welcome my name is natasha sherman and i am your host and this interview is the second half hour of an interview with jack barsky who is an author and i too specialist and former sleeper agent of the b who spied on the united states from one nine hundred seventy eight to eighty eight exposed after the cold war parsky became a resource for the united states counter intelligence agencies and was allowed to remain in the united states his autobiography deep undercover was published in two thousand and seventeen and he's here today sharing his story welcome back jack so let's fast forward  had been developed all these skills including self defense and including you know how to make drops pick up drops all of the things that we have maj and spies are taught except if we're watching james bond movies and so this is more information gathering so you're sent to the united states and we'll talk about your entry in a moment but what was your mission well that the living like an ordinary american yes the one thing i was never really told but this is all something that i found find out found out who by our research the fact that there were about ten of us that were sent in this time frame the fact that we were actually there was just as important as anything that we could actually deliver in terms of intelligence and and this was we were sort of the insurance policy you know when during the cold war there were there were a number of situations where the tensions were very high that could have been a situation where all the diplomats were kicked out now the diplomats half of the russian diplomats over diplomats were spies now think about this you have a diplomat running an agent who is the employee of the cia which happened now they're all gone how do you get information know from this person and get a transmitted illegals so that was really her agent that's correct you know and so i met actually one fellow who is also as a filler that the loss of he and political point of view that this was the best thing for the planet right now the only thing and it was a scientific certainty that terry and end it and on top of it did it was scientific marxism leninism was taught as scientific marxism leninism it's about the evolution of mankind and the mankind as a society so foreign relations where just since he was a professor there was another one and there's still the still exists the hudson institute con conservative think tank and then they were really obsessed with the trilateral commission i don't even know if they exist somehow somebody picked it up and it became a urban legend ok so meanwhile basically they want to in american society they want to know how people think they don't  information that you could share and i gather they also wanted you to send them names of people that you with us made them so they could employ in the service of the soviet union and the cage was ruined and so you're living this and then the story of you came through canada kind of as that you spent some time there is kind of a trial run and one of the things that you talk about is they can teach you the language they can teach you all kinds of things  ut that certain nuances cultural nuances so you tell the story about the beer bottle so yeah that was the first time i actually had a beer in a restaurant that was in canada east thought i was fooling you know i was playing with writing with him but these are subtle things that if anyone was looking for them would notice them and it's like you said you didn't know about tipping or you talk about being in front of bryant park and somebody comes out and says smoke smoke and you reach out to share some cigarettes with him and really i think that's ticked off because he thinks you're messing with him and really what he wants to do is sell you a joint that smoke smoke response was based on me having lived in moscow for two years that skull that was the cultural norm in moscow you could ask anybody on the street any stranger for a cigarette so i thought he was asking yeah yeah so you know these nuances and i think also one of the trickiest things probably is humor and of another culture but so you cross the border you came through you destroyed your identity that you crossed into america with you had a passport and then you described this whole situation where you tried to destroy a passport it wasn't so easy to destroy you finally had to cut it up in pieces because it would never know it doesn't burn so then you came here and you had a new identity and some kind of a job and your first one of the first jobs you got was as a bicycle messenger in new york and that was interesting sold down to the first rung of the social letter from college professor to mr yeah but i think it must have been very educational because you could learn a lot about american society just from hanging out that way first of all it became a street  you know i developed elbows in new york you have to have had to get through the other thing is that and this was accidental by product but really important that the folks that i hung out with you know i just listened a lot and they didn't they weren't really curious and they couldn't they they they weren't curious they couldn't detect any problems in me or with me about my behavior so i spent a good two years learning from these folks the messengers and their supervisors what how americans behaved picked up a lot of sports and culture and all that stuff so later on when i was able to connect with more intelligent folks i had enough background so i didn't have to go back to my my my artificial back story right yeah and so then you needed a social security number and  started out by getting a museum card or a library card yeah i started out with a membership to the museum of natural history even a library card wasn't even though in moscow they thought having an id while and the museum of natural history printed little plastic cards with the name of the address on it if you as a member took right and i used to get to get a library card and and the library card they were oh they kind of questioned it you're thirty something years old and you don't have as much as security number and you created this story about how you lived on a farm  and foreign workers so part of my back story was that i work on a farm in upstate new york so when i and i had to go for an interview with this is the one thing i was really scared of but it went really well  she just asked me how come you didn't have a social security cause i didn't need one why not well i was working on a form ok done wow so the one thing you couldn't get to and we won't go into the details of why but they're just you couldn't get a passport and that was like one of the biggest pieces of your mission so you had to then go to plan b and this is where i think i you know again the long term investment because they were willing to drop plant a now let's go to plan b get an education go to school mingle in society a cultural events whatever again just to connect with people that might be useful yes correct and you know as it turns out plan b i would have been reasonably successful had i stayed with you know i got to a point where one point the company that had it has its headquarters to school and you got a degree and what was your major computer systems ok and and the funny story is that you know here you are living under cover and point after the first semester had all these and i'm at this pretty girl and i wanted to impress and said look it's all a's and one of just a stop whole thing should know i was out in public having stated i'm going to use the whole thing and i by hook or by crook i was going to do it and i did two of the grades on negotiated one professor wanted to give me an a minus and i told him look him messing up my perfect average but so the combination is now of the mission bragging and then cultural ignorance to less you always feel like you were