True Stories from a Soviet Spy | Jack Barsky | EP 412

Hello everyone. I'm pleased to announce my new tour for 2024, beginning in early February and running through June. Tammy and I, along with an assortment of special guests, are going to visit 51 cities in the US. You can find out more information about this on my website, jordanbpeterson.com, as well as accessing all relevant ticketing information. I'm going to use the tour to walk through some of the ideas I've been working on in my forthcoming book, out November 2024, We Who Wrestle with God. I'm looking forward to this. I'm thrilled to be able to do it again, and I'll be pleased to see all of you again soon. Bye-bye.

In my fifth year of being in the United States as an illegal, I was awarded the Order of the Red Banner, the second highest decoration of the Soviet Union. That had to be approved by the Central Committee of the party, and you know, with that came a monetary award of 10,000—not rubles, but dollars. So there was an intellectual discrepancy there. I was being given an award in the currency of the country that we were trying to destroy.

Hello everyone. I had the privilege today to speak with one Jack Barski, a guy about my age, born in East Germany, raised in the depths of the Communist catastrophe. He swallowed the propaganda as a young man, hook, line, and sinker, and was recruited while he was pursuing his degree in chemistry, recruited by the KGB to act as a spy in the West. He recounted his tale in a book called Deep Undercover, which was published in 2017, and shared all that with me today: his double life in the US, his eventual abandonment of the Communist utopian intellectual project, his conversion, as it turns out, by the as a consequence of the love of his infant daughter, his work for the FBI, and his current enterprise now serving as a mentor to young people who might be attracted, say, by the utopian schemes of the intellectual ideologues. So we walked through all of that, and that's very interesting.

Welcome aboard, Mr. Barski. I think what came to my mind as the first mystery when I went through your book was the conditions of your upbringing. Now, one of the things that's very mysterious, thankfully to people in the West, is how it was that young people, in particular, were enticed to swallow hook, line, and sinker the propaganda coming into Eastern Europe from Russia, especially because—and I don't know how much of this you knew when you were a child—but especially when there was such a stark difference between the material conditions in the West compared to the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, and there was some knowledge of that. So why don't you start by telling everyone what you experienced as a child and how you saw the world, you know, up to the point where you entered, say, university.

First of all, the communism didn't originate in Russia as you know it. It was a German invention—Karl Marx, right? And Lenin was the one who actually put this into practice. So there was still communist thinking, residual communist thinking in East Germany. There were a lot of refugees; when Hitler took over, they went to the Soviet Union and then came back and sort of took over rather quickly.

So how did we buy what they were selling? There was nothing else on the market. There was no free market of ideas. It was a massive brainwashing from kindergarten on. You know, I tell people then if everybody you know—family, teachers, friends, relatives—tell you that the moon is made out of cheese, that becomes like part of the foundational knowledge of how the world operates. There was no God there. There was just the idea—the romantic idea of communism—becoming the force that will free all the suppressed nations in the world. And by the way, that is very easy to buy into, and I was 100%—by the time I left college, I was still 100% a communist. And a lot of my generation too.

What the Communists in East Germany did very well was focus on the next generation, us in particular. They focused on the ones that had a reasonably high level of intellect because we were going to be the leaders of the future. One more thing about the wealth of the West: we weren't allowed to travel to the West. We sort of knew that they had a higher standard of living, but this was rationalized very quickly and easily because the NATO countries—imperialist countries—were stealing the wealth from the third world, like the United States stealing the bananas from Guatemala and so on, right?

Okay, so let me ask you some more specific questions about that. One of the things that you alluded to was that the idea that you were working for the freedom of the oppressed was actually a powerful motivator. And so I want to unpack that a little bit. I mean, it's obvious when we look at the world from wherever we sit that some people are more favored than others along any dimension of comparison you can possibly imagine. Now, Marx made the economic comparison primary, pointing out that, well, I suppose that the poor will be with us always, so to speak. But that—and it is definitely the case that that difference in economic security and opportunity exists and is somewhat painful to all observers. I mean, I suppose there are some successful people who pride themselves on the fact that they have plenty while others have none and are pleased at that status differential. But my experience with decent, prosperous people is that even—and most particularly the decent, prosperous people—are still unhappy that there is poverty and suffering anywhere in the world, that there is even relative privation. And I would say it's part of the moral striving that's part and parcel of the human psychological landscape to want to remediate that. And so if the Communists are offering some future vision where suffering is a thing of the past, then in some ways they're capitalizing on that longing in the human soul for suffering as such to be dispensed with. And, you know, and so that makes it perfectly understandable.

I've been writing about this a little bit. The pathological part of it is that it seems to me—and I want to know what you think about this—that as soon as you make the assumption that anybody who is more talented or who owns more is more talented or owns more because that—and that that can only occur as a consequence of injustice and oppression and exploitation, then you're setting up a situation where anyone who has any success whatsoever can be hated and what would you say persecuted with a good conscience? So I'm wondering—you must have thought about this a fair bit—how do you think it's possible for people to separate their moral impulse to aid the oppressed from their immoral impulse to damn the successful?

All right, so you raised a highly complex issue, and I can only address as much as I have lived through the situation. First of all, I grew up in a country where we were all equally poor. So I didn't really understand the concept of poverty as a young child, and even when I went to high school, there were no wealthy people around us. With regard to wealth in the West, it wasn't tangible. So there was nobody to hate, actually, at that point. We started hating all of us when the war in Vietnam got really bad. I mean, I would have signed up and fought on behalf of the Vietnamese. But here's an interesting shift: I did really well in high school and I did so well in college that I received a national scholarship that was limited to 100 concurrent users—holders—in the country. I joined the elite. I got it. The scholarship paid me as much as my salary when I was an assistant professor. I was a rich student, and I was, you know, it's probably quite understandable that I was really full of myself and then everybody admired me. And so I became intellectually the kind of person who will help all the people who need help—the stupid people. You know, this is the condescending attitude that, you know, the elite has. A lot, let's put it this way, we have it in this country; we have it in Western Europe. You know, if we are up there, we look down at the little people and say, "Well, they can't take care of themselves; you've got to do it for them." And then it starts with good will and then very often degrades into not so good simply because the elite needs to stay where it is to fulfill its mission. There's a rationalization. Okay, and we live better; we make more money and all of this because we deserve it. So I never had a chance to hate the capitalist with a vengeance because I didn't know him well enough. It was more theoretical—the exploitation of man.

