True Spies: Debriefs - Jack Barsky on a career after the KGB
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Hello, True Spies listeners. Welcome back to our new assignment, True Spies Debrief. Here on the Debrief, we catch up with some of our favorite guests from the True Spies archive for a deeper look at the themes, events, and insights that fascinate them.

If you like what you hear, subscribe to Spyscape Plus for more exclusive debriefs at plus.spyscape.com. That's plus.spyscape.com.

In episode four of True Spies, Jack Barsky told the tale of how he spent ten years as a KGB agent working in the United States. It's now been over 35 years since Jack quit his job as a spy, and he's since tried on many more careers and identities. In this debrief, True Spies producer Morgan Childs caught up with Jack to hear about finding an identity as a spy and about Jack's life after espionage.

We'll also hear about his new path as a teacher of what he calls applied spycology.

It's great, Jack, to have you here. Thank you. I'm very excited to sit down and talk to you and kind of get up to speed with what you've been up to since the last time True Spies listeners heard from you. But before we kind of get to that, I want to ask you, the last time we spoke, you told me something that I wasn't aware of, which is that you are the last surviving or most senior surviving illegal. And I'm curious how it feels to wear that crown.

Well, you know, it's a virtual crown because in the world of espionage, you never have certain knowledge of anything other than what you were personally involved in, right? So I have to sort of qualify that statement. The official record of having not been discovered by counterintelligence was held by Rudolf Abel.

who was a member of the Rosenberg spy ring. And he managed to operate as an illegal for 10 years in the United States. Now, I was discovered by the FBI. I was approached by the FBI after 19 years after I came here. I was discovered 17 years after I came here. And there is nobody else out in the public realm that used to be

illegal and has that kind of a record. The most recent illegals that are known by the public are the 10 that were captured by the FBI in 2010, and they managed less than 10 years. So it is what it is. But the reason for that is some ability and quite a lot of luck. We

Because I made a lot of mistakes that should have gotten me caught, but they didn't. And you stopped spying in 1988, is that right? 1988, correct. So listeners to the podcast are probably aware of what happened to that date, but they are probably less aware that you had several other careers after that, right?

I wonder if you could just sort of fill us in on what you've been up to in the past three and a half decades. Well, when I legitimately claimed to be now in my sixth career, that really starts out with East Germany. My first job, paid job, was that of an assistant professor at university. And then career number two, I became a spy, right? Right.

And when I came to the United States, I don't know if you want to call this a career, but my first job was bike messenger in Manhattan. Interesting change from assistant professor with a phenomenal future ahead of me and a bike messenger who would ride around in Manhattan and knock ice cream cones out of pedestrian's hands because they were on my way.

So then I studied again. I went to college here. I got a bachelor's degree and I became a computer programmer. That's number three. And after 10 years of programming,

I became a manager and eventually an executive. And then eventually, when I left corporate America, I became a public speaker, an author and a public speaker. And now I am I think we're going to talk about this. I'm involved in doing something new again.

So we're talking about a lot of life changes. And when people say, you know, you had such an interesting life. I said, well, you could have had it too, or you could have it too, because you need to know when it's time to leave, when it's time to go, when it's try to be brave enough to try something else and trust in your ability to make it work. Does one of those identities feel most accurate to you? Oh, as of today, no.

And I discovered this by accident. I knew that I was pretty creative and I knew that I was a reasonably good writer. While I was still employed in corporate, I started writing a blog. So I really like writing and it's kind of phenomenal that I'm a much better writer in English than I am.

am in my sort of mother tongue, German. I just love coming up with new ideas and, you know, my favorite, when people ask me, what's my favorite activity? The answer is thinking. And I embrace this wholeheartedly. It's pretty much fun being me and interacting with a lot of people like you who

who I can have a good conversation with. I guess the question beneath my question about, you know, which of these identities feels most like you is really like, how does somebody form a sense of self when they are in the sort of position that you were in? Yeah. And I'm also sort of curious if that sense of self changed over the many years now that you've been Jack Barsky. Yeah.

