The Jordan Harbinger Show - 285: Jack Barsky | Deep Undercover with a KGB Spy in America Part One

Episode Date: December 3, 2019

Jack Barsky (@DeepCoverBarsky) joins us to discuss his book Deep Undercover: My Secret Life and Tangled Allegiances as a KGB Spy in America. This is part one of a two-part episode; part two airs later this week! What We Discuss with Jack Barsky: What Jack Barsky's childhood was like in postwar East Germany. The stickiness of Soviet-style communist ideology and how it appealed to young people on Jack's side of the Iron Curtain. How spies were recruited and trained during the Cold War. What skills Jack used to assimilate seamlessly into American culture. Why caution is a spy's best friend; paranoia is his enemy. And so much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://jordanharbinger.com/285 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with producer Jason DeFilippo. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most brilliant and interesting people, and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. I want to help you become a better thinker and see the matrix when it comes to how these amazing people think and behave. If you're new to the show, we've got episodes with spies and CEOs. In fact, this is one of them. athletes and authors, thinkers and performers, as well as toolboxes for negotiation, public speaking, body language, persuasion, et cetera. So look, if you're smart and you like to learn and improve, then you're going to be right at home here with us.

Today on the show, this is one of my favorites. This is from the vault. I recorded it a few years ago. It is a two-parter. It is just one of my absolute favorites of all time. Jack Barski, author of Deep Undercover, My Secret Life and Tangled Allegiances as a KGB spy in America. Now you know why I like it, right? This is just unbelievable.

He's a friggin KGB spy who moves to America to spy on us and ends up staying here. He still lives here. The story is bananas. He consulted for the TV show The Americans, which of course is one of my favorite shows on TV back when it was on. The story is just insane. So from East Germany, where I used to live, he trains in Moscow, moves to Canada, and eventually slips into the United States. Jack today on the show is going to get deep into KGB recruits. process, the espionage game from the inside out, will learn how spies, well, were recruited,

and trained, which skills Jack used to assimilate to the United States and pose as an American and fooling his friends, his employer, his colleagues, even his wife. He's got a frigging family here. They didn't even know. And then one day, I just can't even get over this. There's so much more to this story. I don't want to spoil it for you. Here's part one with Jack Barski here on the Jordan Harbinger show. And if you want to know how I managed to book all these great people, it is about networking. It's that KGB spy tactics, that networking tactics. Six-minute networking course is free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. And by the way, most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course and the newsletter. So come join us, and you'll be in great company.

All right, here we go with Jack Barski. I'm going to try not to be funny because I have a tendency to be quirky, but up front, the only advice I can give young people is the following. It always takes longer and it always costs more. So much for trying not to be funny. That's great, though. I love that. Apply that to whatever you do in life. It's true.

So far, that has been definitely been my experience. And I'll tell you what, as a former undercover agent for the KGB, you've got plenty of ideas on using your feelings to your advantage and also probably ignoring emotions. when they are going to take you down a path that you should not go down and trying to stay calm under fire. And I know that you consult for the Americans, which is one of my favorite shows,

producer Jason, just caught up as well. Yeah, and I was an extra. For episode 510, I'm standing there next to an entrance of a dry cleaner and out comes this gorgeous Russian lady and she walks down the street and I put on my best spy look and I'm looking down the road and I follow her

and then she stops and talks to some lady, who comes out of a car and I have to, unfortunately, walk past. Oh, nice. Well, I'll keep an eye out for that. I love that show, and I'm always been obsessed with, you know, the Soviet Union. And that started because I used to live in the former East Germany, which is where I know you're from, and I went to high school there. Oh, wow. Yeah, in Halazala. No way. Yeah. That's about 60, 70 miles from where I studied chemistry. I know. So when I speak German, you and I probably have the exact same. accent. Or you're from the same area where I learned German.

And a bit too English, no. Yeah, also, Zaksen-Had or Zovas. Yeah, no. Yeah. Now, look, this is super interesting. I've been waiting for this for a long time. I'm very excited about this. I know that, just to give people a little context, while the Allies rebuilt West Germany, the Soviet Union effectively looted East Germany, setting it back about 30 years. So when you grew up, there was a struggle for survival. You know, you had to clear your plate, there was not enough food. I guess we now know where that habit comes from

for the United States, for all of our Eastern European ancestry and things like that. I know that when you were young, you mentioned that your mother and your parents were pretty cold. Can you tell us about your childhood? Because I think it does inform some of the things that happened later in your life. Yeah, I've reflected a lot about it because the bottom line is when you think about people and what bothers people or what gets sort of in the way of them becoming fully developing is usually the baggage they take with them from childhood. And my baggage was not necessarily all bad. It was discipline.