Well, I think your comments on that intellectual presumption are extremely interesting. I've been trying to work through that dynamic theoretically because there is an association between that intellectual pride and utopian presumption. You know, when you just laid out a psychological dynamic, you said you were young, you were celebrated for your intellectual prowess, and you can see that intellectual prowess is valuable personally and socially, and so you can understand that it being valued is appropriate. But then you pointed to the fact that if it's celebrated inappropriately, it tends to produce a kind of intellectual pride and condescension. And then that works in sync—see, it works oddly in sync—with the utopian presumptions of communism. Communism is a very intellectual system, and it was designed by someone who had very deep intellectual pretensions—Marx himself. And it's that unholy combination of intellectual pride and the proposition that you're acting in that pride on behalf of people who are too foolish or stupid or ignorant or blind or otherwise incapable of taking care of themselves, right? And then you could say, "Well, you're doing that for all the good reasons." But you pointed out right away that there was an element of overweening pride in that that was attractive to you because you were celebrated for your intellect when you were young.

Absolutely. One other thing: if your frame of reference is mankind, it's very difficult to not be full of pride. If you get to a point where you realize that there's this big universe that was created by some power—whatever you want to call it—then that arrogance shrinks very quickly.

So do you think that it's possible to not suffer from that arrogance, especially if you're an intellectual or intelligent, if you don't have a reference point outside yourself? Or even outside of mankind as such? Because you can imagine someone trying to make a moral case that the appropriate level of analysis for a properly morally oriented young person is the good of mankind as such. But you could counter that by saying, "Well, look, what the hell do you know when you're 18? Maybe you should take care of your own local concerns—like someone who's properly humble—rather than attributing to yourself the ability at such a young age to understand everything that needs to be understood about all the economic and social systems of the world and to bring about, with your own efforts and to your own credit, this hypothetical utopia."

Yes, but here's the thing: I want to just contribute this. I'm not necessarily chiming in with what you just brought up. When you are as well-meaning as you are to help the downtrodden and the less gifted, you become a member of the elite. And some people will kiss up to you, and then you rationalize. I remember a CEO of a company that I worked for. He had a chauffeur driving him all the time, and the rationalization was his time is too valuable. That is why the elite also needs to have private airplanes—you know, for whatever, and you get used to this. You get used to being adored and celebrated, and it's fundamentally impossible to not become full of yourself. I bet you there are some people who are humble by nature, but the majority of us are not.

Okay, so the pathway there is that as soon as you have pretensions to operating on behalf of something approximating universal salvation brought into being in consequence of your own intellectual efforts and your beliefs, is that the probability that you're going to suffer from inflation of ego is virtually certain at that point?

I am 100% certain of that. It's not just because I went through that. You know, there are a lot of my colleagues and other gifted people that joined the cause— the party, the government—and in East Germany, the government, the party was the elite. And, you know, the way communism is constructed, the working class is supposed to rule, but the working class needs a spokesperson or an organization that speaks on its behalf. Those people weren't working class; they were the intellectual elite. Some of them were pretty dumb, but a lot of them were at least clever, right?

So one of the things you're pointing to there too is you're also making the case, I would say, that even in a society that purports to hope to eradicate the economic elite, elites are likely to arise regardless. And in the country that you grew up in, in East Germany, the economic elites were rapidly replaced by the intellectually pretentious elites, let's say. And then that's like part of the argument you're making. But there's something else that's interesting there too because you opened up your argument in two ways. You pointed out that the Soviet propaganda was the water, communist propaganda was the water in which you swam when you were young, and it was everywhere, and that there was really no escaping it. But then you made a secondary argument, which was, "Yeah, but at the same time," swallowing that propaganda and then operating successfully within that system was something that appealed to your pride. And so that you had a reason—a personal reason—for buying into it.

It reminds me, I've been thinking about the doctrines of power, like the communist and the postmodern doctrines. I've been thinking about them in relationship to the story of Cain and Abel because in the story of Cain and Abel you have Cain, who at least regards himself as downtrodden and unfairly oppressed by Abel and by God. He goes to complain to God and he attributes his failure to the injustice of the world, and God says in response to him that his failure is actually at his feet and that the thing that's tempting and possessing him, making him bitter and resentful, was at his door and tempted him, but he invited it in, right?

That's a crucial thing. Is that there's a metaphorical equivalence there that I'm trying to tease out? On the one hand, you said you were fed a nonstop diet of propaganda. And, you know, I think increasingly that's the case for young people in the West. But on the other hand, you said, "Well, that also redounded to your advantage," right? Because it put you in a position of elite status and appealed to your pride. So would you say—what would you say—is it reasonable to say that it was the combination of those two things?

Absolutely. Allow me to illustrate. When I was in my fifth year of being in the United States as an illegal, I was awarded the Order of the Red Banner, the second highest decoration of the Soviet Union that had to be approved by the Central Committee of the party. And, you know, with that came a monetary award of 10,000—not rubles, but dollars. So there was an intellectual discrepancy there. I was being given an award in the currency of the country that we were trying to destroy.

So the KGB was sort of infused with that dichotomy. Well, I wanted to ask you about moral conundrums, but let's walk through your recruitment. Okay, so you're a young guy; you're smart. Now you're actually being offered a pretty interesting combination of adventures. So you get the material luxury and the excitement of traveling to the West. You get the excitement of acting as a double agent. You can tell yourself—and you're being told—that you're acting only on behalf of the world's oppressed, right? And you get to join the elite on the intellectual side, right? That's a pretty heady offer. You know, one of the things I do think about in relationship to what young people are being offered in the West is—and this is something the radical leftists are really good at—is that they have this vision of adventure as one of their offerings.

You know, the conservatives tend to push back against the utopian presumptions of the left, but they don't offer as well-developed a vision of, let's say, romantic adventure. So I think they let the young people languish. Well, you know you're making the case that you were being offered something that was pretty heady, right? I mean you got to leave your country; you got to be an adventurer; you got to work for the poor, at least you got to tell yourself that. And that all redounded to your intellectual advantage and to your status. When you were—let's walk through this. Stages of your recruitment when you were in college and university.

And I'm also interested—were you racked with moral conundrums while you were making the decision to work for the KGB? You know, you just told me what they put on offer. Now had you bought the propagandistic line completely, there wouldn't have been any moral conundrum because, of course, you would have been working for nothing but the good. But you already told me that you—I don't know if you became aware of this later or at the time—that your motives were contaminated by your own pride and also by your own, say, consumeristic desires. So what did you have to wrestle with morally when you were being recruited?

Nothing, and I tell you, had I had a steady girlfriend or a wife at the time, that would have been something to really wrestle with. I did not wrestle with lying to my mother because my mother was a very domineering disciplinarian, and I did not grow up in a loving family. The words— the German words—I never heard as a child spoken at one adult to another or one adult to me. So it was all very tough discipline. So I had no emotional tie to my mother, and that would have been the only moral quagmire. I would have stepped into everything; there were just friendships and relationships, and that was easy to deal with.