Yeah, there have been multiple configurations. You know, at first I was the German, I was the communist, I was the illegal, I was serving the cause of the world revolution. And that slowly disappeared when I found out that a lot of what we were taught growing up in East Germany about capitalism in the United States was not true. Mm-hmm.

And so when I got my first job in corporate as a programmer, this is when I was able to be creative and do creative stuff rather than, you know, doing...

messenger work or doing spy work. Spy work is not necessarily very creative. You have to be creative, but very often it's just a lot of routine. Anyway, I started liking it. And there was a moment, I was maybe five years into this job, I was thinking, you know, when I go back home, and obviously there was a time limit to my service here in the United States,

When I go back home, I'm going to miss this. I'm going to miss the guys. I'm going to miss the atmosphere. I'm going to miss the ability to do the programming work. That was the beginning of the fall or the disappearance of the German in me. But it took a lot more time to complete this. The most radical change happened after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Now, this was after, one year after I quit the KGB. So when I quit, we had become sort of philosophically, politically, worldview-wise neutral. I just wanted to be a private person and live my life as a normal United States citizen with a family and a house in the country and so forth. But when the war came down, I was surprised.

And so was everybody else. The CIA hadn't anticipated, the KGB was surprised. It was just incredible. And I started researching what happened there. And so I encountered so much of the truth that was eye-opening. And particularly, I got a hand on unredacted text of the works by Vladimir Lenin, who was my hero.

I mean, he was our God. And Lenin turned out to have been just as bad a killer as Stalin. He didn't have as many instruments to kill as many people, but he was a bad person. So at that point, I dropped the gene that said communism, if you can do that. But I became...

a moderate anti-communist. Nowadays I'm a radical anti-communist. At that point I still wasn't 100% American, but I was moving in that direction slowly because, you know, one year after I quit the KGB, I bought my first house in the country. And that's when you become a capitalist because I bought property, which you couldn't do in East Germany or in Russia.

And I had a second child. And, you know, again, it was a nice family, a nice house in the country. And so that was my version of the American dream. But I wasn't yet a fully committed United States citizen. Now, that happened again over time. The emotional part.

The emotional component of me becoming an American happened during 9-11. I had a house in Pennsylvania and I commuted to New Jersey, Newark, New Jersey, which is close enough to almost see the World Trade Center. And I get to the office and we were watching the destruction of the World Trade Center on TV live. And as I drove back home, I

I, you know, I was devastated and I realized that I had become emotionally an American. And now it goes further. And then the FBI introduced themselves. That was 97. And I cooperated fully. They gave me hope that I eventually will be allowed to become a citizen.

And that, again, it was a great hope, but it took a while to gain citizenship. It was another five, six years. And when I was sworn in, it felt really good because I had a homeland again. I had a country again. And then there's one more thing that happened to me when I became also intellectually an American, and that's when I

took an online course by Hillsdale College on the American Constitution. And so nowadays, the once communist German has become an anti-communist American in every respect that is emotionally, spiritually, legally and intellectually important.

And if given a choice, all things equal, to move back to Germany and live out the rest of my life in Germany, I would say thank you very much. You would have to offer me a lot of money to do that for a number of reasons. I'm not anti-German, but I can't relate to German culture, German behavior, and the...

The smallness, you know, the lack of size that we have in Germany. When I visited my son, my German son, for the first time, he was in an apartment and I was sitting on the toilet and my niece touched the washing machine.

And in Germany, if you drive down the road, there's almost no free space between towns. So, you know, the United States is expansive in many respects. So I'm now an American and I will live the rest of my life as a true American. Having said that, one more thing. I also have sort of managed to put Humpty Dumpty back together again because the last...

The transformation happened, interestingly enough, after my move to Texas, where I was able to reconnect with my what was originally extroverted self.

And because down here in Austin, people are so friendly and so nice that, you know, there's no fear talking to anybody in any situation. And all of a sudden I realized, hey, that's the way I used to be as a child. I liked being on stage. I was a leader. I was a class clown. And I sort of suppressed this. So

You know, Humpty Dumpty is back together again and he's an American.

