The Dr. Jeff Show Ep. 11 – Jack Barsky

Episode 11: Summary & Transcript

Disclaimer: Please note that this is an automatically generated transcript. Although the transcription is largely accurate, it may be incomplete or inaccurate in some cases due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

Episode Summary

Dr. Jeff interviews Jack Barsky, a former KGB agent from East Germany. Barsky recounts his recruitment and his mission to infiltrate the United States as an undercover agent. He discusses the ease with which he established an American identity due to the country’s lack of security awareness at the time. The pivotal moment in his life came with the birth of his daughter, which led him to defy a KGB recall order by fabricating a story about having HIV/AIDS. The conversation concludes with Barsky’s analysis of the resurgence of Marxism in the United States, which he attributes to a lack of historical education and the romanticized appeal of the ideology to young people, and he offers advice to the younger generation.

Episode Transcript

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:02):
Hey everyone, it’s Dr. Jeff. Welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show. On this show, I interview major thought leaders from lots of different fields to demonstrate that worldview changes everything. On this episode, I interview Jack Barsky. At least that’s what America thought his name was when he secretly infiltrated this country as a KGB agent.

Now, the KGB was the terror-inducing secret police of the Soviet Union, and they wanted Jack to come into this country and gather information so they could infiltrate and destroy our country. How that all happened, and Jack’s change of heart and how he managed to escape the KGB, is the stuff of a modern day thriller. But now as Marxism surges in popularity, Jack has a message I believe every American needs to hear and they will hear it on this episode of the Dr. Jeff Show. Jack Barsky, welcome to the Dr. Jeff podcast. Great to have you here.

Jack Barsky (01:07):
I’m going to enjoy being with you.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:09):
Hey, listen, we’ve got so much to talk about. Your story is incredible. You grew up in East Germany back when it was one of the most oppressive communist states in the world with the most intrusive secret police. And as a young man, you were recruited to spy on America. Tell us how that happened.

Jack Barsky (01:33):
Well, initially the recruitment was they really wanted me to spy, wanted to launch me into West Germany, which would have been the easiest country to spy in because there’s no language barriers and no cultural barriers. Interestingly enough, the KGB, the Stasi had about a thousand spies in West Germany. And in hindsight, I’m still asking myself, why did the KGB want another one or however many? And the bottom line is the answer is they didn’t trust each other.

So yeah, I was a very, very good student. I pretty much aced a very, very difficult chemistry program that went on for four and a half years. Not because I was the smartest, but because I had really good study habits. And I was a standout. I received a national scholarship that only allowed 100 concurrent recipients in the entire country at any moment in time. And people like that came on the radar.

(02:50):
It may well have been that the Stasi found me first and then handed me to the KGB. The first person who approached me was a German national, but I’m very much convinced that he was a volunteer for the KGB in those days.

Dr. Jeff Myers (03:10):
So Jack, just for our younger viewers, Stasi is the East German secret police.

Jack Barsky (03:18):
Correct. It’s an abbreviation.

Dr. Jeff Myers (03:20):
Soviet Secret Police was the KGB. So these were the ones who were grabbing people in the middle of the night, putting them in prison, torturing them, and so forth.

Jack Barsky (03:32):
Well, just to give you an idea of the size of these organizations, the KGB at its strongest had 500,000 employees, full-time employees, and probably a good million volunteers that were working with them. The Stasio had only a much, much smaller country, 100,000 full-time employees. And most of those, and both organizations were directed internally to manage, suppress the population to make sure that, in both cases, it was not the army that supported these dictatorships. It was the secret service, which is historically highly unusual.

Dr. Jeff Myers (04:21):
Right. And so in these situations, they created an incredible climate of distrust. So people couldn’t trust one another. They didn’t trust one another. Yes. But somehow they gave you an assignment to kind of spread that worldview to America. What was your assignment?

Jack Barsky (04:39):
Well, first of all, I need to correct something here. I was not aware of any of the things that I just told you. I knew that the Stasi existed. I knew that the KGB existed, and I also knew that they dealt harshly with the enemies of the revolution. And I was brainwashed like my contemporaries, many of us, to believe in that. And I was not aware of anybody who had been victimized by the Stasi.