Okay, so why was that easy to deal with? Why were you willing—was the offer that was on at hand clearly attractive enough so that the price you paid in terms of friendships and so forth—leaving your interest in basketball? That all paled in comparison to this potential adventure, right?

Well, it didn't pale, but you know when we're talking about a moral quandary, I didn't betray anybody. I mean they had—had they known where I was going, they would have cheered me on. So I betrayed somebody down the road, but at that point, that came not into play.

Okay, so tell me, what did you study when you were in university? And I believe it was in university when you decided to join the Communist Party, and it was partly because you also knew at that time—like everyone knew—that if you didn't become a member of the Communist Party, your career ambitions were going to be severely truncated. So walk us through that and then also through your training.

Not severely truncated, but limited. And I did join the party because that was the right thing to do. You know, pretty much all the smart, ambitious individuals joined the party. By the way, the party at university wasn't as dumb as, you know, the front page of the Communist Party newspaper. We were pretty open with one another, and there were people complaining about that our leaders really weren't the right leaders, so there was some openness and some camaraderie that wasn't so bad. And there was some tolerance of things that were forbidden, such as listening to Western radio stations. So the party was not a bad thing.

But the funny thing is, you know, I studied chemistry. But here's another piece of irony: we had one course in philosophy. It was called scientific Marxism-Leninism. And so the thing is, we bought into this idea that Marxism-Leninism was a science just like, on par with physics because Marx discovered the laws that govern the evolution of human society, and we were just like helping out to bring about the end state, which is, you know, the Communist paradise on Earth. So, you know, this was all very consistent and I had no reason to question because, again, because of the elite status I had, why would I want to just, like, question the system that treated me very well?

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Okay, so you joined the party when you were in college and you were studying sciences, and you accepted the rationale that Marxism was a scientific discipline. And that its outcome in some ways was not only desirable but inevitable; you were speeding that along. You had your moral rationals for that. Lots of people believed that was the case, and certainly almost everyone, at least, made that claim in public. How did it come that you started to work specifically for the KGB? How did they find their potential partners and allies in Eastern Germany?

I can't, for the life of me, trace back who actually suggested to the KGB—or what suggested to the KGB to get in touch with me. My guess is that they had access to the files that they kept on every adult in the country. And they did the same thing that the CIA has been doing for a long time—they recruited students at, you know, in universities, the quality universities. So, you know, this was a targeted search, and they came up to my record and said, "Wow, not only is he academically outstanding, he also is a party member; he plays basketball and he's a student leader who leads groups of students and plays the guitar." So there was something there that said, "We got to take a look at this guy."

One day they knocked on the door. You could not reply, by the way, you wouldn't—I wouldn't even know where the KGB was situated. There was no phone number, there was no address. So they sought out who they would want to talk to. And one day that happened: somebody came to visit me in a dorm room. I don't want to make the story too long; it was a German, and I thought it was Stasi. But it was not, because, you know, after some talk, he asked me just one question: whether I would imagine that one day, after I graduate, I would work for the government.

I read between the lines, and I gave him the answer he was looking for. I said, "Yeah, absolutely, but not as a chemist." So then he invited me to have lunch, or, you know, that’s a big meal in Germany, at the number one restaurant in town. As I see him sitting there, I walk into the restaurant—there’s another person at the table, and I was a little bit hesitant. But he came—my first contact came up to me, led me to the table, and he said, "Oh, by the way, I would like to introduce Herman. We are cooperating with our Soviet comrades." And then he said goodbye, and that’s how I landed with the KGB because Herman was a Russian.

So do you want to tell everybody who's watching and listening the difference between and the similarities between the Stasi and the KGB, and also why you ended up working specifically for the KGB rather than the Stasi?

Well, I think the KGB got first dibs on candidates that they really wanted. The KGB and Stasi were like big brother and little brother. They operated the same way. The KGB was more radical with regard to how they dealt with dissidents. I mean, you know—the gulags. There were millions in gulags; there were thousands and maybe a couple of hundred thousand dissidents in jails. But it wasn’t quite as oppressive, and obviously, the KGB was much, much bigger in terms of numbers—raw numbers. The Stasi was pretty big, but, you know, when you take into consideration how many people were full-time employees and how many people actually cooperated—and you’re familiar with the lives of others, that movie, yes? You know, where family members spied on other family members. It was a rotten system; it was a rotten society. I never had a hint; it didn't happen in my family, and I never had a friend who would talk about something like this. So I had no reason to question that.

Well, I was actually curious about that because I was wondering—we know now that about one in three people in East Germany were informing for the Stasi, and they were often informing on family members and friends. And my sense is, I can't see how that could possibly be the case without corrupting the culture to a massive degree. You mentioned earlier that you had a rather cold relationship with your mother, and so I was wondering, to what degree were family relationships in East Germany in general fragmented? How much of that had to do with the culture of informing, and were you unaware of the fact that this culture of informing was so deep and had had a corrupting influence on the culture at large?

I was totally unaware. I lived in a bubble.

How do you think it was that you were that you had been protected from that?

Well, I wasn't the only one. My best friend, who I still have a relationship with—he lived in the same bubble, somehow. See, but now something comes to mind. Amongst the student population—there were about 80 of us—we had a couple of guys that didn't fit in, and they weren't academically that great, but they were just like a pain in the neck, and they were eventually eliminated. And nobody would have had a problem reporting on those because they, you know, they were in the way, and they could become animadverted, right? So there’s a rationalization going on. So there was some—I actually had some exposure to particularly the fate of this one fellow who was expelled from university, but I tell you, the opposite: I had a roommate—a dorm roommate—who was one of the few people that openly confessed that he was a believing Catholic, and he was a good student. When it came to a point where the decision was made who would go on for a doctorate, I thought he was a good guy; he was a smart guy. When I asked him one question, I said, "If you had to take up arms to defend the East German Democratic Republic, would you do it?" And he said yes; he has a doctorate. So there were some things, you know, that you could move in the right direction. You had to be in the right environment, and university was not as stiff and not as, you know, dogmatic with regard to communism.

So once you had this interview at the café and you... how—first of all, what was offered to you at the café? And then how did you start working with the KGB?

Oh no, no, no. Oh, sorry. Nothing was offered to me other than, "Let’s meet." So I met Herman for like at least six months just in his vehicle, and we would just talk a little bit. And you know, he opened the curtain a little wider, a little wider, and I understand that now that I have some—the hindsight: he would go back after a meeting and he would take notes because there was a KGB archivist who saw the files on me—there were like several binders, big binders. After six months, he must have decided that I was worth pursuing further, and so we then met in an apartment.

