The Illegal | KGB
55:29 Share

Welcome to True Spies. Week by week, mission by mission, you'll hear the true stories behind the world's greatest espionage operations. You'll meet the people who navigate this secret world. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position?

This is True Spies. I spotted something I didn't want to see. It was a red dot on a steel beam. That was the danger sign that was set by a KGB agent and that was a signal for me to run. This is True Spies, episode four, The Illegal. It is 1988 and late fall, early winter.

Today's guide is what you might call an average American. I live in Queens with my wife, Penelope, and our 18-month-old daughter, Chelsea. A company man. My job is in Manhattan. I work as a computer programmer for the insurance company Metropolitan Life. I write code, I debug code, and that's typically what programmers do.

A family man. Other than that, I serve my family. I do shopping, I do chores and all that. But I really, that's my life. Work and the family at this point. A simple life, really. Nothing to see here. Shower, suit, coffee, commute.

Suburb to city every day. My way to work is about one hour. It's a 10-minute walk to the subway station. I take the A train and then I change a couple of times until I finally wind up in Manhattan in the area where the MetLife building is. And this is another two-minute walk. And up there, elevator up to the 17th floor, and there I am. That's where I'm working. 17th.

Today's guide is Jack Barsky. I received the Jack Barsky name because it was stolen from a young man who passed away at the age of five. That grey stone still exists. And that simple life is about to come to an end.

Alright, I'm on my way to the subway station when I spotted something I didn't want to see. It was a red dot on a steel beam. That was the danger sign. That meant I was supposedly in danger of being caught. That was set by a KGB agent and that was a signal for me to run, not to look back.

If I follow the instructions, I just make a beeline to a park to receive an emergency document and then make my way to the Canadian border where eventually I would hook up with somebody in the Russian embassy, which then will exfiltrate me out of the country and get me back into Russia and East Germany. The decision was pretty clear. I either follow the instructions or I don't. This is the story of Jack Barsky and Albrecht Dietrich.

One KGB sleeper agent dropped behind enemy lines in 1970s America to spy for the Soviet Union. One man, two identities, and a world that came crashing down after decades of spying, culminating in a simple decision: whether to be Albrecht or Jack. To stay or go. What would you do?

To answer that question, we have to go back in time to 1949 in the German Democratic Republic, otherwise known as East Germany. Which was Soviet-occupied at the time.

I was born four years after the end of World War II in the easternmost part of East Germany. World War II really devastated this country. There wasn't much left. I remember it was a matter of, you know, just plain survival. Food, clothes, shelter. I had for many years, maybe at Christmas, I got one toy. Poverty.

Any spy recruiter will tell you it's fertile ground for grooming talented future agents, cherry-picking the best of those looking for a way out. And poverty was common in post-war Europe on both sides of the Iron Curtain. But we didn't know that we had a problem because everybody else lived the same way. Plenty of bright young men and women were hungry for a future that looked different from the lives playing out around them.

and maybe some adventure. Well, I was recruited by the KGB in my third year as a student at the university. It was a long process initially. The question was only, you know, are you willing to work with us? And then it took a year and a half to get to know each other. At the end of that year and a half, I was asked that question, are you in or are you not in? That was the decision point.

That decision was not an easy one. I had a stellar career path ahead of me, something I always wanted. But there was an opportunity to do something really great, you know, to help build a better world, because I was a strong believer in the communist cause. And on top of it, you know, this kind of an offer really does something to a young person's ego, because I knew I was going to be very special. Ideology and ego.

You've heard it before. They're among the spy recruiters' most reliable tools. Well, that and tapping into some other common teenage characteristics. And on top of it, I knew I was going to be outside of the law. And I never liked the law that much. I didn't like rules. So, you know, the feeling that you would be somebody special and a hero

eventually I think took precedence over all the other considerations. What would you do if your government came knocking, promising a chance to serve and an exciting new life? Possibly some glamour away from the drab reality of society. Are you in? And after an agonising night,

I finally said yes I am, at which point I then became a contractor, mind you, not an employee because I wasn't a Russian. A contractor to the KGB. Okay, that's the easy part over. Now it's time for some spy training, KGB style. This wasn't just all spy craft. It started with ideology. I had to read a big fat book on the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

