Jack Barsky: KGB Spy | Lex Fridman Podcast #301

00:00:00.000 | something happened where they forced my hand.

00:00:05.000 | This is the only time that a Soviet agent was anywhere near me

00:00:09.120 | on the territory of the United States.

00:00:11.920 | So I'm waiting for the A train on a dark morning still in Queens

00:00:17.120 | and there's this man in a black trench coat

00:00:22.420 | comes up to me from my right and he whispers into my ears,

00:00:26.960 | "You gotta come back or else you're dead."

00:00:32.240 | The following is a conversation with Jack Barsky,

00:00:34.740 | a former KGB spy, author of Deep Undercover,

00:00:38.500 | and the subject of an excellent podcast series called The Agent.

00:00:43.360 | There are very few people who have defected from the KGB

00:00:46.780 | and live to tell the story.

00:00:49.040 | It is one of the most powerful intelligence organizations in history.

00:00:52.920 | And this conversation gives a window into its operation,

00:00:56.740 | both from an ideological and psychological perspectives,

00:01:01.160 | but also it tells the story of a man

00:01:04.500 | who lived one heck of an incredible life.

00:01:08.160 | This is the Lex Friedman podcast.

00:01:10.360 | To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

00:01:13.740 | And now, dear friends, here's Jack Barsky.

00:01:18.120 | Let's start with a big basic question.

00:01:20.320 | What is the KGB?

00:01:22.200 | (speaking in foreign language)

00:01:25.160 | - Right, so that is the Committee of State Security.

00:01:28.900 | Yeah, there's an apostolist, this is a,

00:01:30.900 | apostolist is a threat, right?

00:01:33.320 | - Threat.

00:01:34.160 | - Okay, and bs means?

00:01:35.320 | - Without.

00:01:36.160 | - Right.

00:01:36.980 | - And I guess that directly translates

00:01:38.700 | to security, without threat.

00:01:40.360 | - So, and don't exist anymore.

00:01:43.540 | It was disbanded when the Soviet Union fell apart

00:01:46.160 | and the successor agencies are now the SVR and the FSB.

00:01:52.780 | FSB supposedly the equivalent to the FBI and SVR, the CIA,

00:01:57.120 | but the SVR is relatively weak

00:02:01.080 | and the FSB has taken on a lot of espionage

00:02:04.080 | and active measures and they're much bigger and stronger,

00:02:09.080 | but the most capable intelligence agency in Russia

00:02:12.620 | is the GRU, military intelligence.

00:02:16.580 | - That nobody knows very much about.

00:02:18.400 | - That's right.

00:02:19.240 | When I was in the KGB, I had no idea

00:02:21.200 | that there was military intelligence.

00:02:23.080 | Nobody ever mentioned anything like that.

00:02:25.360 | And by the way, I recently had the pleasure

00:02:28.920 | to give a talk at the DIA.

00:02:31.540 | When they reached out to me,

00:02:33.000 | I didn't know they existed either.

00:02:34.600 | - Interesting.

00:02:35.920 | Yeah, that's always the question.

00:02:37.480 | If you want to be an intelligence agency,

00:02:40.160 | should the world know anything about you?

00:02:42.500 | Because in some sense, you want to create the legend

00:02:45.640 | in order to attract great, competent individuals

00:02:49.400 | to work for you, but at the same time,

00:02:52.720 | you want it to be shrouded in complete mystery.

00:02:55.160 | If nobody knows you exist,

00:02:56.840 | you might be able to operate well

00:02:59.720 | as an intelligence agency.

00:03:01.760 | That is fascinating, but FSB is the thing

00:03:04.880 | that carries the flag of KGB,

00:03:09.240 | KGB being probably one of, if not the most,

00:03:14.240 | sort of infamous, famous, infamous,

00:03:16.800 | and powerful intelligence agencies.

00:03:19.320 | - In history, yes. - Ever.

00:03:20.760 | - Absolutely, 100%.

00:03:22.320 | - It was founded in 1954 after the death of Stalin.

00:03:26.160 | You've, in writing your book,

00:03:28.200 | looked back at the predecessors of the history.

00:03:31.120 | Is there some way in which the KGB

00:03:34.520 | is grounded in the culture, the spirit,

00:03:40.440 | the soul of its predecessors?

00:03:43.600 | - Oh, absolutely.

00:03:44.760 | They just changed names and they changed personnel,

00:03:48.840 | rather frequently, and that had something to do

00:03:51.600 | with Stalin's paranoia.

00:03:53.960 | From between 1923, and I don't remember what,

00:03:58.440 | I think it may have been the NKVD at that time.

00:04:01.440 | It started as a Cheka, and then it became the GPU,

00:04:04.440 | the NKVD, yes. - It's three or four letter words.

00:04:10.200 | - But with those name changes,

00:04:11.880 | you also had changes at the top.

00:04:13.960 | Between 1923 and 1953, when Stalin died,

00:04:18.120 | that is 30 years, they had eight heads of intelligence,

00:04:23.120 | and of those eight, six were executed

00:04:27.640 | when they were replaced.

00:04:29.200 | So that's an indication that this was an organization

00:04:34.200 | that ate itself from the inside.

00:04:38.280 | The Soviet Union was the only dictatorship in history

00:04:40.880 | that did not rest its powers on the military.

00:04:43.840 | They rested its powers on the intelligence apparatus,

00:04:47.680 | and that thing was unstable.

00:04:49.760 | So you know where that leads.

00:04:52.280 | Eventually, if you rest your power on something

00:04:55.880 | that is made out of bricks that don't hold a lot of load,

00:04:58.880 | it will fall apart.

00:05:01.200 | - On sand. - Yeah.

00:05:02.440 | - Why was it unstable, would you say?

00:05:04.120 | What of human nature makes it unstable?

00:05:07.320 | - It's the paranoia.

00:05:09.040 | Stalin was always worried about

00:05:11.840 | the most powerful people coming after him.

00:05:17.200 | So he proactively killed off heads of the KGB,

00:05:20.400 | and he had this great purge where he got rid

00:05:23.480 | of a lot of his generals, really capable generals.

00:05:27.380 | And that cost him dearly when World War II started,

00:05:32.600 | because he started off with a force

00:05:37.600 | that wasn't as capable as it could have been.

00:05:40.800 | - Was it paranoia at all levels?

00:05:42.880 | - I believe so, I believe so.

00:05:45.080 | It comes from the top.

00:05:46.560 | And so if the top doesn't trust you,

00:05:49.640 | you always have to worry about your peers snitching on you.

00:05:54.640 | - Yeah. - Okay?

00:05:57.160 | So, and I think we have a very similar situation

00:06:00.840 | in Russia today.

00:06:01.940 | And in this kind of atmosphere,

00:06:06.680 | the truth will never get to the top.

00:06:10.160 | - So no matter what moral rules the organization operates

00:06:15.160 | under, trust is fundamental to its competence.

00:06:19.160 | - Oh, absolutely, and I wanna extend this

00:06:21.040 | to my own existence.

00:06:22.300 | And this is kind of strange, it's almost dichotomous,

00:06:29.000 | because I was running around lying to everybody,

00:06:33.000 | and I couldn't fundamentally be trusted.

00:06:35.840 | But the relationship that I had with the KGB

00:06:38.060 | was based on trust.

00:06:40.200 | If they don't trust me, they don't send me out.

00:06:43.000 | And if I don't trust them, I'm not going.

00:06:45.800 | And I eventually broke that trust,

00:06:48.000 | and they knew there was always that danger.

00:06:50.840 | - They knew that because something about you,

00:06:54.040 | or just something about human beings--

00:06:55.920 | - No, there were hints about how long my assignment would be,

00:07:00.920 | so 10 to 12 years.

00:07:04.920 | And you see, it makes sense, all right?

00:07:07.840 | I was becoming an American, and over time,

00:07:11.480 | I would become more and more American,

00:07:13.680 | and there was always a chance that I liked it

00:07:16.920 | more here than there, that I was really successful

00:07:20.000 | in what I was supposed to do.

00:07:21.540 | And it sort of happened, but in my case,

00:07:24.640 | it happened because I fathered a child

00:07:26.720 | who I didn't wanna leave when they wanted me back.

00:07:30.640 | - Love always screws up your employment competence, yes.

00:07:35.640 | - You're absolutely right.

00:07:39.920 | But they thought that I had an anchor at home

00:07:44.040 | because I had a wife and a son at home,

00:07:46.520 | which you've gotta worry about them if you defect.

00:07:51.520 | Because in the past, the KGB would go after family,

00:07:58.360 | ruthlessly.

00:08:01.040 | - Including perhaps violence?

00:08:03.200 | - Yeah.

00:08:04.040 | - This is a hard question about the KGB

00:08:05.760 | because it's one of the most ruthless organizations,

00:08:08.200 | but in general, are there lines, KGB agents

00:08:13.200 | at every level of the hierarchy that they would not cross?

00:08:19.920 | Political, legal, ethical, or does anything goes

00:08:23.880 | to achieve the goal?

00:08:25.280 | - I was only in touch with two types of agents,

00:08:30.280 | whether the technical experts,

00:08:34.680 | the ones that taught me tradecraft,

00:08:37.360 | and they were like engineers,

00:08:39.240 | and they were in charge of the secret writing,

00:08:42.640 | and the Morse code, shortwave radio reception,

00:08:47.640 | decryption, encryption, and that kind of stuff.

00:08:51.260 | Those were just doing their job, all right?

00:08:55.960 | And the others, the ones that trained me,

00:08:58.480 | that prepared me for life in the United States,

00:09:02.060 | they were nice people.

00:09:05.240 | They were elegant people.

00:09:06.760 | I don't think, they would not fit into the stereotype

00:09:13.320 | of the ruthless, gun-carrying agent.

00:09:18.920 | - Is it possible that you would not be aware

00:09:22.360 | of the parts of the KGB?

00:09:24.340 | I mean, it's very modular.

00:09:25.840 | Would you, it's possible that you're not aware

00:09:27.840 | of the parts of the KGB that are the quote-unquote muscle?

00:09:31.440 | - Oh, I didn't know.

00:09:32.960 | I would find out afterwards, after I retired

00:09:36.960 | and started doing some research.

00:09:39.320 | I had no clue.

00:09:40.560 | - You're kind of operating in a bubble.

00:09:42.200 | - Oh, very much so.

00:09:43.580 | I mean, this is what the KGB did really, really well,

00:09:47.400 | compartmentalization, and that was based on

00:09:52.400 | the communist movement while it was still underground.

00:09:57.040 | The cells were very small,

00:09:59.000 | so that maybe there were three, four members in one cell

00:10:02.680 | that knew one another,

00:10:04.600 | and then they had a liaison to another cell.

00:10:06.700 | So the bottom line is if you got,

00:10:09.800 | one of those folks were caught,

00:10:12.320 | they could maybe betray four people or three,

00:10:15.280 | something like that,

00:10:16.360 | and the KGB continued with that tradition.

00:10:19.800 | I have reason to believe that my handler,

00:10:24.520 | the person in Moscow that sort of directed me

00:10:27.860 | and made decisions what to do and where to go,

00:10:31.640 | never met me personally.

00:10:33.720 | There's no reason to, right?

00:10:35.160 | Why would, so, and this actually was a big advantage

00:10:40.160 | over other intelligence services,

00:10:44.200 | because you look at what the CIA does, everybody blabs.

00:10:48.040 | There's a lot of leaks coming out of American intelligence.

00:10:50.840 | I don't think there's as many leaks

00:10:52.200 | coming out of the Mossad.

00:10:54.200 | - Strong words from Jack Barsky, by the way.

00:10:56.680 | So, I mean, that is a question I wanna ask

00:10:58.680 | a little more systematically.

00:10:59.880 | Is there something unique about the KGB

00:11:02.880 | compared to the other intelligence agencies?

00:11:05.080 | Let's talk British intelligence, MI6, Mossad, CIA.

00:11:10.080 | Is there unique cultures, spirits, souls

00:11:15.360 | of the different organizations

00:11:16.640 | that maybe somehow connect to the structures of government,

00:11:19.480 | connect maybe the values of the people,

00:11:22.440 | those kinds of things?

00:11:23.680 | - I believe we were all pretty much strong believers

00:11:29.160 | in communism and the future of the world being--

00:11:31.480 | - In KGB? - Yes.

00:11:33.000 | I think that unified us to a large degree,

00:11:36.000 | even the technicians.

00:11:37.360 | - So even, it wasn't something like,

00:11:41.320 | yeah, yeah, the parents believe this thing,

00:11:45.560 | but we know the truth.

00:11:47.120 | You really believe the story of communism.

00:11:49.240 | - Absolutely did, and you need to look at the timeframe.

00:11:52.840 | The Soviet Union, after World War II,

00:11:57.620 | made quite a bit of progress

00:11:59.920 | in influencing the third world.

00:12:02.880 | I still remember when I was in middle school,

00:12:06.840 | we had a map, the map of the world,

00:12:09.240 | and it was color-coded.

00:12:11.040 | So red was communism, that was the Soviet Union

00:12:13.840 | and the Eastern states, and then blue was capitalism,

00:12:18.200 | and then we had green,

00:12:19.920 | which were the third world countries,

00:12:22.280 | and the green slowly turned pink

00:12:24.880 | because a lot of third world governments,

00:12:27.240 | so I'm looking at Angola, I'm looking at Vietnam,

00:12:31.400 | a lot of these countries were very sympathetic

00:12:37.760 | to the Soviet Union, and so we sort of knew

00:12:42.320 | that this would go on like that,

00:12:44.520 | and eventually we would take over,

00:12:46.120 | and pretty much overtake, that was the myth,

00:12:51.120 | overtake the United States, not only militarily,

00:12:56.560 | but also in terms of industrial production and so forth.

00:13:01.560 | That was a stupid pipe dream.

00:13:03.800 | The military, it was a standoff, as we know.

00:13:07.980 | - Well, stupid pipe dream.

00:13:11.200 | Hitler had a stupid pipe dream

00:13:16.600 | that he executed exceptionally effectively on,

00:13:21.480 | if not for a handful of military mistakes,

00:13:26.560 | the world could look very different today.

00:13:28.320 | - Well, the biggest one being invading the Soviet Union,

00:13:32.120 | particularly at the time that he did it,

00:13:34.680 | because he ran into the same thing

00:13:36.240 | that Napoleon ran into, General Winter.

00:13:40.280 | - Well, within, so Operation Barbarossa,

00:13:43.880 | within that, he could have made different decisions,

00:13:48.360 | for example, attacking, skipping Kiev

00:13:53.480 | and attacking Moscow directly,

00:13:55.040 | overthrowing the government.

00:13:56.480 | So marching, I guess that would be learning lessons

00:14:00.140 | from Napoleon as opposed to a different kind

00:14:04.240 | of distribution of forces,

00:14:05.800 | and then getting bogged down in the winter.

00:14:07.480 | But the point is, these ambitions sometimes do,

00:14:12.480 | the ambitions of empire sometimes do materialize

00:14:15.600 | in the growth and the building and the establishment

00:14:17.720 | of those empires, and those empires write the history books

00:14:22.080 | in such a way that we don't think of them as empires,

00:14:25.200 | or we certainly don't think of them as the bad guys.

00:14:27.760 | They write the history books,

00:14:28.960 | therefore they're the good guys.

00:14:30.520 | And right now, America has effectively written the book

00:14:33.760 | about the good guys.

00:14:35.120 | I happen to believe that book,

00:14:37.200 | but we should be humbled and open-minded

00:14:41.080 | to realize that that is in fact what is happening,

00:14:44.200 | is effective empires write the history books

00:14:47.220 | and tell us stories and tell us propaganda

00:14:49.760 | and tell us narratives that we believe

00:14:51.600 | because we are human beings,

00:14:53.440 | and we love to get together and believe ideas.

00:14:55.840 | We love to dream of a beautiful world

00:14:58.280 | and try to build that beautiful world together.

00:15:00.520 | In the United States, that's a beautiful world,

00:15:02.400 | the freedom of respect of human rights,

00:15:06.120 | of all men are created equal, pursuit of happiness.

00:15:11.120 | You know, it always sounds good.

00:15:13.120 | If you look at what the dream of communism is,

00:15:16.040 | it sure as heck, in its words, on the surface, sounds good.

00:15:20.600 | Respect for the workers, the working class,

00:15:23.400 | the lower classes that have been trodden on,

00:15:26.580 | that have been stolen from by the powerful.

00:15:29.560 | They deserve to have the money, the power,

00:15:32.160 | the respect that they have earned

00:15:34.000 | through their hard work, sounds great.

00:15:36.240 | - And everybody gets along, we just have to,

00:15:39.800 | all men are wonderful people,

00:15:44.560 | and if they go bad, it has something to do with the fact

00:15:47.080 | that they have been oppressed, right?

00:15:50.600 | And that dream just never worked out.

00:15:53.880 | And even it is, when you think about it,

00:15:57.320 | and I didn't think about it.

00:15:58.880 | When you're young, you just emotionally, you accept it.

00:16:02.700 | But when you think about it,

00:16:04.920 | somehow that new wonderful organization

00:16:08.900 | has to organize itself.

00:16:11.120 | Even though Lenin predicted

00:16:12.560 | that the state eventually would go away.

00:16:14.440 | Well, how does it work?

00:16:15.880 | Then you have like anarchy, right?

00:16:17.760 | You have to have an organization.

00:16:19.720 | And the only way to really organize a large number of people

00:16:23.920 | is with a hierarchy.

00:16:26.660 | So, and who gets to the top?

00:16:28.520 | The ones that want to go to the top,

00:16:32.520 | the ones that believe in themselves,

00:16:33.920 | the ones that know better than everybody else.

00:16:37.180 | And once you have that hierarchy established,

00:16:39.480 | there is no guarantee that it won't go bad.

00:16:43.480 | And actually, when you look at history,

00:16:46.200 | every such hierarchy has gone bad.

00:16:48.840 | You know, you look at Cuba, for instance,

00:16:51.120 | I believe Fidel Castro was an honest revolutionary.

00:16:54.280 | I do believe that.

00:16:56.400 | And so what did Cuba turn into?

00:17:01.040 | - Yeah, there's something about,

00:17:03.040 | and you speak about Vladimir Putin in this way,

00:17:04.920 | but let's step away from that for a second.

00:17:07.420 | Is there something about being an honest revolutionary

00:17:12.700 | that wants to do good for their country,

00:17:15.540 | and you start to believe that you know better

00:17:18.300 | than everyone else how to do good in the country?

00:17:20.840 | And you very well might first,

00:17:23.960 | but then somehow that grows into a distortion field

00:17:28.960 | where you keep believing you know what's right,

00:17:33.000 | and all the people who disagree with you,

00:17:35.840 | you stop seeing them as having a point.

00:17:38.080 | You instead see them as like

00:17:42.160 | evil manipulators of the truth

00:17:45.740 | that are actually trying to hurt people

00:17:47.620 | for their own greed, for their own power,

00:17:49.700 | and you will protect the people

00:17:51.460 | because you know what's good.

00:17:52.820 | In the case of Stalin, I mean, I don't know,

00:17:56.540 | but it seems like he really believed

00:17:59.540 | that communism would bring about a much better world.

00:18:04.300 | I mean, there was a sense,

00:18:08.560 | you have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet.

00:18:10.960 | This idea that sacrifice is necessary

00:18:16.020 | to bring about a greater world.

00:18:18.540 | And then the other aspect is sort of ruling by terror,

00:18:23.540 | creating terrors that justify a political mechanism

00:18:28.860 | to achieve a better world.

00:18:30.580 | So it wasn't, I mean, perhaps he had to do that

00:18:33.780 | to be able to sleep at night

00:18:35.140 | with the atrocities he's committing.

00:18:37.740 | I think he believed he will bring about a better world.

00:18:41.580 | - And by the way, the terror didn't start with Stalin.

00:18:43.860 | It started right after the Bolsheviks took over

00:18:47.340 | when Lenin told Mr. Jelzinski,

00:18:52.340 | Comrade Jelzinski to build the Chekhov

00:18:55.500 | and then execute the, this is what he called it,

00:19:00.500 | the Red Terror.

00:19:01.620 | So at the birth of the Soviet Union,

00:19:07.540 | there was already terror and it was deliberate.

00:19:10.900 | And it also was, it wasn't just focused on the enemies.

00:19:15.900 | It was focused on whoever you didn't like.

00:19:19.420 | There was no rule of law.

00:19:20.860 | There was no court cases.

00:19:25.660 | People were just pulled out of their apartments

00:19:27.800 | and shot on sight.

00:19:28.800 | And this was done by revolutionaries

00:19:36.700 | who were convinced that eventually,

00:19:38.820 | that these sacrifices had to be made

00:19:41.140 | and eventually that would lead to a much better planet.

00:19:44.540 | - And the populists believed this too,

00:19:47.180 | that those sacrifices, in part.

00:19:48.900 | I mean, this is such a dark thing about dictatorships

00:19:52.140 | is you believe it,

00:19:56.980 | but you're also too afraid to question your beliefs.

00:20:01.340 | Like you're not directly afraid,

00:20:03.700 | but almost like, I don't know what that is.

00:20:06.740 | That's almost like a subconscious fear.

00:20:08.820 | Like don't, there's a dark room with a locked door.

00:20:11.860 | Don't look in that door.

00:20:13.220 | Don't check that door.

00:20:14.540 | And there's something about the United States

00:20:16.260 | that says, especially modern culture,

00:20:19.980 | it's like go to that door first.

00:20:21.660 | And sort of question everything kind of,

00:20:24.360 | that's the power of the freedom of speech

00:20:26.060 | and the freedom of the press,

00:20:27.100 | but you can get, almost become too critical

00:20:31.220 | and too cynical of your own culture in that way.

00:20:33.220 | So there's a balance to strike, of course,

00:20:35.060 | but man, if communism is not a lesson of human nature,

00:20:39.380 | I don't know what is, but you believed,

00:20:41.380 | without thinking too much about it,

00:20:44.100 | you believed in the story of communism.

00:20:46.500 | What did you see just, you know,

00:20:48.740 | I came from the Soviet Union.

00:20:50.500 | What did you maybe feel

00:20:54.260 | that's right and good about communism,

00:20:59.860 | about the vision of communism?

00:21:01.380 | Could you remember like--

00:21:02.900 | - I think the biggest impetus in me believing in communism

00:21:07.540 | was that the communists,

00:21:10.940 | when just before Hitler took over,

00:21:14.500 | the communists were the only force in Germany

00:21:18.720 | that fought the Nazis in the streets.

00:21:22.740 | And that's a historic truth.

00:21:24.820 | - Yes.

00:21:25.660 | - And communists were hunted down by the Nazis,

00:21:30.220 | killed, put in concentration camps.

00:21:33.940 | And so what we knew, when what we were taught,

00:21:38.940 | and I think that was a huge unforced error

00:21:41.420 | by the Western countries, particularly the United States,

00:21:44.680 | that there were ex-Nazis in the government in West Germany.

00:21:48.580 | - Yeah.

00:21:49.420 | - And the most famous one was Reinhard Galen,

00:21:54.420 | who was in charge, was the general in charge

00:21:58.060 | of the intelligence on the Eastern Front under Hitler.

00:22:03.060 | And when the Allied won the war,

00:22:10.260 | it was decided that Galen was too important,

00:22:13.900 | with his knowledge and his organization,

00:22:17.140 | was too important to not use.

00:22:20.940 | So he was co-opted by the CIA and eventually wound up

00:22:24.660 | being the head of the Bundesnachrichtendienst,

00:22:26.500 | the CIA of West Germany.

00:22:29.380 | That gave us, us, when I say us,

00:22:31.500 | you know, the East German party, a huge propaganda victory.

00:22:36.500 | I wanted to, because the emotional aspect of this

00:22:40.700 | was as follows.

00:22:42.180 | When we were in, juniors in high school,

00:22:47.180 | and in those days, when you, you were only allowed

00:22:53.980 | to go to high school if you were in the top 10%

00:22:56.100 | of students, okay, so this was going to be

00:22:58.500 | the next set of ruling elite in the country.

00:23:02.500 | We were sent, we were required to visit

00:23:05.740 | a concentration camp.

00:23:07.020 | And if you know what we, as 17-year-olds,

00:23:13.580 | were made to look at, it was gut-wrenching.

00:23:18.060 | How can men do something like that to men?

00:23:20.940 | Piles of corpses,

00:23:22.380 | lampshades made out of human skin

00:23:27.380 | because that skin had tattoos on them,

00:23:32.660 | and a shrunken head, so heads like the size of my fist.

00:23:36.340 | I mean, the girls all cried.

00:23:40.140 | And it made a huge impression.

00:23:42.500 | - And that was the Nazis.

00:23:45.540 | - Yes.

00:23:46.380 | - And the communists defeated the Nazis.

00:23:48.220 | - The communists were the Nazi fighters.

00:23:49.060 | They were the good guys.

00:23:49.900 | Of course, in hindsight, if the communists

00:23:52.380 | had come to power, it would have been

00:23:53.580 | just the other way around, as we know,

00:23:55.420 | given the example of Stalin and Mao, right?

00:23:58.820 | So, but we didn't know that, right?

00:24:02.100 | - From the Russian, Soviet perspective,

00:24:04.380 | the communist regime banded together

00:24:09.140 | to win the great patriotic war.

00:24:12.620 | - And that was the second one,

00:24:14.460 | the big brother, the Soviet Union.

00:24:18.020 | I mean, when I was approached by the KGB,

00:24:20.020 | that was like, oh, I felt so honored.

00:24:22.340 | - So we should say that we're talking

00:24:28.300 | about East Germany, that you're from East Germany.

00:24:31.540 | Can you describe, you were born four years in,

00:24:36.060 | what is it?

00:24:36.900 | - Yeah, four years.

00:24:37.740 | - 10 days?

00:24:38.580 | - Yeah, sort of, very good.

00:24:40.460 | - After Germany's unconditional surrender

00:24:44.060 | in World War II.

00:24:45.820 | So what is East Germany, what is West Germany?

00:24:49.100 | What is East and West Germany?

00:24:50.980 | What is that, what's the difference?

00:24:52.500 | What's the historical context here?

00:24:54.380 | What is World War II again?

00:24:55.620 | And then, let's do--

00:24:58.620 | - We don't have to go to World War I,

00:25:02.180 | which the result of which actually

00:25:04.340 | seeded World War II in some respect.

00:25:06.260 | - Yes, there's a long history, yes.

00:25:09.700 | - But let's start with World War II.

00:25:11.220 | So when Hitler came to power,

00:25:14.580 | he and his leadership decided that the Germans

00:25:19.580 | needed more what they called Lebensraum,

00:25:22.780 | that means room to live.

00:25:24.060 | And they would start expanding,

00:25:28.780 | and they went into France,

00:25:32.140 | they took Belgium, the Netherlands,

00:25:34.180 | they annexed Austria,

00:25:38.180 | and got a piece of Czechoslovakia.

00:25:43.900 | And then they decided to march into the Soviet Union

00:25:48.700 | after they took Poland.

00:25:50.260 | - Cut up Poland together with the Soviet Union.

00:25:55.180 | - Yes.

00:25:56.020 | - They were friends.

00:25:56.860 | - Yes.

00:25:57.700 | - They were--

00:25:58.540 | - It was a non-aggression pact

00:26:00.380 | that was signed by Ribbentrop and Molotov, right?

00:26:03.300 | I think both parties knew that eventually

00:26:05.300 | they would fall apart, but at the time,

00:26:08.020 | it gave the Soviet Union a little more,

00:26:11.740 | a piece of Poland, and a little more time

00:26:14.660 | to prepare what they thought might happen down the road.

00:26:19.500 | And the Germans had the time and the ability

00:26:24.500 | to pretty much conquer all of Western Europe.

00:26:29.260 | - Do you think Stalin really knew

00:26:31.660 | that it's gonna fall apart?

00:26:33.020 | - Why would somebody like Stalin

00:26:34.460 | trust somebody like Hitler?

00:26:36.020 | - But why did he blunder so bad

00:26:37.940 | not to read the intelligence that was coming his way?

00:26:42.660 | - Oh, he didn't--

00:26:43.500 | - The troops are amassing on the border of the Soviet Union.

00:26:46.020 | - He didn't trust his own intelligence apparatus.

00:26:48.420 | - Boy.

00:26:49.260 | - Here's one example.

00:26:50.340 | There was a German communist who went underground

00:26:57.340 | when Hitler took over, and he went to Japan as a journalist.

00:27:01.100 | His name is Richard Sorge.

00:27:03.180 | Richard Sorge had really, really good intel

00:27:06.860 | about what the Japanese would do and not do.

00:27:11.700 | I forgot exactly what it was,

00:27:13.180 | but it came to Moscow and Stalin totally ignored it.

