YouSaid · the spoken record

Jack Barsky

lines on the record: 235
first: 2022-07-09
most recent: 2022-07-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I hated that name, the Albrecht. I didn't like it. It was very rarely used. My mother named me after a famous German painter, Albrecht de Duro. My cover name in Moscow was known as D And in the United States, I became Jack Barsky. In between, I used a whole bunch of other names that were associated with false passports that I used. One of the names, and I remember is William Dyson, because that is the name that was on the Canadian passport I used to enter the United States.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You bet the very first year I couldn't even work because I had to acquire the documents, Social Security Card and a driver's license to get a job. And then when I had the job, I worked as a bike messenger that gave me a good opportunity to listen because these people... They weren't very curious about me.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First year and first and second year in the United States because I could not interact socially without giving away that something was wrong with me. I had to learn how to be an American. They didn't teach me in Moscow. They couldn't.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, in East Germany and Russia, I believe Theft if you could get away with it was part of your economic activity. I have a friend who I went to school with up until my fourth year, and we reconnected. And he told me how he survived. He would just steal stuff and then sell it or trade it.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To me, it was really good. And you had it from white to very dark and all the varieties. The other thing that was good was if you knew where to get it, Stolich was four rubles.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely was. The one thing that they always had, at least in my days in those two years, there was always fresh bread and the bulletinas.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, this is the late 70s. Mid to late 70s. And also the Had these high-rise apartment buildings that looked pretty good from the front, but you went into the backyard. Ouch”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I did notice that the standard of living in Moscow was significantly lower than in East Germany, in the supermarkets, you could expect with reliability that you can find canned fish and mineral water, everything else was whatever. And if you saw a line at a store, you just line up. You don't even ask what they have because if you don't like it, somebody else will. It was not poverty, but it was close to poverty. There were a lot of drunken men in the streets.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And at the other end, the opposite of a highlight was my visit to the mausoleum where Lenin is still today. There was a nothing. He was my hero, but he looked like a wax figure. And you walk by there, there was nothing inspirational, it was not a religion. It was a big old nothing.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a country music show, real kitschy, but the star of hehaw was giving a concert in Moscow. And I guarantee you at least half the audience were KGB.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The details of the train. You love the answer. You will love the answer. I was given tickets to two performances by Americans. There was a theater troupe that played Our Town. And then there was this, I forget the name of the guy, but you may not be old enough. Have you ever watched Heha?”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A harbor, a military harbor in New Jersey, near Red Bank. It was called Earl Weapon Station. And its codename for that was Early. So they asked me to just want to buy there to see if there was something unusual going on because the Soviet Union were at that point it was Ronald Reagan were really afraid that Reagan was going to start a war. They were absolutely 100% afraid of him.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The abbreviation that's used in Intelligent circles as SDR surveillance detection route. When they say that, you know what that is. And that was it. And a few other things, you know, one-offs, for instance, I was once taught to read silhouettes of ships when you see a ship from a distance, what kind of a ship it might be. They thought this would come in handy actually. There was in 1982 Andrope started A campaign was now I forget the name Operation something something where everybody who was in the West was supposed to look for science that the West was getting ready for war. And I had an object to pay attention to. I had a...”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you know, and this was my discipline. I did this every night routine, boring as hell. So English was the focus, and I also had interaction with some agents who had operated in the United States as diplomats on a diplomatic cover. They would come and talk to me a little bit and tell me and sort of prepare me what was ahead of me. And then I did a whole lot of operational training, particularly surveillance detection. That was big. They also taught me how to drive a car in Moscow.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No American English. And I give you one example that almost nobody gets right. The difference between hot and hot. And German speakers, it's very tough.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I did phonetics exercises. Every night I had a tape that was about a half hour long, and they would say a word and I would repeat the word, say a word, repeat the word. And it's mostly about the vowels, by the way. Most of the accent and particularly, let's say, coming from German into English, but also Russian. It's the vowels.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it was straining. So it was the American-born became my tutor. I met with her twice a week. I also listened to a lot of BBC shortwave BBC Worldwide. I read more English books.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly right. And the other one was a middle aged, the Russian was pretty young. The other one was middle-aged American. And so we talked for maybe a couple of hours, and then they withdrew and I was left alone. Eventually, my liaison, he came back in and he said it was close, but the American thinks you can actually become You get close enough to becoming a native speaker of American English. And he said the Russian was very doubtful. And so I think wishful, it was a tie, literally. Wishful thinking prevailed. So within a couple of weeks. I was moving to Moscow.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, yes, I'm not good enough to make a living out of it, but that raised some interest. And so they sent me to Moscow. That was the first time on a plane, by the way. And I had a conversation with two ladies who spoke English. One was a Russian, a professor at Lamonosov University, who she was obviously KGB. That was her cover.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I also spoke English sort of the British variety of English with not a strong German accent because I've always had the ability to imitate others and sounds. There was an innate ability. I would, you know, when we were in a lab as students, I would very often do monologues imitating East German comedians.