And I also was required to broaden and deepen my knowledge of music, the arts, culture and so forth. And of course, some of the essential skills for spies, whatever side of the Iron Curtain you're from. We're talking about Morse code, shortwave radio reception, decryption, encryption, secret writing, photography.

making micro dots, the dead drop, which is the handing over of material. All of that had to be practiced over and over again. Counter surveillance, finding out whether somebody has ransacked your apartment or searched your apartment and on and on. Yeah, counter surveillance, that took a big part of my time. On any given day, my handler could come to my apartment and tell me it's time to go and time to go meant

Get out into the city and get on a predefined and preselected three-hour route and try to find whether you're being followed or not. It was a competition. It was more than a game because they were highly trained professionals. In the end, the score was me 10 and they nothing. And altogether, I practiced this kind of stuff for about four years.

I was trained for two years in Berlin and another two years in Moscow. As an end result, I was one of the best trained agents that they ever sent into the West. Just in case you're getting the impression that Jack, or Albrecht as he was then, was starting to enjoy the spy games. I lived in Moscow for two years pretty much all by myself. These exercises, even though they were like games, they weren't fun.

Illegals.

The illegals program was sort of their crown jewel. If you joined the illegals program, you were considered a superstar amongst superstars. There were 10 of us that were trained and sent to the United States. We were the sleeper agents behind enemy lines that would be activated when diplomatic relations were broken off. There was no really other KGB representation in the country.

when diplomatic relations were broken off. You can imagine how bad things might have become in the Cold War before that happened. We might not be talking all-out nuclear conflict, but we're not far off. We would be sort of the last line of defense. We would still be there and be able to communicate to the center, that is Moscow. My personal mission was really somewhat ill-defined.

I knew that I had to initially acquire all the documentation necessary. And I knew that I was acting as a sleeper. But I also had a whole bunch of tasks. You know, get to know more people, find out what Americans are thinking, get closer to decision makers or influencers and so forth. But almost nothing ever really clearly defined. They knew that these things, these tasks cannot be

All planned in advance. It required somebody who would be really, really good at making decisions on the spot without asking questions of peers or superiors. One of the most vital skills for a sleeper agent working undercover in an enemy country is, naturally,

Language. When I was first recruited, fundamentally, I had to start learning English from scratch, from like English 101. However, it's not just a case of speaking fluently.

It has to sound like the only language you've ever spoken. And of course, the accent was a big thing to get rid of as much as possible. Now, I had proven to myself already that I had a really good ability to imitate people, to imitate other people's voices and so forth. It now required a lot of practice. I now had to listen to the American pronunciation of words and repeat them over and over and over again. I did this for like

Three years, every night, about a half hour, phonetics exercises. About a half hour. About a half hour. Judge for yourself how successful Jack was at doing this. Does he sound like a German to you? It got to a point where my accent was small enough to hold up with an explanation. And the explanation was that my mother was German and I spoke a lot of German in my childhood.

Okay, so your accent is pretty convincing, but becoming an American is going to take more than just training your voice. It's about identity. You need a whole new history. So let's talk about legends, also known as cover stories or made-up stories.

that account for the time you weren't there. Every undercover spy has their own unique legend. It all depends on the situation, it depends on the background and the individual. And it's not just you. An entire family history needs to be created. And so we made up where mother and father were and where I was born and from then on

We made up where I lived and what schools did I go to, why I didn't graduate from high school because I would have left a record, where I started working and then how I quote-unquote re-entered civilized society. Jack Barsky, or at least the idea of Jack Barsky, was conceived.

Not a very romantic conception, the name being stolen from the gravestone of an American child. We acquired the name of Jack Barsky and then wove a legend around this person as to what did he do after he was born. The real trick to dreaming up an actual living legend is not simply creating a believable backstory. It's to create one that's memorable. After all, you might be captured and interrogated.

Or at the very least, casually asked a random question about your past when you've knocked back a few drinks at a party. When your mind isn't quite focused, that's when you're most at risk. Just one slip and it might be game over. So what are you going to do to embed that completely new identity? What I did to be able to own it more readily is I took a lot of people of my German past with me.

For instance, my first grade teacher or my first friend, and I just gave them similar names. So if I ever had to talk about this, I would have just, you know, reached back into my German past and would have a perfectly consistent good memory about these people. But, you know, when it came to people and memories and injuries and stuff like that, I, you know, I took that all with me just in translation.