Okay, and that’s where he gave me some Western literature to read, and that's where we talked a little more about what it would be like to go to West Germany as an illegal. Oh, just one thing that was very important for him to find out, and my situation in life really made that possible. He became a sort of father figure. He was about ten years older than me, and my dad was a weak link. You know, he was six years younger than my mother; she was the domineering, the smart one. And you know, he couldn't play with me; he had polio, and we never had a father-son talk, and eventually, he got out of that marriage and disappeared from my life. So I was grateful that I could talk to an older person—an older man—and I shared everything with him. I still remember what I said: “I'm so shy amongst the girls, and you know, I don't know—I just can't talk to the girls.” He said, “You keep one thing in mind.” I still remember that: “They are looking for men the same way you're looking for a woman.” It didn't help much at the time, but, you know, we had this relationship, and eventually, he got to a point after 18 months that he had discussed and interviewed me enough that he suggested to headquarters to make me an offer. That’s when it happened. It took 18 months.

One other thing: being a psychologist, you'd be surprised that I never met a psychologist or somebody who studied people who worked for the KGB. The only thing with regard to people skills and understanding people that was handed to me one day was the book by Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People. It's ironic, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah, that's for sure.

Yeah, so do you think that your relationship with him—to what degree was your relationship with him a genuine relationship of caring and mentorship?

Yes, it was absolutely. If I met only one individual that I interacted with in the KGB who I absolutely didn't like. He was an agent in Moscow, and he became my liaison for a while. If that person was Herman or played the role of Herman, I may have thought about the whole situation twice. This guy was a really wonderful guy.

Were you excited about the fact that you were having these clandestine meetings, first of all in a car? And why in a car, and then later in the apartment? Was that part of the adventure and intrigue?

That part wasn't that exciting, no. You know, what was really good for me was that I had a secret. So I had a—I was even elevated higher than everybody else knew, so the pride increases, right? But what he gave—Herman gave me some things to do, and they were not necessarily things that I comfortably did, such as, you know, ringing a doorbell and under some pretense, talking with the person who answers the bell to find out something about a relative of theirs in West Germany. That was hard, but my ambition didn't allow me to fail. I pulled it off. But that was unpleasant. It became much more interesting the first time I had the ability to go to West Berlin and look around. You know, this is—that’s so—you know, the Germans have something in their DNA; it's called Wanderlust—the desire to travel. And I—that was a big desire. I wanted to see, you know, Rome and Paris; I had read about these cities, and you know, West Berlin; that was my first adventure, and then my second adventure was in Canada, believe it or not. It was a test trip to where I spent a lot of time in Montreal.

All right, so what happened after 18 months? What kind of offer were you made, and how was that transformed into this trip to West Berlin?

Yeah, so that was very interesting. Herman sent me to Berlin. He didn't tell me, but by the way, the KGB almost never gave me any background on why they made a decision, this, that, or the other. There was nothing; there was no schedule, no planning, nothing they shared with me; it was ad hoc. They probably knew what they were doing; I didn't. So he sent me to Berlin for some additional training. So that’s when I had my first clandestine meeting. When you go to a certain spot, meet somebody who you don't know—you don't know what they look like—and you have you exchange key words, so you know you're talking to the right person. And so he gave me some things to do. He gave me West German magazines to read, and the day before my departure back to where I studied, he took me to the Soviet headquarters in East Berlin, which was also the KGB headquarters. He took me to an office, and there was this small man sitting behind the desk, very unimpressive. But the moment he opened his mouth, and he spoke only Russian, there was a phenomenal amount of psychological energy coming at me. You know, he did a little bit of small talk about, you know, how we need to do our best to defeat the evil capitalists and Nazis and so forth. And then he, out of the blue, asked me the question, "So, are you in or not?"

I didn't expect that, and I think this was deliberately arranged that way. So I said, "Well, I don't know if I qualify. I don't have any training." I didn't want to give an answer; I wasn't ready; I hadn't thought about it. And he said, "You qualify, and we will train you. But there's one requirement: we only work with people who can make big decisions very quickly. You have until tomorrow noon to give me an answer."

That made for an interesting sleepless night, right?

Well, that's also an appeal to pride because he's giving you the opportunity to demonstrate that you're one of those decisive people.

Good point, but, you know, decision or not, I was an academic, and I learned how to operate with logic. I tried the logical arguments of this and that, and it came out 50/50. So this is when my subconscious, my gut, made the decision, and I said, "Yeah." There was no forcing argument that says, "I've got to go," because there was so much good development ahead of me in staying in East Germany. Unfortunately, I would have wound up in the government and would have eventually become a miserable old communist. So I’m very glad I made that decision, and that’s when I then became officially—not an employee, but a sort of a cooperating agent, so to speak, because the employees had to have Soviet citizenship.

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So how long—how long after they took you on board did you go to West Berlin, and what did they have you do there, apart from these clandestine meetings? And what did you think when you got to West Berlin?

Let me tell you something first of all. When I thought I was in—so, you know, I packed my bags and went to Berlin. I wasn't in yet; they were still testing me. So I meet my new handler, a different guy, and I'm in his car. And I expected that I'm going to have a really, really nice apartment because it was the KGB, you know? I had lived in a dorm for the previous seven years. And we sit down, and Nikolai was his name. He turned to me and said, "I already have a task for you." I said, "What, really?" And then he said, "You've got to find a place to live that is in a place where there was a shortage of living space."

All living space was controlled by the government. There was an impossible task.

All right, so that was a test. I didn't know it was a test, but, you know, I responded the right way. I didn’t make a face; I didn't make the argument that this is impossible; I just went about and found something. I found the worst place I’ve ever lived in—like a one-room concrete structure that had running cold water, a chair, and a bed. And I didn't tell this guy, and I think that impressed him greatly. So if I failed this, I was out.

At that point, if you're out, your career is over too; I couldn't have gone back to the university. So I had no idea that I was an endangered species, and West Berlin was the final test. They had me go there twice with an Eastern passport, and the first time they just said, "You just walk around; you know, have a beer, look at the stores." Just get a feel for the place.

As I show up, I tell people nowadays that to make it clear what the difference was between the East and the West: the West was a movie that was made in color; in the East, it was all black and white because almost all our buildings were brown or gray. It was ugly. And there were a couple of nice buildings, but generally, it was ugly. So that was very interesting.

And I looked through the display windows of the department stores; the beer was better; the sausage was better. But you know, this all yeah—on the one hand, you rationalize it away, on the other hand it says, "Hey, that's going to be a good life," right? So the second visit, I had to pass yet another test. I had to ring the doorbell in an apartment building and make friends out of the people that answered the door.

And I did good. The reason I knew for sure that was another test and that if I failed that test, I would have my career would have been at an end before it started: I met accidentally a classmate of mine from high school who was going to be an illegal for the Stasi, and he had to pass the same test, and he pooped in his pants. And he came back and told them, “I can’t do this.” And guess what? He had a degree in engineering; he never worked as an engineer for the rest of his life.