00:27:17.860 | And when Sorge was captured by the Japanese,

00:27:22.860 | the Soviet Union denied that he was one of theirs,

00:27:26.940 | so he was executed.

00:27:28.120 | The paranoia, again, does a lot of damage.

00:27:34.420 | When you don't believe your own intelligence apparatus,

00:27:38.420 | why bother having one?

00:27:40.900 | - Yeah, I mean, there,

00:27:44.820 | but I'm sure there's contradictory information

00:27:47.260 | coming in from the intelligence apparatus,

00:27:48.940 | so it's difficult.

00:27:50.520 | I mean, first of all, nobody likes to be disagreed with,

00:27:54.160 | especially when you become more and more powerful,

00:27:56.380 | and then the intelligence apparatus

00:27:58.300 | is probably giving you information you don't like.

00:28:00.740 | It's often negative information about--

00:28:04.100 | - Yeah.

00:28:05.300 | - Basically, information that says

00:28:08.620 | that the decisions you made in the past

00:28:11.060 | are not great decisions,

00:28:12.780 | and that's a difficult truth to deal with.

00:28:14.620 | - Yeah.

00:28:15.460 | - So, in the modern times, if we hop around briefly,

00:28:20.100 | is Vladimir Putin has been not happy

00:28:25.100 | with the intelligence of the FSB,

00:28:28.180 | thereby, at least if you read the news,

00:28:31.940 | choosing to put more priority to the GRU

00:28:36.060 | for the intelligence in Ukraine.

00:28:37.900 | - Right.

00:28:38.740 | - But I guess I suppose the same story happens there,

00:28:43.980 | as it does throughout history, is paranoia.

00:28:46.700 | - I give you an example that comes

00:28:51.700 | from a very reliable source,

00:28:53.880 | and that my best German friend worked as a chemist

00:29:00.020 | in the Stasi, East German intelligence,

00:29:04.220 | and he eventually, he rose to the rank of major

00:29:09.220 | and was in charge of the forgery department.

00:29:14.080 | It's very likely that he made passports

00:29:17.260 | that I used to travel.

00:29:18.780 | He was aware that there was intelligence

00:29:22.660 | that was collected.

00:29:24.660 | The Stasi was really good.

00:29:26.420 | They had about 1,000 people in West Germany,

00:29:28.820 | undercover agents, some of them in government,

00:29:32.500 | and the central committee of the party,

00:29:35.860 | the decision makers, ignored it

00:29:37.260 | because it didn't quite fit in their worldview,

00:29:40.220 | it didn't quite fit into their plans.

00:29:42.500 | So, and one delicious thing

00:29:47.900 | that I just wanna add on to this,

00:29:49.980 | when Gorbachev wrote his book

00:29:53.700 | about Perestroika and Glasnost,

00:29:56.820 | the East German rulers did not like it,

00:30:01.540 | they were much more orthodox.

00:30:03.260 | So, they had to print the books in translation.

00:30:07.600 | Guess where they wound up?

00:30:09.140 | They were piled up in the hallways of the Stasi.

00:30:12.080 | They bought the entire print run.

00:30:16.140 | - Fascinating.

00:30:18.660 | But let's backtrack, so Operation Barbarossa,

00:30:22.700 | invasion of Hitler to the Soviet Union,

00:30:25.260 | and then hopefully that leads us

00:30:26.940 | all the way to East Germany, West Germany,

00:30:29.340 | after the end of the war.

00:30:30.420 | - So, what happened was the Soviet Union

00:30:32.900 | rolled into the eastern part of Germany,

00:30:34.820 | and the Western allies took a larger chunk,

00:30:39.540 | which was eventually,

00:30:44.260 | it was occupied by the three allies,

00:30:46.820 | the French, the English, and the Americans,

00:30:51.140 | and the eastern part was occupied by Soviet troops,

00:30:55.060 | and the Soviet troops actually conquered Berlin.

00:31:00.060 | But in a contract, they decided that Berlin

00:31:05.820 | would be ruled by the four allies,

00:31:08.940 | and they all had free access to that city.

00:31:13.940 | I was born in the East German part,

00:31:18.620 | which very quickly became ruled by communists,

00:31:23.820 | slash socialists, the Communist Party

00:31:26.380 | and the Socialist Party united,

00:31:28.460 | but the leaders of that new party were all communists.

00:31:32.300 | - It's nevertheless called democratic.

00:31:34.340 | - Yes, German Democratic Republic,

00:31:36.700 | which was formed a couple of months after I was born.

00:31:41.700 | I was born into a remote southeastern corner

00:31:46.940 | of East Germany, and interestingly enough,

00:31:51.620 | genetically, I'm only half German.

00:31:53.460 | - What's the other half?

00:31:55.660 | - The other half is Czech and Polish.

00:31:57.500 | - Nice.

00:31:58.340 | - Because where I grew up, I could walk to the Neisse River,

00:32:03.100 | which was the border with Poland,

00:32:06.580 | and it was only about an hour by bus

00:32:09.500 | to get to the Czech border, so that's why I'm a mix.

00:32:14.500 | - So, okay, so East Germany after the war

00:32:16.900 | was communist, socialist,

00:32:19.420 | and then the West Germany was representing

00:32:22.500 | the Western world with democracy.

00:32:25.100 | - And what the United States did,

00:32:27.580 | this was really, really very forward-looking,

00:32:33.540 | very strategic, the Marshall Plan,

00:32:36.500 | to rebuild the economy in the West,

00:32:39.260 | as compared to what the Soviet Union did.

00:32:42.300 | Whatever they hadn't destroyed on the way in,

00:32:45.180 | they took with them on the way out for reparations,

00:32:49.460 | because they had every right to do that,

00:32:52.260 | but it was not a good idea,

00:32:54.260 | because East Germany was always behind

00:32:57.460 | in economic development to their Western counterpart.

00:33:01.480 | - So when you were young, as today,

00:33:05.100 | but when you were young,

00:33:06.340 | you were clearly an exceptional student.

00:33:08.900 | You're a brilliant academic superstar.

00:33:12.700 | Let's go to your childhood.

00:33:14.660 | What's a fond memory from childhood that you have

00:33:19.260 | in being woken up to the beauty of this world,

00:33:22.940 | and sort of being curious about all the mysteries

00:33:26.580 | around you that I think ultimately lead to academic success?

00:33:31.020 | Or was it--

00:33:34.980 | - The fondest memory that comes to mind is my first kiss.

00:33:39.380 | - How's that?

00:33:40.500 | Do you wanna go to the details of that?

00:33:44.400 | What'd you make of that kiss?

00:33:46.660 | What'd that teach you about yourself

00:33:49.500 | and human nature and all that?

00:33:51.300 | - It taught me only in hindsight.

00:33:53.100 | At the time, I was just like, my God,

00:33:55.700 | I was head over heels in love.

00:33:57.660 | I was 16 years old.

00:33:59.300 | And I knew in those days, I admired girls.

00:34:05.180 | I knew that girls were like sort of magical beings.

00:34:10.180 | They were not capable of doing evil things.

00:34:13.460 | They were beautiful and they had to be adored.

00:34:16.000 | And one of them actually loved me too.

00:34:19.960 | She came after me initially, right?

00:34:22.920 | - And that too was magical for you.

00:34:25.680 | - Oh my God, yeah.

00:34:26.800 | (Lex laughing)

00:34:28.440 | And I literally, I dedicated,

00:34:33.320 | that's when I started studying.

00:34:34.680 | Up until that point, I just did whatever I had to do

00:34:37.320 | to be in A-minus students.

00:34:39.600 | And that's when I started studying.

00:34:40.920 | And every A that I got, I dedicated to her,

00:34:44.600 | sometimes explicitly,

00:34:46.800 | because I knew I was gonna take care of her as I grew up.

00:34:50.400 | - So you're gonna have to work hard in this world

00:34:52.560 | to be somebody that could be adored by those you love.

00:34:55.640 | - Yes, you're right.

00:34:57.000 | You know, that kiss,

00:34:58.840 | the next day I was running around in school

00:35:03.320 | with a grin on my face.

00:35:05.680 | - And maybe that, in some way, that grin never fades.

00:35:09.800 | So what about the heartbreak that followed?

00:35:12.920 | - Well, the heartbreak followed.

00:35:13.760 | - Surely followed.

00:35:15.240 | - But just to expand on this a little more,

00:35:19.920 | because that passion that I had

00:35:24.920 | was an indication that eventually

00:35:28.120 | love would play a big role in my life.

00:35:30.600 | I wasn't aware of it.

00:35:31.560 | I was just directed at this one girl, but--

00:35:33.800 | - But you understood that that feeling--

00:35:37.280 | - Oh my God, yeah.

00:35:38.120 | - That taught you something,

00:35:39.160 | that you're somebody that can feel those things.

00:35:41.080 | - Absolutely.

00:35:41.920 | - And that's a strong part of who you are,

00:35:46.280 | and therefore it will also be a part

00:35:48.400 | of directing your life trajectory.

00:35:50.800 | - Yeah, so we were an item for two years.

00:35:53.840 | I lost my virginity.

00:35:57.320 | - Congratulations.

00:35:58.160 | - She was not a virgin at the time.

00:35:59.680 | My competitor was--

00:36:03.200 | - There always is a competitor, isn't there?

00:36:06.280 | Isn't that how it works?

00:36:07.320 | - He studied medicine in college already.

00:36:09.700 | - In which ways was he better than you?

00:36:11.780 | - He wasn't, he was older and he was more experienced.

00:36:14.380 | And he was gonna be a doctor.

00:36:16.080 | But I was there and he was not.

00:36:20.540 | Presence wins.

00:36:23.740 | - Yeah, but you still had big dreams.

00:36:25.900 | You wanted to be a tenure professor.

00:36:28.340 | - Yes, yes.

00:36:29.240 | - So you still want to outdo that guy.

00:36:32.420 | - Oh yeah, and she eventually told me

00:36:34.580 | that he was not in the picture anymore.

00:36:39.140 | So it was back and forth, back and forth.

00:36:41.140 | Our senior year we were an item

00:36:44.540 | and I was just dreaming of the future.

00:36:48.780 | But we didn't figure out that in those days

00:36:52.500 | if she went to college in Berlin

00:36:54.620 | and I went to college in Jena,

00:36:56.740 | and the distance between the two cities

00:37:02.460 | was too much for a weekend visit.

00:37:07.460 | Public transportation was very slow

00:37:10.860 | and nobody had cars.

00:37:12.160 | - So the circumstance of life, you drifted apart.

00:37:17.820 | - Yeah, and so we interacted with a couple of letters

00:37:21.260 | and then I got the goodbye letter.

00:37:22.960 | Oh my God.

00:37:25.020 | - Did that hurt?

00:37:26.700 | - I can still feel it.

00:37:27.900 | You know when--

00:37:30.540 | - That's a good thing that you could feel the pain.

00:37:33.700 | That's still part of love.

00:37:35.380 | The pain of loss is still part of love.

00:37:39.060 | And then you kind of change that, you shape it,

00:37:42.740 | and you give that love in deeper,

00:37:44.540 | more profound ways to future people.

00:37:46.740 | - That's very well put.

00:37:47.780 | But at the time it emptied me out.

00:37:51.380 | If I had a tendency to have suicidal thoughts,

00:37:56.380 | I might have killed myself.

00:38:00.500 | - Would you say that was one of the darker moments

00:38:02.420 | of your life?

00:38:03.260 | - Let me see.

00:38:05.580 | As a single moment, yes.

00:38:09.060 | So I still remember, we had a mail slot in the front door,

00:38:14.060 | and I was expecting a letter any day,

00:38:19.700 | and there was the letter.

00:38:20.660 | I go upstairs into my bedroom and I open it and I read it.

00:38:25.120 | And it was just like the life went out of me.

00:38:30.020 | - You're just there alone,

00:38:31.340 | and you have to experience this pain alone.

00:38:33.620 | - So, but--

00:38:34.460 | - And now you're deeply alone in this world.

00:38:37.300 | - Yes, because I didn't have a,

00:38:40.140 | there was no emotional relationship with my parents.

00:38:43.840 | I literally had nobody.

00:38:47.700 | - So this love you have in you had no place to go.

00:38:51.420 | - It was choked off, all right?

00:38:53.420 | But what I did was I,

00:38:59.100 | I wanted to go on, right?

00:39:02.740 | And so I threw myself into the study of chemistry.

00:39:07.540 | I outworked all of my fellow students in a big way.

00:39:12.540 | I just like, I worked my ass off,

00:39:15.180 | and since I was pretty smart too,

00:39:17.500 | I just aced practically everything.

00:39:20.060 | And for the first two years in college,

00:39:22.700 | and look, we go to college,

00:39:23.740 | there are all these pretty girls,

00:39:24.820 | and there's dances and everything.

00:39:26.040 | We had this great student club where,

00:39:28.420 | I didn't look at any girls.

00:39:31.100 | Eventually I knew I was going to,

00:39:34.700 | wanna have female companionship,

00:39:37.260 | but love, uh-uh, no more, that hurts.

00:39:40.780 | There's a song that goes, "Love hurts."

00:39:43.220 | - Yeah, yeah, I know that one.

00:39:45.220 | That's true, there's actually many songs

00:39:47.400 | that have a similar message, yes.

00:39:49.180 | So during that time, during your excellence,

00:39:54.260 | just being an exceptional student of chemistry,

00:39:58.040 | let's go to your story.

00:39:59.120 | So in your book, "Deep Undercover, My Secret Life

00:40:03.280 | and Tangled Allegiances as a KGB Spy in America,"

00:40:06.920 | and in the really, really excellent podcast series

00:40:10.700 | that I've been listening to,

00:40:11.880 | people should definitely listen to it,

00:40:13.240 | it's called "The Agent,"

00:40:14.940 | you document your time as a KGB spy

00:40:17.680 | before, during, and after.

00:40:20.260 | Can you tell the story of when you first were contacted

00:40:22.880 | by the KGB, those, how you were invited,

00:40:27.880 | the offer to join was made?

00:40:30.160 | - Well, it was a big surprise,

00:40:32.160 | and I never thought of myself as a potential agent.

00:40:36.040 | You know, I was gonna be a tenured professor

00:40:38.720 | and join the ruling elite,

00:40:39.960 | because in Europe, tenured professors are few.

00:40:44.280 | It's not like in the United States, you know,

00:40:45.960 | anybody who teaches at colleges has a title of professor.

00:40:49.600 | - Easy now. (laughs)

00:40:51.400 | - It's true, it's not a criticism.

00:40:53.160 | - 100%.

00:40:54.000 | So we should also clarify that tenured professor or not,

00:40:57.920 | it is a very prestigious position

00:41:00.640 | throughout history of Europe.

00:41:02.080 | - Yeah, yeah.

00:41:02.920 | - I would say, especially communists,

00:41:05.920 | I don't actually know the full landscape of the respect,

00:41:09.680 | but at least in the Soviet Union where I grew up,

00:41:11.400 | it's a prestigious position.

00:41:13.240 | - Absolutely was.

00:41:14.360 | And the town of Yenna had about 100,000 people live there.

00:41:18.440 | And I would, it's a wild guess,

00:41:22.360 | but maybe 30 tenured professors,

00:41:24.920 | and they were part of the ruling elite.

00:41:26.960 | I was trying to do as much as I can

00:41:29.800 | to live the good life, right?

00:41:31.200 | You know, have access to things that are nice.

00:41:36.200 | - Yeah, but I think the powerful thing

00:41:38.760 | about being a professor in that context of East Germany

00:41:43.000 | is the prestige.

00:41:44.320 | - And the feeling of superiority.

00:41:47.840 | I was full of myself.

00:41:49.600 | When you are the best of the best,

00:41:52.800 | and in my third year I received a scholarship,

00:41:57.360 | the Karl Marx scholarship,

00:41:59.520 | that was limited to 100 concurrent recipients in the country.

00:42:04.520 | So my God, I was full of myself.

00:42:07.840 | I believed in myself, hook, line, and sinker.

00:42:10.960 | And I was also,

00:42:16.680 | I got a lot of accolades from teachers and fellow students.

00:42:21.680 | - They were feeding the ego, the old, I mean.

00:42:25.880 | - Yeah.

00:42:26.720 | - You have to believe in yourself often

00:42:28.920 | when you're young to truly, to excel.

00:42:32.220 | And you sure as heck did.

00:42:33.740 | - But you know, as a balance, you need a mentor,

00:42:37.000 | somebody who puts things in perspective,

00:42:39.480 | and I didn't have one.

00:42:40.880 | My father was a non-entity and nobody else.

00:42:43.720 | They all looked up to me.

00:42:46.040 | I was an up-and-coming guy, right?

00:42:47.880 | - So there's no father figure that put you in your place.

00:42:50.200 | - Not at all.

00:42:51.040 | And I give you one extreme example.

00:42:53.160 | It was down the road when I fathered a child out of wedlock.

00:42:57.380 | That was in my fifth year, I believe.

00:43:02.840 | The Communist Party in East Germany was very moralistic.

00:43:07.000 | If you did that, they would have a talk with you

00:43:09.760 | and give you whatever, severe reprimand.

00:43:13.320 | Nobody even mentioned a word about this.

00:43:16.440 | So yeah, so this is how this ego gets nurtured.

00:43:20.280 | But anyway, getting back to how the KGB came in contact.

00:43:25.240 | So they most likely got knowledge of me

00:43:30.000 | by looking at Stasi records.

00:43:34.080 | - What's Stasi?

00:43:35.080 | - Oh, that was East German Secret Police,

00:43:37.680 | Staatssicherheit, security for the state.

00:43:42.160 | - There's that word security again.

00:43:43.960 | (laughing)

00:43:45.480 | - And they pretty much kept a record

00:43:48.240 | on everybody in the country.

00:43:50.280 | And so when you look through this,

00:43:53.980 | and this is what the KGB was looking for.

00:43:55.860 | They were looking for candidates,

00:43:57.680 | particularly for this kind of job

00:43:59.240 | that they had in mind for me,

00:44:00.760 | for candidates who were not in their mid-20s,

00:44:05.760 | who were not fully developed yet,

00:44:09.800 | but mature enough to get there.

00:44:12.860 | And still young enough, right?

00:44:17.160 | - 'Cause at that level of maturity,

00:44:18.400 | you can test whether they can handle this kind of job.

00:44:20.400 | - Yes, absolutely right.

00:44:22.520 | So and one day I got a knock on my door

00:44:26.960 | and my dorm room door was on a Saturday.

00:44:29.180 | And they knew that I was by myself.

00:44:36.680 | How did they know it?

00:44:39.560 | We had a, I pieced this together.

00:44:42.220 | We had an exchange student from the Soviet Union

00:44:47.680 | and he was next door to me.

00:44:51.000 | And he befriended me, so he got to know me a little bit.

00:44:56.000 | And the pattern was that my roommate

00:44:59.480 | would always go home for the weekend.

00:45:01.520 | And of course they also knew which door to knock on,

00:45:05.560 | even though there were no nameplates, right?

00:45:07.400 | So somebody knocks and I knew it was a stranger

00:45:12.400 | because if it had been a student,

00:45:15.240 | the pattern was that we would knock on the door

00:45:17.760 | and then go in.

00:45:18.720 | We wouldn't wait for somebody to let us in.

00:45:21.880 | So I waited for 10 seconds and he didn't come in.

00:45:26.880 | I knew that it was a stranger, I said, "Come on in."

00:45:30.500 | And in came a person who spoke fluent German.

00:45:34.520 | So that was not a KGB guy.

00:45:36.480 | It was a collaborator.

00:45:38.120 | And so he started making a bunch of small talk.

00:45:42.280 | He introduced himself as a representative

00:45:45.280 | of Kaltseiss Jena, which was the optics company

00:45:48.960 | that made really, really good optical instruments.

00:45:56.400 | Was one of the best in the world.

00:45:58.400 | - So it's like the super prestigious company in that place.

00:46:04.640 | - Right, and he said that he was a representative

00:46:07.800 | of that company and he would just wanna find out

00:46:12.400 | what my plans were after graduating from college.

00:46:15.360 | And at that point I knew he wasn't from Kaltseiss Jena

00:46:21.280 | because in those days there was no recruitment.

00:46:23.840 | When you were done, if you were in the top 10%

00:46:29.920 | of the graduates, you would most likely pick

00:46:34.280 | to stay and get a doctorate, right?

00:46:36.580 | And the rest of them were assigned.

00:46:39.240 | You had no choice.

00:46:41.600 | So that guy was an idiot.

00:46:46.280 | He didn't know the basics about--

00:46:50.720 | - You interviewed him a little bit to understand--

00:46:53.160 | - Oh sure, I started--

00:46:55.280 | - Like feel out, is this guy full of shit?

00:46:57.400 | Because yeah, he's a stranger showing up to your dorm room.

00:47:00.600 | I knew that, at that point I knew he was Stasi,

00:47:04.520 | which is wrong, but it doesn't matter

00:47:06.440 | because he was German and I had no idea

00:47:08.320 | that the KGB would be involved.

00:47:10.080 | - So sorry to pause briefly.

00:47:12.320 | Did you have a sense, did people know

00:47:16.960 | that there's a Stasi type of organization,

00:47:19.320 | that there's a large number of people doing this kind

00:47:23.320 | of work in East Germany, in order for you to make that guess?

00:47:27.280 | - Yeah, we knew that the Stasi existed.

00:47:30.440 | We even had our James Bond, we had a series

00:47:35.440 | called the Invisible Visor, where a Stasi employee

00:47:41.080 | in East Germany would go into West Germany

00:47:43.080 | and hunt down Nazis.

00:47:44.920 | So yes, the Stasi was known to be there.

00:47:47.400 | - And admired in part, or feared, or both?

00:47:50.960 | - I thought they were necessary and I admired them.

00:47:55.040 | - James Bond.

00:47:56.160 | - Yes, the reason I did so, because I had no information

00:48:00.080 | to the contrary, I never knew anybody personally

00:48:04.880 | or even somewhat removed who was followed by the Stasi,

00:48:09.880 | was put in jail, I had no clue.

00:48:19.280 | I had no clue that they did a lot of damage

00:48:21.800 | and that they were doing a lot of surveillance

00:48:24.480 | of the East German population, the same way the KGB

00:48:28.120 | did for the Soviet Union.

00:48:30.120 | So for me to be talking to somebody from the Stasi,

00:48:34.320 | it raised my interest, I was curious what comes next,

00:48:39.320 | because I sort of knew something interesting

00:48:43.240 | would be coming at me, and I had no other thoughts

00:48:47.920 | about that at that point.

00:48:49.080 | So when he was finally, when he went for the kill

00:48:54.000 | by reversing himself, he said, "You know, I gotta tell you

00:48:57.240 | "that I really am not from Karl Zeiss,

00:49:00.280 | "you know, I'm from the government."

00:49:02.080 | Okay, thank you for pointing that out.

00:49:05.400 | And then he asked this question, he says,

00:49:07.880 | "Can you imagine to one day work for the government?"

00:49:11.800 | And so I gave a pretty clever answer, I said,

00:49:15.360 | "Yes, but not as a chemist."

00:49:17.600 | So I answered the question that he didn't ask,

00:49:21.520 | I helped him out.

00:49:23.200 | So we made an arrangement to meet for lunch,

00:49:28.160 | which in Germany is the main meal,

00:49:30.320 | at the number one restaurant in Vienna.

00:49:33.920 | I still remember what I ate.

00:49:36.040 | - What was that?

00:49:36.880 | - Rump steak with butter on top, and French fries,

00:49:40.800 | it was my favorite.

00:49:42.120 | Anyway, so when I get to the restaurant,

00:49:46.200 | I saw this fellow sitting in the back there at the table,

00:49:49.600 | and there was another person at the table.

00:49:52.440 | So I was a little bit hesitant,

00:49:53.920 | because in those days, it was not unusual

00:49:57.440 | for perfect strangers to share a table,

00:50:00.440 | 'cause there wasn't enough tables and chairs and so forth.

00:50:04.600 | So I didn't know if I could approach him,

00:50:06.920 | but he got up and came to me,

00:50:08.760 | and he took me to the table, and he said,

00:50:11.800 | "I want to introduce Herman,

00:50:14.960 | "we work with our Soviet comrades."

00:50:18.220 | Aha, KGB.

00:50:21.040 | And then he disappeared, he says,

00:50:22.720 | "I got something else to do."

00:50:24.120 | I never knew his name, he just handed me over to the KGB.

00:50:28.540 | - What was the relationship between the KGB and the Stasi?

00:50:32.200 | As collaborators, close collaborators,

00:50:35.440 | or just distant associates?

00:50:37.640 | - They were pretty close collaborators,

00:50:39.600 | as I told you that they bought forged documents

00:50:43.800 | that the Germans made,

00:50:44.720 | because the Germans were better at forgery.

00:50:46.880 | They also exchanged information,

00:50:50.040 | but they didn't trust each other 100%,

00:50:51.960 | and I tell you why I know that.

00:50:55.920 | So they recruited me to send me to West Germany.

00:50:59.600 | As I already said, East Germany had 1,000 agents over there,

00:51:04.240 | why would they wanna have their own?

00:51:06.800 | - Yeah, yeah, okay, this is a fascinating

00:51:10.060 | internal and external dynamic of distrust.

00:51:13.360 | - Yeah. - Okay, so there you are,

00:51:17.120 | welcomed by the KGB, when did the offer, the invite come?

00:51:21.560 | - Well, that took a while.

00:51:22.600 | So Herman and I had an unofficial relationship

00:51:27.320 | for about a year and a half.

00:51:29.880 | I would meet him maybe once a week,

00:51:32.700 | once every two weeks, initially in his car,

00:51:35.200 | but then he took me to a conspirational flat

00:51:40.200 | that was an apartment that was occupied

00:51:45.720 | by a party member, a lady, single lady.

00:51:50.240 | When we came in, she would leave,

00:51:52.680 | she left us tea and cookies,

00:51:54.160 | and then we could freely talk.

00:51:57.000 | He also, at that time, gave me some

00:51:59.960 | West German literature magazines to read,

00:52:02.640 | which was, of course, forbidden.

00:52:04.600 | So already I'm starting to feel somewhat special.

00:52:08.200 | And as we were talking about what they had in mind

00:52:11.640 | for me in general, I knew that I was gonna be

00:52:15.040 | even more special because I would be above the law.

00:52:18.920 | I would operate outside the law of the countries

00:52:23.720 | I would go to, as well as East Germany,

00:52:27.000 | because the magazines, and eventually when I joined up,

00:52:32.000 | they told me I had better watch West German television,

00:52:36.200 | which was also not explicitly prohibited,

00:52:39.920 | but it was something that could get you in trouble.

00:52:45.000 | - So on many levels, you're super special.

00:52:47.080 | You're the James Bond. - Yes, yes, yes.

00:52:49.400 | - So what was that recruitment testing process like?

00:52:54.400 | Testing whether you have what it takes to be a KGB agent?

00:52:59.840 | - First of all, we had very in-depth talks,

00:53:06.280 | Herman and I, about life.

00:53:12.440 | And I still am very honest and sharing my feelings.

00:53:17.440 | - Philosophical or personal?

00:53:21.200 | - Personal. - Personal.

00:53:22.800 | - I even told him that I was shy around the girls.

00:53:25.300 | - He was giving you relationship advice, or what?

00:53:29.560 | How old was he?

00:53:30.400 | So what was the dynamic?

00:53:31.640 | Can you tell me, was it a father, son?

00:53:34.040 | - No, older brother. - Older brother.

00:53:36.080 | - Yeah, he was maybe in his early to mid-30s,

00:53:40.560 | and I was maybe 10 years younger.

00:53:42.320 | - And what languages did he speak?

00:53:43.800 | - He spoke German pretty well.

00:53:46.520 | - But he's originally from Russia?

00:53:48.320 | - Yeah, with a Russian accent.

00:53:49.820 | So I got in trouble one time with him when I asked him,

00:53:54.320 | is your real name German?

00:53:55.980 | He didn't like that. - He didn't like it.

00:53:59.080 | Was he good with girls?

00:54:00.840 | - No, no, I remember what he told me.

00:54:04.120 | He says, you know, you gotta understand one thing.

00:54:07.280 | They're looking for guys too.

00:54:08.760 | That's all.

00:54:11.880 | - Girls are looking for guys too.

00:54:12.720 | - Yeah, absolutely. - Yeah, it's a competitive game.

00:54:15.800 | - Yeah, don't worry about it, don't be so shy.

00:54:18.440 | - So that little flame of love that we talked about,

00:54:21.920 | in all the shapes that it takes in our life,

00:54:24.240 | did he talk to you about that,

00:54:26.840 | that that could be taken advantage of,

00:54:28.520 | that that could be used, or was it implied?