Borrowing details from your real past sounds like a clever trick, right? But it's a dangerous one too.

The two identities that I carried for many, many years of my life weren't 100% separate. I have enough proof to myself that I did have two, you know, psychologically speaking identities, but they were bleeding into each other, particularly the German into the American. Cracks in Jack's new identity had already started to appear right at its very foundation.

They might lie hidden for years, but they were there, even before he made that fateful journey west. So when I first entered the United States, I was 28 years old. The entry happened in 1979. Port of entry was Chicago O'Hare Airport. This was the final leg of a zigzag journey.

In the late 70s, international travel wasn't a straightforward business, particularly if you were leaving a communist country and arriving in the home of decadent capitalism. So if you were an undercover sleeper agent leaving the Soviet Union for a new life behind enemy lines, well, you couldn't simply jump on the first plane out of there to head straight to the land of the free.

I had to arrive in Chicago in such a way that you couldn't

traced me back to having originated in Moscow. So I went from a communist country to a socialist country to a sort of neutral country. There was an escalation with regard to the quote-unquote friendliness of the countries I traveled through. In Moscow, I got on a plane and flew to Yugoslavia, Belgrade. In those days, Serbia was still part of Yugoslavia. Same day, I took a train from Belgrade to Vienna

In Vienna I stayed one night and I met a Soviet KGB agent and handed him the passport I traveled with to Vienna and he got me a different passport. And from Vienna I took a train to Italy, Rome.

where I met yet another agent and I got another passport and that I used to fly to Mexico City and from Mexico City to Chicago. Now in Chicago, I became Jack Barsky.

Jack became Jack. After years of KGB spy training, he entered a parallel universe. From Jack's side of the Iron Curtain, schooled in anti-Americanism and Marxism pretty much since birth, this was the place you were always warned about. The home of the enemy. You arrive at the customs desk. Uniformed officials and police everywhere.

Will they see straight through your fake identity? When I arrived in Chicago, I went through immigration and customs. And what I was really concerned about was some kind of an interview where I would like, you know, fumble the answers. But none of that happens. I got through. I sailed through. No problem. So I was in the clear. And then you step out into the sensory overload of 1970s Chicago.

Everything around you at once familiar, yet totally different. Thousands of miles away back, your friends and family. Will you ever see home again? Will you ever hear anyone say your real name ever again? Now you're behind enemy lines with just a few simple possessions in your suitcase. You know, a false passport, a birth certificate and maybe $6,000 in cash.

That's all you have to start your new life. For spies, this is what it's all about. These moments. The years of training are over. You're out on your own in the world. No one to rely on but you. How would you cope? You know, looking back, how I handled these high-pressure situations, and this was mostly instinctively, I went into sort of what I call execution mode.

So execution mode to me means the following: when you have a task, you focus on every step that needs to be taken to accomplish that task. In this case it was travel, in this case it was getting through various borders and eventually winding up at your destination.

All other thoughts that were not relevant to that task, I got rid of in my mind. And if they were trying to enter, I chased them out. Therefore, fear did not come into play. Tension, yes. And that's good. Tension you need to have in a situation like that. You need to be on tension.

Jack made his way into Chicago. And since the KGB had nobody in Chicago, they had no clue what the city was like. They couldn't give me any recommendations, where to go, where to stay overnight, what kind of hotel maybe to take. So I picked out a hotel at random in the Yellow Pages.

This is the late 70s, no internet, let alone Airbnb. When it came to last-minute cheap hotels, a business directory was the best you were going to get. But unfortunately, they don't come with previous user recommendations. I get to the hotel and as we're driving towards that address, the neighborhood really became rather seedy, not very nice.

Here I am brand new to the United States. I had no frame of reference. I didn't know how to interpret this. I go into the hotel and the reception desk was protected by plexiglass. Again, having no point of reference, I thought maybe most hotels would be that way. So, you know, I handed the guy behind the plexiglass the money I had made a reservation for two nights, paid in cash, gave him the whole amount, got my key. I go upstairs.

And another odd thing, I couldn't turn on the TV. I had to put a quarter in to make that thing work for a little while. When half hour was up, I had to put another quarter in. And at that point, in order to turn off execution mode, I took to the drink. Half a bottle of Johnny Walker Red and, you know, fell into a drunken sleep.

