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

“But just to expand on this a little more. That passion that I had was an indication that eventually love would play a big role in my life. I wasn't aware of it. I was just directed at this one girl.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And literally I dedicated, that's when I started studying up until that point I just did whatever I had to do to be in A- students and that's when I started studying in every A that I got I dedicated to her sometimes explicitly because I knew I was going to take care of her as I grew up”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It taught me only in hindsight. At the time I was just like, my God, I was head over heels in love. I was 16 years old. And I knew in those days I admired girls. I knew that girls were sort of magical beings. They were not capable of doing evil things. They were beautiful and they had to be adored. And one of them... Actually loved me too she came after me initially, right?”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, democracy and what the United States did, this was really, really very forward-looking, very strategic, the Marshall Plan to rebuild the economy in the West as compared to what the Soviet Union did. Whatever they hadn't destroyed on the way in, they took with them on the way out for reparations because, you know, they had every right to do that. But it was not a good idea because, you know, East Germany was always behind in the economic development to their Western counterpart.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other half is Czech and Polish. Because where I grew up, I could walk to the Nicer River, which was the border with Poland, and it was only about an hour by bus to get to the Czech border. So that's why I'm a mix”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, German Democratic Republic, which was formed a couple of months after I was born, I was born into the remote southeastern corner of East Germany. And interestingly enough, genetically, I'm only half German.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Uh, So, what happened was the Soviet Union rolled into the eastern part of Germany and the Western Allies took a larger chunk, which was occupied by the three allies, the French, the English and the Americans. And the eastern part was occupied by the Soviet troops. And the Soviet troops actually conquered Berlin. But in a contract, they decided that Berlin would be ruled by the four allies, and they all had free access to that city I was born in the East German part which very quickly became ruled by communists less socialists, the Communist Party and the Socialist Party united, but the leaders of that new party were all communists.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And one delicious thing that I just want to add on to this, when Gorbachev wrote his book about perestoika and glasnost, the East German rulers did not like it. They were much, much more Orthodox. They had to print the books in translation. Guess where they wound up? They were in piled up in the hallways of the Stasi. They bought the entire print run.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I give you an example that comes from a very reliable source. Ah, and that my best German friend worked as a chemist in Astasi, East German intelligence. And he eventually rose to the rank of major and was in charge of the forgery department. It's very likely that he made passports that I used to travel. He was aware that there was intelligence that was collected, the stars, he was really good. They had about a thousand people in West Germany, undercover agents, some of them in government, and the Central Committee of the party, the decision makers ignored it because it didn't quite fit in their worldview. It didn't quite fit into their plans.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, The Soviet Union didn't trust his own intelligence apparatus. He has one example. There was a German communist who went underground when Hitler took over, and he went to Japan as a journalist. His name is Richard Zorge. Richard Zorge had really, really good intel about what the Japanese would do and not do. I forgot exactly what it was, but it came to Moscow and Stalin totally ignored it. And when Zorga was captured by the Japanese, the Soviet Union denied that he was one of there, so he was executed. The paranoia, again, does a lot of damage when you don't believe your own intelligence apparatus, why bother having one?”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, they were. I was a non-aggression pact that was signed by Ribbentrop and Molotov, right? I think both parties knew that eventually that would fall apart, but at the time it gave the Soviet Union a little more peace of Poland and a little more time to prepare what they thought might happen down the road. And the Germans had the time and the ability to pretty much conquer all of Western Europe.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But let's start with World War II. So when Hitler came to power, he and his leadership decided that the Germans needed more what they call Leibensraum. That means room to live. So, and they would start expanding. They went into France. They took Belgium, the Netherlands, they annexed Austria. And got a piece of Czechoslovakia. And then they decided to march into the Soviet Union after they took Poland.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that was the second one. The Big Brother, the Soviet Union, I mean, when I was approached by the KGB that was like, oh, I felt so honored.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, the Nazi fighters, they were the good guys. Of course, you know, in hindsight, if the communists had come to power, it would have been just the other way around, as we know. Given the example of Stalin and Mao, right? But we didn't know that.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if you know what we as 17-year-olds were made to look at, it was gut-wrenching. How can men do something like that to men? Piles of corpses. Lampshades made out of human skin because that skin had tattoos on them and a shrunken heads like the size of my fist. I mean, the girls all cried, and it would have made a huge impression”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The intelligence on the Eastern Front under Hitler. And when the Allied won the war, it was decided that Galen was too important with his knowledge of his organization, was too important to not use. So he was co-opted by the CIA and eventually wound up being the head of the Bundesnachtenst, the CIA of West Germany. That gave us us when I say us, you know, the East German party a huge propaganda victory. I wanted to, because the emotional aspect of this was as follows, when we were juniors in high school, and in those days, when you were only allowed to go to high school if you were in the top 10%. Of students. So this was going to be the next set of ruling elite in the country. We were required to visit a concentration camp.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could you remember? I think the biggest impetus and me believing in communism was that The communists, just before Hitler took over, the communists were the only force in Germany that fought the Nazis in the streets. And that's a historic truth. And communists were hunted down by the Nazis, killed, put in concentration camps, and so what we knew was When what we were taught, and I think that was a huge unforced error by the Western countries, particularly the United States, that there were ex-Nazis in the government in West Germany. And the most famous one was Reinhard Galen. Who was in charge, was the general in charge of”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Out of the world. And by the way, the tarot didn't start with Stalin. It started right after the Bolsheviks took over when Lenin told Mr. Jazzinski, Comrade Jezinski, to build a Chikar and then execute the, this is what he called it, the Red Terror. So at the birth of the Soviet Union, there was already terror, and it was deliberate. And it also wasn't just focused on the enemies. It was focused on whoever you didn't like. There was no rule of law. There was no court cases. People were just pulled out of their apartments and shot on site. And this was done by Revolutionaries who were convinced that eventually these sacrifices had to be made and eventually that would lead to a much better planet.