So I was happy-go-lucky and a fully engaged young communist. So that made it, of course, a lot easier to recruit me because when you do something as dangerous as going deep undercover in enemy territory with the likelihood of being imprisoned, you need to have more than just a sense of adventure. You need to have more than just the big ego or just like doing something that very few people do.

(05:51):
You need to have some kind of a reason, a foundation, a cause. And my cause as when I signed up and as I still entered the United States was communism. We were clearly, we knew that communism would, that’s Marxist theory, would eventually conquer the world. And I was just going to try to contribute to accelerate this whole thing, this development.

Dr. Jeff Myers (06:20):
Yeah. It’s amazing to hear that because of course the word to Americans back in the 1970s and 80s was there are no communist spies here. There’s nobody here who really has the intent to harm our country.

Jack Barsky (06:35):
Everybody’s welcome here.

Dr. Jeff Myers (06:35):
Everybody’s a wonderful immigrant and so forth. But you, Jack, I want to skip ahead to where you came to New York City.

Jack Barsky (06:45):
Right.

Dr. Jeff Myers (06:45):
It sounds like you, at that point, they understood why they wanted you there, but it sounds like you were grasping as well that your job was to worm your way into American society somehow and begin to spread your worldview.

Jack Barsky (06:59):
That’s correct. The bottom line is they wanted their man. And actually at the time they sent me in that timeframe, they sent about 10 of us. I don’t know how many succeeded to actually establish themselves as Americans, but they wanted to have insiders out in enemy territory. They had tons of spies to KGB that were practically under diplomatic cover, either worked for the UN or were diplomats, Soviet diplomats, but they were fundamentally known to the FBI.

And so they couldn’t do a lot of things that a citizen, and I pretended eventually I acquired the documentation to pretend to be a citizen. I could move around freely and do things that the others couldn’t. One other thing that I want to mention, you talked about the idea that the United States felt secure. That’s one of the problems. And it’s still a problem today, but in my days, the US was wide open.

(08:13):
I mean, you could get on a plane without showing documentation. If you had cash, you could do practically anything. You could register at a hotel under the name John Smith and nobody would ask you for ID. So it was really easy for me to get going. Nowadays, you can’t do that anymore.

Dr. Jeff Myers (08:31):
Right. Yeah. That’s incredible. I remember some of that. I remember getting on an airplane with somebody else’s ticket. But yes, so America had this sense of innocence that allowed the KGB to send people in here to gather information, send it back, spread messages. What were you supposed to do other than just get into American society and build trust?

Jack Barsky (09:00):
See, this was one of those weird things. As I said, the very first task was to acquire enough documentation to be able to live and work as an American in the United States. That took me a little while. And the general direction I was given is I was supposed to gather political intelligence. In other words, get close to government decision makers, foreign policy primarily, or at least influencers. That was a tough task.

I was never once given a specific task to say, “Well, you should find a way to get to know somebody in the Carter administration.” What I was told is make as many contacts as you can possibly make and the higher up in the food chain, so to speak, the better. My problem was that with regard to my standing in society, I was way too low in the food chain to be able to reach up.

Dr. Jeff Myers (10:13):
What’s chilling to me about this story as it’s starting to unfold is that we have heard now of communist Chinese spies doing the same thing now, getting internships in Capitol Hill and then working their way up to be on the staff of different people. Are they running the same game plan?

Jack Barsky (10:38):
No, that’s a little different. They’re all operating under their own name. I acquired an assumed name and I impersonated an American. The Chinese are known to be Chinese. And if I’m not mistaken, there are about half a million Chinese students in the United States. And it’s a good guess that a certain percentage operate on behalf of the Chinese government because this is China, Russia, the old Soviet Union, they know where their people are.

And everybody who wants to study abroad will be approached by their secret service, but as to whether they might not want to volunteer and help them out, that’s good enough. And if one out of a hundred say yes, and it’s probably the ratio is a little bit higher, that means we have a whole lot of interesting people in all kinds of places, universities and postgraduate and whatever friendships they can establish.