The first day of Jack Barsky's young life was over. Next morning, after taking four aspirins to get rid of the headaches, I decided to just get out of there real quick. So I took a flight to New York City after spending almost two weeks traveling from Moscow to New York. Jack had reached his target. I arrived in New York City in 1979.

And it was in the fall, I remember, because it was a gorgeous fall day in New York in October. And I'm there with a suitcase and some equipment that would allow me to communicate with the center. The plane arrived at LaGuardia Airport and I took a bus to Manhattan.

And I'm looking out the window as we get into Manhattan and I'm saying, "Oh my God, these streets are so narrow." It was an optical illusion because they were flanked left and right by huge skyscrapers that seemed to squeeze the streets and make them really small.

Coming out of his days under the skyscrapers of downtown Manhattan, Jack set about creating his new life. Again, number one task was to find a place to live. Once on the ground, I wandered around and eventually found a hotel, reasonably clean. It was private. It had a private bathroom. A private bathroom, desirable for many choosing a hotel, but essential for a spy. That was an absolute must.

because when you do certain types of work, you need to burn up paper and then flush it down the toilet. There were some seedy characters in that place, but it was reasonably safe. And that became my quote-unquote home for the next year. Jack got on with building his life in New York, eventually gaining a social security number so he was able to work. And with a job in place, establishing his cover was almost complete.

But when your mission lasts for years rather than days, sometimes it's more than just the logistics that need to be addressed. After all, being a spy with a secret identity can be lonely. When it was safe for me to engage in, to have a kind of a relationship that was a little more close than just cursory acquaintances. And that was the point when I finally had a decent job as a professional

where I didn't have to hide my intrinsic intelligence. And I was very lonely, I was looking for a companion. I put an ad in the newspaper and I met a lady who originally was from South America and liked her. She liked me. But mutual attraction isn't the only consideration for undercover spies looking for love.

She was incredibly safe. Safe meaning that she wasn't American by birth, she wasn't American by education. She wouldn't have had a clue that I had some German vestiges in me, that my story wouldn't quite add up. So she was as safe as it gets with regard to hiding my true self. And so Jack settled into his new existence as Jack whilst hiding his true self.

But how were the years of dual identities playing out in his mind? Building a life that was a lie and maintaining it? The reality is, every action in your life is built on a foundation of dishonesty. It's dramatic to say, but everyone you allow to get close to you, every relationship is built on lies. Only you know the real secret. How does that feel? Let me tell you something. While I was doing all of this,

I did not feel stressed to a point where I couldn't take it anymore. I did not feel lonely, no depression, no anxiety, no fear. I just did what I had to do. The cracks in Jack's new identity were holding, for now. So he set about doing what he was in the U.S. to do, spy for the Soviet Union.

Hello, True Spies listener. This episode is made possible with the support of June's Journey, a riveting little caper of a game which you can play right now on your phone. Since you're listening to this show, it's safe to assume you love a good mystery, some compelling detective work, and some of the most interesting stories in the history of the show.

and a larger-than-life character or two. You can find all of those things in abundance in June's Journey. In the game, you'll play as June Parker, a plucky amateur detective trying to get to the bottom of her sister's murder. It's all set during the roaring 1920s.

And I absolutely love all the little period details packed into this world. I don't want to give too much away because the real fun of June's journey is seeing where this adventure will take you. But I've just reached a part of the story that's set in Paris.

Hello, listeners. This is Anne Bogle, author, blogger, and creator of the podcast, What Should I Read Next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week, I tech all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read. What should I read next?

They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately. And I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years, and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment, whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change, or a frothy page-turner to help them escape the stresses of work, or a book that they've been reading for years.

school, everything. You'll learn something about yourself as a reader, and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for What Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and visit our website, whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more.

Okay, if we're going to be honest, even for KGB sleeper agents, spying sometimes involves laborious bureaucratic tasks. Communication was the most, with the center, was the most awkward and at one point most annoying part of the whole spying business because it was labor intense, it took a lot of time, and the amount of information that could be transmitted back and forth was not enough to really make sense.

