The Spy Who - The Spies Who Invaded Suburbia | Former illegal spy Jack Barsky on years undercover | 4

Episode Date: March 18, 2025

Jack Barsky was arguably one of the most successful and enduring of the "Illegals”. These were the Soviet and Russian operatives who seamlessly integrated into American society while covertly serving their handlers in Moscow. But as Jack started a family in his new country, the weight of his double life began to take its toll. Talking to actor and spy novelist Charlie Higson, Jack delves into his remarkable journey from Soviet KGB agent to devoted American family man, taking us inside his daring decision to fake his own death to escape his handlers.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wandery Plus subscribers can binge full seasons of The Spy Who early and ad free on Apple Podcasts or the Wandery app. From Wandery, I'm Charlie Higson, spy novelist, actor, comedian, and this is The Spy Who. actor, comedian, and this is The Spy Who. Thank you for joining us for our final episode of The Spies Who Invaded Suburbia. The Illegals were a group of Russian sleeper agents operating in the United States, tasked with gathering intelligence and infiltrating key areas of American society. They looked like ordinary people. They worked, they had families, they drank

with friends. But each was secretly driven by the need to collect sensitive information, attempt to shape US policy and exploit vulnerabilities within the American government and its systems. Jack Barsky, not the name he was born with, was possibly the most successful illegal. Using multiple aliases and intense espionage training, he entered America in 1978 with a long-term aim of gathering intelligence and getting close to policymakers to influence them. As Ronald Reagan deemed the Soviet Union the evil empire and Cold War tensions escalated, Jack was ideally placed to begin America's destruction from the inside.

But this was before his life was turned upside down by the arrival of an American-born daughter, Chelsea. From that moment on, he wanted out. In this episode, I'm going to speak to Jack about what made him so driven to succeed in America, how he was recruited in East Germany, the emotional discipline required to be this kind of spy, and also the ethics of engaging in some pretty dark acts in a bid to gain the advantage over your enemy.

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about indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash wonder ECA terms and conditions apply hiring indeed is all you need. Jack, thank you so much for joining me. Whereabouts are you? I'm in just in the southern suburb of Austin, Texas. How are you doing over there? I'm doing okay. So Jack, I'm calling you Jack, but your name by birth is Albrecht Dittrich. We know that some illegals like Anna Chapman in our story use their real names.

But that wasn't the case when you were operating. So you've been William Dyson, Henry Van Randle and Jack Barsky. How were you getting these names? The Russians still do that. They steal identities from individuals who passed away early. Jack Barsky passed away at the age of 11. There was barely a record of him other than having been born. Or they would also use individuals who could have passed away at an older age but in a foreign country,

then acquired the documentation. Unfortunately, in the United States it was really easy to get the birth certificate of Jack Barsky. So who was getting these certificates? Is this KGB agents in America? Yes, KGB agents, particularly this one agent who got it was stationed in Washington, D.C. And then once you get the birth certificate, you start adding as many other pieces of documentation to that to create this identity? Correct. What was absolutely required to work and live like an American was a social security card and a driver's license

If you've got the best of it, is that fairly straightforward in those days? You could you didn't need even a driver's license to tell who you are when you go to get on a plane or go to a hotel It was wide open the United States I mean we'll get on to that period when you were going into America, but I mean do you think of yourself as Jack now? How long have you been living as Jack Barsky? Since 1978 to do the math, longer than I've been Albrecht Dietrich. I left the Albrecht Dietrich at the age of 28. Is there a part of you that still thinks of yourself as Albrecht?

