#301 – Jack Barsky: KGB Spy

Jack Barsky is a former KGB spy and author of “Deep Undercover: My Secret Life and Tangled Allegiances as a KGB Spy in America”. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – InsideTracker: https://insidetracker.com/lex to get 20% off – Notion: https://notion.com/startups to get up to $1000 off team plan – BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/lex to get 10% off – Blinkist: https://blinkist.com/lex and use code LEX to get 25% off premium – Athletic Greens: https://athleticgreens.com/lex and use code LEX to get 1 month of fish oil EPISODE LINKS: Jack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/deepcoverbarsky Jack’s Website: https://jackbarsky.com Deep Undercover (book): https://amzn.to/39XMTgG The Agent (podcast): https://cumuluspodcastnetwork.com/pods/the-agent PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (06:52) – KGB (19:43) – Communism (38:45) – Childhood (45:32) – Becoming a KGB agent (1:24:04) – Training (1:37:53) – Language (1:43:45) – Moscow (1:58:45) – Spying (2:15:43) – Putin (2:18:35) – War in Ukraine (2:30:02) – Putin in the KGB (2:36:56) – Yuri Bezmenov (2:47:33) – FSB and CIA (2:55:24) – Putin and Zelenskyy (3:04:13) – Quitting the KGB (3:30:32) – Love and regrets (3:38:44) – Mortality

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Jack Barsky, a former KGB spy, author of Deep Undercover, and the subject of an excellent podcast series called The Agent. There are very few people who have defected from the KGB and live to tell the story. It is one of the most powerful intelligence organizations in history, and this conversation gives a window into its operation, both from an ideological and psychological perspectives. But also, it tells the story of a man who lived one heck of an incredible life. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got InsideTracker for longevity,

• 0:45Lex Fridman?

  Notion for startups, BetterHelp for mental health, Blinkist for nonfiction, and Athletic Greens for performance. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by InsideTracker, a service I use to track biological data. They use machine learning algorithms to analyze data that comes from your body, your blood, DNA, fitness tracker data, all that kind of stuff. It's obvious that those kinds of decisions should be based on data that comes from your body. I hope one day we'll have the measurement and the collection of that data

• 1:30Lex Fridman?

  that's perfectly protected in terms of privacy and controlled by the individual, collected regularly, coming from the body and coming from actually the brain. So electrical, mechanical, and chemical signals, all of that, collected and organized nicely for you to own and store locally and based on that data, be able to make decisions more effectively. Anyway, you can go to insidetracker.com/lex for a limited time to get special savings just for being a listener of this very podcast. And you and I can learn more about ourselves by collecting more of our actual biological data from our own body.

• 2:13Lex Fridman?

  This show is also brought to you by Notion, a note-taking and team collaboration tool. It combines note-taking, document sharing, wikis, project management, and much more into one space that's simple, powerful, and beautifully designed. In terms of when I talk to people that really care about productivity, really love being at the cutting edge, Notion is what a lot of people recommend. I still use eMag for a lot of my sort of IDE-type work. It's my fallback for very basic stuff and for programming. But when I want to do organized, rigorous, large-scale note-taking, that's what I use is Notion. But they also want you to know that it's not just for note-taking, it's also for collaboration. So it can be a full-on, what they're calling,

• 2:58Lex Fridman?

  operating system for running every aspect of your startup. They're doing a special offer for startups. You can get up to $1,000 off the team plan, which is almost one year free for a team of 10. Go to notion.com/startups. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed professional therapist in under 48 hours. It's kind of amazing how much improvement you can do if you just surface the stuff that's in the shadows, in the darkness, if you bring it to the surface through conversation. I think that's how you dig at the subconscious mind,

• 3:39Lex Fridman?

  is by speaking about the darker aspects of your past. I think as long as you start talking about it, if you kind of start pulling a thread, and then you might be surprised of what you pull out. And as you start pulling it out, you realize that there's a lot more there, and you bring it to light, and that's how you let it go. Through just talking, you can do that kind of thing. And BetterHelp is just the way to do it super easy. Online, it's private, affordable, available worldwide. Check them out at betterhelp.com/lex and save on your first month. This show is also brought to you by Blinkist, my favorite app for learning new things.

• 4:23Lex Fridman?

  They take key ideas from thousands of nonfiction books and condense them down into just 15 minutes that you can read or listen to. I can recommend a lot of nonfiction books that I return to over and over and over on there. It's basically the best nonfiction books ever written are all on there. Sapiens, My Dietations by Marcus Aurelius, Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch. Beginning of Infinity is like the defining book of what makes a good book. And in general, it's just a good way to get key aspects of a nonfiction book to decide if you want to read further. I don't think, it's not like a spoiler alert thing. It's not like full of spoilers because nonfiction books, you can read, reread, you can dig,

• 5:06Lex Fridman?

  you can jump around and you still get the depth of what the book is about without spoiling anything. It's not like a fiction book. So as a listener of this podcast, you can claim a special offer for savings at blinkist.com/lex. This show is also brought to you by Athletic Greens and the AG1 Drink, which is an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. And when they say daily drink, that's probably what a lot of people drink. It is every day, once a day. But I drink it every day, twice a day. I love the way it tastes. I love the way it makes me feel. It also gives a nutritional base for all the wild mental and physical stuff I do.

• 5:50Lex Fridman?

  Exercise, running in the crazy Austin summer heat, or fasting, not eating 24 hours or more, all that kind of stuff. I can count on Athletic Greens to save my butt from any unhealthy things I might get myself into and not realize it. It's just also a source of happiness for me. It's a place I return to, to remind myself that at least in some aspects of my life, I have it together. They'll give you one month's supply of fish oil when you sign up at athleticgreens.com/lex. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Jack Barsky.

• 6:52Lex Fridman?

  Let's start with a big, basic question. What is the KGB? Komiteet Kusudarstvenej Bezopasnosti.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  Right. So that is the Committee of State Security. Bezopasnost is a threat, right?

• 7:07Lex Fridman?

  Threat.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Okay, and BS means?

• 7:09Lex Fridman?

  Without.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:11Lex Fridman?

  And I guess that directly translates to security without threat.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  So, 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. 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, you know, active measures, and they're much bigger and stronger. But the most capable intelligence agency in Russia is the GRU, military intelligence.

• 7:50Lex Fridman?

  Then nobody knows very much.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:08Lex Fridman?

  Interesting. Yeah, that's always the question. If you want to be an intelligence agency, should the world know anything about you? Because in some sense, you want to create the legend in order to attract great, competent individuals to work for you. But at the same time, you want it to be shrouded in complete mystery. If nobody knows you exist, you might be able to operate well as an intelligence agency. That is fascinating. But FSB is the thing that carries the flag

• 8:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:41Lex Fridman?

  of KGB. KGB being probably one of, if not the most sort of infamous, famous, infamous and powerful intelligence agencies.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  In history, yes.

• 8:54Lex Fridman?

  Ever.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  Absolutely, 100%.

• 8:56Lex Fridman?

  It was founded in 1954 after the death of Stalin. You've, in writing your book, looked back at the predecessors, at the history.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:05Lex Fridman?

  Is there some way in which the KGB? Is grounded in the culture, the spirit, the soul of its predecessors.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. They just changed names and they changed personnel rather frequently. And that had had something to do with Stalin's paranoia from between 1923 and I don't remember what the, I think it may have been the NKVD at that time. It started as a Chikar and then it became the the G P U, the

• 9:41Lex Fridman?

  It's three or four letter words.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  NKVD, yes. But 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 of those eight, six were executed when they were replaced. So that's an that's an indication that, you know, this was 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

• 10:27Speaker 01

  you rest your your power on something that is made out of bricks that don't hold a lot of load, it will it will fall apart.

• 10:35Lex Fridman?

  On sand?

• 10:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:36Lex Fridman?

  Why was it unstable, would you say? What what of human nature?

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Oh, the the it's it's the paranoia. It's, you know, Stalin was always worried about, you know, the the most powerful people coming after him. So he proactively killed off heads of the K G B. And and he had this great purge where he got rid of a lot of his generals, you know, really capable generals. And that that cost him dearly when World War Two started because, you know, he started off with with a force that wasn't as capable as it could have been.

• 11:15Lex Fridman?

  Was it paranoia at all levels?

• 11:17Speaker 01

  I believe so. I believe so. It it comes from the top. And so if the top doesn't trust you, you always have to worry about your peers.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  It's snitching on you.

• 11:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  Okay, so, so, and, and I think we have a very similar situation in Russia today. And, and, and, and this, in, in this kind of atmosphere, the truth will never get to the top.

• 11:44Lex Fridman?

  So no matter what moral rules the organization operates under, trust is fundamental to its competence.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely, and I want to extend this to my own existence.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  And this is kind of strange, it, it's, 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, 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.

• 12:25Lex Fridman?

  They knew that because something about you or just something about human beings.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  No, there were, there were, there were hints about, you know, how long my assignment would be, so 10 to 12 years. And you see, it, it makes sense, all right? I, 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, that I was really successful in what I was supposed to do. And it sort of happened, but in my case, it happened because of I fathered a child who, who I didn't want to leave when they wanted me back, so.

• 13:04Lex Fridman?

  Love always screws up.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 13:08Lex Fridman?

  Your employment competence, yes.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  You're absolutely right.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  So, but that, but they thought, you know, that I had an anchor at home because I had a wife and a son at home, which, you know, you've got to worry about them if you defect. Because in the past, the KGB was, would go after, after family.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  Ruthlessly.

• 13:35Lex Fridman?

  Including perhaps violence?

• 13:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:38Lex Fridman?

  This is a hard question about the KGB because it's one of the most ruthless organizations, but in general.

• 13:45Lex Fridman?

  Are there lines, KGB agents, at every level of the hierarchy

• 13:52Lex Fridman?

  that they would not cross? Political, legal, ethical? Or does anything goes to achieve the goal?

• 13:59Speaker 01

  I was only

• 14:03Speaker 01

  in touch with two types of agents. Whether the technical experts, the ones that taught me tradecraft. And they were like engineers and they were in charge of the secret writing and the

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Morse code, shortwave radio reception, decryption, encryption, and that kind of stuff. Those were just doing their job. All right? And the others, the ones that trained me, that prepared me for a life in the United States. They were nice people. They were elegant people.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  I don't think they would not

• 14:47Speaker 01

  fit into the stereotype of the ruthless gun carrying agent.

• 14:53Lex Fridman?

  Is it possible that you would not be aware of the parts of the KGB? I mean, it's very modular. Would you?

• 15:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:00Lex Fridman?

  It's possible that you're not aware of the parts of the KGB that are the quote unquote muscle?

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Oh, I didn't know. I would find out afterwards, after I retired and started doing some research. I had no clue.

• 15:14Lex Fridman?

  You're kind of operating in a bubble.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  Oh, very much so. I mean, this is what the KGB did really, really well, compartmentalization. And that was based on, you know, the communist movement while it was still underground. You know, the cells were very small. And 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 with 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

• 16:01Speaker 01

  me and made decisions what to do and where to go, never met me personally. There's no reason to. So, and this actually was a big advantage over other intelligence services because, you know, 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 leaks coming out of the Mossad.

• 16:28Lex Fridman?

  Strong words from Jack Barsky, by the way. I mean, that is a question I want to ask a little more systematically. Is there something unique about the KGB compared to the other intelligence agencies? Let's talk the British Intelligence, MI6, Mossad, CIA. Is there unique cultures, spirits, souls of the different organizations that maybe somehow connect to the structures of government, connect maybe the values of the people, those kinds of things?

• 16:57Speaker 01

  I believe we were all pretty much strong believers in communism and the future of the world being-

• 17:05Lex Fridman?

  In KGB?

• 17:06Speaker 01

  Yes. I think that that unified us to a large degree, even the technicians.

• 17:11Lex Fridman?

  So even, it wasn't something like, yeah, yeah, the parents believe this thing, but we know the truth. You really believed the story of communism?

• 17:23Speaker 01

  Absolutely did. 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-

• 18:06Speaker 01

  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 that. And eventually we would take over and, you know, pretty much overtake. That was, 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.

• 18:42Lex Fridman?

  Well, stupid pipe dream. Hitler had a stupid pipe dream.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:50Lex Fridman?

  That he executed exceptionally effectively and on, if not for a handful of military mistakes, the world could look very different today.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  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.

• 19:14Lex Fridman?

  Well, within, so Operation Barbarossa, within that, he could have made different decisions. For example, attacking, skipping Kiev and attacking Moscow directly, overthrowing the government. So marching, I guess that that would be learning the lessons from Napoleon as opposed to, as opposed to a different kind of distribution of forces and then getting bogged down in the winter. But the point is, these ambitions sometimes do, you know, the ambitions of empire sometimes do materialize in the growth and the building and the establishment of those empires. And those empires write the history books in such a way that we don't think of them as, as empires,

• 19:59Lex Fridman?

  or we certainly don't think of them as the bad guys. They write the history books, therefore they're the good guys. And right now, America has effectively written the book about the good guys. I happen to believe that book. But it's, we should be humbled and open minded to realize that, uh, that is in fact what is happening, is effective empires write the history books and tell us stories and tell us propaganda and tell us narratives that we believe because we are human beings and we love to get together and believe ideas. We love to dream of a beautiful world and try to build that beautiful world together. In the United States, that's a beautiful world, the freedom of, uh, respect of human rights, of all men are created equal.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 20:43Lex Fridman?

  Uh, pursuit of happiness. You know, it always sounds good. If you look at what the, the dream of communism is, it sure as heck, uh, in its words, on the surface, sounds good.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 20:55Lex Fridman?

  Respect for the workers.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 20:56Lex Fridman?

  The working class, the lower classes that have been trodden on, that have been stolen from by the powerful. They deserve to have the money, the power, the respect that they have earned through their hard work. Sounds great.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  And everybody gets along and we just have to, you know, uh, and all men are wonderful people. And if they, if they go bad, it has something to do with the fact that they have, they have been oppressed, right? And, uh, that dream just, uh, never worked out. And even, even it is, when you think about it, and I didn't think about it, when you're young, you know, you're just emotionally, you accept it. But when you think about it, somehow, uh, that new wonderful organization has to organize itself, even though Lenin predicted that the state eventually would go away. Well, how does, how does that work? Then you have like anarchy, right? You have to have an organization.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  And the only way to really organize a large number of people is with a hierarchy. So, and who gets to the top? The, the ones that are, that want to go to the top, the ones that believe in themselves, the ones, the ones that know better than everybody else. And once you have that hierarchy established, uh, there is no guarantee that it doesn't, that, that it won't go bad. And actually, when you look at, uh, history, every such hierarchy has gone bad. You know, you look at Cuba, for instance, I believe Fidel Castro was a, an honest revolutionary. I do believe that.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  And so what did Cuba turn into?

• 22:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's something about, and you speak about Vladimir Putin in this way, but let's step away from that for a second.

• 22:43Lex Fridman?

  Is there something about being an honest revolutionary that wants to do good for their country? And you start to believe that you know better than everyone else how to do good in the country. And you very well might first, but then somehow that grows into a distortion field where you know, you keep believing you know what's right.

• 23:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:07Lex Fridman?

  And all the people who disagree with you, you stop seeing them as having a point. You instead see them as like evil manipulators of the truth that are actually trying to hurt people for their own greed, for their own power. And you will protect the people because you know what's good. In the case of Stalin, I, I mean, I don't know. But it seems like he really believed that communism would bring about a much better world. I mean, there was a sense the, you have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:46Lex Fridman?

  This idea that sacrifice is necessary to bring about a greater world. And then the other aspect is sort of ruling by terror, creating terrorism, justified political mechanism to achieve a better world. So it wasn't, I mean, perhaps he had to do that to be able to sleep at night with the atrocities he's committing. He's, I think he believed he will bring about a better world.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  And by the way, the terror didn't start with Stalin. It started right after the Bolsheviks took over. When Lenin told Mr. Zelensky, Commander Zelensky, to build the Chikar and then execute the, this is what he called it, the Red Terror.

• 24:37Speaker 01

  So at the birth of the Soviet Union, there was already terror. And it was deliberate. And it also was, it 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, there was no, no court cases. You know, people were just pulled out of their apartments and shot on sight.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  And this was done by revolutionaries who were convinced that eventually, you know, that these sacrifices had to be made. And eventually that would lead to a much better planet.

• 25:18Lex Fridman?

  And the populists believed this too, that those sacrifices in part.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:23Lex Fridman?

  This is such a dark thing about dictatorships is you believe it, but you're also too afraid to question your beliefs. Like, you're not directly afraid, but almost like, um, I don't know what that is. That's almost like a subconscious fear. Like, don't, there's a dark room with a locked door. Don't look in that door. Don't check that door. And there's something about the United States that says, especially modern culture, say, go to that door first and sort of question everything, kind of. That's the power of the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press. But you can get, um, almost become too critical and too cynical of your own culture in that way.

• 26:07Lex Fridman?

  So there's a balance to strike, of course, but man, if that's, if communism is not a lesson of human nature, I don't know what is. But you believed, without thinking too much about it, you believed in the story of communism. What did you see? Just, you know, I came from the Soviet Union. What did you maybe feel?

• 26:30Lex Fridman?

  That's right and good about communism, about the vision of communism. Do you remember?

• 26:37Speaker 01

  I think the biggest impetus in me believing in communism was that the communists, when, when, 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.

• 26:59Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  And, and communists were hunted down by the Nazis, killed, put in concentration camps. And so what we knew, 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.

• 27:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  And the most famous one was Reinhard Gallen, who was in charge, was the general in charge of the intelligence on the eastern front under Hitler. And when the, the Allied won the war, it was decided that Gallen was too important, with his knowledge of the, and his organization was too important to, to not use. So he was co-opted by the CIA and eventually wound up being the head of the Bundesnachrichtendienst, the CIA of West Germany.

• 28:03Speaker 01

  That gave us, us, when I say us, you know, the East German Party, a huge propaganda victory. I wanted to, because his, the emotional aspect of this was as follows. When we, we were in, when, juniors in high school, and, and those, in those days, when you, you were only allowed to go to high school if you were in the top 10% of students, okay? So this was going to be the next set of ruling elite in the country. We were sent, we were required to visit a concentration camp.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  And if you know what what we as seventeen year olds were made to look at, it was gut wrenching. How can man do something like that to man? Piles of corpses,

• 29:00Speaker 01

  lampshades made out of human skin because that skin had tattoos on them and a shrunken heads, heads like the size of my fist. I mean, the girls all cried and it would have made a huge impression.

• 29:16Lex Fridman?

  And that was the that was the Nazis.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:20Lex Fridman?

  The communists.

• 29:21Speaker 01

  Communists were 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? So, but we didn't know that.

• 29:36Lex Fridman?

  From the Russian Soviet perspective, the communist regime banded together to win the the Great Patriotic War.

• 29:46Speaker 01

  And that was the the second one, you know, the big brother, the Soviet Union. I mean, when when I was approached by the K G B, that was like, oh, I felt so honored.

• 29:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So we should say that we're talking about East Germany, that you're from East Germany. Can you describe you were born four years and what is it?

• 30:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, four years.

• 30:11Lex Fridman?

  Ten days?

• 30:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, sort of. Very good.

• 30:14Lex Fridman?

  After Germany's unconditional surrender in World War Two. So what is East Germany? What is West Germany? What is East and West Germany? What is that? What's the difference? What's the historical context here? What is World War Two again? And then

• 30:32Lex Fridman?

  let's do.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  We don't have to go to World War One, which the result of which actually seeded World War Two in some respect.

• 30:40Lex Fridman?

  Yes, there's a long history, yes.

• 30:43Speaker 01

  But let's start with World War Two. So when Hitler came to power, he he and his his leadership decided that the Germans needed more what they call Lebensraum. That means room to live. So, and they would, you know, they would start expanding. And 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.

• 31:25Lex Fridman?

  Cut up Poland together with the Soviet Union.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:29Lex Fridman?

  They were friends.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:31Lex Fridman?

  They were not...

• 31:32Speaker 01

  There was a non-aggression pact between, that was signed by Ribbentrop and Molotov, right? I think both parties knew that eventually they 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, you know, the time and the ability to pretty much conquer all of Western Europe.

• 32:03Lex Fridman?

  Do you think Stalin really knew that it's gonna fall apart?