(11:55):
It’s a situation. I don’t think anybody has an idea how much damage these people have been doing and are capable of doing down the road. It’s the numbers. It’s the numbers.

Dr. Jeff Myers (12:07):
Yeah. Half a million. Now, obviously we want to be kind to people who come from other countries. We don’t want to be mean. We don’t want to just develop a sense of suspicion. How do we manage that?

Jack Barsky (12:29):
Well, this is one of the major complaints I have about the United States. We just are not securely aware. It doesn’t mean that you have to become a xenophobe and look at everybody who doesn’t look like you with suspicion, but there has to be some awareness that there’s a possibility that the individual you’re working with, particularly if you know that they’re foreign nationals, that they might be up to something.

And I’ve worked in the US and some companies that have very, very rigid security requirements in the electric energy industry, nuclear plants and so forth. We need to have a little more security awareness all around. It isn’t just the organizations, but individuals. And this is not easy to do. It’s part of the American DNA, that to welcome everybody, there has not ever been a war fought on US mainland when the foreign power invaded. Pearl Harbor was Hawaii.

(13:47):
And so there isn’t really any memory of people being hostile. That’s not part of the American DNA. And I think we are still messing up big time when it comes to fighting enemy espionage.

Dr. Jeff Myers (14:04):
So it’s not an issue of whether we’re friendly to people who are from the outside, but you’re always having in your mind, if this person is from a country that does not have the US best interests at heart, there’s a really good chance that they might be sending information back and we need to be really aware of what we share with them, especially if you’re in nuclear power. When you mentioned that, I about passed out. I mean, you can imagine how the power grid, all of these things that are seriously a potential risk, being really security conscious.

Jack Barsky (14:40):
Absolutely right. And I think there ought to be some basic training because it is not that difficult to at least get to a point where you think, “Well, something might be wrong with this person.” There’s pattern recognition. You just got to pay attention. And again, what I would clearly not want is a revival of McCarthyism that all you have to do is denounce somebody and then you can ruin them. But again, awareness and there’s no training.

Think about how we handle these things here. My 10-year-old will soon have one of those typically, and they can be hacked into and used as cyber weapons. We don’t have even a basic course in high school and college, how to handle our electronic devices.

Dr. Jeff Myers (15:55):
Complete strangers are observing everything that you do in your social media.

Jack Barsky (15:59):
Well, you bet. The point being, we don’t let anybody on the road unless they prove that they can handle a car, but we hand out these potential cyber weapons to anybody who has the money to get one. Wow. So overall, I think security wise, and I’m not talking about organizations like the FBI and the CIA, I’m talking about the American population. We are still as vulnerable as can be compared to other countries.

And I don’t know if you can really do that much about it. It may take a massive breakdown in some way to, like nine eleven for about five, six weeks, everybody was security conscious and then we fell right back to our old way.

Dr. Jeff Myers (16:52):
Well, somewhere along the way, you had a change of heart. You decided that you did not want to be a KGB agent anymore. What happened? What flipped that switch?

Jack Barsky (17:08):
Well, it was triggered by another person and people who don’t know the story immediately would think it might have been a female, and they’re right, except it was an 18-month-old female. So it was in 1988 when somehow the KGB, they got cold feet. They thought that the FBI was on my case.

And in the world of espionage, all it takes is a rumor, somebody’s saying something and your handles get nervous. So they wanted me to leave, go back home and be done. And it was an urgent recall. What they didn’t know, that I had an 18-month-old girl by the name of Chelsea, she looked something like this.

Dr. Jeff Myers (18:16):
Wow. Wow.

Jack Barsky (18:19):
And this was really odd, and I still can’t explain how that happened, but I was a pretty hard-nosed egomaniac who was emotionally not very deep. But when I was given the command to go back, I just couldn’t do it. It was what I call, nowadays, I call this a massive attack of unconditional love. Yes. And I have repeated this because I have a 10-year-old now, and I would do anything to protect that one from harm.

And in terms of my daughter, Chelsea, I just wanted to make sure that she could grow up and have a good life. And without me to support her, she wouldn’t have had it. And I’m very grateful. She’s 33 years old now, and she’s doing quite well, and I’m very proud of her.