It was sort of asceticism in that extremely a long period of delayed gratification. And where the harm was was the lack of emotional love. There was just none. I can't remember any. And that was somewhat typical of Germans in post-World War II, but not necessarily. to the extreme that my parents took it. My parents just like didn't manage to even hug and kiss or say I love you that just was completely not part of my childhood.

Not having had that, you don't know. You don't know what you're missing. You don't know what you should have had. And it took me a long time to get to this. And partially because of having to reflect on my past, partially when I was writing the book, I was thinking about all this and, you know, the light bulb went on. And now I'm sort of making up for this. I have a late-comer, six-year-old child, and she gets mothered with loves and kisses,

and I love you because I know it is very important. I think that's extremely important. I think a lot of people would agree that as well. And there's a story in the book where your stomach hurt and your mom made you take the bus to the hospital, which turned out to be an emergency appendectomy. So it seems like early on you learn to ignore your emotions, you learn to ignore pain. Yeah, this is just like. totally bizarre when you think about it. What normal parent in this day and age would make their

15-year-old teenager walk to the bus. I couldn't walk straight anymore. The pain was that bad as well, you go to the hospital. And again, that wasn't anything that I thought was the wrong thing to do. This was just the way things were. And it wasn't, in fact, an emergency appendectomy that had to be performed. In the book, by the way, Deep undercover is the title My Secret Life and Tangled Allegiances as a KGB spy in America. For those of you who are looking for that, we'll link to that in the show notes. It looks like your dad, he bought a Votbrook, and I've driven one of those cars. Did you ever get to drive it?

When I actually worked for the KGB and my German wife got a car with their help, that was more of an upscale. It was a Russian-made copy of an Italian car, it's called a Lada, but a Vot-Borg I've never driven. And, you know, this was the best thing you could buy in those days. It was a piece of job. Yeah, two-stroke engine. There's a choke inside the car, and it fills up with gas fumes when you start it,

so you got to roll the windows down. Yeah, but listen, the one vehicle that was most in use was the phenomenal trabant. There's a GDR museum in Berlin these days. And one of the exhibit is one of those trabant things that barely fits like people my size. I don't know how four people fit in. I burst out laughing. People didn't understand. And I looked at the label and said, it has 24 horses.

Well, my lawn mower is 26. That's amazing. I know what you're talking about. You're talking about the Checkpoint Charlie Museum and the Trabi, Trebant, that you're talking about. They sewed a person into the seat, and then the driver sat on that person, and they drove out of East Berlin to smuggle that person out. Do you remember that? Yes, you and I need to get together a person one day, and they just, like, exchange stories.

I would love that. I am totally up for that. Sign me up. So let's get back to it before I get too excited and geeking out on East Germany stuff here. So they erected the Berlin Wall, you know, to protect you over there from the West German fascists, et cetera. And at that point in your childhood, you saw a bright future ahead compared to capitalism, right? You're thinking, wow, we have the socialist paradise going on. What's the dialogue in your head as a young man? There was no dialogue. There was a monologue. All we ever got was a heavy dose of communist ideology, which, as you know, is very appealing to young people.

You know, the whole idea that we all can live together and be nice with each other and make sure that the rich don't get too rich and everything is jointly owned and is all wonderful. It is incredibly appealing to young minds. And since we didn't get any counter argument, that stuck. And I was informally chatting with you about the stickiness of ideology. Boy, oh boy, this stuck with folks for a long time. There's contemporaries of mine, even though they got royally screwed by the communist state, are still deep down inside their communists.

Yeah, it seems like in your book, again, titled Deep Undercover, the school doesn't have any discussion. The truth comes down from the top, and that played a part in, once you became a spy, once you became an operative, you have this near-delusional confidence and very little emotional attachment, which probably comes in part from your childhood, as well as learning and propaganda and things like that. And you talk about how this affected some of your early relationships. And obviously you brought some of those patterns with you, which no matter what anyone might look back, 2020 hindsight sort of shows, okay, once you join the Communist Party as a brilliant chemist,

you got the knock on your door from the mystery guy, who we still don't know who the heck that is. Of course they're looking for people like you, right? Oh, absolutely. I mean, I was a most inviting target. I was a standout. I got a national scholarship. I was active in the communist youth movement. I was a member of the party.

At the time they recruited me, I had a spotless record. And then I fathered a child out of wetlock, which, by the way, in those days, the party didn't like a lot. And normally, they would have called me in and read me the riot act. Nothing happened. So I was already now removed from the masses, quote, unquote, and I was judged by using a different yardstick. I had joined the elite, not necessarily knowing it, but I know it in hindsight.

