something happened where they forced my hand. This is the only time that a Soviet agent was anywhere near me on the territory of the United States. So I'm waiting for the A train on a dark morning still in Queens and there's this man in a black trench coat comes up to me from my right and he whispers into my ears, "You gotta come back or else you're dead." The following is a conversation with Jack Barsky, a former KGB spy, author of Deep Undercover, and the subject of an excellent podcast series called The Agent.

There are very few people who have defected from the KGB and live to tell the story. It is one of the most powerful intelligence organizations in history. And this conversation gives a window into its operation, both from an ideological and psychological perspectives, but also it tells the story of a man who lived one heck of an incredible life.

This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Jack Barsky. Let's start with a big basic question. What is the KGB? (speaking in foreign language) - Right, so that is the Committee of State Security. Yeah, there's an apostolist, this is a, apostolist is a threat, right?

- Threat. - Okay, and bs means? - Without. - Right. - And I guess that directly translates to security, without threat. - So, and don't exist anymore. It was disbanded when the Soviet Union fell apart and the successor agencies are now the SVR and the FSB. FSB supposedly the equivalent to the FBI and SVR, the CIA, but the SVR is relatively weak and the FSB has taken on a lot of espionage and active measures and they're much bigger and stronger, but the most capable intelligence agency in Russia is the GRU, military intelligence.

- That nobody knows very much about. - That's right. When I was in the KGB, I had no idea that there was military intelligence. Nobody ever mentioned anything like that. And by the way, I recently had the pleasure to give a talk at the DIA. When they reached out to me, I didn't know they existed either.

- Interesting. Yeah, that's always the question. If you want to be an intelligence agency, should the world know anything about you? Because in some sense, you want to create the legend in order to attract great, competent individuals to work for you, but at the same time, you want it to be shrouded in complete mystery.

If nobody knows you exist, you might be able to operate well as an intelligence agency. That is fascinating, but FSB is the thing that carries the flag of KGB, KGB being probably one of, if not the most, sort of infamous, famous, infamous, and powerful intelligence agencies. - In history, yes.

- Ever. - Absolutely, 100%. - It was founded in 1954 after the death of Stalin. You've, in writing your book, looked back at the predecessors of the history. Is there some way in which the KGB is grounded in the culture, the spirit, the soul of its predecessors? - Oh, absolutely.

They just changed names and they changed personnel, rather frequently, and that had something to do with Stalin's paranoia. From between 1923, and I don't remember what, I think it may have been the NKVD at that time. It started as a Cheka, and then it became the GPU, the NKVD, yes.

- It's three or four letter words. - But with those name changes, you also had changes at the top. Between 1923 and 1953, when Stalin died, that is 30 years, they had eight heads of intelligence, and of those eight, six were executed when they were replaced. So that's an indication that this was an organization that ate itself from the inside.

The Soviet Union was the only dictatorship in history that did not rest its powers on the military. They rested its powers on the intelligence apparatus, and that thing was unstable. So you know where that leads. Eventually, if you rest your power on something that is made out of bricks that don't hold a lot of load, it will fall apart.

- On sand. - Yeah. - Why was it unstable, would you say? What of human nature makes it unstable? - It's the paranoia. Stalin was always worried about the most powerful people coming after him. So he proactively killed off heads of the KGB, and he had this great purge where he got rid of a lot of his generals, really capable generals.

And that cost him dearly when World War II started, because he started off with a force that wasn't as capable as it could have been. - Was it paranoia at all levels? - I believe so, I believe so. It comes from the top. And so if the top doesn't trust you, you always have to worry about your peers snitching on you.

- Yeah. - Okay? So, and I think we have a very similar situation in Russia today. And in this kind of atmosphere, the truth will never get to the top. - So no matter what moral rules the organization operates under, trust is fundamental to its competence. - Oh, absolutely, and I wanna extend this to my own existence.

And this is kind of strange, it's almost dichotomous, because I was running around lying to everybody, and I couldn't fundamentally be trusted. But the relationship that I had with the KGB was based on trust. If they don't trust me, they don't send me out. And if I don't trust them, I'm not going.

And I eventually broke that trust, and they knew there was always that danger. - They knew that because something about you, or just something about human beings-- - No, there were hints about how long my assignment would be, so 10 to 12 years. And you see, it makes sense, all right?

I was becoming an American, and over time, I would become more and more American, and there was always a chance that I liked it more here than there, that I was really successful in what I was supposed to do. And it sort of happened, but in my case, it happened because I fathered a child who I didn't wanna leave when they wanted me back.

- Love always screws up your employment competence, yes. - You're absolutely right. But they thought that I had an anchor at home because I had a wife and a son at home, which you've gotta worry about them if you defect. Because in the past, the KGB would go after family, ruthlessly.

- Including perhaps violence? - Yeah. - This is a hard question about the KGB because it's one of the most ruthless organizations, but in general, are there lines, KGB agents at every level of the hierarchy that they would not cross? Political, legal, ethical, or does anything goes to achieve the goal?

- I was only in touch with two types of agents, whether the technical experts, the ones that taught me tradecraft, and they were like engineers, and they were in charge of the secret writing, and the Morse code, shortwave radio reception, decryption, encryption, and that kind of stuff. Those were just doing their job, all right?

And the others, the ones that trained me, that prepared me for life in the United States, they were nice people. They were elegant people. I don't think, they would not fit into the stereotype of the ruthless, gun-carrying agent. - Is it possible that you would not be aware of the parts of the KGB?

I mean, it's very modular. Would you, it's possible that you're not aware of the parts of the KGB that are the quote-unquote muscle? - Oh, I didn't know. I would find out afterwards, after I retired and started doing some research. I had no clue. - You're kind of operating in a bubble.

- Oh, very much so. I mean, this is what the KGB did really, really well, compartmentalization, and that was based on the communist movement while it was still underground. The cells were very small, so that maybe there were three, four members in one cell that knew one another, and then they had a liaison to another cell.

So the bottom line is if you got, one of those folks were caught, they could maybe betray four people or three, something like that, and the KGB continued with that tradition. I have reason to believe that my handler, the person in Moscow that sort of directed me and made decisions what to do and where to go, never met me personally.

There's no reason to, right? Why would, so, and this actually was a big advantage over other intelligence services, because you look at what the CIA does, everybody blabs. There's a lot of leaks coming out of American intelligence. I don't think there's as many leaks coming out of the Mossad.

- Strong words from Jack Barsky, by the way. So, I mean, that is a question I wanna ask a little more systematically. Is there something unique about the KGB compared to the other intelligence agencies? Let's talk British intelligence, MI6, Mossad, CIA. Is there unique cultures, spirits, souls of the different organizations that maybe somehow connect to the structures of government, connect maybe the values of the people, those kinds of things?

- I believe we were all pretty much strong believers in communism and the future of the world being-- - In KGB? - Yes. I think that unified us to a large degree, even the technicians. - So even, it wasn't something like, yeah, yeah, the parents believe this thing, but we know the truth.

You really believe the story of communism. - Absolutely did, and you need to look at the timeframe. The Soviet Union, after World War II, made quite a bit of progress in influencing the third world. I still remember when I was in middle school, we had a map, the map of the world, and it was color-coded.

So red was communism, that was the Soviet Union and the Eastern states, and then blue was capitalism, and then we had green, which were the third world countries, and the green slowly turned pink because a lot of third world governments, so I'm looking at Angola, I'm looking at Vietnam, a lot of these countries were very sympathetic to the Soviet Union, and so we sort of knew that this would go on like that, and eventually we would take over, and pretty much overtake, that was the myth, overtake the United States, not only militarily, but also in terms of industrial production and so forth.

That was a stupid pipe dream. The military, it was a standoff, as we know. - Well, stupid pipe dream. Hitler had a stupid pipe dream that he executed exceptionally effectively on, if not for a handful of military mistakes, the world could look very different today. - Well, the biggest one being invading the Soviet Union, particularly at the time that he did it, because he ran into the same thing that Napoleon ran into, General Winter.

- Well, within, so Operation Barbarossa, within that, he could have made different decisions, for example, attacking, skipping Kiev and attacking Moscow directly, overthrowing the government. So marching, I guess that would be learning lessons from Napoleon as opposed to a different kind of distribution of forces, and then getting bogged down in the winter.

But the point is, these ambitions sometimes do, the ambitions of empire sometimes do materialize in the growth and the building and the establishment of those empires, and those empires write the history books in such a way that we don't think of them as empires, or we certainly don't think of them as the bad guys.

They write the history books, therefore they're the good guys. And right now, America has effectively written the book about the good guys. I happen to believe that book, but we should be humbled and open-minded to realize that that is in fact what is happening, is effective empires write the history books and tell us stories and tell us propaganda and tell us narratives that we believe because we are human beings, and we love to get together and believe ideas.

We love to dream of a beautiful world and try to build that beautiful world together. In the United States, that's a beautiful world, the freedom of respect of human rights, of all men are created equal, pursuit of happiness. You know, it always sounds good. If you look at what the dream of communism is, it sure as heck, in its words, on the surface, sounds good.

Respect for the workers, the working class, the lower classes that have been trodden on, that have been stolen from by the powerful. They deserve to have the money, the power, the respect that they have earned through their hard work, sounds great. - And everybody gets along, we just have to, all men are wonderful people, and if they go bad, it has something to do with the fact that they have been oppressed, right?

And that dream just never worked out. And even it is, when you think about it, and I didn't think about it. When you're young, you just emotionally, you accept it. But when you think about it, somehow that new wonderful organization has to organize itself. Even though Lenin predicted that the state eventually would go away.

Well, how does it work? Then you have like anarchy, right? You have to have an organization. And the only way to really organize a large number of people is with a hierarchy. So, and who gets to the top? The ones that want to go to the top, the ones that believe in themselves, the ones that know better than everybody else.

And once you have that hierarchy established, there is no guarantee that it won't go bad. And actually, when you look at history, every such hierarchy has gone bad. You know, you look at Cuba, for instance, I believe Fidel Castro was an honest revolutionary. I do believe that. And so what did Cuba turn into?

- Yeah, there's something about, and you speak about Vladimir Putin in this way, but let's step away from that for a second. Is there something about being an honest revolutionary that wants to do good for their country, and you start to believe that you know better than everyone else how to do good in the country?

And you very well might first, but then somehow that grows into a distortion field where you keep believing you know what's right, and all the people who disagree with you, you stop seeing them as having a point. You instead see them as like evil manipulators of the truth that are actually trying to hurt people for their own greed, for their own power, and you will protect the people because you know what's good.

In the case of Stalin, I mean, I don't know, but it seems like he really believed that communism would bring about a much better world. I mean, there was a sense, you have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet. This idea that sacrifice is necessary to bring about a greater world.

And then the other aspect is sort of ruling by terror, creating terrors that justify a political mechanism to achieve a better world. So it wasn't, I mean, perhaps he had to do that to be able to sleep at night with the atrocities he's committing. I think he believed he will bring about a better world.

- And by the way, the terror didn't start with Stalin. It started right after the Bolsheviks took over when Lenin told Mr. Jelzinski, Comrade Jelzinski to build the Chekhov and then execute the, this is what he called it, the Red Terror. So at the birth of the Soviet Union, there was already terror and it was deliberate.

And it also was, it wasn't just focused on the enemies. It was focused on whoever you didn't like. There was no rule of law. There was no court cases. People were just pulled out of their apartments and shot on sight. And this was done by revolutionaries who were convinced that eventually, that these sacrifices had to be made and eventually that would lead to a much better planet.

- And the populists believed this too, that those sacrifices, in part. I mean, this is such a dark thing about dictatorships is you believe it, but you're also too afraid to question your beliefs. Like you're not directly afraid, but almost like, I don't know what that is. That's almost like a subconscious fear.

Like don't, there's a dark room with a locked door. Don't look in that door. Don't check that door. And there's something about the United States that says, especially modern culture, it's like go to that door first. And sort of question everything kind of, that's the power of the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press, but you can get, almost become too critical and too cynical of your own culture in that way.

So there's a balance to strike, of course, but man, if communism is not a lesson of human nature, I don't know what is, but you believed, without thinking too much about it, you believed in the story of communism. What did you see just, you know, I came from the Soviet Union.

What did you maybe feel that's right and good about communism, about the vision of communism? Could you remember like-- - I think the biggest impetus in me believing in communism was that the communists, when just before Hitler took over, the communists were the only force in Germany that fought the Nazis in the streets.

And that's a historic truth. - Yes. - And communists were hunted down by the Nazis, killed, put in concentration camps. And so what we knew, when what we were taught, and I think that was a huge unforced error by the Western countries, particularly the United States, that there were ex-Nazis in the government in West Germany.

- Yeah. - And the most famous one was Reinhard Galen, who was in charge, was the general in charge of the intelligence on the Eastern Front under Hitler. And when the Allied won the war, it was decided that Galen was too important, with his knowledge and his organization, was too important to not use.

So he was co-opted by the CIA and eventually wound up being the head of the Bundesnachrichtendienst, the CIA of West Germany. That gave us, us, when I say us, you know, the East German party, a huge propaganda victory. I wanted to, because the emotional aspect of this was as follows.

When we were in, juniors in high school, and in those days, when you, you were only allowed to go to high school if you were in the top 10% of students, okay, so this was going to be the next set of ruling elite in the country. We were sent, we were required to visit a concentration camp.

And if you know what we, as 17-year-olds, were made to look at, it was gut-wrenching. How can men do something like that to men? Piles of corpses, lampshades made out of human skin because that skin had tattoos on them, and a shrunken head, so heads like the size of my fist.

I mean, the girls all cried. And it made a huge impression. - And that was the Nazis. - Yes. - And the communists defeated the Nazis. - The communists were the Nazi fighters. They were the good guys. Of course, in hindsight, if the communists had come to power, it would have been just the other way around, as we know, given the example of Stalin and Mao, right?

So, but we didn't know that, right? - From the Russian, Soviet perspective, the communist regime banded together to win the great patriotic war. - And that was the second one, the big brother, the Soviet Union. I mean, when I was approached by the KGB, that was like, oh, I felt so honored.

- So we should say that we're talking about East Germany, that you're from East Germany. Can you describe, you were born four years in, what is it? - Yeah, four years. - 10 days? - Yeah, sort of, very good. - After Germany's unconditional surrender in World War II. So what is East Germany, what is West Germany?

What is East and West Germany? What is that, what's the difference? What's the historical context here? What is World War II again? And then, let's do-- - We don't have to go to World War I, which the result of which actually seeded World War II in some respect. - Yes, there's a long history, yes.

- But let's start with World War II. So when Hitler came to power, he and his leadership decided that the Germans needed more what they called Lebensraum, that means room to live. And they would start expanding, and they went into France, they took Belgium, the Netherlands, they annexed Austria, and got a piece of Czechoslovakia.

And then they decided to march into the Soviet Union after they took Poland. - Cut up Poland together with the Soviet Union. - Yes. - They were friends. - Yes. - They were-- - It was a non-aggression pact that was signed by Ribbentrop and Molotov, right? I think both parties knew that eventually they would fall apart, but at the time, it gave the Soviet Union a little more, a piece of Poland, and a little more time to prepare what they thought might happen down the road.

And the Germans had the time and the ability to pretty much conquer all of Western Europe. - Do you think Stalin really knew that it's gonna fall apart? - Why would somebody like Stalin trust somebody like Hitler? - But why did he blunder so bad not to read the intelligence that was coming his way?

- Oh, he didn't-- - The troops are amassing on the border of the Soviet Union. - He didn't trust his own intelligence apparatus. - Boy. - Here's one example. There was a German communist who went underground when Hitler took over, and he went to Japan as a journalist. His name is Richard Sorge.

Richard Sorge had really, really good intel about what the Japanese would do and not do. I forgot exactly what it was, but it came to Moscow and Stalin totally ignored it. And when Sorge was captured by the Japanese, the Soviet Union denied that he was one of theirs, so he was executed.