No. However what happens if I go to Germany and people use my name, I react to it, but I am 100% Jack Barsky these days with German roots. So when you were growing up in East Germany in the 50s and the 60s, and you were still Albrecht, I mean, did you ever think that you'd like to be a spy one day, change your name? I mean, were you even aware that it was a thing you could do? I had never even had one tiny thought of ever becoming a spy that was just outside of my universe, period. You know, we're all told that in that time in East Germany that there was a huge amount

of surveillance and the secret police. I mean, did that feel like a part of your life or that whole apparatus of the state around you? I grew up in a bubble. I was not aware of the misdeeds that were committed by the Stasi. My parents were both teachers. I grew up in the country. So to me, the Stasi was just a legitimate organization to make sure that capitalism doesn't come back and that everybody behaves well, but I had no clue otherwise.

So how did you get from there to being recruited by the KGB? One day somebody reached out to me, it was on a Saturday afternoon, came to my dorm room, it was a German individual, spoke perfect German, and started some small talk about what am I gonna do when I'm done with my studies. And I immediately knew something was not right. And he said, you know, I'm sorry, I have to admit, I lied to you, I'm from the government. And this, I will never forget the sentence,

can you, and the answer, can you imagine one day working for the government? I answered yes, but not as a chemist. I had studied chemistry. He had the answer to a question he didn't ask. So how long were you given to decide whether you wanted this job? And what did you think it would entail at this point? Yeah, that was when I was ordered to go to Berlin for a week for some additional training.

My liaison there took me to the headquarters of the KGB in Berlin. I was taken to an office and there was a small, short fellow sitting behind the desk. He was barely visible. He spoke only Russian. There also was a boy fellow sitting behind the desk, he was barely visible. He spoke only Russian, there also was a translator, but quite abruptly he stopped and did a 180 and he said, so can we count on you or not? It was very aggressive. Really I had never taken this seriously. I was just going to see what's going to happen.

And that was the moment I was just going to see what's going to happen. And that was the moment I was recruited. So at what point do they then sort of come out and say, look, this is what we want you to do? The job that they recruited me for or that they looked at me for required a whole lot of innate character traits, a whole lot of things that you can't learn that have to be with you. Fearlessness, quick decision making. It's a whole lot of things that you can't learn that have to be with you. Fearlessness, quick decision making, no problem with changing country, disappearing and showing

up someplace else. The most interesting character traits that we're looking for is well controlled inclination to adventure. And I was an adventurous little fellow. Actually, I wasn't that little. And are you tall? I can't tell you're sitting down. I'm six feet three.

So you were never going to be a spy that blended into the background. That is correct. That is a very good observation because I was told in confidence once they decided to send me to the United States that there were doubts within the KGB because if I enter a room, I'm visible. I can't blend into the background. What were your sort of feelings about the KGB? Were you sympathetic with what they were doing?

Oh yes. And you were thinking if you're signed up, you want to go for it? There was an aura about communists that fought the Nazis and the KGB that contributed to the defeat of Hitler. So KGB agents for us were heroes. In East Germany we have the Stasi version of James Bond. There was a Nazi hunter, illegal, who went to West Germany, hunted down Nazis, but he also lived a good life. He got the girl, he had the fast cars. So I figured,

man, I can travel, I can live high on the hog, and I do something really important and help the world to get rid of all the evil capitalists. So it sounds like a mix of, yeah, you want to go and undermine capitalism, but you also want to enjoy some of the fruits of it. Yeah, the irony of that was not apparent to me. The irony got even worse after eight years of working in the US. I was awarded $10,000. So I was awarded in the currency of the country that I was supposed to help destroy.

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And that was the first time you'd ever been into West Berlin? That was the first time I was in quote unquote enemy territory. And guess what? Not all of us could handle this. I met a classmate of mine who was Stasi who failed that test. He told me that when he came back from West Berlin, he told his handler, he said, I can't do that. Well, that was not a problem for me. Then they sent me again to do a little task to ring the doorbell of an apartment and befriend the elderly people who lived there to do a little task to ring the doorbell of an apartment

and befriend the elderly people who lived there and find out something about their grandson who possibly was a target for recruitment. I passed that too. And when it turned out that I had incredible talent to acquire another language, particularly English, with barely an accent, I was moved to Moscow and after two years of more training, I was declared to be ready. And then I had one more practice trip that was a longer one to Canada.

