- My name is Jack Barsky, I was born and raised
in East Germany and was recruited by the KGB.
I am, to the extent I know, the only existing
ex undercover KGB agent who worked on behalf
of the KGB in the United States.
I did that for ten years.
Today I'm a U.S. citizen and I'm ready to spill the beans.
No-holds-barred, there are no questions that are off limit.
(dramatic music)
I was a third year student in East Germany.
I was studying chemistry, I was an "A" student.
I pretty much aced everything
not necessarily because I was the smartest,
but I was very hard working.
One day, I was sitting in my dorm room.
There was a knock at the door.
There was no name plate on the door.
The fellow obviously knew who he was looking for.
He was looking for me, he asked,
"Whether I could imagine myself
to one day work for the government.
To have a super career, you would join the government.
They ruled everything." So I answered,
"Yes, but not as a chemist."
I knew deep down inside
he was a secret service of some kind.
From that point on, I met him one more time.
He then handed me over to somebody
with a Russian accent saying unceremoniously,
"Oh, by the way, we're working with Soviet friends."
So this is how I got into the hands of the KGB.
I was delighted to have the attention
of what was at the time, and probably in history,
the most powerful, single organization on the planet.
So from the moment they disclosed to me
that this was actually KGB.
The second thought was, "And oh, by the way,
whatever we're talking about is secret.
As long as you're working with us you are a secret.
Nobody, but nobody, not even your mother,
will hear anything about what you're doing with us
or anything about our relationship."
There was no money, there was no power.
There was only service to the cause, mind you,
I was a believing communist.
The bait was fundamentally,
"You get to help us, the Soviet Union and the Eastern camp
to defeat the evil capitalists
and establish a worker's paradise on the entire planet."
But there was a secondary consideration
that wasn't really stated, but it was clear
because I knew from literature and some movies
that you get to live the good life.
You get to go to the west to try to overthrow
the government be that West Germany or France
or the United States.
But while you're doing it,
you also get to live the good life.
There was no fear, there was all excitement.
At one point, after about a year and a half
of a very loose relationship, my handler got to know me.
I got to know him, a couple of times he gave me
some presents, he gave me some extra money.
He gave me literature to read that was actually prohibited
in East Germany, mainly West German news magazines.
That, again, reinforced the fact that I thought
of myself as somebody special.
I was already allowed to break some laws, woo-hoo!
After a year and a half, they sent me to Berlin.
In Berlin, there was my first clandestine meeting
so to speak, I didn't get an address.
I got a street corner where I would meet somebody.
I didn't know what he looked like,
but we had some distinguishing marks on ourselves.
I forgot what I was carrying.
This fellow eventually took me to the headquarters
of the KGB in East Germany where I met
one of those agent handlers.
He came right down to it, he said, "Are you in?
Answer by tomorrow morning."
That was when the game turned serious.
Eventually I couldn't help myself.
I had to go for the big one, I had to go for the adventure.
I said, "I'm in."
Then we worked on what to tell family and friends.
My mother was the biggest "obstacle"
because she was the closest to me.
I told her, "I was recruited by the foreign service.
I'm going to be a diplomat. Isn't that great?"
She always wanted me to be a professor.
"Really?"
I said, "This is good! I get to go see the world!"
She understood a little bit of that.
The rest of them, I just told them,
"I'm going to Berlin.
I'm going to join the foreign service." And that was it.
So I packed my bags, I had a suitcase and a briefcase
and that was all my belongings.
I get on a train, I go to Berlin
and I had to meet somebody there.
Again, there was no address given.
It was another one of those clandestine meetings.
I meet this guy, we sit down in his car.
The first that came out of his mouth said,
"By the way, your first task is to find a place to stay."
I went around on the outskirts on Berlin,
knocked on doors and asked people
and eventually I found sort of an out building.
I succeeded and I would meet this fellow once a week
in his car for a while and he would give me some tasks.
I started training and I started learning
some of the fundamentals of espionage technique.
That included secret writing techniques,
encryption, decryption, short wave radio,
morse code, counter surveillance, secret investigations,
how a Western government operates, and lastly was language.