That's interesting. So by the time you're in the KGB, you are already untouchable to some extent inside the government. And we see that in shows like the Americans where they're busting people who are doing a bit of a racket at the supermarket in Soviet Russia. The woman goes off and goes, you don't understand. This is how the whole country works. Your reason you don't see it is because you're in the KGB and the two guys are kind of sitting there that gives them a little bit of pause because they realize, oh yeah, we kind of do get special treatment. Maybe this is how people survive. Yes, I was untouchable. I was above the law because I broke laws internally as well as in other countries.

I was encouraged to do things that you weren't supposed to do, like watch Western television. I was going to the West, right? But when I crossed the border between East Germany and the Soviet Union, I was always bypassing customs and passport control. So I was a young person that really feels good because I never liked rules. I really had a problem as a child and I almost got kicked out of school because I was rebellious until I learned to fit in. Otherwise, you know, life wouldn't be so good. But when I got the official imprimatur to break rules in support of a good cause, you know, it's having your cake and eat it too, which in real life doesn't happen, but for a while I had it. Yeah, I can see the lure for a young person doing that. And when the KGB was recruiting you,

they had you doing profiles on other students and on people. What were those profiles? What are they having you profile? Well, the profile typically, you know, what are they like? Just a very general profile. I strongly believe that these were sort of exercises for them to determine how well I can judge others. The KGB didn't do internal spying on East Germans. That was a stasi. And it wasn't really very well targeted. Now, when I profiled people while in the United States, I also had an angle to, could they be useful to us, us being the Soviet Union? And if so, how could they be recruited, such as they have weaknesses,

they have ideological preferences, they need money, they have a drug habit, and all of that stuff. When I profiled my fellow students in those days, that was the early beginnings and it was just like undercover work 101, very, very elementary. So they were just trying to see, yeah, how can you read people?

Is there some sort of light reconnaissance, but that it's basically a dry run to see what you can do. They sent you to West Berlin. When you grew up in East Germany, you're kind of in this era, especially post-war. Not a lot of things are being rebuilt. There's a lot of propaganda coming down from the top. What was your first impression of West Berlin

when you finally were able to go and see it firsthand? I don't know if I wrote that in the book. If I didn't, I should have, because I told people a long time ago that my first impression was, oh, wow, they got color. And so I would tell people, you know, the West was a movie shot in color. In the East, they only had black and white.

Because what immediately hit you was that contrast between the brown and the gray and all kinds of colors that were visible once you stepped out of the subway and appeared on Western territory. So it's kind of like going out of a black and white movie and into a technicolor? Yeah, indeed. And that was enemy territory. Now, the unasked question now would be, why didn't you figure out? it might be better on the other side? Of course I did. Of course I did. There was a reason because they took all the wealth away from third world countries.

And so that's why you had poverty in Africa and South America because the evil capitalists, such as in England and the United States, France, and West Germany, they became rich because they exploited the rest of the world. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Jack Barski. We'll be right back. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. Until learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard from our amazing sponsors, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals.

Don't forget, we have a worksheet for today's episode so you can make sure you solidify your understanding of the key takeaways from Jack Barski. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. If you'd like some tips on how to subscribe to the show, just go to Jordan Harbinger.com. Subscribing to the show is absolutely free. It just means that you get all of the latest episodes downloaded automatically. to your podcast player so you don't miss a single thing. And now back to our show with Jack Barski. All right. So they ship you off to Moscow and they tell you, all right, you've got to adopt an American

mindset. How did they instruct you how to do this? I cannot imagine how difficult it must have been to be like, hey, you need to learn as much as you can about becoming American, but you can't go to America yet. You've got to do it in Soviet Russia. Yeah, well, Soviet Russia was because in East Germany, they did not have a trusted individual who could teach me the American brand of English. So that was the primary driver. For two years, I studied my ass off. I never studied as hard. And when I said in the interview on 60 Minutes, I learned 100 new words every day. I can state that with confidence because I always counted in my entire life. And I had a system by which I knew exactly how many words came in and how many words came out. It was really 100 words a day.

So I became quite fluent in American English, but my preparation with regard to American culture was almost non-existent. And there's a good reason for that. The folks that I worked with that there were original Americans and had come to live in Moscow, remembered only things that were like 20, 30 years old. And the folks that thought they knew about American spies, the resident agents who worked for the United Nations or the Soviet embassy, They thought they knew American society, but they looked at it like you look at fish from the outside. You look at the fish as an outsider, and they tried to teach me how to be a fish, and they didn't have a clue. Was that effective? It seems like it would be so hard. Sure, you could learn English, but how are you going to learn mannerisms?

