The Spy

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1:05The first contact was a knock on the door on a Saturday when I was sitting in my dorm room early afternoon. I was studying, and there was some knock on the door, which I knew immediately that there had to be a stranger because another student, when they knocked, it would come right in. It was 1970, and Jack Barsky was studying chemistry at the University of Vienna in East Germany. But at the time, his name was Albrecht Dietrich. So I said, come on in, and in came a short individual with a cast on his left arm. and he introduced himself as a representative of a local optics company, which actually was one of the few companies in East Germany that made stuff that could sell in the West.

1:59It was high precision optics. And he then said, you know, I just want to talk with you about your plans after you graduate. And that was like really dumb. You should have known that in those days companies did not recruit. There was no sense in speaking to me. So I immediately figured out, he's probably East German secret police, and let's see what's, you know, how he's going to, how this is going to evolve. Jack says that they made some small talk about his plans to be a professor after he graduated. And then, suddenly the man asked if Jack could ever imagine himself working for the government.

2:41So we had some communication between the lines and he invited me to lunch at the most expensive restaurant in town. And as I enter that restaurant, I see the fellow sitting at a table and there's another man sitting there. As I walked slowly towards my acquaintance, he got up and came to me and he said, let me introduce you to Herman. We are working with our Soviet comrades. And then he excused himself, and so that's how I wound up having a relationship with the KGB. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

3:33Jack Barsky says that from then on, he started meeting with Herman all the time. Every Monday at 8.30 a.m., he would call Herman and learn when and where they'd meet. It was always somewhere they wouldn't be noticed. Herman's car or a safe house. and Herman would tell Jack everything he knew about how to be a spy. Eventually, Herman decided Jack was ready to try some small things on his own. So, for instance, to go knock on a door and some house and talk to the resident and find out something about a relative who lived in West Germany. I hated that task, but I did well. I got the information. I pretended to be a sociology student, and I wanted to ask her if she would participate in a short survey.

4:32And I had some made-up survey questions, and then sort of I turned this into more of a social talk, and I mentioned some, you know, a relative I had in the West, and before you knew it, oh, you have one too. Another time, Jack says he was asked to find out what was inside a commercial building in town. So another little trickery, a ruse, there was a bus station next to that building. And I left a package on the bench in that bus station overnight and then picked it up, made it disappear. And then I knocked on the door of that building and asked them, did you by any chance remove that package? What package?

5:22Well, you know, there was like this important package. And I said, you know, just like there were some writings in there that I'm preparing for my thesis for my diploma. And he said, well, I can't help you. And then I managed to, it was lunchtime, I said, you want to go to lunch? And so it became again a social event. Jack believes he was being evaluated all this time. evaluated to see if he was trustworthy enough and good enough to take on bigger responsibilities. After about 18 months of training, Herman sent Jack to Berlin. He told him he would meet with a handler there and gave him the time and location and a secret code to use when they met.

6:10Each of them carried a sports newspaper in their left hand so they could recognize each other. Jack approached the man and said, Excuse me, I'm looking for Lindenstrasse. The man responded with the correct code. Is that where Helmut lives? And then they were safe to introduce themselves. After that first contact, they met every three days. At one point, the handler, whose codename was Boris, arranged for Jack to cross over from communist East Berlin into West Berlin for a day to, as Jack put it, get my feet wet. Jack remembers that after he got back to East Berlin, Boris asked to meet. He told me, oh, by the way, we're going to take you to speak to somebody important.

7:00So it was this huge building. I didn't know what it was. I found out later on it was the headquarters of the Soviet Army in East Germany and the headquarters of the KGB. And he took me to a long, long walkway inside, dimly lit. He took me to an office, and there was this little man sitting behind a huge desk, and this man spoke only Russian. So we had a little conversation back and forth with some translation. I had enough school Russian to understand most of what he said, and it was a bunch of small talk about the cause of communism and what we were doing. I didn't need that, but I nodded and whatever.

7:43And all of a sudden, he changed his tune and he said, all right, here's the question, are you in or not? And I was not prepared for that. He knew he would have to give up everything he'd worked for, a career as a chemistry professor at his university, his friends, his name. He would have to disappear from his life, and no one, not even his mother, would know where he was. Jack remembers his contact in Berlin, Boris, saying, As far as most people are concerned, you will have vanished into thin air. Wherever you go, you will be in hostile territory. You will have to befriend your enemies and pretend to be one of them.