The paranoia, again, does a lot of damage. When you don't believe your own intelligence apparatus, why bother having one? - Yeah, I mean, there, but I'm sure there's contradictory information coming in from the intelligence apparatus, so it's difficult. I mean, first of all, nobody likes to be disagreed with, especially when you become more and more powerful, and then the intelligence apparatus is probably giving you information you don't like.

It's often negative information about-- - Yeah. - Basically, information that says that the decisions you made in the past are not great decisions, and that's a difficult truth to deal with. - Yeah. - So, in the modern times, if we hop around briefly, is Vladimir Putin has been not happy with the intelligence of the FSB, thereby, at least if you read the news, choosing to put more priority to the GRU for the intelligence in Ukraine.

- Right. - But I guess I suppose the same story happens there, as it does throughout history, is paranoia. - I give you an example that comes from a very reliable source, and that my best German friend worked as a chemist in the Stasi, East German intelligence, and he eventually, he rose to the rank of major and was in charge of the forgery department.

It's very likely that he made passports that I used to travel. He was aware that there was intelligence that was collected. The Stasi was really good. They had about 1,000 people in West Germany, undercover agents, some of them in government, and the central committee of the party, the decision makers, ignored it because it didn't quite fit in their worldview, it didn't quite fit into their plans.

So, and one delicious thing that I just wanna add on to this, when Gorbachev wrote his book about Perestroika and Glasnost, the East German rulers did not like it, they were much more orthodox. So, they had to print the books in translation. Guess where they wound up? They were piled up in the hallways of the Stasi.

They bought the entire print run. - Fascinating. But let's backtrack, so Operation Barbarossa, invasion of Hitler to the Soviet Union, and then hopefully that leads us all the way to East Germany, West Germany, after the end of the war. - So, what happened was the Soviet Union rolled into the eastern part of Germany, and the Western allies took a larger chunk, which was eventually, it was occupied by the three allies, the French, the English, and the Americans, and the eastern part was occupied by Soviet troops, and the Soviet troops actually conquered Berlin.

But in a contract, they decided that Berlin would be ruled by the four allies, and they all had free access to that city. I was born in the East German part, which very quickly became ruled by communists, slash socialists, the Communist Party and the Socialist Party united, but the leaders of that new party were all communists.

- It's nevertheless called democratic. - Yes, German Democratic Republic, which was formed a couple of months after I was born. I was born into a remote southeastern corner of East Germany, and interestingly enough, genetically, I'm only half German. - What's the other half? - The other half is Czech and Polish.

- Nice. - Because where I grew up, I could walk to the Neisse River, which was the border with Poland, and it was only about an hour by bus to get to the Czech border, so that's why I'm a mix. - So, okay, so East Germany after the war was communist, socialist, and then the West Germany was representing the Western world with democracy.

- And what the United States did, this was really, really very forward-looking, very strategic, the Marshall Plan, to rebuild the economy in the West, as compared to what the Soviet Union did. Whatever they hadn't destroyed on the way in, they took with them on the way out for reparations, because they had every right to do that, but it was not a good idea, because East Germany was always behind in economic development to their Western counterpart.

- So when you were young, as today, but when you were young, you were clearly an exceptional student. You're a brilliant academic superstar. Let's go to your childhood. What's a fond memory from childhood that you have in being woken up to the beauty of this world, and sort of being curious about all the mysteries around you that I think ultimately lead to academic success?

Or was it-- - The fondest memory that comes to mind is my first kiss. - How's that? Do you wanna go to the details of that? What'd you make of that kiss? What'd that teach you about yourself and human nature and all that? - It taught me only in hindsight.

At the time, I was just like, my God, I was head over heels in love. I was 16 years old. And I knew in those days, I admired girls. I knew that girls were like sort of magical beings. They were not capable of doing evil things. They were beautiful and they had to be adored.

And one of them actually loved me too. She came after me initially, right? - And that too was magical for you. - Oh my God, yeah. (Lex laughing) And I literally, I dedicated, that's when I started studying. Up until that point, I just did whatever I had to do to be in A-minus students.

And that's when I started studying. And every A that I got, I dedicated to her, sometimes explicitly, because I knew I was gonna take care of her as I grew up. - So you're gonna have to work hard in this world to be somebody that could be adored by those you love.

- Yes, you're right. You know, that kiss, the next day I was running around in school with a grin on my face. - And maybe that, in some way, that grin never fades. So what about the heartbreak that followed? - Well, the heartbreak followed. - Surely followed. - But just to expand on this a little more, because that passion that I had was an indication that eventually love would play a big role in my life.

I wasn't aware of it. I was just directed at this one girl, but-- - But you understood that that feeling-- - Oh my God, yeah. - That taught you something, that you're somebody that can feel those things. - Absolutely. - And that's a strong part of who you are, and therefore it will also be a part of directing your life trajectory.

- Yeah, so we were an item for two years. I lost my virginity. - Congratulations. - She was not a virgin at the time. My competitor was-- - There always is a competitor, isn't there? Isn't that how it works? - He studied medicine in college already. - In which ways was he better than you?

- He wasn't, he was older and he was more experienced. And he was gonna be a doctor. But I was there and he was not. Presence wins. - Yeah, but you still had big dreams. You wanted to be a tenure professor. - Yes, yes. - So you still want to outdo that guy.

- Oh yeah, and she eventually told me that he was not in the picture anymore. So it was back and forth, back and forth. Our senior year we were an item and I was just dreaming of the future. But we didn't figure out that in those days if she went to college in Berlin and I went to college in Jena, and the distance between the two cities was too much for a weekend visit.

Public transportation was very slow and nobody had cars. - So the circumstance of life, you drifted apart. - Yeah, and so we interacted with a couple of letters and then I got the goodbye letter. Oh my God. - Did that hurt? - I can still feel it. You know when-- - That's a good thing that you could feel the pain.

That's still part of love. The pain of loss is still part of love. And then you kind of change that, you shape it, and you give that love in deeper, more profound ways to future people. - That's very well put. But at the time it emptied me out. If I had a tendency to have suicidal thoughts, I might have killed myself.

- Would you say that was one of the darker moments of your life? - Let me see. As a single moment, yes. So I still remember, we had a mail slot in the front door, and I was expecting a letter any day, and there was the letter. I go upstairs into my bedroom and I open it and I read it.

And it was just like the life went out of me. - You're just there alone, and you have to experience this pain alone. - So, but-- - And now you're deeply alone in this world. - Yes, because I didn't have a, there was no emotional relationship with my parents.

I literally had nobody. - So this love you have in you had no place to go. - It was choked off, all right? But what I did was I, I wanted to go on, right? And so I threw myself into the study of chemistry. I outworked all of my fellow students in a big way.

I just like, I worked my ass off, and since I was pretty smart too, I just aced practically everything. And for the first two years in college, and look, we go to college, there are all these pretty girls, and there's dances and everything. We had this great student club where, I didn't look at any girls.

Eventually I knew I was going to, wanna have female companionship, but love, uh-uh, no more, that hurts. There's a song that goes, "Love hurts." - Yeah, yeah, I know that one. That's true, there's actually many songs that have a similar message, yes. So during that time, during your excellence, just being an exceptional student of chemistry, let's go to your story.

So in your book, "Deep Undercover, My Secret Life and Tangled Allegiances as a KGB Spy in America," and in the really, really excellent podcast series that I've been listening to, people should definitely listen to it, it's called "The Agent," you document your time as a KGB spy before, during, and after.

Can you tell the story of when you first were contacted by the KGB, those, how you were invited, the offer to join was made? - Well, it was a big surprise, and I never thought of myself as a potential agent. You know, I was gonna be a tenured professor and join the ruling elite, because in Europe, tenured professors are few.

It's not like in the United States, you know, anybody who teaches at colleges has a title of professor. - Easy now. (laughs) - It's true, it's not a criticism. - 100%. So we should also clarify that tenured professor or not, it is a very prestigious position throughout history of Europe.

- Yeah, yeah. - I would say, especially communists, I don't actually know the full landscape of the respect, but at least in the Soviet Union where I grew up, it's a prestigious position. - Absolutely was. And the town of Yenna had about 100,000 people live there. And I would, it's a wild guess, but maybe 30 tenured professors, and they were part of the ruling elite.

I was trying to do as much as I can to live the good life, right? You know, have access to things that are nice. - Yeah, but I think the powerful thing about being a professor in that context of East Germany is the prestige. - And the feeling of superiority.

I was full of myself. When you are the best of the best, and in my third year I received a scholarship, the Karl Marx scholarship, that was limited to 100 concurrent recipients in the country. So my God, I was full of myself. I believed in myself, hook, line, and sinker.

And I was also, I got a lot of accolades from teachers and fellow students. - They were feeding the ego, the old, I mean. - Yeah. - You have to believe in yourself often when you're young to truly, to excel. And you sure as heck did. - But you know, as a balance, you need a mentor, somebody who puts things in perspective, and I didn't have one.

My father was a non-entity and nobody else. They all looked up to me. I was an up-and-coming guy, right? - So there's no father figure that put you in your place. - Not at all. And I give you one extreme example. It was down the road when I fathered a child out of wedlock.

That was in my fifth year, I believe. The Communist Party in East Germany was very moralistic. If you did that, they would have a talk with you and give you whatever, severe reprimand. Nobody even mentioned a word about this. So yeah, so this is how this ego gets nurtured.

But anyway, getting back to how the KGB came in contact. So they most likely got knowledge of me by looking at Stasi records. - What's Stasi? - Oh, that was East German Secret Police, Staatssicherheit, security for the state. - There's that word security again. (laughing) - And they pretty much kept a record on everybody in the country.

And so when you look through this, and this is what the KGB was looking for. They were looking for candidates, particularly for this kind of job that they had in mind for me, for candidates who were not in their mid-20s, who were not fully developed yet, but mature enough to get there.

And still young enough, right? - 'Cause at that level of maturity, you can test whether they can handle this kind of job. - Yes, absolutely right. So and one day I got a knock on my door and my dorm room door was on a Saturday. And they knew that I was by myself.

How did they know it? We had a, I pieced this together. We had an exchange student from the Soviet Union and he was next door to me. And he befriended me, so he got to know me a little bit. And the pattern was that my roommate would always go home for the weekend.

And of course they also knew which door to knock on, even though there were no nameplates, right? So somebody knocks and I knew it was a stranger because if it had been a student, the pattern was that we would knock on the door and then go in. We wouldn't wait for somebody to let us in.

So I waited for 10 seconds and he didn't come in. I knew that it was a stranger, I said, "Come on in." And in came a person who spoke fluent German. So that was not a KGB guy. It was a collaborator. And so he started making a bunch of small talk.

He introduced himself as a representative of Kaltseiss Jena, which was the optics company that made really, really good optical instruments. Was one of the best in the world. - So it's like the super prestigious company in that place. - Right, and he said that he was a representative of that company and he would just wanna find out what my plans were after graduating from college.

And at that point I knew he wasn't from Kaltseiss Jena because in those days there was no recruitment. When you were done, if you were in the top 10% of the graduates, you would most likely pick to stay and get a doctorate, right? And the rest of them were assigned.

You had no choice. So that guy was an idiot. He didn't know the basics about-- - You interviewed him a little bit to understand-- - Oh sure, I started-- - Like feel out, is this guy full of shit? Because yeah, he's a stranger showing up to your dorm room.

I knew that, at that point I knew he was Stasi, which is wrong, but it doesn't matter because he was German and I had no idea that the KGB would be involved. - So sorry to pause briefly. Did you have a sense, did people know that there's a Stasi type of organization, that there's a large number of people doing this kind of work in East Germany, in order for you to make that guess?

- Yeah, we knew that the Stasi existed. We even had our James Bond, we had a series called the Invisible Visor, where a Stasi employee in East Germany would go into West Germany and hunt down Nazis. So yes, the Stasi was known to be there. - And admired in part, or feared, or both?

- I thought they were necessary and I admired them. - James Bond. - Yes, the reason I did so, because I had no information to the contrary, I never knew anybody personally or even somewhat removed who was followed by the Stasi, was put in jail, I had no clue.

I had no clue that they did a lot of damage and that they were doing a lot of surveillance of the East German population, the same way the KGB did for the Soviet Union. So for me to be talking to somebody from the Stasi, it raised my interest, I was curious what comes next, because I sort of knew something interesting would be coming at me, and I had no other thoughts about that at that point.

So when he was finally, when he went for the kill by reversing himself, he said, "You know, I gotta tell you "that I really am not from Karl Zeiss, "you know, I'm from the government." Okay, thank you for pointing that out. And then he asked this question, he says, "Can you imagine to one day work for the government?" And so I gave a pretty clever answer, I said, "Yes, but not as a chemist." So I answered the question that he didn't ask, I helped him out.

So we made an arrangement to meet for lunch, which in Germany is the main meal, at the number one restaurant in Vienna. I still remember what I ate. - What was that? - Rump steak with butter on top, and French fries, it was my favorite. Anyway, so when I get to the restaurant, I saw this fellow sitting in the back there at the table, and there was another person at the table.

So I was a little bit hesitant, because in those days, it was not unusual for perfect strangers to share a table, 'cause there wasn't enough tables and chairs and so forth. So I didn't know if I could approach him, but he got up and came to me, and he took me to the table, and he said, "I want to introduce Herman, "we work with our Soviet comrades." Aha, KGB.

And then he disappeared, he says, "I got something else to do." I never knew his name, he just handed me over to the KGB. - What was the relationship between the KGB and the Stasi? As collaborators, close collaborators, or just distant associates? - They were pretty close collaborators, as I told you that they bought forged documents that the Germans made, because the Germans were better at forgery.

They also exchanged information, but they didn't trust each other 100%, and I tell you why I know that. So they recruited me to send me to West Germany. As I already said, East Germany had 1,000 agents over there, why would they wanna have their own? - Yeah, yeah, okay, this is a fascinating internal and external dynamic of distrust.

- Yeah. - Okay, so there you are, welcomed by the KGB, when did the offer, the invite come? - Well, that took a while. So Herman and I had an unofficial relationship for about a year and a half. I would meet him maybe once a week, once every two weeks, initially in his car, but then he took me to a conspirational flat that was an apartment that was occupied by a party member, a lady, single lady.

When we came in, she would leave, she left us tea and cookies, and then we could freely talk. He also, at that time, gave me some West German literature magazines to read, which was, of course, forbidden. So already I'm starting to feel somewhat special. And as we were talking about what they had in mind for me in general, I knew that I was gonna be even more special because I would be above the law.

I would operate outside the law of the countries I would go to, as well as East Germany, because the magazines, and eventually when I joined up, they told me I had better watch West German television, which was also not explicitly prohibited, but it was something that could get you in trouble.

- So on many levels, you're super special. You're the James Bond. - Yes, yes, yes. - So what was that recruitment testing process like? Testing whether you have what it takes to be a KGB agent? - First of all, we had very in-depth talks, Herman and I, about life.

And I still am very honest and sharing my feelings. - Philosophical or personal? - Personal. - Personal. - I even told him that I was shy around the girls. - He was giving you relationship advice, or what? How old was he? So what was the dynamic? Can you tell me, was it a father, son?

- No, older brother. - Older brother. - Yeah, he was maybe in his early to mid-30s, and I was maybe 10 years younger. - And what languages did he speak? - He spoke German pretty well. - But he's originally from Russia? - Yeah, with a Russian accent. So I got in trouble one time with him when I asked him, is your real name German?

He didn't like that. - He didn't like it. Was he good with girls? - No, no, I remember what he told me. He says, you know, you gotta understand one thing. They're looking for guys too. That's all. - Girls are looking for guys too. - Yeah, absolutely. - Yeah, it's a competitive game.

- Yeah, don't worry about it, don't be so shy. - So that little flame of love that we talked about, in all the shapes that it takes in our life, did he talk to you about that, that that could be taken advantage of, that that could be used, or was it implied?