I never met a Soviet agent on the territory of the United States for purposes of direct communication. So I got my instructions to shortwave radio. It was double encrypted Morse code. I got a transmission about once a week. Thursdays at 9.15 p.m.,

And if you think of maybe a half-page typewritten material that would take me to receive and to decrypt, would take me roughly about two and a half hours. Sometimes I spent the whole night into early morning if there was a very lengthy radiogram. For me, to transmit information to the sender was even more awkward because it was via secret writing through the regular mail.

I would compose a letter as if I was writing to somebody, and then on top of the open text, I would put a text in secret writing, and that letter was then mailed to what we call a convenience address, say, in South America or in Europe, to a person who was collaborating with the KGB, who would then hand it to a local KGB agent. It would then go into the diplomatic pouch,

sent to Moscow and over there would be developed. So when you think about, you know, was there a conversation possible? You ask a question and you get an answer three weeks later. So it was awkward and fundamentally insufficient. There was also the waiting because being a sleeper agent does also require a bit of, well, sleeping. My primary task was to actually be here.

At least until it's time to wake up for some actual spying. One time I actually managed to hand over to Moscow some stolen software that they were interested in.

And then I had some special assignments. These special assignments had a lot to do with the fact that I could travel freely in the country, whereas the diplomats, like the UN employees who were actually KGB, they were subject to restrictions. Because here's the thing, as a talent spotter, I sent profiles of probably up to 30 individuals, most of them college students, to the center.

And I have no idea what they did with that. They may have recruited one of those two people. That kind of information was taboo. It would not be shared. And then came the hunt for Nikolai Kharklov.

Well, one of those special assignments came across in the mid-80s when I got a radiogram that sounded a little bit out of the ordinary. It was a lengthy instructions to, you know, get a flight to California, wind up in San Bernardino and find a person named Nikolai Koklov.

I had no idea who Nikolai Koklov was. They were interested in fundamentally basics. You know, does he still live there? Does he, as we think, still teach at the University of California in San Bernardino?

Then came an appendix to this task: "Under no circumstances must you make contact with that individual." So, here I go, you know, it's a task, I'm gonna go and how do I find somebody like that? How do you work with just a name and a job title to track someone down? Sounds easy? Well, consider this:

Your target very likely does not want to be found. And this was the 1980s. So... There was no internet. It was really, really hard to do. And those days you couldn't look up people on Wikipedia. No mobile phones. No internet. Just the phone book. And if someone was ex-directory, that was useless. What would you do?

So I wound up just wandering around in the halls, in the hallways of the UC at San Bernardino, and as luck would have it, at the end of those hallways, there was a door with a name plate on it, and it says Professor Kockloff. I says, "Whoa, I found him." At that point, as I'm looking at that sign, the door opens, and out comes the guy, presumably Kockloff. The center had specifically said

Under no circumstances must you make contact with that individual. You know, I averted my eyes and quickly went the other way. So I had my information, I sent it back to the KGB. A couple of months later, I was watching late night television and there's this guy... I mean, the information that's been passed to me over the years... ...who was being interviewed about Russia and the Soviet Union and intelligence. And I said...

I know this guy, and that was Kharkov. And I realized the guy was ex-KGB, which made me somewhat uncomfortable because now I had a good idea why they wanted to know where this guy was. What I didn't know at the time, which would have made me even more uncomfortable, is that he was still under a death sentence because he had defected in the 50s.

And in those days that generated a death sentence and that death sentence was still in effect. Had Jack just facilitated Kharklov's assassination as a Soviet defector? I took a big, big sigh of relief when I found out eventually that Mr. Kharklov passed away from natural causes. Okay, so you might have spotted something in Jack's voice there.

Just then, when he was talking about his fear of causing Kharklov's death, the more perceptive, or should I say, recruitable, might have noticed. It doesn't exactly sound like the words of a cold-blooded KGB sleeper agent. Well, that's because after so long away from the motherland, Jack had started to experience conflicting thoughts. You see, the girlfriend he'd met through his newspaper advertisement had become his wife, and they'd had a child.

Chelsea. And so Jack became more, well, real. The cracks in the foundations of his identity were widening. And so let's go back to that morning of that late fall, early winter day in 1988. Average American family man Jack Barsky on his morning commute. Some of those conflicting thoughts might have been there at the back of his mind, but little did he know how quickly they were about to be brought to the surface.