I spent three months in Canada just getting a feel for what it's like to live in the United States or go to the United States because mistakenly the KGB considered Canada as a small brother of the United States. Not true. If you have been to both countries, you know that they are somewhat similar, but clearly not equal. Yes, I guess it's the subtle differences that you had to learn and pick up on. The information that I'm sharing with you now came straight from KGB archives. Illegals were extremely rare.

In the late 70s into early 80s, the KGB recruited and trained 10 of us. What happened to the other nine, I met one other, but we were very rare and that means it took a lot of time and effort to look for it, train us. What are you actually being trained to do? How much of it is spycraft and how much of it is how to pass as a Westerner? Very good question. The best training and the majority of my training was tradecraft. Right.

Everything that all the tools that you need to be able to handle to operate as an agent that started with Morse code, shortwave radio reception, secret writing, photography. No gadgets by the way. Gadgets for me were a no-no because if gadgets are found in my apartment, that's proof that I'm up to no good. So that training was excellent. Also, particularly surveillance detection, I got very good at that. The other part, they tried, but they failed miserably to what it's like to live as an American in the United States. There was nobody who had done it that could teach me. They didn't know what it means to get a job, they didn't know what it means to get

an apartment, they didn't know how to date in the United States. Were they also telling you, sort of indoctrinating you about how terrible they were or was it just practical, this is what you got to go in and do? The indoctrination when I signed up for the KGB wasn't necessary anymore. It was nothing but confirmation of what we learned from kindergarten on. If you don't get any opinions to the contrary, you just think that's the way the world is. And there was the evil capitalists and imperialists in West Germany and the United States, and they caused a lot of misery amongst the people, and they were us, and we were going to establish

the workers' paradise on earth. Very romantic notion, very hard to say, well, I don't want to do that. Of course you want to. So after your five years of training between Germany and Moscow, and then when you were eventually sent to America, did you have a sense that this was going to be the rest of your life now? I mean, what had you left behind? No, there was always a sense that there was a limit to my deployment.

A 10-year period was mentioned several times. In hindsight, I know why. Because if us illegals, if we do really well and integrate in society, we are a much higher risk for defection than, let's say, the diplomats. We had to be limited. I had an East German family at that time. They allowed me to get married. My wife, we had a son, so I had an anchor to go back to. They had a good reason to go back to

a nut defect. So I mean that must have been very difficult to leave behind a young family. Yes and no. I am wired to be a rather extreme stoic. I don't have very strong negative emotions. I can shake things off. My wife told me that she knew where I was going and who I was working for and she told me she would wait. So I figured I knew that I knew this would work. I knew I was very well trained. I got a lot of good feedback from my handlers, the people that train me on the tradecraft.

If you start something brand new, you don't go into it with doubts because if you do that you will fail for certain. Okay, so you're trained up, ready to go to America. And what actually was your mission? What did they say to you? This is what we want you to do. This is what you've got to achieve. The first task obviously was to become a functioning American. obviously was to become a functioning American. So to clearly be accepted by other Americans as somebody who was born in the US, the crown jewel of American documentation

was a genuine US passport, right? But we, and that's collective, it's the KGB, and I made a mistake when it came to applying for the passport, and I couldn't get one. The question was, where did you go to high school? The high school in my back story was an elite school that was a bad pick, but if they checked on that, I would be busted. So I managed to get out of this office by grabbing my documentation and the application

that was still lying in front of the agent and just walking out. So when you went into America, where were you going from? I started in Moscow, flew to Belgrade. In Belgrade I took a train to Vienna where I met an agent and traded one German passport for another one. Then I took a train to Rome. I met another agent who then handed me a Canadian passport,

