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Jack Barsky Biography & Facts

Jack Philip Barsky (born Albrecht Dittrich, 18 May 1949) is a German-American author, IT specialist and former sleeper agent of the KGB who spied on the United States from 1978 to 1988. Exposed after the Cold War, Barsky became a resource for U.S. counterintelligence agencies and was allowed to remain in the United States. His autobiography, Deep Undercover, was published in 2017, and he frequently speaks on his experiences and as an expert on espionage. Early life Dittrich was born in Reichenbach, Upper Lusatia, East Germany, only a few weeks after the partition of Germany, and grew up in Jena. His father, a schoolteacher, was an adamant Marxist–Leninist. He also has a brother, Günther, who is three years younger. When Dittrich was 14, he was sent away to boarding school. Shortly after that, his parents divorced. He earned a degree in chemistry at the University of Jena. KGB career In 1969, Dittrich was a senior at the University of Jena when he was approached by a member of the Stasi who asked if he was interested in a job at VEB Carl Zeiss Jena. This turned out to be a ruse, however, and he was offered a job with the KGB. The next year, he was studying for a doctorate in chemistry and working as an assistant professor when he was sent to East Berlin for several weeks of training with the KGB. He was told that the Soviet Union only had use for spies who were willing participants, and thus he was free to turn down the offer, but that he had only 24 hours to decide. Intrigued, he decided to join. In February 1973, Dittrich announced to his family and friends that he was becoming a diplomat and leaving university to move to East Berlin. The KGB taught him Morse code, cryptography and techniques to avoid surveillance, as well as English. He was sent to Moscow in 1975, where his English was evaluated by an American woman who had married a Russian. He underwent two further years of training in the Soviet Union. In 1978, Dittrich was sent to the United States as a sleeper agent. His alias, Jack Philip Barsky, was taken from a child who had died in 1955 at the age of 10, whose name KGB agents had found at a Jewish cemetery in Maryland. He was also given a back story that his mother had been German to explain the occasional accented word. He told his family that he was on a five-year mission to the Baikonur Cosmodrome, a top-secret facility that was home to the Soviet space program; he wrote dozens of letters to his family in advance that were mailed periodically from Baikonur. Dittrich arrived in Chicago on 8 October 1978, flying in by way of Mexico, using a Canadian passport with the name William Dyson. The KGB provided him with Barsky's birth certificate and $6,000 in cash. His mission was to get a U.S. passport, insert himself into American society, to make contacts with foreign policy think tanks and "get close" to President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski in order to influence policy. Dittrich rented an apartment in New York City and assumed the identity of Jack Barsky. His instructions had been to use the birth certificate to get a passport, but the bureaucracy proved more difficult than the KGB had anticipated. He established his identity first by obtaining a membership card at the American Museum of Natural History, followed by a library card, a driver's license and finally a Social Security card. He worked as a bicycle messenger and began attending Baruch College, studying computer programming. Barsky discovered that the people who trained him did not have an authentic understanding of Americans, and he struggled at first with his assignment. While his instructions were to infiltrate political circles and get close to Brzezinski, he was not given specific instructions on how he was supposed to accomplish that. He also learned that while his English was excellent, he was very pushy and argumentative when dealing with people. He was shocked when he was confronted with this fact by a fed-up friend. He realized that he was essentially too East German to fit in. Barsky received weekly radio transmissions from the Soviets and at night spent hours decrypting messages. Photos and documents hidden in small canisters were delivered to the KGB via dead drops around New York. His assignments included tracking Nikolai Khokhlov, a Soviet defector living in California and a KGB spy gone rogue in Canada, and even writing an assessment of the American public's perception of the Soviet–Afghan War. Every two years, he went back to East Germany for three weeks of vacation and debriefing, always returning to the U.S. using fake passports. In 1984, he began working for MetLife and was able to provide the Soviets with programming code that helped their computer scientists keep up with the West. Barsky noted that the Soviets in the 1980s were trying to recruit right-wing radicals as sources. He created profiles on potential right-wing recruits. However, Barsky never learned of the outcome of this effort as separate agents were responsible for the attempted recruitment. Barsky also stated, "Many a right-wing radical had given information to the Soviets under a 'false flag', thinking they were working with a Western ally, such as Israel, when in fact their contact was a KGB operative." On Barsky's first trip back to East Germany in 1980, he was allowed to marry his girlfriend, an accepted practice as the KGB believed a married spy with a spouse back home would be less likely to defect. He married again in the United States in 1986 after a woman he was dating, who was an illegal immigrant from Guyana, needed help to get a green card. He initially married her as a favor, but after she got pregnant, he then tried to make the marriage work. For several years, he led a double life, with a wife and son in East Germany and a wife and daughter in the United States. His two families did not know about each other. He later reflected that he kept his two identities separate in his mind. He told Der Spiegel in 2015, "I did a good job of separating the two. Barsky had nothing to do with Dittrich and Dittrich wasn't responsible for Barsky." Exit from espionage In December 1988, while Barsky was living in Queens, the KGB apparently believed his cover had been compromised. He was alerted on his way to work when he saw a small splash of red paint on the subway platform. The red paint was a predefined signal of the highest emergency, ordering him to immediately report to the Soviet Embassy in Canada to return to East Germany. Concerned about the welfare of his infant daughter, Barsky decided he could not return. He ignored it for several months, until another KGB agent met him in the subway and quietly told him he needed to follow orders or he would wind up dead. He falsely told his handlers he had contracted HIV and needed to stay in the United States for treatment, relying on the KGB's fear of HIV/AIDS being spread in the Soviet Union. He promised them he would never .... Discover the Jack Barsky popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Jack Barsky books.