretty girls and their dances and everything we had thi..."

"let's go to your story so um 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..."

"and the the town of yena had about a hundred thousand people live there and um i would it's a wild guess but maybe 30 tenured professors and they were part of the ruling elite i was trying to do it as..."

"ego the old i mean yeah you have to believe in yourself uh often when you're young to truly try to excel and and you sure as heck did but you know as a balance you need a mentor somebody who puts thin..."

"gets gets nurtured but anyway getting back to how the kgb uh uh came in contact so they most likely got uh knowledge of me by you know looking at the stasi uh records this stuff what's stasi oh that w..."

"so and uh 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 uh we had a i pieced this together and we had an exchange stu..."

"and then came a person uh who spoke fluent german so that was not a kgb guy there was a collaborator uh when and so he started making a bunch of small talk he introduced himself as the as a representa..."

"and the rest of them were assigned you know where you had no choice so so that guy was an idiot he he didn't know the basics about you interviewed him a little bit to understand like oh sure you know ..."

"anybody personally or even you know somewhat removed who was uh uh followed by the stasi uh uh was uh you know put in jail uh i had no clue i i had no clue that they did a lot of damage and that they ..."

"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 me meet for uh lunch which in german..."

"kgb and stasis as uh collaborators close collaborators or just distant associates uh they were pretty close collaborators as i told you that uh you know they they they bought uh forged documents that ..."

"internal and external dynamic of distrust yeah okay so there you are uh welcomed by the kgb when did the offer the invite come well that took a while so herman and i uh had an unofficial relationship ..."

"as east germany because you know that the magazines and uh and eventually when when i joined up they told me i had better watch west german television which was also not explicitly prohibited but it w..."

"years younger and what languages did he speak oh you speak german he spoke german pretty well oh but he's originally from ohio yeah with a russian accent so i got in trouble one time with him when whe..."

"and how well i can report how well i observe uh 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 ..."

"it took you some time to discuss because you know i was i always was and i still am to some degree a bit shy uh i lost a lot of the shyness after moving to the south because uh here in the united stat..."

"and then i directed the conversation to the lady's 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..."

"uh inventive uh you know i'm a storyteller and at heart and that i didn't know it then but you know but there was still something unpleasant about it yes yes which part was well the shyness and then y..."

"would be so it's absolutely nice and it seems like a safe statement yes if it's not the right person exactly right you'll just come off you're absurd or crazy or whatever you you would have you would ..."

"i 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 colleg..."

"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 uh model railroads and stuff like that you m..."

"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 w..."

"and of course the feeling that you're really special yeah james bond yeah what's [Laughter] the the question do i want to be a ten-year professor or james bond yes and and that's as funny as that soun..."

"passed the test and you were sitting with this unimpressive man and had the invite and had to sleep on it and have made the decision to join yeah what was next i was just told you know that i was bein..."

"and uh 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 thought i had an inkling that i'm going i'm gonna go someplace uh..."

"didn't realize it then at all i just like went with a flow you know what do i do so what i did i went i took the the train the city train uh to the very last stop a little uh town called acna and i wa..."

"he said he handed me a key he said i'm gonna take you to your new apartment now i and i didn't know this you know that now i was really in okay imagine you know the hurdles you have to jump over and h..."

"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 right what are some..."

"deciphered i'm assuming nowadays that wouldn't take as much yeah with computers for sure but there's probably they're probably designed in a way that you can manually sort of uh it's efficient and con..."

"here that what are we talking about so how i i don't understand how it's possible to have a physical pad that does the encryption without any computing i how does it include right so so no no it doesn..."

"change it's identical then you know but like if it's not then then one is right and the other is wrong you gotta don't make mistakes no that's right and i really didn't but anyway um so i was i was le..."

"and at the bottom of the hill there was a telephone booth and when you open the door and pick up the telephone you have to look back so it wasn't like this right it wasn't a giveaway this was normal i..."

"they can give you a different face within seconds yeah so i mean again you talk about paranoia is that part of the is that a big part of the job uh counter surveillance like being constantly paranoid ..."

"yeah so what we do nowadays is an embed code in in uh pdfs and stuff like that right yep beautiful okay all right so that that was a learning a training process both in the physical space yes algorith..."

"you have to be and be able to effectively integrate well you also have to know like and that would have been easier uh if they had sent me to west germany you know all the soccer teams you know stuff ..."