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you How I was sent to Moscow. Okay, so one day I had a visitor from Moscow. And he came to visit me in my apartment together with Nikolai. And we talked. And then he said, so how's your English? I said, I pulled a book from the shelf and says, I can read that without the help of a dictionary. Oh that's interesting. And he said, you know what? We're going to send you a tape recorder and you just talk, say something, you know, for 20 minutes, whatever you want to talk about. They sent this thing, and two weeks later I was on a plane to Moscow.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I went to college in the US, and part of the core curriculum was that you were required to take a course in computer, and it was mostly just talk, but we also had to learn a language. We had to write some programs in Fortran, which was, what, five at the time? It was a dumbed-down Fortran. But listen, so I see the ability, I see what you can do with this, I programmed a sine curve, and then I divided the sine curve into really, really small rectangles and then ran the program and it came up with the right area. Wow, this is great.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the way, just one thing you talked about using a computer, I had my first personal computer, I actually wrote a program that does that.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go to medical school. Disconnected fact. And you pretty much, when you're done, you know what you know. You don't have to”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For if you get it right, it goes to five. If you get it wrong, it gets relegated to three. So you go through this. And occasionally I would throw the archived things back into one. So I really acquired a phenomenal vocabulary. When I was done with my English, my vocabulary was significantly higher than the average American because I didn't discriminate. Whatever word I didn't know I learned, which is not necessarily the best way because English has a lot of synonyms, right? And one synonym is usually the preferable one. And when I first interacted with people, I very often used the one that wasn't as good. And people found that I have an interesting way of talking. They didn't know what that meant.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I piled him up. And so I really learned 100 New English words every day. I know this because I counted them, and I had a system how to do this. So you take your index card and you have five categories. It's a really good way to learn rote by rote. So you got category one, that's the new ones. And you got category five. So you start with five. Five, you already... At right four times, if you have it right again, go into the archive.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is that journey? Well, so I told you I started studying English. So I started back from scratch. They paid for a tutor and I went from English 101. I went through that in a couple of months. Then I got another guy with whom I expanded this. We had conversations rather than working from a textbook. And I worked like a maniac. I threw myself into the study of English like it wouldn't believe. And my inspiration came from Vladimir Lenin. I had read somewhere in a book that when Lenin was in exile, he studied German, and he learned one hundred German words every day, new German words. So I started reading newspapers and every word that I didn't know I wrote down on an index card German English”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You were absolutely right. I was. I was when I came to the US after about two years roughly. I was cultured enough to not make a bad impression at a diplomatic sore in Washington, D.C. I mingled freely. And so the whole idea was for me to sort of reach into the upper realms of society where the targets would be juicier than the worker bees.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Able to effectively integrate yourself. Well, you also have to know that would have been easier if they had sent me to West Germany, near all the soccer teams, stuff that everybody knows. When I came to the US I knew very little stuff that everybody knows, that's why I had to be very cautious and take it in over time. Anyway, and the last thing I want to mention is I was strongly encouraged to expand my My cultural education, in other words, go to visit museums, go to the theater, not so much movies, opera, read books from all kinds of authors. That was important to them. And once a month I had to write a report, what I did. But the interesting thing, there was not curriculum, there was no agenda, there were no check marks. It was all ad hoc. Now you do this, and then you do that. And a lot of this also, they relied on my initiative.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not cultural, but they made me read that document. Other than that, I wasn't supposed to study the Soviet Union. I wasn't supposed that was not. And I didn't when they sent me to Moscow, it wasn't to learn Russian, right? It wasn't to learn English. The second document they gave me was the Constitution of West Germany. And then I got lots of magazines and stuff like that. As I told you, I was also told to watch West German television, which I embraced with a vengeance because it was better than East German. So I would get up in the morning and have a little breakfast and watch the German version of Sesame Street.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You bet. Interestingly enough, I was the first book I was given to read was The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Photography Making micro You know what a microdot is? Well, that's you take a photograph and you use a microscope in reverse and make that photograph really small, so small that it's like the head of a pin. That can be used to hide under a poster stamp. In reality, I knew how to make him. In reality then they never asked me to make use of that technique”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, not every day. No, no, no, no, no. Once a month or a Before I would say, mail a letter with secret writing so I was sure that nobody saw me put an envelope into”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they could use different clothes. But they didn't have. The CIA does nowadays. They can give you a different face within seconds.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No. Only counter surveillance. And what helped me in all my training, I would have a competition with folks that were coming, that were following me and me. And I beat them every time They were at a disadvantage because one of them always had to be close. And if you saw the same face twice, you know that you were being followed. And I had a very, very good memory for faces.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it wasn't like this, right? It wasn't a giveaway. This was normal. That was natural. So I could see if somebody would come walking after me. These kinds of things, or you would use public transportation, big buildings where you needed to use an elevator and see who's because surveillance, the object of surveillance is to never lose sight of the individual who you're surveilling because at that point you may miss the window where he does something that That you're looking for. So somebody always has to come close, right?”