It reminds me of the movie Die Hard. I don't know if you'll remember this, but those German terrorists have taken over the building. And the way that Bruce Willis knows they're the bad guys is he says, yeah, it's raining like dogs and cats instead of cats and dogs. and that that's how he knows they're the foreign guys because he gets that idiom wrong. Yeah. How would you get these nuances correct enough to fool people? I very carefully and very slowly. I didn't know what I didn't know

with regard to how to be an American. So I was lucky enough that my first two years in this country, I had no exposure to bright inquisitive individuals. You know, I worked as a bike messenger and I was able to observe from a distance without being caught. I give you a funny episode that occurred to me just the other day,

and this is how you so easily can betray that you're not what you claim to be in terms of nationality. Sometime later in life, I joined a bunch of young kids playing soccer, and I was already, I think, in my late 40s, possibly even 50, and I killed them. Now, how the heck? Somebody who was born in 1940s in the United States

wouldn't know what to do with a soccer ball, right? And you're just doing circles around these young guys because you grew up playing soccer in Europe. Well, you bet. So there's a lot of things that can trip you up that you're not aware of, you know, what they told me back in Russia. Make sure that you never eat with your knife and fork, the knife in the right hand and the fork in the left. Cut your meat, then take the fork and then, you know, just eat with a fork. That sort of is out the window nowadays. But that was the extent to which I learned American culture, not.

That's really funny. I used to get in trouble in East Germany for the way that I ate as well. Even though I'm left-handed, so I use the fork in left hand, the fact that I used the knife and put it down and everything, my family was like, did you grow up on a farm? And I said, no, why? And they were like, no reason, just curious, because they just thought, this guy, he doesn't even know how to use silverware. What a weirdo. But of course, very American of me. That was always a dead giveaway, of course, along with my strong American accent when I'm speaking German. There's a great story in the book as well about your mother coming to visit. Because, of course, she thinks you're working for the space program in the Soviet Union, and you've got to put on this facade. Would you mind telling us that story? Okay, now, the space program came later.

So when she came to visit, I was a low-level employee of the East German embassy. As far as she knew. It was the cover, right? Right. And, you know, we panicked because she wasn't supposed to meet me anywhere. So she went as part of a tourist group and she had two days in Moscow. So we came up with this great idea. I was living at the time in a conspiratorial apartment.

She was not supposed to know about it. So they put me up in a hotel under the cover that my apartment was being renovated. And then we decided that one of my handlers would come as a friend. And we would just like, my mother had her then husband with her. we would just like inundate them with sights and things to see and, you know, make sure that they couldn't even get their head up and ask any kind of questions before you know they were gone. So that went really well. The only thing that really became a problem is when mom said, why don't we take a picture with you and Sergei, who was my friend, right? But he was a handler and my God, you know, I looked at either the corner of my eyes. I saw Sergei wince because KGB employees weren't supposed to have their picture taken,

but he couldn't say no. So this is the only picture that I have. And I think it wound up in the book where it's me, her, and Sergei, where the picture was taken by our husband. So somewhere in Soviet Russia, someone's going, holy crap, there's a picture of my dad with this guy who says he's a KGB spy. My dad worked at a shoe factory. What's this doing in there?

That's a possibility. Love the guy. I wish I could meet him again. I wonder what happened to him. He was a genuinely nice person. And just like me, you know, he had bought into the ideology, hook, line, and sinker. I wonder what happened to him because it was so much easier for me to shed my baggage because I lived here and I was able to gradually move away from that nonsense that I was taught in my youth.

But to people like him, it was like, boom, Soviet Union no more, communist party. Yeah, a fringe party. And what we got now is an oligarchy, which is not any better than what they had before, The whole ideology is gone. The fellow should still be alive. I'm wondering what happened to them. I wonder if any of the sort of fellow spy espionage geeks listening to this have any idea how to get a hold of people who used to be in those niches?

Because who knows, there's probably some clubs in the former Soviet Union, especially Russia, where old KGB guys hang out and drink beer and tell war stories. And who knows? I mean, if they know that that is in the book, they might be able to say, hey, isn't this you? It's very, very possible. The guy's still around. I mean, he's probably just your age. He's my age, secret aided anonymous.

