The Life of a Spy: Jack Barsky's Journey

Jack Barsky shares his extraordinary journey from being a KGB agent in East Germany to living in the United States. He discusses the complexities of his dual identity, the romanticized notions of communism, and the realities of espionage. Barsky reflects on his recruitment into the KGB, the challenges of living a double life, and the impact of ideologies on personal choices. He also shares insights on his transition to life in America, the importance of self-awareness, and his quest for redemption through positive contributions to society. In this conversation, Jack Barsky shares his extraordinary journey from being a KGB spy to living a new life in the United States. He discusses the complexities of loyalty, love, and personal growth, as well as the challenges he faced when the FBI discovered his past. Barsky reflects on the importance of family, the emotional weight of his decisions, and how he ultimately found purpose in mentoring others and sharing his story with the world.

You can read Jack's book here: Buy the book

• Jack Barsky's journey from East Germany to the US is a complex tale of identity and espionage.
• He describes the duality of his identity as both a German and an American.
• Barsky reflects on the romanticized notions of communism and the reality of its implementation.
• He discusses the recruitment process into the KGB and the subtlety involved.
• Barsky shares insights on the challenges of living a double life as a spy.
• He emphasizes the importance of self-awareness and personal growth over time.
• Barsky's experiences highlight the impact of ideologies on personal choices and actions.
• He recounts the difficulties of maintaining relationships while living undercover.
• Barsky's transition to life in America was fraught with challenges, including finding work and establishing identity.
• He ultimately seeks redemption through positive contributions to society.
• Jack found camaraderie among a diverse group of colleagues.
• He experienced a shift in loyalty as he grew personally.
• The KGB's command to return home was a pivotal moment.
• Family and love played a crucial role in his decisions.
• Navigating relationships involved deception and complexity.
• He realized the depth of love beyond physical attraction.
• Rationalizing his choices involved considering family welfare.
• The FBI's discovery of him was a dramatic turning point.
• Debriefing with the FBI was a process of building trust.
• He found purpose in mentoring and sharing his story.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction and Background of Jack Barsky
• 7:01 Jack's Journey to America and Dual Identity
• 12:46 The Cold War Context and Ideological Beliefs
• 19:47 The Nature of Power and Corruption
• 24:45 Recruitment by the KGB and Initial Experiences
• 45:22 Life as a Bike Messenger in America
• 52:22 The KGB's Long Game
• 1:00:59 Navigating Identity and Success
• 1:10:21 The Duality of Life as a Spy
• 1:17:43 Love, Loyalty, and Difficult Choices
• 1:24:08 The Order to Return Home
• 1:29:28 The Unexpected Betrayal
• 1:44:35 The FBI's Introduction
• 1:53:06 The Debriefing Process: A New Beginning
• 2:00:43 Becoming a Public Figure: The Unexpected Journey
• 2:15:11 Mentoring and Purpose: A New Mission
• 2:23:16 Finding Love: A Personal Connection

Transcript

Guy Bloom (00:19)
that were professionals and that's fabulous. Great. So Jack, I'm so excited actually. I'm really glad to have you on this episode of Leadership Bites. Welcome.

Jack Barsky (00:35)
Well, I'm glad to speak to another fellow from the UK. You guys talk a little funny, but other than that, I have great admiration for the Brits.

Guy Bloom (00:48)
We are ⁓ joined and both separated by our language. we always play...

Jack Barsky (00:52)
You know, I love

your sense of humor. mean, almost every successful ⁓ sitcom in the US was modeled after one that originated in your country.

Guy Bloom (01:06)
I do see these kind of clips on social media that when you're talking to soldiers, the British soldiers and the American soldiers, they say, you know, we're joined by the focus, we're joined by the strategy. But the thing that we struggle with is just that English mentality of, doesn't matter how bad things are, let's put the kettle on and make a cup of tea, which always makes me laugh.

Jack Barsky (01:33)
Yeah.

Guy Bloom (01:37)
Right, listen, I'm going to make good use of this time with you. I clearly know who you are. You've been incredibly gracious to make some time to speak to me. I generally don't do introductions. I ask people to introduce themselves. And I think there's no better way than starting this by saying, and it becomes particularly relevant with you, who the hell is Jack Baskie?

It will be good to get some insight into that.

Jack Barsky (02:10)
Well, you were asking in a roundabout way the same question that I was asked out of the blue in my first interview ever, and it was with CBS 60 Minutes. Like, that should be scary, right? But somehow I don't scare in situations like that. So when he asked me, who are you? That's even more like...

It's a challenging question to ask anybody, but then, you know, I hadn't really figured out exactly who I was because, you know, I was still a stranger in a strange land, not anymore.

I was still not fully 100 % Americanized. I have a split personality. For the listeners or the viewers, I was born and raised in Germany. So I'm genetically German.

or like half German and a quarter Czech and Polish, not British or American or English, whatever. So genetically raised in the German culture and then learned, studied, observed to imitate, become, to operate as a born American on behalf of... ⁓

foreign intelligence that in those days was the KGB. So when I set foot on the territory of the United States about three days later, I destroyed the passport that I was ⁓ coming into the country with and pulled out the birth certificate. ⁓

real bona fide copy of a birth certificate for Jack Barsky out of a secret compartment in my luggage. And from that point on, I pretended to have been born in the country as Jack Barsky. ⁓ That was rather bold because I spoke English very well in those days. I had studied the heck out of it. And my accent was...

I still have a touch of an accent, but in those days it was a little stronger. But I was able to pull it off because for two reasons. ⁓ I was deployed in New York City. And in New York City, if you think you're an odd person, there's always somebody more odd than you. So nobody really pays attention. So you have an accent, everybody has an accent in New York.

So, but none of that I actually knew. I was not prepared culturally whatsoever. And so it took me ⁓ about two years to freely socialize and even more time to feel like I really made it. And that took, it's...

still not done. As you know, we're all growing in some way and ⁓ the growth that I'm experiencing is in the English language, English thinking, within the US culture, ⁓ good, bad and indifferent. So ⁓ there are definitely layers to me and one thing I wanted to point out with dual personality, is, and I have not, I wish, ⁓

a neurologist would one day examine my brain. Because this is what happens. If somebody pops into my room right now and says something in German, my English is blocked. There is no strong connection between the two of them. can't translate. Anytime, anytime I... That may happen in this interview that you're gonna ask me a question and the German answer, the word, the German word pops into my head and all of a sudden I freeze.

So now with regard to, I know really who I am now. I have evolved. I was just talking with a good friend of mine. There's a difference between being self-conscious, how others see you and try to like live up to their expectations and self-awareness. And I had a period in my life ⁓ in the last like three, four years where I...

was able to really take a look inside. Part of that was, was, a friend of mine convinced me to write a master class to teach young men to embrace their manhood and you know, and are comfortable with it. And fundamentally, now that I'm thinking about it, I wrote this thing for myself because this class is everything, you know, I had to look back and where,

started and where I am today. All of that is really about me. It was a worthwhile endeavor. So who I am? You want me to summarize me?

Guy Bloom (07:45)
If it helps in this process, that'll be lovely.

Jack Barsky (07:49)
Well,

I can summarize that I'm a self-aware, stable, ⁓ positive thinker who likes to spread this positivity and his faith to the rest of the world, and it resonates with people.

When I show up nowadays, I'm not making this up, it's based on feedback that I get all the time, that people like me show up rather than want me to leave. And that's a good way of being. When you do something nice for somebody, you put a smile on somebody else's face, ⁓ that really does something for your soul. And I call this the existence.

It doesn't always work. Usually when I wake up in the morning I'm sort of somewhat miserable but it goes away after a while. I very often experience ⁓ an existence that I can only ⁓ explain with a ⁓ term, the lightness of being. It's not physically physical, it's spiritually and emotionally that you just...

You feel like you're floating around and everything is wonderful. And that's a good way to be at my age.

Guy Bloom (09:20)
actually just because it does lead me to something else actually if I'd maybe so bold I'll go first I'm 56 so Jack how old are you right now

Jack Barsky (09:31)
you want the age, 76.

Guy Bloom (09:37)
76. Okay so that gives me a target for what good looks like when I'm 76 so that's that's good for me.

Jack Barsky (09:42)
But I feel,

literally, and this is not an exaggeration, a lot of people rationalize when they get older, oh, I feel like I'm 30 years younger. I feel like I'm maybe 50. I am physically in excellent shape. I have super high energy. If you let me talk, I can talk for the rest of the day.

and not get tired. And when I'm done, I feel actually refreshed. ⁓ The doctors that are looking for stuff in me lately have not found anything. I had two ⁓ health sort of emergencies without getting into detail that had to be treated and I'm doing very well. As I'm sitting here at my age, there's no arthritis, there's no pain, there's no back pain.

There's nothing other than double vision and a little bit of sciatica on my right foot. I'm really proud of that one and I had nothing to do with it. is, well, maybe something. It's because it has to do with some, to some degree with exercise. I recently had a bone marrow ⁓ sample taken for analysis and the nurse that took it

She has done this for like close to 10 years. She complained, she said, this is the toughest bone I ever bored into. That is great because when I go to the doctor, they always worry about falling at my age. If you fall, you break a bone. First of all, I know how to fall and I have fallen, I don't break anything. So what can I tell you?

And my entire demeanor is much younger than most people my age. And that is one of the reasons that I have my best friends are all significantly younger than me. Because we have something in common. I'm not looking back. I'm still looking forward to what's next.

Guy Bloom (11:59)
Help me with a little something. I grew up with watching Harry Palmer, Michael Caine playing Harry Palmer in films like the Ippress file, which you may... The Ippress file where he goes over the wall into Berlin. don't know if you've ever seen it. Michael Caine, Harry Palmer, big thick glasses, the old kind of, the older films.

Jack Barsky (12:14)
What's the film title?

Guy Bloom (12:29)
And those were films that were like the million dollar brain and things like that. I don't know if you've seen these kind of things, but I'm a massive Michael Cain fan. But the point was, you know, the Cold War, you know, that there was a, it's a thing that was of an age that your story is, and we're going to get into it, but it's fascinating because it does feel like, I understand it to a point.

But it does, I imagine if you're in your 20s or 30s listening to this, contextually to understand what was going on back then, it must feel, ⁓ to me it feels like a story of an age that is something that people can intellectually understand. But depending on how old you are, it's a long way away. And I'm just, I'd like to bring to life.

⁓ a little bit of what was the world felt like back when you were approached? What was the world like back then? Because I don't think people really know it unless you're of an age.

Jack Barsky (13:26)
what the world felt like. Yeah.