• 32:07Speaker 01

  Why would somebody like Stalin trust somebody like Hitler?

• 32:10Lex Fridman?

  But why did he blunder so bad not to read the intelligence that was coming his way?

• 32:17Speaker 01

  Oh, he doesn't...

• 32:18Lex Fridman?

  That the troops are amassing on the border of the Soviet Union?

• 32:20Speaker 01

  He didn't trust his own intelligence apparatus.

• 32:22Lex Fridman?

  Boy.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  Here's 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 Zorger. Richard Zorger had really, really good intel about what the Japanese would do and not do. And I forgot exactly what it was, but it was, it came to Moscow and Stalin totally ignored it. And when Zorger was captured by the Japanese, the Soviet Union denied that he was wanted there, so he was executed. The paranoia, again, does a lot of damage.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  When you don't, when you don't believe your own intelligence apparatus, why bother having one?

• 33:17Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I mean, there, but I'm sure there's contradictory information coming in from the intelligence apparatus. So it's difficult. I mean, first of all, nobody likes to be disagreed with, especially when you get become more and more powerful. And then the intelligence apparatus is probably giving you information you don't like.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:35Lex Fridman?

  It's often negative information about.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:39Lex Fridman?

  Basically, information that says that the decisions you made in the past are not great decisions. And that's a difficult truth to deal with.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:49Lex Fridman?

  So there, you know, in the modern times, if we hop around briefly, is Vladimir Putin has been not happy with the intelligence of the FSB, thereby, at least if you read the news.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:06Lex Fridman?

  Choosing to put more priority to the GRU for the intelligence in Ukraine.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:14Lex Fridman?

  But I guess I suppose the same story happens there as it does throughout history is paranoia.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  I I give you an example that that comes from a very reliable source. And that my my best German friend worked as a chemist in the Stasi, East German intelligence. And he eventually, he 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 that was collected. The Stasi was really good. They had about 1,000 people in West Germany undercover agents, some of

• 35:05Speaker 01

  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. So, and, and one, one delicious thing that I just want to add on to this. When, when Gorbachev wrote his book about Perestroika on Glasnost, the, the East German rulers did not like it. They were much, much more orthodox. So, they had to print the books in translation. Guess where they wound up? They were in the, piled up in the hallways of the Stasi. They, they bought the entire print run.

• 35:52Lex Fridman?

  Fascinating. So, but let's backtrack. So, Operation Barbarossa, invasion of Hitler to the Soviet Union. And then hopefully that leads us all the way to East Germany, West Germany after the end of the war.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  So, what, what happened was the Soviet Union rolled into the eastern part of Germany and the, the Western Allies took a larger chunk, which was eventually, it was occupied by the three Allies, the French, the, the English and the Americans. And the eastern part was occupied by, by Soviet troops. And the Soviet troops actually conquered Berlin.

• 36:34Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  But as a, and, and, and, as in a, in a contract, they decided that Berlin would be ruled by the four Allies. And they all had, you know, had free access to that city. I was born in the East German part, which very quickly became ruled by communists slash socialists. The, the Communist Party and the Socialist Party united. And, but the leaders of that new party were all communists.

• 37:06Lex Fridman?

  It's nevertheless called democratic.

• 37:08Speaker 01

  Yes, German Democratic Republic, which was formed a couple of months after I was born. I was born into a, the remote southeastern corner of, of East Germany. And interestingly enough, genetically, I'm only half German.

• 37:28Speaker 01

  The other

• 37:28Lex Fridman?

  The other half.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  Uh, the other half is Czech and Polish.

• 37:31Lex Fridman?

  Nice.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  Because, uh, where I grew up, you know, we, I could walk to the Nisa River, which was the, uh, border with Poland and, and it was only about an hour by bus to get to the Czech, uh, border. So that's why I'm a mix.

• 37:48Lex Fridman?

  So, okay. So East Germany after the war was communist socialist.

• 37:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:53Lex Fridman?

  And then the West Germany was representing the Western world with the

• 37:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:58Lex Fridman?

  Democracy.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  And what the United States did, what, this was really, really very, uh, forward looking, very strategic, the, the Marshall Plan to rebuild the economy in the West as compared to what the Soviet Union did. They, whatever they hadn't destroyed on the way in, they took with them, uh, on the way out for reparations because, you know, they had every right to do that. But it was, uh, not a good idea because, you know, East Germany was always behind in economic development, uh, to, to their Western counterpart.

• 38:35Lex Fridman?

  So when you were young, as today, but when you were young, you were clearly an exceptional student.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:43Lex Fridman?

  You're a brilliant academic superstar. Let's go to your childhood. What's a fond memory from childhood that you have in being woken up to the beauty of this world and sort of being curious about all the mysteries around you that I think ultimately lead to academic, um, success?

• 39:07Lex Fridman?

  Or was it?

• 39:08Speaker 01

  The, the fondest memory that comes to mind is my first kiss.

• 39:13Lex Fridman?

  How's that? Do you want to go to the details of that? What, uh, what, what, what'd you make of that? What'd you make of that kiss? What, what'd that teach you about yourself and human nature and all that?

• 39:25Speaker 01

  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 I I knew in those days, I admired girls. I I knew that girls were like a 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,

• 39:56Lex Fridman?

  right? And that was like, that was, that too was magical for you.

• 39:59Speaker 01

  Oh, my God, yeah. And and I literally, I dedicated, that's when I started studying. Up until that point, I just liked it, whatever I had to do to be an A minus student. And that's when I started studying. And every A that I got, I dedicated to her, sometimes explicitly, because I knew I was gonna take care of her, you know, when I grew up.

• 40:24Lex Fridman?

  So you're gonna have to work hard in this world to be somebody that could be adored by the, by those you love.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  Yes, you're right. You know, that, that kiss, the next day, I was running around in school with a grin on my face.

• 40:39Lex Fridman?

  And maybe that, in some way, that grin never fades. So what about the heartbreak that followed?

• 40:47Speaker 01

  Well, the heartbreak.

• 40:47Lex Fridman?

  Surely followed.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  But just to expand on this a little more.

• 40:53Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  Because that, 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, but.

• 41:08Lex Fridman?

  But that, that you understood that that feeling.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 41:12Lex Fridman?

  That taught you something like that you're somebody that can feel those things.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 41:16Lex Fridman?

  And there's, that's a strong part of who you are, and therefore, it will also be a part of directing your life trajectory.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we, we were an item for two years. I lost my virginity.

• 41:31Lex Fridman?

  Congratulations.

• 41:32Speaker 01

  She was not a virgin at the time. She, my, my, my competitor was.

• 41:38Lex Fridman?

  There always is a competitor, isn't there? Isn't that how it works?

• 41:41Speaker 01

  He studied medicine in, in college already.

• 41:43Lex Fridman?

  In which ways was he better than you?

• 41:45Speaker 01

  Uh, he wasn't. He was older and he was more experienced.

• 41:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  And he was gonna be a doctor and I, but you know, I was there and he was not.

• 41:55Lex Fridman?

  Ah.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  The, you know, presence wins.

• 41:57Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but you still had big dreams. You wanted to be a, a tenured professor.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 42:03Lex Fridman?

  So you, you still want to outdo that guy?

• 42:06Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. And, and she, she eventually told me that, uh, you know, he, he was, he was not in the picture anymore. So it was back and forth, back and forth. And, uh, the, our senior year, we were an item and, uh, and I was just dreaming of, uh, you know, the future, but sort of, we didn't figure out that, you know, in those days, if she went to college in Berlin and I went to college in Jena and the, the distance to, uh, between the two cities was too, it was too much to, for a weekend visit, you know, public transportation was very slow and nobody had cars. So.

• 42:49Lex Fridman?

  So the circumstance of life, you drifted apart.

• 42:52Speaker 01

  And so we interacted with a couple of letters and then I got the goodbye letter.

• 42:58Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 42:59Lex Fridman?

  That hurt?

• 43:00Speaker 01

  I can still feel it. You, you know, when.

• 43:04Lex Fridman?

  That's, that's a good thing that you could feel the pain. That's still part of love. That's, that's, that the pain of loss is still part of love. And then you kinda change that, you shape it and you give that love in deeper, more profound ways to future people.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  Very well put, but it, at the time, it, it emptied me out.

• 43:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  If, if I had, uh, a tendency to, you know, to have suicidal thoughts, I might have killed myself.

• 43:33Lex Fridman?

  It was, so you, would you say that was one of the darker moments of your life?

• 43:37Speaker 01

  Um, let me see.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  As a single moment, yes. So, you know, I'm, I still remember, uh, we had a, a mail slot in the front door and I, I was expecting a letter any day and there was the letter. I go upstairs into my, my bedroom and I open it and I read it. And I was just like, the life went out of me.

• 44:04Lex Fridman?

  You're just there alone and you have to experience this pain alone.

• 44:07Speaker 01

  So.

• 44:08Lex Fridman?

  And now you're deeply alone in this world.

• 44:11Speaker 01

  Yes, because I didn't have a, there was no emotional, um, relationship with my parents. Um, I, I literally had nobody.

• 44:21Lex Fridman?

  So this love you have in you had no, had no place to go.

• 44:25Speaker 01

  It was choked off. All right. So, uh, but I, uh, what I did was I, uh, I, I wanted to go on, right? And so I threw myself into the study of chemistry. I outworked all of my fellow students in a big way. I just like, I worked my ass off and since I was pretty smart too, I just aced practically everything. And for the first two years in college, and look, we go to college, there are all these pretty girls and there's dances and everything. We had this, this great student club where, uh, I, I didn't look at any girls. Like, I'm, eventually I knew I was going

• 45:08Speaker 01

  to, you want to have female companionship, but love? Uh-uh. No more, that hurts. There's a, there's a song that goes, "Love hurts."

• 45:17Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I know that one. That's true. There's actually many songs that have a similar message. Yes. Um, so during that time, during your excellence, just being an exceptional student of, of chemistry, let's go to your story. So, um, in your book, Deep Undercover, My Secret Life and Tangled Allegiances as a KGB Spy in America, and in the really, really excellent podcast series that I've been listening to, it's, people should definitely listen to it, it's called The Agent. You document your time as a KGB spy before, during and after. Can you tell the story of when you first were contacted by the KGB, those, how you were?

• 46:01Lex Fridman?

  Invited, the offer to join was made.

• 46:04Speaker 01

  Well, it was a big surprise and I never thought of myself as a potential agent. You know, I was going to be a tenured professor and join the ruling elite because in Europe, tenured professors are few. It's not like in the United States, you know, anybody who teaches at colleges has a title of professor.

• 46:23Lex Fridman?

  Easy now.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  It's true. That's not a criticism.

• 46:27Lex Fridman?

  One hundred percent. So we should also clarify that tenured professor or not, it is a very prestigious position throughout history of Europe.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:36Lex Fridman?

  And I would say, especially communist, I don't actually know the full landscape of the respect, but at least in the Soviet Union where I grew up, it's a prestigious position.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  Absolutely was. And the town of Jena had about a hundred thousand people live there. And I would, it's a wild guess, but maybe thirty tenured professors and they were part of the ruling elite. I was trying to do as much as I can to live the good life, right? You know, have access to things that are nice.

• 47:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but I think the powerful thing about being a professor in that context of East Germany is the prestige.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  And the feeling of superiority. You know, I was full of myself. You know, when you are the best of the best, and I, in my third year, I received a scholarship, the Klimark Scholarship, that was limited to one hundred concurrent recipients in the country. So, my God, no, I was full of myself. I believed in myself, hook, line and sinker. And I was also, I got a lot of accolades from teachers and fellow students.

• 47:57Lex Fridman?

  They were feeding the ego, the old.

• 47:59Lex Fridman?

  I mean,

• 48:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:00Lex Fridman?

  you have to believe in yourself often when you're young to truly

• 48:04Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 48:05Lex Fridman?

  to excel. And you sure as heck did.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  But you know, as a balance, you need a mentor, somebody who puts things in perspective, and I didn't have one. My father was a nonentity and nobody else, they all looked up to me.

• 48:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  I was an up and coming guy, right?

• 48:22Lex Fridman?

  So there's no father figure that put you in your place?

• 48:24Speaker 01

  Not at all. And I give you one extreme example. It was down the road when I fathered a child out of wedlock.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  That was in my fifth year, I believe. The Communist Party in East Germany was very moralistic. If you did that, they would have a talk with you and give you whatever, severe reprimand. Nobody even mentioned a word about this. So, yeah, so this is, this is how this ego gets nurtured. But anyway, getting back to how the KGB came in contact. So they most likely got knowledge of me by, you know, looking at Stasi records.

• 49:07Lex Fridman?

  What's Stasi?

• 49:09Speaker 01

  Oh, that was East German secret police, Staatssicherheit, security for the state.

• 49:16Lex Fridman?

  There's that word security again.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  And they pretty much kept a record on everybody in the country. And so when you, when you look through this and this is what the KGB was looking for. They were looking for candidates, particularly for this kind of job that they had in mind for me, for candidates who were not, you know, in their mid twenties, who were not fully developed yet, but mature enough to get there. And still young enough, right?

• 49:51Lex Fridman?

  Because at that level of maturity, you can test whether they can handle this kind of job.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely right. So, and one day I got a knock on my door and my dorm room door, it was on a Saturday.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  And they knew that I was by myself. How did they know it? We had a, I pieced this together. We had an exchange student from the Soviet Union and he was next door to me. And he, you know, he befriended me, so he got to know me a little bit. And, and the pattern was that my roommate would always go home for the weekend. And of course, they also knew which door to knock on, even though there were no nameplates, right? Somebody knocks and I knew it was a stranger because if it had been a student, the pattern

• 50:50Speaker 01

  was that we would knock on the door and then go in. We wouldn't wait for somebody to let us in. So I didn't, I waited for 10 seconds and he didn't come in. I knew that was a stranger. I said, come on in. And then came a person who spoke fluent German, so that was not a KGB guy. It was a collaborator. And so he started making a bunch of small talk. He introduced himself as the, as a representative of Kautseizena, which was the optics company that made, that was, made really, really good optical instruments. It was one of the best in the world.

• 51:32Lex Fridman?

  So it's like the, you know, the super prestigious company in that place?

• 51:38Speaker 01

  Right. And he said, you know, that he was a representative of that company and he would just want to find out what my plans were after graduating from college. And at that point, I knew he wasn't from Kautseizena because in those days, there was no recruitment. You, when, when you were done, if you were in the top 10% of the graduates, you would most likely pick to stay and get a doctorate, right? And the rest of them were assigned, you know, wherever, you had no choice. So, so that guy was... An idiot.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  He, he, he didn't know the basics about.

• 52:25Lex Fridman?

  You interviewed him a little bit to understand like.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  Oh, sure. You know, I, you know, I started.

• 52:29Lex Fridman?

  Like feel out, is this guy full of shit? Because yeah, he's a stranger showing up to your dorm room.

• 52:34Speaker 01

  And I knew that, at that point, I knew he was Stasi, which is wrong, but it doesn't matter because he was German and I had no idea that the KGB would be involved.

• 52:44Lex Fridman?

  So, uh, so sorry to pause briefly.

• 52:48Lex Fridman?

  Did you have a sense, did people know that there's a Stasi type of organization? That there is a, a large number of people doing this kind of work in East Germany? In, in order for you to make that guess?

• 53:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, we, we, we knew that the Stasi existed. We, we even had our, uh, James Bond, you know, we had, uh, a series, called the Invisible Visor, where, and a Stasi employee in East German would go into West Germany and hunt down Nazis.

• 53:18Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 53:19Speaker 01

  So, yes, the Stasi was, was known to be there.

• 53:21Lex Fridman?

  And admired in part or feared or both?

• 53:25Speaker 01

  I, I thought they were necessary and I admired them.

• 53:29Lex Fridman?

  James Bond?

• 53:30Speaker 01

  The re- yes, the reason I did so because I had no information to the contrary. I never knew anybody personally or even, you know,

• 53:42Speaker 01

  somewhat removed, who was, uh, uh, followed by the Stasi, uh, was, uh, you know, put in jail. I, I had no clue. I, I had no clue that they did a lot of damage and that they were like, doing a lot of surveillance of, of, of the East German population, the same way the KGB that, that did for, for the Soviet Union. So for me to be talking to somebody from the Stasi, it was, uh, it, um, it raised my interest. I was curious, what comes next? Because I sort of knew something interesting would be coming at me. And I, I had no, I had no other thoughts about that at that point.

• 54:23Speaker 01

  So when, when he was finally, when he, uh, he went in, he went for the kill by, uh, reversing himself. He said, you know, I gotta tell you that I really, I really am not from Karlsberg, you know, I'm from the government.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  Okay, thank you for pointing that out. And then he asked this question, he says, can you imagine to one day work for the government? And so I gave a pretty clever answer, I said, yes, but not as a chemist. So we, I answered the question that he didn't ask, I helped him out. So we made an arrangement to meet, meet for lunch, which in Germany is the main meal, at the number one restaurant in, in Jena. I still remember what I ate.

• 55:10Lex Fridman?

  What was that?

• 55:10Speaker 01

  Rum steak with, with butter on top and french fries, was my favorite. Anyway, so when I get to the restaurant, I, I saw this fellow sitting in the back there at the table and there was another person at the table. So I was a little bit hesitant because in those days, it was not unusual for, for perfect strangers to share a table, because there wasn't, weren't enough tables and chairs and so forth. So I didn't know if I could approach him, but he, he got up and came to me and he took me to the table and he said, I want to introduce Herman, we work with our Soviet comrades. Ah, KGB.

• 55:55Speaker 01

  And then he, he disappeared, he says, I got something else to do. I never knew his name, he just handed me over to the KGB.

• 56:03Lex Fridman?

  What was the relationship between the KGB and Astasys as collaborators, close collaborators, or just distant associates?

• 56:11Speaker 01

  They were pretty close collaborators, as I told you that, you know, they, they, they bought forged documents that the Germans made because the Germans were better at forgery. They also exchanged information, but they didn't trust each other 100% and, and I, and I tell you why I know that. So they recruited me to send me to West Germany.

• 56:35Speaker 01

  As I already said, East Germany had a thousand agents over there. Why would they have their, want to have their own?

• 56:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah, okay, this is fascinating, internal and external dynamic of distrust.

• 56:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:47Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so there you are, welcomed by the KGB. When did the offer, the invite come?

• 56:55Speaker 01

  Well, that took a while. So Herman and I had an unofficial relationship for about a year and a half. I would meet him once a week, once every two weeks, initially in his car, but then

• 57:11Speaker 01

  he, he, he took me to a conspirational flat. It was an apartment that was occupied by a, a party member, a lady, single lady. When we came in, she would leave. She left us tea and cookies, and then we could freely talk. He also, at that time, gave me some West German literature, magazines to read, which was, of course, forbidden. So already starting to feel somewhat special. And as we were talking about what they had in mind for me in general, I knew that I was going to be even more special because I would be above the law.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  I would, I would operate outside the law of the countries I would go to, as well as East Germany, because, you know, the magazines and, and eventually, when, when I joined up, they told me I had better watch West German television, which was also not explicitly prohibited, but it was something that could get you in trouble, so.

• 58:19Lex Fridman?

  On many levels, you're super special. You're the James Bond.

• 58:22Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 58:23Lex Fridman?

  So what was that recruitment testing process like, testing whether you

• 58:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:31Lex Fridman?

  are, you have what it takes to be a KGB agent?

• 58:35Speaker 01

  First of all,

• 58:38Speaker 01

  We had very in-depth talks, Herman and I, about life. And I was, I still am, very honest and sharing my feelings.

• 58:53Lex Fridman?

  Philosophical or personal?

• 58:55Speaker 01

  Personal.

• 58:56Lex Fridman?

  Personal.

• 58:56Speaker 01

  I even, I even told him that I was shy around the girls.

• 59:00Lex Fridman?

  He was giving you relationship advice, or what? How old was he? So what was the dynamic? Can you tell me? Was it a father-son?

• 59:08Speaker 01

  No, older brother, older brother. Yeah, he was maybe in his, early to mid 30s, and I was maybe 10 years younger.

• 59:16Lex Fridman?

  And what languages did he speak?

• 59:18Speaker 01

  He spoke German, he spoke German pretty well.

• 59:20Lex Fridman?

  But he's originally from Russia?