which I used for the remainder of my travels. With that passport, I first went through Madrid, Mexico City. The KGB had me go through Chicago where they had nobody, no representation. And as I'm standing in line for immigration, I realized for the first time, and it never occurred to me, that I don't speak Canadian English. I knew if I was interviewed in detail I wouldn't pass and thank God I got through by mumbling my answers and the questions. Were you thinking wow this is glamorous and exciting or was it just so stressful that that's kind of overrode everything else? Yeah I tell you it's standing in that line and it took a while to move forward, I would think

it was the most stressful moment or stressful period of time in my entire life. That actually got me to a point where I couldn't get rid of the stress until I had quite a bit of whiskey that I had bought duty-free that put me in a coma. Got rid of the stress, but it gave me a headache. I made it through, but this could have been the end of my spy career before it even started. So I decided to get rid of the Canadian passport and become Jack Barsky. So I went to the bathroom and tried to eliminate William Dyson, that was the name of the Canadian, by burning

his passport. And I tried to light it on fire and the damn thing didn't burn. It generated a lot of smoke, heavy, thick smoke, which went up there. And as I followed that smoke up to the ceiling there's a smoke detector. If that thing goes off, I'm dead. I had my instructions what to do if I get arrested, but I had the presence of mind to throw that piece of paper in the toilet, so it didn't generate any more smoke and I was darn lucky. I think I must have an Irish gene. Darn lucky that smoke detector didn't go off.

So I registered in my next hotel as Jack Barsky. After that, I can't to get your thoughts on them, Anna Chapman, Tracy Foley, the Murphys. Now you didn't know them, but from what you know about them, do you think they were good agents? They were terrible agents. Their training was not even close to mine. Chapman, I understand, communicated with Moscow via social media. It's insane.

The FBI published a surveillance video that's out there under Operation Ghost Stories. When I watched this for the first time, I was screaming on the TV, I said, you can't do this. Just turning around and hiding a big package in the park someplace. I mean, operationally, tradecraft was nonexistent. And I think it has something to do with the fact that the Soviet Union and the KGB had a lot more qualified personnel, they had a lot more money that they could invest into the training agents,

they threw that wealth into the military and espionage. The Russians just throw some stuff on the wall and hope it sticks. Nowadays, Russian intelligence, really, they rely on volume. There's a lot of exchange students, there's a lot of fluidity and people going in and out of the United States coming from Russia. I guarantee you quite a few of them try to do espionage and some of them might actually be quite successful. It's interesting you say they were amateurs, but one of the illegals, Cynthia Murphy, did

actually manage to get close to Hillary Clinton. I mean that must take some doing. Yeah, amateurs in terms of tradecraft. I think that getting close to Hillary Clinton actually triggered the FBI to finally take him in because they were known from the moment on they entered the United States because we had a mole in Russian intelligence. So they were being observed all the time. You don't think they were ever really a threat to America, the illegals?

No. The moment that looked like they could become a threat, they were arrested and then eventually exchanged. I mean, do you think, was there ever really a big chance of it being successful, changing America in any way? I doubt it very much. You can destabilize, you can do a lot of things, but espionage itself, I don't think can bring down another country unless it's a weak country to begin with. And before you were exposed in America, did you feel you had done anything useful, sent

useful information back to Russia? No, my feeling was that I was a complete failure. And that was contradicted by the fact that the Soviet Union, in my eighth year of being in the United States, the Soviet Union awarded me the Order of the Red Banner. That order was the second highest declaration of the Soviet Union, not the KGB. My KGB handlers thought I was doing a really good job integrating in US society. That makes me guess that a few of the others, if not the majority of them, failed or they just disappeared.

One of the things I do is I've written some James Bond books and there's a big theme through the James Bond books of Ian Fleming which is James Bond knows he must never get married because that will weaken him, he'll become vulnerable, his wife will become vulnerable. And you in America, you met Penelope and that ended up in you getting married, which to a certain extent led to you changing the way you thought about everything. To a certain extent, that's putting it mildly, that dramatically changed my life. That is the reason, one of the reasons I'm speaking to you today. So can you just talk us through what happened, how you met and how that relationship developed?