I was told that every agent like me had to learn
one other language and I picked English.
After about six months, all of a sudden
they found an apartment for me.
So that was an indication that I was really in.
A fellow comes from Moscow to visit and he asked me,
"So, how's your english?" And I said,
"It's pretty good. I can read."
Then I showed him a novel.
"I can read this without the dictionary."
He said, "What?"
So, they flew me to Moscow for an interview
and one said, "He won't be able to do this."
and the other one said, "I think he could."
So they decided, "All right, let's give it a try."
So they brought me to Moscow for two years
and I very, very intense language training
and I got to a point where it was decided
that I had enough of American diction in me
to explain a residual German accent.
The explanation I found was that my mother was German
and we spoke a lot of German.
On Columbus Day 1978, ten days prior to that
I entered the United States at Chicago O'Hare.
That trip from Moscow to Chicago
was about two and a half weeks.
It involved one, two, three European cities,
Mexico City, until I wound up in Chicago.
There were three false passports involved,
two West Germans and the last one I used
was a Canadian one with which I entered the United States.
That was one of the few moments
in my entire "career" that I was scared.
Somehow I figured that it was written on my forehead, "KGB"
but I got through and after that
the tension pretty much dropped off.
I tell you what though, I couldn't sleep that night.
I drank a half a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red
to get me to sleep.
I had cash and I had a birth certificate.
I had nothing else, I couldn't go get a job.
I had no social security card.
I had no drivers license, I had no ID on me, I had nothing.
The plan was for the first two years
get all the identification
that will make you a bone fied citizen.
The crowning achievement would be a U.S. Passport.
Establish yourself as an American.
There were three places in the United States
where you could have some interaction
with somebody from the KGB and there were the places
where they had official representatives.
New York, where they had diplomatic personalities
at the United Nations.
Washington D.C., obviously they had diplomats there.
And San Francisco, so Chicago was only a landing point.
The final destination was always New York.
New York was a good pick because somebody like me
with a little bit of an accent
and kind of a weird backstory.
However weird you are, there was always somebody more weird.
The idea was for me to get a passport,
travel to a Western European country,
open up a business there and then the KGB
who had really good experience doing that,
would funnel a couple of million dollars into that business
and within a year, I'm upper middle class.
I can take that money, bring it back to the U.S.
And I would be established
to be able to mingle with interesting people.
So that was sort of the fuzzy plan.
I also was encouraged, strongly to go to museums,
theater performances, the opera, ballet and so forth
to get a solid background in culture, literature, so forth
in order to be able to mingle with all kinds of people
particularly in an educated setting with elite society.
I had a job as a bike messenger.
I go, as planned, to the passport office
at Rockefeller Center with a filled out application
with my valid ID.
Clerk behind the desk looks at it and says,
"We've got some questions about your ID."
Here was somebody applying for a passport
who didn't know when he was going,
where he was going and he was a bike messenger,
not necessarily somebody who had a lot of money
to go to foreign countries.
So that raised a flag with the clerk.
So he said, "We have some doubts about your ID.
Could you fill out the auxiliary questionnaire?"
I said, "Sure."
I looked at the questionnaire and I said, "Shit."
First question, "Where did you go to high school?"
I had a backstory, I would have told people
I went to Peter Stevenson in New York
but there was no record of a Jack Barsky
ever having gone to Peter Stevenson
so right then and there I couldn't go through with this.
So I ran back to the counter and I said to the guy,
"This is all bullshit. Give me my paper back
and my documentation. I'm out of here."
I managed to get out and I was afraid in going out
of Rockefeller Center you have to go down the stairs
and I was worried that some guard would come after me.
I went back to Moscow after two years
for some debriefing and they understood
that this was a collective failure
because we had actually practiced this,
how to fill out the application back in Moscow
before they sent me.
They relieved me of that responsibility and said,
"Well now, we need to come up with a plan B."
I was at this point a bone fied established secret agent.
I had a working ID.
I had survived two years in the United States.
I was a valuable asset, so what do you do with it?
(dramatic music)