00:54:31.520 | - Yeah, but it was not very focused, not in great detail.

00:54:36.520 | So we talked about personal stuff, and dislikes.

00:54:41.520 | He gave me tasks.

00:54:43.240 | For instance, when my friend and I hitchhiked

00:54:46.880 | from East Germany all the way down to Bulgaria,

00:54:50.280 | he told me to write a report about it, what I saw.

00:54:53.160 | So fundamentally, he wanted to see how well I can write,

00:54:57.840 | and how well I can report, how well I observe.

00:55:02.900 | He also asked me to write some profiles

00:55:06.560 | about fellow students.

00:55:08.120 | I don't believe that was for them to give him to the Stasi.

00:55:11.040 | It was just like, how well do I characterize people?

00:55:14.640 | That's important when you're talking about,

00:55:17.440 | when I was in the US, active in the US,

00:55:20.480 | I operated as a spotter, so I did exactly that.

00:55:23.220 | I wrote profiles about people.

00:55:25.380 | He also gave me some tasks to do that were rather unpleasant.

00:55:31.160 | He would give me an address and a name

00:55:38.040 | of the people who lived at the address.

00:55:42.520 | And he told me to go there, ring the doorbell,

00:55:46.160 | and find out something about a relative

00:55:48.960 | who lived in West Germany.

00:55:50.280 | That is undercover exploration, right?

00:55:54.920 | So you go, you make up a story,

00:55:56.800 | and somehow win the confidence of your target

00:56:01.160 | to tell you something that you wanna know.

00:56:03.400 | - Did that come naturally to you?

00:56:05.960 | - No, no, I hated it.

00:56:07.000 | - The charisma involved?

00:56:08.760 | Which part did you hate?

00:56:09.600 | - Yeah, charisma, I think, I didn't know that I had it.

00:56:12.300 | (laughs)

00:56:13.140 | - It took you some time to discover.

00:56:14.960 | - Because, you know, I always was,

00:56:17.440 | and I still am, to some degree, a bit shy.

00:56:20.060 | I lost a lot of the shyness after moving to the South,

00:56:24.040 | because, here in the United States,

00:56:26.100 | because you don't have to be shy, you know?

00:56:29.400 | (laughs)

00:56:31.360 | - You can let your love shine.

00:56:33.560 | - That's exactly right.

00:56:34.880 | But anyway, I hated doing that, but I did it well.

00:56:38.880 | I still remember, so I, in those days, I had a beard,

00:56:42.940 | and I rang the bell, and--

00:56:45.960 | - Tall, handsome fellow?

00:56:47.200 | - Yeah, and I looked the part,

00:56:50.040 | I said, "I'm a sociology student, and I'm doing a survey."

00:56:54.440 | And I asked a whole bunch of questions,

00:56:56.280 | "Would you like to answer the questions?"

00:56:58.840 | "No problem."

00:57:00.600 | And then I directed the conversation

00:57:04.120 | to the lady's private life,

00:57:06.760 | and she actually gave me information,

00:57:09.960 | she volunteered information that I wanted to know.

00:57:13.600 | - Beautiful.

00:57:14.420 | - I did well, and the other one that I didn't like,

00:57:17.080 | but I also did well with,

00:57:18.880 | when Herman drove me around the city

00:57:23.280 | and showed me a building, and he said,

00:57:25.060 | "Find out what organization is in there, what they do,

00:57:29.380 | "and maybe get to know some people."

00:57:30.820 | And I did that pretty well also.

00:57:33.400 | You have to be inventive to come up with a cover story,

00:57:38.900 | and I've always been quite inventive.

00:57:43.900 | I'm a storyteller at heart, and I didn't know it then,

00:57:48.560 | but--

00:57:49.820 | - But there was still something unpleasant about it.

00:57:51.900 | - Yes, yes.

00:57:52.740 | - Which part was unpleasant?

00:57:53.780 | - Well, the shyness, and then,

00:57:55.700 | I wasn't very comfortable lying.

00:57:59.020 | I became comfortable down the road,

00:58:01.140 | but I was brutally honest,

00:58:05.580 | and never hid anything of me.

00:58:10.080 | But over time, you lose that uncomfortable feeling,

00:58:16.740 | and you rationalize that you gotta do it.

00:58:22.460 | There's only one way, right?

00:58:23.740 | And you're serving a good cause.

00:58:25.460 | - So you were talking to Herman for a year and a half?

00:58:28.180 | - A year and a half.

00:58:29.220 | - And then, how did that progress?

00:58:31.300 | - Yes, so he finally, I guess he sent a report

00:58:36.020 | to headquarters in Berlin,

00:58:38.380 | and then he sent me on a three-week

00:58:42.020 | quote-unquote practice trip to Berlin.

00:58:45.900 | This was the first time when I had a conspiratorial meeting,

00:58:50.900 | where I had an address and a time and a code phrase,

00:58:55.940 | and I met another agent.

00:58:58.980 | His name was Boris.

00:59:01.220 | These names were meaningless.

00:59:02.820 | They were all cover names, right?

00:59:04.740 | - So what was the code, and the meaning?

00:59:06.340 | What was then, can you give a little more detail?

00:59:08.540 | - That code, I don't remember.

00:59:10.260 | - Not the code, but what do you mean by code?

00:59:13.140 | So what was--

00:59:13.980 | - I tell you, the code we used when I met,

00:59:17.500 | while I was active,

00:59:18.620 | I would approach the other person who I thought

00:59:23.140 | may be the person I wanna meet.

00:59:25.340 | We both had something with us or on us

00:59:30.340 | to make us more likely to be the right person.

00:59:34.000 | And I would ask him the following questions.

00:59:39.280 | Excuse me, I'm looking for Susan Green.

00:59:43.980 | And he would answer, yes, you must be David.

00:59:47.820 | Stupid.

00:59:49.660 | If I ask a stranger, they would look at me.

00:59:55.180 | How could I help you?

00:59:56.340 | So I know it's the wrong guy.

00:59:58.580 | - It's just a low probability

01:00:00.060 | that the right thing would be said.

01:00:01.540 | - Oh, absolutely.

01:00:03.140 | - And it seems like a safe statement

01:00:05.300 | if it's not the right person.

01:00:06.780 | - Exactly right.

01:00:07.620 | - It would just come off absurd or crazy or whatever.

01:00:10.740 | - You would have made a good secret agent.

01:00:12.540 | You know exactly--

01:00:13.380 | - How do you know I'm not?

01:00:14.380 | (laughing)

01:00:17.140 | We'll discuss this.

01:00:18.140 | I'm dressed like one.

01:00:21.340 | Actually, yeah, were there any dress code?

01:00:25.060 | - No, just fit in.

01:00:26.660 | - Fit in, no matter what.

01:00:27.700 | And then be creative.

01:00:29.420 | - Yes. - Figure out ways to fit in.

01:00:30.580 | - Right.

01:00:31.660 | So anyways, he gave me some tasks

01:00:33.580 | and we, and he, since I had rented a room in a house,

01:00:38.100 | he gave me Western literature to read.

01:00:41.460 | And we spent time together.

01:00:45.220 | And there was a practice run to West Germany.

01:00:54.540 | Actually, there were two.

01:00:55.860 | And that was very important.

01:00:58.540 | In hindsight, I figured that out.

01:01:00.460 | So I traveled to West Germany, no, not to West Berlin

01:01:06.540 | with an East German passport that was stamped

01:01:09.620 | that that individual was allowed to go to the West.

01:01:13.300 | And there was a part of the border

01:01:18.020 | that was only guarded by Soviet troops.

01:01:23.420 | And that's where they smuggled me into West Germany.

01:01:26.300 | I got on the subway and then appeared in West Berlin.

01:01:31.300 | No Americans, no Brits, no French knew that I had entered.

01:01:37.820 | - Forged documents or not?

01:01:39.460 | - No, no, this was an East German passport.

01:01:41.860 | It was real.

01:01:42.700 | - Okay. - Okay.

01:01:43.740 | So, and the first trip, all they wanted me to do

01:01:47.940 | is just walk around, smell the air,

01:01:52.580 | have a beer or whatever and eat a sausage and then come back.

01:01:56.540 | The second trip, I had a task,

01:02:00.340 | very similar to the one that I had back in Jena,

01:02:04.100 | to ring the doorbell someplace and talk to some people.

01:02:08.100 | And that worked very well also.

01:02:10.460 | - I should mention that you talk about that,

01:02:14.700 | you know, eat a sausage, drink some beer.

01:02:17.580 | I suppose that's a good test too,

01:02:19.940 | to see how you behave under Western,

01:02:23.420 | like when first introduced to the Western culture.

01:02:25.740 | Like, this is why I might not make a good agent,

01:02:29.860 | is when I first came to the United States in the supermarket

01:02:34.340 | I like bananas, as many bananas as I wanna eat.

01:02:38.980 | That, I think that would break me.

01:02:44.060 | - It's a shock.

01:02:44.900 | - Just, it's a shock to have access to Western culture.

01:02:48.860 | You're getting very close to the reason

01:02:51.860 | they actually made me do these two practice trips.

01:02:55.860 | When I first emerged on West Berlin territory,

01:03:01.100 | I felt highly uncomfortable.

01:03:03.860 | That was the enemy, right?

01:03:06.260 | And I saw the cops everywhere,

01:03:07.540 | and even those cops had like light blue uniforms,

01:03:11.300 | not the, they weren't standouts.

01:03:13.460 | So I was wondering, you know, if they knew that,

01:03:15.460 | you know, I had like KGB on my forehead.

01:03:18.900 | - So you were paranoid that they would know,

01:03:20.260 | they would see.

01:03:21.100 | - I was scared, but I overcame that.

01:03:24.020 | - So that's, can we just linger on that?

01:03:25.620 | Because I suppose that's a natural,

01:03:28.700 | like if I give anybody on the street the mission

01:03:31.540 | to do the mission you had to do, is they would be paranoid.

01:03:35.580 | That's a natural human feeling is,

01:03:38.300 | am I being watched, do they know?

01:03:40.120 | Like if you try to steal something from a store,

01:03:44.300 | there's going to be a feeling like,

01:03:47.620 | are they watching me, are the cameras watching,

01:03:49.180 | are the people watching me,

01:03:50.020 | they all know, that kind of stuff.

01:03:51.900 | So you have to overcome,

01:03:52.740 | or you have to be somehow rugged and robust

01:03:55.860 | to that kind of feeling in order to overcome it.

01:03:57.500 | - Yes, exactly.

01:03:58.700 | So, and something very interesting happened

01:04:02.780 | while I was being trained in Berlin.

01:04:04.660 | I met a classmate of mine from high school,

01:04:07.540 | and he confided to me that he was recruited by the Stasi

01:04:12.460 | to become a spy, go as a spy to West Germany.

01:04:16.260 | And he also had this practice trip,

01:04:19.060 | and he peed in his pants.

01:04:20.620 | He went back and told him, I can't do that.

01:04:23.580 | - Just from the terror, the-- - Yes.

01:04:25.980 | - That paranoia.

01:04:27.100 | - Now this guy's career was over.

01:04:30.820 | He had an engineering degree, he was a pretty smart guy.

01:04:35.820 | He was just for the rest of his life,

01:04:39.680 | and he's still alive I believe,

01:04:40.820 | floating around and trading in model railroads

01:04:45.660 | and stuff like that.

01:04:46.500 | - You mean, do you think that experience broke him?

01:04:49.220 | - No, they wouldn't let him back in.

01:04:51.180 | - Oh, I see.

01:04:52.020 | They, oh.

01:04:53.540 | - Yeah.

01:04:54.380 | - So it's a test that if you fail, you pay the price.

01:04:56.820 | - I had no idea that something bad would happen

01:05:01.820 | if I failed that test, but I didn't.

01:05:03.820 | - Yeah.

01:05:04.980 | - I didn't fail.

01:05:05.820 | So, and this led then to the offer, all right?

01:05:10.720 | And after, you know, Boris was happy with me,

01:05:14.040 | and he told his boss, who was most likely

01:05:16.240 | the head of the KGB in East Berlin,

01:05:20.520 | and I had an appointment to meet--

01:05:22.800 | - In East Germany.

01:05:24.160 | - Yes, in East Germany, yeah, all of East Germany.

01:05:26.760 | - Yes. - That's right.

01:05:28.520 | An appointment to meet with him,

01:05:30.660 | and as we walk into the room, there was this huge desk

01:05:35.400 | and a little guy sitting behind it.

01:05:37.760 | Very, very, just like little and unimpressive.

01:05:42.760 | - Nice.

01:05:45.960 | - A lot of paraphernalia, like, you know,

01:05:47.800 | had a bust of Dzerzhinsky on his desk

01:05:51.560 | and some paintings, Lenin and so forth.

01:05:56.140 | But when the guy opened his mouth,

01:05:59.020 | he went like, whoa.

01:06:01.780 | Huge psychological energy.

01:06:06.200 | He spoke only Russian.

01:06:08.120 | Now, and initially he would, you know,

01:06:10.960 | start the bat with five minutes worth of propaganda,

01:06:13.480 | why we're doing what we're doing.

01:06:14.960 | I didn't need that.

01:06:16.360 | I understood most of it, but when I didn't understand,

01:06:21.320 | I'd ask Boris to translate.

01:06:23.320 | And then he sprung it on me, and I was not prepared.

01:06:27.680 | He said, "So what, are you in or not?"

01:06:29.580 | And I was, no, I hadn't made up my mind.

01:06:34.780 | I wasn't expecting that would come.

01:06:36.580 | So I said to him, "I'm not really trained.

01:06:42.600 | "You know, there's a lot of things I need to learn."

01:06:44.920 | And I came up with a couple of really stupid things.

01:06:47.000 | One, not so stupid, but the other one was,

01:06:49.280 | I don't know why I said that.

01:06:50.960 | I said, for instance, I need to learn how to drive a car

01:06:53.800 | and to type with a typewriter.

01:06:55.800 | And he got really annoyed and he said,

01:07:00.320 | "Don't worry about it, we'll train you.

01:07:02.840 | "But I gotta tell you, we need people who are decisive.

01:07:06.340 | "So you got until tomorrow noon to give Boris your decision."

01:07:11.340 | That made for a sleepless night.

01:07:14.340 | - So what was going through your mind?

01:07:17.220 | - Well, I had, this was almost 50/50.

01:07:22.220 | I knew I was gonna have a huge career, a good career.

01:07:26.940 | I was on my way because I was already employed

01:07:32.780 | by the university as an assistant professor.

01:07:35.120 | - So that career would be to become a professor,

01:07:37.680 | become a 10-year professor, be a world-class.

01:07:40.360 | - Yes, Jena had become my hometown.

01:07:43.600 | I really loved the place.

01:07:45.080 | It was my oyster.

01:07:47.300 | And my family was my basketball team.

01:07:52.300 | I was--

01:07:54.200 | - You love playing basketball.

01:07:55.680 | - Oh, absolutely. - So that's what you mean.

01:07:56.920 | Yeah, so this is home.

01:07:58.000 | This is home, this is where your love is.

01:07:59.720 | - This was home.

01:08:01.120 | - Did you understand that the choice involved leaving

01:08:03.800 | the home behind? - Yes, yes.

01:08:05.920 | And the one thing I didn't have,

01:08:09.360 | the two things I didn't have,

01:08:10.860 | an emotional relationship with my mother,

01:08:13.640 | and I didn't have a steady girlfriend at the time.

01:08:16.960 | - I think Freud would have a lot to say about that,

01:08:18.880 | but yeah, go ahead.

01:08:19.920 | But the connection between those two, but yes.

01:08:21.920 | (Roger laughs)

01:08:23.200 | Yeah, I'm sure.

01:08:24.300 | - By the way, my friend, Guntante,

01:08:26.200 | the one who worked for the Stasi,

01:08:27.960 | was also, the Stasi tried to recruit him as an agent,

01:08:31.240 | but he had a love relationship at the time,

01:08:34.480 | and he said politely, "No, I won't, I can't."

01:08:38.880 | - So you didn't have, that's the one thing

01:08:40.840 | that really could-- - Would have helped me.

01:08:43.000 | - Would have held you to this place's love.

01:08:45.200 | - So you got the career on the one hand,

01:08:47.020 | my basketball team, the town that I would be part

01:08:50.160 | of the ruling elite of, and then we had this great adventure

01:08:54.440 | and the ability to contribute to the victory,

01:08:59.440 | the worldwide victory of communism,

01:09:01.800 | and stick it to the Nazis, and of course,

01:09:04.600 | the feeling that you're really special.

01:09:07.280 | - Yeah, James Bond.

01:09:08.640 | - Yeah.

01:09:09.480 | - What's, (laughs)

01:09:11.840 | the question, do I wanna be a tenure professor

01:09:14.020 | or James Bond?

01:09:14.960 | - Yes, and-- - As funny as that sounds,

01:09:17.560 | that was probably a difficult decision.

01:09:19.140 | - It was a difficult decision, but fundamentally,

01:09:21.420 | it wasn't, and it wasn't my zeal to help the revolution.

01:09:26.420 | It was my, what they called, what the Stasi was looking for,

01:09:32.960 | the KGB was looking for in a character

01:09:37.960 | that they would send over, a well-controlled inclination

01:09:41.320 | to adventure, okay?

01:09:42.920 | (laughing)

01:09:45.760 | - Yeah, yeah, James Bond, what do you say?

01:09:48.960 | And the love of women, yeah.

01:09:50.880 | - It was, (laughs)

01:09:53.020 | yes, I gotta put this in right here,

01:09:56.240 | because I'm telling people I have two things

01:09:58.680 | in common with James Bond.

01:10:00.700 | These are my initials, JB,

01:10:02.680 | and I got the girl too, three times.

01:10:07.380 | (laughing)

01:10:08.960 | - Yeah, I mean, and that's adventure.

01:10:11.120 | - Yeah, and the ability to travel to the West,

01:10:15.400 | because the West was closed off to us.

01:10:17.860 | We could go to foreign countries,

01:10:19.520 | but they all had to be communist countries.

01:10:21.840 | You know, I wanted to see Paris,

01:10:23.140 | because I had fallen in love with Honoré Balzac,

01:10:28.140 | who wrote a phenomenal set of novels that I just ate up.

01:10:34.880 | And so when I eventually did go to Paris,

01:10:37.700 | I knew all the places already,

01:10:39.240 | because he described them all.

01:10:40.700 | But anyway, so that one, it was 51-49,

01:10:47.120 | but eventually, when you do the side-by-side

01:10:50.440 | intellectual comparison, that doesn't work.

01:10:55.820 | It becomes a tie, and then you just go with your gut,

01:10:58.580 | and I said, "Hey, I'm in."

01:11:00.000 | - So now that you successfully passed the test,

01:11:02.440 | and you were sitting with this unimpressive man,

01:11:06.500 | and had the invite, and had to sleep on it,

01:11:09.740 | and have made the decision to join, what was next?

01:11:15.980 | - I was just told that I was being recruited

01:11:18.540 | by the State Department of East Germany,

01:11:20.580 | I was going to become a diplomat.

01:11:23.060 | I must have had some paper, but I forgot,

01:11:27.100 | because just by saying so, that wouldn't have worked.

01:11:31.380 | - There's some kind of document that says you can't--

01:11:32.980 | - Yeah, yeah.

01:11:33.820 | - And that was the only entanglement you had to that place.

01:11:36.780 | No love, no, just the basketball.

01:11:39.800 | - Basketball, giving up basketball was huge for me.

01:11:43.060 | I loved playing that game.

01:11:45.220 | I started playing basketball when I was 18.

01:11:48.260 | That's a little late.

01:11:49.620 | - Are you better offensive, defensive?

01:11:51.300 | What do you like more?

01:11:52.500 | Do you like to shoot from a distance?

01:11:53.980 | Do you like to play up?

01:11:55.260 | - I was a runner.

01:11:56.380 | I was very quick on my feet, and I was a good jumper, too.

01:12:01.380 | I typically played the four position.

01:12:06.660 | - What's that?

01:12:08.140 | - Forward.

01:12:09.060 | - Oh, the forward position.

01:12:09.900 | - Forward position.

01:12:10.900 | But anyway, so that was the hardest for me to give up.

01:12:15.900 | But the other thing that I remember I had to do

01:12:19.860 | to hand in my party document

01:12:21.780 | to the party secretary of the university,

01:12:25.140 | and he made a comment,

01:12:27.740 | "Yeah, we probably won't hear much about you,

01:12:29.860 | "but we know that you're gonna do something very important."

01:12:33.260 | So he sort of had an inkling that I'm gonna go

01:12:37.460 | someplace undercover or something like that.

01:12:40.780 | And then I packed my bags and got on a train to Berlin

01:12:45.780 | for another one of those secret meetings

01:12:48.580 | with my new handler, Nikolai.

01:12:52.640 | And here came another test

01:12:56.220 | that would have been quite easy to fail.

01:13:00.380 | So I had lived in Jena for six years in a dorm.

01:13:06.260 | Even when I became an employee of the university,

01:13:10.660 | they didn't have apartments.

01:13:12.820 | I was still living in a dorm in a single room

01:13:15.980 | with a bed, a chair, and a table,

01:13:18.300 | and a toilet down the hallway.

01:13:21.380 | So I figured, you know, Berlin KGB,

01:13:24.020 | I'm gonna get a nice apartment, right?

01:13:26.820 | And so Nikolai took me into his car,

01:13:31.660 | we started talking a little bit,

01:13:33.020 | and then he said, "I have a task for you already.

01:13:35.720 | "Your first task is to find yourself a place to live."

01:13:40.180 | I mean, I don't think I showed it in my face,

01:13:43.240 | but my heart dropped like down into my pants.

01:13:48.240 | I knew this was nearly impossible

01:13:52.220 | because there was a severe shortage of housing

01:13:55.060 | in everywhere in Germany, East Germany.

01:13:58.800 | And all the apartments and homes

01:14:01.120 | were controlled by the government.

01:14:03.440 | There were long waiting lists.

01:14:06.540 | I knew couples that were promised

01:14:09.700 | maybe to get an apartment five years down the road.

01:14:13.780 | So, and then they would postpone the decision

01:14:17.180 | to have a child.

01:14:18.180 | Anyway, this was impossible.

01:14:19.820 | Well, you know, but this was a test.

01:14:23.560 | Because I had to be inventive.

01:14:26.660 | Now I had to figure out how to get out

01:14:29.100 | of an impossible situation.

01:14:30.860 | I didn't realize it then at all.

01:14:33.560 | I just went with the flow, you know?

01:14:35.580 | What do I do?

01:14:37.160 | So what I did, I went, I took the train,

01:14:41.700 | the city train to the very last stop,

01:14:46.360 | a little town called Aachner.

01:14:49.300 | And I wandered around in that town

01:14:51.160 | and knocked on doors and asked people

01:14:53.420 | if they knew where somebody might have a place to live.

01:14:56.840 | And after a couple of hours,

01:14:58.060 | somebody said, "There's this lady that,"

01:14:59.820 | and they gave me the address.

01:15:02.460 | And I talked to the lady and she said,

01:15:04.260 | "I happen to have a place where you might be able to stay."

01:15:08.860 | It was an outbuilding.

01:15:10.340 | I don't know what it served.

01:15:13.900 | It was not a garage, it was concrete.

01:15:16.500 | And it had a bed and a chair,

01:15:21.340 | running cold water, and a stove, a cold stove.

01:15:25.820 | That was going to be my--

01:15:28.020 | - Pretty basic, pretty basic.

01:15:29.540 | - Pretty basic?

01:15:30.380 | Are you kidding me?

01:15:31.620 | - That's the--

01:15:32.780 | - Toilet across the yard, of course.

01:15:35.260 | - Yeah, well, all the essentials.

01:15:37.300 | What are you complaining about?

01:15:38.220 | So you were right.

01:15:39.260 | (both laughing)

01:15:40.500 | You had to run the,

01:15:42.820 | James Bond had to run a special operation

01:15:45.380 | out of the outhouse.

01:15:46.860 | - Yes, to my credit, and I think that

01:15:50.380 | established part of my reputation,

01:15:54.060 | I didn't complain at all to Nikolai.

01:15:56.860 | - That was part of the test, probably.

01:15:58.540 | - Yeah, I just told him, "I found something."

01:16:01.060 | And so, for six months, I would get up in the morning,

01:16:05.980 | get on the train, and walk around in the city,

01:16:09.180 | did some operational stuff, operational training.

01:16:14.180 | I went to the library, did a lot of reading in the library.

01:16:18.060 | And then I found a basketball team that I could join,

01:16:20.580 | so at least I could take a shower twice a week.

01:16:23.380 | And apparently,

01:16:29.820 | it took about six months that I was still on probation,

01:16:33.620 | because after six months, Nikolai, one day,

01:16:37.060 | we were still meeting in his car,

01:16:39.540 | he handed me a key, and he said,

01:16:42.220 | "I'm gonna take you to your new apartment."

01:16:44.380 | Now, and I didn't know this, now I was really in, okay?

01:16:51.100 | Imagine the hurdles you have to jump over,

01:16:54.780 | and how many times you can fail, but you know.

01:16:56.860 | - But not complaining, not asking questions.

01:17:00.300 | - Yes.

01:17:01.220 | - I mean, that was something you've written about,

01:17:04.420 | I think you wrote that bosses do not like

01:17:06.220 | to hear complaints or problems, they prefer solutions.

01:17:09.260 | - That's right.

01:17:10.100 | - So what was your interaction like with the bosses?

01:17:12.340 | Does that essentially represent

01:17:17.340 | the way it went forward as well?

01:17:19.900 | - Yeah, I--

01:17:20.740 | - No complaints, get to solve the problem.

01:17:22.180 | - No complaints, no arguments, no, I know this better.

01:17:25.580 | I was taking it all in.

01:17:27.580 | Now, the technical guys, they taught me something

01:17:30.900 | I didn't know that made sense.

01:17:32.400 | What Nikolai, some of the stuff that he taught me

01:17:36.900 | was somewhat questionable, he was a generalist,

01:17:42.400 | and there's some things he didn't know really well.

01:17:44.660 | So I could have asked, probed a little bit, but I didn't.

01:17:48.740 | So I just played along.

01:17:50.820 | So this new apartment was, it was a studio,

01:17:54.380 | it had a kitchen with running cold water,

01:17:58.900 | and the bathroom was just one flight down the toilet,

01:18:03.100 | not a bathroom, one flight down the stairs.

01:18:06.620 | - It's an upgrade.

01:18:07.540 | - It was a big upgrade.

01:18:09.220 | And he gave me, I think he gave me

01:18:11.300 | a thousand mark to buy furniture.

01:18:13.360 | And in that place, actually I also bought a TV

01:18:17.340 | and started watching West German television.

01:18:19.060 | So I finally had a decent place to stay.

01:18:25.060 | And my training in Berlin took about two years.

01:18:30.060 | - What was the training, what were the interesting aspects

01:18:34.300 | to the training?

01:18:35.340 | What were sort of, if you do an overview systematic

01:18:38.300 | of what was the training process, what was difficult,

01:18:40.780 | what are some insights that generalize

01:18:43.340 | to the training process of what it takes to be a KGB spy?

01:18:46.860 | - Right, so let me start with the tradecraft.

01:18:51.740 | So I was taught Morse code, that took a while.

01:18:55.080 | I was instructed in how to use a shortwave radio

01:19:01.940 | and to receive the shortwave transmissions with Morse code.

01:19:06.940 | I was taught an encryption and decryption algorithm,

01:19:13.900 | manual algorithm.

01:19:15.420 | - Yep.

01:19:16.260 | - You might be interested that eventually I figured out

01:19:21.380 | at least one of the patterns.

01:19:23.220 | The algorithm was such that, and this was all about digits.

01:19:28.220 | And the algorithm was such that in the end,

01:19:32.820 | the digits that were used to decipher other digits

01:19:37.820 | that were sent to me by a shortwave radio,

01:19:42.060 | there were, let's say if there were 100 digits,

01:19:46.040 | there were an equal number of ones, twos, threes,

01:19:48.380 | fours, fives, six, and seven, and up until zero.

01:19:51.600 | And I was told that these algorithms,

01:19:56.460 | these manual algorithms were good for about 300 uses.

01:20:00.020 | After that, they could still be deciphered.

01:20:03.140 | I'm assuming nowadays that wouldn't take as much.

01:20:06.860 | - Yeah, with computers for sure.

01:20:08.900 | But there's probably, they're probably designed

01:20:11.900 | in a way that you can manually,

01:20:15.060 | sort of it's efficient and convenient to use them manually.