And so I can share you my world view in those days. ⁓ fundamentally, we divided the earth into three sections. The evil capitalist, imperialist sections, the noble and future oriented and what would become the future of the entire world, the communist section and the third world.

you know, the developing countries. And I was of the strong belief that, you know, communist ideology, if anybody actually just takes a look at what Marx and Engels wrote and what Lenin wrote, whether they acted in the same way, it doesn't matter. But because there's a lot of misinterpretation these days. Well, they're communists and just because there's people

more left wing or whatever and have, ⁓ you know, are more collectivist. The communist notion of everybody ⁓ being safe, there's no exploitation of man by man, there's no war, it's like paradise on earth. And it is incredibly romantic. Here's the maxim of how capitalism is supposed to function.

no communism supposed to function is from everybody based on their ability to everybody based on their needs. And this is the foundation of the downfall of the whole idea because who determines what my abilities are and who determines what you need. And that requires a governing body and that is the party. And then... ⁓

Once you have a governing body, you know that people have power. There's the ⁓ human nature sets in. You got power, you want to hold on to it. so ⁓ what happened when Lenin took power during the October Revolution, ⁓ he immediately, never mind the romantic notion of communism, he immediately went to work and started something called the Red Terror.

to eliminate, that means kill, ⁓ enemies of the revolution. It was a bloodbath. There was no due process. There was no court of law. He just ⁓ collected under Jadzinski, who eventually became the head of the NKVD, which was the foreman of the KGB. Jadzinski collected a bunch of thugs that would just... And they had lists of people they were gonna kill, and they killed them. And they even killed...

farmers who had too much land just to make an example of people who have undeserved wealth and that kind of stuff. the communist idea is highly romantic and it will never go away. I see this every new generation buys into it because it appeals to your heart. Yeah, why can't we all wonderful and nice?

When you look at the history of man, if you believe that man is fundamentally good, I have a few examples to tell you that this is not realistic. That doesn't mean that most people aren't good. But man as a collective has done evil century after century after century and progress fundamentally. ⁓

made it easier to kill more people.

Guy Bloom (17:35)
I have this kind of thought that many ideologies are pure of intent but they're infected by bad actors.

Jack Barsky (17:43)
absolutely,

yes, 100%. And those bad actors, are clearly, the ones that make it to the top are intrinsically evil. Because there are situations when, and I have a couple of friends who worked in the East German government, which was communist, when the wall was up until the wall came down.

Guy Bloom (17:55)
is ⁓

Jack Barsky (18:12)
And they were the kind of people that were really honest and wanted to do good. And then they get into that system and they found out it's constructed by a of lies. The State Planning Commission, you know, there were two sets of books. Everybody was lying to everybody.

So, ⁓ and some of them just like, courageously found a way out of that system. It's not that easy. But you know, once you're in it, and that I think applies, and I'm not going to get into politics, but this is a philosophical statement that applies to any corrupt organization. You might join it with good intentions, but in order to function in that organization,

You have to play by the rules or else you can't get anything done. And before you know it, you get used to the rules and you rationalize. And then you're a member of that very corrupt system that you wanted to defeat.

Guy Bloom (19:24)
Yeah, it's the normalization of things, I think, that very often become, they're incremental, I think, very often. Sometimes it's terrible and there's a survival reaction where you've got to get with the program quick. But I think very often ⁓ it is a drip of small sort of jigsaw pieces that add up to the...

Jack Barsky (19:27)
Yes, sir.

Guy Bloom (19:47)
to be it a year later, be it two years later, you've gone, for the want of a better word, you've gone native and it's only an outsider's view that can probably see that.

Jack Barsky (19:57)
Yeah, and just one comment if I may. I may come across as a curmudgeon, as an old fart who is now negative at the end of his life. I'm not. I am intrinsically optimistic. I'm just observing what happens to man. There's so much good to be said about the people that I interact with, such as you.

and many, many others, they are bubbles of greatness and goodness, ⁓ but they're always subject to that evil that lurks around the corner. And we need to, us good people need to have our eyes open and not fall for that.

Guy Bloom (20:45)
you're a realist. Mike Tyson was speaking to somebody. Who was he speaking to? A gentleman called Francis Engauer. I think I'm saying the surname wrong. And the point is that Mike Tyson said, you're doing very well in life. You're making ⁓ a lot of money. You're becoming very popular and famous. And so you're favored by God.

Francis goes, yeah, yeah, and he goes, also bear in mind that the moment you're favored by God, you're also favored by the devil. Because the devil chases the ones that are favored by God. And that really struck, that struck hard with me actually, I've got to say. That changed my life a little bit when I heard that.

Jack Barsky (21:21)
⁓ Well, you actually...

Yeah, I tell people that when real, and I don't want to use the S word, but you know what I'm talking about, when bad things happen to me in life, ⁓ I think that that's the work of the devil because I'm on the right path and he wants to just get me off of that path. Are you familiar with ⁓ C.S. Lewis? Yeah, and this is where C.S. Lewis talks.

Guy Bloom (21:36)
Mm-hmm.

screw tape.

Is it the screw tape? Screw tape letters?

Jack Barsky (21:56)
It talks

about a ⁓ senior devil teaching a junior devil how to get people off of their righteous path by distractions. And boy boy are we in a society that is rife and teeming with distractions.

Guy Bloom (22:15)
Yeah, and I mean, and this is the beauty of a conversation like this, you you start on one thing and you bounce to another and that's a beautiful thing. And I think I have come and it's taken me a little while to get there in life, but discipline, the discipline of focus, the discipline of not allowing yourself to drift, the discipline of, et cetera. ⁓

Again, I think there are lots of unsuccessful, highly motivated people because they didn't possess the discipline to actually focus and stay on track. And I think discipline is the thing that separates. If I look at maturity in people now, used to, you know, there may be many things, but actually everybody that I see that I look at and hold in some form of reverence, it's because they have some form of discipline.

Jack Barsky (23:09)
Yeah, and I don't claim to be fully disciplined. I get distracted. But there's some things that people admire me for, for instance, that I do.

regularly, even though I don't necessarily like it. I go out for run every night, no matter what. ⁓ And I go to the gym and lift weights and I hate lifting weights. But I just must, I cannot not do it. And that's, I think this partially because of my genetic makeup, the Germanic discipline and the way I was brought up. And I carried this forward.

But particularly in the digital world, one has to remind oneself not to get sidetracked. Because there's always another signal over there. I oh, wait a minute. I'm not sidetracked by entertainment stuff. as we're talking, if I could, I would go.

Guy Bloom (24:06)
I think that's massive.

Jack Barsky (24:22)
to chat GPT and ask her a question to shed a little light on what I just heard or said. We can ⁓ veer off the path because we don't have one. The whole idea is to just have a conversation and that's okay. But when you want to get things done, you've got to stay focused.

Guy Bloom (24:46)
got a 12 year old and the one thing, if I can teach him anything it'll be the ability to have fun and do silly things and what's the point of life otherwise. But actually when it's time to go, it's the discipline of focus. Putting things to one side and...

getting on with it and I think that's the key. So if I take us back, we set the scene there to a point of a different era. However, things very often are very similar but just are presented now in different ways. I think there are ruling...

elites in the world, there are powers and they shift and they flow and every decade maybe different people come to different places of power. So we can identify it by country, by state, by organizations like investment companies like BlackRock and who now dominate. mean, what was a nation state is now an investment company. exactly. Yeah.

Jack Barsky (25:48)
Right.

And don't forget the high tech companies when you're talking about power structures.

Guy Bloom (26:00)
So we could, you know, that would be with a bottle of wine and a pizza. That would be a fantastic evening's conversation. But I guess I just want to pull back to when somebody knocked on your maybe actual door or metaphorical door. Well, there you go then. So when the proverbial knock came at the door.

Jack Barsky (26:17)
No, there wasn't an actual door. There was a knock.

Guy Bloom (26:24)
How does that go? Is that a... is it a subtle testing? Is it a demand of expectation? I apologise.

Jack Barsky (26:32)
I am sorry, I have to...

I have the phone on...

It shouldn't ring, okay? I have it on, so, but you can edit this out,

Guy Bloom (26:43)
That's all right.

No, no, no, maybe. But, well, so how did that, is it would you be interested or was it no, this is what you're going to do now, but your bags, I mean, give me a sense of that.

Jack Barsky (26:53)
No, I tell you,

it was extremely ⁓ stealthy, subtle, pretty stupid and incompetent. That first knock and when the person came in and started talking, ⁓ if ⁓ I'm in charge of that unit there and I'm aware of his behavior, I would have fired him on the spot.

But you know the intent was to just very cautiously ⁓ Get in touch with me so the the initiative I was in in my dorm room on a Saturday, and by the way ⁓ There were no signs on the dorm room there were no names. How did he know that I? was I I could be found there on a Saturday and that my roommate wasn't one

in the room, that we had an exchange student, a Russian, in the next room. Guarantee you he was KGB. So, they found me somehow most likely by looking through the records that the Stasi kept ⁓ on most adults. And in my records, I was a standout because I had received the...

⁓ Karl Marx Scholarship in my junior year. Now listen to this, that was so elite. And I double-checked to make sure that I don't say something that's not true. I triple-checked. It was ⁓ restricted to 100 concurrent holders in the entire country. So I was a standout. They knew that I was smart. They also knew that I was a communist.

Now, put yourself into the mindset of a recruiter. They were looking for candidates to do the job that I did, that is become an illegal, become another person, and actually operate pretty much in isolation as a lone wolf. It takes a lot of not just smarts, not just ideology, it takes a lot of ⁓ inborn character traits, like things like...

really quick thinking, ⁓ no problem with changing situations, no problem leaving your country, going someplace else all by yourself, no fearlessness and all these things, those were not in the files. the initial, never mind that the guy was incompetent, but the thought was to just make a contact and then see

if the person is actually willing to listen because you don't recruit somebody for that kind of a role with any kind of coercion, force, because when there's resistance, you just created yourself a defection. it needs to come, first of all, the person needs to be qualified and needs to be willing.

passionate about doing this. So they had to get to know me. So this guy introduced himself as a representative of a local optics company, actually, if you're familiar, they still exist, called Zeiss Jena. And he gave me the impression that he was trying to recruit me to go to work for the company after I'm done with my degree.

The stupidity was that in those days nobody in East Germany, no companies recruited. You were assigned after you had your diploma. Some of us, the top tier had the ability to go for a doctorate, but eventually you were still assigned. There was no free will, there was no choice. So, but anyway, without getting too much into detail, he sensed...

I gave him an indirect answer to a question when he asked if I could imagine to work for the government one of these days. And I said, and this was a pretty clever answer, I'm still proud of it, because I said, ⁓ yeah, but not as a chemist. So I gave him an answer to a question that he didn't even have to ask, made it easy on him. So he then... ⁓

We met again three days later at a restaurant and he introduced me to a person. They were sitting at the table. walk in and they both got up and he said, ⁓ by the way, I want to introduce you to Herman. We are working with our Soviet comrades. Okay. And then he, I forgot exactly. He excused himself. Never heard of, he never introduced himself by any kind of name or label. He was just this.

this one figure who just took me to Herman. And Herman was obviously a KGB agent. when said, when the other, the German said, work with our Soviet comrades, I knew it was KGB. At that point, nothing had to be stated. The whole unofficial way of contacting me meant that that had to be intelligence. And since it wasn't Stasi, it was KGB.

So Herman and I became really good friends. was the person who was in charge of studying me, whether I had what it takes. 18 months. 18 months. So he studied my character. We met ⁓ every other week for about an hour in a conspiratorial flat where...