• 59:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, with a Russian accent. So I got in trouble one time with him when, when I asked him, is your real name German? He didn't like that.

• 59:32Lex Fridman?

  He didn't like it. Was he good with girls? Was, was?

• 59:35Speaker 01

  No, no, he just, you know, I remember what he told me. He says, you know, you've got to understand one thing, they're looking for guys too. That's, that's all, you know?

• 59:45Lex Fridman?

  Oh, girls are looking for guys too?

• 59:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 59:48Lex Fridman?

  It's a competitive game, yeah.

• 59:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, don't, don't, don't worry about it, you know, don't be so shy.

• 59:52Lex Fridman?

  So that little flame of love that we talked about?

• 59:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:56Lex Fridman?

  In all the shapes that it takes in our life. Did he talk to you about that? That that could be taken advantage of? That that could be used? Or was it implied?

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, but not in, it was not very focused, not in great detail. So let's, so we talked about personal stuff and, you know, likes, dislikes. He gave me tasks. For instance, when my friend and I hitchhiked from, from East Germany all the way down to Bulgaria, he told me to write a report about it, what I saw. So fundamentally, he wanted to see how well I can, I can write, and how well I can report, how well I observe. He also asked me to write some profiles about fellow students. I don't believe that was for them to give him to the Stasi. It was just like, how well do I characterize people?

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  What's, that's important when you're talking about, when I was in the US, active in the US, I operated as a spotter, so I did exactly that. I wrote profiles about people. He also gave me some tasks to do that were rather unpleasant.

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  Like what?

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  He would give me an address and a name of the people who lived at the address. And he told me to go there, ring the doorbell and find out something about a relative who lived in West Germany.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  That is undercover exploration, right? So you go, you make up a story and somehow win the confidence of your target to tell you something that you want to know.

• 1:01:38Lex Fridman?

  Was that, did that come naturally to you?

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  No, no, I hated it.

• 1:01:41Lex Fridman?

  The charisma involved? Which part did you hate?

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, charisma, I think, I didn't know that I had it.

• 1:01:47Lex Fridman?

  It took you some time to discover?

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  Because, you know, I was, I always was and I still am to some degree a bit shy. I lost a lot of the shyness after moving to the South because here in the United States, because you don't have to be shy, you know?

• 1:02:05Lex Fridman?

  You can let your love shine.

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. So, but anyway, I hated doing that, but I did it well. I still remember, so I, in those days, I had a beard and I rang the bell and...

• 1:02:20Lex Fridman?

  Tall handsome fella?

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I looked the part, I said, "I'm a sociology student and I'm doing a survey and I asked a whole bunch of questions, would you like to answer the questions?" "No problem." And then I directed the conversation to the lady's private life and she actually gave me information, she volunteered information that I wanted to know.

• 1:02:47Lex Fridman?

  Beautiful.

• 1:02:48Speaker 01

  I did well and the other one that I didn't like, but I also did well with, when Herman drove me around the city and showed me a building and he said, "Find out what organization is in there, what they do." Uh, maybe get to know some people and I did that pretty well also. You know, you have to be inventive, you know, to, to come up with a cover story. And, and I've always been quite inventive. You know, I'm a storyteller at heart and that I didn't know it then, but you know.

• 1:03:24Lex Fridman?

  But there was still something unpleasant about it.

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 1:03:27Lex Fridman?

  Which part was unpleasant?

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  Well, the shyness and then, you know, you know, I wasn't very comfortable lying. I became comfortable down the road, but you know, I, I was brutally honest and, and never,

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  never hid anything of me.

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  But you know, over time, you lose that, that uncomfortable feeling. And you rationalize that you gotta do it. There's only one way, right? And you're serving a good cause.

• 1:03:59Lex Fridman?

  So you were talking to Herman for a year and a half.

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  A year and a half.

• 1:04:03Lex Fridman?

  And then how did that progress?

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  Yes, so he said, he finally, I guess he sent a report to headquarters in Berlin. And then he sent me on a three week, quote unquote, practice trip to Berlin. This was the first time when I had a, like a conspiratorial meeting where I would, I had an address and a time and a code phrase and I met another agent. His name was Boris. These names were meaningless. They were all like cover names, right?

• 1:04:38Lex Fridman?

  So what was the code in the meeting? What was then, what, can you give a little more?

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  That code I don't remember.

• 1:04:44Lex Fridman?

  Not the code, but like, what do you mean by code? So what was?

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  I tell you my, the, the code we used when I, when I met while I was active.

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  I would approach the other person who I thought may be the, the person I want to meet. We both had some, something to, with us or on us to make us more likely to be the right person. So, and I would, I would ask him the following questions.

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  Excuse me, I'm looking for Susan Green.

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  And he would answer, yes, you must be David. Stupid. If I, if I ask a stranger, they would look at me, well, how could I help you? So, no, it's the wrong guy.

• 1:05:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's just a low probability that the right thing would be said.

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely.

• 1:05:36Lex Fridman?

  Nice answer. And it seems like a safe statement.

• 1:05:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:05:39Lex Fridman?

  If it's not the right person.

• 1:05:41Speaker 01

  Exactly right.

• 1:05:41Lex Fridman?

  It would just come off absurd or crazy or whatever.

• 1:05:44Speaker 01

  You would have made a good secret agent. You know.

• 1:05:47Lex Fridman?

  You know, I'm not.

• 1:05:50Lex Fridman?

  This is, we'll discuss this.

• 1:05:54Lex Fridman?

  I'm dressed like one. Actually, yeah, where there's any dress code?

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  No, just fit in.

• 1:06:00Lex Fridman?

  Fit in, no matter what. And then be creative.

• 1:06:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:03Lex Fridman?

  Figure out ways to.

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  Right. So anyways, he gave me some tasks and we, and he, since I had rented a room in a house, he gave me Western literature to read.

• 1:06:17Speaker 01

  And we spent time together.

• 1:06:21Speaker 01

  And there was a practice run to West Germany. Actually, there were two.

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  And that was very important. In hindsight, I figured that out. So I traveled to West Germany, no, not to West Berlin, with an East German passport that was stamped that that individual was allowed to go to the West. And there was a part of the border that was only guarded by Soviet troops. And that's where they smuggled me into West Germany. I got on the subway and then

• 1:07:05Speaker 01

  appeared in West Berlin. No Americans, no Brits, no French knew that I had entered.

• 1:07:12Lex Fridman?

  Forged documents or not?

• 1:07:13Speaker 01

  No, no, this was an East German passport. It was real.

• 1:07:16Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  Okay. So, and the first trip, all they wanted me to do is just walk around, you know, smell the air, you know, have a beer or whatever and eat a sausage and then come back.

• 1:07:32Speaker 01

  The second trip, I had a task, very similar to the one that I had back in Jena, to ring the doorbell someplace and talk to some people. And that worked very well as also.

• 1:07:45Lex Fridman?

  I should mention that you talk about that, you know, eat a sausage, drink some beer. I suppose that's a good test, too, to see how you behave under Western, like when first introduced to the Western culture. Like, this is why I might not make a good agent, is when I first came to the United States and supermarket, like bananas, as many bananas as I want to eat. That, I think, I think that would break me.

• 1:08:18Speaker 01

  It's a shock.

• 1:08:19Lex Fridman?

  Just, it's a shock to be, to have access to Western culture.

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  You're getting very close to the reason they actually made me do this, these two practice trips. The, when I first emerged on West Berlin territory, I felt highly uncomfortable. That was the enemy, right?

• 1:08:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:40Speaker 01

  And I saw the cops everywhere. And even those, though those cops had like, light blue uniforms, not the, they weren't standouts. So I was wondering, you know, if they knew that, you know, I had like, KGB on my forehead.

• 1:08:53Lex Fridman?

  You were paranoid that they would know, that would see.

• 1:08:55Speaker 01

  I was scared, but I overcame that.

• 1:08:58Lex Fridman?

  So that's, can we just linger on that? Because I suppose that's a natural, like, if I give anybody on the street the mission to do the mission you had to do, is they would be paranoid. That's a natural human feeling is, am I being watched? Do they know? Like, if you try to steal something from a store, you, there's going to be a feeling like, are they watching me? Are the cameras watching? Are the people watching me? They all know, that kind of stuff. So you have to over, or you have to be somehow rugged and robust to that kind of feeling and overcome it.

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. So, and, and something very interesting happened. While I was being trained in Berlin, I met a classmate of mine from high school. And he confided to me that he was recruited by the Stasi to become a spy, go as a spy to West Germany. And he also had this practice trip and he peed in his pants. He went back and told him, I can't do that.

• 1:09:57Lex Fridman?

  Just from the terror, the

• 1:09:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:10:00Lex Fridman?

  That paranoia.

• 1:10:01Speaker 01

  Now, this guy's career was over. He had an, he had an, he had an engineering degree. He was a pretty smart guy. He, he was just for the rest of his life and he's still alive, I believe, floating around and, you know, trading in model railroads and stuff like that.

• 1:10:20Lex Fridman?

  You mean, do you think that experience broke him?

• 1:10:23Speaker 01

  They, they wouldn't let him back in.

• 1:10:25Lex Fridman?

  Oh, I see. They

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:28Lex Fridman?

  So this is a test that if you fail, you pay the

• 1:10:31Speaker 01

  I had no idea that, that, you know, something bad would happen if I failed that test, but I didn't.

• 1:10:38Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:39Speaker 01

  I didn't fail. So, and this led then to the offer. All right. And after, you know, Boris was happy with me and he told his boss, who was most likely the, the head of the KGB in, in, in East Berlin. And I had an appointment to meet.

• 1:10:57Lex Fridman?

  In East Germany?

• 1:10:58Speaker 01

  Yes, in East Germany, yeah, all of East Germany.

• 1:11:00Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:11:01Speaker 01

  That's right. An appointment to meet with him. And as we walk into the room, there was this, this huge desk and a little guy sitting behind it. Very, very, uh, just like little and not, unimpressive.

• 1:11:19Lex Fridman?

  Nice.

• 1:11:20Speaker 01

  A lot of paraphernalia, like, you know, had a bust of Tchaikovsky on, on, on this desk and, and some, some paintings, Lenin and so forth. But when the guy opened his mouth, he was like, whoa. A huge psychological energy. He spoke only Russian. Now, and initially he would, you know, start about with five minutes worth of propaganda, why we're doing what we're doing. I didn't need that. I understood most of it, uh, but what I, when, when I didn't understand, I'd ask Boris to translate. And then, then he sprung it on me and I was not prepared. He, he said, so what, are you in or not?

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  And I was, no, I'm gonna, I hadn't made up my mind. I wasn't expecting that would come. And so I said to him, I'm not really trained. You know, there's a lot of things I need to learn. And I came up with a couple of really stupid things. One, not so stupid, but the other one was, I don't know why I said that. I said, for instance, I need to learn how to drive a car and to type with a typewriter. And he was, he got really annoyed and he said, don't worry about it. We'll train you. But I gotta tell you, we need people who are decisive. So you got until tomorrow noon to give Boris your decision. That made for a sleepless night.

• 1:12:49Lex Fridman?

  So what was going through your mind?

• 1:12:51Speaker 01

  Well, I had, this was almost 50 50. I knew I was gonna have a huge career, a good career. I would, I was on my way because, you know, I was already employed by the university as an assistant professor.

• 1:13:09Lex Fridman?

  So that career would be to become a professor, become a tenured professor, be a world class?

• 1:13:14Speaker 01

  Yes. Vienna had become my hometown. I really loved the place. It was my oyster. And, and my family was my basketball team.

• 1:13:27Lex Fridman?

  You, you, you love playing basketball.

• 1:13:29Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely.

• 1:13:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so this is home. This is home. This is where your love is.

• 1:13:34Speaker 01

  This was home.

• 1:13:35Lex Fridman?

  Did you understand that the choice involved leaving?

• 1:13:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:13:38Lex Fridman?

  The home behind?

• 1:13:39Speaker 01

  Yes. And, and the one thing I didn't have, the two things I didn't have, an emotional relationship with my mother and I didn't have a steady girlfriend at the time.

• 1:13:51Lex Fridman?

  I think Freud would have a lot to say about that, but yeah, go ahead. But the connection between those two, but yes. Yeah, I'm sure.

• 1:13:58Speaker 01

  By the way, my, my, my friend Günther, the one who worked for the Stasi was also, the Stasi tried to recruit him as an agent, but he had a love relationship at the time. And he said politely, no, I, I won't, I can't.

• 1:14:13Lex Fridman?

  So you didn't have, that's the one thing that really could.

• 1:14:16Speaker 01

  Would have helped me.

• 1:14:17Lex Fridman?

  Would have held you to this place is love.

• 1:14:19Speaker 01

  So you got the career on the one hand, my basketball team, the town that I would be part of the ruling elite of. And then we had this great adventure and the ability to contribute to the victory, the worldwide victory of communism and, and stick it to the Nazis. And of course, the feeling that you're really special.

• 1:14:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, James Bond.

• 1:14:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:43Lex Fridman?

  What's, the, the question, do I want to be a tenure professor or James Bond?

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:14:49Lex Fridman?

  And, and that, as funny as that sounds, that was probably a difficult decision.

• 1:14:53Speaker 01

  It was a difficult decision, but fundamentally it wasn't, and it wasn't my zeal to, to help the revolution. It was my, my, what they called, what the Stasi was looking for, the KGB was looking for in, in, in a character that they would send over, a well-controlled inclination to adventure. Okay?

• 1:15:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Yeah. James Bond. What do you say? And the love of women. Yeah.

• 1:15:24Speaker 01

  I was, yes, I, I gotta put this in right here because I'm telling people I have two things in common with James Bond. These are my initials, JB. And, and I got the girl too, three times.

• 1:15:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. I mean, that's, and that's adventure.

• 1:15:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and, and, and the ability to travel to the West, because the West was closed off to us. We could go to foreign countries, but they all had to be communist countries. You know, I wanted to see Paris because I, I had fallen in love with the Honore Balzac, who wrote.

• 1:16:04Lex Fridman?

  Balzac, yeah.

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  Phenomenal set of novels that I just ate up. And so I, when I eventually did go to Paris, I knew all the places already because he described them all. But anyway, so that one, it was a.

• 1:16:18Speaker 01

  It was fifty one forty nine, but eventually, you know, when you, when you do the side by side intellectual comparison, that doesn't work. It becomes a tie and then, you know, you just go with your gut and I say, I'm in.

• 1:16:34Lex Fridman?

  So now that you successfully passed the test and you were sitting with this unimpressive man and had the invite and had to sleep on it and have made the decision to join.

• 1:16:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:49Lex Fridman?

  What was next?

• 1:16:50Speaker 01

  I was just told, you know, that I was being recruited by the State Department of East Germany. I was going to become a diplomat. I must have had some paper, but I forgot because just by saying so, then that would, that wouldn't have worked.

• 1:17:05Lex Fridman?

  There was some kind of document that says they can't.

• 1:17:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:08Lex Fridman?

  And that was the only entitlement you had to that, to that place. No love, no, just the basketball.

• 1:17:13Speaker 01

  Basketball, giving up basketball was huge for me. I loved playing that game. I started playing basketball when I was eighteen. That's a little late.

• 1:17:23Lex Fridman?

  Are you better offensive, defensive? What do you like more? Do you like to shoot from a distance? Do you like?

• 1:17:29Speaker 01

  I was a runner. I, I was very, very quick on my feet and I was a good jumper, too. I typically pay, played the, the four position, you know.

• 1:17:41Lex Fridman?

  What's that?

• 1:17:42Speaker 01

  Forward.

• 1:17:43Lex Fridman?

  Oh, the forward position.

• 1:17:44Speaker 01

  Forward position. But anyway, um, so that, that, that was the hardest for me to give up. But indeed, the other thing that I remember I had to do to hand in my party document to the party secretary of the university. And he made a comment, yeah, we probably won't hear much about you, but we know that you're going to do something very important. So he sort of had an, had an inkling that I'm going, I'm going to go someplace undercover or something like that. And then I packed my bags and got on the train to Berlin for another one of those secret meetings with my, my new handler, Nikolai.

• 1:18:26Speaker 01

  So, and here, here came another test that, that would have been quite easy to fail. So I'd.

• 1:18:38Speaker 01

  I had lived in Jena 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 in a single room with a bed, a chair and a table and a toilet down the hallway. So I figured, you know, Berlin, KGB, I'm gonna 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. I mean, I don't think I showed it in my face, but you know, my heart dropped like down into my pants.

• 1:19:23Speaker 01

  I knew this was nearly impossible because there 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 their decision to have a child. Anyway, this was impossible. Well, yeah, 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.

• 1:20:07Speaker 01

  I just went with the flow, you know? What do I do? So what I did, I went, 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... And she gave me, they gave me the address. And I talked to the lady and she said, I happen to have a place that you might, where you might be able to stay. It was an outbuilding. And I don't know what it served. It was not a garage. It was concrete.

• 1:20:50Speaker 01

  And it had a bed and a chair.

• 1:20:56Speaker 01

  Running cold water and a stove, a cold stove. That was my, was going to be my-

• 1:21:02Lex Fridman?

  Pretty basic, pretty basic.

• 1:21:03Speaker 01

  Pretty basic? Are you kidding me?

• 1:21:05Lex Fridman?

  That's the uh-

• 1:21:07Speaker 01

  Toilet across the yard, of course.

• 1:21:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, well, all the essentials. What are you complaining about? So you were right. You're right, you had to run the uh, the special, James Bond had to run the special operation out of the-

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:21:20Lex Fridman?

  Outhouse.

• 1:21:21Speaker 01

  To, to, to my credit, and I think that, that, that established part of my reputation. I didn't complain at all to Nikolai.

• 1:21:30Lex Fridman?

  That was part of the test, probably.

• 1:21:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just told him, you know, I found something. And so 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, operational training. Went to the library, did a lot of reading in the library. And then I found a basketball team that I could join. So at least I could take a shower twice a week. Um, and, 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.

• 1:22:13Speaker 01

  He said, he handed me a key, he said, "I'm gonna take you to your new apartment." Now, and I didn't know this, you know, that now I was really in, okay? Imagine the hurdles you have to jump over and how many times you can fail, but you know-

• 1:22:31Lex Fridman?

  But not complaining, not asking questions.

• 1:22:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:22:35Lex Fridman?

  I mean, that was something you've written about. I think you wrote that bosses do not like to hear complaints or problems. They prefer solutions.

• 1:22:43Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:22:44Lex Fridman?

  So what was your interaction like with the bosses? Is that essentially represent the way it went forward as well? No complaints, get-

• 1:22:55Speaker 01

  No complaints, no arguments, no, no, I know this better. I was taking it all in. Now, the, the, the technical guys, you know, they taught me something I didn't know that made sense. Um, what Nikolai, some of the stuff that he taught me-

• 1:23:13Speaker 01

  Was somewhat questionable. He was a generalist. And there's some things he didn't know really well. So I could have like asked and probed a little bit, but I didn't. So I just played along. So this new apartment was a, 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. Uh, one flight down the stairs.

• 1:23:40Lex Fridman?

  An upgrade.

• 1:23:41Speaker 01

  It was a big upgrade. And he gave me, uh, I think he gave me a thousand mark to buy, buy furniture. And in that place, I, actually, I also bought a TV and started watching West German television. So, so it, I finally had a decent place to stay. And the, the, my training in Berlin took about two years.

• 1:24:04Lex Fridman?

  What was the training? What were the interesting aspects to the training? What were sort of, if you do an overview systematic of what was the training process? What was difficult?

• 1:24:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:24:15Lex Fridman?

  What are some insights that generalize to the training process of what it takes to be a KGB spy?

• 1:24:21Speaker 01

  Right. So, uh, let me start with the tradecraft. So I was taught Morse code. That took a while. Uh, I, I, I was instructed in how to, you know, use a shortwave radio and to receive, uh, you know, the, the shortwave transmissions with Morse code. I was taught, uh, uh, an encryption and decryption algorithm, manual algorithm.

• 1:24:49Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 1:24:50Speaker 01

  You, you might be interested that eventually I figured out, uh, at least one of the patterns. Uh, the, the algorithm was such that the, and this was all about digits. Like, uh, and the algorithm was such that in the end, the, uh, the digits that were used to decipher other digits that were handed, that were sent to me via a shortwave radio. There were, let's say, if there were a hundred digits, there were an equal number of ones, twos, threes, fours, fives, sixes, and sevens, up until zero.