01:20:18.860 | - Well--

01:20:19.700 | - It's not to optimize cryptographic security,

01:20:22.300 | it's to optimize, it's like to balance security

01:20:25.220 | and humans being able to actually--

01:20:27.180 | - Yeah, no, I gotta disagree.

01:20:28.620 | It was neither efficient nor convenient.

01:20:30.700 | - Okay.

01:20:31.540 | - It took a long time.

01:20:32.420 | - So it wasn't deciphered.

01:20:33.620 | - When what was significantly easier to do,

01:20:37.160 | but that would require you to have

01:20:40.140 | spy paraphernalia with you.

01:20:41.860 | This is what's called a one-time pad.

01:20:44.580 | So you have the set of numbers on a sheet of paper

01:20:48.900 | that had to be developed.

01:20:51.220 | I had to use iodine to make those numbers visible.

01:20:54.900 | Those are known to be unbreakable

01:20:58.900 | unless they are used multiple times,

01:21:01.020 | the same sheet of paper.

01:21:03.260 | Because the person who encrypts has the same set of numbers

01:21:06.180 | as the person who decrypts.

01:21:08.540 | And one-time use, you cannot figure out what the message is.

01:21:14.540 | - Oh, interesting.

01:21:15.380 | But this is a quick way to communicate

01:21:17.220 | from one person to another one time.

01:21:19.780 | - Well, one time, I had a pad with multiple sheets of paper.

01:21:23.980 | And the reason that they gave me a manual one

01:21:27.020 | is because I literally, I had only,

01:21:31.660 | when I wound up in the United States,

01:21:34.020 | I had only one thing with me that only a spy can have.

01:21:39.380 | And that was a writing pad

01:21:42.100 | where the first 10 pages or so were impregnated

01:21:46.280 | with a trace of a chemical that was used for secret writing.

01:21:49.420 | But you really would have to know

01:21:51.760 | what you're looking for to, you know,

01:21:53.100 | you see this pad, it was bought at Walmart.

01:21:56.180 | - Can you explain a little further?

01:21:58.060 | What is the chemical here that, what are we talking about?

01:22:01.580 | So how, I don't understand how it's possible

01:22:03.940 | to have a physical pad that does the encryption

01:22:07.140 | without any computing.

01:22:09.460 | I, how does it encrypt?

01:22:10.860 | - So, no, no, it doesn't do any work.

01:22:14.060 | So, the communication, the encrypted communication

01:22:19.060 | was a set of groups of five, five digits,

01:22:24.580 | and then another five, and there's always a gap in between.

01:22:29.620 | And so let's say if I get this radio transmission,

01:22:34.740 | I write them all down, and then I use my,

01:22:37.900 | develop my algorithm, and then I do mathematics,

01:22:40.540 | either addition or subtraction.

01:22:42.740 | The resulting set of digits

01:22:44.860 | had, then had a one-to-one correlation to letters.

01:22:48.700 | - And this is an easy way to then do the correlation.

01:22:51.100 | - Yes, yes.

01:22:52.700 | - Well, that's cool.

01:22:53.540 | That's, and you're saying the algorithm was not efficient.

01:22:56.320 | It was not--

01:22:57.160 | - Oh, the manual, it took a long time,

01:22:58.980 | and you can't make an error.

01:23:01.700 | - Right, would you know where, can you,

01:23:05.220 | is it easy to debug?

01:23:06.800 | - No, you-- - No, you do it twice.

01:23:08.960 | - You do it twice, and that's how you check.

01:23:10.460 | - If it's identical, then you know.

01:23:12.580 | - But like, if it's not-- - If it's not,

01:23:13.780 | then one is right and the other is wrong,

01:23:15.940 | you gotta do it again. - So, you just

01:23:16.780 | don't make mistakes. - No, that's right,

01:23:17.900 | and I really didn't.

01:23:19.440 | But anyway, so I was learning that.

01:23:23.180 | I was also told that I was required

01:23:29.180 | to become proficient in another language,

01:23:32.380 | and they gave me a choice, and I picked English.

01:23:35.940 | That's-- - What was the other one?

01:23:37.180 | - Oh, no, they gave me, pick one, French,

01:23:39.060 | you know, whatever is spoken in the West.

01:23:40.940 | - Got it.

01:23:41.780 | What would be second to you?

01:23:44.260 | Would you think French because of Paris?

01:23:46.620 | What would you, why English?

01:23:49.260 | - English was a no-brainer because I was a straight A

01:23:53.340 | student in English without studying.

01:23:55.900 | It came so easily to me.

01:23:58.100 | So, that's why I chose it, right?

01:24:02.100 | So, that was that.

01:24:03.420 | Then I was taught the basics of counter-surveillance,

01:24:08.420 | you know, some trickery and surveillance detection routes

01:24:16.140 | where you wander around in a city for three hours

01:24:21.340 | and determine whether you're being followed or not.

01:24:26.020 | That requires you to plan the route very well.

01:24:29.300 | I give you one example that will illustrate that.

01:24:32.820 | My favorite spot, when I was in Moscow,

01:24:37.660 | I did a lot of that also.

01:24:39.500 | And my favorite spot was, it was a not well-traveled road.

01:24:45.500 | It went down the hill and curved,

01:24:50.580 | and at the bottom of the hill, there was a telephone booth.

01:24:54.780 | And when you open the door and pick up the telephone,

01:24:59.020 | you have to look back.

01:25:00.500 | So, it wasn't like this, right?

01:25:01.940 | It wasn't a giveaway.

01:25:03.060 | This was normal, it was natural.

01:25:04.500 | So, I could see if somebody would come walking after me.

01:25:08.940 | You know, these kinds of things.

01:25:10.060 | Or you would use public transportation,

01:25:15.060 | big buildings where you needed to use an elevator

01:25:21.420 | and see who was, because surveillance,

01:25:25.460 | the object of surveillance is to never lose sight

01:25:28.740 | of the individual who you're surveilling,

01:25:30.900 | because at that point, you may miss the window

01:25:34.020 | where he does something that you're looking for.

01:25:36.900 | So, somebody always has to come close, right?

01:25:40.500 | - Did you have to also study surveillance?

01:25:44.780 | - No, only counter surveillance.

01:25:46.420 | And what helped me, in all my training,

01:25:50.820 | you know, I would have a competition

01:25:55.260 | with the folks that were coming,

01:25:57.780 | that were following me, and me.

01:26:00.620 | And I beat them every time.

01:26:01.980 | They were at a disadvantage,

01:26:04.380 | because one of them always had to be close.

01:26:06.820 | And if you saw the same face twice,

01:26:09.420 | you knew that you were being followed.

01:26:11.640 | And I had a very, very good memory for faces.

01:26:15.460 | - So, basically, figure out a fixed route,

01:26:18.140 | and then a fixed route that allows you to survey the area,

01:26:24.860 | and then record the faces you've seen inside your mind.

01:26:28.740 | And if you see multiple times a single face,

01:26:31.740 | that's a bad sign.

01:26:32.980 | - And they could use different clothes.

01:26:37.040 | What they didn't have was face masks.

01:26:41.700 | The CIA does, nowadays.

01:26:44.020 | They can give you a different face within seconds.

01:26:46.580 | Yeah. (laughs)

01:26:49.620 | - So, how... (laughs)

01:26:53.180 | I mean, again, you talk about paranoia.

01:26:55.180 | Is that a big part of the job?

01:27:02.340 | Counter surveillance?

01:27:04.860 | Like, being constantly paranoid that you're being watched?

01:27:07.860 | - Yeah, I was supposed to--

01:27:09.020 | - Isn't that quite stressful?

01:27:10.500 | So, is that one of the...

01:27:12.340 | Is that actually an effective way to operate?

01:27:14.500 | - No, but it sort of becomes a routine.

01:27:17.140 | I was told to do it while in the US, once a month.

01:27:22.540 | - Okay, it's like a cleaning out.

01:27:24.060 | - Oh, not every day, no, no, no, no, no.

01:27:26.260 | Once a month, or before I would, say,

01:27:28.940 | mail a letter with secret writing.

01:27:30.900 | So, I was sure that nobody saw me

01:27:33.940 | put an envelope into a post box.

01:27:38.580 | - So, this is one of the tools in your toolbox.

01:27:40.420 | So, there's Morse code, there's the decryption,

01:27:42.780 | and the encryption, there's the counter surveillance.

01:27:45.180 | - Photography.

01:27:46.120 | Making micro dots.

01:27:49.720 | You know what a micro dot is?

01:27:52.380 | Well, that's...

01:27:53.220 | You take a photograph,

01:27:59.020 | and you use a microscope in reverse,

01:28:03.100 | and make that photograph really small.

01:28:07.480 | So small that it's like the head of a pin

01:28:11.260 | that can be used to hide under a postage stamp.

01:28:16.560 | In reality, I knew how to make 'em,

01:28:21.340 | but in reality, they never asked me

01:28:23.500 | to make use of that technique.

01:28:26.380 | - It's sort of an encryption mechanism for photographs.

01:28:29.620 | - Yeah, so what we do nowadays,

01:28:31.220 | is embed code in PDFs and stuff like that, right?

01:28:36.220 | - Yeah, beautiful, okay.

01:28:37.860 | All right, so that was a learning, a training process,

01:28:41.340 | both in the physical space, and sort of algorithmically.

01:28:45.980 | Is there other things?

01:28:46.820 | - Oh, you bet.

01:28:48.700 | Interestingly enough, I was...

01:28:51.780 | The first book I was given to read

01:28:55.180 | was the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

01:28:59.820 | - Oh, so understand.

01:29:02.220 | That's interesting, 'cause you said

01:29:03.220 | you had to read Western literature.

01:29:04.700 | - Yeah, that too.

01:29:05.700 | - How much reading, so history,

01:29:07.980 | how much history, politics, geopolitics, culture?

01:29:11.420 | - Not much more, but they made me read that document.

01:29:15.540 | Other than that, I wasn't supposed

01:29:17.740 | to study the Soviet Union, I wasn't supposed.

01:29:20.100 | And that was not, and I didn't,

01:29:21.740 | when they sent me to Moscow, it wasn't to learn Russian,

01:29:24.780 | right, it wasn't to learn English.

01:29:27.340 | The second document they gave me

01:29:29.060 | was the Constitution of West Germany.

01:29:31.700 | And then I got lots of magazines and stuff like that.

01:29:35.900 | As I told you, I was also told to

01:29:38.540 | watch West German television,

01:29:42.100 | which I embraced with a vengeance,

01:29:46.980 | because it was better than East German.

01:29:49.700 | So I would get up in the morning

01:29:50.980 | and have a little breakfast

01:29:52.100 | and watch the German version of Sesame Street.

01:29:55.500 | - And that helps you get an understanding of the culture,

01:30:02.020 | because if you have to do any kind of interaction,

01:30:06.580 | any kind of spying, then you have to be able

01:30:09.020 | to effectively integrate yourself.

01:30:10.020 | - Well, you also have to know,

01:30:11.620 | and that would've been easier

01:30:13.420 | if they had sent me to West Germany,

01:30:16.660 | you know, all the soccer teams,

01:30:18.500 | stuff that everybody knows.

01:30:20.180 | When I came to the US, I knew very little stuff

01:30:22.420 | that everybody knows, that's why I had to be very cautious

01:30:24.900 | and take it in over time.

01:30:27.700 | Anyway, and the last thing I wanna mention is

01:30:30.980 | I was strongly encouraged to expand

01:30:36.660 | my cultural education.

01:30:40.460 | In other words, go to visit museums,

01:30:43.860 | go to the theater, not so much movies, opera,

01:30:48.860 | read books from all kinds of authors.

01:30:54.020 | That was important to them.

01:30:55.060 | And once a month I had to write a report, what I did.

01:30:58.260 | But the interesting thing, there was no curriculum,

01:31:02.900 | there was no agenda, there were no check marks.

01:31:05.300 | It was all ad hoc.

01:31:06.660 | Now you do this, and then you do that.

01:31:11.820 | And a lot of this also, they relied on my initiative.

01:31:15.780 | Again.

01:31:16.620 | - I mean, that's part of the evaluation too.

01:31:17.780 | - You bet.

01:31:19.260 | - Are you able to have creative,

01:31:20.500 | it's interesting that they're developing

01:31:22.740 | a James Bond type of character here,

01:31:24.580 | which is, what's the reason to go to the opera?

01:31:27.780 | As you become cultured in a certain kind of way,

01:31:30.740 | where perhaps that makes you more charming,

01:31:34.380 | more charismatic in terms of your ability

01:31:36.540 | to integrate yourself in different situations.

01:31:38.340 | - You're absolutely right.

01:31:40.980 | I was, when I came to the US,

01:31:45.980 | after about two years roughly,

01:31:50.540 | I was cultured enough to not make a bad impression

01:31:57.340 | at a diplomatic soiree in Washington, D.C.

01:32:02.300 | I mingled freely.

01:32:03.780 | - Yes.

01:32:04.620 | - All right?

01:32:05.460 | And so the whole idea was for me to sort of

01:32:08.660 | reach into the upper realms of society

01:32:12.540 | where the targets would be juicier than the worker bees.

01:32:17.200 | - And how did you end up in Moscow?

01:32:22.300 | Why, how?

01:32:23.620 | What is that journey?

01:32:24.660 | - Well, so I told you, I started studying English.

01:32:29.020 | So I started back from scratch.

01:32:30.760 | They paid for a tutor, and I went from English 101.

01:32:36.140 | I went through that in a couple of months,

01:32:38.500 | and then I got another guy with whom I expanded this.

01:32:43.140 | We had conversations rather than working from a textbook.

01:32:46.680 | And I worked like a maniac.

01:32:48.660 | I threw myself into the study of English

01:32:51.660 | like you wouldn't believe.

01:32:55.660 | And my inspiration came from Vladimir Lenin.

01:33:00.260 | I had read somewhere in a book

01:33:01.660 | that when Lenin was in exile, he studied German.

01:33:05.820 | And he learned 100 German words every day,

01:33:09.620 | new German words.

01:33:11.260 | So I started reading newspapers,

01:33:13.500 | and every word that I didn't know,

01:33:14.740 | I wrote down on an index card, German, English,

01:33:18.580 | and I piled them up.

01:33:21.020 | And so I really learned 100 new English words every day.

01:33:25.340 | I know this because I counted them.

01:33:28.100 | And I had a system how to do this.

01:33:30.060 | So you take your index card, and you have five categories.

01:33:34.700 | That's a really good way to learn rote by rote.

01:33:37.760 | So you got category one, that's the new ones,

01:33:41.100 | and you got category five.

01:33:43.220 | So you start with five.

01:33:46.500 | Five you already had right four times.

01:33:50.260 | If you have it right again, it goes into the archive.

01:33:54.700 | - Oh, like long-term cold archive, yeah.

01:33:57.980 | - Four, if you get it right, it goes to five.

01:34:01.620 | If you get it wrong, it gets relegated to three.

01:34:04.980 | And so you go through this,

01:34:06.700 | and occasionally I would throw the archive things

01:34:13.100 | back into one.

01:34:14.220 | So I really acquired a phenomenal vocabulary.

01:34:20.000 | When I was done with my English,

01:34:21.260 | my vocabulary was significantly higher

01:34:23.260 | than the average American because I didn't discriminate.

01:34:27.440 | Whatever word I didn't know, I learned,

01:34:29.580 | which is not necessarily the best way

01:34:31.460 | because English has a lot of synonyms, right?

01:34:35.060 | - Yeah.

01:34:35.900 | - And one synonym is usually the preferable one.

01:34:39.420 | And when I first interacted with people,

01:34:44.300 | I very often used the one that wasn't as good.

01:34:48.220 | And people found that I have an interesting way of talking.

01:34:52.240 | They didn't know what that meant, but--

01:34:53.980 | - Yeah, so it builds a good foundation for a language.

01:34:57.100 | It's getting a large vocabulary.

01:34:58.740 | - Yes. - It's really interesting.

01:35:00.140 | There's something I do which is called space repetition,

01:35:02.380 | which is a programmatic way of doing this kind of system

01:35:04.900 | that you've developed yourself,

01:35:06.660 | which is if you successfully remember a thing,

01:35:10.780 | it's going to be a longer time

01:35:12.780 | before it brings it up to you again.

01:35:14.300 | - Yeah.

01:35:15.140 | - Now, that requires a computer

01:35:17.380 | to keep track of the information.

01:35:19.980 | If you have cars, that's a really interesting pile system.

01:35:22.900 | One, two, three, four, five, you upgrade it.

01:35:24.820 | One, two, three, four, five.

01:35:26.380 | Maybe I wouldn't go to the archive

01:35:28.540 | and go to pile one right away.

01:35:31.140 | Maybe I would go to, I don't know,

01:35:34.220 | pile five, perhaps, is probably the right place to put it,

01:35:38.020 | 'cause you have to go through that full step again.

01:35:40.500 | But that is a really powerful way to learn,

01:35:44.140 | definitely language, but also facts,

01:35:45.940 | like people that go to medical school--

01:35:46.780 | - Yes, disconnected facts.

01:35:48.620 | - Yeah.

01:35:49.460 | - And you pretty much, when you're done,

01:35:51.980 | you know what you know.

01:35:53.220 | - Yeah.

01:35:54.060 | - You don't have to-- - But then again,

01:35:54.880 | to use it, to integrate it into the music of language,

01:35:57.460 | that's more difficult, that's what you're talking about.

01:35:58.820 | - Yeah, exactly right, exactly right.

01:36:00.140 | - There's a charm, I mean, maybe it's not good

01:36:03.180 | for "Spycraft," but there's a charm to this kind of,

01:36:06.500 | to having an accent and using words incorrectly,

01:36:10.880 | but confidently, there's a,

01:36:12.620 | because language isn't a simple formula.

01:36:15.700 | Language is the play of words.

01:36:17.380 | So actually using the incorrect synonym,

01:36:25.060 | instead of saying I'm cold, saying I'm chilled,

01:36:28.060 | or something, like using offbeat words

01:36:31.540 | can actually be part of the charm.

01:36:33.140 | So it's interesting, if you can learn

01:36:34.420 | how to use that correctly,

01:36:35.720 | 'cause I know a bunch of people with a Russian accent,

01:36:39.180 | and I feel like they get away with saying

01:36:41.300 | a lot of ridiculous shit,

01:36:43.300 | because they're able to sort of leverage

01:36:45.300 | the charm of the non-sequiturs.

01:36:48.500 | - And by the way, by the way, just one thing,

01:36:50.980 | you talked about using a computer.

01:36:53.220 | When I had my first personal computer,

01:36:56.340 | I actually wrote a program that does that.

01:36:58.980 | - That does that.

01:36:59.900 | By the way, when was that?

01:37:01.660 | 'Cause you were a world-class programmer for a time,

01:37:05.980 | you were a very good programmer.

01:37:07.780 | When did the--

01:37:08.620 | - First PC was probably 1984.

01:37:11.060 | - 1984, when did you fall in love with programming?

01:37:13.660 | - When I went to college in the US,

01:37:16.140 | and part of the core curriculum was that you were required

01:37:19.620 | to take a course in computer,

01:37:22.220 | and it was mostly just talk,

01:37:24.780 | but we also had to learn a language.

01:37:27.260 | We had to write some programs in Fortran,

01:37:31.260 | which was what, five at the time?

01:37:33.100 | It was a dumbed-down Fortran.

01:37:37.260 | But listen, so I see the ability,

01:37:42.020 | I see what you can do with this.

01:37:44.380 | I programmed a sine curve,

01:37:46.380 | and then I divided the sine curve

01:37:50.140 | into really, really small rectangles,

01:37:53.060 | and then ran the program,

01:37:54.780 | and it came up with the right area.

01:37:57.420 | Wow, this is great.

01:37:59.740 | - That's incredible, it's incredible.

01:38:01.540 | It's so powerful.

01:38:02.780 | You're creating a little helper

01:38:07.140 | that helps you understand the world,

01:38:08.660 | to help you analyze the world, and so on.

01:38:11.060 | We'll return to that, 'cause it's interesting.

01:38:13.580 | You have so many interesting aspects to your life,

01:38:15.580 | but Moscow, so--

01:38:17.060 | - Yeah, no, let me, how I was sent to Moscow.

01:38:20.820 | Okay, so one day I had a visitor from Moscow,

01:38:23.700 | and he came to visit me in my apartment

01:38:27.260 | together with Nikolai, and we talked,

01:38:31.460 | and then he said, "So how's your English?"

01:38:33.060 | I said, "I pulled a book from the shelf,"

01:38:35.580 | and he says, "I can read that

01:38:36.420 | "without the help of a dictionary."

01:38:38.620 | Oh, that's interesting.

01:38:41.660 | And he said, "You know what?

01:38:43.860 | "We're gonna send you a tape recorder,

01:38:46.140 | "and you just talk, say something,

01:38:48.940 | "you know, for 20 minutes,

01:38:49.940 | "whatever you wanna talk about."

01:38:51.700 | They sent this thing, and two weeks later,

01:38:55.660 | I was on a plane to Moscow.

01:38:57.180 | Because I also spoke English,

01:39:03.260 | sort of the British variety of English,

01:39:05.580 | with not a strong German accent,

01:39:07.700 | because I've always had the ability

01:39:10.380 | to imitate others and sounds.

01:39:13.460 | It was an innate ability.

01:39:15.380 | I would, you know, when we were in a lab,

01:39:19.180 | and as students, I would very often do monologues

01:39:24.180 | imitating East German comedians.

01:39:26.900 | You know, I just-- - Oh, like impressions.

01:39:28.220 | - Yes, yes.

01:39:29.300 | I'm not good enough to make a living out of it,

01:39:32.380 | but that raised some interest,

01:39:37.380 | and so they sent me to Moscow.

01:39:40.180 | That was the first time on a plane, by the way.

01:39:42.780 | And I had a conversation with two ladies

01:39:46.300 | who spoke English.

01:39:47.140 | One was a Russian professor at Lomonosov University,

01:39:52.140 | she was obviously KGB, that was her cover.

01:39:55.060 | And the other one was an American-born lady.

01:39:58.780 | - Oh, by the way, she was an actual professor,

01:40:00.500 | and you're using that as the cover,

01:40:01.540 | or is it just a story?

01:40:03.540 | - No, she said she was a professor.

01:40:06.140 | She may have taught there, too.

01:40:07.940 | - That's an interesting distinction.

01:40:09.340 | - Yeah. - One is like a story

01:40:10.580 | you tell people. - No.

01:40:11.740 | - And one is like you legit are doing the thing,

01:40:14.180 | but are also as a cover. - Yeah.

01:40:16.060 | - Anyway, that's an interesting aspect

01:40:20.580 | of how to be a good liar.

01:40:22.820 | You might as well live the lie.

01:40:24.980 | - Yeah, exactly right.

01:40:26.620 | So, and the other one was a middle-aged,

01:40:30.660 | the Russian was pretty young,

01:40:31.780 | the other one was middle-aged American.

01:40:34.340 | And so we talked for maybe a couple of hours,

01:40:38.180 | and then they withdrew, and I was left alone.

01:40:42.160 | Eventually, my liaison, he came back in,

01:40:46.560 | and he said, "It was close, but the American thinks

01:40:49.920 | "you can actually become, you get close enough

01:40:54.920 | "to becoming a native speaker of American English."

01:40:58.880 | And he said, "The Russian was very doubtful."

01:41:01.720 | And so, I think wishful, it was a tie, literally.

01:41:06.040 | Wishful thinking prevailed.

01:41:08.000 | So, within a couple of weeks, I was moving to Moscow.

01:41:13.000 | - And what was the task in Moscow?

01:41:18.400 | How long were you in Moscow? - Two years.

01:41:21.900 | - And what was the task there?

01:41:24.840 | Is it training, or is it espionage?

01:41:27.040 | - No, it was training.

01:41:28.720 | So, it was, the American born became my tutor.

01:41:33.320 | I met with her twice a week.

01:41:36.400 | I also listened to a lot of BBC,

01:41:41.160 | shortwave BBC Worldwide.

01:41:43.720 | I read more English books.

01:41:46.440 | - So, a lot of that was about the language

01:41:48.040 | and the culture of English, American--

01:41:50.600 | - And I did phonetics exercises every night.

01:41:55.600 | I had a tape that was about a half hour long,

01:42:03.060 | and they would say a word, and I would repeat the word,

01:42:06.340 | say a word, repeat the word.

01:42:07.660 | And it was mostly about the vowels, by the way,

01:42:10.460 | most of the accent, and particularly,

01:42:14.100 | let's say, coming from German into English,

01:42:17.260 | but also Russian, it's the vowels.

01:42:19.220 | - Are we talking about the,

01:42:20.560 | so you would have a single word--

01:42:22.380 | - A word. - Like apple,

01:42:23.380 | and you would just say apple.

01:42:24.980 | - Yes. - And American English

01:42:27.020 | or British English? - No, American English.

01:42:28.860 | And I give you one example that almost nobody gets right,

01:42:33.860 | the difference between hot and hut.

01:42:36.400 | You know what they're-- - Yeah, yeah, yeah,

01:42:39.780 | hot and hut, yeah.

01:42:40.620 | - And in German speakers, it's very tough.

01:42:43.100 | - You know which one, for everyone it's different.

01:42:46.140 | For example, I could say this on a podcast,

01:42:48.980 | something that my brother struggles with,

01:42:51.260 | I struggled with too when I first came to this country

01:42:53.900 | to learn English, is there's differences,

01:42:56.460 | there's embarrassing differences,

01:42:58.860 | like beach and bitch, right?

01:43:02.180 | And you get so, as a young kid, also, you get so nervous,

01:43:05.020 | I don't wanna say the wrong thing.

01:43:06.720 | I can also say that, this is almost a jokey thing,

01:43:11.060 | but there's a famous philosopher, Immanuel Kant,

01:43:15.620 | and you can guess which other word is very similar to that.

01:43:18.980 | So there's a nervousness about,

01:43:22.320 | the what is that, that's interesting.

01:43:24.640 | I mean, and Germans probably have a different tension

01:43:29.560 | of what is hard to learn,

01:43:31.620 | the difference between the pronunciation of the vowels

01:43:33.820 | or the control of the vowels.

01:43:35.340 | Yeah, it's interesting.

01:43:36.500 | So you had to really master this daily exercise.

01:43:39.420 | - And this was my discipline,

01:43:41.580 | I did this every night, routine, boring as hell.

01:43:45.620 | So English was the focus.

01:43:47.660 | And I also had interaction with some agents

01:43:51.180 | who had operated in the United States as diplomats

01:43:54.500 | on a diplomatic cover.

01:43:56.240 | They would come and talk to me a little bit

01:43:58.160 | and tell me, and sort of prepare me what was ahead of me.

01:44:03.080 | And then I did a whole lot of operational training,

01:44:05.640 | particularly surveillance detection, that was big.

01:44:09.020 | They also taught me how to drive a car in Moscow.

01:44:11.740 | - Finally, the one skill you needed.

01:44:13.880 | What's surveillance detection?

01:44:15.600 | - Okay, so this is when you find out

01:44:18.080 | whether you're being followed.

01:44:19.900 | - Ah, got it, got it, got it.

01:44:21.040 | So it's the antiserv, yeah, gotcha.

01:44:22.880 | - The abbreviation that's used in--

01:44:25.680 | - Congress, yeah.

01:44:27.080 | - Yes, in intelligence circles is SDR,

01:44:31.320 | surveillance detection route.

01:44:33.120 | When they say that, you know what that is.

01:44:35.680 | And that was it.

01:44:37.400 | And a few other things, one-offs, for instance,

01:44:42.400 | I was once taught to read silhouettes of ships.

01:44:47.680 | When you see a ship from a distance,

01:44:51.160 | what kind of a ship it might be.

01:44:53.680 | They thought this would come in handy, actually.

01:44:57.960 | There was in 1982, Andropov started a campaign,

01:45:02.960 | it was, now I forget the name,

01:45:06.840 | Operation Something Something,

01:45:08.200 | where everybody who was in the West

01:45:09.800 | was supposed to look for signs

01:45:12.320 | that the West was getting ready for a war.

01:45:16.760 | And everybody had an object to pay attention to.

01:45:21.760 | I had a harbor, a military harbor in New Jersey,

01:45:26.920 | near Red Bank, it was called Earl Weapon Station.

01:45:35.240 | And the code name for that was early,

01:45:37.420 | so they asked me to just wander by there

01:45:41.700 | to see if there was something unusual going on.

01:45:45.000 | Because the Soviet Union, at that point,

01:45:47.300 | it was Ronald Reagan, were really afraid

01:45:48.960 | that Reagan was gonna start a war.

01:45:51.440 | They were absolutely, 100% afraid of him.

01:45:54.600 | - Is there something memorable to you

01:45:57.680 | on a personal level, on a philosophical level,

01:45:59.920 | about your time in Moscow?