Dr. Jeff Myers (19:29):
Great story, Jack. Wow. Let me ask you, because I’m just personally curious, one, to kind of paraphrase a famous movie, one does not simply leave the KGB. How did you tell them, “I am staying here with my daughter. I am not coming back.”

Jack Barsky (19:49):
Yeah, that was a bit of a challenge, obviously. I stalled for quite a while because our communication was such that I never met somebody in New York, other people. That was a no-no. So the communication was through short wave radio or secret writing via regular mail. And so it took a while.

For instance, the order was given to me initially via a signal, a red dot on some kind of a lamppole or something that was part of the “communication plan.” When I saw it, I was supposed to just disappear without knowing why, and I just ignored it. And then I got more information through the weekly short wave radio transmission. And they said, “You got to come home because it is very likely that the FBI is about to arrest you.”

Dr. Jeff Myers (20:55):
How they would have known that is an interesting story, I’m sure.

Jack Barsky (20:59):
And the FBI and I have no idea why they thought there was a problem, but interestingly enough, I met a colleague of mine who was also East German, who also came to the United States to New York as an illegal undercover agent, and he was called back at the same time. Something spooked them, but three months later, they let him go back to the US because it was a false alarm. Wow.

(21:33):
So anyway, I stalled. I was supposed to set a signal someplace to indicate that I had heard the radio transmission, and I just didn’t set the signal. So there was always a possibility that the radio broke or the transmission was too weak, blah, blah, blah. So I stalled for about a month, and then they figured they went to an extreme, which as I said, it was a no-no to meet somebody, one agent to meet another agent, but they just wanted to know, am I still around? What’s going on? How come I don’t know?

And so I was approached one morning on a subway platform waiting for a train, was approached by a short guy in a black trench coat who just sidled up to me and whispered in my ears, “You got to come home or else you’re dead.” So now stalling was over because I knew that they knew that I knew this was direct contact, so I had to now make a decision.

(22:46):
And the decision was to stay. Now I had to make it clear to them why, and also hopefully explain it in such a way that there would be no harm to my relatives back in the East, and that then they wouldn’t try to come after me because I did know that they took defections very seriously.

(23:16):
Nowadays, I know particularly when somebody betrayed the motherland. I couldn’t have portrayed the motherland because I was German, but anyway, and I was inspired to come up with the second biggest lie of my life. The first biggest obviously was that I pretended to be an American and pretended to have been born in New Jersey. The second biggest lie was I sent them my resignation, so to speak, in secret writing.

And I explained to them that I had contracted HIV/AIDS, which was in those days a disease you could not cure, you would die from it and was highly infectious. And I think when they read that, they said, “Oh my God.” They trusted me till the very end. They did not expect that I was coming up with a lie. They had no good reason to think, why wouldn’t I want to go back? Because all the good things for me would have been back there.

(24:26):
The year before my quitting, I had received the second highest decoration of the Soviet Union. I was in very good standing and they treated us very well. Agents who coming back, I would have had a really good life with regard to, in the context of living in East Germany, I would have been, definitely, one of the elites. And so they couldn’t possibly think of, why does this guy not want to come back? Because they didn’t know that I had this child. Had they known that I had a child, maybe it would have dawned on them and say, wait a minute, something’s not quite right.

Dr. Jeff Myers (25:09):
Your whole cover would have been blown.

Jack Barsky (25:12):
Yeah. Clearly, I didn’t know that they would buy this concoction. So for about three months, I was on what one might call high alert. So for instance, when I went from my apartment to the subway station, it was a 15-minute walk. I would switch the time I would leave and I would switch the route I would go. So I wasn’t predictably at a certain spot at a certain time. And so after about three months, I figured nothing happened. It’s all good.

And that’s when I switched off completely. I now sort of started forgetting that I ever worked for the KGB because I now was focused on building the American dream. I was married to Chelsea’s mother. That’s a whole different story, how that happened. Just to give you a hint, she came to the US as an illegal alien and we dated. And when she, one time confessed that she was in the country illegally, and she maneuvered it in such a way that I actually married her so she can get a green card.

Dr. Jeff Myers (26:35):
She thought you were the New Jersey boy then at that point?