• 1:25:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:25:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, with computers for sure. But there's probably, they're probably designed in a way that you can manually, sort of, it's efficient and convenient to use them manually.

• 1:25:53Speaker 01

  Well.

• 1:25:53Lex Fridman?

  It's not to optimize cryptographic security, it's to optimize, it's like to balance security and like humans being able to actually.

• 1:26:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, I gotta disagree. It was neither efficient nor convenient.

• 1:26:05Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 1:26:05Speaker 01

  It took a long time.

• 1:26:06Lex Fridman?

  So it wasn't designed well.

• 1:26:07Speaker 01

  When, what was, 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.

• 1:26:18Lex Fridman?

  Uh huh.

• 1:26:18Speaker 01

  So you have the, the set of numbers.

• 1:26:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:21Speaker 01

  On, on a 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, the same sheet of paper.

• 1:26:37Lex Fridman?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:26:37Speaker 01

  Because, you know, the person who encrypts has the same set of numbers as the person who decrypts. And when, one-time use, you cannot figure out what the message is.

• 1:26:49Lex Fridman?

  Oh, interesting. But this is a quick way to communicate from one person to another one time.

• 1:26:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:26:53Lex Fridman?

  One time.

• 1:26:54Speaker 01

  Well, 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, I had only, when I, 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, a writing pad with, 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 to, you know, you see this pad, it was bought at Walmart and.

• 1:27:30Lex Fridman?

  Can you explain a little, little further? What, what is the chemical here that? What are we talking about? So how, I, I don't understand how it's possible to have a physical pad that does the encryption without any computing. I, how does it?

• 1:27:44Speaker 01

  All right. So, so, no, no, it doesn't, it doesn't do any work, you know? So, and the, the communication that the encrypted communication was, was a, a set of, uh, uh, groups of five, five digits and then another five and there's always a gap in between. And so let's say if I get this radio transmission, I write them all down and then I, then I use my, uh, develop my algorithm and then I do mathematics, either addition or subtraction. The resulting set of digits had, then had a one-to-one correlation to.

• 1:28:21Lex Fridman?

  Got it.

• 1:28:22Speaker 01

  Letters.

• 1:28:22Lex Fridman?

  And this is an easy way to then do the correlation.

• 1:28:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:28:25Lex Fridman?

  Got it. Yes. Well, that's cool. That's a, and you're saying the algorithm was not efficient. It was not.

• 1:28:31Speaker 01

  Oh, the manual, it took a long time and, and you can't make an error.

• 1:28:36Lex Fridman?

  Right. Uh, would you know where, can you, is it easy to debug? No, you.

• 1:28:41Speaker 01

  No, you do it twice.

• 1:28:43Lex Fridman?

  You do it twice and that's how you check.

• 1:28:44Speaker 01

  If it's identical, then you know.

• 1:28:46Lex Fridman?

  But like if it's not.

• 1:28:47Speaker 01

  If it's not, then, then one is right and the other is wrong. You gotta do it again.

• 1:28:50Lex Fridman?

  Still make mistakes.

• 1:28:51Speaker 01

  No, that's right. And I really didn't. But anyway, um, so I was, I was learning that. Uh, I was also, uh, told that I was required to become proficient in another language. And they gave me a choice and I picked English.

• 1:29:10Lex Fridman?

  What was the other one?

• 1:29:11Speaker 01

  Oh, no, they gave them, pick one, friend, you know, whatever is spoken in the West.

• 1:29:15Lex Fridman?

  Got it. What was, what was, what would be second to you? Would you, would you think French because of Paris? What would you?

• 1:29:22Lex Fridman?

  Why English?

• 1:29:23Speaker 01

  English was a no-brainer because I was a straight A student in English without studying. It came so easily to me.

• 1:29:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:32Speaker 01

  So that's why I chose it, right? So that was that. Then I was taught the basics of counter-surveillance. You know, some trickery and surveillance detection routes where you wander around in the city for three hours and 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.

• 1:30:14Speaker 01

  And my favorite spot was, it was a 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 open the door and pick up the telephone, you have to look back. So it wasn't like this, right? It wasn't a giveaway. This was normal. It was natural. So I could see if somebody would come walking after me. You know, these kinds of things. Or you would, you know, use public transportation, big buildings, where you needed to use an elevator and see who's...

• 1:30:57Speaker 01

  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 you're looking for. So somebody always has to come close, right?

• 1:31:14Lex Fridman?

  Did you have to also study surveillance?

• 1:31:19Speaker 01

  No, only counter-surveillance. And what helped me in all my training, you know, I would be, would have a competition with the 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.

• 1:31:49Lex Fridman?

  So basically, figure out a fixed route.

• 1:31:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:53Lex Fridman?

  And then a fixed route that allows you to survey the area and then record the faces you've seen inside your mind. And if you see multiple times a single face, that's a bad sign.

• 1:32:07Speaker 01

  And they could, they could, you use different clothes.

• 1:32:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:11Speaker 01

  But they didn't have was face masks.

• 1:32:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:16Speaker 01

  The CIA does nowadays. They can give you a different face within seconds.

• 1:32:21Lex Fridman?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:32:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:23Lex Fridman?

  So, how, I mean, again, you talk about paranoia.

• 1:32:30Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:32:33Lex Fridman?

  Is that part of the, is that a big part of the job, counter surveillance, like being constantly paranoid that you're being watched?

• 1:32:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was supposed to.

• 1:32:43Lex Fridman?

  Isn't that quite stressful? So is that, is that one of the, is that actually an effective way to operate?

• 1:32:48Speaker 01

  No, but it sort of becomes a routine. I was told to do it while in the US, once a month, and.

• 1:32:56Lex Fridman?

  Okay, it's like a cleaning out.

• 1:32:58Speaker 01

  Oh, not every day. No, no, no, no, no. Once a month. Or before, I would say mail a letter with secret writing. So I was sure that, you know, nobody saw me put an envelope into.

• 1:33:10Lex Fridman?

  Got it.

• 1:33:12Speaker 01

  A postbox.

• 1:33:12Lex Fridman?

  So this is one of the tools in your toolbox. There's Morse code, there's.

• 1:33:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:33:16Lex Fridman?

  The decryption and encryption, there's the counter surveillance.

• 1:33:19Speaker 01

  Photography.

• 1:33:21Lex Fridman?

  Photography.

• 1:33:22Speaker 01

  Making, making micro dots. You know what a micro dot is?

• 1:33:26Lex Fridman?

  What's a micro?

• 1:33:26Speaker 01

  Well, that's, that's, you use, 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.

• 1:33:46Speaker 01

  That can be used to hide under a postage stamp.

• 1:33:52Speaker 01

  In reality, I knew how to make them. But in reality, they never asked me to make use of that technique.

• 1:34:00Lex Fridman?

  It's a sort of an encryption mechanism for photographs.

• 1:34:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, so what we do nowadays embed code in PDFs and stuff like that, right?

• 1:34:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, beautiful, okay. All right, so that was a learning, a training process, both in the physical space and sort of

• 1:34:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:34:18Lex Fridman?

  algorithmically. Is there other things?

• 1:34:21Speaker 01

  Oh, you bet. Interestingly enough, the, I was, the first book I was given to read was the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

• 1:34:35Lex Fridman?

  Oh, so understand, that's interesting because you said you had to read Western literature.

• 1:34:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, that too.

• 1:34:39Lex Fridman?

  How much, how much reading, so history, how much history, politics, geopolitics?

• 1:34:45Speaker 01

  Not much more, but they made me read that document. Other than that, I wasn't supposed to study the Soviet Union. I wasn't supposed, and that was not, and I didn't, when they sent me to Moscow, it wasn't to learn Russia, Russian, right? It was 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, 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.

• 1:35:31Lex Fridman?

  And that, that helps you, that helps you get an understanding of the culture?

• 1:35:36Speaker 01

  Oh, you bet.

• 1:35:36Lex Fridman?

  Because you have to do any kind of. Interaction.

• 1:35:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:35:40Lex Fridman?

  Kind of spying, then you have to be be able to effectively integrate.

• 1:35:44Speaker 01

  Well, you also have to know, like, and that would have been easier if they had sent me to West Germany, you know, all the soccer teams, you know, 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, you know, take it in over time. Anyway, and the last thing I want to mention is they, 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, read books from all kinds of authors. That was important to them.

• 1:36:29Speaker 01

  And once a month, I had to write a report, what I did. But the interesting thing, there was not a, there was no curriculum, there was no agenda, there were no checkmarks. It was all ad hoc, you know, now you do this and then you do that. And, and a lot of this also, they relied on my initiative. Again.

• 1:36:50Lex Fridman?

  I mean, that's part of the evaluation, too.

• 1:36:52Speaker 01

  You bet.

• 1:36:53Lex Fridman?

  Are you able to have creative? It's interesting that they're like developing a James Bond type of character here, which is, what's the reason go to the opera? As you become.

• 1:37:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:37:03Lex Fridman?

  Cultured in a certain kind of way where perhaps that makes you more charming, more charismatic in terms of your ability to integrate yourself in different situations.

• 1:37:12Speaker 01

  You absolutely right. I, 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 soiree in Washington DC. I mingled freely.

• 1:37:38Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:37:38Speaker 01

  Right? And, and, 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, you know, the work of these.

• 1:37:53Lex Fridman?

  And how did you end up in Moscow? Why?

• 1:37:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:57Lex Fridman?

  What is that journey?

• 1:37:58Speaker 01

  Well, so I I told you, I started studying English. So I started back from scratch. You know, I had when they paid for a tutor. And I went from like English one oh one. And then I went through that in a couple of months. Then and then I got another guy with whom we I expanded this. We had conversations rather than working from a textbook. And I and I worked like a maniac. I threw myself into the study of of of English like you wouldn't believe. And 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.

• 1:38:43Speaker 01

  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. And I piled them up. And so I really learned one hundred 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. There's a really good way to learn wrote by wrote. So you got category one, that's the new ones. And you got category five. So you start with with five. Five, you already had right four times. If you have it right again, it goes into the archive.

• 1:39:28Lex Fridman?

  Oh, like long term cold archive. Yeah.

• 1:39:32Speaker 01

  Four, if you get it right, it goes to five. If you get it wrong, it gets relegated to three. So and so you go through this. And and occasionally I would throw the archive things back into one.

• 1:39:49Speaker 01

  So I really, I really acquired a phenomenal vocabulary. When I was done with my English, my vocabulary was significantly higher than the average American because I, I didn't discriminate. Whatever word I didn't know, I learned, which is not necessarily the best way because, you know, English has a lot of synonyms, right?

• 1:40:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:09Speaker 01

  And, and one synonym is usually the preferable one. And, and I, when I first interacted with people, I very often used the one that wasn't as good. And people found that I, you know, I have an interesting way of talking. They didn't know what that meant, but.

• 1:40:28Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, well, so it builds a good foundation for a language. It's getting a large vocabulary.

• 1:40:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:40:33Lex Fridman?

  It's really interesting. There's something I do, which is called spaced repetition, which is a programmatic way of doing this kind of system that you've developed yourself, which is if you successfully remember a thing, it's going to be a longer time before it brings it up to you again.

• 1:40:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:49Lex Fridman?

  Now, that's requires a computer to keep track of the information. If you have cars, that's a really interesting pile system. One, two, three, four, five, you upgrade it, one, two, three, four, five. Maybe I wouldn't go to the archive and go to pile one right away. Maybe I would go to like, I don't know, pile five perhaps is probably the right place to put it because, because you have to go through that full step again. But that is a really powerful way to learn definitely language, but also facts, like people that go to medical school.

• 1:41:21Speaker 01

  Disconnected facts.

• 1:41:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:23Speaker 01

  And, and you pretty much, when you're done, you know what you know.

• 1:41:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:27Speaker 01

  You don't have to.

• 1:41:28Lex Fridman?

  Then again, to use it, to integrate it into the music of language, that's more difficult. That's what you're talking about.

• 1:41:33Speaker 01

  Exactly right.

• 1:41:33Lex Fridman?

  There's a charm. I mean, maybe it's not good for spycraft, but there's a charm to this kind of, to having an accent and using words incorrectly, but confidently. There's a, because language isn't a simple formula. Language is the play of words. So actually using the incorrect synonym, you know, as it.

• 1:41:58Lex Fridman?

  You know, if instead of saying I'm cold, saying I'm chilled.

• 1:42:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:02Lex Fridman?

  Something like using offbeat words can actually be part of the charm. So it's interesting if you can learn how to use that correctly.

• 1:42:11Lex Fridman?

  Cause I've known a bunch of people with a Russian accent and I feel like they get get away with saying a lot of ridiculous shit. Because they're able to sort of leverage the charm of the non sequiturs.

• 1:42:22Speaker 01

  By the way, by the way, just one, one thing that you talked about using a computer. When I had my first personal computer, I actually wrote a program that does that.

• 1:42:33Lex Fridman?

  Who does that? By the way, when was that? When, cause you were a world-class programmer for a time. You were a very good programmer. When, when did the birth?

• 1:42:43Speaker 01

  PC was probably 1984.

• 1:42:45Lex Fridman?

  1984. When did you fall in love with programming?

• 1:42:47Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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, it was a dumbed down Fortran. But listen, so I, I see the ability. I see what, what you can do with this. I programmed a sine curve and then I divided the, the sine curve into really, really, really small rectangles and then ran the program and it came up with the right area.

• 1:43:32Speaker 01

  Wow, this is great.

• 1:43:34Lex Fridman?

  That's incredible. It's incredible. It's so powerful. It's a, you're creating, you're creating a little helper.

• 1:43:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:43:41Lex Fridman?

  Helps you understand the world to help you analyze the world and so on. We'll, we'll return to that because it's interesting.

• 1:43:47Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:43:47Lex Fridman?

  So you have so many interesting aspects to your, to your life, but Moscow, so.

• 1:43:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, let me, no, let me, how, 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 he, you know, we talked and then he says, 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.

• 1:44:16Speaker 01

  And he said, you know what, I'm gonna send you a tape recorder and you just talk, say something, you know, for 20 minutes, whatever you want to talk about. Uh, they sent this thing and two weeks later I was on a plane to Moscow. Because 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. That was an innate ability. I would, you know, when, when, when we were in a lab and as students, I would very often do monologues, imitating East German comedians.

• 1:45:01Lex Fridman?

  Oh, like Compressions?

• 1:45:02Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. I'm not good enough to, 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 professor at Lomonosov University. She was obviously KGB, that was her cover. And the other one was an American-born lady.

• 1:45:33Lex Fridman?

  Oh, by the way, she was an actual professor and using that as the cover? Or is it just a story?

• 1:45:37Speaker 01

  No, I, she said she was a professor. She may have taught there too.

• 1:45:42Lex Fridman?

  That's an interesting distinction. One is like a story you tell people.

• 1:45:45Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:45:46Lex Fridman?

  And one is like you legit are doing the thing, but are also as a cover. Anyway, that's, that's an interesting aspect of how to be a good liar. You might, you might as well live the lie.

• 1:45:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly right. So the other one was a middle-aged, the Russian was pretty young, the other one was middle-aged, an American. And, and so we talked for maybe a couple of hours and then they withdrew and I was left alone. Eventually.

• 1:46:18Speaker 01

  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 become, becoming a native speaker of American English. And he said, the Russian was very doubtful. So I think wishful, it was a tie, literally. Wishful thinking prevailed. So within a couple of weeks, I was moving to Moscow.

• 1:46:47Lex Fridman?

  And what, what was the task in Moscow? And how long were you in Moscow?

• 1:46:55Speaker 01

  Two years.

• 1:46:56Lex Fridman?

  And what was the task there? Is it training or is it espionage?

• 1:47:01Speaker 01

  No, it was training. It was, so it was, the American born became my tutor. I met with her twice a week. I, I also listened to a lot of BBC, short wave BBC worldwide. I read more English books.

• 1:47:20Lex Fridman?

  So a lot of that was about the language and the culture of English, American.

• 1:47:24Speaker 01

  And, and I did phonetics exercises.

• 1:47:29Lex Fridman?

  Nice.

• 1:47:30Speaker 01

  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 was, it's mostly about the vowels, by the way, most of the accent and particularly, let's say, coming from German into, into English, but also Russian. It's the vowels.

• 1:47:53Lex Fridman?

  Are we talking about the, so you would have a single word?

• 1:47:56Speaker 01

  A word.

• 1:47:57Lex Fridman?

  Like apple and you would just say apple?

• 1:47:58Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:47:59Lex Fridman?

  And American English or British English?

• 1:48:02Speaker 01

  No, American English. And I give you one example that almost nobody gets right. The difference between hot and hut.

• 1:48:12Speaker 01

  You know.

• 1:48:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah, hot in the hut.

• 1:48:14Speaker 01

  And in German speakers, it's very tough.

• 1:48:17Lex Fridman?

  You know which one, for everyone is different. For example, I could say this on a podcast, something that my brother struggles with, I struggled with too. When I first came to this country to learn English is there's differences, there's embarrassing differences. Like beach and bitch, right? And you get so, as a young kid also, you get so nervous of, I don't want to say the wrong thing. I can also say that this is almost is a jokey thing, but there's a, there's a famous philosopher, Immanuel Kant. And you can guess which other word is very similar to that. So there's, there's a nervousness about the, what is that? That's interesting.

• 1:48:58Lex Fridman?

  I mean, and Germans probably have a different tension of like, what is hard to learn? The difference between the pronunciation of the vowels or the control of the vowels. Yeah, it's interesting. So you had to really master this daily exercise.

• 1:49:13Speaker 01

  And you know, and this, 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 the diplomatic cover. They would come and talk to me a little bit and tell me, and, 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. I also, they also taught me how to drive a car in Moscow.

• 1:49:46Lex Fridman?

  Finally, the one skill you need. What's surveillance detection?

• 1:49:49Speaker 01

  Okay, so this is what, when, when you find out whether you're being followed.

• 1:49:54Lex Fridman?

  Ah, got it, got it, got it. So it's the anti, yeah.

• 1:49:56Speaker 01

  The abbreviation that's used in, and, and yes, in intelligence circles is SDR, surveillance detection route. You know, when they say that, you know what that is? And, 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.

• 1:50:29Speaker 01

  They they thought this would come in handy, actually, that they there was in in nineteen eighty two, Andropov started a campaign was, now I forget the name, Operation Something Something, where everybody who was in the West was supposed to look for signs that the West was getting ready for a war. And I had an, everybody had an object to, to pay attention to. I had a harbor, a military harbor in, in New Jersey, near Red Bank, it was called Earl Weapons

• 1:51:08Speaker 01

  Station. And its code name for that was Early, so they asked me to just wander by 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 gonna start a war. They were absolutely one hundred percent afraid of him.

• 1:51:28Lex Fridman?

  Is there something memorable to you on a personal level, on a philosophical level, about your time in Moscow? Something that kind of stays with you, outside of the training stuff, maybe, like the details of the train-

• 1:51:41Speaker 01

  You'll love the answer. You will love the answer. I was-

• 1:51:47Lex Fridman?

  I already guessed.

• 1:51:48Speaker 01

  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 Hee Haw?

• 1:52:06Lex Fridman?

  Uh, maybe.

• 1:52:08Speaker 01

  Uh, there was a, it was a country music show, real kitschy, but the star of Hee Haw was giving a concert in Moscow.

• 1:52:19Lex Fridman?

  Concerts.

• 1:52:20Speaker 01

  And I guarantee you, at least half the audience were KGB.

• 1:52:25Lex Fridman?

  Oh, man.

• 1:52:26Speaker 01

  And at the other end, the

• 1:52:30Speaker 01

  the opposite of a highlight was my visit to the to the mausoleum where Lenin is still today. There was so... There wasn't nothing, you know? He was my hero, but he looked like a wax figure. And you walk by there, there was nothing inspirational. There was not a religious experience, nothing. It was a big old nothing.

• 1:53:04Lex Fridman?

  Is that... Did your faith and belief in communism start to crumble at some point here? Is that around... That was still pretty strong?

• 1:53:13Speaker 01

  What I did notice that the standard of living in Moscow was significantly lower than in East Germany. 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.

• 1:53:51Lex Fridman?

  This is the 80s?