The owner would be out when we met for an hour. He gave me, we talked about what it would be like to be an agent. We talked about life in general. He was like a father figure to me because he was old enough to qualify and my father was out of my life. And you know, I was still in a growth phase. For instance, like

I was really shy around the girls and I had my own doubts about this and that and I shared everything with this fellow, including ⁓ mistakes that I made that nobody else knew I made them. And now in hindsight, I guarantee you, every time we met, he sat down and wrote a report and it piled up in a box, a bunch of papers. He also gave me tasks to do.

to see if I could function, you know, sort of basic tradecraft, ⁓ not the technical stuff, but getting to know somebody and finding out about them, befriending them, and getting information out of them without them realizing, we call it elicitation, without them realizing that you were after that information.

And you know, I hated this stuff, but you I couldn't fail. So I went and I was successful with every task. 18, it was 18 months later when I was finally called to Berlin and under a pretext to get more training, that is when I actually was recruited. 18 months after and up until that point, you know, just like my curiosities are just, just play along. Okay.

There was no downside.

Guy Bloom (35:11)
Is there, you know, when you look back on this through the lens of an adult, ⁓ I may not use the word vulnerable, but spotting that if your father wasn't in your life, if you're a person that's quite intelligent and likes a task and likes to achieve and likes, is curious, you know, is that part of that kind of, that kind of...

behavioral kind of conditioning that if the right person approaches the right person, they can fill a father figure role, they can give you rewards, they can... Is that part of that process or is that a bit too simple?

Jack Barsky (35:47)
I think you're overthinking this

a little bit. ⁓ However, the fact that my father was out of my life and it became very clear that I did not have a loving relationship with my mother, that played a role. Because if I had had functioning parents, and particularly a father as an advisor, as a mentor, I most likely would have said, no, I'm not going to do this.

⁓ But I didn't. ⁓ I, you know, my mother was conditioned, she grew up during World War II and she was conditioned to treat her children the way she was treated. Tough love. So it's based on, you know, survival skills.

Guy Bloom (36:41)
So was this an ideological choice? Was it an excitement choice? A little bit of both?

Jack Barsky (36:45)
Yes, yes, it

was both. Good question. You answered your own question pretty much. ⁓ Ideology was the foundation. mean, only crazy people would do something that dangerous with regard to the ⁓ probability of failure and move away from a life that

⁓ had nothing but success as a headline. ⁓ Nobody would sign up for something like that unless it is in service of a higher cause. And it isn't just communism. There's all kinds of causes. People just bend over backwards for and some of them in some cases die for. Yes. So that was the foundation. If I'm not a believing communist,

If I don't think that I will be contributing to ⁓ freeing the oppressed masses on the planet, then I wouldn't have done it. you know, the ⁓ notion that I would also be able to have my cake and eat it too, because I knew one thing that...

the standard of living in the West was significantly higher than in the East. becoming an KGB agent, I knew I would be able to travel to all kinds of countries that otherwise were closed off to East German citizens. And ⁓ we also had an East German version of James Bond. There was a TV series called The Invisible Visor.

And around Christmas there was an every time we couldn't wait for another episode. And that was about a Stasi agent who was an illegal in the West. He was smuggled in when ⁓ prisoners of war came back from the Soviet Union. So he pretended to be one of them and he was hunting down Nazis. But he also had a romantic life.

Guy Bloom (39:14)
Bye bye.

Jack Barsky (39:14)
He also

had fancy cars and lived in nice places. And I occasionally take another peek at a few clips. It's ridiculous. I mean, it's just James Bond, communist James Bond. And subtly during my recruitment, I was fed that romantic notion, very subtly, not strongly, just like reminding me that one day...

I need to pretend to be like a rich individual so I can fit in, that kind of stuff. Yeah, so you got it. And if I can add ⁓ one more ⁓ determining factor for me signing up, it's pride. It's ego. If the ⁓ most powerful intelligence agency of the world

is recruiting you. I mean, yeah, look at me.

Guy Bloom (40:20)
I I feel it now a little bit. know, I mean, it would be something. So did you, I mean, I'm asking silly questions in the context of I don't know the language, but did you go to spy school? You know, to learn spy stuff?

Jack Barsky (40:33)
There was no school, of course, all my training was either self-teaching, teaching myself, or one-on-one. No, were no classes. There was no building where you would show up every morning. ⁓

The that was really good, and it really didn't become very good until I spent two years in Moscow, was the technical aspects of tradecraft. So we're talking about ⁓ Morse code, shortwave reception, secret writing, photography. ⁓

⁓ encryption and decryption, cryptography, and ⁓ surveillance detection, dead drop operations, you know what that is? So when you hand over material without meeting somebody, brush passes, something like that. you you give another agent something without stopping and talking, anything like that. And also, ⁓ you know, meetings.

⁓ All of that training was outstanding. The language training was a lot of self-teaching and had mentors. ⁓ In Moscow I actually had an American-born citizen and I worked with her. ⁓ I met her twice a week for over a year. Obviously we spoke English from

day one. ⁓ And then ⁓ to improve ⁓ my ability to speak English as a man, I was given the opportunity to interact with Morris Cohen. Morris Cohen was a member of him and his wife, Lano. They were members of the Rosenberg spy ring and American citizens. And they

They managed to flee before they were captured by US counterintelligence. Had another stint, a 10-year stint doing work as illegals ⁓ in your country. I forgot, there's a town, and I think ⁓ it still exists, there are facilities. ⁓

⁓ for nuclear submarines where nuclear submarines are built and tested and so forth and they were spying on that. And they wound up in jail, they were caught, but eventually were exchanged and lived their life out in Moscow. my idea of, know, it being good to have been an ex-KGB agent, they lived in luxury in the best...

in Arbatskaya, that was the number one street downtown in Moscow. And Morris really made sure that my pronunciation is as good as it could be. And when he said, I'm ready, that's when he gave the green light for my launch. ⁓ What was not nonexistent,

And if it was attempted, it was terribly wrong, is teaching me how Americans operate. know, Morris was an old man and he had his own idiosyncrasies, like 30, 40 years older than me. So there was no psychological training. I never took a psychological test. The only thing that...

resembled something about culture. One of my trainers, Handlers, gave me the book by Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People. Now, I read the book, but I didn't get much out of it because I didn't have context. I wasn't in the country. I read the book many years later and I thought, yeah, that works really well.

But these people didn't, you know, the people that trained me thought they were experts in what it's like to be an American because they were the only Soviet citizens that were in the United States and interacted with Americans and they were diplomats. So I give that example ⁓ what it's like, what it was like for them. It's like when you go to...

the city of Atlanta, there's this phenomenal aquarium, like huge, you can spend hours watching sharks and all kinds of fish swimming around. And then you walk away and you think it's, you know what it's like to be a fish? No, I was gonna be a fish and they couldn't teach me how to be a fish. I had to learn this over time by observing and imitating and learning my lessons and...

You have to give credit to the KGB. That's one of the reasons they picked me, because they knew if they threw me into the water, I would find a way to swim. And I did. So I'm still here. I was pretty successful.

Guy Bloom (46:35)
So you

get to the US, and then what's that first, let's just give it that first 12 months. it find yourself a job or no, there's already a job for you? Is it just what, yeah, just walk me through that, I'm here day one and just how does that walk us through that?

Jack Barsky (46:50)
no no no no no no no no no no no no no

Yeah,

all I had with me when I came to the US was that birth certificate. I had a shortwave radio to receive transmissions from Moscow. And I had ⁓ some cash left, maybe $6,000, $7,000 to live in the country. You can't get a job without a social security.

I didn't have a driver's license. We were not using forged documents. The birth certificate was a genuine copy that was acquired by a KGB agent diplomat. They never told me how they got a hold of it, but it was all on the up and up. And then I had to get a driver's license. And then I had to get a social security number, which was possible in those days.

because in those days ⁓ babies were not assigned a number at birth. You could get one, but it was not a requirement. and this was, it took me a year to get these documents because the instructions that they gave me in Moscow didn't work. So I had to find workarounds and it gets to be too much detail to get them.

to get into this. ⁓ But again, it took a full year, during which time I needed another infusion of KGB money to exist because I spent, I couldn't get an apartment without having ID. But you could get yourself a hotel room in a seedy hotel by just like writing your name in as John Smith or something like that. In those days, nobody checked ID.

So I stayed in a hotel and I paid the bill in cash. And when I finally had my social security card, then it was time to look for a job. And again, the instructions that I got from the KGB were not workable. ⁓ They thought maybe I should be a taxi driver. Yeah, I learned enough by just observing that driving a taxi...

is a more than full-time job and it doesn't pay very well because the people that made the money were the ones that owned the cabs. And the other suggestion was like, how about you work in the harbor in downtown Manhattan, there's a Stevie door. Well, yeah, dream on, but well paid, but it's fully unionized. You have to have connections. So I did...

My research, I looked at the wanted ads and I couldn't find anything in it. One day I said, wait a minute, there was an ad in there for messengers. I figured, know, messenger, don't need to show a resume for that. And I just needed a job. didn't have need, I didn't need a well-paying job. If I needed more money, I would have gotten that from the KGB. So I showed up ⁓ on a Monday morning at

at the headquarters of the messenger office and I asked him if they're still hiring and the guy looked at me and apparently I made a good impression physically. He said, ⁓ can you ride a bike? That was pure luck because one thing I didn't know that bike messengers made a lot of money. And I said to him, not knowing

Exactly what I was saying yes to is, yeah sure, he asked me do you have a bike? I said no but I can get one and I can ride one. Growing up in East Germany that was our primary means of transportation. Wherever we went we went by bicycle to school and so forth. There was no school buses. Typically I was not afraid of ⁓ joining the crazy Manhattan traffic.

Next day I showed up with a bike and a bag and I was a bike messenger and I started delivering packages. And on payday, I found out that my pay was like five times higher than the foot, the people on foot. They got minimum wage. I was on commission because this was a job that most people didn't feel like doing. It was very dangerous.

Guy Bloom (51:36)
Hmm.

Jack Barsky (51:48)
And I had two accidents, one dislocated shoulder and another one, I'm not exaggerating. I came very close to being run over by a semi truck, a big truck, very close. I was on the ground. And if I had, I fell and if I had fallen in the wrong direction, my head would have been crushed. So ⁓ yeah, I survived.

The KGB folks, two years after entering the US, I was called back for ⁓ debriefing and some rest and relaxation. As well as spending time with my German family, I was actually married in Germany and I had a young child at that time. ⁓

That's another part of the story. right now, I just want to tell you, when I told them ⁓ how much money I was making, their eyes went, wow, I think that impressed them greatly. ⁓ So that's the long answer to the question. You know, the first year, it actually was the first year. And then I spent two and a half years working as a bike messenger.

That was it until it was time to go take the next step.