"mingled freely yes all right and and and so the whole idea was for me to sort of reach into the upper uh realms of society where the targets would be juicier than you know the worker bees and how did ..."

"so you start with uh with five five you already had right four times if you have it right again it goes up go ahead to the archive oh like long-term cold archive yeah yeah four if you get it right it ..."

"number two 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 you have to go through the full step again but that is a really ..."

"that one because you were a world-class programmer for time yeah very good programmer when did the pc was probably 1984 1984 when did you fall in love with programming when i went to college in the us..."

"said so how's your english i said i pulled a book from the shelf and said 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 uh send you a..."

"is it just a story no i she said she was a professor she may have taught there too and that's an interesting distinction yeah one is like a story you tell people no and one is like you legit are doing..."

"th the american american-born became my tutor i met with heart twice a week uh i uh i also listened to a lot of bbc shortwave bbc worldwide uh i read more english books so a lot of that was about the ..."

"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 uh there's a there's a famous philosop..."

"detection route you know when they say that you know what that is uh and and that was it uh and a few other things you know one-offs for instance uh i was once uh taught uh to read silhouettes of ship..."

"moscow something that kind of stays with you outside of the training stuff maybe like the details of the training you love the answer you will love the answer uh i i was uh really guest i was given ti..."

"is that did did your faith and belief in communism start to crumble at some point here is that around that was still pretty small what i did notice that uh the standard of living in in moscow was sign..."

"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 actually wonder i wonder how good..."

"to understand yeah the the different way the different fundamentally different way of life but the interesting thing is um human nature pervades both systems and there's something about the russian sy..."

"did you enter the united states can we take the journey from moscow to the united was states assignment what was the what was that leap what was like what uh just one one one thing in between i had a ..."

"and uh and and i uh 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 eve..."

"so i kept on going uh i had to supposed to i was supposed to visit two more cities and uh they were always one step behind what what what is interesting to me is that they didn't catch me on the way o..."

"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 uh johnny walker red because as one does yeah because i ..."

"yeah if that smoke alarm goes off i'm busted right if somebody if if some some criminal steals i had six thousand dollars on me in cash uh steals either my passport or my or my money or both i don't k..."

"yeah and and by the way this was mutual do you think the cia had good knowledge of the russian culture ah same thing and so um there was a lot of lack of understanding because good good intelligence c..."

"are being used by the ones that are really in power power is money power is wealth i know power is going to go the other it can go both directions you can acquire wealth first which leads you to power..."

"and i found out later but he was able to survive yes and you know that there have been assassinations not not a lot and uh you know that that we know of a good point this is very difficult uh the the ..."

"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 ..."

"of uh being sold i would say a lie about the reason to invade iraq and even afghanistan and i got to live through understanding of this military-industrial complex that leads to the expansion of vampi..."

"to russia agree two thoughts if i may uh 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 h..."

"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 one is in this case the aggressor now you kn..."

"that and um 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 t..."

"question and and i don't know the exact protocol uh that needs to be followed to to launch a nuclear strike from from from nato's end because we have several countries in nato that have nuclear weapon..."

"it's i don't i don't know how this could work any other way there well right now we have some functional idiots in in the central united states government well let me because you did you said that um ..."

"how you think about the world how you analyze the geopolitics of the world how you analyze human nature now i got to tell you one thing he had a different type of training than i did mine was one on o..."

"uh i also have it from from a word from the horse's mouth uh which horse what kind of horse what's the breeze oleg kalugin uh you you know who oleg kalugin is and he's still he's still alive he was at..."

"right because he he was a good politician and uh he had made a lot of good connections and with within the kgb allow me to say something and you just uh you just taught me a lesson and and and the les..."

"this way uh first of all uh we we know that uh the kgb was involved in active measures which is you know um you can call it uh uh fake news yeah uh seeding fake news into the advert in the countries t..."

"kind of a massive well thought out campaign to destabilize the united states i don't believe the kgb was capable of doing that mitroken seems to agree with me i was trained i would think you know i wa..."

"would require first of all not much bureaucracy not much slowing down you have to have incredible in the modern world digital systems are able to do surveillance manipulation there has to be a strateg..."

"i i'm now familiar with the world of uh enhanced artificial persons these are the avatars on facebook and twitter and you know so forth that uh look like real people and uh and uh and there are quite ..."

"you need is is an army of nerds who also know that's no fantastic that's a term of endearment yes i love nerds i i used to be one myself but anyway i was a nerd so you know um so what i was going to s..."