• 1:53:54Speaker 01

  No, this is the late 70s. Mid to late 70s. And also, they had these high-rise apartment buildings that looked pretty good from the front, but you went into the backyard. Ouch, you know?

• 1:54:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, you're describing my childhood here, okay.

• 1:54:14Lex Fridman?

  But it's interesting, even with a professor, even with everything else,

• 1:54:19Lex Fridman?

  it's interesting, because I think the standard of living was much lower. You're right, even in Moscow.

• 1:54:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely was. The one thing that they always had, at least in my days, in those two years, there was always fresh bread in the bulatnyas.

• 1:54:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:34Speaker 01

  Always.

• 1:54:34Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's probably one of the memories I have of childhood is...

• 1:54:40Lex Fridman?

  Well, you're hungry a lot, but when you eat is bread.

• 1:54:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the bread was good.

• 1:54:45Lex Fridman?

  It was good. I mean, I don't, I actually wonder, I wonder how good it was, but I remember it being incredibly good.

• 1:54:53Speaker 01

  To me, it was really good. And, and you know, 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, Stalichnaya was four rubles.

• 1:55:10Lex Fridman?

  Not only is it good vodka, but it's a cheap vodka. I like it.

• 1:55:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you had to know where, you know, this would be like holes in the wall someplace.

• 1:55:19Lex Fridman?

  Well, I think a lot of the way they operate, I wonder if East Germany is this way, but a lot of the ways that Moscow operates is you kind of, you had to know.

• 1:55:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:55:29Lex Fridman?

  Like, there's a very kind of, if you make the right friends, if you give money to the right guy, the guy, the friend of the friend of the friend is gonna hook you up. And there's, there's a culture that this is how you work around a very big bureaucracy.

• 1:55:45Speaker 01

  Underground economy.

• 1:55:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, underground economy. Yeah. You have to, which is, uh, boy,

• 1:55:54Lex Fridman?

  such a stark contrast between, between that and the United States, the capitalist system.

• 1:56:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that was a very big culture shock to me to understand the different way, the different, fundamentally different way of life. But the interesting thing is, um, human nature pervades both systems. And there's something about the Russian system that reveals human nature more intensely because of the underground nature of it. Because you get to deal with greed and trust and all those kinds of things. In the United States, there is much more power to the rule of law. So there's rules and people follow those rules. They had to break the rules nonstop.

• 1:56:39Speaker 01

  Well, in, in East Germany and Russia, I believe.

• 1:56:43Speaker 01

  Theft, if you could get away with it, was part of your economic activity.

• 1:56:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:49Speaker 01

  I have a friend, you know, who I went to school with up until my fourth year and we reconnected. And he told me how he survived, you know, he would, he would just steal stuff and then sell it and or trade it.

• 1:57:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, theft, I mean, it's a relative concept.

• 1:57:07Speaker 01

  You were taking stuff.

• 1:57:08Lex Fridman?

  Bribery, all those kinds of things. People, you know, corruption, you know, it's a relative term. No, I'm just kidding. I mean, it is. You have to work around the giant bureaucracy about the the giant corruption. Corruption builds on top of corruption and it just becomes this giant system that's unstable, as you talked about.

• 1:57:29Speaker 01

  One last word.

• 1:57:30Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:57:32Speaker 01

  The two years in Moscow taught me how to be alone. I had no social interaction.

• 1:57:42Lex Fridman?

  Not with friends, not with women, not with...

• 1:57:45Speaker 01

  No. I was, the only interaction I had was with the folks that trained me. So I was alone. It was a lonely two years.

• 1:57:54Lex Fridman?

  For a person who loves love.

• 1:57:57Speaker 01

  Yes, but that prepared me for my 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.

• 1:58:14Lex Fridman?

  So the first two years in in America, you had to kind of listen more than talk.

• 1:58:20Speaker 01

  Oh, you bet. The very first year, I couldn't even work because I had to acquire the documents, a social security card and a 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 as, you know, because these people that...

• 1:58:43Speaker 01

  They weren't very curious about me.

• 1:58:45Lex Fridman?

  What was your name in East Germany? What was your name in Moscow? What was your name in America?

• 1:58:51Speaker 01

  Okay, so the name I was given at birth is Albrecht Dittrich. Nobody cares.

• 1:58:56Lex Fridman?

  So sexy when you speak in German, with a German accent.

• 1:59:00Speaker 01

  I hated that name, Albrecht. I didn't like it. It was very rarely used. My mother named me after a famous German painter, Albrecht Dürer. My cover name in Moscow was known as Dita. 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 I remember is William Dyson, because that is the name that was on the Canadian passport I used to enter the United States.

• 1:59:36Lex Fridman?

  So how did you enter the United States? Can we take the journey from Moscow to the United States?

• 1:59:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:41Lex Fridman?

  What was the assignment? What was the... What was that leap? What was like what?

• 1:59:47Speaker 01

  Just one thing in between. I had a three-month practice trip to Canada. That was a good idea. And I got to tell you this one thing that happened there.

• 1:59:59Lex Fridman?

  Yes, please.

• 2:00:00Speaker 01

  Okay. Because, you know, the one thing that I like to tell people nowadays is the... One of the secrets to happiness is the ability to make fun of the worst situations that you're in.

• 2:00:11Lex Fridman?

  Yes, absolutely.

• 2:00:12Speaker 01

  You see the humor.

• 2:00:13Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 2:00:13Speaker 01

  Okay, so here comes something quite humorous, in hindsight at least. One of the tasks that I had in Canada was to acquire a birth certificate.

• 2:00:25Speaker 01

  But the name was Henry Van Randall, who was born someplace in California. And I was supposed to, you know, write a little letter saying, "I'm Henry Van Randall. Please send me a copy of my birth certificate. The fee is enclosed." And, uh, and, and I, uh, I lived in a small hotel. So the return address, it wasn't visible that it was a hotel. That was important. So, and it took like three weeks and I get nothing. Four weeks, I get nothing. Eventually I got annoyed and I, I, I, I mustered the courage to call them up from a cell, from a payphone.

• 2:01:08Speaker 01

  I called up the office registrar, whatever they were called in this, in this town in California. And I, and I yelled at them. I says, you got my money. Where's my birth certificate? Well, a couple of weeks later it came. So I see the envelope. This is the Henry Van Randall. Yes. I had prepared the caretakers of the, um, of the hotel to, that I'm expecting a letter from my friend. So I went up to my room. I opened it and I was like, yes, yes, this is a success. And, and then I opened this thing and it was, it was a copy of a birth certificate, but it was stamped with big letters across in red, deceased. Now, think about it. So here's the dead people who was asking for, that person who was asking for a birth

• 2:01:53Speaker 01

  certificate.

• 2:01:56Speaker 01

  I, I had the presence of mind to, to leave. Okay. I went to a couple of other cities. I should have left the country. But I know that the Royal Mounted Police was following me. And I was given that information by the FBI later on and they were.

• 2:02:12Lex Fridman?

  You were able to, yes, oh, you were able to at least suspect that at the time?

• 2:02:17Speaker 01

  I would.

• 2:02:18Lex Fridman?

  Through the, the, the.

• 2:02:20Speaker 01

  I, I knew that, I knew that there was trouble. So I, my counter surveillance route.

• 2:02:28Lex Fridman?

  SDR.

• 2:02:29Speaker 01

  Yes, didn't discover anything. So I kept on going. Uh, I had to supposed to, I was supposed to visit two more cities and, uh, they were always one step behind. What, what, what is interesting to me is that they didn't catch me on the way out. You have to show your passport to the airline.

• 2:02:50Speaker 01

  I mean, I was known by name, I would, because I had to give that to the hotel, right? And I escaped with the hair.

• 2:03:00Lex Fridman?

  They would have to keep you on a list, right?

• 2:03:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:03:06Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's interesting, but that requires like a good computerized updated system to track on that stuff.

• 2:03:13Speaker 01

  This was Swissair, so.

• 2:03:15Lex Fridman?

  Well, you got lucky.

• 2:03:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:03:17Lex Fridman?

  Part of life is luck.

• 2:03:19Speaker 01

  You bet. So, so, and, and other than that, the, the trip to Canada was a big success because it, it gave me the culture shock that, that I needed to not be blown out of, out of the water and when I get, get to the United States.

• 2:03:40Lex Fridman?

  So you hopped a few places in Canada and then Swissair?

• 2:03:44Speaker 01

  I even had a, I even had a relationship with a young lady.

• 2:03:49Lex Fridman?

  Uh, Canadian, French Canadian, regular Canadian?

• 2:03:52Speaker 01

  French Canadian and she, she gave me a book, Winnie the Pooh, because we went to see the movie and then she wrote the dedication, she says, "To the nicest German I've ever met."

• 2:04:04Lex Fridman?

  Was she lying?

• 2:04:06Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:04:07Lex Fridman?

  Oh, you don't know. Speaking of spy craft, and that, that led to heartbreak too?

• 2:04:15Speaker 01

  No. That was sexual. I was not, at that point.

• 2:04:23Lex Fridman?

  Ready for love? Ready to return to that old love?

• 2:04:26Speaker 01

  Well, and I was, I was already, already married in Germany. Okay, that woman I loved.

• 2:04:32Lex Fridman?

  We should return to this.

• 2:04:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:35Lex Fridman?

  So, Swissair, where did you land in the United States?

• 2:04:41Speaker 01

  Oh, when I came, where did I land? I, I, an American Airlines flight from Mexico City to Toronto, but they made me deplane in Chicago. I have no idea. I think that was over engineering. That didn't make any sense to me. You know, why can't the Canadian just take a, take a flight from Mexico City? I, I don't, with this stopover, this kind of nonsense.

• 2:05:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but, okay, but nevertheless, that was it? And then you landed in Chicago?

• 2:05:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:05:11Lex Fridman?

  And tell me the story in America. What was the day to day life? Now, this is now you're a spy.

• 2:05:17Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, I gotta tell you another funny story.

• 2:05:20Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 2:05:22Speaker 01

  So this is another, uh, there's two things that happened that could have ended my career as a spy right then and there. So I'm, uh, so I'm, I'm arriving in, in, um, uh, Chicago in the evening. It's already dark. Uh, I, I had no idea what kind of a hotel to take, you know, I picked one out of a, uh, out of, uh, Yellow Pages and then got a taxi. When I gave him the address, he looked at me like a little funny, you know, whatever, what do I know, you know, just keep on going. I need to get, I need to get sleep because I was extremely, uh, tense, you know, having gone through customs and border control.

• 2:06:06Speaker 01

  So, and, uh, we are going in the southern direction and I noticed that the neighborhoods were, were, became less and less inviting. Didn't, didn't know what that meant either. And I get, uh, I entered the hotel. It was a five story brownstone and something else looked funny. So the reception desk was, uh, protected by Plexiglas. Not having enough background, I didn't know that this was unusual because all I knew that there was a lot of crime in the United States. So I thought maybe every hotel was like that. So I go up into my room and drink a half a bottle of, uh, Johnny Walker Red because I-

• 2:06:46Lex Fridman?

  As one does, yeah.

• 2:06:49Speaker 01

  Because I was so damn tense, I just wanted to sleep. I wanted to get into a coma, which I did. And, and the next day I woke up with a head that was twice as big as, felt twice as big, uh, but you know, I was prepared. I had aspirin with me, so. I killed the headache and went outside to see if I can get something to eat. And so I was right smack in the middle of the south side of Chicago. I didn't know that the south side of Chicago existed. I found later, I found out where I was. So it was time to go very quickly. Go up there and at that point I decided I would, I would register at the next hotel on the Jack Barsky.

• 2:07:34Speaker 01

  So I went to the bathroom and I tried to kill, kill off Mr. Dyson by burning his passport. Unfortunately, I was not trained in how to train passport, how to, how to destroy passports. So I tried to burn it and these things were flame retardant. And it created a cloud of smoke and I'm looking up there and there's a smoke detector.

• 2:08:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, oh no.

• 2:08:02Speaker 01

  Okay, so presence of mind, I threw this thing in the toilet and then, then took out a pair of scissors and cut it into small pieces and flushed it down. If that smoke alarm goes off, I'm busted, right? If somebody, if, if some, some criminal steals, I had $6,000 on me in cash, steals either my passport or my, or my money or both, I don't know what to do.

• 2:08:26Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, you can't go to the authorities, you can't do anything.

• 2:08:28Speaker 01

  There weren't, there weren't any Russian Soviets in Chicago.

• 2:08:31Lex Fridman?

  Do you have any contacts?

• 2:08:33Speaker 01

  No, there was no, there was no, there was no Plan B for Chicago at all. That's an oversight. And I shouldn't, I shouldn't have gone to Chicago. They, they could have shipped me into San Francisco or Washington DC because both of them had Soviets. My end call was, was to go to, to New York, fine. You know, I would have been a really, really dangerous agent if I had gone back and worked with the KGB because I could have told them all the things, how to do it right, right?

• 2:09:07Lex Fridman?

  So in that sense, there is some?

• 2:09:11Lex Fridman?

  Given the scale of the KGB, there is some incompetence in the

• 2:09:15Speaker 01

  Some?

• 2:09:16Lex Fridman?

  A lot of incompetence.

• 2:09:17Speaker 01

  With regard to preparing me to be an American was almost total incompetent.

• 2:09:22Lex Fridman?

  And that, do you think that's representative of the way they operate? Is there's an incompetence like to the logistics, to the

• 2:09:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:09:32Lex Fridman?

  Strategies involved, all that kind of stuff?

• 2:09:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, they, none of these guys had operated as illegals. They, they were outsiders to American society. They had interaction with Americans and, but they all lived in, you know, in New York, they lived in a compound in Northern Manhattan where they all lived together with their families. And, and they, most of the time they spent interacting with, with themselves, with their own people at work.

• 2:09:58Lex Fridman?

  So they really didn't integrate well?

• 2:10:00Speaker 01

  They did not know what it's like to be an American, to have a job, to, to, you know, live like an American. They didn't know it.

• 2:10:08Lex Fridman?

  It's interesting that KGB didn't put a high value to that kind of integration.

• 2:10:13Speaker 01

  They didn't know what they didn't know.

• 2:10:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:15Speaker 01

  And, and by the way, this was mutual. Do you think the CIA had, had good knowledge of the Russian culture? Uh-uh. Same thing. And so there was a lot of lack of understanding because good, good intelligence could have possibly avoided some of the high tension that, situations that we had when, when in the eighties, we got close to nuclear war.

• 2:10:38Lex Fridman?

  So good intelligence would be integrating yourself in society.

• 2:10:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:10:42Lex Fridman?

  Much, much deeper.

• 2:10:43Speaker 01

  And understanding that Ronald Reagan was not a warmonger, but he was talking about the end times because he was a, a Christian.

• 2:10:50Lex Fridman?

  But then that kind of integration can be dangerous because you start to question the propaganda, the narratives that, on which the KGB is built, on which the CIA is built.

• 2:11:00Speaker 01

  And, and then they, they have, they always have, had the options of ignoring the intelligence that they're getting, right?

• 2:11:07Lex Fridman?

  Well, let me ask you this question sort of to jump around. There is a lot of conspiracy theories in this, in this current climate, I mean, throughout history, but now especially. And some of the conspiracy theories put a lot of power in the hands of the intelligence agencies like CIA, FSB, Mossad, MI6. They're basically, the conspiracy theories go that they control the powerful people in this world. And they're able to thereby manipulate those powerful people and manipulate the populace in order to deliver different kinds of messages and so on.

• 2:11:50Lex Fridman?

  Given your experience with this kind of tension between competence and malevolence, would you say there's some truth to those conspiracy theories?

• 2:12:00Speaker 01

  Not one way. I think, I think there is collusion, there's collaboration. But I would think that, like, for instance, some folks in the CIA and the FBI are being used by the ones that are really in power. Power is money, power is wealth.

• 2:12:21Speaker 01

  I know.

• 2:12:21Lex Fridman?

  It can go the other, it can go both directions. You can acquire wealth first, which leads you to power, or you can acquire power first.

• 2:12:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, power is also knowledge, I understand. And, and, and a position in society, in the military or in intelligence. But I don't think it's a straight one way that all the intelligence agencies control the powerful people in their country. You see what's happening in Russia. I mean, Putin dominates his intelligence agencies, right?

• 2:12:51Lex Fridman?

  Well, so the question is which way the direction goes. But you're saying that there is, it's not one way flow of power.

• 2:12:59Speaker 01

  I would think so. And, and I also believe it exists, but it's not as prevalent as, you know, not every conspiracy theory pans out, and most of them don't. They're just damn rumors, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. I guarantee you that they exist, there's collusion, there's people getting together. And not necessarily

• 2:13:21Speaker 01

  preparing a specific action, but more sort of a plan to go forward and maintain the position or even, you know,

• 2:13:30Speaker 01

  strengthen the position that they already have.

• 2:13:32Lex Fridman?

  So KGB, but we can generalize this, FSB, CIA. Do you think a KGB agent would kill someone against international law if they were ordered to do so? So we talked about.

• 2:13:43Speaker 01

  They did. They did. And there's a famous case of one, I think it's Vasili Kukloff, who defected. He was a killer. He was a trained killer. And he had done assassinations in other countries. He was sent to West Germany to kill a defector, a KGB defector. And he decided not to do it. He talked to the guy and he said, I'm supposed to kill you. I'm not. And then he eventually wound up in the United States. I have a connection to this fellow because the KGB once asked me to go to California and see if the guy still lives and works there.

• 2:14:27Speaker 01

  And we, I found him and we looked at each other. So there was an active KGB agent looking at a man that he didn't know was the KGB defector, looking at each other. Neither one knew who the other one was. I found out later.

• 2:14:48Lex Fridman?

  But he was able to survive?

• 2:14:51Speaker 01

  Yes. And you know, there have been assassinations, not a lot. And you know that-

• 2:15:00Lex Fridman?

  That we know of.

• 2:15:01Speaker 01

  A good point.

• 2:15:03Lex Fridman?

  This is very difficult. The question is, how many lines are intelligence agencies willing to cross to attain, to achieve the goal?

• 2:15:17Speaker 01

  I think none of these agencies have the ultimate line. I think eventually the last line will be crossed if they believe it's necessary.

• 2:15:29Lex Fridman?

  Well, I think you can justify a lot of things, especially in this modern world with nuclear weapons, that you can justify that you're saving the world, actually. Let me ask you a few difficult questions and we'll jump back to your time in America. But-

• 2:15:45Lex Fridman?

  Vladimir Putin has been accused of ordering the poisoning and assassination of several people, including Alexander Litvinenko, early on, all the way to Alexei Navalny. Do you think these accusations are grounded in truth? And we will return to a couple more questions, maybe, about Vladimir Putin's early days in the KGB, which would be interesting.

• 2:16:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a phrase that I'd like to say in response. It's called plausible deniability. I don't think Putin gave a direct command as they do that. He would just maybe muse. It would be nice if something were to happen. And then somebody picks it up and does it.

• 2:16:29Lex Fridman?

  Is there, can you still man the case that Putin did not have direct or indirect involvement with this?

• 2:16:36Speaker 01

  Who would know? Who would know? You know, this.

• 2:16:40Lex Fridman?

  Well, the international, the reputation, perhaps, perhaps catalyzed by Putin himself, is that he is the kind of person that would directly or indirectly make those orders. Perhaps the case there is he's somebody to be feared, and thereby you want that narrative out there.

• 2:17:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. But the act itself, the poisoning of Litvinenko and, oh, and then the assassination of the Bulgarian Markov and with the umbrella, and they all directly trace back to Russian Soviet intelligence. And so that's enough to be feared, right? My answer that I gave you is an educated guess. I can't pretend to know this for sure, but.

• 2:17:37Lex Fridman?

  It's frustrating to me because there's a lot of people listening to this would say, would even sort of, would chuckle at the naive nature of the question.

• 2:17:49Lex Fridman?

  But if you actually keep an open mind, you have to understand what is the way that intelligence agencies function? Is it possible to the head of an intelligence agency not to make direct orders of that kind? Where there's a distributed?

• 2:18:05Speaker 01

  No, the head of the intelligence agency would most likely give the order.

• 2:18:08Lex Fridman?

  Even though it's compartmentalized?

• 2:18:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, but, but, but not the head of state.

• 2:18:14Lex Fridman?