Guy Bloom (53:23)
where it gets interesting for me this is a slow burn

Jack Barsky (53:27)
Yeah, very much. It's a long game. Absolutely. And what I was not told explicitly, obviously I knew instinctively that people like me, and I had no idea how many others were there, and there's...

material available that was smuggled out of ⁓ KGB archives that indicates that during the Cold War, the height of the Cold War in the late 70s, early 80s, the KGB trained, 10 of us. There's no proof as to how many were actually sent and how many were successful. I doubt that it was more than a handful that survived like I did. So, but we were, ⁓

the insurance policy, God forbid the cold war becomes hot. We would have gotten some kind of instruction. Nothing, no preparation. I wasn't even told. They kept everything very, very secret. I understand why now. It's a double-edged sword. If you share too much with somebody like me, we are risk for defection. If we do really well and become climatized and...

as I eventually had a family, ⁓ you know too much. You shouldn't know anything, But on the other hand, if you don't know at least the basics, you're going to make decisions based on your own understanding. So anyway, I sensed that ⁓ what was important to them and it was ⁓ confirmed later on in

couple of interviews by ex-heads of the directorate S, the KGB, ⁓ KGB ⁓ section that was in charge of illegals. We were the insurance policy. something, diplomatic relations were broken up, ⁓ we would have interacted with, I name only two names because they're well known, with the two most successful KGB spies in the United States.

during the Cold War. They were both high level employees of the FBI and the CIA, Robert Hanson and Aldrich Ames. And they did a lot of damage to the United States and they handed their material that they smuggled out of their offices to the diplomats. If there are no more diplomats, you know, who can receive the packages? So that was important. ⁓

There was ⁓ an idea that eventually I should become a wealthy American to befriend people who are in charge of foreign policy and directly in charge of foreign policy or influence foreign policy like think tanks. And the plan was, and that was brilliant for me to...

get the documentation and then get a bona fide US passport, no forgeries. And then move to a German-speaking capitalist country such as Switzerland or Austria and open up a business. And the KGB would fund that business. They were really good at money laundering. And then return to the United States.

reasonably wealthy so I could join a country club. You know, we're talking about maybe a hundred thousand dollars after like three years and that would have been well over a million. And I wouldn't have to tell anybody, know, so how did you make the money? Well, I had this business over there in Zurich and it did really well. That failed. That plan would have made me into an extremely dangerous agent because ⁓

I had what it takes as far as my personality, my overall education, the knowledge that I could mingle with really smart people. And ⁓ then you got the money. And I had the personality as well to, in hindsight I know it now, wasn't so aware of it, but I was quite likable so I was able to make friends easily. ⁓

Thank God today I say that I was denied the passport because I made a mistake in the application on the form. I wrote for the and I wrote messenger, which was the truth. I should have written down contractor because that's what I really was. So I was messenger and everybody knew that messengers make minimum wage. And then there was a

a section where they asked what my travel plans were and where I was going to go and when I planned to go there. And it was optional, I left it out. And that raised a flag. here is a person who makes minimum wage who ⁓ doesn't know where he wants to go and he doesn't know when he wants to go there.

So the agent at the passport office asked me to... He said directly, I will never forget these words, we have some doubt about your identity. ⁓ No problem, just fill out this questionnaire. Okay, so I was still confident. no, the questionnaire, big deal. But question one, I went to the back and...

I looked at the questionnaire and the question one said, where did you go to high school? Well, I was smart enough to know that I can't answer the question with the high school that we had in my back story. Because it was very unlikely that Jack Barsky ever went to that school. It was a school for the gifted. Peter Stuyvesant still does exist. So there weren't too many students there and Jack Barsky was not a common name. So I knew I was busted.

So I managed to get out of that trap by just like going back there and cursing under my breath and say like, I don't need this S word, right? Fill in with the S word. know, forget about it. And I had the presence of mind to take my application and the documentation so that the guy still had sitting in front of him.

and then I walked out. And the next weeks, I did a lot of surveillance detection and took some measures to see if I was being watched. I was not. There was another moment of really, really good luck. I got through, but that now...

activated Plan B. Now I was already a US citizen with documentation except for the passport. You didn't need that. I don't need a passport today unless I want to come to the UK. And so there was another way to maybe become wealthy and they told me, well, let's go to college, study economics and then get a Wall Street job. So I went to college. I finished it.

what most people took five years and three years. Surprise, okay. The problem was that I made a mistake that also could have ⁓ damaged me significantly, could have ⁓ pointed the tension to my very being because I graduated as valedictorian. And ⁓ I had to give the...

graduation speech at Madison Square Garden, 4,000 people in the audience. And here's a guy who ⁓ was about 10 years older than the average graduate ⁓ and spoke with a touch of an accent. And the teachers knew about me. They knew I had raced through that program by taking overloads in summer school.

⁓ And aced everything and some of the teachers particularly in my major, they really liked me and nobody after the ⁓ event was over was hanging out with a bunch of classmates and we were talking to some teachers. Nobody who was in the audience, not a journalist. There was a major event at Madison Square Garden, not a journalist.

not the school newspaper, any curious parents asked me, how did you go to high school? How ⁓ did you manage to, what motivated you? All kinds of questions, not a one. That could have also caused a problem for me. So I got by with ⁓ being pretty good, but also being quite lucky.

Guy Bloom (1:03:39)
So at this point, what value have you added? Because they've played a five, six year game so far, positioning you, maneuvering the chess piece around the board.

Jack Barsky (1:03:48)
Yeah, yeah. Okay.

⁓ Sort of minor value, but again, by the way, they never ever gave me feedback saying, job with this particular task or good job with that. Nothing. I did get in my eighth year, I was awarded the Order of the Red Banner.

the second highest declaration of the Soviet Union, that means...

They had to like, actually the KGB had to go to the government and say, we want this guy to get this order. And so they must have seen value that I'm piecing together. Again, I told you about this, insurance policy. was, I was most likely one of maybe three or four illegals that made it in the United States. So, but I never knew explicitly the value.

that I otherwise provided, ⁓ I was always operating as a spotter. So a spotter is like looking for talent who ⁓ might be a good target for recruitment. And so particularly while I was in college, I profiled quite a few fellow students who I suspected

could wind up in government, who had a passion for one thing or another or weakness and that kind of thing. that must have been of value, but they never told me. I never knew whether they would try to recruit any of them except for one. And that is when they asked me, this was a citizen of, ⁓ that's the island, that's Cyprus.

He came from Cyprus and he was a socialist, if not communist. ⁓ And I profiled him. And one day I got a request from the KGB to find out he had moved and to find out where he lives. And I managed to, I had the address of his brothers. And so I found out. So they had talked with him.

sure or wanted to talk with him. That was the only case. The other thing that I thought wasn't of value but in hindsight again, ⁓ it definitely was. Periodically, once every three, four months, more like three months, they asked me to ⁓ write a report about what

the American people attitude toward ⁓ major events in the world. Now I was thinking, why is that of value? I'm talking to a bunch of people and I'm not a research institute. Yeah, but compared to the diplomats, ⁓ when they talk with Americans, they spoke with an accent. They were known as diplomats, as Russians.

No American would give them their honest opinion, right, or very few. So what they wound up is copying stuff from the New York Times and the White Hagen Post. So in that respect, and even if it's just from a career angle, the people that ran me, that handled me, would be able to go to their boss and say, see what we got from this guy? This is the real deal. There's always...

There's always this element of positioning yourself no matter what kind of an organization you work for. I think that also played a role in giving me the order of the Red Band. I see, we've got our man right embedded there. ⁓ I don't really care. I'm just telling you exactly what I observed.

One thing I could have, oh, one more thing. And I was told that this was an assignment that every KGB agent had who worked in a foreign, in an enemy country. Periodically, everybody got assigned a military object to observe periodically to see if there signs that indicate preparation for war. So.

They gave me the naval weapons station Earl, which is still in existence on the New Jersey shore. I never noticed anything different. And there wasn't anything because the US was not preparing for an attack. Well, just knowing that, you know, is also valid intelligence, right? So, and where they, where they

I failed miserably and I could have again done a lot of damage when I started working in computers. I was a programmer and I worked for MetLife and that's public knowledge, I can name the company. MetLife, I worked in the group insurance business as a programmer and I had access to the record of a lot of employees of companies that are

part of the military industrial complex, like Boeing, aircraft manufacturers and weapons manufacturers. I had access to the medical records of these people. And when I shared that in Moscow...

There was no reaction. It was like I was telling them, it's snowing outside.

That was, I mean, how dumb can you be? I mean, if you locate an individual who's an engineer and he is a drug addict, he's in treatment, or there's a child that is in serious trouble and the insurance denied claims, these are the most perfect targets for recruitment. So there's a good reason why in one of my presentations,

I give examples like this and there many more. It's a good reason I call the KGB the Keystone Cops of Intelligence. There was so much ineptitude. It's amazing. some of it was good and they did damage. But the most damage that they did as far as espionage was because people who reported to them, people who volunteered.

walked into the Soviet embassy with immaterial and they wanted to get paid. Ames particularly did this for money. Hansen did it more out of pride. as an offensive intelligence agency ⁓ relying on their own ⁓ tools and means, they were reasonably incompetent.

then

Guy Bloom (1:11:47)
So you have a wife and a child at this point? Yeah, so what was the reality of that? Because you didn't have the internet and you couldn't just do a video call. So what?

Jack Barsky (1:11:51)
Yeah, in East Germany, yeah.

yeah,

was no interaction ⁓ during the time I was in the United States. ⁓ Occasionally, maybe there was a ⁓ little blurb, a very short one, in the radiogram. But clearly, they couldn't send a long report because these radiograms take a while to...

take down and then decipher. So there was really no communication. None, okay, between me and my German wife. And so every two years I went back and was able to spend some time with that family. So that was in...

in 80, 82, 84, and 86, four visits. Not enough to bond with my son. know, the very last visit in 86, he was maybe five years old, and I took a big teddy bear to give him, and he said to his mother,

Hey, look what this uncle just gave me. He didn't even realize I was his father. Did that bother me? I honestly, no. Because my wife knew full well what she was getting into. She said, I will wait for you. I tried other men, you're the one. And I painted the rosy picture of the...

of the future, which was realistic because the idea for me was not to spend the rest of my life in the United States. You know, there's a shelf life for illegals like me. If we're too successful, ⁓ we really become a risk for defection. And I was quite successful, as we will talk about soon.

I still loved my German wife, but the passion was out of it. It was more now, now I have a responsibility for a family and they were very well taken care of. Okay. I mean, she, she was able to buy a car for which most people had to wait 10, 15 years. And she got a, a luxury car and she had a telephone. Private phones were very rare in those days. So, and, and they, they had two, ⁓

vacations on the Black Sea and they had a cook and a driver assigned to them. So that was a signal by the KGB like we're taking care of you guys. ⁓

Guy Bloom (1:14:56)
Hmm.

This is there and it might be different for different people, but is there a.

Is there a trauma in the duality of two lives?

Jack Barsky (1:15:12)
⁓ There's a trauma to my very existence, which the duality has something to do with it. ⁓

a glimpse into my personality, I am.

what I would consider an extreme stoic. It took me a long time to actually discover feelings. I mean, other than, you know, the passion that you have for a woman, but I just...

I had empathy and I still have it, but my empathy is intellectual. If you cut yourself right now on screen, I don't feel your pain. But I'm worried about you. I understand that you're in pain. So I could go through this life without being in pain.

Guy Bloom (1:16:19)
You don't understand.

Jack Barsky (1:16:29)
other than I had problems sleeping. And I took care of that by self-medicating. I became an alcoholic, totally functional. But I needed a drink ⁓ at night. And that started on day one when I came to the US after the most stressful moment in my entire life, entering the US with a false passport. ⁓

And so I drank quite a bit of Johnny Walker Red to fall asleep and wound up with a big hangover. But anyway, that's ⁓ the... I haven't really answered your question yet. I don't believe the dual personality other than the...

the language problems that I switched between German and English. And let me tell you something. Inside, and this was actually a task, inside of that bubble of falsehoods, the pretension that I was born in the US, inside that bubble I was still myself.