Jack Barsky (26:38):
No, of course I was. This is amazing. And we fooled the INS as well, because I had a genuine copy of an American birth certificate under the name of Jack Barsky. I had a driver’s license, I had a social security card. I was an American. The only thing that I didn’t have was a passport, but you didn’t need this for an immigration.

So anyway, my focus now was to take these two ladies, buy a house in the suburbs because I had a halfway decent job in information technology and live out the rest of my life without adventure. And by now I would be retired with probably a lot of money because I had a pretty good career, but somehow it didn’t quite work that way.

Dr. Jeff Myers (27:36):
There’s so much more of your story. And by the way, you wrote a book about this.

Jack Barsky (27:40):
Yes, sir.

Dr. Jeff Myers (27:41):
If somebody wants to dig into the details of it, just give us the name of the book real quick.

Jack Barsky (27:45):
It’s called Deep Undercover.

Dr. Jeff Myers (27:47):
Deep Undercover. So if somebody wants to see this, if they want to read the rest of your story, they can read how that happened. Meanwhile, back in all of this, the Marxist worldview started making a comeback in the United States from the inside. 75% of millennials say they would vote for a socialist for president. That’s a pretty shocking return. What do you think is going on there?

Jack Barsky (28:19):
When that actually started, I think there was one of the most tragic events in American history at the Vietnam War in the ’60s, early ’70s, which radicalized a whole generation of young people. And at the time, there was quite a bit of influence of communist propaganda leaking into the West. And I was still living in East Germany. We were quite optimistic that the end of capitalism was just around the corner.

And this generation that was very active against the Vietnam War, and in the process soaked in some left wing, in some cases, radical ideology, they became teachers, they became college professors. And so now we are already looking at, I think the second generation that has been taught by folks with a leftist stance, whether that’s always full-blown Marxism is a whole nother story. And here’s the problem, history is not being taught anymore.

(29:47):
Young people don’t learn, really, what really happened in the world. It’s either ignored or sort of distorted. And so the romantic notion of what communism can do for the world doesn’t have a counter argument. And I can relate to the romanticism. Think about it. There is no more oppression, there is no more discrimination. Everybody gets what they need. Everybody contributes voluntarily what they can afford. Doesn’t that sound good when you’re young? It sounded really good to me.

Dr. Jeff Myers (30:32):
It sounded really good.

Jack Barsky (30:34):
Yeah. And so when there’s no counter argument that says, well, this notion has never been implemented in practice. As a matter of fact, there were a number of revolutions in the history of the 20th century that honestly was started by revolutionaries who really were idealists, but they all wound up as dictatorships. And so the mechanism is such, and you think about it.

So you overthrow the old regime, now you need to make sure that the revolution is defended, the achievements of the revolution. So now you build up a military or security type apparatus to fight the enemies of the revolution. And before you know it, the enemies of the revolution become, some of them are other revolutionaries and on and on, and before you know it, you wind up with a dictatorship.

Dr. Jeff Myers (31:43):
Educatorship of the proletariat.

Jack Barsky (31:45):
It’s not the proletariat anymore. So this is the oxymoron of the basic idea of communism where it says to everybody, according to their need, from everybody according to their abilities. So who determines what your needs are and what my abilities are? So you need to have somebody who can figure this out, and that then becomes an elite, which is the Communist Party. And of course, every organization has to have some hierarchy.

Before you know it, you have at the top of the entire country, there’s no proletarian. There’s some people who just rise up the ranks and then become dictators or flunkies of dictators. It has always worked like that in history. There is no exception. You can have a community that is very supportive of one another, but even in smaller communities, there will be power struggles and there will be differences of opinion. Even in families.

(33:02):
Now, you think you can live in harmony in a country that has millions and millions of people or the United States as over 300 million people. It’s never going to work.

Dr. Jeff Myers (33:14):
Right. Right. Somebody’s going to take charge and make everybody else do it the way they want it to. So every one of these communist countries started out as what they called democratic socialist and then very quickly dropped the democratic part once the people who wanted to have power got it, and then they’re able to enforce their will on everyone else.