  Not, maybe not the head of state. Although in the case, this is the case in the United States as well, but certainly is the case in Russia, there are close relationships between the head of the FSB and the GRU and personal relationships, not just even.

• 2:18:30Speaker 01

  The head of the FSB was now in jail?

• 2:18:36Lex Fridman?

  There's interesting details, especially coming out recently around the war in Ukraine. So let me actually ask about the war in Ukraine.

• 2:18:47Speaker 01

  All right.

• 2:18:48Lex Fridman?

  What is your analysis of the war in Ukraine from 2014 to the full-on invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022 in February 2022? What, there's many questions we could ask. One is, what are the sins of the governments involved? What are the sins of Russia, Ukraine, America, China? Are those sins comparable? Who are the good guys and the bad guys?

• 2:19:24Speaker 01

  That was more than one question now. Let me just give you my, the basics about this. Savvy observers saw this coming. They were a very small minority because Vladimir Putin was pretty open about what he told the world his mission was, was the re-establishment of a strong Russia, the re-establishment of something like the Russian Empire to unite all the Russian-speaking people in the one country. And the world ignored him. I mean, he was open. What was, was at a conference in France, I believe, when we, where he said this out

• 2:20:08Speaker 01

  in the open. And then what we had in the United States, we had wishful, wishful thinking. You know Obama had this reset with Russia. You know, we all get friendly. And then when Putin invaded Crimea, we did nothing. So and it and it just escalated slowly but surely. It was pretty clear and it is it was, I think, two years ago. There was an essay published by Putin, whether he wrote it or not doesn't matter. But that was also out in public where he was again quite clear what he was going to do. Now, how do you do this?

• 2:20:52Speaker 01

  With force. And and the sins committed by the American government was that we ignored it. We weren't engaging in wishful thinking and we didn't stop it with sanctions before the shooting started.

• 2:21:08Lex Fridman?

  To push back, I don't think you're fully describing. You are describing the sins of the Russian government and Putin. I don't think you're fully describing the sins of the American government here because not only didn't you're doing you're describing the miscalculation. So not only did they not pressure correctly with sanctions and so on and clearly respond to the actual statements and the essays and the words spoken.

• 2:21:36Speaker 01

  I know where you're going, but keep on speaking.

• 2:21:38Lex Fridman?

  Yes, but they also, at the same time, pressured pressured Russia and they also, as Putin himself said, sort of there's a rat and they pushed the rat towards the corner by expanding NATO.

• 2:21:54Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:21:55Lex Fridman?

  And.

• 2:21:56Speaker 01

  And arming Ukraine.

• 2:21:58Lex Fridman?

  And well, the military industrial complex is a machine that that led us. And I think a lot of younger people. I mean, when I came to this country, and this is the country I love.

• 2:22:17Lex Fridman?

  I lived through nine eleven. I lived through the full roller coaster of emotion. I'm a, at that time, before that and after, was a proud American. I went through the whole roller coaster of being sold, I would say, a lie about the reason to invade Iraq and even Afghanistan. And I got to live through understanding of this military industrial complex that leads to the expansion of empires, of the delusion that we have in the populace, in the government,

• 2:22:57Lex Fridman?

  that convinces us that we are the good guys and somehow with military force, we can instill our values, instill happiness, the pursuit of happiness, that all men are created equal, these ideas into other lands. And we could do so with drones and we could do so with weapons and we could do so without significant cost or our own, from our own pockets. And so this idea, this machine, doesn't just apply to Afghanistan and Iraq, it doesn't just apply to Yemen and Syria, it doesn't just apply to China, it also applies to Ukraine, it also applies to Russia.

• 2:23:36Speaker 01

  Agreed. Two thoughts, if I may. First of all, one does not hear the term military industrial complex in the public discourse these days. Eisenhower warned about it. Eisenhower was a capitalist. He was the president of the United States. So it exists and it is very powerful. The more weapons you can sell, the more you have to replace them or send over, you have to replace them. So, yes. The other thing is, there's also a messianic streak that powers American foreign policy. We want to make the world just like us. Why don't they get it?

• 2:24:21Speaker 01

  Because they don't want to. It's almost like, it's not communism, but it's a very similar romantic idea that we can make the world and fashion the world the way we are. And that's the romantic side and the sort of honest side, but it doesn't work.

• 2:24:38Speaker 01

  It failed every time, right? You know, Afghanistan is a royal mess and was would never have become a functioning democracy. I don't know if Ukraine can become a functioning democracy. So.

• 2:24:51Lex Fridman?

  Well, I don't know if American weapons can help Ukraine become a functional democracy. I.

• 2:24:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely right.

• 2:25:00Lex Fridman?

  But there's a huge amount of interest in seeing the world in black and white and selling the story of the world as black and white, that Ukraine is the symbol of democracy in this east, Eastern European world, and Russia is the symbol of authoritarian dictatorship. And the story is not so simple, as many indices show, Ukraine and Russia are the number one and the number two most corrupt countries in Europe.

• 2:25:31Speaker 01

  They're two peas in a pod. One is bigger and one is, in this case, the aggressor. Now, you know, two peas, the aggressor is still ultimately responsible and.

• 2:25:45Lex Fridman?

  The person that throws the first punch, now, there's a lot of people going to disagree where the first punch came from.

• 2:25:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure.

• 2:25:51Lex Fridman?

  But there is, there is magnitude.

• 2:25:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:25:55Lex Fridman?

  And the struggle by Ukraine for its sovereignty stretches back to the beginning of the 20th century. It stretches back even further than that. But there's been, the Ukrainian people are proud people, and they've been, in many cases, tortured by those that sit in the Kremlin throughout the 20th century.

• 2:26:17Speaker 01

  The famine in the early 30s.

• 2:26:21Lex Fridman?

  And it's always, it's never the middle class and the upper class that suffer. It's always the lower classes, the peasants in that time. That, this history stretches back far, and this is yet another manifestation of that. And there's a lot of interest at play. China watches closely, Russia, America watches closely, and there's an extra caveat here that there's nuclear weapons at play as well.

• 2:26:50Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:26:52Speaker 01

  And it's what this is, the situation is as dangerous as I have lived through in my entire life, I believe. And because it's not necessarily at the highest point of escalation, but it will be, in my view, a protracted crisis. And the longer that crisis lasts, the more of a chance there is of an accident.

• 2:27:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, one rocket.

• 2:27:18Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:27:19Lex Fridman?

  There's seems to be a strong incentive to prolong, to do siege tactics, to prolong this conflict over perhaps many years, which is terrifying to think about.

• 2:27:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:27:31Lex Fridman?

  And over that, one, a single rocket can lead to, given that there's leaders that might not, that might be losing their mind.

• 2:27:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:27:43Lex Fridman?

  And Ukraine is not part of NATO. The thing I'm really afraid of is that somebody might think it's a good idea. But for Russia, so Putin might think it's a good idea for Russia to send a message by launching a nuke against Ukraine.

• 2:28:00Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:28:01Lex Fridman?

  Because they're not part of NATO.

• 2:28:02Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:28:03Lex Fridman?

  So surely the West is not going to respond. What is the West going to do?

• 2:28:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:28:08Lex Fridman?

  If, if Russia nukes Ukraine to send a message. I don't know if anyone knows the answer to that question, but it's a terrifying question.

• 2:28:18Speaker 01

  And, and I don't know the exact protocol that needs to be followed to, to launch a nuclear strike from NATO's end, because we have several countries in NATO that have nuclear weapons. So for, let's say for France to fire a nuke, does the United States have to agree? Or how, I don't know how that works.

• 2:28:40Lex Fridman?

  I don't know if anyone knows how that works.

• 2:28:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:28:44Lex Fridman?

  I worry, now, we have different, very kind of anecdotal perspectives on these things, but the people I've interacted with in the DOD, Department of Defense, in the military. There is a compartmentalization, there is a bureaucracy, and within that giant bureaucracy, there's incompetence. We'd like to think that there is like really well organized for really important things, there's going to be the best of the best in the world that's going to execute on the correct decisions, both geopolitically, militarily, all that kind of stuff. And I've seen enough to know that competence at any level of government, at any level of the military is not guaranteed.

• 2:29:28Speaker 01

  Let's go back to the law of hierarchy. The government is the biggest hierarchy there is. And so invariably, politicians find their way to the top. And once you have politics and dictating substantive decisions, they're going to be weak or wrong. I don't know how this could work any other way. Right now, we have some functional idiots in the central United States government.

• 2:30:00Lex Fridman?

  Well, let me, because you said that, I think elsewhere, you said that Putin was not a good KGB agent.

• 2:30:09Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:30:09Lex Fridman?

  A mediocre one, but is an excellent politician.

• 2:30:13Speaker 01

  Yep. And a good organizer. He was known as a really, really good organizer. When Yeltsin hired him as Prime Minister, he cleaned up the mess. Because Yeltsin, what was it? Under Yeltsin, Russia deteriorated tremendously, and it became sort of a mix of oligarchy and a criminal enterprise and chaotic.

• 2:30:40Lex Fridman?

  So he had skills that made him a good executive?

• 2:30:43Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 2:30:44Lex Fridman?

  Now, let's go back to him as a KGB agent. He was a KGB agent, I mean, according to him, once a KGB agent, always a KGB agent. But 16 years, let's say, something like this. What do you think about, from your experience, now you're maybe the same age as him, approximately the same age as him?

• 2:31:08Speaker 01

  He's a little younger.

• 2:31:09Lex Fridman?

  A little younger.

• 2:31:12Lex Fridman?

  What do you think about the KGB experience he had made him the man he is? What aspect of that? From your own experience?

• 2:31:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, well.

• 2:31:22Lex Fridman?

  How much that does that define you? Who you are? How you think about the world? How you analyze the geopolitics of the world? How you analyze human nature?

• 2:31:32Speaker 01

  Now, I gotta tell you one thing. He had a different type of training than I did. Mine was one on one. And he went to school, so to speak, so.

• 2:31:41Lex Fridman?

  Classroom training.

• 2:31:42Speaker 01

  Right. So, but fundamentally, he was not a top agent. This is very simple to do. There's only one thing you need to know. He knows German pretty well. So where was he deployed? In East Germany, not in West Germany, not in Switzerland, not in Austria. That's where they sent the best, right? One would think, generally.

• 2:32:09Lex Fridman?

  We're learning here.

• 2:32:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:32:11Lex Fridman?

  So this is your classification of where they sent the best. You know, there's people classify all kinds of stuff like, what is the best university in the world? What is the best football team in the world? And you start to get a sense. The good guys get sent, the best athletes get sent to, well, we disagree on this, but the football team is. But you have a sense and you're saying that the best agents would have been sent.

• 2:32:34Speaker 01

  One would think so. Now, this is not a forcing argument, but I also have it from a word from the horse's mouth.

• 2:32:43Lex Fridman?

  Which horse? I mean, what kind of horse? What's the breed of the horse?

• 2:32:48Speaker 01

  Oleg Kalugin. You know who Oleg Kalugin is? And he's still alive. He was at one point the head of counterintelligence for the first directorate espionage, right? And Putin was in the first directorate and reported to Kalugin for a while. And Oleg told me to my face that Oleg was not an impressive agent, trainee, or agent.

• 2:33:13Lex Fridman?

  That Vladimir Putin was not impressive.

• 2:33:15Speaker 01

  Not impressive at all.

• 2:33:16Lex Fridman?

  Now, he's biased, given his current situation.

• 2:33:21Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, you know, he could still make it up because he had this big ruckus when he was in parliament and called Putin a war criminal about the war in Serbia.

• 2:33:32Lex Fridman?

  Not only could he make it up, I wouldn't trust his analysis.

• 2:33:37Lex Fridman?

  I mean, I have to, you know, when people, I've been working very hard even before this war to try to understand objective analysis of all the parties involved. You have to really keep an open mind here to see clearly, to understand if you are to try to help in some way make a better world. In this case, stop this war.

• 2:34:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:34:01Lex Fridman?

  Or have all the countries involved flourish, bring out the best of the people, remove the corruption and the greed and the destructive aspects of the governments and let the people flourish. For all of that, you have to put all the biases aside, all the political bickering, all the, I don't know, all the biased analysis. And there's, there's a lot of propaganda that says that, in fact, Putin was a, was a good agent.

• 2:34:36Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:34:36Lex Fridman?

  How else would he rise to the ranks, right?

• 2:34:39Speaker 01

  Because he, he was a good politician and he made a lot of good connections and with, within the KGB. Allow me to say something, you just, you just taught me a lesson. And, and, and the lesson I, I should have figured out myself because I, I keep on telling people that in the intelligence world, you never know the truth 100%. So when you said, oh, I could make that up, of course he could have. But you get to a point where you're forced to make a decision or have an opinion and then you use your best educated guess.

• 2:35:17Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 2:35:18Speaker 01

  So I'm, I'm going to take the certainty of the statement that I made back.

• 2:35:22Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 2:35:22Speaker 01

  Because you, it's quite possible that you're right.

• 2:35:25Lex Fridman?

  Well, what I've noticed about Vladimir Putin, and this is true about, for example, Donald Trump and all those kinds of divisive figures, that some, for some reason, people's opinion on the details of those people are very sticky. Once you decide this is a bad guy.

• 2:35:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:35:43Lex Fridman?

  There's like a black hole and people are not able to think like one act at a time. You don't have to, like, that doesn't somehow justify this, this somehow doesn't.

• 2:35:57Lex Fridman?

  Remove all the evil things that are done, but you can analyze clearly each of the actions. And to me, it is interesting to see how did this man rise through the ranks. Now, you're saying that to be a KGB agent, there's a lot of skills involved. And perhaps raw, um, technical skill of spycraft is perhaps not related to the skill of raising, rising through the ranks.

• 2:36:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:36:27Lex Fridman?

  And you're saying as a politician, he was good at.

• 2:36:30Speaker 01

  But lying and influencing, uh, that is something that, that is significant, is a significant, uh, talent, uh, and, and ability that an agent must have, that helps you, uh, as a politician.

• 2:36:45Lex Fridman?

  Continuing the kind of thread of the role of KGB and defining the, the heart, soul, and mind of Vladimir Putin. Let me return to Yuri Bismannov, who was a Soviet KGB agent that wrote a four-step framework for ideological subversion on a national scale as practiced by the Soviet Union. So the, the four steps are demoralization, destabilization, crisis, and normalization. He had a lot of other kind of systematic ways of describing this kind of stuff. So can you speak to some of these ideas about the systematic, large-scale ideological subversion goals of the KGB?

• 2:37:30Lex Fridman?

  Is there truth to that kind of, those ideas?

• 2:37:34Speaker 01

  Yes, but, um, I, I think I already sort of mentioned it. I think Bismannov was a fraud. And I have, I have, again.

• 2:37:44Lex Fridman?

  Can you elaborate?

• 2:37:45Speaker 01

  Good, good arguments. Let's put it this way. Uh, first of all, uh, we, we know that, uh, the KGB was involved in active measures, which is, you know, um. You can call it fake news.

• 2:38:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:03Speaker 01

  Seeding fake news into countries that are your adversaries. And the Russians have been doing this lately by meddling in our election and focusing on the left and the right fringe and influencing them to become more left and more right. And Vasiliy Mitrokin has, in one of his books, he has a whole chapter about active measures. Okay, so what he has to say about the department, and I forgot what department that was, was the one department that was the least desirable for KGB agents. Because these were desk jobs for people who had to come up with fake stories

• 2:38:48Speaker 01

  in countries where they didn't quite know too much about the country. Now, there were some successes. Like, one of the, the two most famous successes that I'm aware of is that the canard that the AIDS virus was concocted in a CIA lab. And so a lot of people around the world believed that. And the other one was that J. Edgar Hoover was a secret crossdresser, crossdresser. That was, that is still known by a lot of Americans who are of a certain age that this was the truth. But Mitrokin actually traces it back to a story that was placed in a

• 2:39:32Speaker 01

  sort of left-wing but close to mainstream French magazine. And it was then taken up by more, you know, larger newspapers and well-established papers. So they had some successes. But this kind of a massive, well-thought-out campaign to destabilize the United States, I don't believe the KGB was capable of doing that.

• 2:40:05Speaker 01

  My token seems to agree with me. I was trained, I would think, you know, I was one of the crown jewels of the agents. One would think that they used the best that they had to to to help me. How to become an American and they didn't have a clue. So how did they, if you don't know how a country operates, how do you come up with with this? This this this kind of a very detailed, uh, long term plan that's that's also timed, you know, two years this and one year that and all of that.

• 2:40:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so we should we should actually just clarify. So he has this whole idea that there is a 15 to 20 years I needed for demoralization.

• 2:40:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:40:47Lex Fridman?

  Um, where you're, um, you're basically infiltrating a country from a young or people from a young age, manipulating their mind, you're destabilizing them. That's the second step that takes two to five years. You target the country's foreign relations, defense and economy. You create a crisis artificially and then you normalize it as as if it always was this way. So it's basically saying that the KGB is capable of at scale, uh, over many years, manipulate an entire population of people.

• 2:41:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:41:26Lex Fridman?

  And this is kind of, um, there's a lot of people that believe in conspiracy theories that are amenable to this kind of idea. Now, my own experience is that there is, in fact, just a giant amount of incompetence. And that this is something that's actually very difficult to pull off. Cause

• 2:41:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:41:47Lex Fridman?

  It's incredibly, incredibly difficult to achieve this kind of manipulation. I think you would, it would, it would require.

• 2:42:00Lex Fridman?

  First of all, not much bureaucracy, not much slowing down. You have to have incredible, in the modern world, digital systems that are able to do surveillance, manipulation. There has to be a strategy that is carried out in secrecy across a huge number of people effectively. That also requires you hire the best people in the world. And I think it's difficult to execute on this kind of thing with, if you compartmentalize. Because there has to be great collaboration. There has to be a great, where there's a unified vision.

• 2:42:37Speaker 01

  Coordination.

• 2:42:37Lex Fridman?

  And coordination across multiple groups. There has to be, I mean, it's very difficult to do. Now, nevertheless, especially with technology, this becomes easier and easier. So the bar goes lower and lower. To achieve mass surveillance becomes easier and easier and easier. Mass manipulation through platforms, because we're now digitally connected, you can now do that kind of manipulation. So it becomes more and more realistic that you could do this kind of thing. But you're saying that, no, intelligence, first of all, intelligence is hard.

• 2:43:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:43:13Lex Fridman?

  And to do it at scale, and to do it well, and to do it in a way that it's also not just collecting information about the populace, but manipulating the populace is very, very difficult.

• 2:43:26Speaker 01

  Right. Now, let me now give you another argument why I think that Besmanov was a fraud. I mean, I already have, I have Metropoet on my side, and my personal observation of the incompetence that I witnessed. I mean, they really, really didn't know what they didn't know. So now, Besmanov was KGB. Where was he stationed? In India. He was a low-level agent in India.

• 2:43:59Speaker 01

  And I told you was the one thing that the K T V was really good was at was compartmentalization. How does Besmanov in India find out about this massive plan that should have been super secret, right? He made it up, sorry.

• 2:44:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:14Speaker 01

  And you know why he got away with it? Because Americans eat that up, because it's not our fault. It's like the damn Russians that doing all that bad stuff. Speaking of the damn Russians doing all that bad stuff, you know about the Internet Research Agency. They have been doing quite a bit of damage and I'm now familiar with the world of enhanced artificial persons. These are the avatars on Facebook and Twitter and so forth that look like real people. And there are quite a few of them and I have a good friend who operates in that realm.

• 2:44:56Speaker 01

  And you know, he uses, for instance, facial recognition when he thinks that there's a suspicious character, say on LinkedIn or on Facebook. And very often he finds out, yeah, that that person exists, but it's not the person who it pretends to be.

• 2:45:17Lex Fridman?

  So basically detecting the artificial.

• 2:45:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:45:21Lex Fridman?

  Enhanced artificial.

• 2:45:22Speaker 01

  Yes, but he can also make them.

• 2:45:23Lex Fridman?

  Right. It goes hand in hand.

• 2:45:26Speaker 01

  You know, United States doesn't do it. We do it too, but.

• 2:45:29Lex Fridman?

  Well, this is to push back against your pushback, right? Yeah, Besmanov might be a fraud.

• 2:45:33Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 2:45:34Lex Fridman?

  But is it possible, especially in the modern age, that there is these kind of large scale systematic operation? Wouldn't you, as a government.