01:46:01.860 | Something that kinda stays with you,

01:46:03.640 | outside of the training stuff, maybe?

01:46:06.520 | Like the details of the training.

01:46:07.600 | - You'll love the answer.

01:46:08.900 | You will love the answer.

01:46:10.160 | I was-- - You already guessed.

01:46:14.680 | - I was given tickets to two performances by Americans.

01:46:19.440 | There was a theater troupe that played Our Town.

01:46:23.680 | And then there was this, I forget the name of the guy,

01:46:27.160 | but you may not be old enough,

01:46:30.440 | have you ever watched Hee Haw?

01:46:32.120 | - Maybe.

01:46:34.720 | - It was a country music show, real kitschy,

01:46:39.040 | but the star of Hee Haw was giving a concert

01:46:44.920 | in Moscow, and I guarantee you,

01:46:46.960 | at least half the audience were KGB.

01:46:48.880 | (laughing)

01:46:51.360 | - Oh, man.

01:46:52.480 | - And at the other end,

01:46:53.840 | the opposite of a highlight was my visit

01:47:01.760 | to the mausoleum where Lenin is still today.

01:47:11.560 | That was so, that was a nothing.

01:47:15.440 | He was my hero, but he looked like a wax figure.

01:47:20.040 | And you walk by there, there was nothing inspirational.

01:47:24.960 | It was not a religious experience, nothing.

01:47:27.640 | It was a big old nothing.

01:47:29.280 | - Is that, did your faith and belief in communism

01:47:35.080 | start to crumble at some point here?

01:47:36.920 | - No. - Is that around,

01:47:37.960 | that was still pretty strong.

01:47:39.560 | - What I did notice that the standard of living in Moscow

01:47:43.880 | was significantly lower than in East Germany.

01:47:46.400 | In the supermarkets, you could expect,

01:47:52.280 | with reliability, that you can find canned fish

01:47:55.960 | and mineral water, everything else was whatever.

01:48:00.200 | And if you saw a line at a store, you just line up.

01:48:04.040 | You don't even ask what they have,

01:48:05.520 | because if you don't like it, somebody else will.

01:48:08.000 | It was not poverty, but it was close to poverty.

01:48:13.000 | There were a lot of drunken men in the streets.

01:48:16.680 | And-- - This is the '80s?

01:48:19.840 | - No, this is the late '70s. - Late '70s.

01:48:22.440 | - Mid to late '70s.

01:48:23.760 | And also, they had these high-rise apartment buildings

01:48:28.760 | that looked pretty good from the front,

01:48:31.160 | but you went into the backyard, ouch.

01:48:35.120 | - Yeah, you're describing my childhood here, okay.

01:48:37.560 | (both laughing)

01:48:39.920 | But it's interesting, even with the professor,

01:48:42.280 | even with everything else, it's interesting,

01:48:46.040 | because I think the standard of living was much lower,

01:48:49.000 | you're right, even in Moscow.

01:48:50.440 | - Yeah, absolutely was.

01:48:52.080 | The one thing that they always had,

01:48:54.360 | at least in my days, in those two years,

01:48:56.560 | there was always fresh bread in the bullet tinoyas.

01:48:59.120 | - Yeah. - Always.

01:49:00.600 | - Yeah, that's probably one of the memories

01:49:02.800 | I have of childhood is, well, you're hungry a lot,

01:49:07.280 | but when you eat is bread.

01:49:10.000 | - Yeah, and the bread was good.

01:49:11.240 | - It was good.

01:49:12.080 | I mean, I actually wonder, I wonder how good it was,

01:49:17.040 | but I remember it being incredibly good.

01:49:19.160 | - To me, it was really good.

01:49:21.160 | And you had it from white to very dark

01:49:24.160 | and all the varieties.

01:49:26.040 | The other thing that was good was,

01:49:27.720 | if you knew where to get it,

01:49:30.000 | stolichnaya was four rubles.

01:49:33.520 | (Ruby laughing)

01:49:36.080 | Not only is it good vodka, but it's cheap vodka.

01:49:39.880 | I like it.

01:49:40.720 | - Yeah, but you had to know where,

01:49:42.400 | this would be like holes in the wall someplace.

01:49:45.360 | - Well, I think a lot of the way they operate,

01:49:47.520 | I wonder if East Germany is this way,

01:49:49.040 | but a lot of the ways that Moscow operated,

01:49:50.800 | is you kinda, you had to know.

01:49:54.160 | - Yes.

01:49:55.000 | - Like there's a very kind of,

01:49:56.920 | if you make the right friends,

01:50:00.320 | if you give money to the right guy,

01:50:02.760 | the guy, the friend of the friend of the friend

01:50:04.640 | is gonna hook you up and there's a culture,

01:50:07.560 | this is how you work around a very big bureaucracy.

01:50:11.080 | - Underground economy.

01:50:12.160 | - Yeah, underground economy, yeah.

01:50:14.240 | You have to, which is, boy,

01:50:17.920 | such a stark contrast between that and the United States,

01:50:24.560 | the capitalist system.

01:50:25.920 | Yeah, that was a very big culture shock to me,

01:50:31.560 | to understand the different,

01:50:34.240 | fundamentally different way of life,

01:50:36.760 | but the interesting thing is,

01:50:38.960 | human nature pervades both systems.

01:50:42.760 | There's something about the Russian system

01:50:45.240 | that reveals human nature more intensely

01:50:48.280 | because of the underground nature of it,

01:50:51.000 | because you get to deal with greed and trust

01:50:54.240 | and all those kinds of things.

01:50:55.280 | In the United States, there's much more power

01:50:58.160 | to the rule of law, so there's rules

01:51:00.480 | and people follow those rules.

01:51:02.520 | They get to break the rules nonstop.

01:51:04.840 | - Well, in East Germany and Russia, I believe,

01:51:07.560 | theft, if you could get away with it,

01:51:11.240 | was part of your economic activity.

01:51:13.200 | - Yeah. (laughing)

01:51:15.040 | - I have a friend who I went to school with

01:51:18.600 | up until my fourth year and we reconnected

01:51:23.040 | and he told me how he survived.

01:51:24.920 | He would just steal stuff and then sell it or trade it.

01:51:29.480 | - Yeah, theft, I mean, it's a relative concept.

01:51:32.920 | - You are taking stuff.

01:51:34.520 | - Bribery, all those kinds of things.

01:51:36.640 | People, you know, corruption, you know,

01:51:41.160 | it's a relative term, no, I'm just kidding.

01:51:42.600 | I mean, it is, you have to work around

01:51:44.520 | the giant bureaucracy about the giant corruption.

01:51:48.640 | Corruption builds on top of corruption

01:51:50.280 | and then it just becomes this giant system

01:51:52.560 | that's unstable, as you talked about.

01:51:55.640 | - One last word. - Yes.

01:51:58.560 | - The two years in Moscow taught me how to be alone.

01:52:03.560 | I had no social interaction.

01:52:07.640 | - Not with friends, not with women, not--

01:52:10.760 | - No, the only interaction I had

01:52:13.920 | was with the folks that trained me.

01:52:16.440 | So I was alone, it was a lonely two years.

01:52:20.640 | - For a person who loves love, is that difficult?

01:52:22.960 | - Yes, but that prepared me for my first year

01:52:26.400 | and first and second year in the United States

01:52:29.160 | because I could not interact socially

01:52:32.200 | without giving away that something was wrong with me.

01:52:35.120 | I had to learn how to be an American.

01:52:37.440 | They didn't teach me in Moscow, they couldn't.

01:52:40.040 | - So the first two years in America,

01:52:43.400 | you had to kind of listen more than talk.

01:52:45.840 | - Oh, you bet, the very first year, I couldn't even work

01:52:48.800 | because I had to acquire the documents,

01:52:51.520 | a social security card and a driver's license

01:52:55.120 | to get a job and then when I had the job,

01:52:58.280 | I worked as a bike messenger.

01:53:01.680 | That gave me a good opportunity to listen

01:53:04.760 | because these people, they weren't very curious about me.

01:53:11.360 | - What was your name in East Germany?

01:53:13.480 | What was your name in Moscow?

01:53:15.000 | What was your name in America?

01:53:16.960 | - Okay, so the name I was given at birth

01:53:19.280 | is Albrecht Dittrich.

01:53:21.560 | Nobody-- - So sexy when you speak

01:53:23.200 | in German, the German accent.

01:53:24.880 | - I hated that name, Albrecht, I didn't like it.

01:53:28.480 | It was very rarely used.

01:53:30.320 | My mother named me after a famous German painter,

01:53:34.480 | Albrecht de Dürer.

01:53:35.960 | My cover name in Moscow was known as Dieter

01:53:39.160 | and in the United States, I became Jack Barsky.

01:53:44.440 | In between, I used a whole bunch of other names

01:53:47.200 | that were associated with false passports

01:53:50.480 | that I used.

01:53:53.760 | One of the names that I remember is William Dyson

01:53:56.280 | because that is the name that was on the Canadian passport

01:54:00.480 | I used to enter the United States.

01:54:02.200 | - So how did you enter the United States?

01:54:03.960 | Can we take the journey from Moscow to the United States?

01:54:06.680 | - Yeah. - What was the assignment?

01:54:08.920 | What was that leap?

01:54:11.880 | What was like-- - Just one thing

01:54:15.000 | in between, I had a three-month practice trip to Canada.

01:54:20.520 | That was a good idea.

01:54:22.920 | And I gotta tell you this one thing that happened there.

01:54:25.560 | Okay, so because the one thing that I like to tell people

01:54:30.560 | nowadays is one of the secrets to happiness

01:54:34.400 | is the ability to make fun of the worst situations

01:54:36.960 | that you're in. - Yes, absolutely.

01:54:38.240 | - You see the humor. - Yes.

01:54:39.560 | - Okay, so here comes something quite humorous,

01:54:42.320 | in hindsight at least.

01:54:43.520 | One of the tasks that I had in Canada

01:54:47.600 | was to acquire a birth certificate.

01:54:49.560 | But the name was Henry Van Randel

01:54:54.600 | who was born someplace in California

01:54:56.880 | and I was supposed to write a little letter

01:55:00.520 | saying I'm Henry Van Randel,

01:55:01.960 | please send me a copy of my birth certificate.

01:55:04.160 | The fee is enclosed.

01:55:05.280 | And I lived in a small hotel,

01:55:11.440 | so the return address, it wasn't visible

01:55:14.200 | that it was a hotel, that was important.

01:55:16.800 | So, and it took like three weeks and I get nothing,

01:55:20.800 | four weeks I get nothing.

01:55:22.140 | Eventually I got annoyed and I mustered the courage

01:55:28.140 | to call them up for my pay,

01:55:33.960 | for when I called up the office registrar,

01:55:36.480 | whatever they were called in this town in California

01:55:40.000 | and I yelled at them, I says, you got my money,

01:55:42.200 | where's my birth certificate?

01:55:44.620 | Well, a couple of weeks later it came.

01:55:47.080 | So I see the envelope, it says Henry Van Randel, yes.

01:55:50.960 | I had prepared the caretakers of the hotel

01:55:55.960 | that I'm expecting a letter from my friend.

01:55:59.480 | So I went up to my room, I opened it and I was like,

01:56:02.800 | yes, yes, this is a success.

01:56:04.520 | And I opened this thing and it was a copy

01:56:08.520 | of a birth certificate but it was stamped

01:56:10.640 | with big letters across in red, deceased.

01:56:14.540 | Now think about it, so here's a dead person

01:56:16.620 | who was asking for his birth certificate.

01:56:20.380 | I had the presence of mind to leave, okay?

01:56:26.340 | I went to a couple of other cities,

01:56:27.660 | I should have left the country.

01:56:30.020 | But I know that the Royal Mounted Police was following me

01:56:34.260 | and I was given that information by the FBI later on.

01:56:37.580 | - Oh, you were able to at least suspect that at the time?

01:56:43.500 | - I-- - Through the--

01:56:44.780 | - I knew that there was trouble.

01:56:48.740 | My counter surveillance route--

01:56:54.460 | - SDR. - Yes, didn't discover anything.

01:56:57.320 | So I kept on going, I was supposed to visit two more cities

01:57:02.320 | and they were always one step behind.

01:57:06.660 | What is interesting to me is that they didn't catch me

01:57:10.140 | on the way out.

01:57:11.880 | You have to show your passport to the airline.

01:57:14.660 | I mean, I was known by name, I would then,

01:57:19.900 | because I had to give that to the hotel, right?

01:57:22.260 | And I escaped with-- - So how would they--

01:57:25.940 | - By air. - They would have to keep you

01:57:28.500 | on a list, right?

01:57:29.660 | - Yeah. - Yeah, that's interesting.

01:57:33.060 | But that requires like a good computerized updated system

01:57:38.060 | to track all that stuff. - Yeah, this was Swiss Air, so.

01:57:41.620 | - Well, you got lucky. - Yeah.

01:57:43.400 | - Part of life is luck. - You bet.

01:57:45.460 | So, and other than that, the trip to Canada

01:57:50.460 | was a big success because it gave me the culture shock

01:57:56.680 | that I needed to not be blown out of the water

01:58:04.280 | when I get to the United States.

01:58:06.460 | - So you hopped a few places in Canada--

01:58:08.720 | - Yeah. - And then Swiss Air.

01:58:11.320 | I even had a relationship with a young lady.

01:58:13.520 | - Canadian, French-Canadian, regular Canadian?

01:58:18.440 | - French-Canadian, and she gave me a book,

01:58:23.440 | Winnie the Pooh, because we went to see the movie,

01:58:25.960 | and then she wrote a dedication, she says,

01:58:28.120 | "To the nicest German I've ever met."

01:58:30.720 | - Was she lying? - No.

01:58:32.760 | - Or you don't know. (laughing)

01:58:36.840 | Speaking of "Spycraft," and that led to "Heartbreak," too?

01:58:40.920 | - No, that was sexual.

01:58:45.920 | I was not, at that point--

01:58:49.520 | - Ready for love? - No.

01:58:50.760 | - Ready to return to that old--

01:58:52.640 | - Well, and I was already married in Germany.

01:58:56.560 | Okay, that woman I loved.

01:58:58.480 | - We should return to this. - Yeah.

01:59:00.280 | (laughing)

01:59:01.160 | - So, Swiss Air, where did you land in the United States?

01:59:06.160 | - Oh, when I came, where did I land?

01:59:09.920 | An American Airlines flight from Mexico City to Toronto,

01:59:14.440 | but they made me deplane in Chicago.

01:59:19.520 | I have no idea, I think that was over-engineering.

01:59:22.040 | That didn't make any sense to me.

01:59:24.040 | You know, why can't a Canadian just take a flight

01:59:27.120 | from Mexico City?

01:59:28.160 | With this stopover, that's kind of nonsense.

01:59:31.720 | - Yeah, but okay, but nevertheless, that was it,

01:59:34.160 | and then you landed in Chicago.

01:59:36.080 | - Right.

01:59:37.560 | - And tell me the story in America.

01:59:39.040 | What was the day-to-day life?

01:59:40.560 | Now, this is, now you're a spy.

01:59:43.240 | - No, no, no, I gotta tell you another funny story.

01:59:46.280 | - Yes. (laughing)

01:59:48.000 | - So, it's another, there's two things that happened

01:59:51.800 | that could've ended my career as a spy right then and there.

01:59:56.480 | So, I'm arriving in Chicago in the evening.

02:00:01.480 | It's already dark.

02:00:07.040 | I had no idea what kind of a hotel to take,

02:00:09.680 | and I picked one out of Yellow Pages and got a taxi.

02:00:14.680 | When I gave him the address,

02:00:17.960 | he looked at me like a little funny.

02:00:20.440 | Whatever, what do I know?

02:00:22.200 | Just keep on going.

02:00:23.040 | I need to get sleep because I was extremely tense,

02:00:27.960 | having gone through customs and border control.

02:00:32.640 | So, and we are going in the southern direction,

02:00:35.920 | and I noticed that the neighborhoods

02:00:38.280 | became less and less inviting.

02:00:41.080 | Didn't know what that meant either.

02:00:42.960 | And I get, I enter the hotel.

02:00:46.080 | It was a five-story brownstone,

02:00:48.960 | and something else looked funny.

02:00:50.240 | So, the reception desk was protected by plexiglass.

02:00:54.520 | Not having enough background,

02:00:58.520 | I didn't know that this was unusual.

02:01:01.520 | Because all I knew that there was a lot of crime

02:01:03.640 | in the United States,

02:01:04.480 | so I thought maybe every hotel was like that.

02:01:07.160 | So, I go up into my room and drink a half a bottle

02:01:09.840 | of Johnny Walker Red because--

02:01:12.200 | - As one does, yeah.

02:01:13.560 | (laughing)

02:01:15.360 | - Because I was so damn tense, I just wanted to sleep.

02:01:17.800 | I wanted to get into a coma, which I did.

02:01:21.040 | And the next day I woke up with a head

02:01:23.560 | that was twice as big as, felt twice as big.

02:01:26.440 | But I was prepared.

02:01:28.040 | I had aspirin with me, so I killed the headache

02:01:31.160 | and went outside to see if I can get something to eat.

02:01:34.240 | And so, I was right smack in the middle

02:01:37.600 | of the south side of Chicago.

02:01:39.280 | I didn't know that the south side of Chicago existed.

02:01:41.680 | I found later, I found out where I was.

02:01:44.440 | So, it was time to go very quickly.

02:01:49.440 | Go up there, and at that point I decided

02:01:51.720 | I would register at the next hotel on the Jack Barsky.

02:01:56.720 | So, I went to the bathroom and I tried to kill off

02:02:03.840 | Mr. Dyson by burning his passport.

02:02:06.600 | Unfortunately, I was not trained in how to train passport,

02:02:12.400 | how to destroy passports.

02:02:14.280 | So, I tried to burn it, and these things were flame

02:02:19.440 | retardant, and it created a cloud of smoke.

02:02:23.720 | And I'm looking up there and there's a smoke detector.

02:02:26.720 | - Yeah, oh no.

02:02:28.480 | - Okay, so presence of mind, I threw this thing

02:02:30.640 | in the toilet and then took out a pair of scissors

02:02:33.920 | and cut it into small pieces and flushed it down.

02:02:36.760 | If that smoke alarm goes off, I'm busted, right?

02:02:40.760 | If some criminal steals, I had $6,000 on me in cash,

02:02:45.760 | steals either my passport or my money or both,

02:02:50.340 | I don't know what to do.

02:02:52.360 | - Yeah, you can't go to the authorities,

02:02:53.640 | you can't do anything.

02:02:54.480 | - There weren't any Russian Soviets in Chicago.

02:02:57.520 | - Do you have any contacts inside the--

02:02:58.720 | - No, there was no plan B for Chicago at all.

02:03:03.720 | That's an oversight.

02:03:07.120 | I shouldn't have gone to Chicago.

02:03:08.960 | They could have shipped me into San Francisco

02:03:13.960 | or Washington, D.C. because both of them had Soviets.

02:03:17.120 | My end goal was to go to New York, fine.

02:03:22.120 | I would have been a really, really dangerous agent

02:03:27.120 | if I had gone back and worked with the KGB

02:03:29.480 | 'cause I could have told 'em all the things,

02:03:32.020 | how to do it right, right?

02:03:33.400 | - So in that sense, there is some,

02:03:36.440 | given the scale of the KGB, there is some incompetence

02:03:41.040 | in the system. - Some?

02:03:42.280 | - A lot of incompetence. - With regard to preparing me

02:03:44.920 | to be an American, it was almost total incompetence.

02:03:48.160 | - Do you think that's representative of the way they operate

02:03:51.280 | is there's an incompetence to the logistics,

02:03:56.520 | to the strategies involved, all that kind of stuff?

02:04:00.320 | - Yeah, none of these guys had operated as illegals.

02:04:04.040 | They were outsiders to American society.

02:04:06.880 | They had interaction with Americans,

02:04:08.980 | but they all lived in New York.

02:04:12.160 | They lived in a compound in northern Manhattan

02:04:15.600 | where they all lived together with their families.

02:04:18.040 | And most of the time, they spent interacting with themselves,

02:04:22.520 | with their own people at work.

02:04:24.520 | - So they really didn't integrate well.

02:04:26.200 | - They did not know what it's like to be an American,

02:04:29.200 | to have a job, to live like an American.

02:04:33.240 | They didn't know it.

02:04:34.240 | - It's interesting that KGB didn't put a high value

02:04:37.540 | to that kind of integration.

02:04:39.000 | - They didn't know what they didn't know.

02:04:41.120 | And by the way, this was mutual.

02:04:42.840 | Do you think the CIA had good knowledge

02:04:46.000 | of the Russian culture?

02:04:47.240 | Uh-uh, same thing.

02:04:48.960 | And so there was a lot of lack of understanding

02:04:52.600 | because good intelligence could have possibly

02:04:55.840 | avoided some of the high tension situations

02:04:59.120 | that we had when in the '80s, we got close to nuclear war.

02:05:02.720 | - So good intelligence would be integrating yourself

02:05:06.700 | in society much, much deeper.

02:05:08.200 | - Yes, and understanding that Ronald Reagan

02:05:10.280 | was not a warmonger, but he was talking about the end times

02:05:13.840 | because he was a Christian.

02:05:16.440 | - But then that kind of integration can be dangerous

02:05:18.640 | because you start to question the propaganda,

02:05:21.800 | the narratives on which the KGB is built,

02:05:25.000 | on which the CIA is built.

02:05:26.240 | - And then they always had the option of ignoring

02:05:31.000 | the intelligence that they're getting, right?

02:05:33.440 | Yeah.

02:05:34.280 | - Well, let me ask you this question to jump around.

02:05:37.000 | There's a lot of conspiracy theories

02:05:38.880 | in this current climate, I mean, throughout history,

02:05:42.840 | but now especially.

02:05:44.160 | And some of the conspiracy theories put a lot of power

02:05:50.080 | in the hands of the intelligence agencies like CIA, FSB,

02:05:54.840 | Mossad, MI6.

02:05:58.040 | They're basically, the conspiracy theories go

02:06:00.760 | that they control the powerful people in this world

02:06:05.760 | and are able to thereby manipulate those powerful people

02:06:10.200 | and manipulate the populace in order to deliver

02:06:14.440 | different kinds of messages and so on.

02:06:16.480 | Given your experience with this kind of tension

02:06:19.920 | between competence and malevolence,

02:06:22.520 | would you say there's some truth

02:06:24.480 | to those conspiracy theories?

02:06:26.720 | - Not one way.

02:06:28.520 | I think there is collusion, there's collaboration,

02:06:31.980 | but I would think that, like for instance,

02:06:35.140 | some folks in the CIA and the FBI are being used

02:06:39.680 | by the ones that are really in power.

02:06:42.480 | Power is money, power is wealth.

02:06:44.320 | I know power is not--

02:06:47.920 | - But it can go both directions.

02:06:49.640 | You can acquire wealth first, which leads you to power,

02:06:53.040 | or you can acquire power first.

02:06:55.000 | - Yeah, power is also knowledge, I understand,

02:06:58.040 | and a position in society in the military

02:07:02.560 | or in intelligence, but I don't think it's a straight one way

02:07:05.200 | that all the intelligence agencies control

02:07:07.920 | the powerful people in their country.

02:07:09.640 | You see what's happening in Russia.

02:07:11.140 | I mean, Putin dominates his intelligence agencies, right?

02:07:17.160 | - Well, so the question is which way the direction goes,

02:07:21.520 | but you're saying that it's not one way flow of power.

02:07:25.640 | - I would think so, and I also believe it exists,

02:07:30.040 | but it's not as prevalent as, you know,

02:07:32.280 | not every conspiracy theory pans out,

02:07:35.360 | and most of them don't.

02:07:37.080 | They're just damn rumors,

02:07:38.240 | but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

02:07:39.740 | I guarantee you that they exist.

02:07:41.320 | There's collusion, there's people getting together,

02:07:43.760 | and not necessarily preparing a specific action,

02:07:48.760 | but more sort of a plan to go forward

02:07:52.400 | and maintain the position or even, you know,

02:07:54.840 | strengthen the position that they already have.

02:07:58.120 | - So KGB, but we can generalize this, FSB, CIA,

02:08:02.880 | do you think a KGB agent would kill someone

02:08:05.200 | against international law if they were ordered to do so?

02:08:08.360 | So we talked about-- - They did.

02:08:10.000 | They did.

02:08:13.120 | And there's a famous case of one,

02:08:18.120 | I think it's Vasily Kuklov, who defected.

02:08:24.040 | He was a killer, he was a trained killer,

02:08:25.760 | and he had done assassinations in other countries.

02:08:30.760 | He was sent to West Germany to kill a defector,

02:08:34.400 | a KGB defector, and he decided not to do it.

02:08:37.480 | He talked to the guy, and he said,

02:08:39.200 | "I'm supposed to kill you, I'm not,"

02:08:40.600 | and then he eventually wound up in the United States.

02:08:44.280 | I have a connection to this fellow

02:08:46.400 | because the KGB once asked me to go to California

02:08:50.520 | and see if the guy still lives and works there.

02:08:53.560 | And I found him, and we looked at each other.

02:08:58.560 | So it was an active KGB agent looking at a man

02:09:06.880 | that he didn't know was a KGB defector,

02:09:10.200 | looking at each other.

02:09:11.040 | Neither one knew who the other one was.

02:09:13.440 | I found out later.

02:09:14.520 | - But he was able to survive.

02:09:17.920 | - Yes, and there have been assassinations, not a lot.

02:09:22.920 | And you know that-- - That we know of.

02:09:27.800 | - A good point.

02:09:28.920 | - This is very difficult.

02:09:30.280 | The question is, how many lines are intelligence agencies

02:09:37.520 | willing to cross to attain, to achieve the goal?

02:09:42.520 | - I think none of these agencies have the ultimate line.

02:09:47.960 | I think eventually the last line will be crossed

02:09:52.600 | if they believe it's necessary.

02:09:56.360 | - Well, I think you can justify a lot of things,

02:09:58.400 | especially in this modern world with nuclear weapons,

02:10:00.600 | that you can justify that you're saving the world, actually.

02:10:03.600 | Let me ask a few difficult questions,

02:10:06.280 | and we'll jump back to your time in America,

02:10:08.200 | but Vladimir Putin has been accused

02:10:13.200 | of ordering the poisoning and assassination

02:10:16.520 | of several people, including Alexander Litvinenko early on,

02:10:20.760 | all the way to Alexei Navalny.

02:10:23.400 | Do you think these accusations are grounded in truth?

02:10:27.320 | And we will return to a couple more questions,

02:10:31.200 | maybe, above Vladimir Putin's early days in the KGB,

02:10:34.960 | which would be interesting.

02:10:35.880 | - Yeah, there's a phrase that I like to say,

02:10:39.800 | and in response, it's called plausible deniability.

02:10:43.240 | I don't think Putin gave a direct command to say, do that.

02:10:46.800 | He would just maybe muse.

02:10:48.200 | It would be nice if something were to happen.

02:10:50.960 | And then somebody picks it up and does it.

02:10:53.240 | - Is there, can you still man the case

02:10:57.720 | that Putin did not have direct or indirect involvement?

02:11:01.640 | - Who would know?

02:11:03.800 | Who would know?

02:11:05.800 | - Well, the international, the reputation,

02:11:09.360 | perhaps catalyzed by Putin himself

02:11:15.400 | is that he's the kind of person that would directly

02:11:19.440 | or indirectly make those orders.

02:11:21.600 | Perhaps the case there is he's somebody to be feared,

02:11:25.720 | and thereby you want that narrative out there.

02:11:28.680 | - But the act itself,

02:11:32.200 | the poisoning of Litvinenko,

02:11:36.000 | and oh, and then the assassination of the Bulgarian Markov

02:11:41.000 | and with the umbrella,

02:11:43.760 | and they all directly trace back

02:11:46.640 | to Russian Soviet intelligence.

02:11:49.680 | And so that's enough to be feared, right?

02:11:53.400 | My answer that I gave you is an educated guess.

02:12:00.400 | I can't pretend to know this for sure, but--

02:12:02.840 | - It's frustrating to me

02:12:04.240 | because there's a lot of people listening to this

02:12:06.120 | would say, would even sort of,

02:12:10.080 | would chuckle at the naive nature of the question.

02:12:13.880 | But if you actually keep an open mind,

02:12:17.040 | you have to understand what is the way

02:12:19.120 | that intelligence agencies function?

02:12:21.760 | Is it possible to the head of an intelligence agency

02:12:26.720 | not to make direct orders of that kind?

02:12:29.560 | Where there's a distributed--

02:12:30.800 | - No, the head of the intelligence agency

02:12:32.440 | would most likely give the order.