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And once you have that hierarchy established, there is no guarantee that it won't go bad. And actually, when you look at history, such hierarchy has gone bad. You look at Cuba, for instance. I believe Fidel Castro was an honest revolutionary. I do believe that And so what did Cuba turn into?”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And everybody gets along. We just have to, you know, all men are wonderful people. And if they go bad, it has something to do with the fact that they have been oppressed. And that dream just never worked out. And even it is when you think about it, and I didn't think about it. When you're young, you just emotionally, you accept it. But when you think about it, Somehow that new wonderful organization has to organize itself. Even though Lenin predicted that the state eventually would go away, how does that work? Then you have anarchy, right? You have to have an organization. And the only way to really organize a large number of people is with a hierarchy So, and who gets to the top The ones that want to go to the top, the ones that believe in themselves, the ones that know better than everybody else”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The biggest one being invading the Soviet Union, particularly at the time that he did it, because he ran into the same thing that Napoleon ran into General Winter.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That and eventually we would take over ending pretty much overtake. That was the myth, overtake the United States not only militarily but also in terms of industrial production and so forth. That was a stupid pipe dream. The military. It was a standoff, as we know.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely dead. And you need to look at the timeframe. The Soviet Union after World War II made quite a bit of progress in influencing the third world. I still remember when I was in middle school, we had a map, the map of the world, and it was color-coded. So red was communism. That was the Soviet Union and the eastern states. And then blue was capitalism. And then we had green, which were the third world countries. And the green slowly turned pink because a lot of third world governments, like I'm looking at Angola, I'm looking at Vietnam. A lot of these countries were very sympathetic to the Soviet Union. And so we sort of knew that this would go on like...”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I believe we were all pretty much strong believers in communism in the future of the world being Yes, I think that unified us to a large degree, even the technicians.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are we very much so? I mean, this is what the KGB did really, really well, compartmentalization. And that was based on the communist movement while it was still under. The cells were very small so that maybe there were three, four members in one cell that knew one another. And then they had a liaison to another cell. So the bottom line is if you got one of those folks were caught, they could maybe betray four people or three, something like that. And the KGB continued with that tradition. I have reason to believe that my handler, the person in Moscow that sort of directed me and made decisions what to do and where to go never met me personally. There's no reason to, right? So in this actually was a big advantage over other intelligence services because you look at what the CIA does, everybody blabs. There's a lot of leaks coming out of American intelligence. I don't think there's as many.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was only in touch with two types of agents, whether the technical experts, the ones that taught me tradecraft. And they were like engineers, they were in charge of the secret writing and the Morse code shortwave radio reception decryption encryption and that kind of stuff, those were just doing their job. And the others, the ones that trained me, that prepared me for life in the United States There were nice people. They were elegant people. I don't think they would not fit into the stereotype of the ruthless gun carrying agent.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're absolutely right. But they thought that I had an anchor at home because I had a wife and a son at home, which you've got to worry about them if you defect. Because in the past, the KGB would go after family. Ruthlessly”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, there were hints about how long my assignment would be, so 10 to 12 years. And you see, it makes sense. I was becoming an American, and over time I would become more and more American. And there was always a chance that I liked it more here than there, that I was really successful in what I was supposed to do. And it sort of happened, but in my case it happened because I fathered a child who I didn't want to leave when they wanted me back.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh absolutely, and I want to extend this to my own existence. And this is kind of strange. It's almost dichotomous because, you know, I was running around lying to everybody. And, you know, I couldn't fundamentally be trusted. But the relationship that I had with the KGB was based on trust. If they don't trust me, they don't send me out. And if I don't trust them, I'm not going. And I eventually broke that trust. And they knew there was always that danger.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I believe so. It comes from the top. And so if the top doesn't trust you, you always have to worry about your peers snitching on you. And I think we have a very similar situation in Russia today. And in this kind of atmosphere, the truth will never get to the top.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the paranoia. Stalin. was always worried about the most powerful people coming after him. So he proactively killed off heads of the KGB and he had this great purge where he got rid of a lot of his generals, really capable generals. And that cost him dearly when World War II started because he started off with a force that wasn't as capable as it could have been.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But with those name changes, you also had changes at the top between 1923 and 1953 when Stalin died, that is 30 years, they had eight heads of intelligence. And of those eight, six were executed when they were replaced. So that's an indication that this wasn't an organization that ate itself from the inside. The Soviet Union was the only dictatorship in history that did not rest its powers on the military. They rested its powers on the intelligence apparatus, and that thing was unstable. So you know where that leads. Eventually if you rest your power on something that is made out of bricks that don't hold a lot of load, it will fall apart.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh absolutely. They just changed names and they changed a personnel rather frequently and had something to do with Stalin's paranoia from between nineteen twenty three and I don't remember what I think it may have been the NKVD at that time. It started as a Chika and then it became the GPU, the three.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. When I was in the KGB, I had no idea that there was military intelligence. Nobody ever mentioned anything like that. And by the way, I recently had the pleasure to give a talk at the DIA when they reached out to me. I didn't know they existed either.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And don't exist anymore. It was disbanded when the Soviet Union fell apart and the successor agencies are now the SVR and the FSB supposedly the equivalent to the FBI and SVR, the CIA, but the SVR is relatively weak and the FSB has taken on a lot of espionage and active measures and they're much bigger and stronger. But the most capable intelligence agency in Russia is the GRU military intelligence.”
2022-07-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source