living a vigilant life was there you know if i know you were getting messages and you were to encrypt thing transcript thing doing drops but you didn't feel like you were always looking over your shoulder not at all  y took these types of measures and i was cautious and careful before during and after operations prior to turning on the radio and you know receiving the transmission from the center and the kind of stuff but for the most part i lived a normal life you can't live with that kind of tension for it is going to kill you  everything's got i turned it yeah i turned it absolutely fear it was the worst that you can snap in this kind of a situation paranoia will really destroy you so i'm going to fast forward you penelope got pregnant and she also needed papers yet she was illegal so here you are there's a there's another interesting thing that is not normally done so this is illegal made another person at legal i met mary two or you applied for her green card to go to based on my documentation which is absolutely wild so the only in america yes so then your daughter chelsea is the moment chelsea is born it's through like this opening up of the heart and falling in love unconditionally for the first time in your life it's not the moment when she was born  the moment when she was born it was a bit awkward for me because i knew that i didn't know that responsible for this little hopeless thing right which turned into a person right with who you know it's interesting i interviewed this guy tony mcaleer who is a former white area and supremacist who ran a hate line in vancouver and he now is head of an organization called life after hate and so they're called formers these people who have you know turning their life around and he said the thing that kind of the chink in his armor broke at the birth of his daughter and he said it's have jessie and you love them but there's something about he said that female little daughter energy that opened his heart absolutely so it happened to you and so now you're thinking ok i'm living this life and you had a son and then you got recalled so you see the signal that had been agreed upon there is chalk mark that bit i read mark that and so then you go to the drop not really again you're conflicted you go to the drop there's nothing there so the stories a little bit longer but you're right at the end when i went to a drop to just a minimum i hadn't made a decision as to whether i was going to go but i know there was money that's pretty much it almost verbatim quote quote yes you know that's a lie you have to make a choice so you you know again i can't even imagine the conflict but here you've got this daughter and you came up with a story which i think is brilliant and at some point you say there were three things they they were afraid of jews and ronald reagan because they thought he might push the button so you actually write a story and you wrote them and good totally brilliant and you said you know i this is the only place i may get treatment but you know basically undone and they clearly believed you because they went to get a linda and they gave her all your monies that had been set aside and some too so now you're living life like ok i'm for and then of course the soviet union fell apart and so now you're thinking ok i'm done i'm going to gym done yeah i'm sort of an orphan i will never be able to travel out of the country i wasn't going to apply for a passport again i would just live my life out as a middle class american right and then somebody who had lived in the an archivist who from the soviet union had been gathering information over the years over the years and he left and he offered all his information to the americans and they said no we don't think it's valid and he offers it to british intelligence and they go or law this is pretty good and somewhere in all those documents they see the name  so they let the americans know and now the f b i knows about jack barsky and they don't move quickly either because this is a slow process and they want information about information about information sure and so even bought the house next door to you and you did next door for a couple of years watching it for for some time i don't know if it was a couple years all they knew was that i was an extremely well trained agent and they knew that think that was great and she immediately said does that mean i'm now illegal but meanwhile likely the f b i hears this because they've bugged your house so you're a driving somewhere one day and they pull you over and they ask you if you're jack parsky and your first question to them was am i under arrest and they said no i was curious about the second question what the second yes exactly and i did say that it's confirmed by  reilly the fellow who were detained me the word arrest as in i cure it because i never was arrested i was detained because they let me let me go at the end of the day let me go home so why did tense situation i had a i had a very similar thing one time when i encountered a very hostile c e o and i answered the fellow with a joke which backfired by the way as well but the in the service of the amount of time we have left basically you agreed to tell them everything and you had valuable information to share with them and as somebody someplace said you know well you were a trained liar but as you said they could check everything plus they did lie detector tests etc right so what you provided for them was quite valuable and as it turns out you didn't have to go to jail  what a wild story for you and pella p got divorced and then you met your current wife who is a born again christian and you found god did indeed and now you have a six year old daughter and it's like starting life all over again and it gets a little harder but i get another chance to well nobody ever gets a hundred percent right but i think i'm a much better parent today that i was ever before that i could and that is such a blessing to me so my last question or last one or two questions any regrets  i can't answer the question in the affirmative because you know i knew it myself i made mistakes and i hurt people in that respect very very  regretful but on the other hand the decisions that i made were based on what i knew who i was at the time what i knew and what i believed was the right thing to do  personal gain the adventure was part of it but i thought i was serving a good cause that turned out to no it's a good answer it's very clear and so that i have two more questions i don't know if i have enough time biggest life lesson love conquers all yes i like that and so one of the things that you know to me i look at all the spy stuff and it occurs like some colossal philly ness at some point we're watching you and you're watching us we're watching you watching us watching them watching you know it's like oh my god and you know and we don't seem to be solving mending creating new great things so the one thing somebody asked you was what you saw as the biggest danger now and you said cyber  warfare i'm sticking to this yes because these weapons or extremely powerful and it has already happened that the russians did to i think georgia at one point to pretty much knock out the entire infrastructure imagine if this country didn't have the internet for week went as yeah but it won't get your amazon delivery so  o do you think there's no press i'm praying but i'm getting more and more pessimistic i think i think men is not i think men's room was not made to to survive on its own that we are going just jacqui at the end of our time and thank you so so much for being my dad or sharing your story i can't imagine anybody who wouldn't be fascinated by it and i would invite anybody and everybody to read the book there are lessons to be learned but also it's just a very intriguing story so thank you what you're most welcome my name is that kasha sherman thank you for joining u