So endangered species indeed. I had no idea. More endangered than the entire time I operated in the US.

So why do you think you were wise or canny enough to accept the task of finding an apartment under impossible circumstances, and then to accept the apartment you did accept without complaint and with good grace?

Okay, triple answer. First of all, failure was not an option because of the way my mother raised me. You know, I would come home with a B, and I would tell her there was the best grade in the entire class, and she would answer, "Well did they have A’s available?" Failure was not an option, number one. Number two, it was instinct. I found out many years later when I came to when I was confronted with that concept; I'm wired to be very stoic. So I didn't show any emotions when he made that ridiculous order, so to speak. And thirdly, I accepted this because I was used to having lived in miserable conditions—not too good. You know, the college dorms were pretty crummy; there was no privacy, and it was worse than the dorm, but it wasn't something I couldn't handle.

Okay, so, and you know—and again, this was an authority figure. Even though I was anti-authoritarian, I had learned to play with the authority, or else, because one time when my anti-authoritarian self ran away with me in high school, I got very close to being kicked out of high school—a severe reprimand in front of the student body—and I realized you got to play ball and keep your feelings to yourself.

Okay, so how long after that did you end up in Montreal, and how did you establish yourself in North America?

Oh yeah, and I’m curious about—you mentioned that you did observe that life in West Berlin was in color and of a higher quality, but did you depend on that rationalization that all that had been accomplished through oppression and theft, essentially? Or how did you deal with that?

The rationalization became part of my, you know, what I call foundational knowledge about the world. You know, I didn’t think about this repeatedly; I took it in, and I owned it.

Okay, so, with regard to the other question, you know, I was supposed to go to West Germany—makes sense, right? There are no cultural differences, no language differences, and so forth. But I also was required to study another language, and they told me, "Everybody has to," and I picked English. I was really good at it, and so one day, I had a visitor from Moscow. At this point, I had an apartment already. But when I got a key to the apartment, I was actually officially in finally. It took about six months.

And he just wanted to know how I was doing with English. I showed him a book on the shelf and said, "I can't read that without the help of a dictionary." Then a light bulb went on, and within a week, I had a tape recorder, and I was asked to say something in English, whatever. Once they had the tape, within a week later I was on a plane to Moscow where I was interviewed by a college professor who taught English or Russian and an American citizen who had wound up—she fell in love with a Russian somehow and wound up living in Moscow. They were asked specifically, "Is he good enough? Can we teach him English so well that he can pretend to have been born in the United States?"

The Russians said, "No," the Americans said, "Yeah, I can teach him American optimism." And so I spent two years in Moscow where I worked with her and did a lot of phonetic exercises. I worked like a maniac and, point you're remarkably accent-free; I hear my own accent when I listen to tapes, but certainly, I don't talk like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Right, right.

So, you know, I had this rare talent to acquire another language without a strong accent in my adulthood.

Okay, so at one point, it was determined that I was ready to go, and that's when they sent me to Canada to do two things: you know, figure out what it's like to live in the United States—we thought, you know, Canada was like a mini version of the US—not quite true, but they didn't know any better. And I was supposed to get a birth certificate of an individual, of a young man who passed away at an early age in the US, and that was an interesting situation.

I can talk all day, and I want to be careful not to go too far because I want to make sure that we cover all the topics that are important to you. So bottom line is, I failed to get that birth certificate. And interestingly enough, you know, he is a dead person who is asking through the mail to get his birth certificate. I should have been captured right then and there. I got lucky.

So after close to a year, a diplomat—a KGB diplomat—in Washington DC found the gravestone of Jack Barsky, who died at an early age—at the age of 11—and he was able to procure the birth certificate. And at that point, I was ready to go. And that was in 1978.

1978.

Okay, so I was in Montreal not long after that. I moved there in 1984. It was a wonderful place to live; I thought I really enjoyed Montreal.

What was it like for you in Canada there, in Montreal? And how did you set up your North American life? You got your ID, obviously, that was necessary. And what did the KGB have you do at this point? I mean they were setting you up so you had a life in North America, and that was working successfully.

Well, that—you know, just to answer what it was like in Canada: you know, I mostly was a tourist, and I had a bar that I visited a lot so I could talk with people, and I made some friends—a couple of friends. I had a French Canadian girlfriend, and one thing I got to tell you—I was at the Forum when Guy Lafleur broke the record of most goals scored in a home game, in that Forum in one season. And the Forum broke out into spontaneous applause; there was like 15 minutes, there was no game anymore. So that was great, and especially since I had learned to appreciate ice hockey while I lived in Moscow.

But anyway, I came to the United States in the fall of '78, and my primary task was to take that birth certificate that I had and parley that into bona fide American documentation—primarily a driver’s license and a social security card so you could live and work like a born American. I had a backstory that was long that had me live on a farm for a long time, and the best job I could find was a bike messenger. I spent four years riding a bike and carrying packages in Manhattan.

Well, that must have been exciting.

You know, it wasn’t that bad.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, biking in Manhattan, that’s no trivial operation. I’m sure you got to know the city real well.

I got to know the city like the palm of my hand. And I also became a street urchin. You know, I knocked the ice cream cones out of pedestrians that were in my way, and I interacted with a lot of very ordinary Americans. That gave me an opportunity to actually become an American because theoretically, learning the language and talking to somebody who had lived in the United States doesn't make you an American. You have to watch them; you have to know what they talk about; what’s important; and facial expressions and body language and all that.

Without that messenger job, I probably would have been busted too. I was lucky; it was not by—it was by accident. And interestingly enough, I made enough money because I was not an employee; I didn't get minimum wage as a bike messenger; I got commission, and I made enough money to go get an apartment and hang out with people and so forth.

And then, without getting into detail, I was supposed to get a passport and then go back to Europe and establish a company. The KGB was going to—you knew how they knew how to do this—move money into that company so that within two or three years, I would go back to the United States with a few million dollars and repatriate that money and immediately become upper middle class and then become a really, really dangerous agent.

Okay, so what were they—so there’s a lot of investment of time that you’re putting into this, I mean, obviously. And the KGB is actually showing possibly a certain degree of patience. What exactly were they setting you up to accomplish? You said they were going to put you in an upper middle-class position. Now that you’ve established yourself as American, what were they hoping that you could do for the Soviet Union?

They told me that, finally, my task was to operate in the realm of foreign policy—getting to know people who make foreign policy or at least influence foreign policy. That was only the partial truth. I found out much later that there were the heads of the illegals, two of them after the KGB was disbanded, gave interviews, and the number one value that the KGB ascribed to my being in the US was my being in the US. And I tell you why that makes sense.