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It's the most epic coming-of-age story, really long-term coming-of-age story. I'm really curious because I know that people who listen to True Spies every week are quite familiar with a number of people who have chosen to work in intelligence, but it's really, really rare to hear from somebody who fell into it the way that you did. And I wonder if you ever think where you might be today if you hadn't been offered a position so early with the KGB. Yeah.

So in hindsight, even though I went through a lot of hardship, so to speak, you know, the spy life wasn't anything like I had expected to be like, you know, the communist James Bond. In hindsight, I'm actually glad that I said yes to the KGB, because let's say.

And I had the ability to say no, you know, you don't force somebody to take on that kind of a job. But so I would have had a career and possibly as a eventually would have wound up a tenured professor. However, because I was very active in the communist youth movement, people were reaching out to me already to help.

I had a hard offer to become the deputy secretary of the youth organization at the university. And knowing me, who I was then, that would have been a very flattering offer because it would have resulted in eventually becoming the secretary, which of course would have resulted in me winding up somewhere in government or in a high-level party position. And oh my God,

you know, at one point I would have found out the truth. I would have found, I would have, I would have either joined the people that manipulate everybody else, or I would have said, no, we can't do that. Regardless, either way, that future would have been bleak. I, when I went back to Germany for the first time, after I got my passport, that was about eight years ago, I believe. And I met a fellow students, ex fellow students of mine who,

who grew up in the same environment, who were party members like me, and they all were really miserable because when the wall came down, they figured, they found out that something was wrong. They either considered themselves victims, and most of them did,

Or they just said, you know what, our cause was right, but we had the wrong leaders. And, you know, they weren't deep red anymore, but they were still pink. And the most extreme example of those pink fellows was my best friend during my years as a student,

who wound up working as a chemist for the Stasi East German secret police and he wound up eventually leading heading the forgery department of the Stasi

And the bizarre thing is that he told me that they sold false German passports to the KGB. And it's very likely that my best friend made passports that I used to travel. But anyway, to finish this up, yeah.

I was allowed to very slowly decontaminate without any trauma. I found out the truth bit by bit by bit and became American bit by bit by bit. It wasn't like, wow, your life is changing radically. The changes in my life were pretty much mostly initiated by myself after I quit the KGB. I'm curious how your friend came to terms with his past.

Oh, he didn't. He was a victim. He complained about the fact that his pension was cut in half. You know, in Germany, everybody gets a pension. It's government. It's coming from the government. And he was angry. He was angry. And his communication style, I don't know if it's always been like that. But when I first met him, I thought, oh, my God, this guy is like...

He talks like an ugly German, and thereby the grace of God am I, because I just don't like it. German communication is in your face. I'm going to tell you what's wrong with you, regardless of whether you want to hear it or not. So he was not very pleasant to be around anymore.

unless and until we reminisced about the stuff we did when, when we were students, uh, such as, uh, one time we, we took tear gas in liquid form to a, uh, bar and dropped it. And, and we, we were laughing internally as we, as people were tearing up and walking out and didn't know what, what happening. But other than that, uh,

Yeah, no, I'm absolutely thrilled that I'm here talking to you today because for the first time in my entire life, and I started saying this about six months ago, I feel...

100% comfortable in my own skin, and that's a good way of being. That's a very good and enviable way of being. You know, I've lived in Prague for 12 years, and before I moved here, I read about the gray zone and these compromises that people had to make to live and feel all right and get by and earn a living, you know, under communism. And it wasn't until moving here that I saw...

Really the hoops that people had to jump through, even still, to justify the things that they did. Oh, yes. Just to have a decent life. You got to fit in. You got to fit in, you know. And now for me, fitting in is fitting into my own universe. I have a phenomenal set of smart, heart-centered, good friends everywhere.

Some of them are local, some of them are long distance. And, you know, on any given day, I could spend the whole day talking to somebody with whom I can have a good conversation. I also have to do some work.