As I said, I spent 10 years in the service of the KGB undercover in New York. And here's one thing that happens when you take on this kind of an assignment. Over time, you become quite arrogant. You think you're invulnerable. Nothing ever happened. Initially, I was prepared to be intercepted at the border and go right to jail.

And then I figured eventually somebody will find me out and I'll be called into the FBI, interrogated, and nothing ever happened. And then one day in early December, I saw this signal on a predetermined spot that said only one thing: "Emergency, get out of here." Jack's identity had been compromised. He was in immediate danger of being exposed.

The KGB and Albrecht Dietrich were calling him home to the motherland. You know, don't go back, don't pack your bags, don't empty your bank account, just take what you got and run. Can you imagine having to drop everything in your life and leave, never to return? Your career, your house, all your possessions, and most importantly, the people you love. Here was a problem.

And my problem was personal. I had an 18-month-old daughter at the time. And I had really, really fallen in love with this girl. I loved this girl more than anybody else in my entire life. This is the kind of love that you don't really have...

when it's romantic love, because in romantic love, you know, you give, but you also receive. You want something back. You know, when you love a child, you get nothing much back other than a smile and some goo-goo-ga-ga. But if you stay, and your false identity really has been compromised, what then? And that's it. And I just loved this girl so much, and I was conflicted.

Clearly, if the Russians were right, I would wind up in jail and I wouldn't be any good for this girl anyway. But eventually it was an entirely emotional decision. I decided to heck with all the reasoning. And at one point, I think people can relive this in their own lives. If you have a big decision to make and you write up the pros and the cons in two different columns and you figure out maybe there's a formula that make you arrive at

The right decision. Eventually you throw it out and you just say, to heck with it. This is what I feel I should do. And my feelings said, I'm going to stay. And so I declared to the KGB that I was quitting. But you can't just quit the KGB. The question, how did you get away with it?

What could Jack possibly say to justify his decision to stay in America? Or rather, what could possibly make the KGB not want him back? To solve this problem, Jack fell back on his training: deception. Well, I think this was probably the most brilliant lie I ever committed. And so I told him that I had contracted HIV/AIDS. This was late '80s America.

at the start of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Which at the time was a death sentence? With so much unknown about the illness and treatments still in their infancy, there was panic and fear in most countries at possible contagion

And they bought that lie. They told my family in East Germany that I had passed away from AIDS and I was in the clear. I thought, this is it. I've landed and from now on I'm going to live like a normal person. Jack had survived KGB extraction. He was free to continue his life. What would be the first thing you would do?

Jack decided he was going to live a little. And the first, very first thing that I did as a normal person was to sign up for the retirement savings plan at my company. That sort of made sense up to that point. I wasn't participating because you can't take it with you. So now I knew I was going to stay. And the next thing that was indicative that I was going to stay is I bought a house in the suburbs.

And so for another seven years I lived there, totally retired. It was almost as if Jack's identity as a KGB agent had completely dissolved into the past. But of course, that's not the way the past works. No matter how much some spies might want it to, and Albrecht Dietrich was always still there, waiting to reveal himself.

And when he did, it all began with a very normal domestic scene. I had an altercation verbal with my wife. And, you know, she was constantly, you know, not trusting me. And I was trying to explain to her that we're really on the same team. And she just didn't believe it. Jack needed proof of his devotion to his family. But what could he say that would show his wife just how committed he was to them above all else?

Well, yes, there is the whole defying the KGB example, but he's not going to reveal that his entire identity is a lie just to prove a point in a normal domestic argument, is he? Is he? So at one point, I went for what I call the nuclear option. That means I was going to prove to her that I really am there for her and our children. So I told her, hey, listen...

He revealed the secret he had carried and protected so carefully for so many years.

there was a small problem. And that was recorded by the FBI bug. They had bugged my home, my house, with listening devices. So they had my confession on tape. I was once a KGB agent and I had to leave the United States. You have to appreciate the irony here.