Maybe they exist. I have not been contacted. The thing is that we knew one another only by first name. And I would like to add, there was very strong likelihood that the first name was phony. Now, he knew my first name, but I don't know if I know his first name wasn't a cover name. I was introduced to many, many other folks who worked in the KGB under one of my cover name, which was Bruno. And my official cover name

by which the records were kept was Dita, D-I-E-T-E-R. Oh, yeah. So figure this one out. When somebody says, my name is so-and-so, he says, okay, sure, my name is that,

and then you just go on because it doesn't matter. Right. So, of course, Sergei, just basically the name John in Russian essentially, so common that it would be impossible to pull it out.

So, of course, I'm sure, you're right, that probably was a fake name in some way. Now, when you're learning to be a spy, when you're learning to be an espionage undercover agent here, you had a lot of counter surveillance training and drills. Tell us about how you were trained.

It seems like they were chasing you through town and things like that. Super interesting. Yeah. I mean, this is what people think about espionage and what it's like to work undercover. This is as close to how it's portrayed in the media as possible, even though what you see in the media

is just like false in its execution. And I guarantee you even nowadays, if somebody wants to know whether they're being observed or being followed, they need to do what I did. Because there are not enough cameras in the world yet that can be marshaled to follow somebody to know what they're doing. It took phenomenal amount of time for me just to find the right places to visit the right route through Moscow to determine whether I was being followed. And every month I had one exercise where like on a, say, evening before, Sergei would call me and says, hey, tomorrow nine o'clock. It's a go. So then I leave my apartment and I go on a three-hour trip cross town, you know, visit all kinds of public places, shops, possibly a museum, buy a ticket at a theater, and you do all kinds of things that one could do, even though nobody in their right mind would do all of this, but at least there's

no proof. It may be odd, but if somebody follows you, there's no proof that you're doing something that intelligence officers would be doing. So, and the whole idea was to then, get to spots where somebody has to get close enough so you can see them. So my ability to recognize faces was very important because if they don't get close enough, then they'll lose you. And even though, and I typically had between eight and ten people on my tail, even though they would switch places all the time, they ran out of switches, so to speak. And when I got to a point where I saw the same face again, I know that I was being followed. So that's, I wrote my report. They wrote theirs. And it was sometimes was interesting to get the report that they wrote because, you know, I realized,

oh, I missed that one. I missed that one. But ultimately, I was never wrong. The ultimate score, and these were like highly trained professionals, but the ultimate score was me, like 10 and they nothing. But one thing I just would like to share with you and your audience, which was really interesting. One guy got sort of caught. He knew that he was too close. I saw him. And he did something that is the ultimate diversionary tactic. He came up to me and asked me for a light. I never thought that he was one of the surveillance group. So well done. I paid him a compliment. Right, because he did the opposite of what you would think, which is he was supposed to, oh no, he saw me. I'm supposed to duck out of sight or pretend the jig is up. And instead he walked up and said,

hey, you have a lighter? And he thought, oh, well, this can't be him because he's right in my face. Absolutely. And as I said, these were professionals. I know that because there were the teams that would be to follow American diplomats or high-level visitors from the West. There were armies of them, but the guy who was in charge of these groups, I worked with him individually. He was a master of disguise. And I discussed it in the book. And the disguise is not what people think. What is a disguise typically then? If it's not a wig and a fake mustache. He was a master of misdirection, a master of like, you know, you look over here, I do something over there. For me to put on a wig was an absolute no-no. That's nonsense. The surveillance team

sometimes used at least accessories. They might change even jackets or put on a scarf or put on a different hat. But generally, this is one of the running feuds I have with the producers of the Americans because every time I see one of the agents with a wig on, I just shiver. And he said, no, I scream at the TV.

Yeah, they do look ridiculous wearing the wigs and you're thinking, of course you look like the same person. You just have another bad 80s hairdo. What are you doing? Did you ever visit the Stasi? There's a picture of Stasi agents with wigs and funny hats on, and it's so ridiculous. I couldn't stop laughing when I saw that. I must have, but it's been so long.

I went in the 90s, so it's hard to remember everything that I did, but when I go back, I would definitely love to see that as well. And I know that it's in the old Stasi headquarters as well. That I don't remember. It's somewhere near in the center of town, but it doesn't matter. As I said, wigs are a no-no. And so the counter-espionage measures took a lot of time, as far as my second. training is concerned. And I think there was the most thorough part of my training other than language.