8:28And so, but then there was the lure of going to the West and being a hero for the communist cause. At that point, when he asked that question, I just stalled. I said, I can't give you an answer now because I don't know if I qualify. And secondly, I'm not trained at all. And then he said, well, trust me, you qualify. We determined that. And secondly, we will train you, but we only work with people that can make good decisions very quickly. So I give you until noon tomorrow to give me a yes or no. That made for a sleepless night. And I went back and forth in my mind, back and forth. And I tried to, you know, make it like weigh the two paths on a scale that didn't work.

9:22Eventually my instinct said, I gotta do it, there's a chance of a lifetime. So I told Boris the next day, yeah, count me in. We also had an East German version of James Bond. It was an illegal agent sent from the East German secret police into the West to hunt down Nazis. And he changed his identity and he became a different person. And he also lived, you know, the good life, you know, the James Bond type of life where, you know, fast cars and nice houses. And that is what I thought the kind of life I would live. You know, I would, you know, have my cake and eat it too. You know, do great things for the communist cause and live the rich life of the West.

10:10He began with more training. There were two major elements of the training. the best training I got from the KGB was what we call tradecraft all the tools that you need to know and all the ways that you communicate and how you operate and how you behave meetings and handing over materials and Morse code and encryption, decryption secret writing, photography that took a lot of time and that was in person one on one training Then there was a part of the training that was fundamentally up to me. I was told to, you know, broaden my knowledge of culture, of literature, of music, just to become, you know, a very, very well-educated, all-around educated person who could operate in higher strata of society.

11:09He went to museums. He took himself to the opera, and he was told he had to learn another language. He picked English and got very good at it. And then the KGB informed him that he would be going to the United States. At the time, the relationship between the Communist Soviet Union and the United States was tense, and each country was using its intelligence agency to try and get more information about the other. One way the Soviet Union was trying to get information was by sending secret agents to the United States to set up lives with fake identities. Were you excited when you heard that you were going to be going to America?

11:52Absolutely. You know, I wanted to travel the world, and the United States was like, it couldn't have been any better. I knew that the United States was our main adversary. We called it adversary, but fundamentally it was close to being an enemy. And for me to go to the United States that is like, my God, the most powerful nation in the world, and I would help bring that country down, can't get any better than that. Because, you know, I was very ambitious. Jack went to Moscow to learn how to blend in in America. He met with a U.S.-born tutor to practice his English. and he worked with a husband and wife named Morris and Lona Cohen.

12:36Both Lona and Morris were born in America. When they married in 1941, Lona didn't know that her husband was already a spy for the Soviet Union. But he recruited her and they quickly started working together. Lona had helped sneak the blueprints for the atomic bomb from a contact at the U.S. lab at Los Alamos to the Soviet Union. She hid them in a tissue box. They came close to being caught in New York in 1950, but were able to eventually make their way to London and start new lives working as booksellers. They were arrested for espionage in 1961. Investigators found a radio transmitter hidden under their refrigerator and tiny photographs of secret documents hidden in the spines of antique books.

13:31After eight years in prison, they were sent to the Soviet Union in a prisoner swap. They lived in Moscow, where they were treated like heroes, and where they showed Jack Barsky how to talk and act like an American. For the final step in his training, Jack was sent to Canada as a kind of dress rehearsal for living in the United States. Before he left, a contact from the KGB gave him his first pair of Levi's, so he would blend in when he got there. I acquainted myself with the richness of life, materially especially, in North America. He remembers watching television for hours, including sitcoms and Sesame Street.

14:17He was fascinated by The Price is Right. He ordered the same breakfast every day, an order that he'd been told was the usual for Americans. Ham and eggs over easy, whole wheat toast, a glass of milk, and a cup of coffee. After he returned from Canada, he was told that the KGB had found an identity for him to use in the United States. He was given an American birth certificate with the name Jack Barsky. So the birth certificate was a certified copy of, the birth certificate of Jack Barsky, who was born in 1944 and passed away in 1955. In those days, it was possible to acquire a birth certificate of anybody, regardless of whether you—you didn't have to show that you had a valid interest in that birth certificate.

