Jack Barsky

Jack Barsky was an East German spy living in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s. When the Soviet Union ended and Germany was reunified, he kind of figured he could become an illegal alien that nobody would bother to look for. He got married and had children (in addition to a son he had abandoned in Germany), and he settled down. Then the FBI found him. To his credit, Barsky said, "You got me" and started telling the FBI everything he knew. He ended up being allowed to stay in the US. You might think Barsky is an unlikable guy, but he is very likable. He also had an apparently genuine come-to-Jesus conversion and this book is actually published by a Christian publisher.

I have been fascinated by Soviet era spy-craft since the 1960s (awk! I'm old). At one time, the Soviets allegedly had schools that were set up like towns in the U.S. (or U.K., France, etc.) where prisoners or defectors from the target country taught Soviet agents how to impersonate real citizens of the target country. This is what novelist Nelson DeMille called "The Charm School" in his thus-titled novel. (Only DeMille had his fictional facility stumbled upon by an American tourist on the main highway to Moscow, which is exactly why sources who say these schools actually existed also say they were always located in remote regions; nowhere that a tourist could possibly just stumble on them.) It is also the system under which the main characters in the television series "The Americans" were trained, which is why the agents in that series sound so American.

In later years, however, the Soviets seem to have had fewer such Americanized agents. Many agents caught working for the current Russian regime still spoke English with foreign accents. Some were openly natives of Russia. Apparently there were always such agents. Rudolf Abel, a Soviet spy caught in New York in the 1950s claimed to be British but made no secret of his Russian parentage to explain his non-native accent. (See the movie "Bridge of Spies.")

Barsky took a path between the extremes of Abel and "The Americans" to become an "American." Tapped by the East German Stasi or Secret Police in the 1970s, he spent years studying spy-craft: how to stalk someone, how to avoid being stalked, how to make contact with other agents and pass on information, etc. He also began improving his English (which he had studied in school in Germany) by spending time in the Moscow apartment of two American communists who had defected to the Soviet Union. (One of the lessons he learned from them was, if you are not sure how to say it correctly in English, don't say it at all.) Barsky worked hard and ended up speaking American English with only an extremely slight accent.

Barsky then was sent to Canada where he lived for a few months. He tried to get an American id by applying for the birth certificate of a dead person. This had been easier to do in earlier decades, but by the 1980s some bureaus of births, deaths and marriage were cross-checking applications for birth records with death records. Barsky returned to the Soviet Union. Later he was smuggled into the U.S. under one identity and then was given the identity of a different dead person.

He applied for a social security number by telling officials that he had worked on a farm in upstate New York much of his life and had not needed a card before. This was actually an acceptable excuse in those days. With his new identity and fake citizenship, he first got a job as a bike messenger. After less than two years in this job, he went back to school and got a degree in computer programming. (In East Germany, he already had a degree in chemistry.) He got a job at a major U.S. company and rose to head their IT department. One of the observations made by the FBI agent who later arrested Barsky was that U.S. authorities should have spotted Barsky early on because here was a guy who had nothing but a G.E.D. and yet he suddenly went to college where he was at the top of his class and went on to become a hot-shot IT executive in practically no time.

During much of this time, Barsky was a sleeper agent - a dormant agent who was rarely called on to do any actual spying. Eventually he did a few assignments, but when the Soviet Union started to collapse he was given a message that told him to come home. By this time, Barsky had decided that his life in America was sweeter than it would ever be in the Soviet Union or East Germany. He refused to acknowledge repeated orders to go home. Finally he came up with a clever lie to fool the Center into leaving him alone.

Before he was arrested by the FBI, Barsky told his wife the truth. She was one of the victims of Barsky's deception because she was not an American citizen and had always assumed that her legal immigrant status was secure because her husband was presumably a citizen. This not being so threw her status into almost as much jeopardy as his. This is one of several reasons why Barsky doesn't seem like a great guy. His expressions of remorse for the people he hurt seem to be genuine, but, still, you see how the damage was already done.

Revealing quotes from this book:

It was harder to determine that I was not being followed. Caution is a spy’s best friend; paranoia is his enemy.

What I didn’t know was that the illegals program had been sputtering for many years and had suffered numerous failures. My recruitment was part of a renewed effort to establish a net of illegals in the United States.

Given my personal experience, Vasili Mitrokhin’s revelation that the first directorate of the KGB was fundamentally ineffective during the second half of the Cold War was not a surprise.… (more)

A non-fiction book written by Jack Barsky about his time as KGB agent working undercover in the USA. Living in the west most of the spy books I have read have been about agents working for the west and how they operated. This book is much the same but looks at it from the other side which is an interesting change of view. It is a well written book but Barsky didn't actually achieve much in his time as a spy which makes it all a little mundane when compared to spys such as Aldrich Ames or Oleg Gordievsky.… (more)