Toward the end of the Cold War, there was this battle between the CIA and the KGB, and it was constant. All the agents, except for us illegals, were diplomats; and diplomats were expelled, and there was retaliation. They were worried that, at one point, diplomatic relations would be completely interrupted and the only ones left behind enemy lines would have been us illegals. And guess what? Who would have run Aldrich Ames and, um, forgot his first name—it’s Hansen, the most dangerous moles in the history of the United States and the most successful spies for the KGB. So they never told me any of that, but I knew it was like I was going to, you know, get to know members of conservative think tanks and, you know, the Trilateral Commission. I don't know why they were so obsessed with the Trilateral Commission, and they were very much obsessed with Zbigniew Brzezinski and the Columbia Institute for Foreign Relations or whatever it's called.

As a bike messenger and student and junior computer programmer, I had no ability to befriend people like that, but I would have had that ability if I had been able to rise into the upper middle class very quickly, right? And so they were willing to spend the time and put in the energy to give you that very well-developed backstory in the hope that you would be positioned maybe in a decade or something.

It was a long-term game. Yeah, they were not impatient. They actually were very, very appreciative of the fact that I improvised a lot and overcame obstacles, and, you know, you don’t get the Order of the Red Banner if you weren’t doing really well, right?

Right, right.

So they—okay, so they were regarding all your maneuvering and your problem-solving in North America as exactly what you should be doing. Now, you said thank God that those plans didn't materialize.

Now, so how did your career develop after that, and why—and why are you pleased that the goal that was in mind for you didn't make itself manifest? Because I'm able to talk to one Dr. Jordan Peterson today. My life changed so radically for the best. God forbid I’m a successful KGB agent, and the Wall comes down; I'm saying, “What's going on here?” And then the Soviet Union falls apart. Now I'm stuck. I would not have notified the FBI of my existence. I would have gone back to Russia, and I would now live a very miserable life in Russia because I never served Russia. I served—not even the Soviet Union; I served the Communist cause. And, you know, I learned the truth, and as I say, the truth shall set you free. I'm a free citizen to the extent you still have all the freedoms that we supposed to have.

Right, right.

Okay, so let's—let's now jump ahead. Now you start working as a coder, if I remember correctly.

Yes, sir, I did.

Okay, and at some point, you come to the attention of the FBI. How does that—how do you start that new career and how do you come to the attention of the FBI?

Well, I came to the attention of the FBI because of a betrayal, and this is another situation where I would, if the person was still alive, I would thank him on my knees for his betrayal. He was an archivist by the name of Vasil Mokin. He was an archivist in the KGB, and he had access to all the records because he managed the records. He started reading those records, and he found out what an evil organization the KGB was. So he developed a severe hatred of the Soviet system and the KGB, and he figured out the only way to do damage was to copy some information.

Over many years, he took handwritten small pieces of paper with handwritten notes on them in his underwear and in his shoes and his socks and then transcribed them and piled it all up and buried the material in the dacha. In 1992, he wound up in Estonia at the British Embassy and told MI6 what he had. They were able to dig this stuff up, they took it to England, and eventually shared some of the information. It took a while with the FBI, and amongst that enormous amount of data, there were a couple of sentences: "There’s a fellow named Jack Barsky, who is an illegal KGB undercover agent who lives in the northeast of the United States."

And it didn't take the FBI very long to find me because, you know, they looked at Social Security data, and there was only one Jack Barsky they found who got his Social Security card at the age of like 35 or something.

Right, okay. So you—you moved to Manhattan in 1978.

I arrived in New York in ’78 and I was in Manhattan in ’78. I stayed one year in a hotel.

Okay, so you were—you were successfully undercover for at least 15 years.

I was successfully undercover—not detected—for 19 years in the service of the KGB. Only 10 years, I resigned after 10 years.

Oh, okay.

So how—okay, so how did the resignation come about and why?

And you will understand that I’m given to understand that you have a great relationship with your daughter. So this is what happened: I had a girlfriend in the US who I married. Without getting, again, too much into detail, she decided to become pregnant. I watched this little girl grow up, and when she turned 18 months, I knew I was in love with this girl. I was so much in love with her that I could not imagine leaving her. And I tell people this: this is when the arrogant adventurer joined the human race.

Oh yeah.

Because this was an act of unconditional love. And at that time, the KGB got spooked, and they thought I was about to be arrested by the FBI. And we had an emergency procedure; there was—we both knew what to do if there was an emergency. And they activated that procedure with a signal at a signal spot. And I walk by that spot every day, and all of a sudden, one day, I see this red dot and that said, "Danger! Get out of here immediately!"

And I’m sorry for that bad word, but the only—I have to say it because this popped into my head. Oh, what do I do now? I want to take care—I had no idea how to take care of this child. And I knew that if I leave her, she would grow up in poverty because her mother had only four years of schooling. Okay?

And so I went back and forth, back and forth. I played for a time, but it got to a point where they were checking on me, saying, "What's going on?" And they found me. A man came up to me; I was waiting for a subway train, and he sidled up to me, and he whispered with a clear Russian accent, "You got to come home or else you're dead, dead."

Now the point was that they knew that I knew that they knew. Because before that, I could have been in a hospital; my radio could have been broken; a lot of things could have been happening to me; and I was not able to comply.

Well, so now I had to make a decision. Do you know what a dead drop operation is?

No.

It's an operation where you hand over not information, but something that has weight and dimensions, such as a passport, money, and so forth. You put it in—you put it in a container, you drop it someplace where somebody else would pick it up. They, uh, through a shortwave radio, told me to go to a dead drop operation this one day. At that point, I went because I knew there would be money and a passport. So at minimum, I would just pocket the money, right? I had not made a decision, and it was really interesting because when I went—the dead drop operation has a couple of signals involved. So the first signal is the person who deposits the container says, "I go and get it." Okay?

I put it there. So I saw the signal, and I went to the place, and that place was impossible to miss because I had found it myself. It was a tree with a hollow bottom, and there was no container; there was no crushed oil can, and I just—I did a double take. I walked around, walked around, it wasn’t there. I walked out of that park, and my subconscious again made a decision, and it said, "I'm staying." That was an irrational decision because everything I knew at the time that was good for me was over there in the East. I would've gone back as a conquering hero.

And even if I manage to stay and the FBI doesn’t arrest me, if they do arrest me, I’m no good for this child either, so I should have rationalized and said I got to go; I have no choice. My subconscious overrode any of that logical thinking, and obviously, it was a tremendous risk, but I had no choice. It was—it’s the power of unconditional love.

Yeah, well, that’s a very interesting issue. So it sounds to me—and correct me if I'm wrong—that what you're relating is that the love that you developed for your daughter—so I would hazard to guess that that was perhaps the first genuine love that you had in your life, and that that was enough to break the grip of your intellectual hubris.

Something like that. Is that correct?