15:13So there was one of those diplomat agents wandering around one day at a cemetery outside of Baltimore, and he found Jack Barsky's gravestone and acquired that birth certificate. To fill out his American identity as Jack Barsky, he began to practice the made-up story of his past. Places he could have lived, schools he might have attended, a farm in upstate New York where he could have worked for a few years. For more personal stories, he used his own memories and focused on switching the names of his German friends for American-sounding names. To explain what remained of his German accent, Jack planned to say that his mother grew up in Germany.

16:05We'll be right back.

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18:38What did you tell your family before you left? Oh, what I told him? That I was recruited to work as a chemist in Kazakhstan, where they had a highly secret space research and rocket launch place that was not accessible to anybody unless they had a permission. and that also had no phone lines in and out of the place. So I was fundamentally unable to communicate directly. The only way I could communicate was with letters. He pre-wrote generic letters and postcards that would be periodically sent to his mother during the years he would be away and unable to communicate with her. What did you say in the letters?

19:26You know, nonsense. You know, like stuff that, you know, daily life, you know, small talk and writing. You know, I made it up. It was painful to do, but, you know, I was ill or I fell. I had my wisdom tooth pulled. I was talking about some colleagues and on and on and on. Eventually, we changed our method of operation. and so rather than handwriting the letters, I typed them. And I left space at the end so if there was a question to be answered, somebody else could type it in. And at the end, I left a signature. So a belief in these letters to be real was encouraged that way. In 1978, Jack left for America.

20:20He took a complicated route on planes and trains through Belgrade, Rome, Vienna and Mexico City, so no one would be able to figure out that he'd come from Moscow. He says he spent a brief time in Chicago, and then he went to New York. I landed at LaGuardia Airport and took a bus into Manhattan, and I was thinking, oh my lord, these avenues and streets are so narrow. Fifth Avenue is not narrow Madison Avenue is not narrow but the buildings that line those roads are so high it looks like they're squeezing the roadways in Moscow the big, big roads for instance in and out of the airport were lined by four to five story buildings and they appeared a lot wider so that was my first impression How did you set up a life for yourself?

21:16Well, the first year when I didn't have documentation, I spent in a rather somewhat sleazy hotel, but you could blend in, because nobody asked you any questions, if you paid with cash, it was no problem. And I also made sure that there was no suspicion by staff. And every morning I left at a certain time, and every evening I came back to sort of feign that I had a job to go to. So I spent the days in town. And my first job, like I couldn't get a really good job because I wasn't able to bring my past with me. So I couldn't say go to university and say, you know, I want to be an assistant professor.

22:06So I picked a bicycle messenger. so as a bike messenger my colleagues were all transient workers they were in and out of the job and they didn't care to ask questions so I spent a lot of time in the office when I was waiting for another delivery to be made just listening to them learning about baseball learning about what they watch on television learning about the movies and watch them and how they gestures and everything. And it absorbed a lot of things. What were you supposed to be doing? Okay, so there was the explicit mission and there was the implied mission. The implied mission was to just live there and become an American.

22:52Because there was concern that during the height of the war, that eventually diplomatic relations would be broken up altogether. And then the only ones left, so to speak, behind enemy lines were us illegals. Spies like Jack were called illegals by the KGB. So the explicit instructions were, well, you know, you need to become an American and get to know as many people as you can and find out if they, first of all, people who are maybe working in government or having an influence on government decisions. and also people that we might want to recruit. In addition to getting to know as many people as possible, Jack was also supposed to be getting his documents squared away.

23:42A driver's license, a Social Security card, and ultimately, and most importantly, a U.S. passport. All he had was the birth certificate for Jack Barsky, but he'd been given instructions for how to use it to get started. And the instructions didn't work. You needed to get a driver's license, you needed a birth certificate and some kind of ID that showed where you lived with name and address. And they told me, just get a library card. So I went to the library in Brooklyn, I said, I filled out an application and said to the librarian, can I have a library card? She looked at me and says, do you have ID?

