- My name is Jack Barsky.
I am a retired and reformed ex-undercover KGB agent.
I spent 10 years working on behalf of the KGB.
Tried to like disappear.
I resigned with a letter in secret writing.
(suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] In 1989, Jack had been living undercover
in the US for two years.
The KGB's first plan to get him a US passport failed.
This was their backup plan.
- Plan B was get a degree and that way you'll become
a professional and then you can enter
the straight on society, where you could do
some significant damage.
So we decided on City University,
which had a very low tuition and I still worked part-time
as a bike messenger.
I took overloads.
It took courses in the summer.
I raced through the program in three years.
Through some hard work, brains and some negotiation
I did three classes.
I negotiated the grade up from an A minus to an A.
I was really proud of myself,
and then I get called into the Dean's office,
and I go in there and he says,
"You need to prepare your speech for graduation."
I says, "What?"
"Well you're the valedictorian."
I said, "Oh shit."
This is the last thing I wanted to be, right in front
of about 4,000 people giving a speech.
I was supposed to be undercover, lying low.
There was a chance that even the newspapers might
pick something up, that the Russians might find out.
They would have really read me the riot act,
and I tried to weasel out of this.
I couldn't, and I got away with it!
I have one picture of me doing this and that picture
is so bad, you wouldn't know that it's me.
There was no recording.
There was nothing in the newspaper.
Once I had a degree, their idea was now,
go to work, become a professional
which will allow you A, to make more money
and B, to make contact with people
that are of interest to us directly.
So I took a job as a programmer with MetLife
and this was one of those bad insurance companies
that we were always told were really, really
the epitome of evil capitalism, and the exploiters
of the workers and all that,
and at the time, I still believed in that crap.
Then I started working there and it was really nice.
It was so nice I fell in love with the job.
That was the beginning of my slow conversion away
from believing in the Communist ideals.
The thing about somebody who lives undercover
in another country, particularly in another system,
there's a shelf life.
One establishes relationships and all of a sudden
it's a possibility that one likes a new life
better than the old life.
The Soviets were well aware of that.
What they were not aware of was that I was even more
established than they could possibly have feared.
I had a child in this country.
She was born in 1987.
She was the prettiest little girl with the biggest eyes,
and I bonded with her.
When they decided to terminate by assignment
and called me back to the other side of the Iron Curtain,
I was torn because I had this little girl here
that I loved a whole lot.
But I also had a lot of reasons for going back.
Well they claimed that the FBI was about to arrest me.
The other thing is I would have gone back
to a hero's welcome.
I had just received the second highest decoration
of the Soviet Union, the year before.
I would've lived a good life and continued to live
sort of outside the law and above the law
in East Germany in the Soviet Union.
That little girl kept me here.
It was a phenomenal attack of what I today call,
a phenomenal attack of unconditional love.
So I decided I wouldn't go back.
I came up with this brilliant idea,
and everybody's who's ever heard it,
agrees with me that it is brilliant.
And I told them that I had contracted AIDS, A-I-D-S.
In those days it was a death sentence pretty much,
and the last thing they wanted is to have
somebody in their country who had that infectious
and very feared disease.
So they bought it, and they told my family in East Germany,
that I actually had died from AIDS.
So for about three to four months I was pretty much
concerned about my well-being.
Nothing happened.
The FBI didn't find me.
The KGB didn't come after me.
So, I would now blend into society and become
a bonafide American middle-class citizen,
and lived the rest of my life pretty much undisturbed
with a family and a house in the country and so forth.
About six months after I put a down payment on a house,
we moved into the suburbs.
So the mother of this child and I, we were married.
I went to the INS with her and here's one illegal,
making another illegal, legal.
And I made a decision.
Let's, you know, live the American dream.
Buy a house.
We bought a house, about 60 miles north of New York.
We had another child within about a year.
And that was the good life.
We eventually moved to Pennsylvania,
to a house in the country.
Nine years after the KGB, I was at the time,
low-level manager.
I had a mortgage.
I had bills to pay.
I had to kids to deal with in terms of school.
My daughter started playing basketball.
It was just a good American life
and one day special agent FBI shows up at a traffic stop
and says to me, "FBI, we would like to talk to you."
My face went white as a sheet.
He made me step into his car
which was driven by another agent.
I saw he had a gun strapped to his ankle
so I really knew he was serious.
It was not some kind of a nightmare.
First question was, "Am I under arrest?",
and the answer was, "No."
I said, "So what took you so long?"
(laughs)
They took me to a motel and I was debriefed
for a couple of hours, and then
they actually let me go home,
not without warning me though.
The warning was, "Hey listen, if you think of running,
"we got about 50 agents.
"We have covered the entire area.
"There's no way that you can escape.
"We want all the information that you could possibly
"have retained in your head,
"and you can't keep anything from us.
"If we sense that you are holding back,
"and you are somewhat insincere,
"you're going some place where you don't wanna be."
Interestingly, all they had on me
that they could have proved was
that I was illegally in the country.
They had no proof of espionage.
If I had still been active they would have tried
to turn me and made me into a double agent.
Obviously, that was too late.
I had given the KGB the big lie
and for me to come like Lazarus,
who rised from the dead and tell the Russians,
"Hey I'm back, can we do something together?"
That wouldn't have worked.
I did operate as a trusted source for many years.
- [Narrator] Did you every tell your wife or daughter
about working for the KGB?
- I told both my wife and my daughter about my life
as a spy at different moments.
Another twist in this story is that my wife and I
had started fighting a lot,
and was trying to like make this marriage work,
and at one point she was at it again,
and I sat her down and I said, "Hey listen honey.
"Let me tell you what I did, what I risked to stay
"with you and Chelsey, our daughter."
And I told her about my past as a Soviet spy.
Well that backfired in two ways.
A, she immediately said, "Oh wait a minute.
"If you're not legal, then I'm not legal!"
The FBI had listening devices in my house.
The FBI had my confession on tape,
and within a couple of weeks they introduced themselves.
My daughter had to wait until her 18th birthday.
I waited for her to be an adult.
It told her I was going to jail,
and I risked possibly being killed to stay with you.
She cried.
(suspenseful music)
What better indication of a parent love can a child have?
And we still have a really, really good relationship.
- [Narrator] Do you regret working with the KGB?
- I have no regrets having worked for the KGB.
Am I proud of it?
Absolutely not.
This is one of the most murderous organizations
in the history of mankind,
even though I didn't know that at the time.
I got out of it and eventually I wound up
in this great country here.
I grew up in a country where emotional love
was not the order of the day.
It was a matter of survival.
It was just have World War II.
We were poor.
It was about getting enough food,
having a roof over your head and have clothes to wear.
And I grew up very selfish, not loving myself.
I was not emotionally living person.
And then this little girl came into my life
and she woke up something in me
that makes me now say, when I'm asked,
"What is the biggest lesson
"that you've learned out of your life?"
Nevermind the espionage, love conquers all.
With that I've become a whole lot more
loving parents, husband.
I've become a lot softer.
That was not the way I started.
(suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] To learn more about Jack's story,
read his memoir, Deep Undercover.
(suspenseful music)