Do you have any tips for learning faces? You mentioned your facial recognition skills had to be on point. I think it's a bit of a talent. I've been told even early on when I was a teenager, when we would be with a friend or with my family in a restaurant and people would tell me, stop staring. I was always staring at people. I was always observing. There was no, nothing I practiced. There were no tools that allow me to get better with that. I think it's partially a talent and partially just focus. Yeah, maybe you're just looking at people's faces instead of being self-absorbed or looking at their faces instead of looking at their clothing, things like that. Well, the one thing that may help, when I look at people, I usually speculate who are they, where they come from, why they're

here. And so now your brain operates already at a different level, and I think it may make the visual stick better. So what are those three factors again? Who are they, where do they come from and why they're here? And what are they going to do next? This is sort of like, especially when you're stationary and there's folks next to table at a restaurant. I've been very, very curious all my life. And, you know, that's part of what makes you good at least that kind of activity. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Jack Barski.

We'll be right back after this. Thank you for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers keeps us on the air. To learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard so you can check out those amazing sponsors, visit jordanharbinger.com slash deals. And don't forget the worksheet for today's episode. That link is in the show notes at Jordanharbinger.com slash podcast. If you're listening to us on the Overcast player, please click that little star next to the episode. We really appreciate it.

And now for the conclusion of Part 1 with Jack Barski. You mentioned in the book Deep Undercover that caution is a spy's best friend and paranoia is his enemy. what does that mean? That's well put, isn't it? Yeah. Well, obviously you have to be cautionary, but if you take this to an extreme, at any point in time in my career, so to speak,

I could have come up with 50 to 100 reasons why I shouldn't be doing this, right? Yeah. There's danger lurking around every corner, and if you can't put this out of your mind, then you will freeze because then you will just pee in your pants out of fear. It's almost like performance anxiety.

I'm sure you're familiar with that. any good performer has a certain level of performance anxiety. If you go too far, you can't perform. But if you don't have it, your entire being will not be ready to do its very best. And I think that's what I meant by this saying. Don't be afraid to be scared, but don't be scared to a point where you can't operate anymore. Then you might as well just pack it in and go home. How do you keep those two things straight?

Because caution and paranoia are basically on the same spectrum. Because I think you can do that only in the realm of reason. When you allow your emotions to take over, that caution will very quickly turn into fear that cannot be managed. It's reason. You reason with yourself, you know, this can't happen. This can happen. It doesn't make any sense.

The probabilities of something going bad here are very low. Put this out of your mind. That's fascinating, right? So you have to control your emotional response to things. otherwise you will start to become paranoid, which is the far end of the spectrum when it comes to the caution. So in other words, you can become so cautious that you become ineffective. Yeah, and I think my scientific training had a lot to do with this. When I said I studied chemistry and there was a lot of math in there and I've always been a numbers person. So when you go into

a particular situation, when you go into a new endeavor and you figure that the probabilities these are reasonably in your favor, then you stop thinking about it, and you just do it. So finally, the KGB sends you to Canada. You're ready for almost prime time. You're watching a ton of TV. You mentioned the price is right,

and good times with JJ and a dynamite. Yes, sir. And you said he had trouble understanding him. Is that because he spoke essentially an urban dialect of English that you wouldn't have learned from your teacher? Yeah, it was jive, right? I could not understand it.

I mean, it was so foreign to me. And nowadays, you know, I don't even know why I didn't understand it, but I had learned what you call high American, so to speak. It's not, it doesn't exist, but, you know, the Midwestern brand of the American accent. And I could not understand JJ, no way. I barely managed to understand the flow person out of the diner episode because she had a southern accent.

I managed to understand her, you know, and it showed me that. I was far away from actually being an American. That test trip was actually a real good thing that helped me a lot to understand and to make sure that I don't go into the real game, cocky. That's like when you have a good practice game and your coach will tell you all the bad things that you just did. You know, in my case, I just noticed that all myself.

Right. So you had to pick up so many different things. You mentioned Flo from the diner, and she's the Kiss my Gritz. That's her, right? Yes, sir. That type of thing. I watched a lot of TV as a kid. Can you tell?

Yeah, we watch the same stuff. Yeah. But what you probably didn't watch is the friendly giant from Canadian broadcasting. I did, and I'll tell you why. I grew up in Detroit. So I was right across from Windsor, and you mentioned going to Windsor in the book, and you nailed the American comment here. You say, oh, it's always worth the trip across the river.

Your beer's so much better than ours. That is something that everybody from Detroit says when they go to Windsor, which we do all the time. Oh, wow. That was a good guess. I had no clue, but I knew that the beer was better. I don't know how I knew this because I hadn't had any American beer, but I knew it was, by law, it was weaker. Maybe while I was in Montreal, people were bragging about, well, you know, it's like our beer is so much better than, you know, because the Canadians have a chip on their shoulder.