So let's talk a little bit about what you've been doing more recently. And I'd like to ask you, so you've been teaching something called applied psychology. And I'd like to hear a little bit about how you define that and why someone would want to learn it. I came up with this idea. I once attended a performance by an excellent speaker, motivational speaker. Her topic was Stop Global Whining.

And somehow during, while she was talking, my subconscious fed me that term. I applied psychology. Yeah, that sounds really interesting. Clever, isn't it? Very much, yes. So through some interaction with others and, you know, a lot of thinking, just feeling my way around self, I realized that

I learned a lot of skills during my time as a spy that I actually applied to have a successful career in corporate America. I actually applied in daily life. Long story short, we taped something that was supposed to become a master class in January.

The material is all there, but the masterclass is not going to happen as a masterclass. I took a lot of that material and put it in a presentation. But I'm also, first of all, I'm expanding the material. And then secondly, this is the project of my future. And I am working with a couple of fellows who are Gen Z students.

interesting to work with Gen Z, but they are experts in something I'm terrible with, and that's social media marketing. And we're building something we're calling a Spicologist Den. So that's going to be a hangout for people. I'm focusing primarily on young men, but everybody would be welcome

where I just share wisdom and I want to explain why I use the word wisdom. You know, if you lived a life like mine, long and very, very deliberate and with eyes wide open, and you're my age and you're not wise, the word wisdom has no meaning. So I'm not shy calling myself wise. Share the life wisdom I have learned

in all during my entire life and particularly it isn't just espionage but it starts with the espionage where I learned so much about human behavior, learned so much about myself and learned so much about managing really difficult situations but it went on to the five different jobs I had in corporate America

And in particular, because every job that I every new job was in a different industry, in a different company, in a different location where I started totally fresh. And my ability to be successful had to do with something that I learned as a spy is quick decision making and not being afraid of making decisions, right?

And reading people, reading your boss, reading the people working, your colleagues and people reporting to you. Because ultimately, in management, when you manage, in any organization, you manage the people. You don't manage the stuff. You manage the people that take care of the stuff. So this is...

What's going to happen in that context, I will also run a podcast. We're working on this pretty intensely. I think we have a good chance of being successful because the podcasts that I've been on lately have gotten me phenomenal feedback and I can only get better. And I think...

Having not slept very well, I think I'm doing reasonably well in this interview with one or two stumbles. You're doing brilliantly. I'm curious to ask you about people skills in particular, because, you know, sometimes in interviewing for this series, we talk to people, but the stories you'll hear just make you think, goodness, you could have just as easily become a therapist, a psychologist, you know, some of the work that

the spies on True Spies talk about is very complicated and very nuanced and very emotional. So when you talk about teaching or the people skills that you acquired in your espionage career, what exactly are you referring to? Okay, now, first of all, I want to reach back into history. You know, the nature of people

has not changed since we know what people were like. And that is since we have written documentation. There's a book in the Bible. This is where King Solomon talks about human nature and, you know, the good, the bad, and the ugly. And when you read that, it's like it's the same today. And here's an interesting tidbit here.

I got absolutely no psychological training by the KGB. I never met a KGB psychologist. They didn't test me. They determined that I had the skills to learn all of this by myself. But one day, one of my trainers, teachers, handlers, popped into my apartment and he threw a book on my desk. And it was Dale Carnegie, how to...

"Win Friends and Influence People." And that book is as valid today as it was then, except in those days I was too young and I wasn't embedded in US society yet. So because this was written for a free society with a capitalist economy, so I didn't really embrace it. But I happened to reread it like three, four years ago and says, yeah,

And some of the things, about half of what Carnegie talks about, I already instinctively knew and practiced myself. Which is what? I've never read the book. How do you win friends and influence people? Well, you got to read the book. There's more to it. But, you know, a couple of things. How do you instantly make people like you? The first meeting, anybody. The most important thing, smile. The second most important thing,

introduce yourself and ask them for their name. And then you repeat that name. And as you talk a little more, you repeat the name over and over again because it's a known fact that

The sound of their own name is the most important sound for many people. Now, I'm an exception because my name is Phoney. It was stolen, right? And there are listening skills and there's active listening. I can go on and on, but that would now take another hour and a half or so.