I was known as an honest, authentic guy. And I was known as an honest, authentic guy as a German. If I had started playing a role, I would have blown up. I had to be myself. If you act like somebody else, eventually you create traps for your own self. And the lies that I shared with people were just the

basic foundational lies. So I didn't have to remember what I lied about yesterday. So no direct damage. The damage came when I realized that I had served the wrong master and it hurt people that were close to me, my German wife and my mother.

There may have been others, but I'm not aware of any others. These two clearly, they loved me, believed in me, and I disappeared eventually. And that took me quite some time to digest. There's no, can't make it better now, but I'm very, very hard.

And I enjoy this actually to get redemption by doing good for others.

Guy Bloom (1:19:31)
So there was a point where you were on a mission, or you were given a mission and on a mission personally, you were on this journey, you have a North Star. Is there a point where you hit maximum value and in essence could have kept going, or actually you had an internal shift and that changed things?

Jack Barsky (1:19:43)
Yeah.

I

get the question. There's two sides to that coin. ⁓ I had become quite valuable to the KGB. And when initially the thought was, you know, 10 years, roughly 10 years, and you're going to come back. There was no sign I had reached the 10th anniversary. There was no indication that they wanted me back. That's part one of the answer.

I didn't know how long they wanted me to stay. That probably would have been a year-by-year decision. You know, always worried about me defecting, right? But as far as I'm concerned, there were some, initially there were not necessarily ideological doubts. I had moved from radical communism to socialism.

sort of a welfare state kind of a situation. I had embraced the convergence theory that was concocted by socialist parties in Europe, where the idea was to merge the good parts of capitalism and communism. And I knew one thing, that I had personal evidence that the capitalist system was significantly...

more powerful and more successful. So take some of that and then take the good part of communism. So I still didn't feel bad about serving the Soviet Union. In fact, there's evidence, personal evidence, that there were some elements in the KGB that actually ⁓ subscribe to the convergence theory. You know, was the time when Gorbachev

took power and some people were further to the left of Gorbachev. There was a thawing going on there, even in the intelligence service. And I was still serving my own country, the German Democratic Republic. The wall didn't come down after I quit. Here's where my doubts came and they were personal. I loved my job. The company MetLife took really good care of its employees.

It felt like almost like working for the German company, East German company. You you do a good job, they pay you well. The MetLife even gave us free lunch. But most importantly, I loved what I was doing. ⁓ You know, creating, using my creative spirit to write code. I told people that I would want to do this even if I don't get paid. It was like a hobby that I got paid for. That's a...

That's a good way for a good job to have. And then I made a lot of friends. the department that I worked in, they were about...

70 people maybe, and ⁓ of those 70 there were maybe 25 up to 30 were computer geeks like me. And you know, we got along fabulously. It was fun interacting with them. We spoke the same geek language. And interestingly enough, it felt like the United Nations. We had a Cuban. ⁓

national. We had a ⁓ Ukrainian, three Russians, four Russians, ⁓ several black African Americans, but I was the only white born American. It's just a little, it's hilarious. But you know, it was so much fun and ⁓ you know, we socialized occasionally and

Guy Bloom (1:23:58)
hilarious when you say that.

Jack Barsky (1:24:08)
And I still remember one day, ⁓ I'm getting out of the subway and going to take the last two steps for work and I'm thinking, you know, one day I have to leave them. I'm gonna miss these guys. So there was a little bit of crumbling around the edges of this rock. And had it taken longer, that...

that Krumling could have destroyed Iraq. can't predict this, you never know.

So this is what I do. You ask me short questions and I come up with long answers.

Guy Bloom (1:24:48)
There's a depth to this. It's just a glib response. So this wasn't necessarily shifting loyalties at a, yeah, this was more a, just a sense of your, guess what you were finding the value in just on a personal level and just recognizing, don't know if I want to this up.

Jack Barsky (1:24:54)
Yeah.

No, was not. Not at that point.

Yeah,

there was no action at this point. There was no thought of acting, but having thoughts that I hadn't had five years before.

Guy Bloom (1:25:28)
And that can be the same for anything in life. I used to love working for this company, now I just suddenly realized that I don't. Or I used to love this car, now I'm not so keen on it. mean, that things, you don't always know the day, right?

Jack Barsky (1:25:41)
Yeah, there's a day when you most likely act on the beliefs that start out as seedlings.

Guy Bloom (1:25:51)
So moving that forward, what happened? At any point, was there a request to return home? Was there any, know, yeah.

Jack Barsky (1:26:05)
Yeah.

That was not a request. It was a command. So again, I don't know what triggered it, but you know, the KGB was very, very protective of their legals. Not because they loved us so much, but because if we were arrested, it made it very uncomfortable for them because they had to get us out.

If they don't get us out, nobody signs up for that job. They told me, if you ever go to jail, we'll get you out. So getting somebody out requires to set somebody else up, an American, put him in jail, you know, and all this. And also, there was always the danger that if I get arrested, that I cooperate with America.

So that's why they were really nervous. somebody must have indicated something probably sort of fuzzy along the lines of, you know, you guys have an illegal in New York and the FBI is investigating this guy. ⁓ I know at that time there was another illegal.

a German citizen who was in the United States. ⁓ He had a job at Columbia University. So maybe they investigated him, I don't know. But clearly they didn't investigate me because the FBI told me that they didn't have a clue that I existed. ⁓ so the KGB had reason to believe that ⁓ I might get busted. they ordered me home.

We had an emergency protocol that meant for me to as soon as I get that order to just run for the border with Canada and get to make my way to the Soviet Embassy and they would like get me out of the Western world with a forced passport and that was it. ⁓

That sounded pretty simple. also had emergency documents that I had hidden in a park in the Bronx. And I was supposed to get those documents. But not even once I see there was a signal, it was a red dot on a beam that supported the, so it still supports the elevated portion of the subway train, the A train. And once I saw that red dot, I was supposed to get the documents.

And I was always required to have enough cash on me so I wouldn't have to go to a bank or to go home. Just get out and get across the bridge between, you know, the Niagara Falls Bridge. In those days you could go across that bridge without showing documentation. I had investigated that.

Not anymore, now you have to show at least a driver's license or something. And so, ⁓ that was the order. And if I not married with a child, I would have gone. No doubt about it. My life in the US wasn't comfortable enough to stay. ⁓ my life behind the Iron Curtain would have been in

incredibly, incredibly upscale. Because I had, I don't know, 50, 60 thousand dollars in savings and dollar denomination. That was a lot of wealth behind the Berlin Wall. They had promised me a house once I am done with that particular assignment. I would have

still work for the KGB, short assignments, would have been able to travel to the West and buy Western goods and take care of my family. I mean, it would have been the life of Riley, as they say. ⁓

Never did I imagine that the wall would come down, right? If the wall is down, I'm not going anywhere because I didn't want to wind up in Russia. So it was just me knowing that going back home would be very good for me. what trumped all of that was this unconditional love that I had for my 18-month-old daughter.

This was the first time that... True love.

Guy Bloom (1:31:30)
Just to catch

us up there Jack, you're now married in the US? That's okay.

Jack Barsky (1:31:34)
Oh yeah, I'm sorry. Yes.

Well, yeah, obviously I was unfaithful to my wife, but this was part of the assignment. To live as a normal individual, you have to have a girlfriend. You can't just, because if you, as an asexual or potentially homosexual, you couldn't mingle freely with in those days. There was a lot of stigma attached to that.

So I had to, and I went for safe choice. I was looking in ⁓ the Village Voice where you could, know, there were dating pages where you could, you know, try to make a connection. Nowadays it's on the internet. And I was looking for a dark-skinned lady. First of all, I liked dark-skinned, but secondly, ⁓ they were most likely...

there were more of a likelihood, not most likely, that they were actually not born in this country. And I found one that wasn't born in this country. It was very pleasant. She came from ⁓ Guyana, and she wouldn't have possibly known that I wasn't 100 % American at the time. ⁓ So yeah, no, I had a girlfriend and I could socialize. I would take her ⁓ to some of the events and that was good. And I...

Then she dropped the bomb. One day she told me that she was illegal.

She had ⁓ worked as a ⁓ flight attendant for Guyana Airways and just decided to stay in the country and stay with a friend of hers. So she asked me if I could marry her.

Damsland's stress syndrome. She shared with me that she had paid a guy $10,000 and he married, he didn't marry her. Or he married her and then he didn't file for the green card. So I felt really sorry for her. She cried in front of me and was like, I don't know what to do because back home it's like horrible. So she was a nice woman and I said,

And I did some research and I figured I had what it takes. I had the documents and ⁓ I interviewed a friend of hers who went through something like that and I was advised that the question that trips up people who are not really living together is would they take them separate and ask them to describe the living room and stuff like that and favorite.

TV shows and what we eat for dinner and so forth. So I practiced that and I was pretty confident that we would pass. ⁓

And that practice wasn't necessary because she decided what I told her with regard to this arrangement, said loud and clear because I was still dead set to go back to live out the rest of my life with my German family. And I said to her, ⁓ I'm not the kind of guy who wants to live in marriage. So when we...

When you have your green card, we get a divorce." And she agreed. And obviously I said, and I hope you stay on the birth control pill because the last thing I want is a child here. Well, she decided to get pregnant. Okay? Because, know, another vestige of cultural ignorance. This is even nowadays. Now the immigration situation is quite different now, but...

Up until recently, ⁓ illegal ladies tried to capture a man and make a child with him. And that works a lot. And it wound up working for me in my case as well because I fell in love with this girl. And ⁓ it was the first time that love in here was not attached to lust.

It was real. It was genuine. It was ⁓ unexpected, crept up on me. And I wasn't even fully aware of that it did, in the end, going back and risking being arrested and risking by not going back, risking that to be interpreted as a

as a defection, all of that.

hold my rational mind, you have to go back. the other hand, was the knowledge that if I did not stay, I couldn't take care of this child. And her mother had only four years of schooling. They would have grown up in poverty, both of them. So in the end, the decision was to stay. It was the dumbest decision I ever made with regard to self.

preservation with regard to logic. The logic could have said, you know, if I stay, I get arrested. I'm not good for these people anyway. Actually, the wife might be kicked out of the country and the poverty would be even greater. there was the rational mindset, you got to go. But the love trumped that.

So when I say stupid, good stupid. Sometimes our decisions, we make a lot of decisions based on gut feeling and if we sometimes sit down and think about the decision, we come up with an answer and then your gut overrides the rational decision and it turned out to be the right decision to begin with. Not always, but.

It happens, and in my case, it more frequently than I expected when I went for my degree in chemistry and taught math and logic in college.

Guy Bloom (1:38:32)
Can I ask you difficult question?

Jack Barsky (1:38:35)
⁓ There are no difficult questions unless you make them difficult for yourself.

Guy Bloom (1:38:43)
How did you rationalise?

family in Germany and what they would have to go through.

Jack Barsky (1:38:56)
⁓ That was relatively easy to do. ⁓

because the one thing that I was certain of, that my son would be well taken care of. ⁓ Because of the...

The story that I shared with the KGB, I imagined that... ⁓ The story was that... The reason for For defying that command to go back was that I had incurred the HIV, AIDS virus. And ⁓ in those days, it was more or less a death sentence.