• 2:45:46Speaker 01

  More so.

• 2:45:47Lex Fridman?

  That's investing billions of dollars into military equipment. And in a world that's more and more clearly going to be defined by cyber war versus hot war. Wouldn't you start to have serious meetings, large amounts of hires.

• 2:46:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:46:12Lex Fridman?

  That are working at how do we manipulate the information flow? How do we manipulate the minds of the populace? How do we sell them a narrative? So even though he might have been making up a story because people eat it up. Could it speak to some deep truth that's actually different than the the truth you came up in as a KGB agent?

• 2:46:32Speaker 01

  Oh, I agree with you 100%. It's much easier when, you know, all you need is is is an army of nerds who also know.

• 2:46:41Lex Fridman?

  No offense. No offense to nerds.

• 2:46:43Speaker 01

  That's a term of endearment, I use. I love nerds. I I used to be one myself, but anyway.

• 2:46:51Lex Fridman?

  Once a nerd, always a nerd.

• 2:46:55Speaker 01

  So what I was gonna say here is.

• 2:46:57Lex Fridman?

  All you need is an army of nerds.

• 2:46:58Speaker 01

  And and what but also experts in the culture of the target country. Okay? And and nowadays, the world is different. There's a whole lot more fluidity. There's a whole lot of more people that like, say, Russians, for instance, study in the United States, Chinese, an army of Chinese studying in the United States. They they have a lot more knowledge of how we function than the KGB did. And it's vice versa. Not as many Americans in in Russia, but we have some. But the Chinese and the Russians have an advantage here.

• 2:47:34Lex Fridman?

  Can I ask you a question based on your experience? So I have been talking to a lot of powerful people and some of which have very close connections to in this particular conflict, Ukraine and Russia, but in other places as well. I don't believe I've ever been contacted by or interacted with an intelligence agency, CIA, FSB, MI6, Assad. I don't think I have, well, let me say explicitly, I haven't had an official conversation, which is what I assume I would have, because I have nothing to hide. Right? So I think there's no reason for people to

• 2:48:16Lex Fridman?

  be secretive. But would I, why, why is that? Would I know? Am I interesting at all? How how are people determined if they're a person of interest or not? And I guess the question, I mean, some of it I ask in a bit of a humorous way, but also perhaps there's truth in some of the humor is, would I know if I have ever interacted with a intelligence agency spy?

• 2:48:45Speaker 01

  Well, you you don't know that you haven't been contacted, but but certainly not.

• 2:48:53Speaker 01

  I think you you never had a conversation that related to intelligence in any way, shape or form, right?

• 2:48:58Lex Fridman?

  Right, like where a person, another person introduced.

• 2:49:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. Introduce themselves or, you know, becomes sort of wants to be your friend and then talks about these types of topics, right?

• 2:49:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but I.

• 2:49:16Lex Fridman?

  There's people, because because of who I'm interacting with, there, I mean, even with just even with Elon Musk, like if you think about Elon Musk, there's a lot of people that are.

• 2:49:31Lex Fridman?

  That are part of the conversations that happen. How do I know they're all trustworthy? They all present themselves as trustworthy. Now, again, I have nothing, so this is this is for the intelligence agencies. I have nothing to hide. I am the same person privately as publicly, well intentioned, real, no, no controlled, no weird sexual stuff where you can manipulate me.

• 2:49:54Lex Fridman?

  What else?

• 2:49:54Speaker 01

  No drug use?

• 2:49:55Lex Fridman?

  No drug use, no, no skeletons in the closet, none of that kind of stuff. But, you know, I don't, I don't know. I mean, just even having these conversations, you know, I tend to trust people as a default.

• 2:50:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, me too.

• 2:50:12Lex Fridman?

  And you start when you think, well, especially with some of the people I've been talking with and some of the traveling I'm doing, I'm realizing there's a, you know, there's hard men in this world, there's military, there's serious suffering and there's war and there's serious people there are doing serious harm. And so you have to be careful of thinking who to trust was with a person approaches you with a smile and asks you a question. My, my natural inclination is that person is a cool person. I'll answer the question, I'll become a friend.

• 2:50:55Lex Fridman?

  But it becomes difficult when you realize that there's, there's things like intelligence agencies with thousands of employees. There's people that are doing major military actions that involve tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of soldiers. This is serious stuff. And so how do I, how do you know how to operate in this world?

• 2:51:14Speaker 01

  The folks that you're interacting with have a responsibility not to tell you.

• 2:51:21Speaker 01

  What they shouldn't tell you, right?

• 2:51:22Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 2:51:23Speaker 01

  So, and most of them probably won't. And, and I'm guessing occasionally they will say, well, I can't go there. Right?

• 2:51:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:31Speaker 01

  So, so what, what, what you are aware of is sort of public. And what you're doing is you, you, you're collecting it and you,

• 2:51:46Speaker 01

  you editing it to some extent, you're not, you're not changing the verbiage.

• 2:51:52Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 2:51:52Speaker 01

  You, you just repeat what they say. So from that angle, you're not, you don't, you're not privy to any real secrets. What you have possibly that could be of use is you learn to get to know the person. So I'm thinking there's a good possibility if you get the interviews

• 2:52:16Speaker 01

  in, in the east, that somebody may actually approach you and ask you what's, what's your opinion?

• 2:52:21Lex Fridman?

  I just hope they approach me and introduce themselves properly. I, I just, there's a, there's a kind of, I mean, would you know, like, how many Russian spies are there in the United States? How many American spies are there in Russia? Do you, do you have a sense? Is it?

• 2:52:38Speaker 01

  No idea.

• 2:52:38Lex Fridman?

  Just like with the GRU.

• 2:52:40Speaker 01

  No idea.

• 2:52:41Lex Fridman?

  Is it, is it possible there is like tens of thousands and we're not, or like thousands?

• 2:52:47Speaker 01

  Not, not thousands like I used to operate. We were too hard to train and we weren't that successful to begin with. But particularly Russians and Chinese, you know, both governments know who is going abroad. And I guarantee you, there's a lot of amateur spies. They're, they're being asked, you know, help us out, you know, do something for the motherland.

• 2:53:14Lex Fridman?

  Like crowdsourced spying.

• 2:53:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, sort of.

• 2:53:17Lex Fridman?

  Not, not serious training, but yeah.

• 2:53:19Speaker 01

  And, yeah, for instance, this, this lady, I forgot her first, first name, Butina. She was a rank amateur. She used. Social media to communicate with Moscow. Uh, she had no training, but she was reasonably successful. I mean, she, she got, uh, and, and, and, um, I, the difference between, let's say, uh, uh, the current Russian intelligence and the KGB, Vladimir Putin and his, uh, his henchmen, uh, are okay with people being caught because, and every time I, I, I go and talk and give a talk someplace, I, I'm always asked this question, how, how do you, how many, how many Russian spies do you think

• 2:54:03Speaker 01

  we, we have here? Because that, that scares the people, right? And Putin likes to scare people. The KGB was very solicitous of, uh, of their agents. They were, you know, they, uh, they didn't want anyone of them caught, right? So that's, that's a big difference. And, uh, you know,

• 2:54:21Lex Fridman?

  So getting caught, so for the FSB, getting caught sends a strong signal to the world that there's

• 2:54:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, there could be many more and there probably are, but, and, uh, because, because also the world, again, there's a whole lot more travel going on, a whole lot more interaction, studying abroad, doing business. And, uh, you know, there's, there will be attempts at espionage probably one, every minute in this country. That doesn't mean they would be successful. No. Uh, uh, but there is a, a cottage industry now that, um, is doing quite well, that, that teaches companies how to, uh, you know, fortify themselves against

• 2:55:05Speaker 01

  like industrial espionage or also, uh, foreign actors, uh, spying. It's all over the place.

• 2:55:12Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. As it becomes easier and easier with digital,

• 2:55:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:55:15Lex Fridman?

  with cyber,

• 2:55:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:55:16Lex Fridman?

  that becomes a serious,

• 2:55:17Speaker 01

  And

• 2:55:18Lex Fridman?

  a very serious threat.

• 2:55:19Speaker 01

  We might wind up in a world where nobody knows anymore what's up and what's down.

• 2:55:23Lex Fridman?

  If I were to have a conversation with Vladimir Putin and/or Volodymyr Zelensky, is there something you would ask?

• 2:55:36Lex Fridman?

  About the time in the KGB. The time in his past. We are, all of us, men and women, are creations of the experiences we have through our life. Early on in life and through the formative experiences. Successes and failures. So.

• 2:55:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, you just said the key words. You know, I would ask, you know, without giving away anything, you know, just being high level. Your biggest success and your biggest failure.

• 2:56:07Lex Fridman?

  As a politician or as a KGB agent?

• 2:56:09Speaker 01

  We're talking in the realm of KGB. When the wall came down and he was in an office, a KGB office in the city of Dresden. And these Germans were besieging Stasi offices and they also dropped by the KGB office and they, it was pretty threatening. It looked like they were actually storming the office and get, you know, the documents and stuff like that. And initially, the first demonstration was

• 2:56:54Speaker 01

  was told that if they come any closer, weapons would be used. So they disappeared and then they came back and I don't know, somebody in that office called Berlin and said, what are we going to do? Are we allowed to use force? And the answer came back that Gorbachev said, absolutely not. And so this is where Putin, all of a sudden, you know, he was at one point a member of the greatest, the most powerful intelligence organization in the world. And all of a sudden, he was powerless and he had to watch. How, you know, this was a defeat, big one. And.

• 2:57:34Lex Fridman?

  Is supposedly a powerful intelligence agency cowering.

• 2:57:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:57:40Lex Fridman?

  Sort of crawling back into a position of weakness.

• 2:57:44Speaker 01

  And he probably promised himself, never again. Russia needs to be great again.

• 2:57:49Lex Fridman?

  The KGB, FSB, Russia, the Russian Empire, needs to rise again. And that there's a feeling for him that that's, as he talks about the collapse of the Soviet Union being a great tragedy. There's a feeling like that was, that was like never again.

• 2:58:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I believe that he has a, he has a strong conviction that, I don't know if he's religious, he carries a cross now, but I don't know what that means. But somehow, but that it's the destiny of the Russian nation to be great. And that that is sort of, that's, whether it's determined by God or some higher power, that is very important for him.

• 2:58:42Lex Fridman?

  Of course, that nationalist idea is one that Americans share as well. And, you know, it could help a nation flourish. So by itself is not necessarily a bad thing. It's how it manifests itself is the question.

• 2:58:59Speaker 01

  Well, one other thing is if I were to get a chat with the Ukrainian president, I would ask him, how many lives? What is the equation between giving up some land? And how many lives are worth this land?

• 2:59:23Lex Fridman?

  And that's a, it's a good way to phrase the question. Of course, that question gets you killed in Ukraine. But because there's another part of that equation, which is it's not just land versus lives. It's the sovereignty, the knowledge that you're free and you're self-determined. And like, it's not about like fighting for the particular land. It's saying, we are messed up, corrupt.

• 2:59:53Lex Fridman?

  Uh, we have problems. It's a messy world, but it's our world. Uh, I think Stephen Crane has a poem about like a man eating his own heart. And he was asked, uh, how does it taste? And he said, it's bitter, but I like it because it is bitter and because it is my heart. And then there's a sense of like, I want, this is not just about land. This is our nation, uh, the same love of nation that Putin has for Russia, the greater Russia, this vision of this great empire. Uh, I believe Ukraine does as well. They're not every na-, you know, there's levels to this game and Ukrainian people are some of

• 3:00:37Lex Fridman?

  the proudest people, uh, throughout the history of the 20th century, throughout the history of earth. The Polish people are proud people. You could just see in World War Two, the people who said, fuck you. You're not having this, we will die to the last man. Those, there, there's different cultures that kind of really hold their ground and Ukrainian people are that.

• 3:01:02Speaker 01

  You know, I, I have to admit in that respect, I'm a, I'm a bit of a coward. I, I could not do what Zelensky has been doing. Uh, I, uh, I would sort of try, try to find a way to carve out something that I, I can live with. However, if, if that force, that evil force goes, gets to my family.

• 3:01:32Lex Fridman?

  Right. There is lines.

• 3:01:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:01:35Lex Fridman?

  That's, that's right. You're, you become the world's bravest man if somebody crosses that line.

• 3:01:41Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:01:43Lex Fridman?

  You mentioned something about you've not been to Moscow back, uh, and that you, it might not be safe for you to travel there.

• 3:01:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:01:56Lex Fridman?

  Can you speak to the nature of that? You know, as somebody, somebody that successfully.

• 3:02:03Lex Fridman?

  Got out of the KGB. How are you still alive?

• 3:02:08Speaker 01

  A number of reasons. First of all, when my story became public, that was six years ago. I was pretty old, right? And so the folks that may have a personal interest or may have had a personal interest in doing me harm, most of them don't live anymore. All right? That's number one. Number two, I did not, I wasn't a hired hand, a German. I did not betray the motherland. That's a crime that is punished by death. You betray the motherland.

• 3:02:45Speaker 01

  That's, and, and, and the other thing is, if there is, you know that these kinds of operations to assassination on a, in another country are very difficult to plan and implement. And if there's a list of people that they don't like, I may not be at the very top. Having said that, you know, if I wind up, say, in Moscow, or even in countries like Turkey, where there's a lot of lawlessness, you know, accidents can easily be arranged. And that's just sending another message, you know, that's like, you know, we, we, we

• 3:03:29Speaker 01

  can do a lot of things.

• 3:03:31Lex Fridman?

  Powerful.

• 3:03:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:03:33Lex Fridman?

  Do you think it's safe for me to travel in Russia and Ukraine?

• 3:03:37Speaker 01

  I think you, you know very well how to communicate in both countries. You know, you've shown this in this interaction that you have a lot of empathy for the people you'll be talking with. And empathy means good understanding where they're coming from. And then there are lines that you can't cross.

• 3:03:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:00Speaker 01

  Like the question that I was gonna ask Zelensky, you're not gonna ask, good for you.

• 3:04:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, isn't that the funny thing about this world? There's lines, there's lines everywhere, even in love, even in personal relationships. There's lines you should not cross.

• 3:04:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:04:13Lex Fridman?

  How did you finally get caught?

• 3:04:16Speaker 01

  I resigned in nineteen eighty-eight, so.

• 3:04:19Lex Fridman?

  Let's actually talk about that. There was a.

• 3:04:20Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah.

• 3:04:21Lex Fridman?

  Resigned, there's this warning sign.

• 3:04:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:04:24Lex Fridman?

  There's another, yet another choice, yet another crossroads.

• 3:04:27Speaker 01

  Yes, okay.

• 3:04:28Lex Fridman?

  What was the calculation? What was the choice to be made?

• 3:04:31Speaker 01

  To give a little background, it was nineteen eighty-eight. And I was, I thought they would, my, my, uh, my time in the US would soon end. Because, you know, I thought ten to twelve years, it was already past ten years. There was no indication that they, that they indicated, you know, that they said, you know, you know, we're done, you're done. But in December of nineteen eighty-eight, I got this one, one thing that I never wanted to see. So we had a system of signals.

• 3:05:07Speaker 01

  That, uh, uh, either one of those diplomat agents could set at a spot that I pass by every day. Or I could set where they would pass by, like on their way from where they live to the United Nations, for instance, who would just drive. So, and, and mine was, uh, my, my, the signal spot for me was on a, on a support beam for the elevated atrium in, in Queens. And it was, uh, morning in December that I walked by there and routinely look at it and I never expected anything. And there was this red dot, it was about the size of my fist with a, you know, red paint.

• 3:05:51Speaker 01

  And, uh, and since you have done it already, I can, I think I can curse in this moment. Because it's the only way I can really indicate how I felt. I says, oh shit. Because that was the danger signal. There was like, you must, you are in severe danger of, uh, and you, you, you need to get out of the country as soon as possible. There was a, a protocol that I was supposed to follow. I wasn't even supposed to go home. I just needed to, was supposed to get my, my reserve documents that I had, uh, hidden in, in a park in, in the Bronx. And made, make a beeline to, to the Canadian border.

• 3:06:32Speaker 01

  I wasn't ready. So I just like ignored this thing. I mean, I couldn't ignore it, but I went on to work. Got on the A train, went to work. And then went to my cubicle and stared at the computer screen all day because I couldn't think. I could think only about what to do, what to do, what to do. The reason for this indecisiveness was that I was a father at the time. I was, my little girl by the name of Chelsea was 18 months old. And I was there when she was born. I took her to her to home. I watched her grow up.

• 3:07:15Speaker 01

  I watched her take the first steps. And always look at me with these big eyes, lovingly look at me. And that is when I started my reentry into the human race. Because I just fell in love with this girl. That's when love came back and it was completely unexpected. And there's a lot of fathers who understand, particularly fathers of girls, who understand what happened there. And I still thought I need to go back because, you know, there was, there was probably some danger. But I hadn't figured out how to take care of the girl, you know.

• 3:08:00Speaker 01

  I'd leave her, but you know, maybe she need to, she need to have a good life and grow up and have a chance. And her mother had a, she was from South America. She had a fourth grade education. That would have not worked very well. So I played for time. I, obviously, I could be sick. I couldn't, you know, I could be in a hospital. There was a precedent where I was sick, where I couldn't communicate for about three weeks. So I just did nothing. That was on a Monday. On a Thursday was my regular short wave transmission.

• 3:08:40Speaker 01

  I listened and they explained a little in a few sentences. We have reason to believe that the FBI is on your case. You need to execute the emergency procedure. Come home right away.

• 3:08:56Speaker 01

  I still had some time because the radio could be broken or the transmission was bad or I still could be in hospital, right? So I gave myself some more time. And then

• 3:09:12Speaker 01

  something happened where they forced my hand. This is the only time that a Soviet agent was anywhere near me on the territory of the United States. So I'm waiting for the A train on a dark morning still in Queens. And there's this man, this short man in a black trench coat, comes up to me from my right and he whispers into my ears, "You gotta come back or else you're dead." I can't imitate the Russian accent. It was a Russian accent. So now, and it was a pretty strong accent.

• 3:09:54Speaker 01

  The "you're dead" phrase can have two meanings. And an American would have said, "Or else you're busted, or else you get arrested, or else you're dead," is very strong. So now you have to have to take it seriously to some degree because I knew that they had a history of assassinating or at least trying to assassinate defectors. So that obviously raised the stakes a little bit. But I just talked myself into believing this was just bad phrasing. And but at this point, I knew and they knew that we both knew, right? So there was no more guessing.

• 3:10:39Speaker 01

  He found me, he talked to me, I know. So now I had to act. So in the next radiogram, I was asked to execute a dead drop operation where they would give me money and a passport.

• 3:10:56Speaker 01

  And that was in a park in, on Staten Island. It was a location that I found and I described. And I was always praised for my, my ability to describe spots that are easy to find. So that was, that was a given. So. And the only thing that was different in this, for this operation, they, they scheduled it for the dark. All right. So, but it was still no problem because it was in a park and then a couple of, about a hundred yards in by, next to a fallen tree. It would be hard to miss.

• 3:11:40Speaker 01

  So I go to Staten Island and I read the signal that said, I, I put the container in the drop. That, that was the protocol. There's a, there's a signal that the person who, who hands over something puts at a, at a spot not too far from the spot itself. That means I would go in and just pick it up. The reason I actually went to pick up this, this container because there was money in it. So I didn't have to make a decision yet. Okay? I could throw away the passport. I, it was like I was still trying to figure out what to do, what to do, what to do.

• 3:12:22Speaker 01

  So I get to the spot, I get to the tree and I had a flashlight with me. The park, there was no way in the park. It was, even during the day, this park was not, it was more, almost like a little forest. And I don't see the container. It wasn't supposed to be a crushed oil can. Pretty sizable, not hard to miss. And I do a double take and I look again and I look around, I look around a little more. See if they misplaced it. I can't find it. That's the only one, that one of those operations failed. And that just doesn't make a lot of sense.

• 3:13:07Speaker 01

  So when as I'm walking away from this, like sort of numb emotionally.

• 3:13:15Speaker 01

  I said to myself, I'm staying.

• 3:13:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:19Speaker 01

  That decision-

• 3:13:20Lex Fridman?

  Some kind of signal, some kind of muse just spoke to you.