- Yeah, but it was not very focused, not in great detail. So we talked about personal stuff, and dislikes. He gave me tasks. For instance, when my friend and I hitchhiked from East Germany all the way down to Bulgaria, he told me to write a report about it, what I saw.

So fundamentally, he wanted to see how well I can write, and how well I can report, how well I observe. He also asked me to write some profiles about fellow students. I don't believe that was for them to give him to the Stasi. It was just like, how well do I characterize people?

That's important when you're talking about, when I was in the US, active in the US, I operated as a spotter, so I did exactly that. I wrote profiles about people. He also gave me some tasks to do that were rather unpleasant. He would give me an address and a name of the people who lived at the address.

And he told me to go there, ring the doorbell, and find out something about a relative who lived in West Germany. That is undercover exploration, right? So you go, you make up a story, and somehow win the confidence of your target to tell you something that you wanna know.

- Did that come naturally to you? - No, no, I hated it. - The charisma involved? Which part did you hate? - Yeah, charisma, I think, I didn't know that I had it. (laughs) - It took you some time to discover. - Because, you know, I always was, and I still am, to some degree, a bit shy.

I lost a lot of the shyness after moving to the South, because, here in the United States, because you don't have to be shy, you know? (laughs) - You can let your love shine. - That's exactly right. But anyway, I hated doing that, but I did it well. I still remember, so I, in those days, I had a beard, and I rang the bell, and-- - Tall, handsome fellow?

- Yeah, and I looked the part, I said, "I'm a sociology student, and I'm doing a survey." And I asked a whole bunch of questions, "Would you like to answer the questions?" "No problem." And then I directed the conversation to the lady's private life, and she actually gave me information, she volunteered information that I wanted to know.

- Beautiful. - I did well, and the other one that I didn't like, but I also did well with, when Herman drove me around the city and showed me a building, and he said, "Find out what organization is in there, what they do, "and maybe get to know some people." And I did that pretty well also.

You have to be inventive to come up with a cover story, and I've always been quite inventive. I'm a storyteller at heart, and I didn't know it then, but-- - But there was still something unpleasant about it. - Yes, yes. - Which part was unpleasant? - Well, the shyness, and then, I wasn't very comfortable lying.

I became comfortable down the road, but I was brutally honest, and never hid anything of me. But over time, you lose that uncomfortable feeling, and you rationalize that you gotta do it. There's only one way, right? And you're serving a good cause. - So you were talking to Herman for a year and a half?

- A year and a half. - And then, how did that progress? - Yes, so he finally, I guess he sent a report to headquarters in Berlin, and then he sent me on a three-week quote-unquote practice trip to Berlin. This was the first time when I had a conspiratorial meeting, where I had an address and a time and a code phrase, and I met another agent.

His name was Boris. These names were meaningless. They were all cover names, right? - So what was the code, and the meaning? What was then, can you give a little more detail? - That code, I don't remember. - Not the code, but what do you mean by code? So what was-- - I tell you, the code we used when I met, while I was active, I would approach the other person who I thought may be the person I wanna meet.

We both had something with us or on us to make us more likely to be the right person. And I would ask him the following questions. Excuse me, I'm looking for Susan Green. And he would answer, yes, you must be David. Stupid. If I ask a stranger, they would look at me.

How could I help you? So I know it's the wrong guy. - It's just a low probability that the right thing would be said. - Oh, absolutely. - And it seems like a safe statement if it's not the right person. - Exactly right. - It would just come off absurd or crazy or whatever.

- You would have made a good secret agent. You know exactly-- - How do you know I'm not? (laughing) We'll discuss this. I'm dressed like one. Actually, yeah, were there any dress code? - No, just fit in. - Fit in, no matter what. And then be creative. - Yes.

- Figure out ways to fit in. - Right. So anyways, he gave me some tasks and we, and he, since I had rented a room in a house, he gave me Western literature to read. And we spent time together. And there was a practice run to West Germany. Actually, there were two.

And that was very important. In hindsight, I figured that out. So I traveled to West Germany, no, not to West Berlin with an East German passport that was stamped that that individual was allowed to go to the West. And there was a part of the border that was only guarded by Soviet troops.

And that's where they smuggled me into West Germany. I got on the subway and then appeared in West Berlin. No Americans, no Brits, no French knew that I had entered. - Forged documents or not? - No, no, this was an East German passport. It was real. - Okay. - Okay.

So, and the first trip, all they wanted me to do is just walk around, smell the air, have a beer or whatever and eat a sausage and then come back. The second trip, I had a task, very similar to the one that I had back in Jena, to ring the doorbell someplace and talk to some people.

And that worked very well also. - I should mention that you talk about that, you know, eat a sausage, drink some beer. I suppose that's a good test too, to see how you behave under Western, like when first introduced to the Western culture. Like, this is why I might not make a good agent, is when I first came to the United States in the supermarket I like bananas, as many bananas as I wanna eat.

That, I think that would break me. - It's a shock. - Just, it's a shock to have access to Western culture. You're getting very close to the reason they actually made me do these two practice trips. When I first emerged on West Berlin territory, I felt highly uncomfortable. That was the enemy, right?

And I saw the cops everywhere, and even those cops had like light blue uniforms, not the, they weren't standouts. So I was wondering, you know, if they knew that, you know, I had like KGB on my forehead. - So you were paranoid that they would know, they would see.

- I was scared, but I overcame that. - So that's, can we just linger on that? Because I suppose that's a natural, like if I give anybody on the street the mission to do the mission you had to do, is they would be paranoid. That's a natural human feeling is, am I being watched, do they know?

Like if you try to steal something from a store, there's going to be a feeling like, are they watching me, are the cameras watching, are the people watching me, they all know, that kind of stuff. So you have to overcome, or you have to be somehow rugged and robust to that kind of feeling in order to overcome it.

- Yes, exactly. So, and something very interesting happened while I was being trained in Berlin. I met a classmate of mine from high school, and he confided to me that he was recruited by the Stasi to become a spy, go as a spy to West Germany. And he also had this practice trip, and he peed in his pants.

He went back and told him, I can't do that. - Just from the terror, the-- - Yes. - That paranoia. - Now this guy's career was over. He had an engineering degree, he was a pretty smart guy. He was just for the rest of his life, and he's still alive I believe, floating around and trading in model railroads and stuff like that.

- You mean, do you think that experience broke him? - No, they wouldn't let him back in. - Oh, I see. They, oh. - Yeah. - So it's a test that if you fail, you pay the price. - I had no idea that something bad would happen if I failed that test, but I didn't.

- Yeah. - I didn't fail. So, and this led then to the offer, all right? And after, you know, Boris was happy with me, and he told his boss, who was most likely the head of the KGB in East Berlin, and I had an appointment to meet-- - In East Germany.

- Yes, in East Germany, yeah, all of East Germany. - Yes. - That's right. An appointment to meet with him, and as we walk into the room, there was this huge desk and a little guy sitting behind it. Very, very, just like little and unimpressive. - Nice. - A lot of paraphernalia, like, you know, had a bust of Dzerzhinsky on his desk and some paintings, Lenin and so forth.

But when the guy opened his mouth, he went like, whoa. Huge psychological energy. He spoke only Russian. Now, and initially he would, you know, start the bat with five minutes worth of propaganda, why we're doing what we're doing. I didn't need that. I understood most of it, but when I didn't understand, I'd ask Boris to translate.

And then he sprung it on me, and I was not prepared. He said, "So what, are you in or not?" And I was, no, I hadn't made up my mind. I wasn't expecting that would come. So I said to him, "I'm not really trained. "You know, there's a lot of things I need to learn." And I came up with a couple of really stupid things.

One, not so stupid, but the other one was, I don't know why I said that. I said, for instance, I need to learn how to drive a car and to type with a typewriter. And he got really annoyed and he said, "Don't worry about it, we'll train you. "But I gotta tell you, we need people who are decisive.

"So you got until tomorrow noon to give Boris your decision." That made for a sleepless night. - So what was going through your mind? - Well, I had, this was almost 50/50. I knew I was gonna have a huge career, a good career. I was on my way because I was already employed by the university as an assistant professor.

- So that career would be to become a professor, become a 10-year professor, be a world-class. - Yes, Jena had become my hometown. I really loved the place. It was my oyster. And my family was my basketball team. I was-- - You love playing basketball. - Oh, absolutely. - So that's what you mean.

Yeah, so this is home. This is home, this is where your love is. - This was home. - Did you understand that the choice involved leaving the home behind? - Yes, yes. And the one thing I didn't have, the two things I didn't have, an emotional relationship with my mother, and I didn't have a steady girlfriend at the time.

- I think Freud would have a lot to say about that, but yeah, go ahead. But the connection between those two, but yes. (Roger laughs) Yeah, I'm sure. - By the way, my friend, Guntante, the one who worked for the Stasi, was also, the Stasi tried to recruit him as an agent, but he had a love relationship at the time, and he said politely, "No, I won't, I can't." - So you didn't have, that's the one thing that really could-- - Would have helped me.

- Would have held you to this place's love. - So you got the career on the one hand, my basketball team, the town that I would be part of the ruling elite of, and then we had this great adventure and the ability to contribute to the victory, the worldwide victory of communism, and stick it to the Nazis, and of course, the feeling that you're really special.

- Yeah, James Bond. - Yeah. - What's, (laughs) the question, do I wanna be a tenure professor or James Bond? - Yes, and-- - As funny as that sounds, that was probably a difficult decision. - It was a difficult decision, but fundamentally, it wasn't, and it wasn't my zeal to help the revolution.

It was my, what they called, what the Stasi was looking for, the KGB was looking for in a character that they would send over, a well-controlled inclination to adventure, okay? (laughing) - Yeah, yeah, James Bond, what do you say? And the love of women, yeah. - It was, (laughs) yes, I gotta put this in right here, because I'm telling people I have two things in common with James Bond.

These are my initials, JB, and I got the girl too, three times. (laughing) - Yeah, I mean, and that's adventure. - Yeah, and the ability to travel to the West, because the West was closed off to us. We could go to foreign countries, but they all had to be communist countries.

You know, I wanted to see Paris, because I had fallen in love with Honoré Balzac, who wrote a phenomenal set of novels that I just ate up. And so when I eventually did go to Paris, I knew all the places already, because he described them all. But anyway, so that one, it was 51-49, but eventually, when you do the side-by-side intellectual comparison, that doesn't work.

It becomes a tie, and then you just go with your gut, and I said, "Hey, I'm in." - So now that you successfully passed the test, and you were sitting with this unimpressive man, and had the invite, and had to sleep on it, and have made the decision to join, what was next?

- I was just told that I was being recruited by the State Department of East Germany, I was going to become a diplomat. I must have had some paper, but I forgot, because just by saying so, that wouldn't have worked. - There's some kind of document that says you can't-- - Yeah, yeah.

- And that was the only entanglement you had to that place. No love, no, just the basketball. - Basketball, giving up basketball was huge for me. I loved playing that game. I started playing basketball when I was 18. That's a little late. - Are you better offensive, defensive? What do you like more?

Do you like to shoot from a distance? Do you like to play up? - I was a runner. I was very quick on my feet, and I was a good jumper, too. I typically played the four position. - What's that? - Forward. - Oh, the forward position. - Forward position.

But anyway, so that was the hardest for me to give up. But the other thing that I remember I had to do to hand in my party document to the party secretary of the university, and he made a comment, "Yeah, we probably won't hear much about you, "but we know that you're gonna do something very important." So he sort of had an inkling that I'm gonna go someplace undercover or something like that.

And then I packed my bags and got on a train to Berlin for another one of those secret meetings with my new handler, Nikolai. And here came another test that would have been quite easy to fail. So I had lived in Jena for six years in a dorm. Even when I became an employee of the university, they didn't have apartments.

I was still living in a dorm in a single room with a bed, a chair, and a table, and a toilet down the hallway. So I figured, you know, Berlin KGB, I'm gonna get a nice apartment, right? And so Nikolai took me into his car, we started talking a little bit, and then he said, "I have a task for you already.

"Your first task is to find yourself a place to live." I mean, I don't think I showed it in my face, but my heart dropped like down into my pants. I knew this was nearly impossible because there was a severe shortage of housing in everywhere in Germany, East Germany.

And all the apartments and homes were controlled by the government. There were long waiting lists. I knew couples that were promised maybe to get an apartment five years down the road. So, and then they would postpone the decision to have a child. Anyway, this was impossible. Well, you know, but this was a test.

Because I had to be inventive. Now I had to figure out how to get out of an impossible situation. I didn't realize it then at all. I just went with the flow, you know? What do I do? So what I did, I went, I took the train, the city train to the very last stop, a little town called Aachner.

And I wandered around in that town and knocked on doors and asked people if they knew where somebody might have a place to live. And after a couple of hours, somebody said, "There's this lady that," and they gave me the address. And I talked to the lady and she said, "I happen to have a place where you might be able to stay." It was an outbuilding.

I don't know what it served. It was not a garage, it was concrete. And it had a bed and a chair, running cold water, and a stove, a cold stove. That was going to be my-- - Pretty basic, pretty basic. - Pretty basic? Are you kidding me? - That's the-- - Toilet across the yard, of course.

- Yeah, well, all the essentials. What are you complaining about? So you were right. (both laughing) You had to run the, James Bond had to run a special operation out of the outhouse. - Yes, to my credit, and I think that established part of my reputation, I didn't complain at all to Nikolai.

- That was part of the test, probably. - Yeah, I just told him, "I found something." And so, for six months, I would get up in the morning, get on the train, and walk around in the city, did some operational stuff, operational training. I went to the library, did a lot of reading in the library.

And then I found a basketball team that I could join, so at least I could take a shower twice a week. And apparently, it took about six months that I was still on probation, because after six months, Nikolai, one day, we were still meeting in his car, he handed me a key, and he said, "I'm gonna take you to your new apartment." Now, and I didn't know this, now I was really in, okay?

Imagine the hurdles you have to jump over, and how many times you can fail, but you know. - But not complaining, not asking questions. - Yes. - I mean, that was something you've written about, I think you wrote that bosses do not like to hear complaints or problems, they prefer solutions.

- That's right. - So what was your interaction like with the bosses? Does that essentially represent the way it went forward as well? - Yeah, I-- - No complaints, get to solve the problem. - No complaints, no arguments, no, I know this better. I was taking it all in.

Now, the technical guys, they taught me something I didn't know that made sense. What Nikolai, some of the stuff that he taught me was somewhat questionable, he was a generalist, and there's some things he didn't know really well. So I could have asked, probed a little bit, but I didn't.

So I just played along. So this new apartment was, it was a studio, it had a kitchen with running cold water, and the bathroom was just one flight down the toilet, not a bathroom, one flight down the stairs. - It's an upgrade. - It was a big upgrade. And he gave me, I think he gave me a thousand mark to buy furniture.

And in that place, actually I also bought a TV and started watching West German television. So I finally had a decent place to stay. And my training in Berlin took about two years. - What was the training, what were the interesting aspects to the training? What were sort of, if you do an overview systematic of what was the training process, what was difficult, what are some insights that generalize to the training process of what it takes to be a KGB spy?

- Right, so let me start with the tradecraft. So I was taught Morse code, that took a while. I was instructed in how to use a shortwave radio and to receive the shortwave transmissions with Morse code. I was taught an encryption and decryption algorithm, manual algorithm. - Yep. - You might be interested that eventually I figured out at least one of the patterns.

The algorithm was such that, and this was all about digits. And the algorithm was such that in the end, the digits that were used to decipher other digits that were sent to me by a shortwave radio, there were, let's say if there were 100 digits, there were an equal number of ones, twos, threes, fours, fives, six, and seven, and up until zero.

And I was told that these algorithms, these manual algorithms were good for about 300 uses. After that, they could still be deciphered. I'm assuming nowadays that wouldn't take as much. - Yeah, with computers for sure. But there's probably, they're probably designed in a way that you can manually, sort of it's efficient and convenient to use them manually.