And any time they can say something or talk about something where they're better or superior to their sort of neighbor, they will rub it in your face. Yeah, of course. That definitely makes sense maybe a little bit of a complex there. Now they're just glad they don't have to deal with the same politicians as we do. But back then, definitely there was a little. little bit of a, hey, you know, we're different in this way. No offense. I love my Canadian brothers and the majority of really good comedians in the United States all come from Canada. So thank you very much for that export. Yeah, of course. Look, you had to acquire your identity in Canada. Can you tell us how you tried to get the birth certificate and become essentially American or at that point by what you were doing there? Yeah, that was a failure, actually. Besides this being a practice trip, I was also instructed to get a copy of a birth certificate

of a young person who had passed at an early age. I don't know how they found out. I have no idea how they actually found that information because the county where that person was born was someplace in California. And the only place in California where the Soviets had folks operating out of was San Francisco. No idea. So anyway, they gave me a name and they gave me basic information. And in those days, at least it was possible that you can get the copy of your birth certificate by mail. So I sat down, I wrote a little letter. It says, I'm Henry Van Randall, which is the real name that this person had. I remember that one.

And this is my father's name. It's my mother's name. I was born on this date and this place. I'd like to have a copy of my birth certificate and closed as the amount of, you know, that there was a fee attached to it. And I mailed that letter. And then I waited, and I waited, and I waited. And I waited, instead of just taking a week or two weeks as we had thought, after like five or six weeks, I decided I got to do something about it.

I actually called the registrar's office of the county. And I sort of pretended to be angry. I yelled at them and said, hey, listen, what happened to my birth certificate? You got my money. So can I please have what I paid for? And so there was some back and forth. And eventually the lady at the other end or whoever was, it could have been a guy, but I think it was a lady. said, okay, we'll take care of it. And within a week's time, I get a letter in the mail. It's addressed

to Henry Van Randall at the address where I lived. I masked the address. It was a small hotel, so it wasn't visible that it was a hotel. And it was from California. I say, you-hoo. You know, I collect this downstairs. I go up to my room and in anticipation of this great success. I opened the letter and I pulled this thing out. And that was one of the biggest disappointments in my entire life. I mean, it ranks only second to being dumped by my first girlfriend. There was a bold red letters stamped across from bottom left to top right, deceased. So this is what I was thinking, oh shit, because, you know, immediately you understand that here is a person who says, send me a copy of my birth certificate, but the person died. Something is wrong.

So, you know, I packed up. I left Montreal, you know, went on the rest of my trip. from town to town until I wound up in Windsor. And later on I found out that actually law enforcement was on my tail, but they never really caught up with me. As a matter of fact, the FBI during my debriefing process, or you would call it interrogation, or whatever you want to call it, but they showed me a police sketch of me.

Wow. That was taken based on the folks who were running the hotel, giving them a description of what I looked like. I mean, I escaped by head's breath. of being caught. And at that point, no more undercover career, you know, they would have put me in jail. I would have told them, you know, I want to talk with the East German embassy, and eventually, you know, they could have kept me in jail for a while, and then I would have been exchanged. I have no idea what the Russians would have done with me, but certainly I was off the market for

an undercover career. Jeez, that's insane. How then did you become Jack Barski? And I realized this in the book is quite the saga, but how did you become Jack Barski? Who was this person because it's easier for us to say, oh, it's the person you're talking to now, but that wasn't always the case. Well, after this failure to acquire the birth certificate of Mr. Van Randall, the Soviets decided that maybe we will do something different. They sent me back to Berlin for a while with the instructions to learn Portuguese. The whole idea that somehow Brazil was in the picture. They never disclosed whether Brazil was going to be a waste station into the United States, which would have been quite normal, was what they did very often,

or to the United States via a different country, or whether Brazil was going to be the final stop for me. But anyway, but after about six months, I get a call from my handler and says, oh, listen, pack it back to Moscow, we got a birth certificate for you. So some diplomat in Washington, D.C., was wandering around in cemeteries, and he found the gravestone that was engraved with the name of Jack Barski, born in 1944, and passed away in 1954. I know that now, but I didn't know it then, but he posed as the father of the deceased,

first acquired a debt certificate, and with that, actually was able to get a copy of the original birth certificate and sent it to Moscow, and it was added to me, and that's how it became Jack Barski. What do you think of that whole thing now? I mean, is there any sort of at any level in your head, is there sort of any identity issues that,

look, you've been living under the name of a dead kid for a long time, but at the same time, that's you also now. Two answers are possibly even three, but two primary answers to that question. A, there was standard operating procedure by Soviet intelligence to steal people's identities, particularly individuals who had passed away at younger ages. They did this throughout, you know, the 30s and 40s and into the 50s. Number two, I don't feel good about it, and I had plans to change the name back to my, at least the last name, back to my German name, which would do well in American English,

as I could be pronounced as Dietrich. But I couldn't at the time because I was involved in some civil proceedings in court, and you're not allowed to change your name. Then I was caught by 60 minutes, and before you knew it, you know, I now have a brand name that says Jack Barski. I can't get out of it and continue to function in the way I'm functioning now as an author and as a public speaker and all that. I just can't. You know, eventually I have to find it. My daughter, by the way, Chelsea, the one who plays a big role in my life, she changed her last name back to the German last name.