Jack Barsky (33:39):
There were elections, and it depends. Every country had a different way of becoming communistic. Like for instance, in Russia, initially there were elections, but where they left gained influence, but eventually it was a good old push that established the Bolsheviks as the ruling party. In Eastern Europe, it was established through the Soviet Union because when Hitler was defeated, the Soviet Union made sure that yes, the Democrats, they didn’t immediately install communists as the rulers.

This was somewhat democratic in the beginning, but it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that the communists would take charge. Look at what happened in Cuba. I believe, and I don’t know this for a fact, but I believe that Castro actually had noble goals, but then he ran into this idea that not everybody had the same goals that he did. And so you see how this all goes? It always goes in the same direction.

(34:55):
It goes in the same direction. And this is one thing that I would like to point out to young people who are ardent nowadays revolutionaries or are very strong supporters of leftist organizations. The revolution has a tendency to eat its own. In other words, once you take care of the arch enemies, then you look around and see who else you don’t like. And it could be the guy that was with you in the trenches.

Dr. Jeff Myers (35:28):
Now he’s not sufficiently pure.

Jack Barsky (35:31):
Exactly. And it happened when you read the history of the Soviet Union or the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the KGB. Oh my God. You know how many generals Stalin had executed?

Dr. Jeff Myers (35:46):
That’s right. I have no idea the number, but that’s exactly right.

Jack Barsky (35:49):
A lot.

Dr. Jeff Myers (35:50):
And the French Revolution is the first time I really noticed that, that Robespierre, the guy who started guillotining people ended up getting killed on the guillotine, right?

Jack Barsky (36:05):
That’s right.

Dr. Jeff Myers (36:06):
So young adults need to be aware.This is a worldview that is inherently self-destructive.

Jack Barsky (36:14):
It is.

Dr. Jeff Myers (36:15):
Yeah. So Jack, I get to work with a lot of young people, 40,000 young people every year. And as a guy who grew up in a communist system, grew up coming to this country to try to work on behalf of a communist government, what’s your word? What would you say to those 40,000 young people because they will become leaders and make a difference, whether it’s for a good worldview or a bad one?

Jack Barsky (36:49):
First of all, read a history book. Yeah. Read a decent book, and I can’t at this point recommend something, but about the history, let’s say European history of the 20th century. You get your hits or you get your Stalin, you get the Cold War, but delve a little bit into history.

Secondly, listen with critical ears because you are most likely being manipulated. But when you listen carefully, you may actually find signs of that manipulation. Don’t trust people that, they typically will work on your emotions. Use your head because you’re much easier manipulated when the appeal is emotional.

Dr. Jeff Myers (37:49):
Jack, one of the slogans we have at Summit Ministries is if you want to be a leader, you’ve got to be a reader because you can’t just watch Torvin. You can’t just pay attention to social media. You can’t just listen to the idealistic notions of your friends. You have to be informed and especially now.

Jack Barsky (38:09):
You’re 100% right.

Dr. Jeff Myers (38:11):
Yeah. Jack, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate the interview. I’m really interested in people getting a chance to take a look at your book. And I want everybody else to know too, this is why we spend so much time focusing on a Marxist worldview in our Summit Ministries programs, because it is a counterfeit worldview that intends your destruction, and it’s really important to understand that even as you understand the truth of a biblical worldview. So Jack, thank you again. Really appreciate your time.

Ryan Dobson (38:47):
Hi, everyone. I’m Ryan Dobson from the Rebel Parenting Podcast. When my parents, Jim and Shirley Dobson sent me to the Summit Ministries Worldview Conference when I was 17, we had no idea the impact it would have on my life. It changed me so much in two short weeks. I’ve returned every summer for 34 years. This summer, your student can attend an in- person conference. That’s right, in person.

Summit Ministry’s Worldview Conference challenges students ages 16 to 24 to think deeper about their convictions and their faith by engaging with today’s top worldview thinkers and apologists. Can you imagine in person with other students learning about the Christian worldview? If not, they can attend Summit’s virtual experience and it’s amazing. Change your students’ life forever by partnering with Summit Ministries Worldview Conference today. Find out more by clicking the link in the show notes.