But I said, you know, I want to stay in this country. I might get treatment here, but no place else. And they believed that story. I didn't know this until many years later, but since ⁓ there was a good chance that they would, I knew that they might even ⁓ comply with my wishes to give to my German ⁓ wife.

the dollar savings that I had. There's evidence, my son told me that he got some money. Not all of it, somebody probably took some of that for themselves. know, espionage cash is the only currency. Now it could be Bitcoin as well. But anyway, so and I knew that materially they wouldn't suffer and, ⁓ Galinda.

had a very, very strong family structure. I had spent time with her parents. ⁓ She had a nice, very intelligent brother. I knew that my son, without me, would do okay, and he did. He has a doctorate in chemistry now. ⁓ And I knew that without me, Chelsea, my daughter,

would struggle tremendously. So that was the rationale. I couldn't really dwell much on the betrayal of Gelinda because...

I just chose not to think about it because I still loved her even when I made the decision to stay with Chelsea. But minor rationalization, I didn't leave her for another woman.

Guy Bloom (1:41:53)
There's something about maybe the reason you get chosen to do a role like this is because of the capacity to compartmentalize.

Jack Barsky (1:42:02)
yeah, absolutely. And so there's one thing when I called them the KGB, the Keystone Cops, the way they recruited and screened me.

was outstanding. I mean, if you don't do this well, you're sending somebody out who will fail right from the beginning. know, loneliness, my God, what are you doing? I spent a lot of time alone, but I managed to deal with that. One of the things was ⁓ music. I bought a pile of...

long playing records and played classical music all the

Nobody taught me that. That was just something that came, you know, I just, I wanted to do, and it worked.

Guy Bloom (1:43:04)
How did you move? Did you get onto the FBI's radar or did you, did that happen triggered by you? Was there something that happened for that to occur?

Jack Barsky (1:43:13)
No,

The FBI did not know that I exist until there was a betrayal. ⁓ There was a fellow by the name of Vasili Mitrokin. He was the head archivist of ⁓ the first directorate for the KGB. He was in charge of the archives. First directorate was espionage. And he...

I mean, that was an security hole. The guy could smuggle out bits and pieces of information in small little paper strips. He hadn't copied them. And then when he went back home, ⁓ he transcribed them with a typewriter. when he eventually wound up at MI6, at the ⁓

British embassy in one of the Baltic countries, he told him that he had several boxes worth of collected over a period of about 10 years. And so what made him do this? He had developed a deep hatred of the Soviet system and the KGB because he was reading stuff.

And he found all this stuff like the murderous nature of that organization. And I believe there was also a situation that his son was very ill and there could have been treatment. The only country where there was treatment available for that illness was your country, the UK. And obviously they didn't allow him to go there.

So this hatred made him just do what he did. He got away with it. And eventually the information that he collected, there was just a little tidbit in it that says there is an illegal KGB agent in the Northeast. I think he knew the last name, Barsky. Yeah, I think it was Barsky because... ⁓

I got that information in hindsight, it was shared with me by the KGB, how they found me. And so the KGB got that, ⁓ the FBI got that information and they did a little bit of research. There are not too many barskis in this country. And the one that got his social security card at an unusual age, at the age of like,

30, whatever, five, was even older. I think it was close to 40. That was their man. So they started observing me, watching me, not knowing whether I was still active or not. One comment here. ⁓ So I was betrayed. And the irony of all this is if Matrokin was still alive and I could meet him, I would thank him from the bottom of my heart for this betrayal.

Okay, because without that I would not be able to talk to you today. Without that I would still be living in secret and would not have been able to come to terms with my past, which I am now. So thank you, Vasili, wherever you are these days. And the FBI took two years to eventually introduce themselves. They wanted to be sure that I wasn't active anymore because they knew that

One thing they knew, they knew that I had survived altogether 15 years undetected. So they knew that I was very well trained and if they got too close to me, I would most likely run. I would find out that they're investigating me. So they kept at a distance until they came to the conclusion that I wasn't active anymore and that was the time when they introduced themselves.

Guy Bloom (1:47:35)
And how does that go? Hi Jack. What was the point just to say, ⁓ we just want to let you know that we know or actually are you in a position where you can be of use to us now because we could actually make your life, we could technically put you in prison. So how does that go?

Jack Barsky (1:47:53)
Well, yeah, similar

to the KGB, didn't explicitly state what they were after. So it was just an introduction, sort of a hijacking, yes, in a sense. They knew that I commuted to work from New Jersey into Pennsylvania and I had to go across a bridge.

over to Delaware at the toll bridge. So you have to slow down and just look, you got to stop. And in those days you put a quarter in. And so they rented themselves a ⁓ state police, state trooper, state trooper ⁓ with a uniform. As I ease out of the toll gate, he waved me over.

And so I stopped and he said, ⁓ state police, routine traffic control. That's what he said. And I, I, I had long forgotten that I once was a spy. That was not anywhere near the top of my mind. And I said, okay. So, ⁓ and instead of what every policeman does next, they would say, ⁓ open the window and let me see your license.

registration. He said, could you please step out of the vehicle? I still didn't have a clue what that meant because I was just not focused that way. But then there came from my right, there came a man in civilian clothes and as he walked up to me, he flipped open a wallet.

And I didn't have to look at it. At that point, I knew that that was FBI or whatever. You know, it wasn't good news. And he actually said, FBI, we would like to have a talk with you.

That was...

I'm not calling it the scariest moment of my life, but the most dramatic one. you know, everything in a moment...

changed drastically and there was an implicit threat.

Okay, clear and it was implicit, but it was stated. You know, FBI, I knew that that means, you know, I could be arrested. And so they told me to step into a car and there was, he had a partner, obviously they always work with partners. And this guy was sitting in the back seat and I was placed next to him and this fellow had a gun strap to his ankle, very visibly.

little bit of psychological game. That didn't bother me. But, you know, they were saying, you know, we're serious. And I broke the ice. I started talking. I asked him, am I under arrest? And ⁓ Joe Riley, that was the lead agent, he said, no.

That's it. Okay, so I'm not under arrest. And so now I did something that people like me. That's why one of the reasons that the ⁓ KGB recruited me, I did something that would help me. ⁓

take a little control of the situation, a little bit, and inject humor into the situation. I asked him, so what took you so long?

instinctive, right? And this is confirmed. mean, the FBI guy who is ⁓ still a friend of mine, who was the lead agent, he confirms that. I asked that question.

Instinctive, I didn't think about it. But my instinct said, you got to like these guys. You got to establish a personal relationship. then actually Riley said something, he volunteered, said, Jack, this may not be the worst day of your life. That's all. It wasn't, we want you to cooperate. ⁓ And then maybe we'll think about, ⁓ you

treating you nicely. ⁓ They led me to a motel and they had rented all the rooms in that motel. And it was L-shaped and in one of the corridors ⁓ they had an en garde at each end and I was...

led to the center room of this particular section and a little more psychological games playing. They had decorated that room with some written material, large letters, ⁓ where there was information that they knew about me that was

available. I don't know how they got to it. Some of it came from a trocan and some of it came through their research where they were saying, well, we know a lot about you. Like one of them was the ⁓ convenience address. ⁓ Convenience address where I sent letters to third countries in secret writing. But I hadn't lost my mental acuity.

And I pretty soon noticed that this was all dated. There was no recent information. But nevertheless, I knew that I had to take control and I did. Before they could even ask any questions, said, gentlemen, I know one thing for sure that for me and particularly my family to get out of this situation with the least amount of damage, I have to cooperate and I intend...

do so fully and completely. I could have meant this and I did, but it was enough for them to let me go after talking. They asked me a whole bunch of questions. was the beginning of not an interrogation, it was a debriefing. And just before letting me go home, they allowed me to call my wife and told her, like, I'm going to be late because you know it was.

delayed at work. And then one of, they had a huge team, surveillance team distributed all over the place just in case I run. And the head of the surveillance team talked to me and he said, if you think you can run, we got every intersection covered.

I still think I could have gotten away because I lived in the country and I had a back door entry that wasn't a door, it was a, I don't know what they call this, a plate that you can lift up out of the basement. I could have snuck out in the dark and walked ⁓ my way for a long, you know, into the mountains. And I could have had...

money stashed away, which they actually knew I did, but that money was to buy my wife an engagement ring. anyway, I digress. So I'm home and the debrief, ⁓ it was once a week for a couple of months, one-on-one with ⁓ the lead agent. He asked me about everything, like every detail that...

Guy Bloom (1:56:22)
How long was the debrief? Was it just one day or?

Jack Barsky (1:56:39)
that I could share with them, my upbringing. ⁓ There was nothing that ⁓ they didn't deem valuable. They also ⁓ later on sent two ⁓ psychologists, top-notch ⁓ US psychologists to test me. I had to take tests for two days in a row. ⁓

Again, it was about two months, and at the end of the two months, I had to pass a lie detector test. The FBI swears by those tests. I was told later on the guy who, the examiner, was the top examiner in the Northeast for the FBI. They wanted to make sure that I hadn't told them anything wrong, and it was probably protocol, you know, you gotta check that box.

I'm sure Riley knew that I was dead honest already at that time. But it was interesting that test, there are all kinds of ways of conducting that test. Very often it's hostile. People will like shine light on you and yell at you and say, I'm gonna find out what that, I know that you're yelling, I'm gonna figure this one out. I've, others, like ex.

CIA and ex-FBI told me that they had been subject to those kinds of tests. It's normal, okay? Mine was extremely polite. I knew all the questions in advance. There was no light. I was seated comfortably. And the only answers allowed were whispered yeses and noes. That's it. So...

was about, and we did a test without even the equipment on me. All right? So amazing, right? Really? Does it work? Well, they made it work. And this is something that I found out also, I found out so many things about me and what happened to me and the reasons for this, that and the other by interacting with ex-

⁓ intelligence agents or just getting information in some other way. So I took the test, the live test, and the examiner went back to his office. He came back after 20 minutes and he said...

I don't know if he called me Mr. I don't know, probably called me Mr. Barsky. We got a problem here. I said, what is it? You failed this one test and he showed me a printout and there was a spike. And I said, there's no way I lied. I told you the truth, yes or no, whatever the truth was, whether it was yes or no, as I know, there was no, no.

not even a thought of lying. He said, yeah, but that machine doesn't lie. So, and this was all a setup. So I asked him, can you tell me what the question was? And he said, yeah. And I'm looking at the question. It was an innocent question. said, how would that trigger the machine? And then I said, wait a minute.

That's a double negative.

You say, my God, yeah, you were right. That could have triggered it. Yeah, I'm sorry, I apologize. That bastard put it in there on purpose. I'm sorry to call him a bastard. It's just to be funny here. ⁓ I had to fail that test. Just that little hesitation to make the double negative into a positive, so I answered correctly, needed to trigger that machine.

So that means that any other attempt of me lying the machine would have caught it. that theory that I developed eventually was confirmed by a couple of polygraphers that are experts in taking these tests. They say that's a proven technique. They sometimes use that.

Guy Bloom (2:01:24)
It's

a baseline.

Jack Barsky (2:01:27)
Yeah, it's a really good baseline. And after I passed the test, they finally told me explicitly, you're allowed to stay, your family's allowed to stay, and we're gonna work on getting you ⁓ genuine documentation. And that eventually, there's a path to citizenship.