And you've got to wait until I go out in public with that. And Jack, what about you? I mean, what are you hoping to gain from this next chapter of your life as a teacher and a trainer? Well, you know, you're pretty young, but I think you can relate to what I'm saying next. To have a fulfilled life, you have to have a reason why you get up in the morning. And it shouldn't be that you're going to a job that you hate.

A lot of people go to jobs that they hate and then they say, thank God it's Friday. I sort of replace it with, thank God it's Monday because I love what I'm doing. So that's number one. But my purpose is, you know, at my age, people think about legacy. You know, my legacy are my children, obviously. They're wonderful human beings. But I also want to leave a legacy by myself.

you know, helping people younger than me and in some cases not much younger than me because I could have given myself of today, could have given advice to myself

three, four years ago, which would have saved my marriage. So, you know, it's just leave a mark on society to the extent I can. I don't want to become a megalomaniac, but do what I can. And that is why I'm getting up in the morning and saying,

As a side effect, I would like to earn enough money doing that to allow my youngest daughter, she's 13, she's a brilliant child, allow this child to have a choice of

of a college that she would like to attend. And that could include also going to Europe. I strongly believe that whoever is listening to this podcast will eventually have the ability to check in on what I'm producing because I'm going to be very, very public, which is not necessarily what I like, but that's what you got to do if you want to be heard in this noisy world today.

I have one last question for you. You told me when we were preparing for this interview that you have learned one exceptional lesson in your very exceptional life, but you haven't told me what that lesson is. And as somebody who is a generation or two behind you, I would really love to hear what it is that you've learned. So I came to that conclusion spontaneously. I...

had given a talk at Microsoft headquarters. And at the end of the talk, there was Q&A and a young lady asked me, so what have you learned from all this wild and crazy life that you lived? And that was a question I never considered and I was never asked. So I hesitated for a few seconds. And then again, it's my subconscious does it for me a lot. It does a lot of thinking and then feeds me the result.

And I said, well, it's three words, love conquers all. Now, obviously, it started out with me

defying the KGB because I was in love with my 18 month old daughter. The logical conclusion for me would have been I have to run because they thought they had evidence the FBI was going to arrest me. There was danger staying and defying them. The FBI could arrest me. The KGB could interpret my defiance as defection and I knew that they didn't treat defectors very nicely. So the danger was staying

And all the good stuff was going back to Germany. All of it, I would have returned as a conquering hero and lived a really good life in East Germany because at the time the wall was still up. So to extend this now, I embrace the love sentiment 100% because love is what's coming from the inside. You can love people that are not likable. My wife, now unfortunately, the ex, is wired that way.

She once shared with me, and I'm not telling about who she referred to, I don't like this person, but I love them anyway. And I tell you what, if you have just love inside, it's a phenomenal feeling because it doesn't depend upon whether you're loved back.

It is all about how you operate in this world where there's so much negativity. And love is the most powerful, positive emotion that we have. And it's been working very well for me. Well, Jack, I want to say, you know, we're recording this on a Friday, but being able to speak with somebody with your kindness and your generosity is,

Makes me feel about my job, even on a Monday. I'm glad that it's a Monday. So Jack, thank you very much. It's such a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much for tuning in for The Debrief. We're so happy to have you along for the ride.

We hope you enjoyed that conversation between our producer, Morgan Childs, and Jack Barsky. If you liked what you heard, more debriefs are available exclusively to Spyscape Plus subscribers. You'll also be able to access other premium series, like The Resume-Off Files, our ambitious retelling of Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes.

And for true crime fans, there's The Great James Bond Car Robbery, the story of the hunt for James Bond's most notorious set of wheels. Subscribers also get new episodes of True Spies early and ad-free. Subscribe to Spyscape Plus at plus.spyscape.com. That's plus.spyscape.com. See you next time.