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“English was a no brainer because I was a straight student in English without studying. It came so easily to me. So that's why I chose it, right? So that was that then I was taught the basics of counter surveillance, some trickery and surveillance detection routes where you wander around in the city for three hours. Determine whether you're being followed or not. That requires you to plan the route very well. I give you one example that will illustrate that. My favorite spot when I was in Moscow, I did a lot of that also. And my favorite spot was not well traveled road. It went down the hill and curved. And at the bottom of the hill, there was a telephone booth. And when you opened the door and pick up the telephone, you have to look back.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, that's right, and I really didn't. But anyway, I was learning that. I was also told that I was required to become proficient in another language. And they gave me a choice and I picked English Oh no, give him a pick one, friend. You know, whatever is spoken in the West.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All right, so no, no, it doesn't do any work. The communication, the encrypted communication was a set of groups of five, five digits and another five, and there's always a gap in between And so let's say if I get this radio transmission and write them all down and then I use my algorithm And then I do mathematics, either addition or subtraction. The resulting set of digits then had a one to one correlation to Letters”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One time, but I had a pad with multiple sheets of paper, right? And the reason that they gave me a manual one is because I literally had only when I wound up in the United States, I had only one thing with me that only a spy can have. And that was a writing pad where the first 10 pages or so were impregnated with a trace of a chemical that was used for secret writing. But you really would have to know what you're looking for. You see this pad that was bought at Walmart and.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What was significantly easier to do, but that would require you to have spy paraphernalia with you. This is what's called a one-time pad. So you have the set of numbers On the sheet of paper that had to be developed, I had to use iodine to make those numbers visible. Those are known to be unbreakable unless they are used multiple times, the same sheet of paper. Because, you know, the person who encrypts has the same set of numbers as the person who decrypts. And one-time use, you cannot figure out what the message is.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was told that these algorithms, these manual algorithms were good for about 300 uses. After that, they could still be deciphered. I'm assuming nowadays that wouldn't take as much.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let me start with a trade craft So I was taught Morse code that took a while I was instructed in how to use a short wave radio and to receive the shortwave transmissions with Morse code. I was taught an encryption and decryption algorithm, manual algorithm. You might be interested that eventually I figured out at least one of the patterns the algorithm was such that this was all about digits. And the algorithm was such that in the end the digits that were used to decipher other digits that were sent to me via shortwave radio, there were, let's say, if there were 100 digits, there were an equal number of ones, twos, threes, fours, fives, six, and seven up until zero.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a big upgrade. And he gave me. I think he gave me a thousand mark to buy furniture. And in that place, actually I also bought a TV and started watching Western television. So I finally had a decent place to stay. And my training in Berlin took about two years.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No complaints, no arguments, I know this better. I was taking it all in. Now the technical guys, you know, they taught me something I didn't know that made sense. What Nikolai, some of the stuff that he taught me... was somewhat questionable he was a generalist and some things he didn't know really well so I could have asked probed a little bit but I didn't so I just played along so this new apartment was it was a studio it had a kitchen with running cold water and the bathroom was just one flight down the toilet not a bathroom one flight down the stairs”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I just told him, you know, I found something. For six months, I would get up in the morning, get on the train, and walk around in the city, you know, did some operational stuff and operational training. I went to the library, did a lot of reading in the library. And then I found the basketball team that I could join, so at least I could take a shower twice a week. And apparently it took about six months that I was still on probation because after six months Nikolai one day we were still meeting in his car. He handed me a key. He said, I'm going to take you to your new apartment. Now and I didn't know this. Now I was really in. Okay. Imagine the hurdles you have to jump over and how many times you can fail, but you know.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You were right. Yes. Out house. To my credit, and I think that established part of my reputation, I didn't complain at all to Nikolai.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, but this was a test because I had to be inventive now. I had to figure out how to get out of an impossible situation. I didn't realize it then at all. I just went with a flow. What do I do? So what I did, I took the train, the city train, to the very last stop, a little town called Akna, and I wandered around in that town and knocked on doors and asked people if they knew where somebody might have a place to live. And after a couple of hours somebody said, There's this lady that gave me the address, and I talked to the lady and she said, I happen to have a place that you might be able to stay. It was an outbuilding. I don't know what it served. It was not a garage. It was concrete. And it had a Running cold water and a stove, a cold stove. That was my was going to be my”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I don't think I showed it in my face, but my heart dropped like down into my pants. I knew this wasn't nearly impossible because it was a severe shortage of housing everywhere in Germany, East Germany. And all the apartments and homes were controlled by the government. There were long waiting lists. I knew couples that were promised maybe to get an apartment five years down the road. So then they would postpone the decision to have a child. Anyway, this was impossible.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had lived in Vienna for six years in a dorm, even when I became an employee of the university. They didn't have apartments. I was still living in a dorm. And a single room with a bed, a chair, and a table, and toilet down the hallway. So I figured, you know, Berlin KGB, I'm going to get a nice apartment, right? And so Nikolai. Took me into his car. We started talking a little bit, and then he said, I have a task for you already. Your first task is to find yourself a place to live.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source