After all the deception, Jack finally comes clean and in doing so finds out that honesty isn't always the best policy. But why were the FBI listening in on his mundane domestic life in the first place? Well, there was a defector from the KGB who smuggled tons and tons of information out of the KGB archives where he worked. And amongst that information, there was a little blurb about Jack Barsky's

undercover agent but it was enough to find me because there are not too many Jack Barskis and there was only one who got his social security card at the ripe old age of 35 so then they knew they had their man but they had no idea as to whether I was still active or whether I was just a sleeper to be woken up at a certain time so they were very very very careful until they decided it's time to go in

for the kill, so to speak. Well, thank God it wasn't a kill because I'm still here. But of course, Jack doesn't know anything about the FBI listening in as he's revealing his past life to his wife. And argument over, his conscience clear, he heads off to work. I was stopped when I drove home from my way to work. I was stopped at a toll bridge

Very quickly it became clear it was the FBI and they wanted to literally, the fellow said, we would like to talk to you. Oh boy.

Albrecht Dietrich was back. So my past came right, rushing back into my brain. Now I remember that I had been a secret agent and I knew I was in big trouble. And the agent took me to a motel and spent about two hours interrogating me. But Jack quickly realized this wasn't the interrogation he had long feared. It was a very friendly interrogation.

It was almost a talk, a chat. And from the very first moment, I made it clear to them that my only chance for me to get out of this in decent shape and to be able to take care of my family, which had then grown to a total count of four, I had a son.

would be to cooperate and that I fundamentally had no reason not to cooperate. And so it took a good three months of interrogation and I had to pass a lie detector test until I was told one day that I wasn't a clear and that eventually I would be allowed to stay in the United States and even attain citizenship, which I did four years ago.

Amazingly, in the spirit of post-Cold War friendship, Jack had been forgiven, by the FBI at least, for all his years of spying. And perhaps even more amazingly, he became the person whose identity he had created.

even down to the name taken from a young boy's grave all those years in the past. The question why I kept the name Jack Barsky has come up frequently. There's a number of reasons. Initially, when the FBI caught up with me, I was still operating for quite some years under my illegally obtained documentation. It would have caused trouble with my employer and would have been cause for trouble.

immediate termination. I was so enmeshed in American society, bank accounts, mortgage, names all over the place, my kids, my wife. I mean, it would have created a phenomenal amount of disruption. It also would have cost the government quite a bit of money. They allowed me to pretty much clean me up in place. It took a while, but...

It was all around the better way to go. I also was very, very much used to being Jack Barsky. Now, the one thing that the FBI did, they paid a courtesy call to Jack Barsky's parents who were still alive at the time. And they asked for permission for me to retain that name. And they graciously allowed for that. This was the right thing to do. There is a final footnote in the story of Jack Barsky.

It's one that speaks to the unlikely forgiveness and friendship at the end of his years of Soviet spying. So the fellow who was the lead agent in my case was a fellow by the name of Joe Riley. He had a lot of experience doing organized crime and counterintelligence. And so he spent three years investigating me.

He watched me from a distance with binoculars. He went through my garbage. I mean, they followed me. He learned a lot about me just by watching me. He would say that later on. And when they finally decided to introduce themselves and have a conversation with me, he was the one who interrogated me over a period of three months.

Initially every evening and then eventually once a week. At the end of these interviews we exchanged opinions about society, philosophy, God and the world and on and on and on. And we found out that we have a lot in common. At that time I had pretty much said goodbye to any vestiges of my belief in communism.

and Marxism-Leninism. It just didn't compute. I also had found out all the bad stuff that happened in the Soviet Union and in East Germany that I never knew about until after I had the ability to do research and had access to sources. So we really got along swimmingly, and one day he said, "Why don't you come and play a round of golf with me? I don't know what... I never even had a golf ball in my hands."

So, you know, I said, okay. So, you know, I went to initially went to the range, hit a few balls and then I hacked it up. In my first round, I joined him and his group and it became a weekly occurrence and we really, really became good friends. One time he invited me to his Christmas party and I had to sing a German Christmas song and it was just like the guy is a good friend and eventually he became friends

The godfather to my last child, her name is Trinity, he's one of my best friends. Kind of odd, but not necessarily so unusual that you couldn't imagine it. Because once you shed the baggage that you have, if there is baggage to be shed, then you find out who you really are. Jack Barsky, not so illegal now. And who among us, or should I say, which spies among us,

doesn't have any baggage they'd rather lose. I'm Hayley Atwell. Join us next week for another debrief with true spies. We all have valuable spy skills and our experts are here to help you discover yours. Get an authentic assessment of your spy skills created by a former head of training at British Intelligence for free now at Spyscape.com.