02:12:34.680 | - Even though it's compartmentalized.

02:12:36.320 | - Yeah, but not the head of state.

02:12:39.960 | - Maybe not the head of state.

02:12:41.460 | Although in the case,

02:12:45.720 | this is the case in the United States as well,

02:12:47.440 | but certainly is the case in Russia,

02:12:50.040 | there are close relationships

02:12:51.440 | between the head of the FSB and the GRU,

02:12:53.840 | and personal relationships, not just even--

02:12:56.760 | - The head of the FSB who is now in jail?

02:12:59.600 | (Lex laughs)

02:13:01.800 | - There's interesting details,

02:13:03.720 | especially coming out recently around the war in Ukraine.

02:13:08.720 | So let me actually ask about the war in Ukraine.

02:13:13.560 | What is your analysis of the war in Ukraine from 2014

02:13:19.360 | to the full-on invasion of Ukraine by Russia

02:13:22.240 | in 2022, in February, 2022?

02:13:27.200 | What, there's many questions we could ask.

02:13:32.200 | One is, what are the sins of the governments involved?

02:13:37.360 | What are the sins of Russia, Ukraine, America, China?

02:13:42.640 | Are those sins comparable?

02:13:48.120 | Who are the good guys and the bad guys?

02:13:50.000 | - That was more than one question, though.

02:13:52.120 | Let me just give you the basics about this.

02:13:57.440 | Savvy observers saw this coming.

02:14:01.740 | They were a very small minority,

02:14:04.200 | because Vladimir Putin was pretty open

02:14:07.480 | about what he told the world his mission was,

02:14:11.320 | was the reestablishment of a strong Russia,

02:14:14.920 | the reestablishment of something like the Russian Empire

02:14:18.320 | to unite all the Russian-speaking people

02:14:23.480 | under one country, and the world ignored him.

02:14:27.760 | I mean, he was open.

02:14:29.200 | It was at a conference in France, I believe,

02:14:32.720 | when he said this out in the open.

02:14:35.480 | And then what we had in the United States,

02:14:39.320 | we had wishful thinking.

02:14:41.460 | Obama had this reset with Russia.

02:14:45.320 | We all get friendly.

02:14:48.500 | And then when Putin invaded Crimea,

02:14:53.160 | we did nothing.

02:14:54.040 | And it just escalated slowly, but surely,

02:14:59.620 | it was pretty clear.

02:15:03.360 | And they said, it was, I think, two years ago,

02:15:06.520 | there was an essay published by Putin.

02:15:09.480 | Whether he wrote it or not doesn't matter,

02:15:11.000 | but that was also out in public,

02:15:12.920 | where he was, again, quite clear what he was gonna do.

02:15:15.740 | Now, how do you do this?

02:15:16.940 | With force.

02:15:21.800 | And the sins committed by the American government was,

02:15:25.240 | we ignored it.

02:15:26.080 | We weren't engaged in wishful thinking,

02:15:28.560 | and we didn't stop it with sanctions

02:15:31.600 | before the shooting started.

02:15:33.980 | - To push back, I don't think you're fully describing,

02:15:38.700 | you are describing the sins

02:15:39.960 | of the Russian government and Putin.

02:15:42.320 | I don't think you're fully describing the sins

02:15:44.040 | of the American government here,

02:15:45.800 | because not only didn't,

02:15:47.420 | you're describing the miscalculation.

02:15:51.360 | So, not only did they not pressure correctly

02:15:53.680 | with sanctions and so on,

02:15:55.200 | and clearly respond to the actual statements

02:16:00.280 | in the essays and the words spoken.

02:16:02.280 | - I know where you're going, but keep on speaking.

02:16:04.080 | - Yes, but they also, at the same time,

02:16:07.780 | pressured Russia, and they also,

02:16:12.420 | as Putin himself said, sort of, there's a rat,

02:16:15.280 | and they pushed the rat towards the corner

02:16:18.380 | by expanding NATO.

02:16:21.360 | And--

02:16:22.200 | - And arming Ukraine.

02:16:24.480 | - And, well, the military industrial complex

02:16:28.480 | is a machine that led us,

02:16:32.300 | and I think a lot of younger people,

02:16:36.240 | I mean, when I came to this country,

02:16:39.440 | and this is the country I love,

02:16:41.000 | I lived through 9/11.

02:16:46.480 | I lived through the full rollercoaster of emotion.

02:16:49.960 | I'm a, at that time, before that,

02:16:53.440 | and after, was a proud American.

02:16:55.880 | I went through the whole rollercoaster

02:16:58.360 | of being sold, I would say, a lie

02:17:02.080 | about the reason to invade Iraq, and even Afghanistan.

02:17:07.080 | And I got to live through understanding

02:17:11.360 | of this military industrial complex

02:17:13.520 | that leads to the expansion of empires,

02:17:17.600 | of the delusion that we have in the populace,

02:17:21.120 | in the government, that convinces us

02:17:23.800 | that we are the good guys, and somehow,

02:17:27.680 | with military force, we can instill our values,

02:17:32.680 | instill happiness, the pursuit of happiness,

02:17:34.600 | that all men are created equal,

02:17:36.160 | these ideas into other lands.

02:17:39.320 | And we can do so with drones, and we can do so with weapons,

02:17:44.280 | and we can do so without significant cost

02:17:46.480 | from our own pockets.

02:17:48.960 | And so, this idea, this machine,

02:17:52.400 | doesn't just apply to Afghanistan and Iraq,

02:17:54.760 | doesn't just apply to Yemen and Syria,

02:17:57.120 | it doesn't just apply to China, it also applies to Ukraine.

02:18:00.160 | It also applies to Russia.

02:18:01.760 | - Agreed, two thoughts, if I may.

02:18:03.540 | First of all, one does not hear

02:18:08.080 | the term military industrial complex

02:18:10.380 | in the public discourse these days.

02:18:12.920 | Eisenhower warned about it.

02:18:15.360 | Eisenhower was a capitalist,

02:18:17.640 | he was the President of the United States.

02:18:19.740 | So, it exists, and it is very powerful.

02:18:24.040 | The more weapons you can sell,

02:18:25.520 | the more you have to replace them,

02:18:27.880 | or send over, you have to replace them, so yes.

02:18:30.720 | The other thing is, there's also a messianic streak

02:18:36.160 | that powers American foreign policy.

02:18:42.160 | We want to make the world just like us.

02:18:45.520 | Why don't they get it?

02:18:46.740 | Because they don't want to.

02:18:48.240 | It's almost like, it's not communism,

02:18:50.500 | but it's a very similar romantic idea

02:18:53.320 | that we can make the world,

02:18:55.080 | and fashion the world the way we are.

02:18:57.920 | And that's the romantic side,

02:19:00.160 | and the sort of honest side, but it doesn't work.

02:19:02.760 | It failed every time, right?

02:19:05.240 | You know, Afghanistan is a royal mess,

02:19:08.320 | and would never become a functioning democracy.

02:19:11.860 | I don't know if Ukraine can become a functioning democracy.

02:19:15.800 | - Well, I don't know if American weapons

02:19:19.660 | can help Ukraine become a functional democracy.

02:19:22.860 | - Yeah, absolutely right.

02:19:25.960 | - But there's a huge amount of interest

02:19:28.080 | in seeing the world in black and white,

02:19:31.560 | and selling the story of the world as black and white,

02:19:34.280 | that Ukraine is the symbol of democracy

02:19:39.420 | in this Eastern European world,

02:19:42.800 | and Russia is the symbol of authoritarian dictatorship.

02:19:47.120 | And the story is not so simple,

02:19:49.240 | as many indices show,

02:19:51.960 | Ukraine and Russia are the number one,

02:19:54.760 | and the number two most corrupt countries in Europe.

02:19:57.480 | - They're two peas in a pod.

02:19:59.240 | One is bigger, and one is, in this case, the aggressor.

02:20:03.360 | Now, you know, two peas,

02:20:05.640 | the aggressor is still ultimately responsible.

02:20:10.180 | - The person that throws the first punch,

02:20:13.380 | now there's a lot of people going to disagree

02:20:15.500 | where the first punch came from.

02:20:17.460 | But there is magnitude.

02:20:20.300 | - Yes.

02:20:21.140 | - And the struggle by Ukraine for its sovereignty

02:20:26.140 | stretches back to the beginning of the 20th century.

02:20:29.220 | It stretches back even further than that.

02:20:31.580 | But there's been the Ukrainian people are proud people,

02:20:35.500 | and they've been, in many cases, tortured

02:20:39.320 | by those that sit in the Kremlin

02:20:41.720 | throughout the 20th century.

02:20:43.420 | - The famine in the early '30s.

02:20:46.780 | - And it's always, it's never the middle class

02:20:49.460 | and the upper class that suffer.

02:20:51.060 | It's always the lower classes, the peasants in that time.

02:20:56.060 | This history stretches back far,

02:20:59.100 | and this is yet another manifestation of that.

02:21:01.940 | And there's a lot of interest at play.

02:21:05.540 | China watches closely, Russia, America watches closely,

02:21:10.540 | and there's an extra caveat here

02:21:13.980 | that there's nuclear weapons at play as well.

02:21:15.860 | - Exactly.

02:21:16.680 | And it's, this is, the situation is as dangerous

02:21:23.060 | as I have lived through in my entire life, I believe.

02:21:27.900 | And because it's not necessarily at the highest point

02:21:31.440 | of escalation, but it will be, in my view,

02:21:34.260 | a protracted crisis, and the longer that crisis lasts,

02:21:38.420 | the more of a chance there is of an accident.

02:21:42.480 | - Yeah.

02:21:43.500 | One rocket. - Yeah.

02:21:45.380 | - There seems to be a strong incentive to prolong,

02:21:48.540 | to do siege tactics to prolong this conflict

02:21:51.660 | over perhaps many years, which is terrifying to think about.

02:21:56.660 | And over that, one single rocket can lead

02:22:01.220 | to, given that there's leaders that might not,

02:22:05.280 | that might be losing their mind.

02:22:06.680 | - Yeah.

02:22:07.520 | - And Ukraine is not part of NATO,

02:22:10.980 | the thing I'm really afraid of is that somebody might think

02:22:15.740 | it's a good idea, but for Russia,

02:22:19.320 | so Putin might think it's a good idea for Russia

02:22:21.580 | to send a message by launching a nuke against Ukraine,

02:22:26.580 | because they're not part of NATO.

02:22:28.840 | So surely the West is not going to respond.

02:22:31.400 | What is the West going to do?

02:22:33.360 | - Yeah.

02:22:34.200 | - If Russia nukes Ukraine to send a message?

02:22:38.140 | I don't know if anyone knows the answer to that question,

02:22:41.920 | but it's a terrifying question.

02:22:44.220 | - And I don't know the exact protocol

02:22:47.560 | that needs to be followed to launch a nuclear strike

02:22:52.560 | from NATO's end, because we have several countries

02:22:56.740 | in NATO that have nuclear weapons.

02:22:58.940 | So let's say for France to fire a nuke,

02:23:02.520 | does the United States have to agree?

02:23:04.760 | I don't know how that works.

02:23:05.880 | - I don't know if anyone knows how that works.

02:23:09.640 | - Okay, yeah.

02:23:10.640 | - I worry, now we have different,

02:23:13.660 | very kind of anecdotal perspectives on these things,

02:23:17.580 | but the people I've interacted with

02:23:19.160 | in the DOD, Department of Defense, in the military,

02:23:23.120 | there is a compartmentalization.

02:23:25.400 | There is a bureaucracy, and within that giant bureaucracy,

02:23:28.800 | there's incompetence.

02:23:29.760 | We'd like to think that there is like really well organized

02:23:34.760 | for really important things.

02:23:37.700 | There's going to be the best of the best in the world

02:23:40.600 | that's going to execute on the correct decisions,

02:23:43.660 | both geopolitically, militarily, all that kind of stuff.

02:23:46.700 | And I've seen enough to know that competence

02:23:50.900 | at any level of government, at any level of the military

02:23:53.700 | is not guaranteed.

02:23:54.560 | Let's go back to the law of hierarchy.

02:23:57.340 | The government is the biggest hierarchy there is.

02:24:01.400 | And so, invariably, politicians find their way to the top.

02:24:06.160 | And once you have politics

02:24:07.480 | and dictating substantive decisions,

02:24:12.480 | they're going to be weak or wrong.

02:24:16.320 | I don't know how this could work any other way.

02:24:20.680 | Right now, we have some functional idiots

02:24:24.000 | in the central United States government.

02:24:26.440 | - Well, let me, 'cause you said that,

02:24:30.760 | I think elsewhere you said that Putin

02:24:33.080 | was not a good KGB agent.

02:24:35.160 | - That's right. - A mediocre one,

02:24:36.520 | but is an excellent politician.

02:24:38.920 | - Yeah, and a good organizer.

02:24:41.220 | He was known as a really, really good organizer.

02:24:43.120 | When Yeltsin hired him as prime minister,

02:24:48.120 | he cleaned up the mess,

02:24:52.280 | because under Yeltsin,

02:24:56.640 | Russia deteriorated tremendously,

02:24:58.960 | and it became sort of a mix of oligarchy

02:25:02.960 | and a criminal enterprise and chaotic.

02:25:06.640 | - So he had skills that made him a good executive.

02:25:08.960 | - Absolutely.

02:25:09.800 | - Now, let's go back to him as a KGB agent.

02:25:12.480 | He was a KGB agent.

02:25:14.760 | I mean, according to him, once a KGB agent,

02:25:18.840 | always a KGB agent.

02:25:20.080 | But 16 years, let's say, something like this.

02:25:23.420 | What do you think about, from your experience,

02:25:28.940 | now you're maybe the same age as him,

02:25:33.280 | approximately the same age as him.

02:25:34.720 | - He's a little younger.

02:25:35.680 | - A little younger. - Yeah.

02:25:37.120 | - What do you think about the KGB experience

02:25:41.360 | he had made him the man he is?

02:25:44.320 | What aspect of that, from your own experience,

02:25:48.560 | how much does that define you, who you are,

02:25:51.600 | how you think about the world,

02:25:53.040 | how you analyze the geopolitics of the world,

02:25:56.160 | how you analyze human nature?

02:25:57.960 | - Now, I gotta tell you one thing.

02:25:59.680 | He had a different type of training than I did.

02:26:01.860 | Mine was one-on-one, and he went to school, so to speak.

02:26:06.860 | - Classroom training.

02:26:08.680 | - Right.

02:26:09.520 | But fundamentally, he was not a top agent,

02:26:17.920 | and this is very simple.

02:26:19.480 | There's only one thing you need to know.

02:26:21.840 | He knows German pretty well.

02:26:24.600 | So where was he deployed?

02:26:27.120 | In East Germany.

02:26:28.720 | Not in West Germany, not in Switzerland, not in Austria.

02:26:31.040 | That's where they sent the best, right?

02:26:32.800 | One would think, generally.

02:26:35.600 | - We're learning here. - Right.

02:26:37.200 | - So this is your classification

02:26:39.320 | of where they sent the best.

02:26:41.120 | People classify all kinds of stuff,

02:26:42.860 | like what is the best university in the world,

02:26:45.280 | what is the best football team in the world.

02:26:47.320 | And you start to get a sense, the good guys get sent,

02:26:50.600 | the best athletes get sent to,

02:26:53.240 | well, we can disagree on this,

02:26:54.560 | but what the football team is.

02:26:56.800 | But you have a sense, and you're saying

02:26:58.280 | that the best agents would have been sent to West Germany.

02:27:00.120 | - One would think so.

02:27:00.960 | Now, this is not a forcing argument,

02:27:02.800 | but I also have it from a word from the horse's mouth.

02:27:07.800 | - Which horse?

02:27:10.480 | I mean, what kind of horse?

02:27:13.080 | What's the breed of the horse?

02:27:13.920 | - Oleg Kalugin.

02:27:15.400 | You know who Oleg Kalugin is, and he's still alive.

02:27:18.800 | He was, at one point, the head of counterintelligence

02:27:22.440 | for the first directorate espionage, right?

02:27:25.800 | And Putin was in the first directorate

02:27:27.760 | and reported to Kalugin for a while.

02:27:30.720 | And Oleg told me to my face

02:27:33.760 | that Oleg was not an impressive agent trainee, or agent.

02:27:38.760 | - That Vladimir Putin was not impressive.

02:27:41.040 | - Not impressive at all.

02:27:42.420 | Now, he's biased, given his current situation.

02:27:46.320 | - Well, yeah, he could still make it up

02:27:50.160 | because he had this big ruckus when he was in Parliament

02:27:53.300 | and called Putin a war criminal about the war in Serbia.

02:27:58.200 | - Not only could he make it up,

02:27:59.680 | I wouldn't trust his analysis.

02:28:01.780 | (Roger laughs)

02:28:02.980 | I mean, I have to, when people,

02:28:05.780 | I've been working very hard, even before this war,

02:28:08.720 | to try to understand objective analysis

02:28:10.520 | of all the parties involved.

02:28:12.640 | You have to really keep an open mind here

02:28:14.660 | to see clearly, to understand.

02:28:16.880 | If you are to try to help in some way

02:28:20.900 | make a better world, in this case, stop this war,

02:28:27.040 | or have all the countries involved flourish,

02:28:31.660 | bring out the best of the people,

02:28:33.320 | remove the corruption and the greed

02:28:35.540 | and the destructive aspects of the governments,

02:28:37.780 | and let the people flourish.

02:28:39.180 | For all of that, you have to put all the biases aside,

02:28:43.480 | all the political bickering, all the,

02:28:46.380 | I don't know, all the biased analysis.

02:28:53.440 | And there's a lot of propaganda

02:28:57.320 | that says that, in fact, Putin was a good agent.

02:29:02.320 | How else would he rise to the ranks, right?

02:29:05.160 | - Because he was a good politician

02:29:08.400 | and he made a lot of good connections within the KGB.

02:29:13.400 | Allow me to say something.

02:29:15.400 | You just taught me a lesson.

02:29:18.560 | And the lesson I should have figured out myself

02:29:23.000 | because I keep on telling people that,

02:29:25.580 | in the intelligence world, you never know the truth 100%.

02:29:30.320 | So when you said, "Oh, I could make that up,"

02:29:31.920 | of course you could have.

02:29:34.000 | But you get to a point where you're forced

02:29:37.120 | to make a decision or have an opinion

02:29:39.600 | and then you use your best educated guess.

02:29:43.360 | - Yes.

02:29:44.200 | - So I'm gonna take the certainty

02:29:46.480 | of the statement that I made back

02:29:48.400 | because it's quite possible that you're right.

02:29:50.760 | - Well, what I've noticed about Vladimir Putin,

02:29:53.160 | and this is true about, for example, Donald Trump

02:29:55.560 | and all those kinds of divisive figures,

02:29:59.700 | that for some reason, people's opinion

02:30:02.400 | on the details of those people are very sticky.

02:30:05.720 | Once you decide this is a bad guy,

02:30:08.120 | there's like a black hole

02:30:11.200 | and people are not able to think one act at a time.

02:30:15.520 | You don't have to, that doesn't somehow justify this,

02:30:19.560 | that somehow doesn't remove all the evil things

02:30:24.320 | that are done, but you can analyze clearly

02:30:25.920 | each of the actions.

02:30:27.080 | And to me, it is interesting to see

02:30:29.440 | how did this man rise through the ranks?

02:30:32.900 | Now, you're saying that to be a KGB agent,

02:30:37.060 | there's a lot of skills involved.

02:30:38.760 | And perhaps raw technical skill of spycraft

02:30:44.980 | is perhaps not related to the skill

02:30:50.420 | of rising through the ranks.

02:30:52.380 | - Right.

02:30:53.560 | - And you're saying as a politician,

02:30:55.380 | he was good at rising through the ranks.

02:30:56.220 | - But lying and influencing,

02:30:58.720 | that is something that is significant,

02:31:02.140 | has a significant talent and ability

02:31:05.780 | that an agent must have,

02:31:07.380 | that helps you as a politician.

02:31:10.940 | - Continuing the kind of thread of the role of KGB

02:31:15.620 | in defining the heart, soul, and mind of Vladimir Putin.

02:31:20.620 | Let me return to Yuri Bezmenov,

02:31:24.940 | who was a Soviet KGB agent

02:31:26.540 | that wrote a four-step framework for ideological subversion

02:31:30.340 | on a national scale, as practiced by the Soviet Union.

02:31:33.740 | So the four steps are demoralization, destabilization,

02:31:38.740 | crisis, and normalization.

02:31:41.820 | He had a lot of other kind of systematic ways

02:31:44.460 | of describing this kind of stuff.

02:31:46.220 | So can you speak to some of these ideas

02:31:49.880 | about the systematic, large-scale,

02:31:53.820 | ideological subversion goals of the KGB?

02:31:56.580 | Is there truth to that kind of, those ideas?

02:31:59.780 | - Yes, but I think I already sort of mentioned

02:32:04.780 | that I think Bezmenov was a fraud.

02:32:08.180 | And I have, again--

02:32:10.220 | - Can you elaborate?

02:32:11.780 | - Good arguments, let's put it this way.

02:32:14.960 | First of all, we know that the KGB

02:32:18.780 | was involved in active measures,

02:32:21.140 | which is, you can call it fake news.

02:32:26.140 | Seeding fake news into the countries

02:32:33.220 | that are your adversaries.

02:32:35.420 | And the Russians have been doing this lately

02:32:38.580 | by meddling in our election,

02:32:40.580 | and focusing on the left and the right fringe,

02:32:43.740 | and influencing them to become more left and more right.

02:32:47.980 | And Vasily Mitrokhin has, in one of his books,

02:32:52.980 | he has a whole chapter about active measures.

02:32:57.060 | Okay, so what he has to say about the department,

02:33:00.540 | and I forgot what department it was,

02:33:02.700 | was the one department that was the least desirable

02:33:05.860 | for KGB agents, because these were desk jobs

02:33:09.500 | for people who had to come up with fake stories

02:33:14.820 | in countries where they didn't quite know

02:33:18.140 | too much about the country.

02:33:20.260 | Now, there were some successes,

02:33:22.540 | like one of the two most famous successes

02:33:26.880 | that I'm aware of is that the canard,

02:33:30.340 | that the AIDS virus was concocted in a CIA lab.

02:33:34.840 | A lot of people around the world believe that.

02:33:38.860 | And the other one was that J. Edgar Hoover

02:33:42.740 | was a secret cross-dressers.

02:33:44.740 | (laughing)

02:33:46.580 | That is still known by a lot of Americans

02:33:49.900 | who are of a certain age that this was the truth.

02:33:52.700 | But Mitrokhin actually traces it back

02:33:55.540 | to a story that was placed in a sort of left wing,

02:33:59.580 | but close to mainstream French magazine,

02:34:03.400 | and it was then taken up by more,

02:34:06.900 | larger newspapers and well-established papers.

02:34:13.420 | So they had some successes, but this kind of a

02:34:17.100 | massive, well-thought-out campaign

02:34:23.620 | to destabilize the United States,

02:34:26.260 | I don't believe the KGB was capable of doing that.

02:34:30.660 | Mitrokhin seems to agree with me.

02:34:33.540 | I was trained, I would think,

02:34:36.980 | you know, I was one of the crown jewels of the agents.

02:34:39.940 | One would think that they used the best

02:34:42.080 | that they had to help me how to become an American,

02:34:47.080 | and they didn't have a clue.

02:34:48.900 | So how did they, if you don't know how a country operates,

02:34:52.000 | how do you come up with this kind of a very detailed,

02:34:57.000 | long-term plan that's also timed,

02:35:00.560 | you know, two years this and one year that and all that?

02:35:03.180 | - Yeah, so we should actually just clarify.

02:35:05.880 | So he has this whole idea that there's 15 to 20 years

02:35:11.120 | that are needed for demoralization,

02:35:13.120 | where you're basically infiltrating a country

02:35:19.320 | from a young, or people from a young age,

02:35:22.400 | manipulating their mind, you're destabilizing them,

02:35:24.960 | that's the second step, that takes two to five years.

02:35:27.740 | You target the country's foreign relations,

02:35:30.080 | defense and economy, you create a crisis artificially,

02:35:33.580 | and then you normalize it as if it always was this way.

02:35:37.420 | So it's basically saying that the KGB is capable of,

02:35:41.980 | at scale, over many years,

02:35:45.860 | manipulate an entire population of people.

02:35:51.940 | And this is kind of,

02:35:53.100 | there's a lot of people that believe in conspiracy theories

02:35:58.420 | that are amenable to this kind of idea.

02:36:02.020 | Now, my own experience is that there is, in fact,

02:36:06.060 | just a giant amount of incompetence,

02:36:08.700 | and that this is something that's actually

02:36:10.260 | very difficult to pull off.

02:36:11.700 | 'Cause it's incredibly,

02:36:14.620 | incredibly difficult to achieve this kind of manipulation.

02:36:21.260 | I think it would require,

02:36:23.760 | first of all, not much bureaucracy, not much slowing down.

02:36:29.220 | You have to have incredible, in the modern world,

02:36:32.140 | digital systems that are able to do surveillance,

02:36:34.780 | manipulation, there has to be a strategy

02:36:38.140 | that is carried out in secrecy

02:36:40.300 | across a huge number of people, effectively,

02:36:43.620 | that also requires you hire the best people in the world.

02:36:46.960 | And I think it's difficult to execute on this kind of thing

02:36:51.700 | if you compartmentalize,

02:36:56.480 | because there has to be great collaboration.

02:36:59.220 | There has to be a great, where there's a unified vision.

02:37:02.940 | - Coordination.

02:37:04.220 | - And coordination across multiple groups.

02:37:07.420 | There has to be, I mean, it's very difficult to do.

02:37:10.940 | Now, nevertheless, especially with technology,

02:37:14.340 | this becomes easier and easier.

02:37:15.780 | So the bar becomes lower and lower.

02:37:17.880 | To achieve mass surveillance

02:37:20.340 | becomes easier and easier and easier.

02:37:22.660 | Mass manipulation through platforms,

02:37:25.340 | because we're now digitally connected,

02:37:27.000 | you can now do that kind of manipulation.

02:37:29.180 | So it becomes more and more realistic

02:37:30.760 | that you could do this kind of thing.

02:37:31.900 | But you're saying that, no, intelligence,

02:37:36.140 | first of all, intelligence is hard.

02:37:38.340 | And to do it at scale and to do it well

02:37:42.740 | and to do it in a way that it's also

02:37:46.820 | not just collecting information about the populace,

02:37:49.380 | but manipulating the populace is very, very difficult.

02:37:52.420 | - Right, now let me give you another argument

02:37:55.140 | why I think that Besminov was a fraud.

02:37:58.300 | I mean, I already have Mitrokhin on my side

02:38:03.100 | and my personal observation of the incompetence

02:38:07.060 | that I witnessed.

02:38:08.640 | I mean, they really, really didn't know

02:38:11.060 | what they didn't know.

02:38:12.540 | So now Besminov was KGB, where was he stationed?

02:38:17.140 | In India.

02:38:17.980 | He was a low-level agent in India.

02:38:23.440 | And I told you, the one thing that KGB was really good

02:38:27.820 | at was compartmentalization.

02:38:30.700 | How does Besminov in India find out about this massive plan

02:38:35.260 | that should have been super secret, right?

02:38:37.940 | He made it up, sorry.

02:38:39.620 | And you know why he got away with it?

02:38:42.300 | Because Americans eat that up, because it's not our fault.

02:38:45.260 | It's like the damn Russians that doing all that bad stuff.

02:38:49.100 | Speaking of the damn Russians doing all that bad stuff,

02:38:52.380 | you know about the Internet Research Agency.

02:38:55.620 | They have been doing quite a bit of damage.

02:38:58.260 | And I'm now familiar with a world

02:39:02.860 | of enhanced artificial persons.

02:39:06.660 | These are the avatars on Facebook and Twitter

02:39:10.020 | and so forth that look like real people.

02:39:13.840 | And there are quite a few of them.

02:39:18.300 | And I have a good friend who operates in that realm.

02:39:22.460 | And he uses, for instance, facial recognition

02:39:26.420 | when he thinks that there's a suspicious character,

02:39:31.420 | say, on LinkedIn or on Facebook.

02:39:35.560 | And very often he finds out, yeah, that that person exists,

02:39:39.420 | but it's not the person who it pretends to be.

02:39:43.980 | - So basically detecting the artificial,

02:39:46.640 | the enhanced artificial people.

02:39:47.740 | - Yes, but he can also make them.

02:39:50.220 | You think the United States--

02:39:51.060 | - Right, it goes hand in hand, yeah.