- Well-- - It's not to optimize cryptographic security, it's to optimize, it's like to balance security and humans being able to actually-- - Yeah, no, I gotta disagree. It was neither efficient nor convenient. - Okay. - It took a long time. - So it wasn't deciphered. - When what was significantly easier to do, but that would require you to have spy paraphernalia with you.

This is what's called a one-time pad. So you have the set of numbers on a sheet of paper that had to be developed. I had to use iodine to make those numbers visible. Those are known to be unbreakable unless they are used multiple times, the same sheet of paper.

Because the person who encrypts has the same set of numbers as the person who decrypts. And one-time use, you cannot figure out what the message is. - Oh, interesting. But this is a quick way to communicate from one person to another one time. - Well, one time, I had a pad with multiple sheets of paper.

And the reason that they gave me a manual one is because I literally, I had only, when I wound up in the United States, I had only one thing with me that only a spy can have. And that was a writing pad where the first 10 pages or so were impregnated with a trace of a chemical that was used for secret writing.

But you really would have to know what you're looking for to, you know, you see this pad, it was bought at Walmart. - Can you explain a little further? What is the chemical here that, what are we talking about? So how, I don't understand how it's possible to have a physical pad that does the encryption without any computing.

I, how does it encrypt? - So, no, no, it doesn't do any work. So, the communication, the encrypted communication was a set of groups of five, five digits, and then another five, and there's always a gap in between. And so let's say if I get this radio transmission, I write them all down, and then I use my, develop my algorithm, and then I do mathematics, either addition or subtraction.

The resulting set of digits had, then had a one-to-one correlation to letters. - And this is an easy way to then do the correlation. - Yes, yes. - Well, that's cool. That's, and you're saying the algorithm was not efficient. It was not-- - Oh, the manual, it took a long time, and you can't make an error.

- Right, would you know where, can you, is it easy to debug? - No, you-- - No, you do it twice. - You do it twice, and that's how you check. - If it's identical, then you know. - But like, if it's not-- - If it's not, then one is right and the other is wrong, you gotta do it again.

- So, you just don't make mistakes. - No, that's right, and I really didn't. But anyway, so I was learning that. I was also told that I was required to become proficient in another language, and they gave me a choice, and I picked English. That's-- - What was the other one?

- Oh, no, they gave me, pick one, French, you know, whatever is spoken in the West. - Got it. What would be second to you? Would you think French because of Paris? What would you, why English? - English was a no-brainer because I was a straight A student in English without studying.

It came so easily to me. So, that's why I chose it, right? So, that was that. Then I was taught the basics of counter-surveillance, you know, some trickery and surveillance detection routes where you wander around in a city for three hours and determine whether you're being followed or not.

That requires you to plan the route very well. I give you one example that will illustrate that. My favorite spot, when I was in Moscow, I did a lot of that also. And my favorite spot was, it was a not well-traveled road. It went down the hill and curved, and at the bottom of the hill, there was a telephone booth.

And when you open the door and pick up the telephone, you have to look back. So, it wasn't like this, right? It wasn't a giveaway. This was normal, it was natural. So, I could see if somebody would come walking after me. You know, these kinds of things. Or you would use public transportation, big buildings where you needed to use an elevator and see who was, because surveillance, the object of surveillance is to never lose sight of the individual who you're surveilling, because at that point, you may miss the window where he does something that you're looking for.

So, somebody always has to come close, right? - Did you have to also study surveillance? - No, only counter surveillance. And what helped me, in all my training, you know, I would have a competition with the folks that were coming, that were following me, and me. And I beat them every time.

They were at a disadvantage, because one of them always had to be close. And if you saw the same face twice, you knew that you were being followed. And I had a very, very good memory for faces. - So, basically, figure out a fixed route, and then a fixed route that allows you to survey the area, and then record the faces you've seen inside your mind.

And if you see multiple times a single face, that's a bad sign. - And they could use different clothes. What they didn't have was face masks. The CIA does, nowadays. They can give you a different face within seconds. Yeah. (laughs) - So, how... (laughs) I mean, again, you talk about paranoia.

Is that a big part of the job? Counter surveillance? Like, being constantly paranoid that you're being watched? - Yeah, I was supposed to-- - Isn't that quite stressful? So, is that one of the... Is that actually an effective way to operate? - No, but it sort of becomes a routine.

I was told to do it while in the US, once a month. - Okay, it's like a cleaning out. - Oh, not every day, no, no, no, no, no. Once a month, or before I would, say, mail a letter with secret writing. So, I was sure that nobody saw me put an envelope into a post box.

- So, this is one of the tools in your toolbox. So, there's Morse code, there's the decryption, and the encryption, there's the counter surveillance. - Photography. Making micro dots. You know what a micro dot is? Well, that's... You take a photograph, and you use a microscope in reverse, and make that photograph really small.

So small that it's like the head of a pin that can be used to hide under a postage stamp. In reality, I knew how to make 'em, but in reality, they never asked me to make use of that technique. - It's sort of an encryption mechanism for photographs. - Yeah, so what we do nowadays, is embed code in PDFs and stuff like that, right?

- Yeah, beautiful, okay. All right, so that was a learning, a training process, both in the physical space, and sort of algorithmically. Is there other things? - Oh, you bet. Interestingly enough, I was... The first book I was given to read was the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

- Oh, so understand. That's interesting, 'cause you said you had to read Western literature. - Yeah, that too. - How much reading, so history, how much history, politics, geopolitics, culture? - Not much more, but they made me read that document. Other than that, I wasn't supposed to study the Soviet Union, I wasn't supposed.

And that was not, and I didn't, when they sent me to Moscow, it wasn't to learn Russian, right, it wasn't to learn English. The second document they gave me was the Constitution of West Germany. And then I got lots of magazines and stuff like that. As I told you, I was also told to watch West German television, which I embraced with a vengeance, because it was better than East German.

So I would get up in the morning and have a little breakfast and watch the German version of Sesame Street. - And that helps you get an understanding of the culture, because if you have to do any kind of interaction, any kind of spying, then you have to be able to effectively integrate yourself.

- Well, you also have to know, and that would've been easier if they had sent me to West Germany, you know, all the soccer teams, stuff that everybody knows. When I came to the US, I knew very little stuff that everybody knows, that's why I had to be very cautious and take it in over time.

Anyway, and the last thing I wanna mention is I was strongly encouraged to expand my cultural education. In other words, go to visit museums, go to the theater, not so much movies, opera, read books from all kinds of authors. That was important to them. And once a month I had to write a report, what I did.

But the interesting thing, there was no curriculum, there was no agenda, there were no check marks. It was all ad hoc. Now you do this, and then you do that. And a lot of this also, they relied on my initiative. Again. - I mean, that's part of the evaluation too.

- You bet. - Are you able to have creative, it's interesting that they're developing a James Bond type of character here, which is, what's the reason to go to the opera? As you become cultured in a certain kind of way, where perhaps that makes you more charming, more charismatic in terms of your ability to integrate yourself in different situations.

- You're absolutely right. I was, when I came to the US, after about two years roughly, I was cultured enough to not make a bad impression at a diplomatic soiree in Washington, D.C. I mingled freely. - Yes. - All right? And so the whole idea was for me to sort of reach into the upper realms of society where the targets would be juicier than the worker bees.

- And how did you end up in Moscow? Why, how? What is that journey? - Well, so I told you, I started studying English. So I started back from scratch. They paid for a tutor, and I went from English 101. I went through that in a couple of months, and then I got another guy with whom I expanded this.

We had conversations rather than working from a textbook. And I worked like a maniac. I threw myself into the study of English like you wouldn't believe. And my inspiration came from Vladimir Lenin. I had read somewhere in a book that when Lenin was in exile, he studied German. And he learned 100 German words every day, new German words.

So I started reading newspapers, and every word that I didn't know, I wrote down on an index card, German, English, and I piled them up. And so I really learned 100 new English words every day. I know this because I counted them. And I had a system how to do this.

So you take your index card, and you have five categories. That's a really good way to learn rote by rote. So you got category one, that's the new ones, and you got category five. So you start with five. Five you already had right four times. If you have it right again, it goes into the archive.

- Oh, like long-term cold archive, yeah. - Four, if you get it right, it goes to five. If you get it wrong, it gets relegated to three. And so you go through this, and occasionally I would throw the archive things back into one. So I really acquired a phenomenal vocabulary.

When I was done with my English, my vocabulary was significantly higher than the average American because I didn't discriminate. Whatever word I didn't know, I learned, which is not necessarily the best way because English has a lot of synonyms, right? - Yeah. - And one synonym is usually the preferable one.

And when I first interacted with people, I very often used the one that wasn't as good. And people found that I have an interesting way of talking. They didn't know what that meant, but-- - Yeah, so it builds a good foundation for a language. It's getting a large vocabulary.

- Yes. - It's really interesting. There's something I do which is called space repetition, which is a programmatic way of doing this kind of system that you've developed yourself, which is if you successfully remember a thing, it's going to be a longer time before it brings it up to you again.

- Yeah. - Now, that requires a computer to keep track of the information. If you have cars, that's a really interesting pile system. One, two, three, four, five, you upgrade it. One, two, three, four, five. Maybe I wouldn't go to the archive and go to pile one right away.

Maybe I would go to, I don't know, pile five, perhaps, is probably the right place to put it, 'cause you have to go through that full step again. But that is a really powerful way to learn, definitely language, but also facts, like people that go to medical school-- - Yes, disconnected facts.

- Yeah. - And you pretty much, when you're done, you know what you know. - Yeah. - You don't have to-- - But then again, to use it, to integrate it into the music of language, that's more difficult, that's what you're talking about. - Yeah, exactly right, exactly right.

- There's a charm, I mean, maybe it's not good for "Spycraft," but there's a charm to this kind of, to having an accent and using words incorrectly, but confidently, there's a, because language isn't a simple formula. Language is the play of words. So actually using the incorrect synonym, instead of saying I'm cold, saying I'm chilled, or something, like using offbeat words can actually be part of the charm.

So it's interesting, if you can learn how to use that correctly, 'cause I know a bunch of people with a Russian accent, and I feel like they get away with saying a lot of ridiculous shit, because they're able to sort of leverage the charm of the non-sequiturs. - And by the way, by the way, just one thing, you talked about using a computer.

When I had my first personal computer, I actually wrote a program that does that. - That does that. By the way, when was that? 'Cause you were a world-class programmer for a time, you were a very good programmer. When did the-- - First PC was probably 1984. - 1984, when did you fall in love with programming?

- When I went to college in the US, and part of the core curriculum was that you were required to take a course in computer, and it was mostly just talk, but we also had to learn a language. We had to write some programs in Fortran, which was what, five at the time?

It was a dumbed-down Fortran. But listen, so I see the ability, I see what you can do with this. I programmed a sine curve, and then I divided the sine curve into really, really small rectangles, and then ran the program, and it came up with the right area. Wow, this is great.

- That's incredible, it's incredible. It's so powerful. You're creating a little helper that helps you understand the world, to help you analyze the world, and so on. We'll return to that, 'cause it's interesting. You have so many interesting aspects to your life, but Moscow, so-- - Yeah, no, let me, how I was sent to Moscow.

Okay, so one day I had a visitor from Moscow, and he came to visit me in my apartment together with Nikolai, and we talked, and then he said, "So how's your English?" I said, "I pulled a book from the shelf," and he says, "I can read that "without the help of a dictionary." Oh, that's interesting.

And he said, "You know what? "We're gonna send you a tape recorder, "and you just talk, say something, "you know, for 20 minutes, "whatever you wanna talk about." They sent this thing, and two weeks later, I was on a plane to Moscow. Because I also spoke English, sort of the British variety of English, with not a strong German accent, because I've always had the ability to imitate others and sounds.

It was an innate ability. I would, you know, when we were in a lab, and as students, I would very often do monologues imitating East German comedians. You know, I just-- - Oh, like impressions. - Yes, yes. I'm not good enough to make a living out of it, but that raised some interest, and so they sent me to Moscow.

That was the first time on a plane, by the way. And I had a conversation with two ladies who spoke English. One was a Russian professor at Lomonosov University, she was obviously KGB, that was her cover. And the other one was an American-born lady. - Oh, by the way, she was an actual professor, and you're using that as the cover, or is it just a story?

- No, she said she was a professor. She may have taught there, too. - That's an interesting distinction. - Yeah. - One is like a story you tell people. - No. - And one is like you legit are doing the thing, but are also as a cover. - Yeah.

- Anyway, that's an interesting aspect of how to be a good liar. You might as well live the lie. - Yeah, exactly right. So, and the other one was a middle-aged, the Russian was pretty young, the other one was middle-aged American. And so we talked for maybe a couple of hours, and then they withdrew, and I was left alone.

Eventually, my liaison, he came back in, and he said, "It was close, but the American thinks "you can actually become, you get close enough "to becoming a native speaker of American English." And he said, "The Russian was very doubtful." And so, I think wishful, it was a tie, literally.

Wishful thinking prevailed. So, within a couple of weeks, I was moving to Moscow. - And what was the task in Moscow? How long were you in Moscow? - Two years. - And what was the task there? Is it training, or is it espionage? - No, it was training. So, it was, the American born became my tutor.

I met with her twice a week. I also listened to a lot of BBC, shortwave BBC Worldwide. I read more English books. - So, a lot of that was about the language and the culture of English, American-- - And I did phonetics exercises every night. I had a tape that was about a half hour long, and they would say a word, and I would repeat the word, say a word, repeat the word.

And it was mostly about the vowels, by the way, most of the accent, and particularly, let's say, coming from German into English, but also Russian, it's the vowels. - Are we talking about the, so you would have a single word-- - A word. - Like apple, and you would just say apple.

- Yes. - And American English or British English? - No, American English. And I give you one example that almost nobody gets right, the difference between hot and hut. You know what they're-- - Yeah, yeah, yeah, hot and hut, yeah. - And in German speakers, it's very tough. - You know which one, for everyone it's different.

For example, I could say this on a podcast, something that my brother struggles with, I struggled with too when I first came to this country to learn English, is there's differences, there's embarrassing differences, like beach and bitch, right? And you get so, as a young kid, also, you get so nervous, I don't wanna say the wrong thing.

I can also say that, this is almost a jokey thing, but there's a famous philosopher, Immanuel Kant, and you can guess which other word is very similar to that. So there's a nervousness about, the what is that, that's interesting. I mean, and Germans probably have a different tension of what is hard to learn, the difference between the pronunciation of the vowels or the control of the vowels.

Yeah, it's interesting. So you had to really master this daily exercise. - And this was my discipline, I did this every night, routine, boring as hell. So English was the focus. And I also had interaction with some agents who had operated in the United States as diplomats on a diplomatic cover.

They would come and talk to me a little bit and tell me, and sort of prepare me what was ahead of me. And then I did a whole lot of operational training, particularly surveillance detection, that was big. They also taught me how to drive a car in Moscow. - Finally, the one skill you needed.

What's surveillance detection? - Okay, so this is when you find out whether you're being followed. - Ah, got it, got it, got it. So it's the antiserv, yeah, gotcha. - The abbreviation that's used in-- - Congress, yeah. - Yes, in intelligence circles is SDR, surveillance detection route. When they say that, you know what that is.

And that was it. And a few other things, one-offs, for instance, I was once taught to read silhouettes of ships. When you see a ship from a distance, what kind of a ship it might be. They thought this would come in handy, actually. There was in 1982, Andropov started a campaign, it was, now I forget the name, Operation Something Something, where everybody who was in the West was supposed to look for signs that the West was getting ready for a war.

And everybody had an object to pay attention to. I had a harbor, a military harbor in New Jersey, near Red Bank, it was called Earl Weapon Station. And the code name for that was early, so they asked me to just wander by there to see if there was something unusual going on.

Because the Soviet Union, at that point, it was Ronald Reagan, were really afraid that Reagan was gonna start a war. They were absolutely, 100% afraid of him. - Is there something memorable to you on a personal level, on a philosophical level, about your time in Moscow? Something that kinda stays with you, outside of the training stuff, maybe?