"there's people because because of who i'm interacting with they're i mean even 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 conve..."

"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 proba..."

"and that there's a sense of like i want this is not just about land this is our nation uh the same love of nation that uh putin has for russia the greater russia this vision of this great empire uh i ..."

"you become the world's bravest man as somebody across that line oh yeah you mentioned something about you've not been to moscow back and that you it might not be safe for you to travel there yes um ca..."

"uh and um and and the other thing is um if there is a you know that these kinds of operations to assassination on a in another country are very difficult to plan and implement and if there's a list of..."

"going to ask zelinski who not going to ask good for you yeah isn't that the funny thing about this world there's lines there's lines everywhere even in love even in personal relationships there's line..."

"i did i couldn't ignore it but i went on to work got on the a train get went to work and then went to my cubicle and stared at the computer screen all day because i couldn't think i could think only a..."

"and i still thought i need to go back because you know there was there was probably some danger but i hadn't figured out how to take care of the girl you know and leave her but you know maybe she need..."

"believe that the fbi is on your case you need to execute the emergency procedure come home right away i still had some time because the radio could be broken or the transmission was bad or he still co..."

"i can't imitate the russian accent there was a russian accent so now and it was a pretty strong accent the you're dead phrase can have two meanings and an american would have said or else you're buste..."

"so now i had to act so in in the next radiogram i was uh asked for uh to execute a dead drop operation where they would give me money and a passport and that was in a park in on staten island it was a..."

"it up the reason i actually went to pick up this container because there was money in it so i didn't have to make a decision yet okay i could throw away the passport i it was like i was still trying t..."

"i said to myself i'm staying yeah that decision kind of signals some kind of muse just spoke to you that decision was made for me now you know that i'm a christian now and i think that was like god to..."

"this is where uh i was discovered by the fbi and how did they know about me uh i if if it if it hadn't been for this defector vasily mitrokin who was an archivist in in the kgb archives he was actuall..."

"the soviet union was gone so he showed up at the u.s embassy in moscow and told him what he had and it was on a weekend and apparently there was a junior person in charge and he said you know what wha..."

"uh they and the other thing that they knew that i was a really really well-trained agent because i was still there right so um they took i think almost three years to investigate me watch me from a di..."

"there was no indication that uh i was still active but they were still cautious and but at one point they they were able to plant a bug in my kitchen a listening device and i my wife and i didn't get ..."

"now uh they knew an attempt to turn me would have been useless because you know because you know you turned somebody was active but they figured they had there was enough reason to treat me nicely bec..."

"id and they said fbi we would like to have a talk with you now this is uh my now friend joe riley who who actually is the uh he's the godfather of my of trinity my last child but anyway uh he told me ..."

"and there were some props there some binders with labels and i immediately thought now this is pretty silly because what what i know but i noticed that the the labels all referred back to my early yea..."

"you know to keep my name and then just you know make everything like official so for instance i had to change my birth year uh simply because if i jack barsky was born in 1944 if i kept 1944 the fbi w..."

"we're going through right now um and then the last thing that changed my life again and i don't want to get into details because it's a little complicated story i never wanted to be a public person an..."

"stuff that happened oh it's been a fun one what you wrote uh because i'm allowed to leave behind a documented legacy of my unusual life yeah i'm praying that the legacy will be described by a single w..."

"that i'm pretty mature to put it mildly uh i'm i'm also more loving towards many more people you know these things like random acts of kindness for strangers i do them i'm looking for them now and you..."

"facilities so and some one of my classmates old classmates from high school started the rumor that i died in a rocket accident and everybody knew that so when i came back to germany went back to germa..."

"no we actually met so there's two elderly people in their 60s uh who meet each other after so many years and the one that ended the relationship started the conversation by saying you know what i made..."

"had oh yeah uh and you know i was actually when she said i made a mistake and i was thinking to myself no you didn't there was none there was nothing left there was nothing left uh and also the person..."

"but it does come to an end and so does this conversation i guess no this goes on for many more hours but yes uh do you think about your own death huh do you think about death do you think about your o..."

"but whether he lets us go again for an eternity i just hope i won't convince somebody else at this point which is doesn't make me a really really good questioning because i'm supposed to evangelize bu..."

"something you've lived from the very beginning before yes before god was part of your life before anything was part of your life it seemed that love was part of your life and has been a consistent thr..."