• 3:13:24Speaker 01

  That decision was made for me. Now, you know that I'm a Christian now, and I think that was like, God told me this, you know?

• 3:13:35Lex Fridman?

  But it was certain there. It was right there.

• 3:13:36Speaker 01

  That was it.

• 3:13:37Lex Fridman?

  That was it.

• 3:13:38Speaker 01

  That was it. And so what I did to, well, first of all, I,

• 3:13:46Speaker 01

  divine intervention helped me to find a good explanation. I sent them my last letter with secret writing. I communicated to them. I said, I wish I could come, but I can't because I have contracted HIV/AIDS. That was the best lie ever, because nobody wanted to have AIDS in their country. Those days, it was a death sentence, right? And I knew, we had conversations when I was back in Moscow, how they were snickering about what's going on in the United States, you know, that depraved culture, and you see, they're killing each other.

• 3:14:26Lex Fridman?

  And the depraved culture took over your being and how you're-

• 3:14:31Speaker 01

  Yes. And I was convincing enough, I even traced it back to a girlfriend I had once that I actually reported on, that she, you know, I interacted with this lady who had a boyfriend at one point, who was a drug addict, and she was infected, and she infected me. So, they believed it. They sent, and I asked them to give my dollar savings to my German family. They gave them some, but they told my family that I already passed away, that I'm dead. They believed it, 100%. And I guess the agent who took the money took half of it for himself.

• 3:15:16Speaker 01

  So that was it. And the next three months, I made sure that I wasn't reliably at the same spot in the same timeframe. So I went to work in different paths at different times, just to, you know, just as a safety measure, so to speak, and not not not huge. But, you know, I did it. It kept me, kept my, allowed me to keep my sanity. And obviously, after I sent the letter, I threw the shortwave radio in the Hudson River,

• 3:15:54Speaker 01

  destroyed the one-time paths that I still had. So I was now ready to

• 3:16:02Lex Fridman?

  For a new life.

• 3:16:03Speaker 01

  For a new life and live out my life as an American undiscovered, but, you know, starting to work on my version of the American dream.

• 3:16:14Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 3:16:16Speaker 01

  And the first action was, was telling my wife, the mother of this child, you know, she always wanted to have a house. And I said, you know what, we should buy a house. And a year later, we moved into the suburbs. And then I said, we should have another child. And we had another child. So and I had a career. I did pretty well. I moved a couple of times, wound up in a McMansion. But before that, my second house was actually in Pennsylvania, in rural Pennsylvania. And this is where I was discovered by the FBI. And how did

• 3:17:00Speaker 01

  they know about me? If it hadn't been for this defector, Basili Mitrokin, who was an archivist in the KGB archives, he was actually pretty high level. He was in charge of the relocation of the archive from Lubianka to Yasinovo.

• 3:17:22Speaker 01

  And he really hated, he had reason to believe he hated the Soviet system. I think I remember that his son was quite ill and he could have gotten treatment in England and he was not allowed to travel to England with his son. So, his hatred, he tried to figure out what to do and how to do damage to that system. So, he started copying notes, little slips of paper, handwritten, that he smuggled out in his underwear and his socks, over the years. And then he transcribed them with a typewriter and then put the pieces of paper into some

• 3:18:06Speaker 01

  kind of a container and buried this in his dacha. It was, I believe, in 1992 when he showed up, that was already, the Soviet Union was gone. So, he showed up at the US Embassy in Moscow and told him what he had. It was on a weekend and apparently there was a junior person in charge and he said, "You know what, what you got, we are not interested in, it's really old." That's a career-limiting move, right? Because Vasily Mitrokin then made his way to one of the Baltic Republics and contacted MI6.

• 3:18:48Speaker 01

  And they said, "Come on in, old fellow, have a cup of tea." And so, they managed to get this stuff out of the dacha and get it to England. And eventually, MI6 shared it with the FBI and there wasn't a whole lot of information about me, it was very, very little. It was like, "There's a person by the name of Jack Barsky who is an illegal operating in the northeast of the United States." Now, if it was Jim Miller, they wouldn't have found me, Jack Barsky was easy to find. So, they checked social security and Jack Barsky had gotten his social security card at the age of 33. Bingo, okay?

• 3:19:34Speaker 01

  All they knew, though, was that I wasn't illegal, that I was still living there. They didn't know whether I was active, inactive. And the other thing that they knew, that I was a really, really well-trained agent, because I was still there, right?

• 3:19:49Speaker 01

  So they took, I think, almost three years to investigate me, watch me from a distance, because, you know, if I was still active, I would have found out that somebody's investigating me.

• 3:20:04Lex Fridman?

  So you started being less and less active in terms of...

• 3:20:07Speaker 01

  Oh, I stopped completely.

• 3:20:08Lex Fridman?

  What I mean is...

• 3:20:09Speaker 01

  Oh, surveillance detection, right?

• 3:20:11Lex Fridman?

  Yes, surveillance detection.

• 3:20:12Speaker 01

  After three months, I stopped altogether.

• 3:20:14Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 3:20:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, good point.

• 3:20:15Lex Fridman?

  And FBI is still very careful.

• 3:20:18Speaker 01

  They were very careful. They pretty much watched me. And at one point, I had a house in the country with one neighbor. At one point, that house was for sale, so the FBI bought it. And they put a couple of agents there and just to keep a closer eye on me.

• 3:20:35Speaker 01

  There was no indication that I was still active, but they were still cautious. And but at one point, they were able to plant a bug in my kitchen, a listening device.

• 3:20:52Speaker 01

  And I... My wife and I didn't get along very well. You know, there was a lot of friction and she was constantly complaining about things. And, you know, I got sick and tired of it. And one day, we had an argument in the kitchen.

• 3:21:08Speaker 01

  And I chose to deploy the nuclear option.

• 3:21:16Speaker 01

  And that is telling her what I sacrificed to be with her, so she would understand that I am there on her side.

• 3:21:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:25Speaker 01

  I'm supporting her. If something doesn't quite fit, it is not because I don't love the both of them, Chelsea and Penelope. So when I said that, the listening device was active, so the FBI was hearing my confession. I was once a KGB agent, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I quit because then because of... And then stayed here because of you and Chelsea. And...

• 3:21:56Speaker 01

  That also made it clear to the FBI that I wasn't active anymore. They had both of that. So now, they knew an attempt to turn me would have been useless. Because, you know, because you turned somebody who was active. But they figured they had, there was enough reason to treat me nicely. Because they figured I had a lot of information that was as age as it was. But it was still important for the FBI to get to know. And so, one day, it was a Friday evening. I'm driving back home from the office.

• 3:22:40Speaker 01

  And I'm being stopped by a state, state, state police. As I'm going through, they told, it's a bridge over the Hudson. And they had to pay toll. And he waved me, he got me right where I stopped. And he said, could you please move over here? It's a routine traffic stop. Thought nothing of it. I had forgotten at that point that I once was a spy. You know, it was like, this was gone. And, and then he said, could you please step out of the car? That should have aroused my suspicion. That's unusual, right? Routine traffic stop. Yeah, I did it, no problem.

• 3:23:23Speaker 01

  And then, again, somebody came from the right, came into my view. And he flipped his ID and he said, FBI, we would like to have a talk with you. Now, this is my now friend, Joe Riley, who, who actually is the, he's the godfather of Trinity and my last child. But anyway, he told me later that when, when I heard that phrase, all the blood left my face, I became totally white. But I recovered very quickly and he said it himself. So, you know, he, they took me to a vehicle.

• 3:24:05Speaker 01

  And there was another agent in the vehicle. And he had a gun strapped to his ankle. So, it was pretty real.

• 3:24:16Speaker 01

  First question I had, so am I under arrest? And the answer was no. And then my instinct kicked in and my ability to operate very well under high-pressure situations. And I asked them, so what took you so long? You know, the intent of that was to to diffuse any kind of tension. Yes. And I saw a smile. Instant friends. Yeah, I knew that I had to make them like me.

• 3:24:57Speaker 01

  And I'm, I think by now I know I'm a pretty likable person, so. I would say so. So, and when they took me to a motel, which they had rented, there was a two wings at a right angle. They had, they bought all the rooms in one wing. And they had a guard at each end of that wing. And they took me in the middle. And there were some props there, some binders with labels. And I immediately thought, this is pretty silly. Because what I noticed that the labels all referred back to my early years.

• 3:25:41Speaker 01

  I knew that they didn't know much else. So I told Joe that afterwards, and that was not a great idea. But anyway. But I volunteered. I made the following statement before we even started the interview. I said, I know there's only one way for me to, and my family, to have a chance to get through here without much damages if I'm completely 100% cooperative. And it's my intent to do exactly that. All right, so we spent about two hours in the interview. They allowed me to call my wife, tell her that I'm going to be late. That indicated to me already that they would let me go.

• 3:26:25Speaker 01

  And after two hours, they let me go. But they had the area covered with a whole bunch of people. And the head of that team talked to me and he said, if you think of running, we got every intersection in this area covered. You can't. I didn't say anything, but you know, I had no, no thought of running. So, and that was the beginning of another phase of my life where I was cooperating with the FBI for quite a while and living still undercover for several years until I had real good documentation and became an American citizen seven years ago.

• 3:27:08Lex Fridman?

  From today, seven years ago, so recently?

• 3:27:11Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, quite recent. The bureaucracy took a long time to figure out how to, how to make me real and, and also not put me in, in, in these witness protection program, you know, to keep my name and then just, you know, make everything like official. So for instance, I had to change my birth year. Simply because if I, Jack Barsky was born in 1944. If I kept 1944, the FBI would have helped me commit a crime because I would have collected social security of four years sooner. So, and anyway.

• 3:27:51Lex Fridman?

  Details of that.

• 3:27:52Speaker 01

  Yes, it, it, it took quite a while and when I finally got the call from the office of Homeland Security, the lady says, this is Agent so and so from Homeland Security. Can you come into the office tomorrow? And I said, let me look at my calendar and then I said, wait a minute, what, what am I talking about? What time do you want me to be there? Because I had waited for that moment for a long time and I was sworn in right then and there. It was a good feeling to walk out of there because I, I had a country again, you know, and I love this country just as much as you said you love it, with all its warts and its

• 3:28:37Speaker 01

  problems that we're going through right now. And then the last thing that changed my life again, and I don't want to get into details because it's a little complicated story. I never wanted to be a public person. And then I was discovered through a number of dots that were unlikely to be connected. It had to do with a relative, with a half brother of my wife who lives in Germany, was taken to Germany by his mother, who came to visit somebody, not us, but that somebody that he came to visit, lived 50 miles from our house. And that my wife and

• 3:29:22Speaker 01

  this half brother never, never met in person before. They knew about each other through social media. And when he found out my background, he, he was a conductor of the German railroad at the time. He said, oh, this is a big story. I'm going, that's going to be big, big, big. Okay. Well, he happened to know this one person who happened, happened to know, uh, one of the star reporters of Der Spiegel. And after she did some research and determined that I was real, she was on my case. And she happened to know Steve Croft, the guy, guy from 60 Minutes. Is he all these connections? I had nothing to do with it.

• 3:30:05Lex Fridman?

  That's how life works. Dots get connected somehow, sometimes. For most of us, it doesn't.

• 3:30:09Speaker 01

  Stuff happens.

• 3:30:10Lex Fridman?

  You get lucky.

• 3:30:11Speaker 01

  You, you don't know.

• 3:30:12Lex Fridman?

  You've gotten lucky a few times in your life.

• 3:30:14Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, I think I'm, must be part Irish too. Yeah. So, uh, it's, uh, it's been, it's been an interesting ride. Um, I'm just still shaking my head about all this stuff that happened.

• 3:30:31Lex Fridman?

  Oh, it's been a fun one. What you wrote, uh, because I'm allowed to leave behind a documented legacy of my unusual life.

• 3:30:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:30:41Lex Fridman?

  I'm praying that the legacy will be described by a single word, love. So, let us return to the thing we started the conversation with, which is love.

• 3:30:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:30:51Lex Fridman?

  What role does love play in this? Human condition in your life and

• 3:30:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:30:57Lex Fridman?

  In our life here together.

• 3:30:59Speaker 01

  I I give you an answer by telling you what happened one day. I I gave a presentation at Microsoft headquarters.

• 3:31:11Lex Fridman?

  That's a strange beginning of a love story, but yes.

• 3:31:14Speaker 01

  No, that's not a love story. And then so there's this, there's this young, this beautiful young lady sitting in the back. And she's, she's paying a lot of attention. Found out later that her, her, her job at Microsoft, the job, job title was storyteller. It's soft marketing, right?

• 3:31:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, you could say that.

• 3:31:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, but, but that's, if you can't afford somebody like that, that's, that's good. Anyway, she, question and answer, she raised her hand and she asked me, so all the things that you have done and you have experienced, what's the, the number one lesson you've taken away from, from your life? That was a new question for me. I've never, never been asked that question. And I, I thought about, about it for 20 seconds. And then I came up with this, this phrase that we all know, love conquers all. Because in my life, it did in the end.

• 3:32:16Speaker 01

  And, and it's, it's the strongest human emotion. And that is what makes us human, really.

• 3:32:25Lex Fridman?

  And you spoke about the, I mean, offline, as I've spoken with you, it's, it's clear to me how transformative, how powerful the life of your children are, your, your daughters in your life and who you are and, and why you think life is beautiful and why you think this country is beautiful.

• 3:32:44Speaker 01

  Now that, that I'm pretty mature, to put it mildly, I'm, I'm also more loving towards many more people. You know, these things like random acts of kindness for strangers, I do them. I'm looking for them now. And you know what? It's good for me.

• 3:33:07Lex Fridman?

  Well, welcome to Texas because this random acts of kindness to strangers seems to be a way of life, which is one of the reasons I love it here. It just reminds me why I love human beings, which is that there's just this warmth, this connection.

• 3:33:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, and Georgia is the same thing.

• 3:33:26Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, amen. Do you have any regrets? Do you, looking back at life, do you wish you've done something different?

• 3:33:36Speaker 01

  Well, I could have, but then I would have had a would have a different regret. I betrayed the wife, the German wife that I loved. I really did love her, and I betrayed her. But if I don't betray her, then I betray the child.

• 3:33:58Lex Fridman?

  That is a source of so much love for you now. So maybe your life is a kind of,

• 3:34:05Lex Fridman?

  you get to choose your regrets.

• 3:34:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a, it's a little bit of a strange way of putting it, but I, there's no other choice. And I tell you what I don't regret, and that's, that may be, you probably understand it now because you have enough background about me. I don't regret having lied to my mother.

• 3:34:29Speaker 01

  Because I had no really strong emotional relationship with her. She took care of me. She was proud of me, but we didn't hug. We didn't, we didn't interact emotionally whatsoever.

• 3:34:45Lex Fridman?

  So you don't feel like you betrayed that love that?

• 3:34:49Speaker 01

  Well, I did. I know that, I know that she, she was looking for me until the day she died. She, she wrote a letter to President Gorbachev, asking him for help to locate me. She, she checked with the Stasi. She just was like hell-bent on finding me and couldn't find me. So she passed away without knowing.

• 3:35:18Speaker 01

  What happened to me? Now, there was this rumor that was flying around and she possibly may have bought into that rumor because my cover for when I went to the United States was that I changed careers again and I joined an institution in Kazakhstan that did space research. Intercosmos something, something and I had a piece of paper that invited me to start there and it was a forgery. Intercosmos didn't, it never existed.

• 3:35:57Speaker 01

  But people knew that in Kazakhstan there were super secret facilities. So, and some, one of my classmates, old classmates from high school started the rumor that I died in a rocket accident. And everybody knew that. So, when I came back to Germany, went back to Germany, I found the telephone number of this girl that had dumped me. I called her and I said, I said, "So guess who this is? Maybe you hold on to your chair." She says, "Yes." I said, "This is Albrecht."

• 3:36:39Speaker 01

  It's a good payback. No, we actually met. So, there's two elderly people in their 60s who meet each other after so many years. And the one that ended the relationship started the conversation by saying, "You know what? I made a really bad mistake." And the tears came down, hot cheeks. I wasn't asking for that. I wasn't, I wasn't happy about it, but it did feel good. Now, a while later, I knew why she said she made a mistake. I met her husband.

• 3:37:24Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I mean, there's a, there's a, Tom Waits has a song called Martha, where he make, or an older gentleman calls somebody he used to love and they have a conversation. They're both married now. And it's, sometimes you can meet people from your past and it gives you a glimpse of a possible different life you could have had.

• 3:37:44Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. And, you know, I was actually, when she said, I made a mistake, and I was thinking to myself, no, you didn't. There was none. There was nothing left. There was nothing left. And also, the person that she became, personality-wise, wasn't as attractive as I remembered her. You know, it's puppy love, you know?

• 3:38:09Lex Fridman?

  But it's still love.

• 3:38:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was. It was passionate love, for sure. And I would have, I would have thrown myself under the bus if I could save her. It was that strong. And just as strong as the love for my two girls.

• 3:38:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:38:28Lex Fridman?

  Life is full of moments and periods like that of love, and that's what makes life so freaking awesome. But it does come to an end.

• 3:38:37Speaker 01

  And so does this conversation, I guess.

• 3:38:41Lex Fridman?

  No, this goes on for many more hours. But yes, do you think about your own death? Do you think about death? Do you think about your own death?

• 3:38:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:38:50Lex Fridman?

  Are you afraid of it?

• 3:38:51Speaker 01

  Yes, even though I'm a Christian.

• 3:38:58Lex Fridman?

  As a Christian, do you have a sense what's coming after? Or is it full of uncertainty?

• 3:39:02Speaker 01

  I have a hope. I have a hope. You know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of Christianity, which is quite logical. A lot of Christianity, which is also, you know, the life of Christ has a lot of, a lot of proof. But, you know, and I became a Christian, starting with a head. And, and, and I was already quite old. And I,

• 3:39:41Speaker 01

  You know, when you don't, when you don't get this faith very early, it's tougher to buy into everything. You know, there are some, there are some things that are difficult for me to understand and, and believe, but, but there's many, many other things that I can't explain only with the existence of a God. But whether he lets us go again for an eternity, I just hope. I won't convince somebody else at this point, which is, doesn't make me a really, really good Christian, because I'm supposed to evangelize.

• 3:40:19Lex Fridman?

  But there's still a fear.

• 3:40:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:40:23Lex Fridman?

  There's a fear and a hope.

• 3:40:24Speaker 01

  On the other hand, I know that, you see, see, this, this is, this is how I approached the last years of my life. I will not, I will not mentally or physically get decrepit. I will do everything I can do to be alert and fit. I still run. I run four or five times a week. And I'm going to start lifting weights again.

• 3:40:55Lex Fridman?

  Good. You stay physically and mentally sharp.

• 3:40:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:41:00Lex Fridman?

  Go out with guns blazing.

• 3:41:01Speaker 01

  That's, that's, and I once read a book written by, by a medical doctor. He said, "Most people are, when, when, when, when they're becoming mature, that the, the rest of their life is a slow downward move." And the-

• 3:41:20Lex Fridman?

  Not for you.

• 3:41:21Speaker 01

  No, the, the, the last years are pretty bad. He said, "You gotta do this." Boom.

• 3:41:29Lex Fridman?

  That's- That's pretty good advice from a doctor. And if nothing else from Christianity, whichever parts you take on, one of the big ones is love.

• 3:41:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:41:41Lex Fridman?

  And that's something you've lived from the very beginning before-

• 3:41:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:41:45Lex Fridman?

  Before God was part of your life, before anything was part of your life. It seemed that love was part of your life and was been a consistent thread throughout.

• 3:41:52Speaker 01

  Yes, sir. And there's, there's a short sentence in, in the Bible that says, "God is love."

• 3:42:00Speaker 01

  And the other thing I want to say, the Christian morality is, I can sign that with my blood. Okay.

• 3:42:11Lex Fridman?

  God is love. Amen. Jack, you're an incredible person, lived an incredible life.

• 3:42:19Lex Fridman?

  Thank you for talking today. Thank you for telling your story. Thank you for being who you are. And thank you for being all about love. This is a beautiful conversation. It was an honor.

• 3:42:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I appreciate the tough questions that you asked.

• 3:42:34Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jack Barsky. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Edward Snowden. "You can't come up against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept the risk. If they want to get you, over time, they will." Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.