Like the details of the training. - You'll love the answer. You will love the answer. I was-- - You already guessed. - I was given tickets to two performances by Americans. There was a theater troupe that played Our Town. And then there was this, I forget the name of the guy, but you may not be old enough, have you ever watched Hee Haw?

- Maybe. - It was a country music show, real kitschy, but the star of Hee Haw was giving a concert in Moscow, and I guarantee you, at least half the audience were KGB. (laughing) - Oh, man. - And at the other end, the opposite of a highlight was my visit to the mausoleum where Lenin is still today.

That was so, that was a nothing. He was my hero, but he looked like a wax figure. And you walk by there, there was nothing inspirational. It was not a religious experience, nothing. It was a big old nothing. - Is that, did your faith and belief in communism start to crumble at some point here?

- No. - Is that around, that was still pretty strong. - What I did notice that the standard of living in Moscow was significantly lower than in East Germany. In the supermarkets, you could expect, with reliability, that you can find canned fish and mineral water, everything else was whatever.

And if you saw a line at a store, you just line up. You don't even ask what they have, because if you don't like it, somebody else will. It was not poverty, but it was close to poverty. There were a lot of drunken men in the streets. And-- - This is the '80s?

- No, this is the late '70s. - Late '70s. - Mid to late '70s. And also, they had these high-rise apartment buildings that looked pretty good from the front, but you went into the backyard, ouch. - Yeah, you're describing my childhood here, okay. (both laughing) But it's interesting, even with the professor, even with everything else, it's interesting, because I think the standard of living was much lower, you're right, even in Moscow.

- Yeah, absolutely was. The one thing that they always had, at least in my days, in those two years, there was always fresh bread in the bullet tinoyas. - Yeah. - Always. - Yeah, that's probably one of the memories I have of childhood is, well, you're hungry a lot, but when you eat is bread.

- Yeah, and the bread was good. - It was good. I mean, I actually wonder, I wonder how good it was, but I remember it being incredibly good. - To me, it was really good. And you had it from white to very dark and all the varieties. The other thing that was good was, if you knew where to get it, stolichnaya was four rubles.

(Ruby laughing) Not only is it good vodka, but it's cheap vodka. I like it. - Yeah, but you had to know where, this would be like holes in the wall someplace. - Well, I think a lot of the way they operate, I wonder if East Germany is this way, but a lot of the ways that Moscow operated, is you kinda, you had to know.

- Yes. - Like there's a very kind of, if you make the right friends, if you give money to the right guy, the guy, the friend of the friend of the friend is gonna hook you up and there's a culture, this is how you work around a very big bureaucracy.

- Underground economy. - Yeah, underground economy, yeah. You have to, which is, boy, such a stark contrast between that and the United States, the capitalist system. Yeah, that was a very big culture shock to me, to understand the different, fundamentally different way of life, but the interesting thing is, human nature pervades both systems.

There's something about the Russian system that reveals human nature more intensely because of the underground nature of it, because you get to deal with greed and trust and all those kinds of things. In the United States, there's much more power to the rule of law, so there's rules and people follow those rules.

They get to break the rules nonstop. - Well, in East Germany and Russia, I believe, theft, if you could get away with it, was part of your economic activity. - Yeah. (laughing) - I have a friend who I went to school with up until my fourth year and we reconnected and he told me how he survived.

He would just steal stuff and then sell it or trade it. - Yeah, theft, I mean, it's a relative concept. - You are taking stuff. - Bribery, all those kinds of things. People, you know, corruption, you know, it's a relative term, no, I'm just kidding. I mean, it is, you have to work around the giant bureaucracy about the giant corruption.

Corruption builds on top of corruption and then it just becomes this giant system that's unstable, as you talked about. - One last word. - Yes. - The two years in Moscow taught me how to be alone. I had no social interaction. - Not with friends, not with women, not-- - No, the only interaction I had was with the folks that trained me.

So I was alone, it was a lonely two years. - For a person who loves love, is that difficult? - Yes, but that prepared me for my first year and first and second year in the United States because I could not interact socially without giving away that something was wrong with me.

I had to learn how to be an American. They didn't teach me in Moscow, they couldn't. - So the first two years in America, you had to kind of listen more than talk. - Oh, you bet, the very first year, I couldn't even work because I had to acquire the documents, a social security card and a driver's license to get a job and then when I had the job, I worked as a bike messenger.

That gave me a good opportunity to listen because these people, they weren't very curious about me. - What was your name in East Germany? What was your name in Moscow? What was your name in America? - Okay, so the name I was given at birth is Albrecht Dittrich. Nobody-- - So sexy when you speak in German, the German accent.

- I hated that name, Albrecht, I didn't like it. It was very rarely used. My mother named me after a famous German painter, Albrecht de Dürer. My cover name in Moscow was known as Dieter and in the United States, I became Jack Barsky. In between, I used a whole bunch of other names that were associated with false passports that I used.

One of the names that I remember is William Dyson because that is the name that was on the Canadian passport I used to enter the United States. - So how did you enter the United States? Can we take the journey from Moscow to the United States? - Yeah. - What was the assignment?

What was that leap? What was like-- - Just one thing in between, I had a three-month practice trip to Canada. That was a good idea. And I gotta tell you this one thing that happened there. Okay, so because the one thing that I like to tell people nowadays is one of the secrets to happiness is the ability to make fun of the worst situations that you're in.

- Yes, absolutely. - You see the humor. - Yes. - Okay, so here comes something quite humorous, in hindsight at least. One of the tasks that I had in Canada was to acquire a birth certificate. But the name was Henry Van Randel who was born someplace in California and I was supposed to write a little letter saying I'm Henry Van Randel, please send me a copy of my birth certificate.

The fee is enclosed. And I lived in a small hotel, so the return address, it wasn't visible that it was a hotel, that was important. So, and it took like three weeks and I get nothing, four weeks I get nothing. Eventually I got annoyed and I mustered the courage to call them up for my pay, for when I called up the office registrar, whatever they were called in this town in California and I yelled at them, I says, you got my money, where's my birth certificate?

Well, a couple of weeks later it came. So I see the envelope, it says Henry Van Randel, yes. I had prepared the caretakers of the hotel that I'm expecting a letter from my friend. So I went up to my room, I opened it and I was like, yes, yes, this is a success.

And I opened this thing and it was a copy of a birth certificate but it was stamped with big letters across in red, deceased. Now think about it, so here's a dead person who was asking for his birth certificate. I had the presence of mind to leave, okay? I went to a couple of other cities, I should have left the country.

But I know that the Royal Mounted Police was following me and I was given that information by the FBI later on. - Oh, you were able to at least suspect that at the time? - I-- - Through the-- - I knew that there was trouble. My counter surveillance route-- - SDR.

- Yes, didn't discover anything. So I kept on going, I was supposed to visit two more cities and they were always one step behind. What is interesting to me is that they didn't catch me on the way out. You have to show your passport to the airline. I mean, I was known by name, I would then, because I had to give that to the hotel, right?

And I escaped with-- - So how would they-- - By air. - They would have to keep you on a list, right? - Yeah. - Yeah, that's interesting. But that requires like a good computerized updated system to track all that stuff. - Yeah, this was Swiss Air, so. - Well, you got lucky.

- Yeah. - Part of life is luck. - You bet. So, and other than that, the trip to Canada was a big success because it gave me the culture shock that I needed to not be blown out of the water when I get to the United States. - So you hopped a few places in Canada-- - Yeah.

- And then Swiss Air. I even had a relationship with a young lady. - Canadian, French-Canadian, regular Canadian? - French-Canadian, and she gave me a book, Winnie the Pooh, because we went to see the movie, and then she wrote a dedication, she says, "To the nicest German I've ever met." - Was she lying?

- No. - Or you don't know. (laughing) Speaking of "Spycraft," and that led to "Heartbreak," too? - No, that was sexual. I was not, at that point-- - Ready for love? - No. - Ready to return to that old-- - Well, and I was already married in Germany. Okay, that woman I loved.

- We should return to this. - Yeah. (laughing) - So, Swiss Air, where did you land in the United States? - Oh, when I came, where did I land? An American Airlines flight from Mexico City to Toronto, but they made me deplane in Chicago. I have no idea, I think that was over-engineering.

That didn't make any sense to me. You know, why can't a Canadian just take a flight from Mexico City? With this stopover, that's kind of nonsense. - Yeah, but okay, but nevertheless, that was it, and then you landed in Chicago. - Right. - And tell me the story in America.

What was the day-to-day life? Now, this is, now you're a spy. - No, no, no, I gotta tell you another funny story. - Yes. (laughing) - So, it's another, there's two things that happened that could've ended my career as a spy right then and there. So, I'm arriving in Chicago in the evening.

It's already dark. I had no idea what kind of a hotel to take, and I picked one out of Yellow Pages and got a taxi. When I gave him the address, he looked at me like a little funny. Whatever, what do I know? Just keep on going. I need to get sleep because I was extremely tense, having gone through customs and border control.

So, and we are going in the southern direction, and I noticed that the neighborhoods became less and less inviting. Didn't know what that meant either. And I get, I enter the hotel. It was a five-story brownstone, and something else looked funny. So, the reception desk was protected by plexiglass.

Not having enough background, I didn't know that this was unusual. Because all I knew that there was a lot of crime in the United States, so I thought maybe every hotel was like that. So, I go up into my room and drink a half a bottle of Johnny Walker Red because-- - As one does, yeah.

(laughing) - Because I was so damn tense, I just wanted to sleep. I wanted to get into a coma, which I did. And the next day I woke up with a head that was twice as big as, felt twice as big. But I was prepared. I had aspirin with me, so I killed the headache and went outside to see if I can get something to eat.

And so, I was right smack in the middle of the south side of Chicago. I didn't know that the south side of Chicago existed. I found later, I found out where I was. So, it was time to go very quickly. Go up there, and at that point I decided I would register at the next hotel on the Jack Barsky.

So, I went to the bathroom and I tried to kill off Mr. Dyson by burning his passport. Unfortunately, I was not trained in how to train passport, how to destroy passports. So, I tried to burn it, and these things were flame retardant, and it created a cloud of smoke.

And I'm looking up there and there's a smoke detector. - Yeah, oh no. - Okay, so presence of mind, I threw this thing in the toilet and then took out a pair of scissors and cut it into small pieces and flushed it down. If that smoke alarm goes off, I'm busted, right?

If some criminal steals, I had $6,000 on me in cash, steals either my passport or my money or both, I don't know what to do. - Yeah, you can't go to the authorities, you can't do anything. - There weren't any Russian Soviets in Chicago. - Do you have any contacts inside the-- - No, there was no plan B for Chicago at all.

That's an oversight. I shouldn't have gone to Chicago. They could have shipped me into San Francisco or Washington, D.C. because both of them had Soviets. My end goal was to go to New York, fine. I would have been a really, really dangerous agent if I had gone back and worked with the KGB 'cause I could have told 'em all the things, how to do it right, right?

- So in that sense, there is some, given the scale of the KGB, there is some incompetence in the system. - Some? - A lot of incompetence. - With regard to preparing me to be an American, it was almost total incompetence. - Do you think that's representative of the way they operate is there's an incompetence to the logistics, to the strategies involved, all that kind of stuff?

- Yeah, none of these guys had operated as illegals. They were outsiders to American society. They had interaction with Americans, but they all lived in New York. They lived in a compound in northern Manhattan where they all lived together with their families. And most of the time, they spent interacting with themselves, with their own people at work.

- So they really didn't integrate well. - They did not know what it's like to be an American, to have a job, to live like an American. They didn't know it. - It's interesting that KGB didn't put a high value to that kind of integration. - They didn't know what they didn't know.

And by the way, this was mutual. Do you think the CIA had good knowledge of the Russian culture? Uh-uh, same thing. And so there was a lot of lack of understanding because good intelligence could have possibly avoided some of the high tension situations that we had when in the '80s, we got close to nuclear war.

- So good intelligence would be integrating yourself in society much, much deeper. - Yes, and understanding that Ronald Reagan was not a warmonger, but he was talking about the end times because he was a Christian. - But then that kind of integration can be dangerous because you start to question the propaganda, the narratives on which the KGB is built, on which the CIA is built.

- And then they always had the option of ignoring the intelligence that they're getting, right? Yeah. - Well, let me ask you this question to jump around. There's a lot of conspiracy theories in this current climate, I mean, throughout history, but now especially. And some of the conspiracy theories put a lot of power in the hands of the intelligence agencies like CIA, FSB, Mossad, MI6.

They're basically, the conspiracy theories go that they control the powerful people in this world and are able to thereby manipulate those powerful people and manipulate the populace in order to deliver different kinds of messages and so on. Given your experience with this kind of tension between competence and malevolence, would you say there's some truth to those conspiracy theories?

- Not one way. I think there is collusion, there's collaboration, but I would think that, like for instance, some folks in the CIA and the FBI are being used by the ones that are really in power. Power is money, power is wealth. I know power is not-- - But it can go both directions.

You can acquire wealth first, which leads you to power, or you can acquire power first. - Yeah, power is also knowledge, I understand, and a position in society in the military or in intelligence, but I don't think it's a straight one way that all the intelligence agencies control the powerful people in their country.

You see what's happening in Russia. I mean, Putin dominates his intelligence agencies, right? - Well, so the question is which way the direction goes, but you're saying that it's not one way flow of power. - I would think so, and I also believe it exists, but it's not as prevalent as, you know, not every conspiracy theory pans out, and most of them don't.

They're just damn rumors, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. I guarantee you that they exist. There's collusion, there's people getting together, and not necessarily preparing a specific action, but more sort of a plan to go forward and maintain the position or even, you know, strengthen the position that they already have.

- So KGB, but we can generalize this, FSB, CIA, do you think a KGB agent would kill someone against international law if they were ordered to do so? So we talked about-- - They did. They did. And there's a famous case of one, I think it's Vasily Kuklov, who defected.

He was a killer, he was a trained killer, and he had done assassinations in other countries. He was sent to West Germany to kill a defector, a KGB defector, and he decided not to do it. He talked to the guy, and he said, "I'm supposed to kill you, I'm not," and then he eventually wound up in the United States.

I have a connection to this fellow because the KGB once asked me to go to California and see if the guy still lives and works there. And I found him, and we looked at each other. So it was an active KGB agent looking at a man that he didn't know was a KGB defector, looking at each other.

Neither one knew who the other one was. I found out later. - But he was able to survive. - Yes, and there have been assassinations, not a lot. And you know that-- - That we know of. - A good point. - This is very difficult. The question is, how many lines are intelligence agencies willing to cross to attain, to achieve the goal?

- I think none of these agencies have the ultimate line. I think eventually the last line will be crossed if they believe it's necessary. - Well, I think you can justify a lot of things, especially in this modern world with nuclear weapons, that you can justify that you're saving the world, actually.

Let me ask a few difficult questions, and we'll jump back to your time in America, but Vladimir Putin has been accused of ordering the poisoning and assassination of several people, including Alexander Litvinenko early on, all the way to Alexei Navalny. Do you think these accusations are grounded in truth?

And we will return to a couple more questions, maybe, above Vladimir Putin's early days in the KGB, which would be interesting. - Yeah, there's a phrase that I like to say, and in response, it's called plausible deniability. I don't think Putin gave a direct command to say, do that.

He would just maybe muse. It would be nice if something were to happen. And then somebody picks it up and does it. - Is there, can you still man the case that Putin did not have direct or indirect involvement? - Who would know? Who would know? - Well, the international, the reputation, perhaps catalyzed by Putin himself is that he's the kind of person that would directly or indirectly make those orders.

Perhaps the case there is he's somebody to be feared, and thereby you want that narrative out there. - But the act itself, the poisoning of Litvinenko, and oh, and then the assassination of the Bulgarian Markov and with the umbrella, and they all directly trace back to Russian Soviet intelligence.