100% correct because there was a point when this girl—she was about five years old. She couldn’t—she wasn’t admitted to kindergarten because she was behind in her ability to speak, and I told my colleagues, I said, “I think my daughter’s a little dummy—but I love her anyway.” So intellect to me was not important anymore, so you’re right about that. And, you know, one of the times I was in love, it was passion, and there was obviously sex involved. There was no sex involved, and unconditional means you can’t get anything back but a smile.

So how did you actually manage to get out? I mean, that must have been—with its—I mean, I can't understand why they let you out, and then—well, and then let’s discuss how you ended up working for the FBI.

Yeah, they hired themselves a brilliant guy with a brilliant subconscious, and it popped into my head and said, "Oh, wait a minute! I just tell him I can't come because I have HIV/AIDS." And since I knew to be brutally honest with everything, and since they didn’t know that I had a child, I was certain of that. They couldn’t think of a reason why I was lying to them. It worked.

Okay, okay, and so how do you—how did you come to the eventual attention of the FBI? And what did it mean that you worked for them?

Well, what they wanted from me—it wasn't quite clear initially—but they knew that they couldn’t—wait a minute; did they know that I was already declared dead?

I can’t remember. But in our first interview, I told them that I don't exist in Germany anymore, so they couldn't turn me.

Okay.

That would have been a great—but they also—no, I remember they found out after observing me for two years that I wasn’t active anymore, so I was not a target to be turned, but I was a target to be debriefed in the greatest of detail. We—I spent hours and hours talking with the agent who interviewed me about every single detail in my life, and apparently, that is very useful because even, you know, the successors of the KGB, you know, who—their training and that, you know, there’s a DNA—organizational DNA—that’s handed down.

The information that I gave them was considered very, very useful. And one other thing: at the time when they caught up with me, Hansen and Ames were still operational. No, they had been caught. I’m sorry, but there were concerns that there were other moles and that I might be running one of them.

So sometimes finding out a negative is actually a really good thing. The fact of the matter is the FBI leadership was so impressed with what the FBI team did that my—the lead agent got a commendation by the FBI by the head of the FBI. So it is what it is; I’m not making that up. You ask them; they will tell you it was really good information that I was able to give them.

So what do you think it was that you provided to them that they found so useful?

What makes foreign illegals? What kinds of people the KGB was recruiting. Turns out that the CIA is recruiting the same type of people.

Right, right, well that makes sense. I have friends in the CIA, and it's almost identical. There's a list of character traits that, you know, things that you're born with rather than you acquire—not skills.

Yeah, that the KGB was looking for, and I shared that list with a retired CIA agent, and he said, "Well, that's—we had the same list."

But you know this confirmation is important for counterintelligence.

And to what extent, you know, that is specifically useful, I don't know that—I don't—I don't know the details. I was also given a test by two eminent psychologists on a contract with the FBI. They gave me two days of test, and the lady who gave me the Rorschach test—her claim to fame was that she also analyzed the Unabomber.

And when she was done, she said, "I have never interviewed somebody who had that many stories to tell about these damn ink blots."

Right, so it’s creativity.

I had to be creative to be successful.

When you look back over your career, I’ve got two questions for you. I want to know when you look back over your life, what do you regret and what are you thankful for? And I'm also interested now—you had immersed yourself in this value and belief system that characterized communism. You obviously abandoned your allegiance to that in favor of, at least in part, in favor of the relationship with your daughter. But you also make allusions in your book to starting to study other philosophical matters and religious matters. So first question is, when you look back on your life and your career, how do you evaluate what you did and where you ended up ethically and morally? And second, how did you—when you abandoned your allegiance to the utopian vision of the communists and you started inquiring philosophically and theologically into other domains, what did you conclude?

No good. Very good questions. The one thing I regret is that I—the woman I loved in Germany—when I decided not to go back to my German family, it was because of the love for a child. But I abandoned that woman, and I loved her. I broke my promise. That can't be undone, and that’s really the most regret I have.

I don't regret anything that I did as an illegal agent simply because I was never told whether, let's say, some of the people that I pointed to for possible recruits were recruited, what happened to them. I have no knowledge of what I should regret if there was something else.

So, there’s no specific guilt that you carry for the things that you did, partly because you don’t know what the consequences of the more. Yes, they never once congratulated me on a tip that I gave them. I never got any feedback, period.

Okay.

That’s one of the weaknesses of the KGB, by the way, because if you have to make decisions on your own all the time and you don’t have a proper frame of reference, you wind up making bad decisions.

Right, right, right. Without the broad—yeah, well that’s the problem with not informing people, right? Is you have no context to guide you when you're making decisions.

Yeah, and that secrecy was rooted in the revolutionary background of the KGB, you know, the cell structure.

Okay, so, what I'm grateful for, first of all, I'm grateful for living in the greatest country that ever existed on this Earth, particularly the country as it was constructed by the founders. Simply because I’m a student of history, and I am convinced that one of the biggest flaws that left-wing thinking has is the idea that man is fundamentally good and all we have to do is—and that communism was the same thing—we have to take the shackles away from them.

It’s the circumstances, and I know for a fact, when you look at history and you just—there’s so much anecdotal evidence that man—we all have the seed of evil in us, many of us deal with it very well. But it turns out in history, the ruling people were mostly evil, you know? And so the Constitution is constructed in such a way to manage that evil—not eradicate it; manage it by, you know, the separation of powers and the whole idea that all men are created equal and have these inalienable rights—that appeals to me. To my anti-authoritarianism and my absolute disgust with collectivism.

We are not getting the rights from the buff. We are not getting the rights from the law. The law actually can take rights away from us. Some of them are necessary to be taken away, such as, you know, to get the funds to defend the country and so forth. But most of the laws that we have in this country are taking rights away from us.

So, it is what it is. But how did you come to the conclusion or what convinced you of the validity and utility of the doctrine of inalienable rights? Is that certainly—that's certainly not a hypothesis associated with communist utopianism, for example. Why did you come to that conclusion?

That’s a good leading question because I became a Christian. And it was a pretty slow progress. I became a deist first because after I started thinking about and getting exposed to, like, thinkers like C.S. Lewis, I realized my atheism was an idiotic belief system. You know, to just believe that the universe just exploded out of nothing and then ordered itself in a way that we have all this complexity—that makes perfectly no sense.

And let’s assume, even if it was already there, it violates the third law of thermodynamics when a closed system, which the universe is ultimately a closed system, will tend toward disorder. So where does the order come from? So there was a logic behind me becoming a deist. And then the love word came into play again. I was evangelized by a woman that I hired. But I didn’t become a Christian because I wanted to marry her. She opened my eyes to the Bible. We did some Bible study, and then she invited me to church.