One of those days, I'll find a way to at least shed part of that name because this is one of the things that I don't feel good about. There's not too many things where I said I was absolutely fundamentally morally wrong, but this is one of them. And every time somebody asked me that question or I think about it, you know, I just want this to go away, but it's hard. Yeah, I can imagine. And I understand the tough spot that you're in.

I don't know if I would have done anything differently. It seems very tough to be able to change something like that after so many years. And to a certain extent, you've had the name Jack Barski longer than the person who originally had it. And so, I don't know. It's tricky. Yeah, I had it longer than the German name. And think about this one, I got a six-year-old. You ask her, what's your name?

Trinity Barski. Oh, yeah. Okay, so it's a good Jewish, Polish name. A lot of people attach emotions to names. I don't because I carried a lot of them, particularly when I traveled illegally. But you have to respect how other people look at names, and very often people attach their own self to a particular name that they carry. Yeah, well, again, you didn't.

And I think it's more your choice now. The original Jack Barski has nothing to say about it. In fact, you've in many ways lived a fuller life than he ever had, of course. So I don't know. I definitely understand both sides of the equation. Tell us about your arrival in the United States. Now you're finally ready for prime time. Well, I wasn't ready, but you can't make that up, can you?

And that's indicative how poorly prepared I was. The Russians didn't have anybody in Chicago, so they couldn't prepare me for what to look out for in Chicago and what areas to avoid. So when I arrived late in the evening, and when I deplaneed, I got through customs, the first thing is I need a place to sleep. So I look up in the yellow pages.

I look up at a hotel. I called them up. I made a reservation. I got in a cab, and I said, well, this is the address, and the cab driver looked at me funny, and I had no idea why is he looking at me funny. Anyway, but when we get there, I had an inkling because there was a rundown place, and the people in the street were not of the same color as I was. So when I walked boldly into the hotel, and then I got an idea that this may not be the place where I want to be,

because the receptionist was protected by a wall of plexiglass. But I have this funny way, and this is probably a guy thing, we don't like to turn around. We don't like to make U-turns. But in my situation, I felt funny. If I walk out of there after I make a reservation, I don't know, maybe I tip my hands, maybe somebody figures out something that's wrong with this guy. So I went through with this. I stayed at that hotel.

I had actually reserved it for two nights, but I ran out of there the next morning. After I managed to destroy my passport, I traveled under and pulled out the American birth certificate from a secret compartment. At that point, I was Jack Barski, and then I checked into a hotel further uptown. It was a lot more amenable and a lot safer under the name of Jack Borski. And that's how my life in the United States

as Jack Barski began. That was early October of 1978. Yeah, that is incredible. And so, of course, you're looking for an apartment at this point, and I know that you got scammed looking for that apartment. You said you learned a valuable lesson about capitalism. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

I want to know, is it not also applicable to communism? In fact, to me, this sounds like the motto for communism. Big thank you to Jack Barski. We're not done yet. Part two coming out soon. Jack wrote Deep Undercover, My Secret Life and Tangled Allegiances as a KGB spy in America. Great read, obviously.

Link to that will be in the show notes. There's also worksheets for each episode so you can review what you've learned from Jack. Barski at Jordan Harbinger.com in the show notes. We also get transcripts now for every episode, and those can be found in the show notes as well. We're teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using systems and tiny habits over at six-minute networking. That's our free course on networking.

That's at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Don't do it later. Do it now. You think Jack Barski waited till later? No. Dig the well before you get thirsty. Once you need relationships, you're too late. Don't stagnate.

Don't procrastinate. Do it now. The drills take a few minutes per day. This is all going to just crush for personal and business stuff. All free, Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. And by the way, guests on the show, most of them, they subscribe to the course and the newsletter. So come join us. You'll be in smart company.

Speaking of building relationships, you can always reach out and or follow me on social. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. This show is created in association with Podcast One, and this episode was produced by Jen Harbinger, Jason DeFilippo, edited by Jace Sanderson. Show notes and worksheets by Robert Fogarty. Music by Evan Viola. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Our advice and opinions and those of our guests are their own.

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