Guy Bloom (2:01:50)
So you clear it with the US, which is a remarkable journey just in itself. Did you ever think, there going to be any repercussions? Will the KGB be watching? Where is he going? Am I under observation there? Was any of that going through your head?

Jack Barsky (2:01:57)
Yeah.

That's a legitimate question and I addressed this right away. I spoke with the FBI and I told them, so it's been 10 years since I lied to the KGB.

There's ... Since they hadn't come after me, I believe that they brought the lie. So ...

There's no indication that they were investigating me in some way, shape, form. For quite a while, did surveillance detection and took some other measures that would help me to find out, for instance, whether somebody opened a letter so that the FBI—this was about the FBI. But anyway, surveillance detection. There was never any indication.

I was not loud in public. I existed, but they would have had to actually look for me. Apparently, they did not. Had they looked for me, they would have most likely done some damage right then and there. So they wrote me off. That was an educated guess. ⁓

The FBI agreed with my reasoning that I would be, eventually, I wanted to go back to Germany and connect with my past, I would be safe in friendly countries. Never ever go back to Russia and never ever go to countries that have friendly relationships with Russia. Like, for instance, right now, just not to pull out a country is bad, but Turkey was mentioned quite a bit.

because in Turkey, I think one of the Russian intelligence agencies actually committed assassinations. So I feel, in this country as well as in the Western world, I feel safe.

Guy Bloom (2:04:30)
What was your stepping stone into the public space?

Jack Barsky (2:04:36)
Yeah, my stepping stone. I didn't want to become a public figure. ⁓ I wanted to live my life out quiet and I did tell my family and I had to tell, you know, my wife, she would have suspected that something is a little bit off because

I had all these meetings that had nothing to do with work and so forth. Then I decided to share this past with my children, my daughter, both of them after they hit 18, so when they became adults. When I shared this, when Chelsea, my daughter and I...

sat down with my son, he got really excited and he said, Dad, you need to write a book. And I said, no, no, no. Yeah, and then Chelsea said, yeah, yeah, yeah, write a book. You you should. And she got, she was in college at the time and a professor of hers who taught literature told her how to go about it. And Chelsea told me.

You know, you need to approach, you can't approach publishers. You need to go through literary agents. So I looked for literary agents. I sent emails to 10 of them. Because I now had decided I would want to go into the public because my kids wanted me to.

So I sent emails to 10 literary agents in the realm of true crime. That was the right subject matter. And ⁓ in the email, there was barely a full page of my history, just to give them an understanding of the ⁓ complexity and potentially uniqueness of my story.

I got one response out of ten. And that was a guy who told me in his email, he said, I will gladly write your story, but I will charge $20,000. So I drew the conclusion that since they didn't want to take this, they didn't believe the story. And that conclusion turned out to be 100 % correct, because when my first

appearance in public was the interview with CBS 60 Minutes. And that had in total like 15 million viewers, but when it was first viewed it was several million. 60 Minutes was very popular in those days. And after that I had ⁓ agents and publishers reaching out to me. So all of a sudden I was a public figure.

And by the way, this was even much later, like 20 years after my resignation. And for that reason, I don't, you know, I'm not in danger of being assassinated by the KGB, by the FSB or the SVR, ⁓ with one exception. And that is if I wind up in Moscow, I might fall out of a window. You know why?

not because of revenge, it's because to send a signal, we're get you the signal to the existing agents that they have. So if you think you can get away with this shit, I'm sorry, now I said it, we know where to find you. And no Russian would have to say anything. It would have leaked into the Western press and the targets would...

would become aware of it because it would have been sort of, it would have been big in the Western press, right? So ⁓ that's why I don't show up in Moscow. But that's how I became a public figure. The story how CBS 60 Minutes found me is a story, ⁓ again, I had decided the publishers don't want me, the agents don't want me, so I'm done. I'm not doing anything anymore.

So I did nothing to become public. Nothing, zero. ⁓ And the story how I became a public figure had to do with a lot of dots, many dots that had to be connected. And I had nothing to do with the dots. I had something to do with some of the dots, but nothing to do with the connections. It started out with my wife's brother.

⁓ My wife, my then wife, is originally from Jamaica and she had a number of half-brothers, some of whom she was in touch with. And this one happened to wind up in Germany, ⁓ with his mother took him to Germany to get away from his non-existing, ⁓ nasty father. Anyway, was nasty to non-existent.

And ⁓ he was in touch with Sean, my wife then. And he had befriended, or ⁓ he had met, while still in Jamaica, a ⁓ French painter, an itinerant French painter who really loved the boy. He spent a couple of years in Jamaica and he wanted to almost adopt him, but they decided not, it's not good for his life, but they kept in touch.

Well, speaking of that, this French painter once found ⁓ during his travels, connected with an executive of L'Oreal, ⁓ who lived at the time he is not with us anymore, in a town of Hudson, New York, had a mansion there. ⁓

And he invited the painter to come visit him. And the painter liked Hudson, New York. It's very picturesque. And he bought himself a farmhouse to store a lot of his art in a farmhouse with a couple of acres. And ⁓ one day he invited his young friend, Richard, my wife's brother, to come to visit.

And it so happened that at the time we lived only an hour drive from Hudson. The number of things had to happen for me to move there. I had to be fired from a well-paying job and be hired from a job that made me ⁓ move the family to the Albany or New York area. and then Richard said that he told Sean on my phone that he had arrived in the US.

He had not planned to visit us. He planned to visit the painter. And ⁓ it turned out that he found out that we were close by. I picked him up. We came to visit. And Shona had told him a little bit about my German past. And so he asked me curiously, said, so how did you get here? Because he knew how Shona made it. She was... ⁓

made it as ⁓ a bilingual secretary for the United Nations. That's how she became a US citizen eventually. So, and I told, ⁓ you know, just with my odd sense of humor, said, I had some help from the government. I said, what government? The American or the German? I said, no, no, no, the Soviet government. ⁓ what?

and I unpacked my past to him and ⁓ he took notes. And then he said on his way out after spending a couple of days with us, said, Jack, I'm gonna take that to Germany and this story is gonna be big. And I'm thinking, all right, the guy is subject, he has a tendency to exaggerate. he's just like, everything to him is big.

So I'm thinking, okay, a literary agent didn't buy into this story. He was a conductor at the German railroad in those days at the Bundesbahn. And what can he do to blow up the story? Well, what he did, he had a friend who he was roommate with when this guy was in college, studied for a master's degree.

in Chinese studies and as part of that he acquired the art of Feng Shui or however you pronounce this, ⁓ the art of configuring your living space to be spiritual and he had a lot of

interesting clients and his top client was the number one journalist, female journalist of Der Spiegel. Okay? So they told her about me. She did some research. She had enough access to some materials in the archives. Not much, but she had enough ⁓ information to

sort of believe the story, called me up and said, you know, I want to interview you. I said, there's no way I can't be interviewed. I'm not a citizen yet. Well, I became, I got my citizenship and I told her, I had a phone number. told her, no, if you still want to talk, that's fine. Let's have coffee together. And that's it. And when I get to the airport,

entity, the arrivals hall at the airport in Berlin, I have a camera and a microphone in my face because she knew she had a real story at that point. And so she followed me for like four or five days through my, the Rip Van Winkle-like travels through my past and interviewed me like nobody ever interviewed me before. And that was my first real interview.

Right? And it was days and she took copious notes. And then there's another dots that had to be connected. She personally knew Steve Croft, the star of CBS 60 Minutes in those days. And she did something that no self-respecting journalist would consider doing, but she had a reason for that. She gave away a scoop. She told him that I exist.

and that could have easily resulted in 60 minutes get the story first. Well, they made an arrangement that Spiegel was because of what's print, they could go first and it wasn't German. so that is, and there are more things that had to happen further in the past that I didn't mention that made me a public figure. Totally, none of my doing.

And ⁓ so one day ⁓ the producer of 60 Minutes called me at the office and told me he wants to come visit me and talk with me about what we could do together. ⁓ let me just allow me to say this because it's important. ⁓ Can you blame me knowing this? Can you blame me that I believe in a higher power?

That was a range. I know little bit statistics. I knew that the probabilities of all these dots connecting without somebody actually orchestrating it is less than a trillion to one because probabilities, you multiply. One is 0.1 and the next one in East Avenue is 0.1. All of a sudden it becomes 0.001.

you know it, there's a lot of zeros. That was insane. And it extends the fact that I'm speaking to you is even more improbable. Sorry, I digress again.

Guy Bloom (2:18:19)
Not

at all. just look, I'm just the only reason I'm just kind of about to kind of round us off is just, you know, respecting your time and just recognizing the attention span of people listening.

Jack Barsky (2:18:35)
Yeah, thank you.

And I do have in a half hour, have ⁓ my weekly call with the producer, the would be ⁓ producer of my mini series based on my story.

Guy Bloom (2:18:47)
So where is your energy now? What is it that is taking your interest that you're putting your energy into? What is the world asking of you?

Jack Barsky (2:18:58)
I to share that with you. There's another one of those quote unquote coincidences. And I have to reach back to how this happened and will conclude with where my focus is nowadays. The purpose for being, the reason I'm getting up in the morning and it has evolved over time. ⁓

So it starts with another thing that I did not foresee, that I did not ⁓ initiate. I have this ⁓ marketing campaign on LinkedIn and I got a lot of exposure for that. The marketing is primarily to get me out in the public for mentoring and public speaking.

At that time, the reason for me to get up was number one, taking care of my 14-year-old daughter, brilliant child. And I really, I feel I want to start her in life the same way I started the other two children. That was number one. And number two, I wanted to, ⁓ there's a lot of confusion in the world these days for...

what makes for a real man. And that starts with young men, but it reaches now up into the upper echelons. And that's not good for society. So I figured if I can do a little bit of mentoring and make money in the process and help Trinity and her mother, who I am not married to anymore. ⁓

That would be a good combination and it would make me feel good. And you know, I always liked helping people. Always, always. So that would also...

Guy Bloom (2:21:00)
Why would people approach

you Jack? What would they approach when it comes to either public speaking or it comes to mentoring? What would be, this is my sweet spot. This is where I can really help you.

Jack Barsky (2:21:06)
⁓

Okay.

Are you talking about the subject matter?

Guy Bloom (2:21:15)
Yeah, if somebody said, somebody's listening to this and they think I'd like to reach out to Jack, why would they? What would they be reaching out to you for?

Jack Barsky (2:21:21)
Why would they?

Okay, and this, thank you for asking that question. Simply because mentoring is not the same as teaching. Okay, teaching is much easier to sell. You you have a course and you learn this, that and the other, and then, you know, then you are better than you were before. That very often doesn't work. You know, teaching, you can teach skills, but I'm in the realm of human behavior and that is acquired, it takes a lot longer.