When I started making some decent money and I had a job that wasn't, my first job was bike messenger and when I had a real job in corporate America, I put an ad in the paper and I looked for a girlfriend. I knew there were a lot of immigrants that came to the United States. I wanted a girlfriend not to be a white-born American who would have figured out that something is wrong with me. I dated a couple of ladies and one was very pretty. She was born in Guyana. I spoke with a bit of an accent she wouldn't have known in a million years that I wasn't

a true blue American. At one point, she confined to me that she was in the country illegally. And then she asked me... Both of you. Yeah. Well, she didn't know me. She finally, she reached out to me in some way and asked me to marry her. And I didn't marry her because I loved her.

I liked her. She was nice to be with, she was safe to be with. We got married, we applied for a green card and I told her, early on I said, I was still faithful in my mind at least to my German wife, I was going to go back to that wife who I truly loved. I told Penelope, you know, when you have your green card we're going get divorced again. Well, she decided otherwise. She got pregnant. Well, you were complicit in that. Yeah, I was complicit, but she was supposed to be on birth

control pills. She made the unilateral decision to get off the pill. And that was the best thing that ever happened to you. Yes! But you got it. So she gave birth to a little girl. I watched this little girl grow up and that's a love that is stronger than any other love that I ever experienced. It was unconditional. It was, oh my God, I got to take care of this girl. I mean, it got to a point where I really stressed over having to leave that girl.

And so this is the late 80s. You've been in America for about 10 years. You're wondering what the hell do you do next? Now you've got this family. And then in December 1988, you get the message, prepare for urgent departure. We have reason to believe that your cover has been blown. You are in severe danger. What danger were you in and how did you react to that?

I was supposed to just like get out of the country as quickly as possible and I wasn't ready. You know, now this is conflict. I can't leave this girl, but if I stay, I might get arrested. And I wouldn't be of any use to her either. So it was like back and forth, back and forth. And I still loved my German wife. And I knew that everything that was good for me, everything

was back on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The Berlin Wall was still up. I would have come back as a conquering hero. They promised me a house and I still would have worked for the KGB doing some like career work. I would have lived a very privileged life with a beautiful family and all of that was not strong enough for me to leave this little girl. And it's totally amazing. The power of love, it's incredible. So is that a decision at that point to say, you're going to not work with the KGB anymore,

you're going to try and defect? I mean, how did you work out how to go about all of that? Well, defection was really not something that I ever considered, because that would have been too dangerous. Because I knew one thing that even if they had thought I was defecting, if they went after people and tried to assassinate people, that was those people who were guilty of defection. And I didn't want to risk that.

So I quit. Well you make that sound easy. How did you quit? No, there's since you know about James Bond, there's a scene in one of the James Bond movies where the Russian agents tells a collaborator in the U.S. who said, I quit. They said, nobody ever quits the KGB. Well, I did. And I succeeded by pretty much coming up with the second biggest lie that I used

in my entire life, the first one being that I was born an American. I told them in my last letter in secret writing, I acknowledged that I received the order to return, but I couldn't come home. I tearfully shared with them that I had contracted HIV AIDS. Not true. And that was a death sentence in those years. They were extremely afraid of letting anybody from the West with that disease into the country. And they had no reason to not believe me.

They didn't ask for any proof? No. I was clever enough to actually trace the infection back country and they had no reason to not believe me. They didn't ask for any proof? No. I was clever enough to actually trace the infection back to a girlfriend that I had who had a boyfriend who was a drug addict and I got infected via my interaction with that earlier girlfriend who I reported. I had to report everybody that I had an intimate relationship with. So they had no reason not to believe me.

All they knew about my existence was that I had a halfway decent job in the US. They didn't know that I had a child. Had they known I had a child, they wouldn't have believed me. They would have known I had a reason to stay. And they told my German family that I passed away. And is it at this point that you tell your American family the truth? Oh no, no, no, no, no, no. Nobody got the truth until I was almost forced out of the closet.