And so that's enough to be feared, right? My answer that I gave you is an educated guess. I can't pretend to know this for sure, but-- - It's frustrating to me because there's a lot of people listening to this would say, would even sort of, would chuckle at the naive nature of the question.

But if you actually keep an open mind, you have to understand what is the way that intelligence agencies function? Is it possible to the head of an intelligence agency not to make direct orders of that kind? Where there's a distributed-- - No, the head of the intelligence agency would most likely give the order.

- Even though it's compartmentalized. - Yeah, but not the head of state. - Maybe not the head of state. Although in the case, this is the case in the United States as well, but certainly is the case in Russia, there are close relationships between the head of the FSB and the GRU, and personal relationships, not just even-- - The head of the FSB who is now in jail?

(Lex laughs) - There's interesting details, especially coming out recently around the war in Ukraine. So let me actually ask about the war in Ukraine. What is your analysis of the war in Ukraine from 2014 to the full-on invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022, in February, 2022? What, there's many questions we could ask.

One is, what are the sins of the governments involved? What are the sins of Russia, Ukraine, America, China? Are those sins comparable? Who are the good guys and the bad guys? - That was more than one question, though. Let me just give you the basics about this. Savvy observers saw this coming.

They were a very small minority, because Vladimir Putin was pretty open about what he told the world his mission was, was the reestablishment of a strong Russia, the reestablishment of something like the Russian Empire to unite all the Russian-speaking people under one country, and the world ignored him. I mean, he was open.

It was at a conference in France, I believe, when he said this out in the open. And then what we had in the United States, we had wishful thinking. Obama had this reset with Russia. We all get friendly. And then when Putin invaded Crimea, we did nothing. And it just escalated slowly, but surely, it was pretty clear.

And they said, it was, I think, two years ago, there was an essay published by Putin. Whether he wrote it or not doesn't matter, but that was also out in public, where he was, again, quite clear what he was gonna do. Now, how do you do this? With force.

And the sins committed by the American government was, we ignored it. We weren't engaged in wishful thinking, and we didn't stop it with sanctions before the shooting started. - To push back, I don't think you're fully describing, you are describing the sins of the Russian government and Putin. I don't think you're fully describing the sins of the American government here, because not only didn't, you're describing the miscalculation.

So, not only did they not pressure correctly with sanctions and so on, and clearly respond to the actual statements in the essays and the words spoken. - I know where you're going, but keep on speaking. - Yes, but they also, at the same time, pressured Russia, and they also, as Putin himself said, sort of, there's a rat, and they pushed the rat towards the corner by expanding NATO.

And-- - And arming Ukraine. - And, well, the military industrial complex is a machine that led us, and I think a lot of younger people, I mean, when I came to this country, and this is the country I love, I lived through 9/11. I lived through the full rollercoaster of emotion.

I'm a, at that time, before that, and after, was a proud American. I went through the whole rollercoaster of being sold, I would say, a lie about the reason to invade Iraq, and even Afghanistan. And I got to live through understanding of this military industrial complex that leads to the expansion of empires, of the delusion that we have in the populace, in the government, that convinces us that we are the good guys, and somehow, with military force, we can instill our values, instill happiness, the pursuit of happiness, that all men are created equal, these ideas into other lands.

And we can do so with drones, and we can do so with weapons, and we can do so without significant cost from our own pockets. And so, this idea, this machine, doesn't just apply to Afghanistan and Iraq, doesn't just apply to Yemen and Syria, it doesn't just apply to China, it also applies to Ukraine.

It also applies to Russia. - Agreed, two thoughts, if I may. First of all, one does not hear the term military industrial complex in the public discourse these days. Eisenhower warned about it. Eisenhower was a capitalist, he was the President of the United States. So, it exists, and it is very powerful.

The more weapons you can sell, the more you have to replace them, or send over, you have to replace them, so yes. The other thing is, there's also a messianic streak that powers American foreign policy. We want to make the world just like us. Why don't they get it?

Because they don't want to. It's almost like, it's not communism, but it's a very similar romantic idea that we can make the world, and fashion the world the way we are. And that's the romantic side, and the sort of honest side, but it doesn't work. It failed every time, right?

You know, Afghanistan is a royal mess, and would never become a functioning democracy. I don't know if Ukraine can become a functioning democracy. - Well, I don't know if American weapons can help Ukraine become a functional democracy. - Yeah, absolutely right. - But there's a huge amount of interest in seeing the world in black and white, and selling the story of the world as black and white, that Ukraine is the symbol of democracy in this Eastern European world, and Russia is the symbol of authoritarian dictatorship.

And the story is not so simple, as many indices show, Ukraine and Russia are the number one, and the number two most corrupt countries in Europe. - They're two peas in a pod. One is bigger, and one is, in this case, the aggressor. Now, you know, two peas, the aggressor is still ultimately responsible.

- The person that throws the first punch, now there's a lot of people going to disagree where the first punch came from. But there is magnitude. - Yes. - And the struggle by Ukraine for its sovereignty stretches back to the beginning of the 20th century. It stretches back even further than that.

But there's been the Ukrainian people are proud people, and they've been, in many cases, tortured by those that sit in the Kremlin throughout the 20th century. - The famine in the early '30s. - And it's always, it's never the middle class and the upper class that suffer. It's always the lower classes, the peasants in that time.

This history stretches back far, and this is yet another manifestation of that. And there's a lot of interest at play. China watches closely, Russia, America watches closely, and there's an extra caveat here that there's nuclear weapons at play as well. - Exactly. And it's, this is, the situation is as dangerous as I have lived through in my entire life, I believe.

And because it's not necessarily at the highest point of escalation, but it will be, in my view, a protracted crisis, and the longer that crisis lasts, the more of a chance there is of an accident. - Yeah. One rocket. - Yeah. - There seems to be a strong incentive to prolong, to do siege tactics to prolong this conflict over perhaps many years, which is terrifying to think about.

And over that, one single rocket can lead to, given that there's leaders that might not, that might be losing their mind. - Yeah. - And Ukraine is not part of NATO, the thing I'm really afraid of is that somebody might think it's a good idea, but for Russia, so Putin might think it's a good idea for Russia to send a message by launching a nuke against Ukraine, because they're not part of NATO.

So surely the West is not going to respond. What is the West going to do? - Yeah. - If Russia nukes Ukraine to send a message? I don't know if anyone knows the answer to that question, but it's a terrifying question. - And I don't know the exact protocol that needs to be followed to launch a nuclear strike from NATO's end, because we have several countries in NATO that have nuclear weapons.

So let's say for France to fire a nuke, does the United States have to agree? I don't know how that works. - I don't know if anyone knows how that works. - Okay, yeah. - I worry, now we have different, very kind of anecdotal perspectives on these things, but the people I've interacted with in the DOD, Department of Defense, in the military, there is a compartmentalization.

There is a bureaucracy, and within that giant bureaucracy, there's incompetence. We'd like to think that there is like really well organized for really important things. There's going to be the best of the best in the world that's going to execute on the correct decisions, both geopolitically, militarily, all that kind of stuff.

And I've seen enough to know that competence at any level of government, at any level of the military is not guaranteed. Let's go back to the law of hierarchy. The government is the biggest hierarchy there is. And so, invariably, politicians find their way to the top. And once you have politics and dictating substantive decisions, they're going to be weak or wrong.

I don't know how this could work any other way. Right now, we have some functional idiots in the central United States government. - Well, let me, 'cause you said that, I think elsewhere you said that Putin was not a good KGB agent. - That's right. - A mediocre one, but is an excellent politician.

- Yeah, and a good organizer. He was known as a really, really good organizer. When Yeltsin hired him as prime minister, he cleaned up the mess, because under Yeltsin, Russia deteriorated tremendously, and it became sort of a mix of oligarchy and a criminal enterprise and chaotic. - So he had skills that made him a good executive.

- Absolutely. - Now, let's go back to him as a KGB agent. He was a KGB agent. I mean, according to him, once a KGB agent, always a KGB agent. But 16 years, let's say, something like this. What do you think about, from your experience, now you're maybe the same age as him, approximately the same age as him.

- He's a little younger. - A little younger. - Yeah. - What do you think about the KGB experience he had made him the man he is? What aspect of that, from your own experience, how much does that define you, who you are, how you think about the world, how you analyze the geopolitics of the world, how you analyze human nature?

- Now, I gotta tell you one thing. He had a different type of training than I did. Mine was one-on-one, and he went to school, so to speak. - Classroom training. - Right. But fundamentally, he was not a top agent, and this is very simple. There's only one thing you need to know.

He knows German pretty well. So where was he deployed? In East Germany. Not in West Germany, not in Switzerland, not in Austria. That's where they sent the best, right? One would think, generally. - We're learning here. - Right. - So this is your classification of where they sent the best.

People classify all kinds of stuff, like what is the best university in the world, what is the best football team in the world. And you start to get a sense, the good guys get sent, the best athletes get sent to, well, we can disagree on this, but what the football team is.

But you have a sense, and you're saying that the best agents would have been sent to West Germany. - One would think so. Now, this is not a forcing argument, but I also have it from a word from the horse's mouth. - Which horse? I mean, what kind of horse?

What's the breed of the horse? - Oleg Kalugin. You know who Oleg Kalugin is, and he's still alive. He was, at one point, the head of counterintelligence for the first directorate espionage, right? And Putin was in the first directorate and reported to Kalugin for a while. And Oleg told me to my face that Oleg was not an impressive agent trainee, or agent.

- That Vladimir Putin was not impressive. - Not impressive at all. Now, he's biased, given his current situation. - Well, yeah, he could still make it up because he had this big ruckus when he was in Parliament and called Putin a war criminal about the war in Serbia. - Not only could he make it up, I wouldn't trust his analysis.

(Roger laughs) I mean, I have to, when people, I've been working very hard, even before this war, to try to understand objective analysis of all the parties involved. You have to really keep an open mind here to see clearly, to understand. If you are to try to help in some way make a better world, in this case, stop this war, or have all the countries involved flourish, bring out the best of the people, remove the corruption and the greed and the destructive aspects of the governments, and let the people flourish.

For all of that, you have to put all the biases aside, all the political bickering, all the, I don't know, all the biased analysis. And there's a lot of propaganda that says that, in fact, Putin was a good agent. How else would he rise to the ranks, right? - Because he was a good politician and he made a lot of good connections within the KGB.

Allow me to say something. You just taught me a lesson. And the lesson I should have figured out myself because I keep on telling people that, in the intelligence world, you never know the truth 100%. So when you said, "Oh, I could make that up," of course you could have.

But you get to a point where you're forced to make a decision or have an opinion and then you use your best educated guess. - Yes. - So I'm gonna take the certainty of the statement that I made back because it's quite possible that you're right. - Well, what I've noticed about Vladimir Putin, and this is true about, for example, Donald Trump and all those kinds of divisive figures, that for some reason, people's opinion on the details of those people are very sticky.

Once you decide this is a bad guy, there's like a black hole and people are not able to think one act at a time. You don't have to, that doesn't somehow justify this, that somehow doesn't remove all the evil things that are done, but you can analyze clearly each of the actions.

And to me, it is interesting to see how did this man rise through the ranks? Now, you're saying that to be a KGB agent, there's a lot of skills involved. And perhaps raw technical skill of spycraft is perhaps not related to the skill of rising through the ranks. - Right.

- And you're saying as a politician, he was good at rising through the ranks. - But lying and influencing, that is something that is significant, has a significant talent and ability that an agent must have, that helps you as a politician. - Continuing the kind of thread of the role of KGB in defining the heart, soul, and mind of Vladimir Putin.

Let me return to Yuri Bezmenov, who was a Soviet KGB agent that wrote a four-step framework for ideological subversion on a national scale, as practiced by the Soviet Union. So the four steps are demoralization, destabilization, crisis, and normalization. He had a lot of other kind of systematic ways of describing this kind of stuff.

So can you speak to some of these ideas about the systematic, large-scale, ideological subversion goals of the KGB? Is there truth to that kind of, those ideas? - Yes, but I think I already sort of mentioned that I think Bezmenov was a fraud. And I have, again-- - Can you elaborate?

- Good arguments, let's put it this way. First of all, we know that the KGB was involved in active measures, which is, you can call it fake news. Seeding fake news into the countries that are your adversaries. And the Russians have been doing this lately by meddling in our election, and focusing on the left and the right fringe, and influencing them to become more left and more right.

And Vasily Mitrokhin has, in one of his books, he has a whole chapter about active measures. Okay, so what he has to say about the department, and I forgot what department it was, was the one department that was the least desirable for KGB agents, because these were desk jobs for people who had to come up with fake stories in countries where they didn't quite know too much about the country.

Now, there were some successes, like one of the two most famous successes that I'm aware of is that the canard, that the AIDS virus was concocted in a CIA lab. A lot of people around the world believe that. And the other one was that J. Edgar Hoover was a secret cross-dressers.

(laughing) That is still known by a lot of Americans who are of a certain age that this was the truth. But Mitrokhin actually traces it back to a story that was placed in a sort of left wing, but close to mainstream French magazine, and it was then taken up by more, larger newspapers and well-established papers.

So they had some successes, but this kind of a massive, well-thought-out campaign to destabilize the United States, I don't believe the KGB was capable of doing that. Mitrokhin seems to agree with me. I was trained, I would think, you know, I was one of the crown jewels of the agents.

One would think that they used the best that they had to help me how to become an American, and they didn't have a clue. So how did they, if you don't know how a country operates, how do you come up with this kind of a very detailed, long-term plan that's also timed, you know, two years this and one year that and all that?

- Yeah, so we should actually just clarify. So he has this whole idea that there's 15 to 20 years that are needed for demoralization, where you're basically infiltrating a country from a young, or people from a young age, manipulating their mind, you're destabilizing them, that's the second step, that takes two to five years.

You target the country's foreign relations, defense and economy, you create a crisis artificially, and then you normalize it as if it always was this way. So it's basically saying that the KGB is capable of, at scale, over many years, manipulate an entire population of people. And this is kind of, there's a lot of people that believe in conspiracy theories that are amenable to this kind of idea.

Now, my own experience is that there is, in fact, just a giant amount of incompetence, and that this is something that's actually very difficult to pull off. 'Cause it's incredibly, incredibly difficult to achieve this kind of manipulation. I think it would require, first of all, not much bureaucracy, not much slowing down.

You have to have incredible, in the modern world, digital systems that are able to do surveillance, manipulation, there has to be a strategy that is carried out in secrecy across a huge number of people, effectively, that also requires you hire the best people in the world. And I think it's difficult to execute on this kind of thing if you compartmentalize, because there has to be great collaboration.

There has to be a great, where there's a unified vision. - Coordination. - And coordination across multiple groups. There has to be, I mean, it's very difficult to do. Now, nevertheless, especially with technology, this becomes easier and easier. So the bar becomes lower and lower. To achieve mass surveillance becomes easier and easier and easier.

Mass manipulation through platforms, because we're now digitally connected, you can now do that kind of manipulation. So it becomes more and more realistic that you could do this kind of thing. But you're saying that, no, intelligence, first of all, intelligence is hard. And to do it at scale and to do it well and to do it in a way that it's also not just collecting information about the populace, but manipulating the populace is very, very difficult.

- Right, now let me give you another argument why I think that Besminov was a fraud. I mean, I already have Mitrokhin on my side and my personal observation of the incompetence that I witnessed. I mean, they really, really didn't know what they didn't know. So now Besminov was KGB, where was he stationed?

In India. He was a low-level agent in India. And I told you, the one thing that KGB was really good at was compartmentalization. How does Besminov in India find out about this massive plan that should have been super secret, right? He made it up, sorry. And you know why he got away with it?

Because Americans eat that up, because it's not our fault. It's like the damn Russians that doing all that bad stuff. Speaking of the damn Russians doing all that bad stuff, you know about the Internet Research Agency. They have been doing quite a bit of damage. And I'm now familiar with a world of enhanced artificial persons.