02:39:52.260 | United States doesn't do it, we do it too, but--

02:39:55.140 | - Well, this is to push back against your pushback, right?

02:39:57.900 | Yeah, Beslanov might be a fraud,

02:39:59.820 | but is it possible, especially in the modern age,

02:40:04.060 | that there is these kind of large-scale systematic,

02:40:07.740 | wouldn't you, as a government--

02:40:12.140 | - More so.

02:40:12.980 | - That's investing billions of dollars

02:40:17.860 | into military equipment,

02:40:21.700 | in a world that's more and more clearly

02:40:24.900 | going to be defined by cyber war versus hot war,

02:40:29.900 | wouldn't you start to have serious meetings,

02:40:34.740 | large amounts of hires that are working at

02:40:37.900 | how do we manipulate the information flow,

02:40:41.140 | how do we manipulate the minds of the populace,

02:40:43.980 | how do we sell them a narrative?

02:40:45.580 | So even though he might've been making up a story

02:40:49.620 | because people eat it up,

02:40:51.980 | could it speak to some deep truth

02:40:53.620 | that's actually different than the truth

02:40:56.700 | you came up in as a KGB agent?

02:40:59.140 | - I agree with you 100%, it's much easier.

02:41:01.520 | All you need is an army of nerds who also know--

02:41:07.060 | - No offense.

02:41:08.580 | No offense to the nerds.

02:41:09.700 | - That's a term of endearment, I guess.

02:41:11.660 | - Yes, of love. - I love nerds.

02:41:13.260 | I used to be one myself, so.

02:41:16.780 | But anyway--

02:41:17.620 | - Once a nerd, always a nerd, so.

02:41:18.940 | (both laughing)

02:41:20.940 | - So what I was gonna say here is--

02:41:22.940 | - All you need is an army of nerds.

02:41:24.780 | - And what also experts in the culture

02:41:29.780 | of the target country, okay?

02:41:32.020 | And nowadays the world is different.

02:41:35.300 | There's a whole lot more fluidity,

02:41:36.900 | there's a whole lot of more people that like say Russians,

02:41:39.380 | for instance, study in the United States, Chinese,

02:41:41.820 | an army of Chinese studying in the United States,

02:41:44.500 | they have a lot more knowledge of how we function

02:41:48.620 | than the KGB did, and it's vice versa.

02:41:52.300 | Not as many Americans in Russia, but we have some,

02:41:56.240 | but the Chinese and the Russians have an advantage here.

02:41:59.300 | - Can I ask you a question based on your experience?

02:42:02.620 | So I have been talking to a lot of powerful people,

02:42:07.620 | and some of which have very close connections

02:42:13.540 | to in this particular conflict, Ukraine and Russia,

02:42:17.320 | but in other places as well.

02:42:19.500 | I don't believe I've ever been contacted by

02:42:22.100 | or interacted with an intelligence agency.

02:42:24.780 | CIA, FSB, MI6, Assad, I don't think I have,

02:42:29.780 | well, let me say explicitly,

02:42:33.740 | I haven't had an official conversation,

02:42:35.580 | which is what I assume I would have,

02:42:37.960 | because I have nothing to hide, right?

02:42:40.260 | So I think there's no reason for people to be secretive.

02:42:43.520 | But why is that?

02:42:47.500 | Would I know?

02:42:48.820 | Am I interesting at all?

02:42:50.420 | How are people determined if they're

02:42:52.460 | in person of interest or not?

02:42:54.300 | And I guess the question, I mean, some of it I ask

02:42:57.700 | in a bit of a humorous way, but also perhaps

02:43:00.700 | there's truth in some of the humor is,

02:43:02.660 | would I know if I have ever interacted

02:43:05.760 | with an intelligence agency spy?

02:43:11.060 | - Well, you don't know that you haven't been contacted,

02:43:14.240 | but certainly not, I think you never had a conversation

02:43:19.240 | that related to intelligence in any way, shape, or form.

02:43:24.480 | - Right, like where a person, another person introduced--

02:43:27.240 | - Yeah, introduced themselves or becomes,

02:43:31.840 | sort of wants to be your friend and then talks

02:43:34.440 | about these types of topics, right?

02:43:36.600 | - Yeah, but I (laughs)

02:43:40.460 | there's people, because of who I'm interacting with,

02:43:45.460 | they're, I mean, even with Elon Musk,

02:43:50.340 | like if you think about Elon Musk,

02:43:51.820 | there's a lot of people that are part

02:43:54.820 | of the conversations that happen.

02:43:59.660 | How do I know they're all trustworthy?

02:44:01.540 | They all present themselves as trustworthy.

02:44:03.780 | Now, again, I have nothing, so this is

02:44:06.420 | for the intelligence agencies, I have nothing to hide.

02:44:08.820 | I am the same person privately as publicly,

02:44:11.560 | well-intentioned, real, no controlled,

02:44:16.440 | no weird sexual stuff where you can manipulate me.

02:44:18.940 | (Lex laughs)

02:44:20.280 | What else? - No drug use?

02:44:21.480 | - No drug use, no skeletons in the closet,

02:44:25.460 | none of that kind of stuff, but I don't know,

02:44:30.920 | I mean, just even having these conversations,

02:44:33.820 | I tend to trust people as a default.

02:44:36.040 | - Yeah, me too.

02:44:37.880 | - And you start, when you think, well,

02:44:42.540 | especially with some of the people I've been talking with

02:44:45.640 | and some of the traveling I'm doing,

02:44:48.140 | I'm realizing there's hard men in this world,

02:44:53.140 | there's military, there's serious suffering,

02:44:58.800 | and there's war, and there's serious people

02:45:02.340 | that are doing serious harm, and so you have to be careful

02:45:06.800 | of thinking who to trust.

02:45:08.560 | The person approaches you with a smile

02:45:11.880 | and asks you a question, my natural inclination

02:45:15.720 | is that person is a cool person, I'll answer the question,

02:45:19.400 | I'll become a friend, but it becomes difficult

02:45:22.560 | when you realize that there's things

02:45:24.840 | like intelligence agencies with thousands of employees,

02:45:28.720 | there's people that are doing major military actions

02:45:31.120 | that involve tens of thousands,

02:45:33.160 | hundreds of thousands of soldiers.

02:45:35.360 | This is serious stuff, and so how do you know

02:45:38.680 | how to operate in this world?

02:45:39.840 | - The folks that you're interacting with

02:45:41.800 | have a responsibility not to tell you

02:45:45.880 | what they shouldn't tell you, right?

02:45:48.480 | - Right.

02:45:49.320 | - So, and most of them probably won't,

02:45:51.240 | and I'm guessing occasionally they will say,

02:45:53.940 | well, I can't go there, right?

02:45:56.640 | - Yeah.

02:45:57.480 | - So what you are aware of is sort of public,

02:46:04.880 | and what you're doing is you're collecting it

02:46:08.920 | and you're editing it to some extent,

02:46:13.920 | you're not changing the verbiage,

02:46:18.320 | you just repeat what they say,

02:46:22.200 | so from that angle you're not privy to any real secrets.

02:46:27.200 | What you have possibly that could be of use

02:46:31.880 | is you learn to get to know the person.

02:46:35.160 | So I'm thinking there's a good possibility

02:46:39.280 | if you get the interviews in the East

02:46:43.520 | that somebody may actually approach you

02:46:45.360 | and ask you what's your opinion.

02:46:47.520 | - I just hope they approach me

02:46:49.120 | and introduce themselves properly.

02:46:51.120 | I just, there's a kind of, I mean, would you know,

02:46:56.120 | like how many Russian spies are there in the United States,

02:46:59.980 | how many American spies are there in Russia?

02:47:02.380 | Do you have a sense?

02:47:03.580 | Is it-- - No idea.

02:47:04.420 | - I mean, just like with the GRU.

02:47:06.160 | - No idea.

02:47:07.000 | - Is it possible there's like tens of thousands,

02:47:10.560 | and we're not, or like thousands?

02:47:12.780 | - Not thousands like I used to operate.

02:47:15.780 | We are too hard to train

02:47:17.220 | and we weren't that successful to begin with,

02:47:19.780 | but particularly Russians and Chinese,

02:47:25.420 | both governments know who is going abroad.

02:47:30.420 | And I guarantee you there's a lot of amateur spies.

02:47:35.520 | They're being asked, you know, help us out,

02:47:38.020 | you know, do something for the motherland.

02:47:40.460 | - And crowdsource spying.

02:47:42.100 | - Yeah, sort of.

02:47:43.540 | - Not serious training, but yeah.

02:47:44.940 | - And yeah, for instance, this lady,

02:47:48.340 | I forgot her first name, Butina, she was a rank amateur.

02:47:52.740 | She used social media to communicate with Moscow.

02:47:56.420 | She had no training, but she was reasonably successful.

02:48:01.380 | I mean, she got, and the difference between,

02:48:06.380 | let's say the current Russian intelligence and the KGB,

02:48:13.280 | Vladimir Putin and his henchmen

02:48:16.100 | are okay with people being caught because,

02:48:21.780 | and every time I go and talk and give a talk someplace,

02:48:25.140 | I'm always asked this question,

02:48:26.660 | "How many Russian spies do you think we have here?"

02:48:30.980 | Because it scares the people, right?

02:48:33.380 | And Putin likes to scare people.

02:48:35.460 | The KGB was very solicitous of the agents.

02:48:38.860 | They didn't want anyone of them caught, right?

02:48:43.500 | So that's a big difference.

02:48:46.060 | - So getting caught, so for the FSB,

02:48:49.020 | getting caught sends a strong signal to the world

02:48:51.420 | that there's agents everywhere.

02:48:52.260 | - Yeah, there could be many more, and there probably are.

02:48:55.020 | Because the world, again,

02:49:02.140 | there's a whole lot more travel going on,

02:49:04.140 | a whole lot more interaction,

02:49:05.860 | studying abroad, doing business.

02:49:08.700 | And there will be attempts at espionage

02:49:12.820 | probably every minute in this country.

02:49:16.060 | That doesn't mean they will be successful, no.

02:49:20.380 | But there is a cottage industry now

02:49:23.420 | that is doing quite well that teaches companies

02:49:27.060 | how to fortify themselves against industrial espionage

02:49:32.060 | or also foreign actors spying.

02:49:37.540 | It's all over the place.

02:49:38.660 | - Yeah, as it becomes easier and easier

02:49:40.220 | with digital, with cyber, that becomes a serious,

02:49:43.940 | very serious threat.

02:49:44.900 | - We might wind up in a world where nobody knows anymore

02:49:48.060 | what's up and what's down.

02:49:49.500 | (Lex laughs)

02:49:50.980 | - If I was to have a conversation with Vladimir Putin

02:49:53.860 | and/or Volodymyr Zelensky,

02:49:57.620 | is there something you would ask

02:50:00.300 | about the time in the KGB,

02:50:05.840 | the time in its past?

02:50:08.460 | All of us, men and women, are creations

02:50:14.300 | of the experiences we have through our life,

02:50:16.500 | early on in life and through the formative experiences,

02:50:20.180 | successes and failures.

02:50:21.820 | - Yeah, you just said the key words.

02:50:24.980 | I would ask, without giving away anything,

02:50:28.720 | just being high level, your biggest success

02:50:31.380 | and your biggest failure.

02:50:33.380 | - As a politician or as a KGB agent?

02:50:35.620 | - We're talking in the realm of KGB.

02:50:40.100 | When the wall came down and he was in an office,

02:50:45.420 | a KGB office in the city of Dresden,

02:50:48.260 | and these Germans were besieging Stasi offices,

02:50:53.260 | and they also dropped by the KGB office,

02:50:59.140 | and it was pretty threatening.

02:51:03.520 | It looked like they were actually storm the office

02:51:06.860 | and get the documents and stuff like that.

02:51:13.180 | Initially, the first demonstration was told

02:51:17.180 | that if they come any closer, weapons would be used.

02:51:25.220 | So they disappeared and then they came back.

02:51:27.420 | I don't know, somebody in that office called Berlin

02:51:32.620 | and said, "What are we gonna do?

02:51:35.060 | "Are we allowed to use force?"

02:51:37.140 | And the answer came back that Gorbachev said,

02:51:39.060 | "Absolutely not."

02:51:41.260 | And so this is where Putin, all of a sudden,

02:51:44.700 | he was at one point a member of the greatest,

02:51:47.540 | the most powerful intelligence organization in the world,

02:51:50.660 | and all of a sudden he was powerless

02:51:52.860 | and he had to watch how, this was a defeat, big one.

02:51:57.860 | - It's supposedly a powerful intelligence agency cowering,

02:52:05.980 | sort of crawling back into a position of weakness.

02:52:10.060 | - And he probably promised himself never again.

02:52:12.700 | Russia needs to be great again.

02:52:14.260 | - The KGB, FSB, Russia, the Russian Empire

02:52:20.340 | needs to rise again.

02:52:22.380 | And that there's a feeling for him that that's,

02:52:24.900 | as he talks about the collapse of the Soviet Union

02:52:27.300 | being a great tragedy, there's a feeling like that was,

02:52:32.300 | that was like never again.

02:52:38.580 | - Yeah, and I believe that he has a strong conviction

02:52:43.580 | that, I don't know if he's religious,

02:52:48.740 | he carries a cross now, but I don't know what that means,

02:52:52.100 | but somehow, but that it's the destiny

02:52:56.420 | of the Russian nation to be great.

02:52:59.100 | And that is sort of, whether it's determined by God

02:53:04.100 | or some higher power, that is very important for him.

02:53:08.380 | - Of course, that nationalist idea is one

02:53:12.860 | that Americans share as well, and it could help

02:53:17.740 | a nation flourish, so by itself

02:53:19.820 | is not necessarily a bad thing.

02:53:21.380 | It's how it manifests itself is the question.

02:53:24.040 | - Well, one other thing, if I were to get a chat

02:53:29.540 | with the Ukrainian president, I would ask him

02:53:36.700 | how many lives, what is the equation

02:53:41.700 | between giving up some land and how many lives

02:53:45.140 | are worth this land?

02:53:47.740 | - And it's a good way to phrase the question.

02:53:52.260 | Of course, that question gets you killed in Ukraine.

02:53:55.460 | But because there's another part of that equation,

02:53:59.380 | which is it's not just land versus lives.

02:54:02.540 | It's the sovereignty, the knowledge that you're free

02:54:07.540 | and you're self-determined.

02:54:10.460 | And it's not about fighting for the particular land.

02:54:14.060 | It's saying we are messed up, corrupt,

02:54:19.060 | we have problems, it's a messy world, but it's our world.

02:54:25.740 | I think Stephen Crane has a poem about a man

02:54:31.020 | eating his own heart, and he was asked,

02:54:35.140 | "How does it taste?"

02:54:35.980 | And he said, "It's bitter, but I like it

02:54:38.260 | "because it is bitter and because it is my heart."

02:54:41.260 | And that there's a sense of like, I want,

02:54:43.500 | this is not just about land, this is our nation.

02:54:47.780 | The same love of nation that Putin has for Russia,

02:54:52.180 | the greater Russia, this vision of this great empire,

02:54:55.380 | I believe Ukraine does as well.

02:54:58.540 | Not every, there's levels to this game,

02:55:01.180 | and Ukrainian people are some of the proudest people

02:55:05.140 | throughout the history of the 20th century,

02:55:08.260 | throughout the history of Earth.

02:55:10.820 | The Polish people are proud people.

02:55:12.140 | You can just see in World War II,

02:55:15.600 | the people who said, "Fuck you, you're not having this.

02:55:20.600 | "We will die to the last man."

02:55:23.100 | There's different cultures that kind of

02:55:25.340 | really hold their ground, and Ukrainian people are that.

02:55:29.020 | - I have to admit, in that respect, I'm a bit of a coward.

02:55:33.260 | I could not do what Zelensky has been doing.

02:55:36.540 | I would sort of try to find a way to carve out

02:55:45.620 | something that I can live with.

02:55:51.820 | However, if that force, that evil force,

02:55:56.820 | gets to my family-- - Right.

02:55:59.180 | There's lines. - Yes.

02:56:01.180 | - That's right.

02:56:02.020 | You become the world's bravest man

02:56:05.660 | if somebody crosses that line. - Oh yeah.

02:56:07.860 | - You mentioned something about you've not been to Moscow

02:56:13.340 | back, and that it might not be safe for you to travel there.

02:56:18.340 | - Yes.

02:56:19.160 | - Can you speak to the nature of that?

02:56:24.620 | As somebody that successfully got out of the KGB,

02:56:29.620 | how are you still alive?

02:56:33.100 | - A number of reasons.

02:56:35.860 | First of all, when my story became public,

02:56:40.860 | that was six years ago, I was pretty old.

02:56:44.020 | The folks that may have a personal interest,

02:56:49.900 | or may have had a personal interest in doing me harm,

02:56:53.180 | most of them don't live anymore.

02:56:54.940 | All right, that's number one.

02:56:56.060 | Number two, I did not, I hired hand, a German.

02:57:01.060 | I did not betray the motherland.

02:57:04.300 | That's a crime that is punished by death.

02:57:09.300 | You betray the motherland.

02:57:10.720 | And the other thing is,

02:57:21.700 | you know that these kinds of operations to assassination

02:57:25.260 | in another country are very difficult to plan and implement.

02:57:30.020 | And if there's a list of people that they don't like,

02:57:33.820 | I may not be at the very top.

02:57:36.700 | Having said that, if I wind up, say, in Moscow,

02:57:40.260 | or even in countries like Turkey,

02:57:41.980 | where there's a lot of lawlessness,

02:57:44.860 | accidents can easily be arranged,

02:57:48.860 | and that's just sending another message.

02:57:51.820 | You know, it's like, you know, we can do a lot of things.

02:57:56.820 | - Powerful. - Yes.

02:57:58.820 | - Do you think it's safe for me

02:57:59.980 | to travel in Russia and Ukraine?

02:58:01.740 | - I think you know very well

02:58:08.740 | how to communicate in both countries.

02:58:11.100 | You know, you've shown this in this interaction,

02:58:13.140 | that you have a lot of empathy

02:58:17.700 | for the people you'll be talking with,

02:58:19.220 | and empathy means good understanding

02:58:21.220 | where they're coming from.

02:58:22.740 | And that there are lines that you can't cross.

02:58:25.680 | Like the question that I was gonna ask Zelensky,

02:58:27.980 | who I'm not gonna ask, good for you.

02:58:29.780 | (laughing)

02:58:30.980 | - Yeah, isn't that the funny thing about this world?

02:58:33.220 | There's lines, there's lines everywhere.

02:58:34.980 | Even in love, even in personal relationships,

02:58:37.100 | there's lines you should not cross.

02:58:39.700 | How did you finally get caught?

02:58:42.100 | - I resigned in 1988.

02:58:44.500 | - Well, let's actually talk about that.

02:58:46.060 | There was a, resigned, there's warning signs.

02:58:50.260 | There's yet another choice, yet another crossroads.

02:58:53.340 | - Yes, okay.

02:58:54.420 | - What was the calculation, what was the choice to be made?

02:58:57.500 | - To give a little background, it was 1988,

02:59:02.420 | and I thought they would,

02:59:06.140 | my time in the US would soon end,

02:59:12.100 | because I thought 10 to 12 years,

02:59:14.980 | it was already past 10 years.

02:59:17.140 | There was no indication that they indicated,

02:59:20.660 | that they said, you're done.

02:59:23.380 | But in December of 1988, I got this one thing

02:59:28.380 | that I never wanted to see.

02:59:29.940 | So we had a system of signals

02:59:32.020 | that either one of those diplomat agents

02:59:38.500 | could set at a spot that I passed by every day,

02:59:43.940 | or I could set where they would pass by,

02:59:46.580 | like on their way from where they lived

02:59:48.540 | to the United Nations, for instance, who would just drive.

02:59:52.060 | So, and mine was, the signal spot for me was

02:59:57.060 | on a support beam for the elevated atrium in Queens.

03:00:02.740 | And it was morning in December that I walked by there

03:00:08.220 | and routinely look at it, and I never expected anything.

03:00:11.300 | And there was this red dot,

03:00:12.860 | it was about the size of my fist with a red paint.

03:00:16.340 | And since you have done it already,

03:00:20.540 | I think I can curse in this moment,

03:00:23.460 | because it's the only way I can really indicate

03:00:26.740 | how I felt, I said, oh shit.

03:00:29.600 | Because that was the danger signal.

03:00:31.460 | There was like, you are in severe danger

03:00:34.780 | of, and you need to get out of the country

03:00:37.540 | as soon as possible.

03:00:38.940 | There was a protocol that I was supposed to follow.

03:00:42.220 | I wasn't even supposed to go home.

03:00:44.380 | I just needed to, was supposed to get my reserve documents

03:00:48.160 | that I had hidden in a park in the Bronx,

03:00:53.160 | and make a beeline to the Canadian border.

03:00:56.840 | I wasn't ready.

03:00:59.380 | So I just like ignored this thing.

03:01:01.420 | I mean, I couldn't ignore it, but I went on to work.

03:01:05.140 | Got on the A train, went to work,

03:01:07.980 | and then went to my cubicle and stared

03:01:10.340 | at the computer screen all day,

03:01:11.660 | because I couldn't think.

03:01:12.740 | I could think only about what to do,

03:01:14.260 | what to do, what to do.

03:01:15.700 | The reason for this indecisiveness was that

03:01:18.900 | I was a father at the time.

03:01:22.100 | I was, my little girl by the name of Chelsea

03:01:26.460 | was 18 months old.

03:01:27.780 | And I was there when she was born.

03:01:33.660 | I took her to her dorm.

03:01:38.660 | I watched her grow up.

03:01:41.580 | I watched her take the first steps

03:01:43.860 | and always look at me with these big eyes,

03:01:47.060 | lovingly look at me.

03:01:48.260 | And that is when I started my re-entry

03:01:53.260 | into the human race,

03:01:55.500 | because I just fell in love with this girl.

03:01:59.460 | That's when love came back,

03:02:03.220 | and it was completely unexpected.

03:02:05.600 | And there's a lot of fathers who understand,

03:02:10.220 | particularly fathers of girls

03:02:11.740 | who understand what happened there.

03:02:14.740 | And I still thought I need to go back

03:02:18.100 | because there was probably some danger,

03:02:22.740 | but I hadn't figured out how to take care of the girl.

03:02:26.180 | I'd leave her, but maybe she need to have a good life

03:02:30.220 | and grow up and have a chance.

03:02:32.300 | And her mother, she was from South America.

03:02:35.500 | She had a fourth grade education

03:02:38.180 | that would have not worked very well.

03:02:41.220 | So I played for time.

03:02:44.300 | I obviously, I could be sick.

03:02:47.940 | I couldn't, you know, I could be in a hospital.

03:02:50.180 | There was a precedent where I was sick,

03:02:51.660 | where I couldn't communicate for about three weeks.

03:02:54.960 | So I just did nothing.

03:02:59.140 | That was on a Monday.

03:03:01.020 | On a Thursday was my regular shortwave transmission.

03:03:05.940 | I listened and they explained a little in a few sentences.

03:03:10.940 | We have reason to believe that the FBI is on your case.

03:03:15.060 | You need to execute the emergency procedure.

03:03:19.260 | Come home right away.

03:03:20.660 | I still had some time because the radio could be broken

03:03:25.660 | or the transmission was bad

03:03:28.500 | or I still could be in a hospital, right?

03:03:30.020 | So I gave myself some more time.

03:03:34.380 | And then something happened where they forced my hand.

03:03:39.380 | And this is the only time that a Soviet agent

03:03:45.260 | was anywhere near me on the territory of the United States.

03:03:49.860 | So I'm waiting for the A train

03:03:52.220 | on a dark morning still in Queens.

03:03:57.220 | And there's this man,

03:04:02.060 | this short man in a black trench coat

03:04:04.860 | comes up to me from my right

03:04:07.120 | and he whispers into my ears,

03:04:09.380 | you gotta come back or else you're dead.

03:04:12.780 | I can't imitate the Russian accent.

03:04:14.340 | That was a Russian accent.

03:04:15.620 | And it was a pretty strong accent.

03:04:20.580 | The you're dead phrase can have two meanings.

03:04:25.580 | And an American would have said,

03:04:28.420 | or else you're busted or else you get arrested

03:04:31.460 | or else you're dead is very strong.

03:04:34.180 | So now you have to take it seriously to some degree

03:04:38.580 | because I know that they had a history of assassinating

03:04:43.580 | or at least trying to assassinate defectors.

03:04:46.220 | So that obviously raised the stakes a little bit.

03:04:51.220 | But I just talked myself into believing

03:04:54.640 | this was just a bad phrasing.

03:04:59.060 | But at this point I knew and they knew

03:05:02.260 | that we both knew, right?

03:05:03.840 | So there was no more guessing.

03:05:04.980 | He found me, he talked to me, I know.

03:05:07.900 | So now I had to act.

03:05:09.060 | So in the next radiogram I was asked

03:05:13.420 | to execute a dead drop operation

03:05:17.060 | where they would give me money and a passport.

03:05:21.720 | And that was in a park on Staten Island.

03:05:27.660 | It was a location that I found and I described.

03:05:31.940 | And I was always praised for my ability

03:05:36.940 | to describe spots that are easy to find.

03:05:41.520 | So that was a given.

03:05:43.180 | And the only thing that was different

03:05:46.580 | in this for this operation,

03:05:47.940 | they scheduled it for the dark.

03:05:50.980 | All right, but it was still no problem

03:05:53.660 | because it was in a park and a couple of,

03:05:57.180 | about 100 yards in by next to a fallen tree.

03:06:02.180 | Would be hard to miss.

03:06:05.940 | So I go to Staten Island and I read the signal

03:06:09.700 | that said I put the container in the drop.

03:06:14.700 | That was the protocol.

03:06:16.340 | There's a signal that the person

03:06:18.980 | who hands over something puts at a spot

03:06:25.020 | not too far from the spot itself.

03:06:27.380 | That means I would go in and just pick it up.

03:06:29.980 | The reason I actually went to pick up this container

03:06:34.980 | because there was money in it.

03:06:38.860 | So I didn't have to make a decision yet.

03:06:41.580 | Okay, I could throw away the passport.

03:06:44.140 | It was like I was still trying to figure out

03:06:46.220 | what to do, what to do, what to do.

03:06:48.160 | So I get to the spot, I get to the tree

03:06:50.700 | and I had a flashlight with me.

03:06:53.380 | The park, there was no way in the park.

03:06:56.140 | Even during the day, this park was not,

03:06:58.820 | it was more almost like a little forest.

03:07:00.820 | And I don't see the container.

03:07:06.420 | It was supposed to be a crushed oil can.

03:07:09.960 | Pretty sizable, hard to miss.

03:07:12.400 | And I do a double take and I look again

03:07:16.100 | and I look around, I look around a little more,

03:07:18.460 | see if they misplaced it.

03:07:20.340 | Can't find it.

03:07:23.260 | It's the only one that one of those operations failed.

03:07:26.420 | And that just doesn't make a lot of sense.

03:07:33.580 | So when as I'm walking away from this,

03:07:35.500 | like sort of numb emotionally,

03:07:37.640 | I said to myself, I'm staying.

03:07:42.780 | - Yeah.

03:07:45.660 | - That decision--

03:07:46.500 | - Some kind of signal, some kind of a muse

03:07:49.100 | just spoke to you.

03:07:50.220 | - That decision was made for me.

03:07:53.820 | Now you know that I'm a Christian now

03:07:55.460 | and I think that was like, God told me this.

03:07:58.120 | - But it was certain there.

03:08:01.860 | It was right there.

03:08:02.700 | - That was it.

03:08:03.540 | - That was it.

03:08:04.360 | - That was it.

03:08:05.200 | And so what I did to, well first of all,

03:08:10.200 | divine intervention helped me to find a good explanation.

03:08:16.940 | I sent them my last letter with secret writing.

03:08:19.840 | I communicated to them, I said,

03:08:24.380 | I wish I could come but I can't

03:08:26.540 | because I have contracted HIV/AIDS.

03:08:30.280 | That was the best lie ever

03:08:34.140 | because nobody wanted to have AIDS in their country.

03:08:37.380 | Those days it was a death sentence, right?

03:08:39.700 | And I knew, we had conversations when I was back in Moscow

03:08:44.100 | how they were snickering about what's going on

03:08:46.860 | in the United States, that depraved culture

03:08:49.700 | and you see they're killing each other.

03:08:52.540 | - And the depraved culture took over your being

03:08:55.980 | and how you're saying--

03:08:56.820 | - Yes, and I was convincing enough,

03:08:59.540 | I even traced it back to a girlfriend I had once

03:09:03.540 | that I actually reported on that she,

03:09:06.260 | I interacted with this lady who had a boyfriend

03:09:11.260 | at one point who was a drug addict

03:09:13.860 | and she was infected and she infected me.