First of all, the FBI had to catch up with me first because I didn't defect. I quit. So I just kept on living my life undercover as an ordinary American. Okay. My version of the American dream. And your cover is eventually blown by information coming out of Moscow. Yes. My cover was blown by an archivist by the name of Vasily Mitrokin, who had worked with MI6 and smuggled tons and tons of secret material out of the

archives. And among that material, there was a little note that said there's a person named Jack Barsky. He is an illegal living in the Northeast of the United States. That was it. There are not too many Jack Barskys. And it was real easy for the FBI to know that they had me because I got my social security card as an adult, not at birth, at the age of like 34 or something like that.

And so they knew they had their man. But they didn't immediately confront you, did they? They started surveillance to make sure that... Yes. Were they just trying to be absolutely sure or were they thinking perhaps you might also be able to give them, unwittingly give them some information? I think both. And so they wanted to make sure that I wasn't active anymore. I had survived 19 years not being discovered. The one thing that they did when the house next door, and

there was only one house next door, was for sale and they bought it. And they had a couple of FBI agents live there for a while to just watch me. They never made contact. And this observation alone gave the lead agent of my case, the conviction that if arrested, I would cooperate because I love my children.

It was quite obvious. And they also had a listening device in my kitchen. So they got a little bit of an idea what my family life was all about. Did you tell Penelopudi at this point who you really were? We were arguing a lot. She had become very jealous. She thought I had affairs, which I didn't. And at one day, I'm in the kitchen, we're arguing again,

and I decided to use the nuclear option, so to speak. And I told her, hey, listen, I stayed here in this country to live with you and take care of you and Chelsea. When I was in severe danger of being arrested or being assassinated, I was an Russian agent. And guess what? This is when somebody in the FBI, in an FBI office overheard all of that. So they had my confession on tape as well. And that backfired because now she knew that I was a retired agent,

retired so to speak, then she knew I was a retired agent, retired so to speak, then she knew I was a liar. She didn't believe anything anymore that I told her. It does sound like a classic lie that a controlling man might come out with. Hey, the reason I'm ending all these strange things, I'm really in the Secret Service. Yes. For you, it actually was the truth. It was the truth. It was the truth. And when the FBI approached me, a state police waved me over

and told me that this was a routine traffic stop. Police step out of the car. I stepped out of the car. And then this man comes at me from the right, and he flips this FBI ID. But I didn't even look at it. I knew it. I knew what that was.

It felt like being doused with 10 gallons of ice cold water. But this is what I was thinking. Oh my God, this is it. It's over. My whole past like just went through my brain and I was racing through my brain and because I know I could be in big trouble. Well, were you actually officially arrested? Because you didn't end up in jail, did you?

There was no arrest. I didn't spend a minute in jail. I was detained and drove me to a motel, interviewed me for about two hours, and then they allowed me to go back home. They came to my house and introduced themselves and told Penelope that the story that I told her was the truth. And then how come they ended up letting you stay in America? They didn't just kick you out. Where to? To Russia? To Germany? First of all, they spent about six weeks debriefing me very, very thoroughly.

And they also saw value in me cooperating for some time as what they call a trusted source when they needed some of my opinions about certain situations because I was still of value being around. And how did you feel then? You have these two families, everything is out in the open, I guess you don't have the excuse anymore that you can't tell anybody, it's all secret. How did you square all that and what did you tell your other family? Well everything was not out in the open.