24:33Oh, sorry, yeah, I do, but I don't have it with me. I'll come back. Now I'm caught in what they call a catch-22, so you got to have ID to get ID. That was a dead end. I reported this back to Moscow and they had no idea. how I could get out of that quandary. And it took me a lot of research. I went into libraries and looked at all kinds of books and I read newspaper ads and I just tried to figure out how to get started with something that looks like an ID that has my name and address on it. And I stumbled upon it. One day I went to the Museum of Natural History and there was a poster on the wall that says for, I don't know the amount, for$70 a year, you can become a member.

25:21And then there was an exhibit of the membership card. And it was a nice plastic card. It had a name and address on it. So I paid my$70 and I had a card. And with that, I went to a different library. And that was acceptable to that librarian. And I got my library card. So from that point on, getting a driver's license was just a matter of learning how to drive in New York. To get his Social Security card, he said that before coming to New York City, he'd worked on a farm and hadn't needed a Social Security card. To sell the story, he didn't shave for a few days and put dirt under his fingernails before visiting the Social Security office.

26:02And it worked. He was approved. But when he tried to apply for a passport, one form he had to fill out included the question, What high school did you attend? Jack realized that they'd be able to figure out pretty easily that his answer was a lie, and that that might trigger an investigation. Soon after that, Jack flew back to Moscow for debriefing and planning. He'd been in the United States for two years. One of the first things he did when he arrived was to read all the letters his mother had written him. He also read the letters from a woman he'd been seeing before he left for the United States, Gerlinda.

26:44He traveled to East Germany to see her, and they decided to get married. She knew he'd be gone for several more years, but that this wouldn't last forever. Soon after Jack arrived back in the United States, he learned via shortwave transmission from Moscow that Gerlinda was pregnant. He remembers wanting to share the news with someone, but realizing there was no one he could tell. The next year, in 1981, he enrolled in college The idea was that he might be able to make more valuable contacts with a degree He studied management and specialized in information systems He graduated as valedictorian of his class He got a job as a computer programmer for an insurance company, MetLife How often were you talking to the KGB?

27:41In person or talking, when you say talking? How often were you in contact? The contact that I had while in the United States was never in person. That is misrepresented in movies and even in the Americans. There was a hard requirement that an illegal would never meet another KGB agent in the country where he operated. too risky. So I got my instructions and answers to questions via Morse code and encrypted messages, shortwave radio, once a week. How did it work? It was always the same time. At 9.15 p.m., I would turn on my radio and dial the frequency. There was a specific frequency. And then listen to a call signal to understand this is really what I have to listen to and then then I wrote down the the signals that were delivered they were all just digits this Morse code there was never any letters because it was encrypted and you don't encryption with letters is really really weird we did encryption and decryption by on like some numeric operations and that that took a while so you know started 915.

29:03Sometimes it took me until way past midnight to decrypt the entire message. And my communication to the sender was primarily through letters with secret writing and there were only two sheets of paper that I could put in each one of the letters. Once in a while I was asked to send reports about how American citizens react to certain big events in the world. And when I had those things to write, I mean, you know, there's not a lot of, you can't put a lot of information onto two pieces of paper, particularly because I had to also write them in large block letters and, you know, I printed it. He had special pads that looked like normal notepads, but the first few pages were covered in a chemical that would transfer onto the page below it when pressed by a pencil.

30:03So he would write an innocuous-looking letter on a piece of paper, then slide it under the chemically treated paper and write his real message on top of that. And then after I was done, I put the letter into an airmail envelope, and then I had to make sure that nobody was following me. Then eventually I mailed this, I put this letter in one of those public yellow mailboxes that were everywhere and I mailed it in a spot that was close to the fake return address I put on there. And the fake return address was always a large apartment building so if it comes back for some reason, people would just care.

30:49They would just throw it away. There are a lot of different ways that Jack made sure he wasn't being followed. So fundamentally, this is the way it worked. It is about a three-hour travel through the city. You go from point to point to point. You walk. You take a train, the subway. You take a streetcar. you might take a taxi and you could take a bus and there has to be a reason you for you to explain why you were there like you go to maybe so to a movie theater and buy a ticket then you go and spend some time in a museum that was one of my favorite spots to walk around in a museum or in an apartment store because in those places, you can walk around and you can turn around and change direction and you see and look at the faces of the people that might be following you.