And at that time, the love word came back into play. I was in a really, really bad divorce with the woman that I had married and that had the daughter that I was in love with. She went mentally ill, and it was a lengthy divorce. I was the only time in my life I was actually depressed. And this young lady, whom I secretly courted—I was in love with her; she didn’t know that—invited me to the church. And as it happens so often when you go to church, and you listen to the pastor, you know, he was talking to you because he was talking about the love of God.

So what do you make of love, then? You know, you said that the first time it really transformed you was a consequence of whatever manifested itself to you and your daughter. And the effect of love on your life was what? Would you say it was outside of the domain of mere rationality? And so how do you make sense of the transforming power of that love, and how does that fit into your intellectual apprehension?

Love to me is the strongest emotion that humans can have, and we are ultimately emotional beings. So when they say love conquers all, I have proof. And as I embraced the faith and as I realized what God did for us, I’ve become a real loving person, loving even the ones that you don’t like because the love is something that says something about yourself. If you can love the unlikable, that makes you whole, so to speak. And you know the life of Jesus is so phenomenal, the way I would like to be living and be seen. At least I’m trying to get to that point, and I think I’ve traveled a long way. One of the things that made a huge difference in my life the last year was coming to Texas and being around a lot of loving, wonderful people and great churches, that are not afraid to talk about what’s going on in society these days. Not cowardly like many others that I’ve visited.

So let me—I’m going to talk for everybody watching and listening. I’m going to talk for another half an hour with Jack on the Daily Wire side, and I think we’ll probably go deeper into this issue of faith because we’ve covered a fair bit of his autobiography, which is what I often do. And so maybe we’ll close with this. I mean, as you know, the power of left-wing utopianism has made itself manifest once again in the West. I mean, I spent a lot of time traveling in Eastern Europe in the last few years, and one of the questions that I was constantly bombarded with in Eastern Europe was, "How is it that the West could come under the sway of the ideas that were so destructive to us for so long? And what could we do about it?"

What I would like to ask you is for the people who are watching and listening, like you, out loud—in some detail—what you found attractive about the utopianism that was being offered to you as a purpose for life. What message would you have to young people who are now attracted by that vision of helping the world’s oppressed and poor, identifying the oppressors, and having the adventure that goes along with that pathway to redemption?

I mean that was offered to you. You followed it for a long time. You eventually rejected it. You found a religious calling instead. But you understand why that vision was so attractive. So what can you say that might be of some utility to young people who are attracted by those utopian ideas?

Well, if I would say, "If you respect yourself, you don't want to be a fool, do you?" I'm talking to a young person now—you don’t want to be a fool, so you are being fooled all the time. I tell you that you need to go check out the truth and not just take it in as it's being presented to you the same way I took it in. But the difference is, we didn’t have a marketplace of opportunities. There is a marketplace of opportunities. You can find out the undeniable truth. You’re being lied to all the time, and that makes you a puppet. And that takes your individuality out of you, who you are.

You think that’s going to make for a happy, fulfilled life? You’re meant to be an individual and not a member of a crowd.

So what is it that you—how old are you now? And first, let’s start with that—how old are you?

I'm 73.

And what do you occupy your time with now?

Oh, you know, I am so lucky that I don't have to use the phrase "Thank God it’s Friday" anymore. I get to create! I write; I do public speaking, and I just developed a masterclass that I call applied spyology that is primarily going to be talking to young people—mostly men, I think—and I think another voice like that, that is sort of side-by-side next to you, is probably not competition. I think it's a good thing to have.

And with regard to that, I am offering the audience something extra. I'm assuming there’s going to be questions, and we developed a website where people can get to the website and ask the questions, and I will answer every one of them personally. The website is called kgbspy.com, and we’ll have a little bonus. There’s a document that I can share as a freebie that points out how the KGB operated in the realm of persuasion that is not necessarily evil, right? Because when you look at what Dale Carnegie taught, it can be used for good and for evil.

So that's where I'm at, and this is my—I have a dual mission in life. Mission number one is taking care of my 13-year-old; I have a young daughter. And mission number two is to do what I'm planning to do—work with whoever wants to listen to me, but primarily young people, to help them evade a destiny where they become useful idiots.

That will—the useful idiots will be thrown away as you know.

Yes, I'm aware of that.

Yeah, yeah.

So what do you think that the people that you're trying to reach will learn as a consequence of taking your course? And you're making allusions to psychology. What are you trying to persuade them of, convince them of, teach them about?

Yeah, so this is going to be more or less infotainment. You know, I'm going to share some things that are not necessarily in the book—had to do with my operating as a spy—and then draw some conclusions where I say, "Well, this is what helped me get out of this mess." And, oh, by the way, you can acquire some of these skills yourself, such as, for instance, like developing your subconscious. You know, I studied people all my life. I can read people like this right now, and it's coming from my subconscious. I’m not—and there’s a few other things, and also, you know, I wasn’t taught people skills, but I acquired them.

And, again, I can talk about those, and coming from me, with the background I have and the fact that I'm still talking to you and I managed to get through all this nonsense that I was in, I think it may add value.

You know, I absolutely respect you as an academician. I have admired you since I found you. You know, having a scientific background—it’s great to have almost synergy with what I'm coming up with instinctively and what you come up with through science.

So, yeah, well, it sounds to me like you're trying to offer, at least to the degree that that can be done in a virtual environment, some of the mentorship even that you found.

Yes, sir.

Mhm, yeah.

Well, young people, you need—you even referred to this with regards to the first contact you had at the KGB. The fact that he offered himself as a mentor filled a void in your life, and that is absolutely necessary. People need an apprenticeship and a mentor.

Definitely, especially if they don't have it at home. And the other thing that they need is accountability partners. If they want to make changes happen, they need to have an accountability partner.

Right, right, right, right.

Yeah, yeah.

All right, well good. Is there anything else that you'd like to bring to the attention of this audience in particular, this more general audience, before we go to the other interview?

Just let me just tell you one thing, and I'm going out on a limb here. When I got the email from your producer, I got emotional. I'm not going to go any further. This was so important to me to be able to talk to you, and I'm so, so glad that it happened.

Well, thank you very much, sir. I appreciate also the opportunity to have heard your story and to have the privilege, too, of bringing to the attention of all the people that will be watching and listening. I’m going to talk to Jack Barsky for another half an hour on the Daily Wire side. I think we’ll delve into the philosophical and theological in some more detail in that half an hour. And I'd like to thank you, sir, very much for your forthright comments today and for walking us through the strange transformations of your life and for shedding some light on how one person was pulled into this terrible ideological battle that’s been going on for, well, the greater part of the last century. And I'd like to thank everybody watching and listening for their time and attention, and for the Daily Wire Plus folks for making this conversation possible. Thank you very much, sir.

You're most welcome. Thank you.