My German family knew I was dead. And I did not care to reach out and somehow tell them that I'm still alive. I was deathly afraid of that, but leave it up to Chelsea to connect the families. Because when I told her that she had a half brother in Germany, she looked for him intensely. And eventually found Matthias,

that's his name, on the internet, reached out to him and they decided that they are siblings and she invited Matthias to come visit her. He didn't want to meet me, but he changed his mind. I was deathly afraid of that meeting because I had left him and had favored Chelsea as my child when I had to make a decision. It worked out okay. He called me dad. Long story. And looking back over your career as a spy and going deep

undercover and having to lie to so many people, do you think it's a fair way of getting the upper hand over an enemy? The way it's done, there's no fairness involved here. The espionage world is full of lies. You've got to assume that everybody in this world lies to you. As insiders call it, the wilderness of mirrors, you don't really know what's real and what's not. You don't know if I'm telling you the truth, except I don't have a real good reason not

to. Well, you would say that though, wouldn't you? Yeah, sure. But do I get, what benefit do I get out of it? I don't know. Yeah, well. Looking at the death certificates of children, leaving your first family, lying to your second family, telling people you had AIDS, friends at the time not knowing who you really were,

lying to your wife, fooling your colleagues. Do you have any regrets about all this? I cannot make change this. Go back and undo what I did. Having lied to my mother, who until the day she died, she didn't know what happened to me, that I deserted my German wife, there's just no way I can fix that in hindsight. People ask me, would I do it over again? I said, if I were the person that I was then and I knew what I knew then, I couldn't imagine having made a different decision.

And you ended up with the daughter Chelsea that you obviously love. Yes, and what I'm truly proud of is that I became a highly functioning American. I did a lot of good work for corporations. I helped a lot of people to become the best that they could be when I was a manager and an executive and corporate. So I've been trying to do good and I think there is some redemption, some measure of redemption in my life.

And what's the one thing you've learned through all this? It sounds trite, but it's absolutely 100% true. Love conquers all. It certainly conquered you. It did. And it's worth noting that the FBI did speak to the family of the real Jack Buskey, the child who died, to ask them on your behalf if you could keep the name. The parents were still alive and they understood the rationale behind it and they agreed.

Yeah, God, that must have been such a weird bit of information for that family. Yes. I actually have a picture, which I don't make public because it could be misinterpreted. I found Jack Barsky's grave and I have a picture of me standing next to his grave and that was more or less a spiritual experience because I wouldn't be standing there if he hadn't passed away. It's very, very strange. Well, I think that is an excellent place to finish our chat.

That's been absolutely fascinating. Jack, thank you so much for giving us your time. Take care. See you. Bye-bye. It's fascinating to talk to an actual real-life spy. We've talked about spies a lot over these series, but to actually have the real words and thoughts of someone who's been through that is, I found, really interesting.

And keep coming back to these attributes of what makes the perfect spy. And I think Jack was very honest when he talked about his emotions, or in fact, his kind of lack of emotions. The fact that he could treat this as a job and separate family life, home life, emotional life from what he was doing and lying to everyone around him. We didn't really go into how it was with his friends and his work colleagues,

but he implied that he lived a fairly normal life on that front. Thank you for listening, and do join us for our next episode, The Spy Who Duped Hitler, hosted by Raaza Jafri. Next time, we open the file on Ewan Montagu and Charles Chumley. 1943. Winston Churchill wants to capture Sicily, the key to breaking Hitler. Success hinges on diverting Nazi attention and troops elsewhere.

Churchill's spy chiefs devise Operation Mincemeat, an impossibly daring deception plan involving a deceased man from Wales. Follow The Spy Who now, wherever you listen to podcasts. From Wandery, this is the final episode in our series, The Spies Who Invaded Suburbia. This episode of The Spy Who is hosted by me, Charlie Higson. Our show is produced by Vespucci for Wandery, with story consultancy by Yellow Ant. The senior producers of this episode are Ashley Clevery and Philippa Gearing. Our supervising producer is Rachel Byrne.

Our sound designer is Ivor Manley. Music supervisor is Scott Velasquez for Frisson SYNC. Executive producers for Vespucci are Johnny Galvin and Daniel Turcan. The executive producer for Yellow Ant is Tristan Donovan. Our senior producer for Wondery is Theodora Leloudis, and our senior managing producer for Wondery is Rachel Sibley. Executive producers for Wondery are Estelle Doyle, Chris Bourne, Morgan Jones and Marshall Louis. you