03:09:16.820 | So they believed it, they sent,

03:09:19.620 | and I asked them to give my dollar savings

03:09:23.220 | to my German family.

03:09:24.900 | They gave them some but they told my family

03:09:30.700 | that I already passed away, that I'm dead.

03:09:33.300 | They believed it, 100%.

03:09:35.060 | And I guess the agent who took the money

03:09:38.580 | took half of it for himself.

03:09:40.260 | So that was it and the next three months

03:09:45.240 | I made sure that I wasn't reliably at the same spot

03:09:50.240 | in the same time frame.

03:09:53.860 | So I went to work in different paths at different times

03:09:57.980 | just to, you know, just as a safety measure so to speak

03:10:02.660 | and not huge but you know, it kept me,

03:10:07.660 | allowed me to keep my sanity.

03:10:14.040 | And obviously after I sent the letter

03:10:16.560 | I threw the shortwave radio in the Hudson River,

03:10:20.640 | destroyed the one time pads that I still had

03:10:23.160 | so I was now ready to--

03:10:28.000 | - For a new life.

03:10:28.920 | - For a new life and live out my life

03:10:31.960 | as an American undiscovered but you know,

03:10:36.800 | starting to work on my version of the American dream.

03:10:42.140 | And the first action was, was telling my wife,

03:10:47.140 | the mother of this child, you know,

03:10:50.920 | she always wanted to have a house

03:10:53.920 | and I said, you know what, we should buy a house.

03:10:56.680 | And a year later we moved into the suburbs

03:11:00.280 | and then I said we should have another child

03:11:02.840 | and we had another child.

03:11:04.500 | So and I had a career, I did pretty well.

03:11:09.360 | I moved a couple of times, wound up in a McMansion

03:11:13.140 | but before that my second house was actually

03:11:17.340 | in Pennsylvania, in rural Pennsylvania

03:11:19.340 | and this is where I was discovered by the FBI.

03:11:24.340 | And how did they know about me?

03:11:27.780 | If it hadn't been for this defector,

03:11:32.060 | Vasily Mitrokhin who was an archivist in the KGB archives,

03:11:37.060 | he was actually pretty high level,

03:11:38.940 | he was in charge of the relocation of the archive

03:11:42.100 | from Lubyanka to Yasenovo.

03:11:45.380 | And he really hated, he had reason to believe

03:11:52.380 | he hated the Soviet system.

03:11:54.540 | I think I remember that his son was quite ill

03:11:59.760 | and he could have gotten treatment in England

03:12:01.700 | and he was not allowed to travel to England with his son.

03:12:05.580 | So his hatred, he tried to figure out what to do

03:12:10.580 | and how to do damage to that system.

03:12:12.380 | So he started copying notes, little slips of paper,

03:12:17.380 | handwritten that he smuggled out in his underwear

03:12:20.660 | and his socks over the years.

03:12:23.820 | And then he transcribed them with a typewriter

03:12:25.900 | and then put the pieces of paper

03:12:31.340 | into some kind of a container

03:12:33.580 | and buried this in his stature.

03:12:37.340 | It was, I believe, in 1992 when he showed up,

03:12:42.340 | that was already, the Soviet Union was gone.

03:12:45.620 | So he showed up at the US embassy in Moscow

03:12:48.780 | and told him what he had and it was on a weekend

03:12:51.680 | and apparently there was a junior person in charge

03:12:53.780 | and he said, "You know what, what you got,

03:12:55.660 | "we are not interested in, it's really old."

03:12:57.860 | (laughing)

03:13:00.220 | That's a career limiting move, right?

03:13:02.420 | Because Vasily Mitrokhin then made his way

03:13:06.660 | to one of the Baltic republics and contacted MI6

03:13:11.660 | and they said, "Come on in, old fellow,

03:13:17.100 | "have a cup of tea." (laughing)

03:13:19.740 | And so they managed to get this stuff out of the dacha

03:13:22.940 | and get it to England and eventually,

03:13:27.580 | MI6 shared it with the FBI

03:13:29.220 | and there wasn't a whole lot of information about me,

03:13:32.700 | it was very, very little.

03:13:33.860 | It was like there's a person by the name of Jack Barsky

03:13:37.300 | who is an illegal operating in the northeast

03:13:41.200 | of the United States.

03:13:42.180 | Now, if it was Jim Miller, they wouldn't have found me,

03:13:45.260 | Jack Barsky was easy to find.

03:13:47.660 | So they checked social security

03:13:50.580 | and Jack Barsky had gotten his social security card

03:13:55.460 | at the age of 33, bingo, okay?

03:13:58.740 | All they knew though was that I wasn't illegal,

03:14:02.580 | that I was still living there.

03:14:04.020 | They didn't know whether I was active, inactive.

03:14:06.420 | And the other thing that they knew

03:14:09.380 | that I was a really, really well-trained agent

03:14:12.260 | 'cause I was still there, right? (laughing)

03:14:14.940 | So they took, I think, almost three years

03:14:19.940 | to investigate me, watch me from a distance

03:14:22.740 | because if I was still active,

03:14:25.940 | I would have found out that somebody's investigating me.

03:14:30.060 | - So you started being less and less active in terms of--

03:14:33.020 | - Oh, I stopped completely.

03:14:34.660 | - What I mean is-- - Oh, surveillance detection.

03:14:36.900 | - Yes, surveillance detection.

03:14:38.100 | - After three months, I stopped altogether.

03:14:40.380 | Yeah, good point.

03:14:41.780 | - And FBI is still very careful.

03:14:43.940 | - They were very careful.

03:14:45.020 | They pretty much watched me and at one point,

03:14:49.580 | I had a house in the country with one neighbor.

03:14:51.380 | At one point, that house was for sale,

03:14:53.980 | so the FBI bought it and they put a couple of agents there

03:14:57.500 | and just didn't keep a closer eye on me.

03:14:59.660 | There was no indication that I was still active,

03:15:05.980 | but they were still cautious.

03:15:08.500 | But at one point, they were able to plant a bug

03:15:14.180 | in my kitchen, a listening device.

03:15:18.020 | And my wife and I didn't get along very well.

03:15:23.020 | There was a lot of friction

03:15:25.700 | and she was constantly complaining about things

03:15:28.420 | and I got sick and tired of it.

03:15:30.580 | And one day, we had an argument in the kitchen

03:15:32.860 | and I chose to deploy the nuclear option.

03:15:39.060 | (laughing)

03:15:41.820 | And that is telling her what I sacrificed to be with her,

03:15:47.020 | so she would understand that I am there on her side.

03:15:51.300 | I'm supporting her.

03:15:52.180 | If something doesn't quite fit,

03:15:53.980 | it is not because I don't love the both of them,

03:15:56.500 | Chelsea and Penelope.

03:15:59.220 | So when I said that, the listening device was active,

03:16:04.020 | so the FBI was hearing my confession.

03:16:07.160 | I was once a KGB agent, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,

03:16:11.060 | and I quit because of an unstable situation.

03:16:16.100 | And stayed here because of you and Chelsea.

03:16:19.740 | And that also made it clear to the FBI

03:16:24.620 | that I wasn't active anymore.

03:16:26.220 | They had both of that.

03:16:27.100 | So now, they knew an attempt to turn me

03:16:31.860 | would have been useless because you turn somebody

03:16:36.860 | who's active.

03:16:38.100 | But they figured there was enough reason

03:16:41.860 | to treat me nicely because they figured

03:16:46.860 | I had a lot of information that was as aged as it was,

03:16:51.900 | but it was still important for the FBI to get to know.

03:16:55.060 | And so, one day, it was a Friday evening,

03:17:01.060 | I'm driving back home from the office

03:17:06.660 | and I'm being stopped by a state security guard.

03:17:12.340 | State police.

03:17:14.180 | As I'm going through the toll,

03:17:18.060 | it's a bridge over the Hudson and they had to pay a toll.

03:17:22.620 | And he waved me, he got me right where I stopped

03:17:26.300 | and he said, "Could you please move over here?

03:17:29.100 | It's a routine traffic stop."

03:17:31.100 | Thought nothing of it.

03:17:32.300 | I had forgotten at that point that I once was a spy.

03:17:36.340 | It was gone.

03:17:38.300 | And then he said, "Could you please step out of the car?"

03:17:42.500 | That should have aroused my suspicion.

03:17:45.100 | That's unusual, right?

03:17:46.060 | Routine traffic stop.

03:17:48.260 | I mean, I did it, no problem.

03:17:49.620 | And then again, somebody came from the right,

03:17:52.540 | came into my view and he flipped his ID

03:17:57.540 | and he said, "FBI, we would like to have a talk with you."

03:18:00.580 | Now, this is my now friend Joe Riley,

03:18:04.860 | who actually is the, he's the godfather of Trinity,

03:18:09.860 | my last child.

03:18:10.900 | But anyway, he told me later that when I heard that phrase,

03:18:15.900 | all the blood left my face, I became totally white.

03:18:22.120 | But I recovered very quickly and he said it himself.

03:18:26.860 | So, they took me to a vehicle

03:18:31.420 | and there was another agent in the vehicle

03:18:35.300 | and he had a gun strapped to his ankle.

03:18:38.140 | So, it was pretty real.

03:18:40.300 | First question I had, so am I under arrest?

03:18:44.740 | And the answer was no.

03:18:46.500 | And then my instinct kicked in

03:18:50.420 | in my ability to operate very well

03:18:55.260 | under high pressure situations.

03:18:57.100 | And I asked him, "So, what took you so long?"

03:19:01.220 | You know, the intent of that was to

03:19:04.020 | defuse any kind of tension.

03:19:11.860 | - Yes. - And I saw a smile.

03:19:13.380 | - Instant friends.

03:19:16.740 | - Yeah, I knew that I had to make them like me.

03:19:21.740 | And I think by now I know I'm a pretty likable person.

03:19:28.180 | - I would say so.

03:19:30.180 | So, and when they took me to a motel,

03:19:34.020 | which they had rented, there was two wings

03:19:37.020 | at a right angle, they bought all the rooms in one wing

03:19:45.340 | and they had a guard at each end of that wing

03:19:49.620 | and they took me in the middle.

03:19:51.660 | And there were some props there,

03:19:54.500 | some binders with labels.

03:19:57.380 | And I immediately thought, "This is pretty silly,"

03:20:00.860 | because what I noticed that the labels

03:20:04.700 | all referred back to my early years.

03:20:07.460 | I knew that they didn't know much else.

03:20:09.420 | So, I told Joe that afterwards

03:20:13.460 | and that was not a great idea.

03:20:15.260 | But anyway, but I volunteered.

03:20:20.260 | I made the following statement

03:20:21.500 | before we even started the interview.

03:20:24.180 | I said, "I know there's only one way for me

03:20:26.620 | "to and my family to have a chance to get through here

03:20:30.780 | "without much damages, if I'm completely 100% cooperative

03:20:35.620 | "and it's my intent to do exactly that."

03:20:40.460 | All right, so we spent about two hours in the interview.

03:20:43.620 | They allowed me to call my wife,

03:20:46.140 | tell her that I'm gonna be late.

03:20:47.940 | That indicated to me already that they would let me go.

03:20:51.100 | And after two hours, they let me go.

03:20:54.820 | But they had the area covered with a whole bunch of people.

03:20:59.700 | And the head of that team talked to me and he says,

03:21:04.020 | "If you think of running,

03:21:06.860 | "we got every intersection in this area covered.

03:21:09.260 | "You can't."

03:21:10.340 | I didn't say anything, but I had no thought of running.

03:21:14.940 | So, and that was the beginning of another phase of my life

03:21:22.420 | where I was cooperating with the FBI for quite a while

03:21:25.380 | and living still undercover for several years

03:21:27.700 | until I had real good documentation

03:21:30.340 | and became an American citizen seven years ago.

03:21:33.660 | - Today, seven years ago.

03:21:36.420 | So, it was recently.

03:21:37.820 | - Yeah, quite recent.

03:21:39.700 | The bureaucracy took a long time to figure out

03:21:42.220 | how to make me real and also not put me

03:21:47.220 | in these witness protection program,

03:21:51.420 | to keep my name and then just make everything official.

03:21:56.420 | So, for instance, I had to change my birth year

03:21:59.540 | simply because if I, Jack Barsky was born in 1944.

03:22:05.380 | If I kept 1944, the FBI would have helped me commit a crime

03:22:09.420 | because I would have collected social security

03:22:12.740 | of four years sooner.

03:22:14.860 | So, anyway.

03:22:17.180 | - Details of that name.

03:22:18.020 | - Yes, it took quite a while.

03:22:19.860 | And when I finally got the call

03:22:21.500 | from the office of Homeland Security,

03:22:24.900 | the lady says, "This is agent so-and-so

03:22:30.380 | from Homeland Security.

03:22:34.300 | Can you come to the office tomorrow?"

03:22:36.900 | And I said, "Let me look at my calendar."

03:22:41.900 | And then I said, "Wait a minute, what am I talking about?

03:22:44.820 | What time do you want me to be there?"

03:22:46.860 | Because I had waited for that moment for a long time

03:22:49.140 | and I was sworn in right then and there.

03:22:51.260 | It was a good feeling to walk out of there

03:22:54.380 | because I had a country again.

03:22:57.060 | And I love this country just as much as you said you love it

03:23:01.660 | with all its warts and its problems

03:23:03.580 | that we're going through right now.

03:23:05.340 | And then the last thing that changed my life again,

03:23:11.060 | and I don't wanna get into details

03:23:12.820 | because it's a little complicated story.

03:23:14.820 | I never wanted to be a public person.

03:23:18.700 | And then I was discovered through a number of dots

03:23:23.700 | that were unlikely to be connected.

03:23:26.260 | It had to do with a relative,

03:23:27.620 | with a half-brother of my wife who lives in Germany,

03:23:32.620 | was taken to Germany by his mother,

03:23:37.540 | who came to visit somebody, not us,

03:23:40.380 | but that somebody that he came to visit

03:23:43.180 | lived 50 miles from our house.

03:23:45.740 | And that my wife and this half-brother

03:23:49.300 | never met in person before.

03:23:51.940 | They knew about each other through social media.

03:23:54.820 | And when he found out my background,

03:23:56.540 | he was a conductor of the German railroad at the time.

03:24:01.540 | He said, "Oh, this is a big story.

03:24:03.860 | "I'm going to be big, big, big."

03:24:05.980 | (Roland laughs)

03:24:06.820 | Okay.

03:24:07.780 | Well, he happened to know this one person

03:24:09.660 | who happened to know one of the star reporters

03:24:14.180 | of Der Spiegel.

03:24:15.700 | - Hmm.

03:24:16.540 | - And after she did some research

03:24:19.620 | and determined that I was real, she was on my case.

03:24:23.860 | And she happened to know Steve Kroft,

03:24:26.700 | the guy from "60 Minutes."

03:24:28.500 | You see all these connections?

03:24:29.780 | I had nothing to do with it.

03:24:30.620 | - That's how life works.

03:24:31.700 | Dots get connected somehow, sometimes.

03:24:34.220 | - Yeah. - Most of us, it doesn't.

03:24:35.260 | - Stuff happens.

03:24:36.100 | - Stuff happens, you get lucky.

03:24:37.540 | - You don't know what's happening.

03:24:38.380 | - You've gotten lucky a few times in your life.

03:24:40.500 | - Yeah, I think I must be part Irish too.

03:24:43.660 | (Roland laughs)

03:24:45.220 | Yeah, so it's been an interesting ride.

03:24:50.220 | I'm just still shaking my head

03:24:55.780 | about all the stuff that happened.

03:24:57.700 | - Oh, it's been a fun one.

03:24:58.660 | Well, you wrote, "Because I'm allowed to leave behind

03:25:02.620 | "a documented legacy of my unusual life,

03:25:06.840 | "I'm praying that the legacy will be described

03:25:09.480 | "by a single word, love."

03:25:12.620 | So let us return to the thing we started

03:25:15.180 | the conversation with, which is love.

03:25:17.360 | What role does love play in this human condition,

03:25:21.380 | in your life and in our life here together?

03:25:24.940 | - I give you an answer by telling you

03:25:29.940 | what happened one day.

03:25:31.580 | I gave a presentation at Microsoft headquarters.

03:25:35.540 | (Roland laughs)

03:25:37.540 | - That's a strange beginning of a love story, but yes.

03:25:40.420 | - No, that's not a love story.

03:25:41.580 | And so there's this beautiful young lady

03:25:44.900 | sitting in the back and she's paying a lot of attention.

03:25:48.820 | Found out later that her job at Microsoft,

03:25:52.300 | her job title was storyteller.

03:25:54.940 | It's soft marketing, right?

03:25:57.940 | (Roland laughs)

03:25:59.260 | - Yeah, you could say that.

03:26:00.740 | - Yeah, but if you can't afford somebody like that,

03:26:04.100 | that's good.

03:26:05.420 | Anyway, she, question and answer,

03:26:10.660 | she raised her hand and she asked me,

03:26:12.580 | so all the things that you have done

03:26:16.540 | and you have experienced,

03:26:17.980 | what's the number one lesson

03:26:19.820 | you've taken away from your life?

03:26:22.240 | That was a new question for me.

03:26:25.260 | I've never been asked that question.

03:26:27.620 | And I thought about it for 20 seconds

03:26:31.580 | and then I came up with this phrase

03:26:34.740 | that we all know love conquers all.

03:26:36.920 | Because in my life it did.

03:26:40.520 | In the end.

03:26:41.360 | It's the strongest human emotion

03:26:47.780 | and that is what makes us human, really.

03:26:51.060 | - And you spoke about the,

03:26:52.700 | I mean, offline as I've spoken with you,

03:26:55.460 | it's clear to me how transformative,

03:26:58.460 | how powerful the life of your children

03:27:01.940 | or your daughters in your life and who you are

03:27:05.500 | and why you think life is beautiful

03:27:08.140 | and why you think this country is beautiful.

03:27:10.420 | - Now that I'm pretty mature,

03:27:14.000 | to put it mildly,

03:27:16.440 | I'm also more loving towards many more people.

03:27:22.260 | You know, these things like random acts of kindness

03:27:26.660 | for strangers, I do 'em.

03:27:28.220 | I'm looking for them now.

03:27:29.340 | And you know what?

03:27:30.540 | It's good for me.

03:27:31.460 | - Well, welcome to Texas

03:27:34.260 | because this random acts of kindness to strangers

03:27:37.980 | seems to be a way of life.

03:27:40.540 | Which is one of the reasons I love it here.

03:27:44.380 | It just reminds me why I love human beings

03:27:47.460 | is that there's just this warmth, this connection.

03:27:50.020 | - Yeah, and Georgia is the same thing.

03:27:52.180 | - Yeah, amen.

03:27:54.100 | Do you ever have any regrets?

03:27:56.760 | Looking back at life,

03:28:00.140 | do you wish you'd done something different?

03:28:02.140 | - Well, I could have,

03:28:04.380 | but then I would have had a different regret.

03:28:08.940 | I betrayed the wife, the German wife that I loved.

03:28:12.460 | I really did love her and I betrayed her.

03:28:16.580 | But if I don't betray her, then I betray the child.

03:28:21.580 | - That is a source of so much love for you now.

03:28:27.300 | So maybe your life is a kind of,

03:28:28.980 | you get to choose your regrets.

03:28:33.020 | You don't get to avoid them.

03:28:36.860 | It's a little bit of a strange way of putting it,

03:28:40.300 | but there's no other choice.

03:28:42.460 | I tell you what I don't regret,

03:28:46.060 | and that may be,

03:28:48.700 | you probably understand it now

03:28:50.360 | because you have enough background about me.

03:28:51.940 | I don't regret having lied to my mother

03:28:53.900 | because I had no really strong emotional relationship

03:28:59.500 | with her.

03:29:00.540 | She took care of me.

03:29:01.540 | She was proud of me, but we didn't hug.

03:29:06.260 | We didn't interact emotionally whatsoever.

03:29:10.640 | - So you don't feel like you betrayed that love that--

03:29:15.420 | - Well, I did.

03:29:16.260 | I know that she was looking for me until the day she died.

03:29:21.260 | She wrote a letter to President Gorbachev

03:29:26.180 | asking him for help to locate me.

03:29:28.040 | She checked with the Stasi.

03:29:33.800 | She just was like hell-bent on finding me

03:29:38.800 | and couldn't find me,

03:29:40.780 | so she passed away without knowing what happened to me.

03:29:45.780 | Now, there was this rumor that was flying around,

03:29:50.160 | and she possibly may have bought into that rumor

03:29:52.800 | because my cover for when I went to the United States

03:29:57.800 | was that I changed careers again,

03:30:01.860 | and I joined an institution in Kazakhstan

03:30:06.760 | that did space research.

03:30:09.000 | Intercosmos something something,

03:30:12.760 | and I had a piece of paper that invited me to start there,

03:30:17.760 | and it was a forgery.

03:30:20.840 | Intercosmos never existed,

03:30:22.880 | but people knew that in Kazakhstan

03:30:25.340 | there were super secret facilities.

03:30:30.520 | And one of my classmates,

03:30:33.700 | old classmates from high school,

03:30:35.020 | started the rumor that I died in a rocket accident,

03:30:40.020 | and everybody knew that.

03:30:41.960 | So when I came back to Germany,

03:30:45.340 | went back to Germany,

03:30:47.420 | I found the telephone number of this girl

03:30:51.420 | that had dumped me.

03:30:53.460 | I called her, and I said to her,

03:30:57.500 | "So guess who this is.

03:30:59.300 | "Maybe you hold on to your chair."

03:31:01.440 | She says, "Yes."

03:31:02.360 | I said, "This is Albrecht."

03:31:04.940 | (Albrecht screaming)

03:31:08.440 | - It's a good payback.

03:31:09.800 | (both laughing)

03:31:10.800 | - No, we actually met.

03:31:12.360 | So there's two elderly people in their 60s

03:31:15.000 | who meet each other after so many years,

03:31:19.700 | and the one that ended the relationship

03:31:24.480 | started the conversation by saying,

03:31:26.840 | "You know what, I made a really bad mistake."

03:31:31.180 | And the tears came down her cheeks.

03:31:33.820 | I wasn't asking for that.

03:31:35.260 | I wasn't happy about it, but it did feel good.

03:31:38.380 | Now, a while later,

03:31:41.820 | I knew why she said she made a mistake.

03:31:46.380 | I met her husband.

03:31:47.540 | - Yeah, I mean, there's a,

03:31:52.740 | Tom Waits has a song called "Martha,"

03:31:55.100 | where he made, or an older gentleman calls

03:31:59.020 | somebody he used to love, and they have a conversation.

03:32:01.360 | They're both married now,

03:32:03.240 | and it's, sometimes you can meet people from your past,

03:32:06.720 | and it gives you a glimpse

03:32:08.320 | of a possible different life you could have had.

03:32:10.560 | - Oh, yeah, and you know, I was actually,

03:32:13.080 | when she said, "I made a mistake,"

03:32:14.520 | and I was thinking to myself,

03:32:16.860 | "No, you didn't."

03:32:19.560 | There was none.

03:32:20.400 | There was nothing left.

03:32:21.220 | There was nothing left.

03:32:24.040 | And also, the person that she became,

03:32:25.920 | personality-wise, wasn't as attractive as I remembered her.

03:32:33.440 | You know, it's puppy love, you know?

03:32:35.760 | - But it's still love.

03:32:37.040 | - Yeah, oh, it was.

03:32:37.880 | - It still happened.

03:32:38.720 | - It was passionate love, for sure,

03:32:40.720 | and I would have thrown myself under the bus

03:32:45.680 | if I could save her.

03:32:47.240 | It was that strong, and just as strong

03:32:49.100 | as the love for my two girls.

03:32:51.400 | - Yeah.

03:32:52.240 | Life is full of moments and periods like that of love,

03:32:58.000 | and that's what makes life so fricking awesome.

03:33:01.440 | But it does come to an end.

03:33:03.720 | - And so does this conversation, I guess.

03:33:06.060 | - This goes on for many more hours, but yes.

03:33:10.400 | Do you think about your own death?

03:33:12.040 | - Huh?

03:33:12.880 | - Do you think about death?

03:33:13.700 | Do you think about your own death?

03:33:14.880 | - Yes.

03:33:16.120 | - Are you afraid of it?

03:33:17.440 | - Yes, even though I'm a Christian.

03:33:20.760 | (Ralph sighs)

03:33:23.800 | - As a Christian, do you have a sense of what's coming after?

03:33:26.720 | Or is it full of uncertainty?

03:33:28.360 | - I have a hope.

03:33:29.320 | I have a hope.

03:33:31.240 | You know, there's a lot of Christianity

03:33:37.000 | which is quite logical.

03:33:39.400 | A lot of Christianity which is also, you know,

03:33:42.280 | the life of Christ has a lot of proof.

03:33:46.520 | But, you know, I became a Christian

03:33:51.520 | starting with a head.

03:33:56.960 | And I was already quite old.

03:34:01.960 | And I, you know, when you don't get this faith very early,

03:34:14.560 | it's tougher to buy into everything.

03:34:16.880 | You know, there are some things that are difficult

03:34:20.880 | for me to understand and believe,

03:34:23.760 | but there's many, many other things

03:34:26.160 | that I can't explain only with the existence of a God.

03:34:29.560 | But whether he lets us go again in eternity, I just hope.

03:34:34.560 | I won't convince somebody else at this point,

03:34:39.840 | which doesn't make me a really, really good Christian

03:34:43.360 | because I'm supposed to evangelize.

03:34:45.260 | - But there's still a fear.

03:34:48.640 | - Yeah.

03:34:49.480 | - There's a fear and a hope.

03:34:50.920 | - On the other hand, I know that,

03:34:53.760 | you see, this is how I approach the last years of my life.

03:34:58.760 | I will not mentally or physically get decrepit.

03:35:08.560 | I will do everything I can do to be alert and fit.

03:35:13.560 | I still run.

03:35:16.200 | I run four or five times a week.

03:35:18.760 | And I'm going to start lifting weights again.

03:35:21.880 | - Good.

03:35:22.880 | So you stay physically and mentally sharp.

03:35:24.880 | - Yes.

03:35:26.240 | - Go out with guns blazing.

03:35:27.760 | - That's, and I once read a book

03:35:30.000 | written by a medical doctor.

03:35:32.640 | He said most people,

03:35:35.960 | when they're becoming mature,

03:35:39.080 | the rest of their life is a slow downward move.

03:35:43.280 | And--

03:35:46.480 | - Not for you.

03:35:47.680 | - No, the last years are pretty bad.

03:35:51.480 | He said, "You gotta do this."

03:35:53.920 | Boom.

03:35:54.760 | - That's pretty good advice from a doctor.

03:35:57.920 | And if nothing else from Christianity,

03:36:02.440 | whichever parts you take on,

03:36:04.440 | one of the big ones is love.

03:36:06.520 | - Yes.

03:36:07.360 | - That's something you've lived from the very beginning

03:36:09.280 | before God was part of your life,

03:36:12.880 | before anything was part of your life,

03:36:14.240 | it seemed that love was part of your life

03:36:16.440 | and has been a consistent thread throughout.

03:36:18.480 | - Yes, sir.

03:36:19.320 | And there's a short sentence in the Bible

03:36:24.320 | that says God is love.

03:36:25.760 | And the other thing I wanna say,

03:36:28.880 | the Christian morality is,

03:36:33.680 | I can sign that with my blood.

03:36:35.240 | - God is love, amen.

03:36:38.880 | Jack, you're an incredible person,

03:36:41.440 | lived an incredible life.

03:36:43.180 | Thank you for talking today.

03:36:46.120 | Thank you for telling your story.

03:36:47.760 | Thank you for being who you are.

03:36:50.320 | And thank you for being all about love.

03:36:53.640 | This is a beautiful conversation, it was an honor.

03:36:56.080 | Thank you for talking today.

03:36:56.920 | - Yeah, and appreciate the tough questions that you asked.

03:37:00.760 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation

03:37:02.200 | with Jack Barsky.

03:37:03.400 | To support this podcast,

03:37:04.560 | please check out our sponsors in the description.

03:37:07.240 | And now let me leave you with some words

03:37:09.160 | from Edward Snowden.

03:37:10.460 | You can't come up against

03:37:12.600 | the world's most powerful intelligence agencies

03:37:15.080 | and not accept the risk.

03:37:17.200 | If they want to get you, over time, they will.

03:37:21.000 | Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

03:37:25.160 | (upbeat music)

03:37:27.740 | (upbeat music)

03:37:30.320 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Jack Barsky: KGB Spy | Lex Fridman Podcast #301

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