These are the avatars on Facebook and Twitter and so forth that look like real people. And there are quite a few of them. And I have a good friend who operates in that realm. And he uses, for instance, facial recognition when he thinks that there's a suspicious character, say, on LinkedIn or on Facebook.

And very often he finds out, yeah, that that person exists, but it's not the person who it pretends to be. - So basically detecting the artificial, the enhanced artificial people. - Yes, but he can also make them. You think the United States-- - Right, it goes hand in hand, yeah.

United States doesn't do it, we do it too, but-- - Well, this is to push back against your pushback, right? Yeah, Beslanov might be a fraud, but is it possible, especially in the modern age, that there is these kind of large-scale systematic, wouldn't you, as a government-- - More so.

- That's investing billions of dollars into military equipment, in a world that's more and more clearly going to be defined by cyber war versus hot war, wouldn't you start to have serious meetings, large amounts of hires that are working at how do we manipulate the information flow, how do we manipulate the minds of the populace, how do we sell them a narrative?

So even though he might've been making up a story because people eat it up, could it speak to some deep truth that's actually different than the truth you came up in as a KGB agent? - I agree with you 100%, it's much easier. All you need is an army of nerds who also know-- - No offense.

No offense to the nerds. - That's a term of endearment, I guess. - Yes, of love. - I love nerds. I used to be one myself, so. But anyway-- - Once a nerd, always a nerd, so. (both laughing) - So what I was gonna say here is-- - All you need is an army of nerds.

- And what also experts in the culture of the target country, okay? And nowadays the world is different. There's a whole lot more fluidity, there's a whole lot of more people that like say Russians, for instance, study in the United States, Chinese, an army of Chinese studying in the United States, they have a lot more knowledge of how we function than the KGB did, and it's vice versa.

Not as many Americans in Russia, but we have some, but the Chinese and the Russians have an advantage here. - Can I ask you a question based on your experience? So I have been talking to a lot of powerful people, and some of which have very close connections to in this particular conflict, Ukraine and Russia, but in other places as well.

I don't believe I've ever been contacted by or interacted with an intelligence agency. CIA, FSB, MI6, Assad, I don't think I have, well, let me say explicitly, I haven't had an official conversation, which is what I assume I would have, because I have nothing to hide, right? So I think there's no reason for people to be secretive.

But why is that? Would I know? Am I interesting at all? How are people determined if they're in person of interest or not? And I guess the question, I mean, some of it I ask in a bit of a humorous way, but also perhaps there's truth in some of the humor is, would I know if I have ever interacted with an intelligence agency spy?

- Well, you don't know that you haven't been contacted, but certainly not, I think you never had a conversation that related to intelligence in any way, shape, or form. - Right, like where a person, another person introduced-- - Yeah, introduced themselves or becomes, sort of wants to be your friend and then talks about these types of topics, right?

- Yeah, but I (laughs) there's people, because of who I'm interacting with, they're, I mean, even with Elon Musk, like if you think about Elon Musk, there's a lot of people that are part of the conversations that happen. How do I know they're all trustworthy? They all present themselves as trustworthy.

Now, again, I have nothing, so this is for the intelligence agencies, I have nothing to hide. I am the same person privately as publicly, well-intentioned, real, no controlled, no weird sexual stuff where you can manipulate me. (Lex laughs) What else? - No drug use? - No drug use, no skeletons in the closet, none of that kind of stuff, but I don't know, I mean, just even having these conversations, I tend to trust people as a default.

- Yeah, me too. - And you start, when you think, well, especially with some of the people I've been talking with and some of the traveling I'm doing, I'm realizing there's hard men in this world, there's military, there's serious suffering, and there's war, and there's serious people that are doing serious harm, and so you have to be careful of thinking who to trust.

The person approaches you with a smile and asks you a question, my natural inclination is that person is a cool person, I'll answer the question, I'll become a friend, but it becomes difficult when you realize that there's things like intelligence agencies with thousands of employees, there's people that are doing major military actions that involve tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of soldiers.

This is serious stuff, and so how do you know how to operate in this world? - The folks that you're interacting with have a responsibility not to tell you what they shouldn't tell you, right? - Right. - So, and most of them probably won't, and I'm guessing occasionally they will say, well, I can't go there, right?

- Yeah. - So what you are aware of is sort of public, and what you're doing is you're collecting it and you're editing it to some extent, you're not changing the verbiage, you just repeat what they say, so from that angle you're not privy to any real secrets. What you have possibly that could be of use is you learn to get to know the person.

So I'm thinking there's a good possibility if you get the interviews in the East that somebody may actually approach you and ask you what's your opinion. - I just hope they approach me and introduce themselves properly. I just, there's a kind of, I mean, would you know, like how many Russian spies are there in the United States, how many American spies are there in Russia?

Do you have a sense? Is it-- - No idea. - I mean, just like with the GRU. - No idea. - Is it possible there's like tens of thousands, and we're not, or like thousands? - Not thousands like I used to operate. We are too hard to train and we weren't that successful to begin with, but particularly Russians and Chinese, both governments know who is going abroad.

And I guarantee you there's a lot of amateur spies. They're being asked, you know, help us out, you know, do something for the motherland. - And crowdsource spying. - Yeah, sort of. - Not serious training, but yeah. - And yeah, for instance, this lady, I forgot her first name, Butina, she was a rank amateur.

She used social media to communicate with Moscow. She had no training, but she was reasonably successful. I mean, she got, and the difference between, let's say the current Russian intelligence and the KGB, Vladimir Putin and his henchmen are okay with people being caught because, and every time I go and talk and give a talk someplace, I'm always asked this question, "How many Russian spies do you think we have here?" Because it scares the people, right?

And Putin likes to scare people. The KGB was very solicitous of the agents. They didn't want anyone of them caught, right? So that's a big difference. - So getting caught, so for the FSB, getting caught sends a strong signal to the world that there's agents everywhere. - Yeah, there could be many more, and there probably are.

Because the world, again, there's a whole lot more travel going on, a whole lot more interaction, studying abroad, doing business. And there will be attempts at espionage probably every minute in this country. That doesn't mean they will be successful, no. But there is a cottage industry now that is doing quite well that teaches companies how to fortify themselves against industrial espionage or also foreign actors spying.

It's all over the place. - Yeah, as it becomes easier and easier with digital, with cyber, that becomes a serious, very serious threat. - We might wind up in a world where nobody knows anymore what's up and what's down. (Lex laughs) - If I was to have a conversation with Vladimir Putin and/or Volodymyr Zelensky, is there something you would ask about the time in the KGB, the time in its past?

All of us, men and women, are creations of the experiences we have through our life, early on in life and through the formative experiences, successes and failures. - Yeah, you just said the key words. I would ask, without giving away anything, just being high level, your biggest success and your biggest failure.

- As a politician or as a KGB agent? - We're talking in the realm of KGB. When the wall came down and he was in an office, a KGB office in the city of Dresden, and these Germans were besieging Stasi offices, and they also dropped by the KGB office, and it was pretty threatening.

It looked like they were actually storm the office and get the documents and stuff like that. Initially, the first demonstration was told that if they come any closer, weapons would be used. So they disappeared and then they came back. I don't know, somebody in that office called Berlin and said, "What are we gonna do?

"Are we allowed to use force?" And the answer came back that Gorbachev said, "Absolutely not." And so this is where Putin, all of a sudden, he was at one point a member of the greatest, the most powerful intelligence organization in the world, and all of a sudden he was powerless and he had to watch how, this was a defeat, big one.

- It's supposedly a powerful intelligence agency cowering, sort of crawling back into a position of weakness. - And he probably promised himself never again. Russia needs to be great again. - The KGB, FSB, Russia, the Russian Empire needs to rise again. And that there's a feeling for him that that's, as he talks about the collapse of the Soviet Union being a great tragedy, there's a feeling like that was, that was like never again.

- Yeah, and I believe that he has a strong conviction that, I don't know if he's religious, he carries a cross now, but I don't know what that means, but somehow, but that it's the destiny of the Russian nation to be great. And that is sort of, whether it's determined by God or some higher power, that is very important for him.

- Of course, that nationalist idea is one that Americans share as well, and it could help a nation flourish, so by itself is not necessarily a bad thing. It's how it manifests itself is the question. - Well, one other thing, if I were to get a chat with the Ukrainian president, I would ask him how many lives, what is the equation between giving up some land and how many lives are worth this land?

- And it's a good way to phrase the question. Of course, that question gets you killed in Ukraine. But because there's another part of that equation, which is it's not just land versus lives. It's the sovereignty, the knowledge that you're free and you're self-determined. And it's not about fighting for the particular land.

It's saying we are messed up, corrupt, we have problems, it's a messy world, but it's our world. I think Stephen Crane has a poem about a man eating his own heart, and he was asked, "How does it taste?" And he said, "It's bitter, but I like it "because it is bitter and because it is my heart." And that there's a sense of like, I want, this is not just about land, this is our nation.

The same love of nation that Putin has for Russia, the greater Russia, this vision of this great empire, I believe Ukraine does as well. Not every, there's levels to this game, and Ukrainian people are some of the proudest people throughout the history of the 20th century, throughout the history of Earth.

The Polish people are proud people. You can just see in World War II, the people who said, "Fuck you, you're not having this. "We will die to the last man." There's different cultures that kind of really hold their ground, and Ukrainian people are that. - I have to admit, in that respect, I'm a bit of a coward.

I could not do what Zelensky has been doing. I would sort of try to find a way to carve out something that I can live with. However, if that force, that evil force, gets to my family-- - Right. There's lines. - Yes. - That's right. You become the world's bravest man if somebody crosses that line.

- Oh yeah. - You mentioned something about you've not been to Moscow back, and that it might not be safe for you to travel there. - Yes. - Can you speak to the nature of that? As somebody that successfully got out of the KGB, how are you still alive?

- A number of reasons. First of all, when my story became public, that was six years ago, I was pretty old. The folks that may have a personal interest, or may have had a personal interest in doing me harm, most of them don't live anymore. All right, that's number one.

Number two, I did not, I hired hand, a German. I did not betray the motherland. That's a crime that is punished by death. You betray the motherland. And the other thing is, you know that these kinds of operations to assassination in another country are very difficult to plan and implement.

And if there's a list of people that they don't like, I may not be at the very top. Having said that, if I wind up, say, in Moscow, or even in countries like Turkey, where there's a lot of lawlessness, accidents can easily be arranged, and that's just sending another message.

You know, it's like, you know, we can do a lot of things. - Powerful. - Yes. - Do you think it's safe for me to travel in Russia and Ukraine? - I think you know very well how to communicate in both countries. You know, you've shown this in this interaction, that you have a lot of empathy for the people you'll be talking with, and empathy means good understanding where they're coming from.

And that there are lines that you can't cross. Like the question that I was gonna ask Zelensky, who I'm not gonna ask, good for you. (laughing) - Yeah, isn't that the funny thing about this world? There's lines, there's lines everywhere. Even in love, even in personal relationships, there's lines you should not cross.

How did you finally get caught? - I resigned in 1988. - Well, let's actually talk about that. There was a, resigned, there's warning signs. There's yet another choice, yet another crossroads. - Yes, okay. - What was the calculation, what was the choice to be made? - To give a little background, it was 1988, and I thought they would, my time in the US would soon end, because I thought 10 to 12 years, it was already past 10 years.

There was no indication that they indicated, that they said, you're done. But in December of 1988, I got this one thing that I never wanted to see. So we had a system of signals that either one of those diplomat agents could set at a spot that I passed by every day, or I could set where they would pass by, like on their way from where they lived to the United Nations, for instance, who would just drive.

So, and mine was, the signal spot for me was on a support beam for the elevated atrium in Queens. And it was morning in December that I walked by there and routinely look at it, and I never expected anything. And there was this red dot, it was about the size of my fist with a red paint.

And since you have done it already, I think I can curse in this moment, because it's the only way I can really indicate how I felt, I said, oh shit. Because that was the danger signal. There was like, you are in severe danger of, and you need to get out of the country as soon as possible.

There was a protocol that I was supposed to follow. I wasn't even supposed to go home. I just needed to, was supposed to get my reserve documents that I had hidden in a park in the Bronx, and make a beeline to the Canadian border. I wasn't ready. So I just like ignored this thing.

I mean, I couldn't ignore it, but I went on to work. Got on the A train, went to work, and then went to my cubicle and stared at the computer screen all day, because I couldn't think. I could think only about what to do, what to do, what to do.

The reason for this indecisiveness was that I was a father at the time. I was, my little girl by the name of Chelsea was 18 months old. And I was there when she was born. I took her to her dorm. I watched her grow up. I watched her take the first steps and always look at me with these big eyes, lovingly look at me.

And that is when I started my re-entry into the human race, because I just fell in love with this girl. That's when love came back, and it was completely unexpected. And there's a lot of fathers who understand, particularly fathers of girls who understand what happened there. And I still thought I need to go back because there was probably some danger, but I hadn't figured out how to take care of the girl.

I'd leave her, but maybe she need to have a good life and grow up and have a chance. And her mother, she was from South America. She had a fourth grade education that would have not worked very well. So I played for time. I obviously, I could be sick.

I couldn't, you know, I could be in a hospital. There was a precedent where I was sick, where I couldn't communicate for about three weeks. So I just did nothing. That was on a Monday. On a Thursday was my regular shortwave transmission. I listened and they explained a little in a few sentences.

We have reason to believe that the FBI is on your case. You need to execute the emergency procedure. Come home right away. I still had some time because the radio could be broken or the transmission was bad or I still could be in a hospital, right? So I gave myself some more time.

And then something happened where they forced my hand. And this is the only time that a Soviet agent was anywhere near me on the territory of the United States. So I'm waiting for the A train on a dark morning still in Queens. And there's this man, this short man in a black trench coat comes up to me from my right and he whispers into my ears, you gotta come back or else you're dead.

I can't imitate the Russian accent. That was a Russian accent. And it was a pretty strong accent. The you're dead phrase can have two meanings. And an American would have said, or else you're busted or else you get arrested or else you're dead is very strong. So now you have to take it seriously to some degree because I know that they had a history of assassinating or at least trying to assassinate defectors.

So that obviously raised the stakes a little bit. But I just talked myself into believing this was just a bad phrasing. But at this point I knew and they knew that we both knew, right? So there was no more guessing. He found me, he talked to me, I know.

So now I had to act. So in the next radiogram I was asked to execute a dead drop operation where they would give me money and a passport. And that was in a park on Staten Island. It was a location that I found and I described. And I was always praised for my ability to describe spots that are easy to find.

So that was a given. And the only thing that was different in this for this operation, they scheduled it for the dark. All right, but it was still no problem because it was in a park and a couple of, about 100 yards in by next to a fallen tree.

Would be hard to miss. So I go to Staten Island and I read the signal that said I put the container in the drop. That was the protocol. There's a signal that the person who hands over something puts at a spot not too far from the spot itself. That means I would go in and just pick it up.

The reason I actually went to pick up this container because there was money in it. So I didn't have to make a decision yet. Okay, I could throw away the passport. It was like I was still trying to figure out what to do, what to do, what to do.

So I get to the spot, I get to the tree and I had a flashlight with me. The park, there was no way in the park. Even during the day, this park was not, it was more almost like a little forest. And I don't see the container. It was supposed to be a crushed oil can.

Pretty sizable, hard to miss. And I do a double take and I look again and I look around, I look around a little more, see if they misplaced it. Can't find it. It's the only one that one of those operations failed. And that just doesn't make a lot of sense.

So when as I'm walking away from this, like sort of numb emotionally, I said to myself, I'm staying. - Yeah. - That decision-- - Some kind of signal, some kind of a muse just spoke to you. - That decision was made for me. Now you know that I'm a Christian now and I think that was like, God told me this.