First of all, it starts out with getting to know yourself. You know how many people I've met, adults who don't know themselves? And if you don't know yourself, ⁓ you don't even know what your true strengths and likes and dislikes and weaknesses are. if you are focused on, and society is very often focused on, killing your weaknesses instead of working with your strengths.

which makes for a much happier and more successful existence. I am now very comfortable with who I am. It took a long time and took a lot of feedback from the outside, but what I have learned over time with interacting with so many people, I can help people to get to know themselves really well. And that's the beginning. And then the mentoring is all about

helping people making good decision in the situations that they're in. I have a mentee, no name's named here, who is in transition, had a job for a long time, two decades, very successful in one particular industry. It's all about professionalism, but once to...

do something that is more fulfilling. But she never floated a resume. So this is bit of hand holding. It's also a bit of cheerleading. It has to be genuine. I don't cheerlead like blah, blah, blah. That's meaningless and it's kind of productive. It has to come from here, from the gut. And that's why I...

I will only work with people that I can relate to, that I can, ⁓ that I understand that they have a lot to give and they're not even aware of it. So the bottom line is to ⁓ learn by doing. And you know that there are schools, ⁓ the, to mine comes the Waldorf School, and there's another one, I forgot the name, that...

use experiential learning. And there's proof that this works a lot better than classroom-based learning. And so in this case, I'll just be the person with whom you can discuss things, talk about upcoming decisions, drawing conclusions, and then...

retain that knowledge for the future. That's how you get better. It's not overnight. And one other thing that happens a lot with people like you and me, people who like to think, we come up with ideas while we're talking. And that happens to me a lot. You know, I talked to a friend and said, by the way, I just came up with this idea. think this is where I'm going. That's how mentoring works. It happens to me a lot.

you know, some of the most original ideas that I have come from my subconscious, they're already there. And they're shaken loose by speaking out loud. So that's, and in this sense, there is an element of life coaching involved, but I'm trying to do this in the context of the business environment because I, in addition to,

Having been a pretty decent, successful spy, I also have a lot of experience in the corporate world. I went all the way up to the corporate suite ⁓ and collected a lot of information, a lot of experiences, good, bad, and different. And now I have been in the entrepreneurial world for 10 years. So I also know... ⁓

what the transition is like. It wasn't easy. I didn't have a mentor. I had to figure this out through painful mistakes. So I can help people also when there's people who want to go one way or the other way. anyway, there's always, the corporate world and the business world is full of landmines. And I, for the...

Guy Bloom (2:26:36)
Hmm.

Jack Barsky (2:26:39)
I stepped into quite a few of those. I'm a little more aware of them. I'm very good at what the FBI folks did and what the KGB recruiters did. I'm very good at asking questions to get to know you and help you and help you draw your own conclusions and own the decisions that you make. That's pretty long. Thank you for allowing me to do that.

Guy Bloom (2:27:04)
Okay. No, no, Listen, I'm going to

put the links to your book deep under cover and to you on LinkedIn. put all of that and make that available to people. This is my... ⁓

Jack Barsky (2:27:14)
Yeah, no, but this

was really good. And with regard to finding me right now, ⁓ it's on LinkedIn, ⁓ look by name Jack Barsky. But there's a website out there that's still functional, but it will be replaced pretty soon.

Guy Bloom (2:27:25)
I'll put the links in.

So here's my last question.

Jack Barsky (2:27:35)
Yes, sir.

Guy Bloom (2:27:40)
Where's the love in your life right now? Where's it coming from?

Jack Barsky (2:27:45)
Yeah, so this is where we're going to the purpose thing again. Thank you for bringing me back there. So yeah, I got sidetracked. Thanks for putting me back on track. ⁓ I'm running this campaign on LinkedIn to get me known. And one day I get... ⁓

a lady making ⁓ an appointment for an introductory call, zoom call. And as I do with every one of those, I accept them and I look up and do some research on the person. That person, I misspelled the name and the person was known to me as a producer out of Switzerland. So I figured I would politely end the call.

very quickly because I don't need a producer out of Switzerland and I couldn't possibly be of value to them. So I start saying this like a hemming and whoring a little bit and this lady says, well, just wait a little. Let's talk for a while. This is okay. And we started a little small talk ⁓ about likes and dislikes. And it was some...

interesting matches. You know, ⁓ she knew a little bit about the Soviet Union. We're talking about a mature black woman that's rare for Americans, black, white, and otherwise. She mentioned not just Putin, but also Gorbachev. said, ⁓ yeah, I'm very curious. I read a lot of stuff.

Then we got to literature and she had read some of my favorite French authors, like Balzac for instance. So then I, now I'm getting curious, what kind of music you like? Oh, all kinds of music. You like classical? Oh yeah, what's your favorite Beethoven piece? It's for Elise. Mine too. I said, what?

So now, we knew that she said she would disclose to me that she is a teacher, says, you can't afford me as a mentee, but I tell you what, I like you so much. And it turns out that she's also of the Christian faith. And I said, you know what, I wanna be friends with you, you're such an interesting person. And we have so much in common, I think we can.

sort of learned from each other. And at the end I said, and I, by the way, I love you like a sister. And she said, I love you too. And we talked again and we found even more stuff in common. And then I tested her on some other things. I was trying to find some gaps and I found one.

where she didn't know one thing. So I asked her about, you know, Beatles. Do you like Beatles? Well, not very much, but do you have a favorite Beatles song? May I ask you what, ⁓ Guy, what's your favorite Beatles song? get most people answer this with the same people.

Guy Bloom (2:31:22)
Mine is a

yellow submarine.

Jack Barsky (2:31:25)
⁓ that means you're a little quirky. Me too. I like that one too. Most people answer yes today.

Guy Bloom (2:31:35)
seen the sky with diamonds.

Jack Barsky (2:31:37)
all right. No comment here. I like that one too, but I told her my favorite song is ⁓ Blackbird ⁓ because it's performed so very well and it has deep meaning. And she didn't know the song. And... ⁓

Guy Bloom (2:31:44)
You

Jack Barsky (2:32:06)
I sent her a link on WhatsApp. She listened to the song and I get a WhatsApp message back that has two blackbirds on a branch.

And underneath there was a text that says, I've been looking for you all my life. Teach me how to fly. I still have that, okay? You can't make this thing up. you know, that wasn't exactly I love you, but the next message I had emojis that, you know,

The people use emojis when they use the heart, the red heart, that means I like it. This was an emoji with a smiling face that had a heart surrounded. So now I get the message. say, and I ask her like, are you falling in love with me? She said, duh. And I already had this feeling in my, you know, I get this feeling in my gut when I really like something, love something, it doesn't have to be a woman, it can be.

an idea can be a plant, an animal, something. I get this electrical storm here. And I had this while talking with her because we were so incredibly well matched. And giving our different backgrounds, you know, she grew up in an urban slum in the Midwest. I grew up in the country.

⁓ I grew up a communist. grew, she's a, she's a pastor's daughter. Like, and, we met so well. So I don't remember if, I ever said, I love you until we met. She lives in an hour, two hours away. We met in person and here comes, here comes something. We are both quirky also.

And we meet, ⁓ and he already made me laugh many times. I mean, laugh out loud. No other woman could ever do that. So we meet in person for the first time and ⁓ I was concerned with how this would work out. But there was no awkwardness. I met her brother.

outside of where she lives, and this brother hugged me.

Never met him, never spoke with him. That means she must have shared something with him. And so this was not a flirtatious thing. It was pretty deep. So anyway, I tried to make her laugh and shared a...

situation with her when I used humor to make an introduction into the corporate world. I was hired as a CIO at a corporate, at a Fortune 500 company. It was a very high level position in a large company. ⁓ I was, on day one, I was introduced to all my peers, not the CEO, all the other C-levels.

folks and one was missing. She wasn't there and she told me that you need to go and introduce yourself tomorrow. I won't be able to. And she told me, by the way, I'm warning you, she's a little bit weird. She has an odd sense of humor. said, you think if I can connect with her with some humor, would that work? She said, yeah, try it. So I walk in there. Just before I walk in, I put...

my Austin Powers dentures on. You have a picture, they look like this. Except discolored. And I said, you know, I'm sorry, I don't have a lot of time. I have a dental appointment and she like, huh? And then I took the dentures out and we had a big laugh and we were friends for the rest of our existence in that company together.

And here's the reason I shared that with you. I shared this with Ines, that's her name. And she laughed and she reached for her purse and put out a pair of ugly dentures herself and put them in. This is, you know, this is a movie scene. It's delicious. And I exploded.

Guy Bloom (2:37:04)
So there is.

Jack Barsky (2:37:15)
And we spend a lot of time laughing and acting like children. And you know where that comes from? And now I'm going to get closer to the purpose. You know where that comes from? Is that she spent close to 25 years teaching children with autism. She went into that field.

She has a master's degree in education, special ed, particularly autism, because she gave birth to two autistic children. Her first born couldn't speak for nine years. her passion is, he can talk, he can function. You wouldn't know that he was once so severely disabled. And she threw herself into this. This is her mission, this is her.

This is her passion in life. And she's now going to expand this and leave the confines of the public educational system and widen her range. she is amazing. And she diagnosed me psychologically too. And just, she is so much fun to be around. Just for that, I love her, but I love her.

primarily because of the spirit in her. And I admire her. She's intellectually at my level. That helps too, by the way. And she knows as much as I do about so many things. But the passion that she has for doing good, and now you connect that with the fact that an 18-month-old changed my life. You know that I love children and young children.

My passion these days includes helping her to the extent I can to use most of her time, if not all of it, most of the time that she has available in addition to taking care of herself, obviously, to follow her calling. And in that process, I still am going to try to make money with mentoring and speaking.

And also, I'm not, you know that I'm a Christian, I'm not a preacher, I'm not a pastor, but distributing the moral message that Christ has taught us to all comers by my behavior, treating everybody with love, and occasionally giving my testimony.

settings. So you put this all together and you probably understand very well why I'm a happy guy even though a lot of stuff happens that just is not reason to be happy but I know why I'm here and that is why I'm still gonna I'm gonna live another 50 years.

Guy Bloom (2:40:34)
Listen, I'm bring this to a close. I don't want to but I'm going to Jack I want you to stay on just for two minutes just to make sure everything uploads from me. You've been an absolute joy I have ⁓ Appreciated you so thank you

Jack Barsky (2:40:43)
Yeah.

Well, and

thank you for allowing me, first of all, asking the questions that came at the end and allowing me to just pour out my heart, because that's me. ⁓ There are many interviews where I can't do it, but it feels incomplete, because completion, I'm still working on it, but I made...

enormous steps towards becoming who I was supposed to become. And that is acknowledged by people who have known me for a long time that the last two, three years I have changed dramatically. And I think I'm almost, almost rid of the last vestiges of German behavior, except of maybe the discipline.

Guy Bloom (2:41:45)
I've enjoyed the window into a journey and that means a lot to me on a personal level.

Jack Barsky (2:41:49)
Thank you.

Well,

if you'll give me access to that video, I'm going to take some clips out. don't know if I'm to... But I have to check with the people I'm working with to what extent this can be used. It will be used for sure. It was very, very good. And I also know that towards the end, I actually got better.

Guy Bloom (2:42:13)
Well, you can have access to whatever you wish.

Jack Barsky (2:42:20)
There was some time in the middle when I was a little bit, got a little tired. But overall, was, I'm not tired now. That means I did pretty well by my own

Guy Bloom (2:42:33)
you stay with me for a minute. I'm just going to press stop here. So

Jack Barsky (2:42:35)
yeah, no, no, don't worry about it. This was a drunk call.

Guy Bloom (2:42:39)
you so very much.