- But it was certain there. It was right there. - That was it. - That was it. - That was it. And so what I did to, well first of all, divine intervention helped me to find a good explanation. I sent them my last letter with secret writing. I communicated to them, I said, I wish I could come but I can't because I have contracted HIV/AIDS.

That was the best lie ever because nobody wanted to have AIDS in their country. Those days it was a death sentence, right? And I knew, we had conversations when I was back in Moscow how they were snickering about what's going on in the United States, that depraved culture and you see they're killing each other.

- And the depraved culture took over your being and how you're saying-- - Yes, and I was convincing enough, I even traced it back to a girlfriend I had once that I actually reported on that she, I interacted with this lady who had a boyfriend at one point who was a drug addict and she was infected and she infected me.

So they believed it, they sent, and I asked them to give my dollar savings to my German family. They gave them some but they told my family that I already passed away, that I'm dead. They believed it, 100%. And I guess the agent who took the money took half of it for himself.

So that was it and the next three months I made sure that I wasn't reliably at the same spot in the same time frame. So I went to work in different paths at different times just to, you know, just as a safety measure so to speak and not huge but you know, it kept me, allowed me to keep my sanity.

And obviously after I sent the letter I threw the shortwave radio in the Hudson River, destroyed the one time pads that I still had so I was now ready to-- - For a new life. - For a new life and live out my life as an American undiscovered but you know, starting to work on my version of the American dream.

And the first action was, was telling my wife, the mother of this child, you know, she always wanted to have a house and I said, you know what, we should buy a house. And a year later we moved into the suburbs and then I said we should have another child and we had another child.

So and I had a career, I did pretty well. I moved a couple of times, wound up in a McMansion but before that my second house was actually in Pennsylvania, in rural Pennsylvania and this is where I was discovered by the FBI. And how did they know about me?

If it hadn't been for this defector, Vasily Mitrokhin who was an archivist in the KGB archives, he was actually pretty high level, he was in charge of the relocation of the archive from Lubyanka to Yasenovo. And he really hated, he had reason to believe he hated the Soviet system.

I think I remember that his son was quite ill and he could have gotten treatment in England and he was not allowed to travel to England with his son. So his hatred, he tried to figure out what to do and how to do damage to that system. So he started copying notes, little slips of paper, handwritten that he smuggled out in his underwear and his socks over the years.

And then he transcribed them with a typewriter and then put the pieces of paper into some kind of a container and buried this in his stature. It was, I believe, in 1992 when he showed up, that was already, the Soviet Union was gone. So he showed up at the US embassy in Moscow and told him what he had and it was on a weekend and apparently there was a junior person in charge and he said, "You know what, what you got, "we are not interested in, it's really old." (laughing) That's a career limiting move, right?

Because Vasily Mitrokhin then made his way to one of the Baltic republics and contacted MI6 and they said, "Come on in, old fellow, "have a cup of tea." (laughing) And so they managed to get this stuff out of the dacha and get it to England and eventually, MI6 shared it with the FBI and there wasn't a whole lot of information about me, it was very, very little.

It was like there's a person by the name of Jack Barsky who is an illegal operating in the northeast of the United States. Now, if it was Jim Miller, they wouldn't have found me, Jack Barsky was easy to find. So they checked social security and Jack Barsky had gotten his social security card at the age of 33, bingo, okay?

All they knew though was that I wasn't illegal, that I was still living there. They didn't know whether I was active, inactive. And the other thing that they knew that I was a really, really well-trained agent 'cause I was still there, right? (laughing) So they took, I think, almost three years to investigate me, watch me from a distance because if I was still active, I would have found out that somebody's investigating me.

- So you started being less and less active in terms of-- - Oh, I stopped completely. - What I mean is-- - Oh, surveillance detection. - Yes, surveillance detection. - After three months, I stopped altogether. Yeah, good point. - And FBI is still very careful. - They were very careful.

They pretty much watched me and at one point, I had a house in the country with one neighbor. At one point, that house was for sale, so the FBI bought it and they put a couple of agents there and just didn't keep a closer eye on me. There was no indication that I was still active, but they were still cautious.

But at one point, they were able to plant a bug in my kitchen, a listening device. And my wife and I didn't get along very well. There was a lot of friction and she was constantly complaining about things and I got sick and tired of it. And one day, we had an argument in the kitchen and I chose to deploy the nuclear option.

(laughing) And that is telling her what I sacrificed to be with her, so she would understand that I am there on her side. I'm supporting her. If something doesn't quite fit, it is not because I don't love the both of them, Chelsea and Penelope. So when I said that, the listening device was active, so the FBI was hearing my confession.

I was once a KGB agent, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and I quit because of an unstable situation. And stayed here because of you and Chelsea. And that also made it clear to the FBI that I wasn't active anymore. They had both of that. So now, they knew an attempt to turn me would have been useless because you turn somebody who's active.

But they figured there was enough reason to treat me nicely because they figured I had a lot of information that was as aged as it was, but it was still important for the FBI to get to know. And so, one day, it was a Friday evening, I'm driving back home from the office and I'm being stopped by a state security guard.

State police. As I'm going through the toll, it's a bridge over the Hudson and they had to pay a toll. And he waved me, he got me right where I stopped and he said, "Could you please move over here? It's a routine traffic stop." Thought nothing of it. I had forgotten at that point that I once was a spy.

It was gone. And then he said, "Could you please step out of the car?" That should have aroused my suspicion. That's unusual, right? Routine traffic stop. I mean, I did it, no problem. And then again, somebody came from the right, came into my view and he flipped his ID and he said, "FBI, we would like to have a talk with you." Now, this is my now friend Joe Riley, who actually is the, he's the godfather of Trinity, my last child.

But anyway, he told me later that when I heard that phrase, all the blood left my face, I became totally white. But I recovered very quickly and he said it himself. So, they took me to a vehicle and there was another agent in the vehicle and he had a gun strapped to his ankle.

So, it was pretty real. First question I had, so am I under arrest? And the answer was no. And then my instinct kicked in in my ability to operate very well under high pressure situations. And I asked him, "So, what took you so long?" You know, the intent of that was to defuse any kind of tension.

- Yes. - And I saw a smile. - Instant friends. - Yeah, I knew that I had to make them like me. And I think by now I know I'm a pretty likable person. - I would say so. So, and when they took me to a motel, which they had rented, there was two wings at a right angle, they bought all the rooms in one wing and they had a guard at each end of that wing and they took me in the middle.

And there were some props there, some binders with labels. And I immediately thought, "This is pretty silly," because what I noticed that the labels all referred back to my early years. I knew that they didn't know much else. So, I told Joe that afterwards and that was not a great idea.

But anyway, but I volunteered. I made the following statement before we even started the interview. I said, "I know there's only one way for me "to and my family to have a chance to get through here "without much damages, if I'm completely 100% cooperative "and it's my intent to do exactly that." All right, so we spent about two hours in the interview.

They allowed me to call my wife, tell her that I'm gonna be late. That indicated to me already that they would let me go. And after two hours, they let me go. But they had the area covered with a whole bunch of people. And the head of that team talked to me and he says, "If you think of running, "we got every intersection in this area covered.

"You can't." I didn't say anything, but I had no thought of running. So, and that was the beginning of another phase of my life where I was cooperating with the FBI for quite a while and living still undercover for several years until I had real good documentation and became an American citizen seven years ago.

- Today, seven years ago. So, it was recently. - Yeah, quite recent. The bureaucracy took a long time to figure out how to make me real and also not put me in these witness protection program, to keep my name and then just make everything official. So, for instance, I had to change my birth year simply because if I, Jack Barsky was born in 1944.

If I kept 1944, the FBI would have helped me commit a crime because I would have collected social security of four years sooner. So, anyway. - Details of that name. - Yes, it took quite a while. And when I finally got the call from the office of Homeland Security, the lady says, "This is agent so-and-so from Homeland Security.

Can you come to the office tomorrow?" And I said, "Let me look at my calendar." And then I said, "Wait a minute, what am I talking about? What time do you want me to be there?" Because I had waited for that moment for a long time and I was sworn in right then and there.

It was a good feeling to walk out of there because I had a country again. And I love this country just as much as you said you love it with all its warts and its problems that we're going through right now. And then the last thing that changed my life again, and I don't wanna get into details because it's a little complicated story.

I never wanted to be a public person. And then I was discovered through a number of dots that were unlikely to be connected. It had to do with a relative, with a half-brother of my wife who lives in Germany, was taken to Germany by his mother, who came to visit somebody, not us, but that somebody that he came to visit lived 50 miles from our house.

And that my wife and this half-brother never met in person before. They knew about each other through social media. And when he found out my background, he was a conductor of the German railroad at the time. He said, "Oh, this is a big story. "I'm going to be big, big, big." (Roland laughs) Okay.

Well, he happened to know this one person who happened to know one of the star reporters of Der Spiegel. - Hmm. - And after she did some research and determined that I was real, she was on my case. And she happened to know Steve Kroft, the guy from "60 Minutes." You see all these connections?

I had nothing to do with it. - That's how life works. Dots get connected somehow, sometimes. - Yeah. - Most of us, it doesn't. - Stuff happens. - Stuff happens, you get lucky. - You don't know what's happening. - You've gotten lucky a few times in your life. - Yeah, I think I must be part Irish too.

(Roland laughs) Yeah, so it's been an interesting ride. I'm just still shaking my head about all the stuff that happened. - Oh, it's been a fun one. Well, you wrote, "Because I'm allowed to leave behind "a documented legacy of my unusual life, "I'm praying that the legacy will be described "by a single word, love." So let us return to the thing we started the conversation with, which is love.

What role does love play in this human condition, in your life and in our life here together? - I give you an answer by telling you what happened one day. I gave a presentation at Microsoft headquarters. (Roland laughs) - That's a strange beginning of a love story, but yes.

- No, that's not a love story. And so there's this beautiful young lady sitting in the back and she's paying a lot of attention. Found out later that her job at Microsoft, her job title was storyteller. It's soft marketing, right? (Roland laughs) - Yeah, you could say that. - Yeah, but if you can't afford somebody like that, that's good.

Anyway, she, question and answer, she raised her hand and she asked me, so all the things that you have done and you have experienced, what's the number one lesson you've taken away from your life? That was a new question for me. I've never been asked that question. And I thought about it for 20 seconds and then I came up with this phrase that we all know love conquers all.

Because in my life it did. In the end. It's the strongest human emotion and that is what makes us human, really. - And you spoke about the, I mean, offline as I've spoken with you, it's clear to me how transformative, how powerful the life of your children or your daughters in your life and who you are and why you think life is beautiful and why you think this country is beautiful.

- Now that I'm pretty mature, to put it mildly, I'm also more loving towards many more people. You know, these things like random acts of kindness for strangers, I do 'em. I'm looking for them now. And you know what? It's good for me. - Well, welcome to Texas because this random acts of kindness to strangers seems to be a way of life.

Which is one of the reasons I love it here. It just reminds me why I love human beings is that there's just this warmth, this connection. - Yeah, and Georgia is the same thing. - Yeah, amen. Do you ever have any regrets? Looking back at life, do you wish you'd done something different?

- Well, I could have, but then I would have had a different regret. I betrayed the wife, the German wife that I loved. I really did love her and I betrayed her. But if I don't betray her, then I betray the child. - That is a source of so much love for you now.

So maybe your life is a kind of, you get to choose your regrets. You don't get to avoid them. It's a little bit of a strange way of putting it, but there's no other choice. I tell you what I don't regret, and that may be, you probably understand it now because you have enough background about me.

I don't regret having lied to my mother because I had no really strong emotional relationship with her. She took care of me. She was proud of me, but we didn't hug. We didn't interact emotionally whatsoever. - So you don't feel like you betrayed that love that-- - Well, I did.

I know that she was looking for me until the day she died. She wrote a letter to President Gorbachev asking him for help to locate me. She checked with the Stasi. She just was like hell-bent on finding me and couldn't find me, so she passed away without knowing what happened to me.

Now, there was this rumor that was flying around, and she possibly may have bought into that rumor because my cover for when I went to the United States was that I changed careers again, and I joined an institution in Kazakhstan that did space research. Intercosmos something something, and I had a piece of paper that invited me to start there, and it was a forgery.

Intercosmos never existed, but people knew that in Kazakhstan there were super secret facilities. And one of my classmates, old classmates from high school, started the rumor that I died in a rocket accident, and everybody knew that. So when I came back to Germany, went back to Germany, I found the telephone number of this girl that had dumped me.

I called her, and I said to her, "So guess who this is. "Maybe you hold on to your chair." She says, "Yes." I said, "This is Albrecht." (Albrecht screaming) - It's a good payback. (both laughing) - No, we actually met. So there's two elderly people in their 60s who meet each other after so many years, and the one that ended the relationship started the conversation by saying, "You know what, I made a really bad mistake." And the tears came down her cheeks.

I wasn't asking for that. I wasn't happy about it, but it did feel good. Now, a while later, I knew why she said she made a mistake. I met her husband. - Yeah, I mean, there's a, Tom Waits has a song called "Martha," where he made, or an older gentleman calls somebody he used to love, and they have a conversation.

They're both married now, and it's, sometimes you can meet people from your past, and it gives you a glimpse of a possible different life you could have had. - Oh, yeah, and you know, I was actually, when she said, "I made a mistake," and I was thinking to myself, "No, you didn't." There was none.

There was nothing left. There was nothing left. And also, the person that she became, personality-wise, wasn't as attractive as I remembered her. You know, it's puppy love, you know? - But it's still love. - Yeah, oh, it was. - It still happened. - It was passionate love, for sure, and I would have thrown myself under the bus if I could save her.

It was that strong, and just as strong as the love for my two girls. - Yeah. Life is full of moments and periods like that of love, and that's what makes life so fricking awesome. But it does come to an end. - And so does this conversation, I guess.

- This goes on for many more hours, but yes. Do you think about your own death? - Huh? - Do you think about death? Do you think about your own death? - Yes. - Are you afraid of it? - Yes, even though I'm a Christian. (Ralph sighs) - As a Christian, do you have a sense of what's coming after?

Or is it full of uncertainty? - I have a hope. I have a hope. You know, there's a lot of Christianity which is quite logical. A lot of Christianity which is also, you know, the life of Christ has a lot of proof. But, you know, I became a Christian starting with a head.

And I was already quite old. And I, you know, when you don't get this faith very early, it's tougher to buy into everything. You know, there are some things that are difficult for me to understand and believe, but there's many, many other things that I can't explain only with the existence of a God.

But whether he lets us go again in eternity, I just hope. I won't convince somebody else at this point, which doesn't make me a really, really good Christian because I'm supposed to evangelize. - But there's still a fear. - Yeah. - There's a fear and a hope. - On the other hand, I know that, you see, this is how I approach the last years of my life.

I will not mentally or physically get decrepit. I will do everything I can do to be alert and fit. I still run. I run four or five times a week. And I'm going to start lifting weights again. - Good. So you stay physically and mentally sharp. - Yes. - Go out with guns blazing.

- That's, and I once read a book written by a medical doctor. He said most people, when they're becoming mature, the rest of their life is a slow downward move. And-- - Not for you. - No, the last years are pretty bad. He said, "You gotta do this." Boom.

- That's pretty good advice from a doctor. And if nothing else from Christianity, whichever parts you take on, one of the big ones is love. - Yes. - That's something you've lived from the very beginning before God was part of your life, before anything was part of your life, it seemed that love was part of your life and has been a consistent thread throughout.

- Yes, sir. And there's a short sentence in the Bible that says God is love. And the other thing I wanna say, the Christian morality is, I can sign that with my blood. - God is love, amen. Jack, you're an incredible person, lived an incredible life. Thank you for talking today.

Thank you for telling your story. Thank you for being who you are. And thank you for being all about love. This is a beautiful conversation, it was an honor. Thank you for talking today. - Yeah, and appreciate the tough questions that you asked. - Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jack Barsky.

To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Edward Snowden. You can't come up against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept the risk. If they want to get you, over time, they will. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

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